Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Sunoo died like deadlines came: sudden, inconvenient, and past the point of giving up.
It was sometime past the 11th hour of the night. The office was silent safe for the hum of the air conditioner that became a perpetual background noise to Sunoo's predicament. Fluorescent lights, unwashed coffee mugs in the pantry, and unkempt office chairs littered sunoo's periphery. Hunched over his keyboard, he was scrolling through the fifth revision on his slide deck no one would surely pay attention to tomorrow.
Suddenly, his phone buzzed.
Boss: can u fix page 6? letter 'u' is slightly askew.
*read at 11:24 PM*
Boss: woah you're still at the office??
Sunoo sighed through his nose. Not even exasperatedly, just slowly. One that came with a calm face while holding an imaginary knife behind his back.
He slammed his laptop shut, having enough of everyone's bullshit, picked his bag and left the building in a rush before he exploded.
The city was cold, creeping into your bones like the thought of unpaid credit card bills in the back of your mind. The roads were deserted, safe for lone corporate slaves like him who were at the edge of their sanity.
The streetlights flickered. The pedestrian light turned green.
Sunoo thought as he took a step, "I can't wait to finish reading that ao3 fic in my bookmark..."
Just then, a pair of headlights came towards his direction. A blind spot from the intersection.
Too bright.
Too fast.
Too loud.
For a split second, Sunoo thought of everything but his burdens. Relief simmered for a split second, but then-- "fuck! I didn't save the ppt file--!"
And then, black.
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He first moved his fingers.
Success.
Then, his toes.
Also success.
Sunoo doesn't know how long he was asleep for, but his body felt like it had been ran over by something heavy. He opened his eyes to the smell of dried herbs, incense, and something that smelled suspiciously like rotting moss.
"Ugh," he groaned as he blinked the sleep away.
His teeth ached. His spine ached. His fucking soul ached--and he never knew that could even happen.
He expected a pavement, sirens, or an ER doctor shouting his name, but instead--
Somewhere above his head, a drop of something liquid dropped on his forehead.
He blinks to clear his vision.
Above him, hung from a lumber beam, was a deer skull. How he knew it was a deer was beyond him. Hollow eyes, twine garland around it's severed neck, and what looked like a peacock feather between its teeth.
"...hello?" he whispered.
The room groaned.
"Ah!" He jumped at the sound.
He thought it was something else in the room with him, but it was the room that made a sound. Literally. Wood shifted beneath his ass; something thumped behind the walls; and the light flickered through the traditional rice paper screen.
Wait. What is this hanok-looking place.
This wasn't the hospital.
This wasn't Seoul.
This was...
Gasp!
He sat up too fast, and the world spun. In an attempt to balance himself, his elbow knocked over a bowl, upturning it.
Sunoo stared as something crawling and slimy slithered its way from beneath it. A worm, softly glowing blue, wriggled its way out, turned its head, and seemingly met Sunoo's eyes.
It screamed.
Sunoo screamed back.
"What the fwwwoooockk--!!"
Something heavy thudded outside the room, and then footsteps followed.
The door flew open.
An older woman appeared in the doorway—short, bent with age, dressed in layered robes in burnt plum and stormwater mud. Her hair was pulled into an impossibly tight bun, and her beady little eyes looked sharp and full of judgment.
"Thou art awake at last!" she snapped. "Another minute and I'd have burned thee with the incense with rat droppings."
"...what the hell.."
"Nay, not hell," she marched toward him in short strides. "But thou might soon see it if thou kept scaring the sigil worms!"
Then she smacked Sunoo's arm with unnatural strength.
"Ow..." Sunoo whimpered, backed into the wall, and took in his surroundings. "I'm--what is this? Who are you?... Am I... dead?"
She smirked and pinched the boy's arm. "Ah--!"
"Death be easier than servitude, boy."
She turned and grabbed what looked like a disheveled broomstick and thrust it into his arms.
"Now up you go. We prepare the ashes for the midday rites. Clean everything of soot and dust, the souls dislike thy vermin. And fetch water! Take heed of the well ghoul. The last apprentice perished."
Sunoo blinked. "Perished?"
"Possessed. Then perished," she shrugged as she turned to walk out the door. "Weak lad."
The broom in his hand twitched. Sunoo gasped and almost let go.
He took a look at his surroundings. A semi-delapidated hut, the shaman who just left the room, the dried herbs decorating the walls, and the absurdity of it all. A symbol of a flag in ancient hangul characters littered unfinished talismans on a table nearby.
Wait. He knew this.
More so, he knew this exact chapter.
"Oh my fucking gosh..." he whispered. "I fell into the fanfic I read in ao3."
It was when he ran out of the hut, his quarters rather, that he realized what was truly happening.
It wasn't just any fanfic. It was the one he was anticipating finishing when he was hit by the truck; the one with the tags that said "cursed prince", "blood magic", and "slow burn enemies to lovers".
But this. This specific setting, this specific hut. The bones. The halmeoni who slaps her assistant with her espadrilles, and the said assistant who dies not long after the story starts.
"Oh no..." he whispered again, looking around in all directions, seeing the dark forest beyond the wooden gates, seeing the endless field beyond their entrance, seeing the lake fizzing beneath the winter sun. "Oh no, no no no no-"
He clutched the edge of his worn-out robe. Ugly.
"I'm not even reincarnated as the main character. I'm not even a second lead. But I'm reincarnated as the shaman's assistant?!"
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🧹✨💨
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Sunoo thought that when he died, he would have a break. Finally getting to have a full 8 hour sleep without feeling the anxiety of having to wake up the next day to a phone call, or an alarm, or a project reminder, or a Slack message.
But it seems such an escape was a luxury even in this life.
Halmeoni Goh -- the old bat who hit him and is undoubtedly an HR risk -- was exactly as she was described in the fic. From what little he can recall, that is. Short tempered, vaguely magical, majorly sarcastic, and deeply uninterested in explaining anything.
Seriously, as a corporate soldier, Sunoo thought of the things he could improve in her deliverables:
- Cleanliness, for one! The place is rancid. RAN.CID. And he'd have hired a cleaner as soon as he found a manpower agency nearby.
- Also, onboarding training! Lacking training material for all things she wants him to execute, as if she expected him to know the first time around.
- Finally, documentation! How does she expect to remember stuff if she appears to be doing it on a whim. How about her future shaman descendants? How about her children? How about Sunoo?! Who. is. clueless. about. every. single. thing! The ingredients list? Oh, don't even bother, it's all in her wrinkled brain!
Sunoo huffed as he stirred the last batch of the powdered bones of a golden ox for the evening invocations.
Even in here, he needs to pick up everyone's slack.
But, in light of this, there is nothing--and he repeats--nothing better than corporate operations and compliance than the ✨Senior Management Consultant of the Mortgage and Banking department, Kim Sunoo✨
"Just you wait, Halmeoni. I'll fix up your business like a true corporate asset!"
After a few moments of thinking, he muttered, "... do you think she'd like me to draft the corporate bylaws?..."
---
This in mind, it was difficult to start from scratch.
He learned the hard way as she shoved him into a routine that included:
- boiling deer bones with bittergourd
- cleaning out the outhouse from ghost poop (?!)
- recopying prayer scrolls with ink made from ant queens who lived "comfortably" (?!?!?!)
- chanting purification verses while dancing around a pentacle (he could not memorize it)
He tried to light the incense.
It exploded at the altar.
"Apprentice!" she yelled from behind him.
"But I didn't even do anything!"
"Thou existed incorrectly!" she pinched his hip.
"Ah--!"
Then, when he tried to sweep the shrine, the broom snagged the floor panels and hit him in the eye. Then when he tried to clean the water basin, it growled.
Sunoo nearly cried.
But he didn't know what was worse - that this plot is all familiar to him, or the fact that he knew where this is going. He remembered distinctly.
It was chapter 3. The shaman's assistant dies after disrespecting a royal official, an envoy of the main character. Then the story begins.
"This is all a fucking scam," Sunoo muttered back in his room, lit dimly by a lone candle, one that didn't bite.
Scribbling on the parchment paper that he had snagged from the archive room, he wrote everything that he had been taught for the past few days, even the most absurd things.
---
On the night that Sunoo finally got a chance to walk around and observe the scope of his vicinity, he tried his best to remember what he could.
Everything felt blurred, as all fics melt with time after reading them.
But he knew the major key persons to this venture project of his: one, the cursed prince was the main lead and had a demon inside him; two, the commoner main character whom the prince fell in love with; and three, some other extras who all fight their way into the heart of the mc. This was a fucking harem fic, as far as he knew. And it was all about political drama between the prince and his adversaries. He stopped around the part where everyone fought off the demon.
But he wasn't too sure about the technicalities, too far gone into brain fog of death and powerpoint decks.
So, Sunoo made a decision. He was going to commit. To being an NPC. A background role. A broom-wielder. Quiet and compliant. That way, he might be able to keep his life the second time around.
'Stay out of the plot. Stay away from the prince. Hold on to your broom, Sunoo. Fighting !!'
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🧹✨💨
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Sunoo had counted the days that passed using a tracker that he made from his corporate parchment paper.
Two weeks. And for some reason the days here are much, much shorter.
By this time, he had successfully created a list of inventory, a Standard Operating Procedure for future employees, and profit and loss ledger. Yeah, yeah. He was the shit, bro.
He was about to start scrubbing blood from the bottom of the cauldron when the magical outer gates creaked. And they never opened to strangers.
Sunoo peeked out the window.
A figure stepped into the threshold, hunched over and limping, and his hair unbound. His robes appeared to be ruined iterations of royal fabric, and his the skin beneath it looked deathly pale, dripping blood down the seam of his shoulder like he'd regurgitated internal bleeding.
"Help..." he pleaded just above a whisper.
Then he fell on the front lawn like a puppet unstrung.
The air stilled.
The hearth hissed in leftover embers.
Sunoo froze. The man is unwelcome here.
Or, rather, whatever was inside the man was unwelcome.
Because he knew the man before him, no doubt. Sharp cheekbones, shadowed eyes, dark lashes, tall stature, and a mouth that looked like it was made to deliver commands
The silk on his chest was torn, and Sunoo could see a tattoo-looking seal beneath it that pulsed with purple light:𓆩⚔️𓆪
Sunoo bravely took a few steps towards the person.
"That's the male lead," he muttered faintly. "That's the male lead."
"Prepare the-"
"Ah!" Sunoo jumped as Halmeoni spoke behind him. "You scared me!"
She glared at him.
"Prepare the boiling water, apprentice."
"For what? He's literally dying," Sunoo gestured.
Halmeoni grunted as she walked past sunoo and towards the sleeping figure.
"Water heals, fool. Or at least cleans."
I sighed exasperatedly once, witnessing halmeoni magically make the body float indoors before he turned and stumbled towards the hearth to boil water.
When he returned, the man was already sprawled in the middle of the shrine room, placed in the middle of a magic circle made from salt and powdered bones of crows.
He knelt beside halmeoni, observing as she inspected the man's wounds.
She handed him a cloth. "Wipe him."
He paused. "Like, everywhere?... Even down there--"
Halmeoni tsked.
Sunoo began to work. "Alright, alright, alright. Sheesh... and it's past my work hours, too, mind you."
He pressed the cloth to the man's wrist. It was warm. Albeit too warm for a human.
"I never expected royalty to flea this far into the mountains," halmeoni whispered as she helped strip the man.
That's when sunoo remembered. Right. This was a goddamn prince.
And he was staring at his flaccid dick.
Then, suddenly, the prince's eyes fluttered open, ever so slightly, as Sunoo was about to wipe below the hip line.
"Art thou... the shaman of the Obsidian Mountains?" he whispered as he looked at him.
Sunoo froze.
Then dropped the cloth right on his face.
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🧹✨💨
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Prince Heeseung slept for two days.
Within those two days, he interviewed halmeoni incessantly about all the details he missed. All the stuff that might have been overwritten in the original fic.
His Royal Highness, Prince Lee Heeseung of the house of Lee. Old money. Tough shit. But cursed by generations preceding his parents. The only child is prophesied to be the vessel of the great demon of wrath. And when he was a child, Halmeoni was commissioned to place a seal on the prince's soul to keep the demon inside Heeseung, never to be released to the world.
Like a fallen statue, the prince lay still.
Sunoo alternated between doing all of his routine and adhoc tasks, and pretending he was fine that such an important person was sleeping in their jurisdiction.
Why was he cast here again? I can't remember. Why was he injured, then?...
"This is fine," he says as he distracted himself by feeding the flesh-eating crickets in the vegetable garden. "This is peak NPC activity. Nothing I have to worry about. I am functioning. I am surviving."
By dawn of the third night of his royal lodging, Halmeoni gave Sunoo a list of instructions to fulfill while she went away to represent a forest nymph for litigation against beavers.
Feed the disgusting looking porridge to the comatose royal; Chase away moth-vultures with a broom while reciting namu amita borata; and buring spirit incense again (non explosive this time).
He was busy swatting insects, having given up on dancing and chanting, when the prince's fingers twitched. His brows furrowed once, and he mumbled something that sounded like,
"Keep me contained...Don't let it out..."
Sunoo blinked at him.
"Damn right. I barely managed to have time to take a dump today. Please don't drag me into your plot arc. "