Chapter 14: My First Kiss Was Stolen by a Ghost

“Is this your house, Mister?”

Lee Young asked as she stared at the two-story townhouse spread out before her.

Actually, it was so enormous that calling it a townhouse hardly seemed appropriate.

A mansion would be a much better description.

“Yeah.”

“Wow, company presidents really do live differently…”

“It’s the bare minimum.”

“If you get hungry, do you tear the doors off and eat them?”

“You don’t have to do that. There’s plenty of metal around.”

Sa Hae had brought Lee Young to his house the very next day after she encountered the songaksi.

Lee Young couldn’t even bring herself to open the windows, let alone go back to the bookstore, and whenever Sa Hae tried to leave, she would grab him by the collar.

Even after he told her that the day of strong yin energy had passed and that it was safe now, Lee Young couldn’t bring herself to believe him.

‘Do you want to come to my house?’

‘What?’

‘I’m asking if you want to go to my house.’

For the thoroughly frightened Lee Young, Sa Hae’s solution was simple, but fairly foolproof.

Keep her within his territory.

There was no safer option than that.

If Lee Young stayed at his house, neither yokai nor ghosts would be able to approach her recklessly.

And even if something did approach, Sa Hae would be right beside her, so she wouldn’t be nearly as terrified as she had been when she encountered the songaksi.

Lee Young hesitated for quite some time before finally nodding at Sa Hae’s proposal.

“I think it was a good idea to come…”

After setting Tori down in Sa Hae’s large garden, Lee Young said this with a relieved expression.

There wasn’t a single thing she disliked about the place.

Not the enormous house.

Not the spacious lawn.

Nothing.

“Can I really live here? For free?”

“What, if I tell you to pay rent, are you going to?”

At the mention of rent, Lee Young flinched and shook her head vigorously.

“Why? Business at the bookstore’s doing pretty well these days.”

“E-even so…”

“Even so?”

“You’re rich, Mister. And you’re a company president.”

He was technically the CEO, not the president, but there was no need to correct her over something so trivial.

Sa Hae merely shrugged at her words.

‘She really doesn’t know that the people who have money are the worst.’

“There’s an old saying that the rich are more frightening.”

“…Besides, you’re not a rich human. You’re a rich yokai.”

“What’s the difference? I like money.”

By now, Lee Young had begun to understand that he was joking.

But with Sa Hae’s completely serious expression, it was impossible to believe that he actually was.

“D-do I really have to pay rent?”

Lee Young honestly had no desire to return to her old home anytime soon.

She was afraid the songaksi would appear again.

And if virgin ghosts really looked like the one she had seen, then surely other ghosts would look the same.

Just thinking about it made her feet refuse to move.

“How much are you going to charge me?”

“I’ll squeeze the marrow out of a flea.”

Lee Young spoke as though she genuinely intended to pay rent, and at her hesitant, childlike expression, Sa Hae burst out laughing.

‘This filthy world where only cute things get loved… I think I’m beginning to understand it a little.’

“Am I a flea?”

“Yeah.”

‘A cute flea.’

Sa Hae swallowed the last part of that thought and led Lee Young inside his house.

It was the first time he had ever brought someone into the house where he lived.

Many of Sa Hae’s firsts had belonged to Sun-young.

The first person to call him by his name.

The first person he had saved.

But now, Lee Young was becoming another first for Sa Hae.

“You don’t have to pay rent, so live here.”

“…”

“There are plenty of rooms upstairs. Use whichever one you want.”

“Really? You can’t take it back later!”

“Yeah, I won’t. Even if you say you’re leaving, I won’t let you go, so make yourself comfortable.”

Lee Young’s face immediately brightened.

Holding Tori in her arms, she practically ran up the stairs to the second floor, and for the first time since he had begun living in this house, Sa Hae learned what it sounded like to have someone other than himself making noise inside it.

“Mister! I’m using this room!”

“Suit yourself.”

Sa Hae answered and followed Lee Young upstairs.

And so Lee Young, who had been born with the fate of seeing yokai and helping them, came to live together with a yokai—the Bulgasal—in his home.

It was the beginning of a rather unusual cohabitation.

****

The weather on Taebaeksan was unpredictable.

No, to be more precise, it was the weather in the valley where the master of Taebaeksan, the Dokkaebi, resided that behaved that way.

Humans often called the place Fox Valley.

It would suddenly start pouring, like a fox was getting married, only for the sun to suddenly come shining through again.

No human knew that it wasn’t the work of foxes, but simply the temperament of the Dokkaebi.

An unimaginably long time had passed since the Dokkaebi of Taebaeksan had settled there.

Even he had only a vague memory of when he had been born—or whether he had been created at all.

Everyone called him a Dokkaebi, so he simply accepted it.

There were even those who claimed that perhaps he wasn’t a Dokkaebi at all, but a mountain immortal.

Of course, judging by his temper, he was unquestionably a particularly violent Dokkaebi.

“You’ve grown quite a bit.”

The Dokkaebi of Taebaeksan ventured deep into the forest and spoke to himself as he touched a tree imbued with his energy.

“What has?”

“Go in.”

“Into the tree?”

An Eoduksini emerged from his sleeve as though she had been waiting for the cue.

The Eoduksini, who enjoyed frightening humans, was a yokai who had once tormented people in the distant past until the Dokkaebi had grabbed her by the collar and dragged her to Taebaeksan.

“This is that tree, right? The one meant to serve as a cradle for the mountain god who’s going to be born on Taebaeksan.”

The Eoduksini wrapped her darkness around the enormous tree as though she knew exactly what she was talking about.

At that very moment, the Dokkaebi’s long tobacco pipe came down with a sharp thwack on the Eoduksini’s head.

“You’re bad luck. Get away from it. How dare you let that darkness touch it.”

At the Dokkaebi’s words, the Eoduksini pouted, withdrew the darkness wrapped around the tree, and slipped back into the Dokkaebi’s sleeve.

“What good is having a tree if there’s no Gwitae to be born?”

The Eoduksini asked curiously, but instead of answering, the Dokkaebi stroked the tree he had raised once before continuing on his way.

With every step the Dokkaebi took, faint lights sparkled.

****

“Your first kiss?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, so you came to me because you never got to have your first kiss?”

“Yeah.”

Sa Hae and Lee Young were sitting across from each other at the dining table in his house.

Sa Hae had neatly placed a wrapped set of brass spoons and chopsticks in front of him, while Lee Young was eating sushi.

Chewing each piece carefully, as though it would be a waste for it to disappear too quickly, Lee Young responded to Sa Hae with an utterly baffled expression.

“So you became a ghost because you couldn’t get over never having had your first kiss?”

“Her grudge ran pretty deep.”

Naturally, the subject of Sa Hae and Lee Young’s conversation was the songaksi who had come looking for Lee Young.

Lee Young still looked frightened whenever she thought about the ghost’s appearance, but perhaps because she was currently staying at Sa Hae’s house, she seemed somewhat reassured.

“No, but why would she come looking for me just to fulfill her grudge over a first kiss?”

“Because she liked women.”

“…Huh?”

“She liked women.

“She’d kissed men before, but never having kissed a woman even once in her entire life was the greatest regret she died with.”

Lee Young froze for a moment with a piece of sushi in her mouth.

“Chew.”

At Sa Hae’s command, Lee Young nodded and began chewing.

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah, so I helped her resolve her grudge.”

“You did?”

“Yep.”

“You mean she wanted to kiss a woman?”

“That’s right.”

“But you’re male.”

At the word male, Sa Hae’s gaze settled on Lee Young with a strangely suggestive glint.

“Male?”

“…Should I say man instead?”

“Why? Want me to bark like a male animal?”

“Nooo, it’s just that you’re not human…”

Male.

After everything, this kid was now calling him both Mister and male.

Sa Hae let out a hollow laugh, apparently amused by the way Lee Young referred to him.

She really was a child who had no filter whatsoever.

“So you gave her her first kiss?”

“She said she didn’t need a male.”

“Then how did you do it?”

At Lee Young’s question, Sa Hae stared at her for a moment.

Then his gaze dropped to her lips.

They were unmistakably a little swollen compared to usual.

Lee Young noticed his gaze and looked puzzled before raising a hand to lightly touch her own lips.

“…”

“She thanked me.”

“…For what?”

“Well, for several things?”

Sa Hae smiled brightly as he recalled the sight of the songaksi ascending peacefully.

She had been an unfortunate soul who had been born in the wrong era, dying without ever pressing her lips to a woman’s or confessing her feelings to the woman she had loved.

As luck would have it, Lee Young could see ghosts, and she had been born with the fate of receiving blessings whenever she granted the wishes of ghosts or yokai.

And she also happened to have exactly the kind of face the songaksi liked.

“…You’re lying.”

Lee Young stammered the accusation several times, as though she knew Sa Hae was teasing her.

“Why? Is it going to wear off?”

“…”

“You did a good deed. You’ll get blessed again…”

“My first kiss!”

Lee Young shot to her feet and shrieked at Sa Hae.

“My first kiss! My first kiss is gone!”

‘Wait, was that really her first kiss? So that was her first kiss with the songaksi?’

A look of bewilderment flashed across Sa Hae’s face.

That was something he hadn’t expected.

“Who gave you the right to give my first kiss to a virgin ghost?!”

Lee Young lunged at Sa Hae as though she were about to grab him and beat him senseless.

What enraged Lee Young wasn’t so much the fact that she had unknowingly kissed such a frightening-looking ghost.

It was the fact that her first kiss had been whisked away while she was asleep.

“You damn Mister!”

“What the hell were you doing all the way up to your age without kissing anyone even once?”

‘That’s rich coming from you.’

Sa Hae was hardly in a position to talk.

But Lee Young had no way of knowing that.

Her face bright red, she stomped her feet as though she were about to grab Sa Hae by the hair and tear it out.

“You should’ve at least woken me up!”

“Hey, if I’d kissed you after seeing that face, you’d have died of shock.”

“Then you should’ve found some other woman for her!”

“I don’t know any other woman whose lips I’d be willing to lend to a ghost.”

“Yaaah!”

Lee Young’s loud voice filled the dining room.

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