Chapter 1: My Grandmother Left Me a Bulgasari

“…Why would I get a registered letter from the court?”

Lee Young asked in a trembling voice as she stared at the mailman handing her a document.

Even if a person lived their entire life without committing a crime, the mere mention of the police or the courts was enough to make them shrink instinctively. An ordinary person like Lee Young was no exception.

“Who knows? You’re renting this bookstore, right?”

“…Of course I’m renting it.”

‘If this bookstore were entirely mine, I wouldn’t be struggling this hard to make a living.’

The words rose all the way to the tip of her tongue, but Lee Young merely gave that answer.

The mailman looked at her with an expression that seemed to say he understood, then gazed at her with a faint hint of pity.

“…No way.”

After the mailman left, a sharp voice burst through the small independent bookstore, where the only customer that morning had been a single college student.

“Mortgage… seizure… auction?”

Lee Young read the words written across the documents spread out before her, her eyes growing wider and wider as her face flushed with agitation.

It was simple.

The building owner had been unable to pay his debts, and the building where Lee Young’s little independent bookstore, was renting a space was going up for auction.

“…Then what happens to my deposit?”

It was a shop into which she had put a whopping 100 million won as a deposit. It was the first space Lee Young had ever managed to secure entirely through her own efforts, the one thing she had built for herself in a life plagued by rotten luck.

Despite suffering from insomnia, depression, and lethargy, she had gone to work every single day and used the money she earned to open this bookstore.

She had been running it with the thought that all she needed was enough to put food on the table… She really hadn’t had any great ambitions.
She truly hadn’t.

She had simply planned to earn a modest living in this little shop and live a modest life. And yet even that modest dream had come crashing down around her.

****

“How can life be this…”

“Drink. Drink and forget, okay?”

“Forget what…? It’s 100 million won. One hundred million…”

Lee Young finally burst into tears as she spoke to her only friend, Ji-eun, sitting across from her.

In the noisy bar, Ji-eun had dragged Lee Young out of the bookstore, where she had been crying the entire time, and brought her to a nearby drinking establishment, telling her that she might as well drink and forget about it.

“Just drink for now.”

At Ji-eun’s words, Lee Young picked up the soju glass sitting in front of her. She had never been much of a drinker to begin with, but right now, she needed to drink, just as Ji-eun had said.

She had lost her parents when she was five and her grandmother when she was seven.

After losing the grandmother who had been her only ally, Lee Young had bounced from one orphanage to another, and it was only at twenty that she was finally able to attend university with the help of a sponsor.

Lee Young’s life had been so terribly unlucky that it made her wonder if there could possibly be another person in the world with such rotten luck.

“It’s not your fault. Who could’ve known that asshole landlord would disappear?”

“How could someone become a landlord and still…”

“Yeah. Drink.”

She wished with all her heart that this was all a dream.

She wished and wished that she could get drunk, wake up, and find that everything had been a dream, that every single unlucky thing that had happened to her until now had all been nothing more than a nightmare.

But Lee Young knew.

She had always cried herself to sleep wishing that everything would turn out to be a dream, but never once had everything actually been a dream.

If anything, the problem was that reality was always far too painfully real.

“You know a bad guy will come and take you away if you cry here.”

“…What?”

Lee Young raised her head at the voice coming from above her and immediately frowned at the strangely seductive-looking man staring down at her.

“Hey, Ji-eun…”

Lee Young leaned forward, looking for Ji-eun, but Ji-eun’s seat was empty.

“Ji-eun?”

Lee Young shook her head, remembering that Ji-eun had been sitting across from her only moments ago, and somehow, the strange man who had spoken to her was now sitting in the seat where Ji-eun had been.

“Your friend left a little while ago.”

“Ji-eun did?”

“Yeah.”

“W-where did she go?”

Already drunk, Lee Young stammered as though she could not quite understand what the man was saying.

Ji-eun had left?

That couldn’t be.

Even in her drunken state, Lee Young tried to pull herself together, but the man stepped in front of her.

“Your grandmother’s name is Sa Sun-young, right?”

“…What?”

That was not a name that should have been spoken here. For someone to mention the name of a grandmother who had been dead for twenty years in this crowded, raucous bar was clearly not normal.

Wariness crept into Lee Young’s eyes.

And as wariness appeared in Lee Young’s eyes, a strange satisfaction appeared in the eyes of the man across from her. It was the look of someone who had finally found something he had been searching for all this time.

“…What are you?”

“So you are, huh? Sa Sun-young’s granddaughter.”

“…”

“I thought that family line had died out completely… Looks like what they say about the Myodu-sa of Bukhansan was true after all.”

‘What the hell is he talking about? Bukhansan Myodu, what?’

Lee Young frowned, unable to understand the dangerous-looking man sitting before her.

One thing was certain. This situation was dangerous. Lee Young tried to avoid the man, but he was persistent.

“Help me out.”

“I don’t know what you mean…”

“Let’s help each other and get by. I need help, and you’re fated to help.”

The incomprehensible man’s words echoed in Lee Young’s ears.

It seemed that was when her consciousness began to fade. No, more accurately, perhaps she had never really been conscious from the beginning.

“Wait…”

Lee Young suddenly wondered if she had really come to the bar with Ji-eun at all. Ji-eun never encouraged her to drink. Ji-eun knew better than anyone that Lee Young couldn’t hold her liquor.

“Ah.”

‘Who was it that encouraged me to drink?’

As Lee Young wondered that, she felt the sky spinning around and around.

The voices of the people nearby began to change strangely. She could hear people laughing as though she had suddenly been dropped into the middle of a marketplace, but no matter how carefully she listened, those were not human voices.

“Sleep well, Sa Sun-young’s granddaughter.”

****

“f*ck, then why the hell are you getting in my way?!”

The man who had been smiling suggestively at Lee Young was slammed onto the hotel floor, screaming as though he were throwing a tantrum.

Sa Hae entered the hotel room in an instant.

The lust demon, who had been climbing onto Lee Young’s body, went pale with shock at Sa Hae’s appearance, and before long, Sa Hae had slammed him into the floor.

The hotel’s ceiling, covered in geometric patterns, filled the lust demon’s vision.

‘Ah, f*ck. And here I thought I was having good luck today…’

“What do you mean, getting in your way? You think the Jisa would let you off if he found out a lust demon like you had gone after a human?”

“She’s not just a human!”

The lust demon shouted indignantly.

From the lust demon’s perspective, Lee Young was not an ordinary human.

“If she’s not an ordinary human, what is she, some kind of demon spawn?”

“The twenty-third descendant of the Sa family!”

“So what? Why does that matter?”

Sa Hae watched the lust demon, who was whining back at him from beneath his feet, then raised his foot and firmly pressed it against his mouth.

The sole of Sa Hae’s expensive shoe crushed the lust demon’s lips.

“Mmph. Mmmph!”

“You’ll wake her up. Keep your voice down. Quiet.”

The lust demon’s body flinched at Sa Hae’s irritated voice. His body was already weak from being unable to feed on yang energy.

The world had become a harsher place, which, naturally, was only according to the lust demon, and monsters like Bulgasari had grown stronger by devouring as much metal as they could, while he had grown weaker from being unable to feed on the yang energy of humans.

‘It was so much easier to live back then. All you had to do was climb over the wall of any house…’

The lust demon swallowed as he briefly recalled the past. Those really had been good times to be alive.

There had been plenty of widows, and because noblemen observed strict separation between men and women, husbands and wives even slept in separate rooms, making it an absolutely glorious era for lust demons.

Sa Hae clicked his tongue shortly as he watched the lust demon, whose mouth was still being blocked, thinking about something else. These things couldn’t even think for very long. As if anyone needed proof that they were nothing more than lowly little goblins.

“You want to be thinking about something else at a time like this?”

“…Mmph!”

The lust demon glared at Sa Hae and struggled furiously despite having his mouth covered.

“Get out and find another human. This one is off-limits.”

“Ugh, spit, spit. Why?! She’s perfect! I can feed on her! Why are you stopping me?!”

“Who the hell told you that you could feed on her?”

Sa Hae asked in confusion, and at his question, confusion appeared on the lust demon’s face.

“What? You stupid lump of iron, you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“She’s her.”

“Who is she?”

“The twenty-third descendant of that Sa family whose people were cursed after eating a five-hundred-year-old tree that the Taebaeksan dokkaebi had raised to use as a cradle.”

Sa Hae stared at the lust demon for a moment as though he had failed to understand.

‘Was Sun-young carrying a curse like that? I watched her for sixty years, all the way until she crossed the Sanzu River, and I never knew.’

The lust demon clicked his tongue as he looked at Sa Hae’s expression.

“The family line cursed by the Taebaeksan dokkaebi. That one. She needs volunteer hours.”

“Who are you calling a b*tch? Watch your mouth.”

“I need human volunteers, she needs volunteer hours, so we’re going to help each other out. Why the hell are you-!”

Sa Hae didn’t need to hear any more. He grabbed the lust demon, who was sprawled on the floor and thrashing about, by the neck, lifted him up, and threw him straight into the hallway outside the hotel room.

There was not even the slightest trace of hesitation or reluctance in his movements. He was as cold and indifferent as someone throwing out a piece of filthy trash.

“If you don’t get the hell out of here right now, I’ll make sure you can’t even be a lust demon anymore.”

As he said that, Sa Hae opened his mouth wide.

Bulgasari could swallow anything. It wasn’t limited to swallowing metal.

The unnaturally handsome human face began to distort, Sa Hae’s mouth gradually widening until the form of Bulgasari emerged.

“Ugh…”

The lust demon stared at the enormous maw gaping open before him, froze stiff, and then bolted down the hotel corridor as though fleeing for his life.

“You really have to see something nasty before you understand.”

Having said that, Sa Hae closed his gaping mouth and restored his face to its handsome human form.

Click, click.

Sa Hae adjusted his jaw with a series of snaps before turning around and walking back into the hotel room.

Click, clack—.

The movement of Sa Hae’s jaw stopped abruptly the moment he met the clear eyes staring straight at him.

‘Ah, f*ck me.’

“…What are you?”

“Ah, why are you waking up now?”

Sa Hae sighed in exasperation and looked at Lee Young.

A multitude of emotions filled Lee Young’s gaze. Shock, curiosity, and then, eventually, a light of recognition spread across her eyes.

“A body that shines… Could it be Ah-hae?”

“Ah?”

“You’re Ah-hae, right? The one my grandmother told me about…”

‘Ah, Sun-young. Did you tell your granddaughter about me?’

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