Chapter 28: Crayfish and Curses

“Jae-yoon won. I’ll buy ice cream on my way down. Anything you want?”

“…….”

How annoying. Throwing his weight around just because he has money? My family is rich too. I wanted to snap at him like that, but looking at Seo Yi-han’s annoyingly bright smile, I swallowed all the curses rising in my throat.

‘You should be grateful for your face.’

Instead of answering, I picked up a flat stone at my feet and tossed it toward the surface of the stream. The stone skipped across the water, bouncing three or four times. Seo Yi-han gasped in admiration again—an added bonus.

“How did you do that? Teach me.”

“You don’t know how to skip stones?”

City boys, honestly. My wounded pride quickly recovered, and I puffed out my chest, smugly demonstrating the technique. Yi-han clapped every time the stone skimmed the water, as if it were the most amazing thing he’d ever seen.

Yi-han, being naturally athletic, seemed to catch on after watching me a few times. He picked up another flat stone and threw it. It worked perfectly.

“Is this right?”

“Yeah.”

That guy really is good at everything. So that’s why Dad always nagged me to be even half as good as Seo Yi-han.

But Yi-han quickly lost interest after succeeding at skipping stones. He didn’t try again. Instead, he took off his sandals and placed them neatly beside a large boulder, apparently planning to search for crayfish in the stream.

Watching him, I offered advice born from experience.

“Keep your shoes on. You’ll lose a toenail.”

“What?”

To find crayfish, you have to lift the big rocks in the water, and your toes often get caught under them.

Last summer, I’d been playing in a stream like this when I injured my fourth toe. I’d bawled my eyes out and had to be carried down the mountain on Dad’s back.

That toenail eventually fell off on its own and grew back. It grew in straight, but the pain was still fresh in my mind, and I didn’t want Yi-han to hurt his foot.

At my words, Yi-han turned pale. He walked back to the water’s edge and carefully put his sandals back on. Then, following what I’d taught him, he began ruthlessly lifting the large rocks in spots where the water flowed gently.

I joined him, and soon we were catching crayfish with a vengeance, determined to wipe out the entire population of this stream. Before long, Yi-han’s net was packed full.

Looking at the now-heavy net, Yi-han asked, “Will these… survive until I submit them as summer homework?”

“They’ll die. Write your collection journal about something else.”

Those things die so easily. Yi-han, who had never even smelled a rotting crayfish, made a sad face. He’d been acting uncharacteristically enthusiastic, and now I realized he wanted to use them for a school assignment.

“Then what do I do with these?”

“What else? Take them home and eat them.”

If you ask Dad to stir-fry them, they’re delicious. But Yi-han, probably never having eaten freshwater crayfish before, looked stunned as he stared blankly into the net.

“If Jae-yoon eats them, I’ll eat them too…”

His muttering sounded like a solemn resolution, and I laughed out loud.

***

“Crayfish…”

“You awake?”

At my mumbled nonsense, still thick with sleep, Yi-han replied immediately. He was looking down at me with a face full of worry.

He was still letting me use his lap as a pillow. Feeling embarrassed, I tried to wiggle away, but Yi-han gently pressed my forehead and spoke first.

“Why crayfish all of a sudden?”

“…I had a dream. When we were kids, catching crayfish…”

“Ah, that time.”

Yi-han’s eyes grew distant with nostalgia. Since he didn’t pretend not to remember, it seemed this was another genuine memory from our shared past.

I decided not to dwell on how every time I fell asleep, I dreamed of memories that weren’t mine. I just kept reassuring myself that the system was playing tricks again.

Besides, trying to think too hard about it gave me a headache.

But in the dream, I saw little Yi-han, and now waking up, I saw the big Yi-han. They say good things come in threes, but seeing him so often, even his face should get old… except it didn’t.

Actually, it was fun comparing the little Yi-han from my dream to the one right in front of me. His hair had always been that light color, he’d lost his baby fat, things like that.

But from childhood, Yi-han was always Yi-han. The way he clung to me excessively, his ridiculously handsome face, his taller-than-average build—none of that had changed.

“Jae-yoon? Can you not get up yet?”

Still lying sprawled on his lap, I was idly admiring his face when another worried question came.

It finally occurred to me that his legs must be incredibly numb. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep, but if he’d been sitting with my head on his lap, his feet must be tingling.

Fortunately, after closing my eyes for a bit, my body felt incomparably lighter. I sat up immediately.

But the sudden movement made my head spin. As if expecting it, a pale, slender hand brought a water bottle to my lips.

I gulped down the cold water, and my head cleared.

“…Hey, sorry. You should have just let me sleep on the mat.”

I cleared my throat a couple of times and offered an ambiguous apology—half sorry, half blaming—but Yi-han just rubbed his thighs and pretended to be dramatic.

“If you’re sorry, can you rub them for me? My legs…”

“Don’t you have hands?”

I never asked to use his lap as a pillow in the first place, so why would I massage him? I shot back coldly and looked away. I heard him mutter something small.

Why does he keep throwing this pointless fuss and tantrum that never work?

“Lee Jae-yoon, are you okay now?”

“Yeah. Are you guys hurt?”

“We just ran away carrying you. Oh, here.”

Yoon Soo-ah collected the talismans we each had and handed them to me. I had given everyone one before we went to the grounding spirit, but mine had burned. Now only four were left.

‘The situation is…’

Bad. Extremely bad. I clutched my head.

Thanks to the talismans Mother gave me, I had been able to handle being surrounded by evil spirits calmly, but now only four remained. The story had diverged so much from what I knew that it might as well be a different game. And on top of that, whenever I closed my eyes, memories I didn’t have were forcibly implanted in my mind.

Plus, my heart raced weirdly every time I saw Yi-han. Even when he acted ridiculously, I couldn’t bring myself to dislike him. I just thought I must be crazy.

And from the dream I just had, it seemed my weakness for Yi-han’s face was a habit I’d had since childhood.

‘Hey, system.’

Why had the story changed? What were these bizarre dreams? I wanted to shake it down, but that bastard remained silent as ever.

He used to respond faithfully whenever I called, no matter what. But now, the system acting like a broken machine was only making things worse.

Shit, fine. Whatever. I had to start the third boss fight with no knowledge anyway; this just sped things up.

I gave up calling the system and recalled the woman’s memory I had briefly glimpsed.

The grains of rice and fingernails left at the gate, the mirror that bewitched people—this was clearly *yangbap*. Black magic. A curse.

People performed all sorts of folk rituals: pouring chicken blood in front of a newly opened restaurant to wish it failure, or hammering nails into a doll with fingernails and hair to block someone’s path. Curses came in many forms.

And that woman had definitely been enchanted by the hand mirror used as a curse medium, picked it up without thinking, and became the target of the curse herself.

It wasn’t a light curse that brings minor bad luck or small accidents; this was a life-threatening curse sealed in that hand mirror. Maybe there was even a demon inside the mirror.

‘Since it was left at the front gate, it probably wasn’t aimed at her.’

The front gate of a house usually symbolizes the head of the family. So it was likely prepared to target the chairman, but either she was unlucky enough to pick it up instead of her father, or…

‘She was an only child.’

I recalled a photo of just her and her parents, no siblings. And I remembered Mother’s teaching: curses and extreme malice don’t work well on people with strong energy, but they can latch onto weaker blood relations.

The chairman and his wife had an unusually rigid aura even in photos. On the other hand, their only daughter seemed to have inherited none of her parents’ formidable presence—I’d wondered about that even while looking at the photo.

‘…Maybe the curse meant for the chairman went to his daughter.’

In the memory, the woman was unnaturally quickly enchanted by the hand mirror. That would make sense if the curse, having failed to harm its original target, transferred to a blood relative.

And the shaman who prepared this curse must have known it might target the daughter instead. Otherwise, why use such a fancy hand mirror that would appeal to a woman?

Whichever theory was true, it was clear that woman was terribly unlucky. She died because of a curse meant for her father.

‘But who?’

Someone with a deep grudge against the chairman must have commissioned it. And the ledgers of corruption we found in the old school building were more than enough to prove that the chairman had made many enemies by living so greedily. Stealing others’ land to live extravagantly—no wonder he had grudges piled up.

What I was curious about was the shaman who carried this out. I’d heard there were shamans who specialized in curses, but what kind of shaman would cast a curse that could kill instantly? And even prepare an evil spirit?

📚 Also on NHV Novels

We Got Married

BLBoys LoveOmegaverse

Read Now →
Not interested