Be the Sacrifice Chapter 11

“Guess I don’t really need it, huh?”

 

He was smiling, but Heesa held back, afraid that if she opened her mouth, drool would drip out.

 

This was the first time in her life she had encountered such a difficult offering. 

 

She had chosen wrong. She chose so wrong. She should have listened to Baksu’s words.

 

This wasn’t an offering she could handle. 

 

Cutting his hair? 

 

And on top of that, the petty spite of cutting it because he didn’t want to give it to her was just awful.

 

Swoosh—

 

Hong Yeomrang’s patience ended exactly there.

 

Even that had been him holding back a lot. He let go of the hair he had been dangling over the lamp. 

 

The moment he did, fire caught the ends of the hair, and it burned with a whoosh. The smell of burning was pungent. 

 

No longer thinking of using his own cut hair to lure Heesa, Hong Yeomrang chose instead to completely destroy the bait. His face remained calm.

 

“No!”

 

Heesa sprang up from her crouched position and threw herself toward the blazing lamp.

 

“Are you insane?!”

 

She grabbed the already burning hair without even feeling the heat. She clutched the burning ends with her bare hands. 

 

Hong Yeomrang seized the back of her neck and hurriedly pulled her up. 

 

Still, she wouldn’t let go of the flaming hair, so he forcibly pried it from her grip and threw it far away.

 

“Haa, haa…”

 

She was already hungry, and then suddenly charged forward in excitement. 

 

Heesa was completely drained. The tips of her fingers burned with pain. She could see the clump of hair—now no bigger than the palm of her hand, looking like a bundle of straw—fall with a thud onto the rock. 

 

Not even realizing she was being held by Hong Yeomrang, Heesa thrashed toward it.

 

“Why would you jump into fire?!”

 

A thunderous shout crashed down on top of her head.

 

“Why did you burn it?!”

 

Refusing to back down, Heesa shouted back.

 

If you’re going to burn it, why not just give it to me since I need it? 

 

How can you just cut the hair your parents gave you and burn it like that? 

 

In all her life, Heesa had never met a man like this.

 

Now I understand why Baksu still sometimes trembles in fear whenever he thinks back to Hong Yeomrang as a child.

 

“What makes you think you can yell at me like that?”

 

“You unfilial bastard!”

 

“Yeah, sure. Why not just call me a filthy bastard instead?”

 

Hong Yeomrang had been called an unfilial bastard since he was a kid. 

 

When he reported his own father to the authorities for the third time, he was driven out of the village after being called a filthy bastard—so right now, this woman was basically throwing a very elegant, very yangban-style tantrum.

 

Somehow he had managed to catch her in his grasp, but perhaps because she had no strength left to run, her resistance was slow and weak, not even fierce. 

 

Her gaze wasn’t directed at Hong Yeomrang; it remained fixed on the hair that was still burning, flames eating away at it until the very end.

 

Did she really crawl all the way here just to eat hair?

 

Well then, cutting it was worth it.

 

Whether the story about her putting his hair in her mouth and running off was a lie or the truth had now been clearly confirmed. 

 

It wasn’t provocation. It was real. This was… a hair-eating monster…

 

His thoughts reached that point when his eyes caught sight of Heesa’s fingers—already blistered and swollen from the burns.

 

“Hey.”

 

Hong Yeomrang shook her by the scruff of the neck to get her attention.

 

Her body swayed limply. It dangled without strength, like something with no bones. 

 

Once the hair had completely burned away, she slumped as though she had let go of life itself. 

 

Suddenly, Hong Yeomrang realized that the back of her neck, which he was still holding, was drenched in cold sweat.

 

He quickly tossed her onto the mat as if throwing her away. He had already blocked the only way out long ago. 

 

Standing with his back to the sole exit, he looked down at Heesa as she lay curled up tightly on the mat, trembling. She looked exactly like a small red puddle that had formed. 

 

Just like a young animal that believes it’s hidden by covering only its head, Heesa huddled there, wrapping her face with the long sleeves of the durumagi he had given her as though trying to hide completely.

 

She was hungry.

 

Every last bit of strength she had left had been spent trying to protect that hair. Her fingers stung and burned hotly. 

 

But since this much wouldn’t kill her, it was fine. 

 

The real problem was the one hundred days out of the year. The vital yang energy she could only consume on those exact days—she wasn’t getting any of it now. 

 

Enduring hunger wasn’t a big deal; she thought she could hold out for a few days at least. But seeing all that hair burned into a charred clump right in front of her plunged Heesa into despair.

 

…How am I supposed to spend three months with this guy?

 

She wanted to send him back down. She wanted to tell him to let the entire village blame him for every misfortune that happened throughout the year. 

 

While having such wicked thoughts, Heesa suddenly smacked her own forehead with her palm. She couldn’t become the same kind of person as him.

 

She had known all along that his temper was rotten.

 

It was her own fault for calling him here; having thoughts like that wasn’t right.

 

Meanwhile, Hong Yeomrang thought she was crying. Up until the moment she, who had been covering her face, suddenly struck her own forehead with her palm, he had definitely thought so. 

 

She had hit herself so hard that her forehead turned bright red, and Heesa blinked slowly.

 

“I can endure it. I can endure it.”

 

“You seem to think I’ve gone completely bald or something.”

 

Hong Yeomrang looked down at her and said. 

 

At those words, she jerked her head up sharply. Though short, the hair that still reached below her ears came into view. 

 

Without realizing it, Heesa licked her lower lip once. 

 

But this was far more difficult than snatching a handful of long hair and running away.

 

“…You’re not bald.”

 

“I still have hair, and from now on, I’ll give it to you whenever I feel like it.”

 

“You’ll give it to me?”

 

“In exchange, you become my servant.”

 

“Servant?”

 

“Open the forest. I need to go down.”

 

“Ah~ So you want to go down.”

 

Heesa nodded her head. But that didn’t mean she was agreeing. She had simply understood that she needed hair, and he wanted to leave the forest. 

 

Hong Yeomrang didn’t want to spend even one more second in this place that made people strange. 

 

This place was eerie. 

 

The woman named Heesa was a bizarre monster who bewitched people to steal their life, no, their hair. She even got hurt like a human and didn’t heal easily. 

 

Somewhere, it all felt sloppy, and he no longer wanted to waste any more of his emotions or time in a place like this.

 

He should just stop caring what the village believed or what they did.

 

He couldn’t understand his past self, who had returned to the village after so long and stepped forward, saying he would catch the monster.

 

Heesa slowly raised her upper body from the mat. 

 

Sometimes she moved like a bolt of lightning, yet at other times she was this slow. 

 

Sitting on the mat, she tilted her head to the side and looked up at Hong Yeomrang. 

 

A strange light flickered in her eyes. Her pale lips curved into a mischievous child’s smile.

 

“I don’t die even when I’m hungry. I just get hungry enough to feel like dying. Yeomrang, you really want to go down right now, don’t you?”

 

Whether she knew or not that blisters had formed on her fingers, Heesa spoke while gently nibbling the tip of her index finger with her teeth. 

 

That action scraped at Hong Yeomrang’s nerves like crazy. If she bit just a little lower, it felt like the freshly formed blister would burst.

 

“I told you to open the forest. Open it when I say so.”

 

“The forest isn’t something I open and close. What should I do….”

 

“What?”

 

“The dokkaebi are the ones who do it. If you want to go down, you have to find a dokkaebi and ask them.”

 

…So this forest has both monsters and dokkaebi.

 

“What kind of place even is this?”

 

A hollow question slipped out of Hong Yeomrang’s mouth.

 

“Sacrificial offerings can’t leave the forest for a hundred days. That’s the rule.”

 

“Even if I say open it right now?”

 

“Only I know where the dokkaebi are. So, Yeomrang. Now, who’s the servant?”

 

Heesa struggled to keep her body, which kept slumping forward from her starving stomach, upright. Then, stretching languidly and leisurely as if yawning, she asked Hong Yeomrang. 

 

For a girl so tiny—so small she couldn’t even eat a bowl of thin rice gruel, who had been caught and curled up into a tight ball—he found her speaking so boldly utterly outrageous.

 

He hadn’t wanted to find out this way, but perhaps this was exactly how his own father had felt whenever he looked at him.

 

Just moments ago, she had been so hungry she was licking her lower lip and swallowing hard, and now she comes out with this?

 

At this almost adorably provocative attitude, Hong Yeomrang was simply dumbfounded.

 

“So the one who’s desperate is definitely me.”

 

“You’re the one who brought up the servant thing. I….”

 

“Yes, miss. Fuck, how exactly is this lowly servant supposed to get out of here?”

 

Hong Yeomrang let out a spinning laugh while spitting out the kind of crude swearing you’d hear from a thug in the marketplace. 

 

And yet he raised his speech level, calling her “miss.” 

 

He asked politely, yet it was astonishing how one person could overflow with so much malice. 

 

If someone placed a bowl at Hong Yeomrang’s feet right now, it would probably fill to the brim with that overflowing malice and still spill over.