Wandering Through Vol. 1 Chapter 26 - First Life 02

The sky was overcast.

 

Thin raindrops dripped and fell. It was a bad day.

 

Half sitting on the floor, wiggling his legs like a child in his master’s absence, he looked up at the sound of footsteps. 

 

A hooded man was approaching, wearing a raincoat.

 

“Master. Where is my lady?”

 

“I believe she’s with the Great Lord.”

 

Ban stamped his foot, as if unimpressed by his answer.

 

“Tsk. Is she well-fed and sleeping well?”

 

“I’m sure the Great Lord will take good care of that.”

 

“Well taken care of what is well taken care of. I’m sure he’s only thinking about tearing her apart and eating her.”

 

Ban, his mouth agape, looked around, then lowered his voice to a whisper.

 

“He’s scary and mean, and I pity her.”

 

He was so young. He didn’t know what he could and couldn’t say.

 

“Why bother her so much, if she’s going to die? No matter how nice she is, I would run away.”

 

And sometimes young eyes saw the world more honestly. 

 

Ban continued to chatter, “She said she was sick and went to rest at a place with good water, but can she rest if that frightful man follows her? He won’t let her go until she’s out of breath, and she can’t eat anything but porridge because he is always pinning her down. By the way, who makes her porridge? Where’s her medicine? When do I go there?”

 

Amid these deafening questions, the man calmly replied, “The Great Lord is boiling porridge and medicine and serving it to the lady.”

 

Ban’s face crumpled. 

 

Gukmu the shaman handed over the towel and asked, “I would have told you to stay at the Great Lord’s house instead, so why are you here? Go back, and the Madam will return.”

 

“Why is the Master here?”

 

“There is someone I was supposed to meet here.”

 

The tracing raindrops had stopped falling. 

 

The man turned his head briefly toward the dark clouds in the sky, then looked back at Ban as he spoke.

 

“I think you’d better get back before it starts pouring.”

 

Nothing he said seemed to move the needle. Ban rolled his eyes, grabbed the parasol he’d given him, and stood up. 

 

As I hesitantly walked away, I kept glancing back.’

 

He didn’t seem like a real person… He acts like he sees everything when he doesn’t.

 

Gukmu kept his head turned in that direction until Ban was out of sight, and only after he was gone did he look up. 

 

The rain was falling again, drop by drop. He brushed a drop off his cheek with his hand. 

 

A rough hand turned his shoulder and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

 

“—Did you know?!”

 

Shin Suyeong, a young man who should have grown up with nothing but kindness in his heart, demanded, his face contorted like a demon.

 

“Did you know this would happen?”

 

“I must certainly have told you.”

 

It took a lot of work for the Gukmu to discern what the young man was referring to by ‘this’. 

 

The young man’s today was a product of the young man’s past.

 

“All that you have done will be returned to you.”

 

It all felt like a mockery to the young man. 

 

The young man clenched his jaw and he growled, “This is what comes back to me? How? I have no fault at all!”

 

“Since the blood was shed for someone dear to you in a previous life, wouldn’t it be fitting that in this life, your dear one should be the one to shed it? That’s your karma.”

 

The young man threw him violently to the ground. 

 

As he looked at the Gukmu sprawled on the soggy ground, he asked sullenly.

 

“Where is she?”

 

It was clear who he was asking. He had come all this way to find her in the first place. 

 

Looking at the young man as if he would tear him apart if he didn’t answer, Gukmu pursed his lips.

 

Turning to the young man, who turned away as soon as he heard his words, he asked.

 

“Are you sure you want to continue?”

 

Of course, he had to get going. The young man turned back around and said, “Of course I should go.”

 

…So here it was.

 

Seeing the tiny, skinny figure wrapped in a futon, Suyeong couldn’t hold back the rising anger in his heart and collapsed onto the ground.

 

Too small, too skinny, it made it unbearable.

 

“Don’t cry. Please don’t cry…”

 

He looked up at the faintly soothing words. 

 

Crouching on the darkened room floor, she flinched. 

 

Seeing her hand flailing in the air, uncertain whether to reach out and comfort him or not, Suyeong made up his mind.

 

He took her hand and held it tightly.

 

“Come with me, I’ll…, I, I promise I’ll be good, I’ll take care of you…”

 

Up close, Yiseo’s face was pale. He couldn’t even exert strength on the hand he held. 

 

It felt like it was going to break. There were red handprints on her wrists, and her hands were dotted with raw spots as if something had chewed them.

 

At the nape of her neck, he saw a gash where a crust of blood had formed and a bluish bruise around it, and he squeezed her hand involuntarily.

 

“Ugh…”

 

With a pained groan, I pulled away. I don’t know what the hell he’s done to her body that’s causing her so much pain just because I squeezed her hand a little too hard. 

 

He released his grip on her arm and scrambled to his feet. She wobbled to her feet and fell back to the ground.

 

Only then did Suyeong notice the scar on her right ankle. 

 

The scar wasn’t the only problem. Her ankle was too thin. It was as if her right leg had never grown.

 

This place was horrible. He kept reminding her, over and over again, that this was karma for the sins he had committed in his previous life.

 

We must get out of here before he returns, and we must hide her. Where he would never find her.

 

The bewildered face looked back at Suyeong.

.

When he had met him before, Yangmu had clearly not recognized her. It shouldn’t have been surprising, they had met in a past life.

 

“Why, or how, do you remember…”

 

Yiseo stammered, unable to organize her words. 

 

Suyeong glanced outside. The rain was still pouring down hard. He wrapped her carefully in layers of blankets and tattered clothes from the floor.

 

Then he carried her out of the house. He trudged down the mountain through the downpour. 

 

The rain pounded against his body, but he cared only that she was less soaked, not that it would do much good in the dense rain anyway.

 

In fact, he didn’t want to move in the pouring rain. But the moment he saw her huddled in the room, he couldn’t leave her there any longer. 

 

Somewhere safe, for now, yes. He felt the urge to take her somewhere safe, where the Great Lord wasn’t, to be precise.

 

If the Great Lord was who Suyeong thought he was in his previous life…

 

“Ugh…”

 

His foot slipped on the muddy mountain path, and he stumbled, still clutching Yiseo tightly. 

 

Yiseo whispered urgently, “Just let me down, okay? Or we can turn around. We can go back and talk…”

 

“I’m not going back.”

 

“Yangmu.”

 

He frowned at Yiseo’s call.

 

“…At first, I thought I heard wrong, but why do you keep calling me that?”

 

“I’ve never heard your name in this life, so I don’t know…”

 

“I’m Shin Suyeong. My last name is Sukrang.”

 

Suyeong braced himself against a tree and barely caught his breath. 

 

Even on a clear day, the treacherous mountain passes and pouring rain made every step difficult. 

 

But if he showed it, the anxious-eyed Yiseo might ask him to turn back again, so he smiled and pretended not to care.

 

As if he’d paused not to rest, but merely to talk.

 

“You’re going to call me by my name anyway, so I don’t need to tell you, though you can call me by my old name if you’re not familiar with it yet.”

 

He added, pulling her into a hug.

 

“Myungah.”

 

Yiseo momentarily doubted her ears.

 

‘Who was that? Myungah? Wasn’t the young man carrying her now the reincarnation of Yangmu? Was I mistaken?’ 

 

But if so, why was he carrying her down this rainy mountain?

 

“Who are you…?”

 

“Your cousin’s younger sibling, the only one.”

 

At that moment, he stumbled down the slope, swept away by the rain.

 

💫

 

First Life 04

 

The maiden sat on the prince’s lap and whispered, “This country will live for at least two hundred more years, and no one will ever usurp your throne.”

 

The Prince buried his face in the maiden’s chest and smiled.

 

“And after that? Will the king after that be a Lee? Will your family be a royal family?” 

 

“The king will come from the descendants of my cousin’s brother, who fled from the capital, and he will be…”

 

“I don’t want to know that, what about you?”

 

Instead of answering, the maiden stroked the round forehead of the prince, who buried his face in her chest as he looked up. 

 

His eyes narrowed, and he bit her chest with a slight ache. He flicked his tongue over the bite marks on the white flesh and asked.

 

“What will you be in your next life?”

 

She smiled and pressed her lips to his ear.

 

“Perhaps I will be born a king’s child, like you.”

 

Her lips tickled as she tried to answer, and he swallowed his laughter and rolled on the bed, holding her close.

 

“Then I may be born a shaman, like you, even before I ever met you, I know you.”

 

He kissed her cheek at the reminder, and she blushed even more. He whispered, trailing his lips down her increasingly reddened neck.

 

“You loved me before you ever met me, you told me, and so will I in the afterlife, because I’ll miss you before I ever met you.”