An Office Worker Is Good At Exorcism - Chapter 1

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The shamanic terminology and explanations appearing in this novel reference the Korean Folk Culture Encyclopedia compiled by the National Folk Museum of Korea, though some elements have been modified for narrative flow and entertainment purposes.
Specific locations and place names featured in this work are unrelated to the story, and the events described are entirely fictional.
Furthermore, this novel is not intended to promote superstition.
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Episode 1
Chapter 1. Follow the Divine Guidance (1)
Clang-whang! Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! Boom! Thud!
The sound of a gong being struck.
The sound of a drum resonating.
The sound of bells trembling.
In the expansive courtyard, those playing instruments cried out with shouts like “Uh-huh!” or “Hwaaa!”
Their expressions were grave, their eyes desperate.
It was a gut—a shamanic ritual.
Young Kang Hyung-seok, the subject of the ritual, gazed blankly at the shaman dancing before him.
She swayed white cloth suspended from both hands, dressed in vibrant red and blue garments.
Why am I here, in the midst of this ritual?
Kang Hyung-seok shifted his gaze from the shaman to the altar behind her, suspended between reality and illusion.
There stood a figure clad in black armor like a general.
The appearance was striking, yet the others seemed oblivious to his existence.
It was shrouded in black heat shimmer, its face invisible.
Yet it was unmistakably gazing at Kang Hyung-seok.
With eyes that yearned for something desperately.
‘Who are you?’
What do you expect of me so earnestly?
He asked urgently through lips that would not open, but it did not answer.
Suddenly, his head spun.
Overwhelmed by unbearable vertigo, Kang Hyung-seok collapsed like a wooden statue.
Amid the clamor of traditional instruments, his parents and the musicians rushed over.
Even as he fell, Kang Hyung-seok continued to stare at the black general.
Until the moment consciousness faded.
Twenty years later.
Whoooosh.
A remote road deep in Gangwon Province.
Kang Hyung-seok gripped the steering wheel of a reasonably priced silver sedan, while Noh Su-chul, his superior from the same company, sat in the passenger seat with furrowed brows, gazing out the window.
“Ha, it feels like a goblin might jump out at any moment.”
The words came from Noh Su-chul, a fellow department head at Daejeong Materials.
They weren’t close enough to joke around with each other.
I didn’t want to play along, but this time I couldn’t help but agree.
“Indeed.”
The night mist hung heavy in the air, thick and suffocating.
The road twisted like a coiled serpent beneath us.
We were heading back from a business trip.
The hour crept toward dawn, and the moon had vanished behind the clouds.
Without a single streetlight in sight and no other vehicles on the road, the atmosphere was eerie enough that a ghost—not just a goblin—wouldn’t have seemed out of place.
“This is a high-risk accident zone.”
“Turn that damn thing off!”
Noh Su-chul’s brow furrowed sharply as he spoke, and I drew in a deep breath before exhaling and lowering the volume on my phone mounted on the dashboard.
“Tsk! Everything’s annoying. Seriously.”
Noh Su-chul reclined his seat and pulled out a cigarette.
It was my car.
Yet he lit up without asking for permission.
“Phew! Was it Kim Jae-sik? Your professor?”
The name of a professor I’d been close to during my university days.
I furrowed my brow, anticipating where this was going.
“Folklore major, so that’s why. A professor’s recommendation in this day and age? How tacky.”
“…That’s an overstatement.”
“Is it? Then I apologize.”
Noh Su-chul took a long drag on his cigarette, then opened his mouth.
“And you—if you got in through a recommendation, shouldn’t you work harder? You shouldn’t be hearing whispers about parachuting in behind your back.”
I exhaled sharply through my nose and clenched my teeth.
This bastard had been like this for ages.
Every time, the urge to throw in my resignation surged up violently.
If not for Kim Jae-sik’s request, I would have done it long ago.
‘Keep working steadily. You need to set an example so I can help your juniors find jobs too.’
I’d endured for one year because of those words.
The remaining two years, I’d persevered out of sheer spite.
“I haven’t heard anyone else say that except you, sir.”
“This punk, you’ve gotten bold? Talking back now?”
“I suppose I have you to thank for that.”
Noh Su-chul’s lips moved silently in a murmur, but I didn’t need to hear it to know.
He was cursing.
A man incompetent yet prideful, with pathetically fragile self-esteem.
The type who believed his own worth increased by needling those around him.
That was Noh Su-chul.
If only I didn’t have a partner.
Kang Hyung-seok tilted his head to the side, letting his discomfort show, and drove on in silence.
That was when it happened.
“Hey, folklore expert.”
When Noh Su-chul called me that way, there was only one reason.
“Yes?”
“The weather’s miserable anyway—tell me a scary story.”
Kang Hyung-seok let out an incredulous laugh and turned the steering wheel along the winding curve of the road.
“It’s so sudden, I’m not sure what story to tell.”
“You must have experienced something frightening at least once in your life.”
Noh Su-chul even reclined his seat back, waiting for Kang Hyung-seok to speak.
Kang Hyung-seok pressed his lips together, thinking for a moment, then opened his mouth.
“You don’t know why I majored in folklore, do you?”
Kang Hyung-seok glanced briefly at Noh Su-chul and continued.
“I see ghosts.”
Noh Su-chul’s expression shifted subtly, and Kang Hyung-seok reduced his speed because of the thickening night fog.
“The first time was when I was five. No one was home, and I saw a ghost standing on my parents’ bed.”
Noh Su-chul’s eyes narrowed—he hadn’t expected such an account.
“It looked filthy. It was trampling all over the bed with both feet, and its eyes were blood red.”
Kang Hyung-seok had majored in folklore because of ghosts.
Folklore teaches not just customs but also oral traditions and legends.
Fear stems from the unknown.
So I decided I needed to pull the object of my fear into the realm of understanding.
“As I was trying to leave the room, our eyes suddenly met. That thing suddenly crawled toward me on all fours, its limbs twisted grotesquely like a crushed spider.”
Perhaps it was because the calm tone of voice, combined with the surrounding atmosphere, painted such a vivid picture.
Noh Su-chul’s brow furrowed as the image of the ghost formed in his mind.
“You’re not making this up, are you?”
“I see them often at the company too.”
“What?”
“You know Lee Jin-pyung, right? Ask him sometime. Whether he’s ever owned a dog.”
Wariness flickered across Noh Su-chul’s eyes, which had been full of disbelief.
A look that asked: how could you possibly know that?
There’s no way I couldn’t know—I’ve seen it.
“An old white Spitz. The tail probably curves slightly to the right.”
Lee Jin-pyung would never know.
That the dog comes to work with him every single day.
And that it lingers around him, playing, before leaving satisfied at the end of the day.
“Did Lee Jin-pyung tell you?”
“Would he be the type to do that?”
Lee Jin-pyung was someone who kept his mouth firmly shut.
He kept quiet about both personal and work matters—enough to make several people pull at their hair in frustration.
“In any case, I’ve been seeing ghosts since childhood. It’s caused me considerable suffering.”
“….”
With Noh Su-chul’s mouth sealed shut, silence settled over the car.
A thick, heavy silence dragged up old memories from the depths.
Kang Hyung-seok, his brow furrowed on one side, stared into the darkness and clicked his tongue softly.
‘Damn it. Why ask something like that?’
The past torment of ghosts came rushing at him like fog, overwhelming and suffocating.
“I thought I might improve if I became physically stronger, so I served in the military in a tough unit, but it didn’t really help.”
It might have been better if I’d gone somewhere that actually hunted ghosts.
That was what I’d thought during those hundred-mile marches with ghosts at my heels.
“You’re not spouting nonsense just because I said something harsh, are you?”
“Whether you believe me or not is entirely up to you, sir.”
“I don’t believe it. If what you said were true, would you be here? You’d have received divine descent long ago and opened a shrine.”
At the scoffing question, Kang Hyung-seok raised one corner of his mouth in a smile.
“I received divine suppression instead.”
“…What?”
“I should have received divine descent, but because I suffered from divine illness from such a young age, I underwent divine suppression instead.”
There are often people with great interest in shamanism and the occult.
Noh Su-chul was exactly that kind of person, so he knew the difference between divine suppression and divine descent.
And he knew well that those who don’t receive divine descent can suffer from divine illness or torment from malevolent spirits.
“It must have been a malevolent spirit. Since you didn’t receive divine descent.”
Noh Su-chul flicked his serpentine tongue, trying any way he could to get under Kang Hyung-seok’s skin.
But it didn’t reach his heart.
“I underwent the divine suppression ritual for nearly a month.”
This child wasn’t ready to receive the divine yet.
So a grace period was granted.
This was what the divine suppression ritual was, and the fact that it took a month meant the deity that had chosen Kang Hyung-seok was an immensely powerful being.
“Even the shaman couldn’t identify who that being was. She said if I had received divine descent, I would have become a great master shaman.”
Noh Su-chul pressed his lips firmly together, and an unexpected silence descended upon the car.
A great master shaman meant the highest order of shamans.
A shaman respected by all other shamans.
Kang Hyung-seok’s confession that he could have become such a person was something Noh Su-chul couldn’t easily dismiss.
“Was that entertaining?”
Since Noh Su-chul didn’t answer, Kang Hyung-seok didn’t press further either.
A heavy atmosphere settled in, but different from before.
The engine hummed steadily.
About three minutes into the drive after that.
Kang Hyung-seok narrowed the space between his eyebrows.
It wasn’t just because Noh Su-chul in the passenger seat lit a cigarette with a thoughtful expression on his face.
Thump, thump.
The car rattled as if the road had never been paved in the first place.
“This is strange. Are you sure we came the right way?”
“It was a single-lane road, wasn’t it?”
Kang Hyung-seok eased off the accelerator and glanced at his phone.
The navigation app on the phone was functioning normally, but something felt off—perhaps because of the thick fog rolling across the landscape.
I had the unsettling feeling that I was heading somewhere I shouldn’t be.
That same eerie sensation of driving toward a cursed house or a den of malevolent spirits was creeping closer with each passing moment.
Whoosh!
Something suddenly emerged from the fog,
Screech! Thud!
and collided with the car as Kang Hyung-seok slammed on the brakes.
As the acrid smell of burning rubber filled the vehicle, I felt my mind go blank.
‘What did I just see?’
While my attention remained fixed on that glimpse before impact, Noh Su-chul’s sharp voice pierced through.
“Watch the road, you idiot! What did you hit?”
Snapping back to reality, Kang Hyung-seok unbuckled his seatbelt and spoke.
“I’ll go check it out.”
“Damn it, damn it! What the hell! Can’t you drive properly?”
As Noh Su-chul fumbled with his seatbelt in panic, Kang Hyung-seok stepped out of the car.
As I did, I recalled what I had glimpsed moments before.
‘It wasn’t a roe deer or a wild boar piglet.’
But it wasn’t human either.
On this desolate road, with no villages nearby, there was no reason for a person to be here.
Neither beast nor human.
Our eyes had even met.
Chilled to the bone, Kang Hyung-seok shook his head vigorously and activated the flashlight on his phone.
“Come on! Let’s go!”
Kang Hyung-seok moved forward with Noh Su-chul following behind.
The thick fog carried with it the scent of wet earth, as if rain had just fallen.
Squelch, squelch, squelch.
Kang Hyung-seok illuminated the ground beneath his feet as he walked.
The strange sensation grew heavier, as if sandbags had been tied around my ankles.
Yet I had no choice but to continue—I couldn’t completely dismiss the possibility that what I’d hit might have been human.
“Why can’t I see anything? Did I imagine it?”
Noh Su-chul muttered from behind.
Whoosh.
The thin beam of the phone’s flashlight illuminated the collapsed form.
Kang Hyung-seok’s feet froze, and Noh Su-chul, who had caught up, turned to stone at the sight.
“Wh-wh-what is that?”
It was still alive.
The size of a large dog, its entire body covered in thick yellow and black fur.
The ribs crushed when struck by the car heaved with each labored breath, but the true horror lay in the head.
The face of a middle-aged man.
Attached to the body of a beast.
“Wheeeeze, wheeeeeze.”
Breathing barely through the collapsed lungs, it glared at Kang Hyung-seok and Noh Su-chul with bloodshot eyes.
Not round pupils like those of a human, but vertical slits stretched lengthwise.
Crackle, snap.
Noh Su-chul stumbled backward in shock, seemingly incapable of even thinking to call the authorities or document what lay before him.
“Damn it, damn it all. What the hell did you hit! You lunatic!”
Kang Hyung-seok said nothing, exhaling sharply through his teeth as he stared down at the creature.
Though I had never seen such a thing in my life, somehow I felt as though I understood what it truly was.
Changgwi.
It was as if someone whispered the name directly into my ear.
Whether it was knowledge born within my mind or the guardian spirit I should have received, I could not say.
‘Changgwi….’
The vengeful spirit of one devoured by a tiger.
A ghost that failed to find peace in the afterlife, becoming the limbs and instrument of the tiger.
I lifted my head and surveyed the surroundings.
A Changgwi has but one purpose.
To lead other victims to the tiger.
From within the deep, suffocating mist, the premonition that something watched me pierced my skin like needles.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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