The Returned Ex-Wife and the Mother-in-Law’s Secret
“Oh, now that’s interesting.”
Yu Se-ran, the moment she stepped into the shrine, began to swagger the way she had that day long ago. Kang-to watched her bait him with cold eyes.
“Hey, Lee Kang-to, you look totally sharp standing there like that.”
She walked toward him without the slightest hesitation—and then that face caught the full force of Kang-to’s thunderous oracle.
“You shameless wench. Do you know where you are?”
The voice was clipped, but the wave behind it hit harder than high-voltage current. And because it carried the resonance of spirit speech, it was the terror of a divine general under the command of the Supreme Heavenly Deity himself.
“Kang-to... it’s me. It’s me, Yu Se-ran...”
“And you still have the nerve to say that, you bitch.”
Kang-to raised the jingling of the spirit bell.
Jangle.
Unlike usual, the sharp, splitting sound rang through the room and pierced the ears. Struck by that sound, Se-ran clutched at her head and folded in on herself.
“......?”
That one sound was enough to make her lose her wits completely. It had clenched around her knees like the tight ring on Sun Wukong’s head.
“Pfft.”
From outside, Assistant Manager Seo, who had been quietly taking in the situation, couldn’t help laughing bitterly before returning to his place.
She had looked like nothing but trouble from the start. Acting as if she owned the place, casually selling out Kang-to while claiming to be Sol-bi’s mother—it was absurd. He had worried for a moment, but now he could relax. Kang-to was furious in a way he’d never seen before. Just from the atmosphere, it looked like Se-ran would be lucky to walk out in one piece.
“So you dared mock my body deity, did you?”
Deep in Kang-to’s eyes, a fireball burned and seethed. It split and fused over and over again until it became an armored divine general. Just looking at him made it feel as if one’s heart might burst from terror. It was the return of the twin generals of judgment, Jeongsa Shinjang and Gapshin Shinjang.
“......”
Se-ran had lost the power of speech. Ice formed along her spine, and her toes curled inward. The fear was so overwhelming she could hardly breathe, as if she were about to wet herself right there.
“What business brought you here? Speak plainly, without leaving anything out.”
Kang-to’s interrogation struck bone as it went in. He wore Lee Kang-to’s face, and yet he was no longer the green freshman Se-ran used to toy with back then.
“......”
“Well? Are you going to confess your true motives or not?”
“I... Kang-to got famous, and then I found out he was the son of a chaebol family... and, well, we do have old feelings...”
“He is not Kang-to. He is Dharma Master Kang-to, the one who serves the will of the Supreme Heavenly Deity, Gucheon Hyeonnyeo, and the Grand Supreme Elderly Lord.”
“Dharma Master Kang-to...”
“You transferred away every right you had in the distant past. And now you come back with what face?”
“But I’m her mother—the woman who gave birth to Matilda...”
“You wretched woman.”
Jjarang.
The spirit bell rang again. The reverberation was no different from an assault of pure dread, and Se-ran shrank back even further.
“You had no shame, no sense of responsibility, and a rotten personality—I already knew that much. But when you abandoned your own flesh and blood and ran, when was it again that you cared to call yourself a mother?”
“......”
“Since then, you’ve gone through well over ten men, living a life dyed in decadence. And then last year and the year before, with the stars of misfortune and imprisonment piling up on each other, you went to prison, and after an accident you spent a long time bedridden, coughing up blood, didn’t you?”
“......?”
She was utterly stunned.
That was the backstory behind the fourth man she’d met in Japan. He’d been single and wealthy. When he got drunk and passed out, she took three gold bars from the safe. She was sued and served a year in prison. The moment she got out, she went straight back to drinking hard liquor and smoking heavily, and her larynx and liver were ruined. She had narrowly escaped cancer, but it was the kind of rare disease that left her nearly dead and then somehow alive again.
For him to pick out even that much as if he had seen it with his own eyes—she couldn’t even breathe.
“The remedy for that baleful fate went east, toward green places and Japan, so you met the condition of the east. But you abandoned the green, didn’t you?”
“......”
Se-ran’s expression twisted yet again. She had once worked in the plant business, but not long after going to Japan, she’d abandoned it. Chasing men had been more fun.
[Health Luck ▮▮▮▮▯]
[Wealth Luck ▮▯▯▯▯]
[Family Luck ▮▯▯▯▯]
[Career Luck ▯▯▯▯▯]
[People Luck ▮▯▯▯▯]
- Merit Jar ▯▯/▯▯/▯▯
The battery of fate followed the same pattern. Her health luck was strong—she had a body that had been born sturdy. But everything else was drained flat. The source of it all lay in the merit jar.
When you throw out garbage, you pollute the environment. The damage doesn’t end with you. Once the air and the land are contaminated, the consequences are handed down to future generations.
That was how merit worked.
From Se-ran’s ancestors onward, wrongdoing and resentment had piled up. It wasn’t on the scale of atrocities like the horrific murders born of forced labor, but it had continued like a fine rain soaking through clothing, and now it was finally manifesting in Se-ran’s generation.
“You’ve taken after your ancestors’ rotten temperament, and up to this very day you’ve never once done a good deed.”
“......”
“Thanks to that, your baleful fate has only grown deeper. What remains for you now is nothing but grinding hardship.”
Each time Kang-to’s spirit-guided oracle struck her, cold sweat dripped from Se-ran’s body. She didn’t even seem to know it herself; she stood there dazed, empty-headed.
“I don’t even want to say more, but even bad karma is karma. So I’ll give you one final path to remedy. Follow it—or take the star of heavenly punishment and go straight to hell. Suit yourself.”
The next oracle struck even more precisely at her core. Se-ran knew it too. She had never ended well with the men she’d taken up with lately. When she was younger, the men had all been just for fun. As she got older, that was no longer true. And because of that, she had more and more people waiting to settle accounts with her.
“Heavenly punishment...”
Se-ran muttered it under her breath. Kang-to’s oracle had overwhelmed her so completely that, in the end, she had even wet herself.
“Do I have even a single thing wrong?”
“......”
“Since you can at least admit that much, I’ll use my body deity’s mercy to give you a saving oracle.”
“......”
“You were born under the triple curse of heavenly void, lonely man, and solitary widowhood. Marriage was never in the cards for you, and your life was always going to be one where nothing worked out. If you don’t want to keep seeing uglier and uglier scenes, then take tonsure in the deep forests of the east and live as a practitioner in the religious life. You at least came out of the womb with one good thing—the fondness you have for plants—so if you perform silent practice among the green woods, you’ll be able to avoid the worst of your fatal misfortune.”
“......”
“If you understand, then get up and go at once. Judging by your fate, you’ll be turned away twice. If you don’t give up before the third time, your remaining life may still be salvaged.”
Jjallang.
The spirit bell’s sound severed the air like a blade. It was the judgment document of the Supreme Heavenly Deity. Seized already by that majesty, Se-ran’s earlier swagger had flowed away into the backside of time. Her body soaked with fear, teeth chattering, she barely managed to stand.
Hoo.
Once Se-ran was gone, Kang-to ended the spirit descent.
Yu Se-ran.
His feelings had already been settled long ago.
Still, he had once thought they might meet again someday. Had she come with goodwill, he might have felt a trace of pity. But that wasn’t how she came. So he treated her the way a shaman should when delivering an oracle. He carried not a single shred of personal feeling into it.
She had been born carrying the curse of solitary widowhood, so if she married, she would ruin the man. The other two baleful stars were the same. The only way for her to overcome them was to entrust herself to a religion located deep in the eastern mountains.
“Here, at least take this to cover yourself.”
When Se-ran came out, Assistant Manager Seo handed her a cloth bundle. She only then noticed the wetness between her legs and on her backside, and went blank once more.
Lee Kang-to.
He had once been that easy freshman boy she could push around. But the world had turned over in a single night. The terrifying image of the divine generals still would not leave Se-ran’s mind. She was so frightened of the island she could barely stand it.
After descending from the lighthouse, Se-ran headed straight for the dock.
When she first came, she had planned to use Sol-bi as leverage and make off with a profit. That plan shattered like foam on the waves. Now she wanted nothing more than to get off this island as quickly as possible.
Kang-to watched from the lighthouse. He had worried she might try to approach Sol-bi, but that wasn’t her target.
Back in the shrine, Kang-to turned to Assistant Manager Seo and said, “Please receive the guest Madam Gyeongsin sent.”
“Hello?”
Soon after, Lee Bok-sun came in. The woman in her late fifties radiated fortune the way water spills from a fountain. Even more astonishing was the fact that her wealth luck was still climbing.
But...
She wasn’t Korean. She was Southeast Asian.
It didn’t matter.
First he looked at the battery of destiny.
[Wealth Luck ▮▮▮▮▯]
Aside from the hardship of her early years, her life had since become a nonstop advance toward money and success.
[Health Luck ▮▮▮▮▮]
Her health luck was even better. She had a naturally sturdy frame, the kind of body that seemed like it would never fall ill even once. But the gods are fair. Though she had everything else, one thing was missing. Family luck.
[Family Luck ▯▯▯▯▯]
She was ill-fated. She had no luck with parents, and no luck with husbands. Her relationship with her mother-in-law was bad, and she had no luck with people either. The reason lay in two baleful stars.
[Disharmony of Yin and Yang Curse, Needle-Wisp Curse]
By that point, he moved into the consultation.
“Madam Gyeongsin said I should come see the Dharma Master...”
Bok-sun began hesitantly. She had lived in Korea for so long that her pronunciation and intonation were perfect. Her face also showed almost nothing unusual; if she hadn’t said so herself, she wouldn’t have seemed much different from a Korean woman at all.
“She is my spirit mother. There’s almost nothing she can’t do better than I can, and for gut rituals especially she’s top-tier nationally, so I’m not sure why she sent you to me.”
“It’s because of my mother-in-law, who passed away ten years ago.”
Bok-sun’s eyes filled with tears at those words alone. Kang-to looked at her calmly.
It was because of the filial-vexation curse. A daughter-in-law bearing that curse usually couldn’t coexist with her mother-in-law. On top of that, this woman had the Needle-Wisp Curse as well. People like that tended to have sharp, negative personalities, and were easily caught up in lawsuits and scandal; they could even fall victim to heavenly punishment through conflict with those around them.
He checked one more thing.
[People Luck ▮▮▮▯▯]
As expected. Her people luck had been rock bottom through her youth. And yet, interestingly enough, it had since shot to the top of the market. That meant she had overcome the baleful curse.
How?
Kang-to became curious too.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m actually from Myanmar. I sold corn to tourists as pigeon feed in Bagan, the city of pagodas. Since I was four years old.”
Her story began to unfold.
Since she was four years old.
That pierced straight through the core, but he simply listened.
“It cost five hundred kyat for one bowl, but kind Koreans usually gave me a thousand. It was originally my father’s work—he had only one leg—but when I sat there instead of him, I sold more, so all day long...”
“......”
“If I sold all day, I’d make about five thousand to fifteen thousand kyat. Kyat is Myanmar’s currency, and with that money you could buy a bottle of Grant Royal, which my father liked, and a bowl of noodles called kauk swe. My mother died when my father had his accident.”
“......”
“I quit school after elementary school, and after that I ran a street stall selling skewers of pork organs. That’s where I met my husband, who had come to ride the hot-air balloon. He came to eat my skewers every day, and on the day he was returning to Korea, he gave me a note. ‘My name is Kim Hyun-soo. I like you. I’ll come back.’”
“......”
“It was clumsy Myanmar written in careful block letters. I was grateful, but I forgot about it. And then... one day, my husband really did come. I was so shocked I pricked my hand on the skewer while threading pork intestines.”
“......”
“I accepted his proposal and, after a lot of hardship, came to Korea. Myanmar’s bureaucracy is on a completely different level from Korea’s. There are a lot of civil servants who demand money at every step of the process.”
“......”
“It really did feel like a dream. He wasn’t some old grandfather—he was only five years older than me. After I came to Korea, I even made a new name for myself and helped with odd jobs at the raw meat restaurant my mother-in-law ran. Since I’d worked hard in Myanmar, the work wasn’t that difficult. But...”
She lost her husband.
It had been seven years after their marriage. Right after she and her husband returned from a trip to Myanmar. It had been for her father’s funeral. On the day the restaurant was closed, she had made plans to go out to eat with her husband. She was waiting at the meeting place for him to get off work when... news came not with him, but instead in his place. A traffic accident while he was avoiding an illegally driven motorcycle. Regrettably, he died instantly.
“My Korean Dream flew away just like that. My husband, the one who’d turned dark-skinned me into a white Korean woman, was gone. I thought about going back to Myanmar, but my father was dead, so I had nowhere to go. I just stayed put beside my mother-in-law.”
“......”
“That Disharmony of Yin and Yang Curse and Needle-Wisp Curse, right?”
Bok-sun suddenly asked him.
“Yes.”
Kang-to answered. She was a guest sent through Madam Gyeongsin. Someone who had come by way of Gyeongsin Buin would have her baleful stars pinned down even with her eyes closed, so it wasn’t strange that Bok-sun knew about them too.
But then.
What Bok-sun said next made Kang-to jolt in shock.
“The Disharmony of Yin and Yang Curse and the Needle-Wisp Curse... my mother-in-law was the one who taught them to me.”
Huh?
Not Madam Gyeongsin, but...
My mother-in-law?
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