— Heeey. Think you could quit sleeping in and get up?

A voice droned somewhere near my ear.

What was that? Whose folksy old-man voice was that?

— The son of the Mountain Mother of Jirisan, who carries the vital spirit of Taebaek in him, and he’s this pathetic? Get up, now! Snap out of it before the other bastards catch on! (TL Note: Mount Taebaek is where Korea’s foundation myth places the descent of the god Hwanung; the Mountain Mother of Jirisan is one of the peninsula’s oldest local deities. The old man is claiming Tae-san has divine ancestry.)

Thunder went off against my eardrums.

“W-who’s there!”

I shot upright.

No — I thrashed around trying to.

But only my mouth opened. The rest of me didn’t budge.

That shitty feeling of being tied up tight in a spiderweb.

— Don’t you worry about that for now. Wake up already, you rotten little shit! You’ve slept that long, now get up! The sun’s already coming up!

He was chewing me out like we went way back.

— Still, you did better than you look. Threw your own life away and earned yourself one hell of a pile of good karma. Heh heh. So I called it even against the price of your life, rubbed the Mirror of Heaven’s Reversal, the Emperor on High’s own, till my arm damn near fell off, and woke you.

The Mirror of Heaven’s Reversal?

Words I couldn’t make sense of rang in my ears.

Whoa! I— wasn’t I dead?

I couldn’t think straight at all.

Through the haze, the last scene in my memory came back to me.

Skreeeeeeeech— WHAM! CRACK!

The scream of brakes.

The smell of rubber burning off the tires.

People’s shrieks tearing the air.

Even the crisp snap of my rock-hard skull splitting — I remembered all of it, vividly.

Around dinnertime I’d filled my stomach with a double order of cup rice and gone wandering the streets of Noryangjin.

July of the year 2020, and Noryangjin said everything about the age.

Dingy young people who hadn’t washed their hair in days shuffled toward the cram schools like zombies, souls left somewhere behind them.

The world of 2020 was harsher than it had ever been.

The factional brawling among the Middle East, America, Europe and China had gotten fiercer, and as national interests sharpened and trade retaliation escalated, the export channels closed one by one.

Household debt set a new record every day, and real estate, the safe asset, had gone completely to hell.

Talk that we had hit a second IMF drifted around everywhere — the internet, the news, all of it. (TL Note: Koreans call the 1997 Asian financial crisis “the IMF,” after the bailout that followed it; a “second IMF” means a collapse on that scale.)

With conglomerates and small firms alike going under, there was almost nothing one person could do.

America’s safeguard tariffs bit harder, and China’s trade barriers, built to swallow Korea whole, were just as enormous.

Wedged in between, the Republic of Korea was nothing but sandwich filling.

Merciful Buddha, amen…

And then, once again — damn it!

The securities firm I worked at went under.

In a situation like a second IMF, the company went belly-up, and I went down with it.

I’d been this close to a permanent contract!!!

I tried to land another job, but it was a world where companies vanished like foam melting in the sun.

I settled in Noryangjin, the place they call the holding pen for young refugees.

I figured I would at least make grade-nine civil servant, but by then that test had left the bar exam in the dust.

I was hungry, so I emptied out the money I had left on a double order of cup rice.

After I ate, I wanted to go down to the Han River and take in the sight of Seoul one last time.

Tomorrow I had to head back down to the country.

Seoul had run dry even of part-time work.

My last supper in Seoul.

Dozens of people a day jumped into the Han, and the world wasn’t going to change over one more.

Enjoying the unfamiliar feeling of a full stomach, I scuffed down the street in my slippers.

Ahead of me walked a grade-schooler, one of the younger ones.

The kid, who didn’t know the first thing about how the world worked, was humming a cartoon theme song.

He had a phone in one hand and was lost in a game.

Must be nice, that age.

Me, unemployed, and him, whose whole job was being a student — the contrast was brutal.

I wished him happiness, and that he would never turn out like me.

The light was green.

The two of us, me and the little guy, crossed side by side.

Even staring at his phone, the kid obeyed the signal to the letter.

That was when I saw it.

A red sports car blew through the light and came charging at us like a Siberian bear a month into starving.

Wow. Seriously… My body went stiff as a board, like my soul had been shaken clean out of it.

I could see the plate.

Damn it! It read like a message: oppa, hurry up and drop dead. (TL Note: read aloud in Korean, 5-8-8-2 sounds out a phrase meaning roughly “oppa, hurry up and die” — a plate-number joke. Oppa is what a younger woman calls an older man she’s close to.)

The humming stopped.

The kid had seen the car coming, and like me he’d frozen solid, like this was a game of freeze tag.

The little guy was in danger.

I’d lived enough of my life, but he hadn’t.

I threw myself at him!

There was no time for long thoughts.

Ahh, nice and nimble, sweeping the kid up and—

Like hell!

Bodies moving like lightning in the movies is a load of crap!

My feet wouldn’t come up, like they’d been superglued down.

I stared blankly at the sports car bound for hell while my body defied my will.

The critical moment when the grade-schooler and I were about to enter the afterlife in the same graduating class.

Then, just like that, my feet came free.

Cup rice or not, strength surged up in me.

I hooked the kid with my right arm.

It was already too late for both of us to get clear.

I used the momentum and threw him.

The little guy went flying toward the curb.

Skreeeeeech!

The brakes caught, far too late, with a hell of a noise.

WHAAM!

Fireworks went off.

And then I was flying through the sky like a bird.

My breath jammed in my throat.

Strangely enough, none of my body hurt at all.

My soul, the bastard, had abandoned the body before I did.

And then — thwack!

My skull cracked open with a crisp little sound.

Thanks to the rock-head reputation I’d carried since I was little(?), I didn’t die on the spot.

There was no pain, but I could dimly see the red blood pudding spreading across the asphalt.

People’s screams tearing the air, and the foul smell of burning tires.

And then a long, long blackout came down.

— Now you listen close. Those snake-spawn of Nüwa and the Yellow Emperor, who think nobody’s brats are precious but their own — wreck them! And the children of Nagi and Nami, who stole our elder brother’s fire and then crawled into bed with the snakes — smash them too! I keep quiet a while and these things start treating me like some hick who fell off a turnip cart! Agh! Not one of them worth a single punch— gah! (TL Note: Nüwa and the Yellow Emperor are Chinese creator deities; Nagi and Nami are Izanagi and Izanami, the Japanese ones. The old man is having a family argument about Korea’s neighbors.)

A fresh brand of furious nonsense reached me.

My head was getting clearer.

Huh? Hold on, I’m not dead yet?

I couldn’t smell anything, and I couldn’t feel any pain.

There was only that droning voice, and it was extremely loud.

Excuse me, who are you?

I asked the unidentified gentleman.

My mouth wouldn’t open, but telepathy seemed to get through.

— You are the firstborn. You have to show those bastards, once and for all, what the dignity of a firstborn means! Understand?

The firstborn? I am the firstborn in my family… but do you know me?

It was an old man’s voice I’d never heard before.

My own grandfather had died early, when I was little.

— Agh! Those vicious, sneaking children of the snake and the shadow are going to give me an ulcer. Hey! I went to all the trouble of making you the descendants of heaven, and you wag your tails at the dogs next door? The mutts next door are laughing at us!

The old man’s shout came down like lightning and rang my eardrums.

It was vivid, like something alive, and completely impossible to follow.

Whatever it was about, he was clearly furious.

And he had one hell of a temper on him, too.

— Hey, hey… Don’t you ever forget what happened today. Don’t go playing the saint like Jesus or the Buddha, spreading that big generous heart of yours around like a moron and forgiving your enemies!

Yes, yes. It’s all I can do to feed myself in this world.

I sold that big generous heart off a long time ago and bought ramen with it.

Jesus and the Buddha had come up.

He sounded like he knew them personally, or at least well.

— Bastards who won’t straighten out the first time never turn over a new leaf, not ever! Keep that in mind! Wreck the snake’s brood and the shadow’s brood so thoroughly they never act up again! Clear out the rage I’ve been piling up for thousands of years, and do it properly! Otherwise… you can count on me killing you for five thousand years straight!

The old man’s threats were a dud.

There was no way a dead man was going to die again.

— Right, I’ll be going.

The old man, who’d been beating his own drum and running the whole show, said he was leaving.

I wasn’t sorry to see him go.

My head was just a mess.

— Ah! And before I go, I stuck a present in you.

Go? Go where? And what present?

He seemed like a con man, any way I looked at it.

Do reapers run phone scams too? The suspicion hit me hard.

Countless questions swept through my head and vanished.

— It isn’t allowed, normally, but your abilities are so damn pitiful I put it in anyway. Hey! A son of the Mountain Mother of Jirisan, getting beaten up by kids and shaken down for pocket money — the shame of it… Live well, you punk! A human lifetime’s a hundred years, short as a mayfly’s nose hair. So strike up the music and enjoy every bit of it. Handle the one thing I told you to and then live however the hell you please. I’ve lived it, and life turns out to be nothing special.

Whoa!

I was certain that old man was insane.

With my skull cracked wide open, the odds of my surviving were zero.

Even dying, I felt proud of myself.

I’d never had a chance to do a good deed while I was alive, and I’d pulled off something big.

Saved the little guy, too…

And since it was a crosswalk accident with the car in motion, I’d left my parents a decent insurance payout.

I’m an unfilial son, going on ahead of you, but please put pizza and fried chicken on the memorial table every year!

And if you can spare it, draft beer instead of cans would be great.

Thank you, so very, very much, for everything.

Your worthless son, Jang Tae-san, respectfully.

In my head, with my chest full, I sent up my last letter home.

A few tears squeezed out.

Huh? What’s this? Th-this hot, nasty wetness I’m feeling right now???

BRRRRRING! BRRRRRING!

An alarm clock went off ferociously right beside my head.

“Hurgh!”

I let out a scream at the horrible, shrieking racket and shot upright.

My eyes flew open.

“…?”

Huh? My body moves?

The noisy bulldozer of an old man’s voice was gone, too.

Light came into my eyes.

Objects slowly registered on my retinas.

This was a very familiar space—

What is this?

A room the size of a booger.

The room across the hall in my family’s country house, where I’d lived through high school.

My cramped little room, with its grimy wallpaper and the smell of earth pouring off it.

One beat-up computer, a coat rack…

The big Nonghyup calendar hanging beside the desk came into view all on its own.

“2… 006, July???”

(End of Chapter 1)