By Zephyria “So, save me.”
“……”
“The princess will close her eyes and wait.”
His voice was layered over the sound of air flowing within his palm covering his ear. It felt like hearing his call for help while submerged underwater. Instead of sounding distant, it left a deeper resonance.
Even after he left the entrance, even after his footsteps faded, took the elevator, and completely disappeared, Choi Hong-seo remained standing in the same spot.
He didn’t know how much time had passed. Nyaa… Tiffany’s plaintive cries, as if chiding him for not coming inside the house yet, could be heard. Tap, tap, do-do-do-do. She jumped down from the Cat Tower and walked towards the entrance. Choi Hong-seo crouched down and stroked her back. Since that day, the first day the phone rang under the name ‘Carrot Seller’, she had allowed him this much.
“You’re mad because I stayed out all night? Were you waiting for me?”
There was no shortage of food or water thanks to the automatic feeder. Tiffany couldn’t possibly have been waiting eagerly for his return. Even knowing this, Choi Hong-seo spoke to her as if he were a particularly beloved butler.
Repeatedly stroking her long fur from her back to the tip of her tail, he retraced the events of the past day. He couldn’t believe he was back home after only being gone for a single day. He felt like an explorer, exhausted after a long adventure, who had finally returned to his homeland.
Can you hold me like Choi Hong-seo can?
In the end, they would only leave each other with messy scars. Even thinking that, Lee Hae-sung must have made the offer, and Choi Hong-seo, even thinking that, couldn’t refuse it. If they could embrace each other even in their imperfect states, then the scars left by embracing each other were by no means an expensive price to pay.
It was clearly a mess when he had tried to stop their intimacy midway.
But the situation changed from the moment he desperately reached out to him and wrote on his bare back.
He had fallen asleep, exhausted, so he hadn’t even realized he had slept, let alone that he had stayed in the room with him. Even after that, he had remained kind.
It was different from when he had deliberately treated ‘Yoon Hye-an’ like Choi Hong-seo during his previous visit to this house. It was a different kind of kindness.
Choi Hong-seo momentarily stopped stroking Tiffany.
From the moment he woke up until he was driven back home, he realized that he had never once been called ‘Yoon Hye-an’ by him today. No matter how hard he tried to recall, he had never been called ‘Yoon Hye-an’.
It felt like a major hint to the princess and prince story, and his heart began to pound again. Nyaa? As Tiffany nudged him, urging him to continue stroking her, he started moving his hand, but his mind was elsewhere.
He had stayed with him until morning and prepared a meal. He had openly expressed that ARA’s Lee Hae-sung was with Yoon Hye-an, answering the manager’s call and telling him not to worry about people’s stares.
Most importantly, the touch that had enveloped his cheek and ear at the end was no different from before. That’s why Choi Hong-seo hadn’t even suspected.
That he would disappear from his sight after that.
■
The road to the ancestral shrine in Hanam was clear. As if the rain that had poured down so recently were a lie, the sky had cleared beautifully.
“The weather is almost winter now. They said it would drop to 0 degrees tomorrow morning, but it’s only 5 degrees now, even with such clear skies.”
Yong-jae, in the driver’s seat, glanced at his phone on the mount and spoke. Choi Hong-seo, sitting in the back seat, turned his gaze from the window to Yong-jae. Since the rain stopped a few days ago, the temperature had dropped significantly, just as Yong-jae said. Having checked the weather beforehand, Choi Hong-seo had also brought a light padded jacket.
“I’m sorry for asking you to come with me on a day you don’t have a schedule.”
“Even if you don’t have a schedule, it’s a workday for me anyway. Why are you apologizing for something like that?”
Yong-jae laughed as if it were a silly thing to say and exited the highway, following the sign towards ‘Gwangju’.
“But it’s already been a year. Time flies.”
“……”
“After that incident, we were completely preoccupied with your accident… so the Choi Hong-seo case was buried.”
The ‘incident’ Yong-jae was referring to was the case of Choi Hong-seo’s death in Thailand. Yoon Hye-an had committed suicide a few months later, around the time of the X-Boy Scandal trial. Therefore, Yoon Hye-an’s agency, ENA, would have had no energy to spare for the X-Boy Scandal, which was someone else’s problem. That was how the world worked. No matter how powerful an event occurred socially, what was more important to each individual were the matters immediately before them. It wasn’t particularly cruel.
“There’s nothing around… maybe because it’s winter, but the trees have lost their leaves, making it bleak.”
The ancestral shrine was not far from the IC. As he entered the parking lot adjacent to the funeral hall, Jae-woo, a man of sturdy build, bent his upper body and cautiously surveyed the surroundings.
Choi Hong-seo put on his outer garment and picked up the small bouquet of chrysanthemums he had placed on the passenger seat. The last time he visited, he couldn’t bear to offer flowers to his own remains and had come empty-handed, but this time he had prepared flowers.
“It’s 20 minutes, Hyung? If you don’t contact me or come out after 20 minutes, we’ll come in to check, right?”
“Yeah, I’d appreciate that.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come in with me?”
He smiled at Yong-jae, who looked at him with concern, and got out of the car. The air felt sharper than in Seoul. Even though it wasn’t that far.
Haa…
As he took a deep breath looking at the ancestral shrine building, his breath plumed.
Choi Hong-seo’s own death anniversary was just a few days away. Even though the memories and emotions of the person named Choi Hong-seo were alive within someone’s body, it was Choi Hong-seo’s death anniversary in a few days. That fact still caused a conflict within Choi Hong-seo’s inner self.
He knew fans were holding an event on the anniversary day, so he had deliberately come a few days early.
He wanted to visit again. He wanted to properly face the death of his body once more. He felt that if he did, he could take one step forward from here. Even if he didn’t know where ‘here’ was or where the step forward led, he had a vague premonition in the vastness.
Even though he had visited once before, perhaps because the season had changed, the atmosphere inside felt more desolate than he remembered.
At the time, he had been completely out of his mind, still unable to accept the fact that he had woken up in Yoon Hye-an’s body. He couldn’t even remember the location of the VIP resting chamber.
He checked the location on the map in the central hall and moved slowly.
One more thing. There was something he wanted to confirm here.
This was the place where he had first lost consciousness and collapsed after waking up in Yoon Hye-an’s body. The next was Lee Hae-sung’s residence in Seocho-dong, and although he had experienced symptoms in Director Kang Woo-hyun’s second-floor drawing room, he hadn’t lost consciousness.
He wanted to know the cause of the symptoms.
Afterward, even after several more script study sessions at Director Kang Woo-hyun’s house, the same incident did not repeat. It had only happened when he was talking with Lee Hae-sung in the second-floor drawing room.
Could it be a symptom that occurs when strongly recalling Choi Hong-seo’s past memories or emotions in a place strongly related to Choi Hong-seo? For now, that was his only conjecture. But nothing was certain.
Fearing that the symptoms might occur without any time to recover, he had asked Yong-jae to accompany him today. He had instructed him beforehand to come into the ancestral shrine to find him if he didn’t contact him or return after 20 minutes.
“……”
As soon as he entered the VIP resting chamber, his condition worsened. The reaction was much faster than the first time he visited. However, it was still just a feeling of nausea, like severe seasickness. It was bearable.
In the center of the VIP room hall, a new flower offering stand had been added, which hadn’t been there before. It was prepared in anticipation of an increased number of visitors for Choi Hong-seo’s first death anniversary. Flowers, gifts, and messages from fans who had visited in advance were placed there, and the stand itself was decorated with great care. He knew who was putting so much effort into Choi Hong-seo’s memorial.
Suddenly, a watery film appeared before his eyes, and cold sweat began to break out. His body wouldn’t allow him to examine them leisurely.
Choi Hong-seo quickly captured every trace on the flower offering stand with his phone camera. His hands began to tremble. Fear washed over him, like being trapped alone in a sealed room with a gas leak.
The first time he visited, he had known nothing. He hadn’t known such a thing would happen, and the symptoms had been sudden. But now he knew that these symptoms led to losing consciousness, and he also knew that these symptoms were supernatural phenomena, inexplicable by medicine or science, like superpowers or psychic phenomena.
It was frightening.
Not the symptoms themselves, but the fact that he was exposed to these bizarre phenomena without any preparation was frightening.
No, his very existence now was a bizarre phenomenon. He was a monster that no one could accept, and his existence was a lie to the world. Who on earth would believe in such an existence?
Tears welled up more than sweat. He left the VIP room before the symptoms worsened. He hurried his steps outside the building. He collapsed onto a bench and took in the fresh air.
I could feel my body slowly returning to normal. Even that reaction was terrifying. I couldn’t tell if the tears flowing were from sadness or fear.
“Are you a ghost, or a corpse?”
In an instant, the shaman’s voice from the Gutdang in Gangwon Province struck my head like lightning.
“Even if you walk and talk and chew food like a living person, you are a corpse. Even if you feel joy, anger, sadness, or pleasure, in the end, you are a ghost. How did a ghost gain a body, and how did a corpse gain a soul?”
At the time, I was so scared by her energy that I just froze and trembled, but she had definitely said that.
A ghost exists only as a soul without a body, and a corpse is the opposite: an empty body from which the soul has departed.
If the shaman truly knew about this situation when she spoke, then the ghost was Choi Hong-seo, and the corpse was Yoon Hye-an. A ghost who gained a body. That’s what I was now, a monstrous existence. I didn’t know when I would lose my soul again and become a formless god, drifting through the universe without hands or voice.
When would I lose consciousness next? Would I be able to open my eyes again, as I had every time before? I couldn’t guarantee anything.
The merciless cold wind slashed painfully across my tear-soaked cheeks. Choi Hong-seo wiped his tears away haphazardly with the back of his hand.
After confronting such vivid fear, the reality behind it came into view. The light of determination flashed in my eyes, which had been streaming with tears.
I will tell him.
Even if he doesn’t believe me, even if he thinks I’m crazy, I will cling to his legs and beg him, just please, listen to my story until the end.