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Prologue
“You must raise only one of the twins.” The shaman spoke with conviction, her eyes flashing sharp and bright. The deep shadow cast beneath the divine statue—which Soo-ae had unknowingly looked up at—suffocated her. Pressing down hard on her chest, Soo-ae barely managed to let out a breath and asked, “What… what do you mean by that?” “There is an old saying: when two fates enter a cursed house, misfortune follows. Not all twins are like that. But there are twins who fit this saying perfectly. And that’s your children. If you aren’t careful, one child will end up harming the other. If you want to prevent that, live as if you only have one child. That is the only way.” “Isn’t that… just superstition?” Soo-ae wrapped both hands around her belly and stepped back slightly from the shaman. Seeing this, the shaman’s eyes flared up like sparks. “How on earth is that mere superstition?” The shaman’s voice cracked low. “Even if your ancestors committed a sin, that karma passes down to the children. This is all karma.” The shaman slapped her knee sharply and spat out words that sounded like a curse. “In the households that ignored my words, the child ended up dying, the parents died young, and the family was torn to pieces. If you don’t want the gods to hand down a harsher punishment and hurt both children, keep my words in mind.”
Soo-ae was devastated. How hard had it been to conceive these children…!
After failing to conceive naturally multiple times, it had already been more than seven years since she and her husband, Hyeong-jin, walked into an infertility clinic holding hands. At first, implantation went well and everything seemed good. But the heartbreak of miscarriages visited Soo-ae repeatedly. Yet, Soo-ae could not bring herself to abandon her desperate desire to have a child. With a mindset that this was truly her last attempt, she underwent her thirteenth IVF procedure.
The result was a miraculous success.‘What if I lose them again?’ Her anxiety was short-lived; even after three months of pregnancy, the babies grew healthily inside her. The moment they were certain that the long-awaited twins could finally be born into the world safely, the couple literally cried and laughed at the same time. They were the children they had longed for so deeply. Soo-ae had only visited the fortune teller’s house to soothe her lingering restlessness, even though she had entered a stable phase of her pregnancy. She simply wanted to hear that the babies would be born safely. Instead, the shaman poured out nothing but cruel and cold words upon her.
“I guarantee it. One brings fortune, and the other brings disaster. If you keep them together, both their fortune and their life force will vanish in the end. If you don’t want to lose both, choose one.”
Soo-ae pushed her heavy body up and glared fiercely at the shaman. “Who are you to say that! How could you say such a thing to our children…!” Undeterred, the shaman silently looked up at Soo-ae with fierce, stern eyes. Unable to endure the suffocating gaze of the shaman, Soo-ae stormed out of the place.
That night, in the dark room, Soo-ae wept alone. Worried about his wife, Hyeong-jin cautiously opened the door and walked in. However, he merely sat helplessly beside her. He already knew that no words, no comfort could reach her.
To cast a curse on unborn children… She shouldn’t have visited a fortune teller in the first place. Drenched in regret, she raised her trembling hand and gently placed it on her stomach. Two small, warm lives were still there. It was a miracle that had come after ten years. It was the life they had waited for so long.
‘Right. It’s all superstition.’ How could anyone know if she was truly a legitimate shaman anyway? She recalled news stories about so-called “fraudulent shamans” who made money by scaring visitors into paying for exorcism rituals. Soo-ae convinced herself that the shaman she visited was just one of those, pulling herself together.
Around the time she was due to give birth, Hyeong-jin’s business began to falter for no apparent reason. Soon after, his mother passed away in a sudden accident. Every single word the shaman had uttered haunted and tore through Soo-ae’s mind every night. The anxiety she had tried to dismiss as impossible gradually became a reality.
Meanwhile, the day of Soo-ae’s delivery arrived. The delivery room was filled with cries that sounded almost like screams. The child born first greeted the world with a robust cry before even catching her breath. The doctor and nurse nodded and said, “She is very healthy. A true blessing.”
However, the second child, who barely followed, did not cry for a long time. Her skin was pale, and her breathing was weak. Flustered, the doctor frowned and lifted the baby upside down. Small hands hung limp and swayed. “Breathing is weak. Prepare the incubator.” The medical staff moved hurriedly. Just then, another doctor looked down at the chart and said in a low voice, “Mother, during the delivery process, the second baby’s umbilical cord was entangled around the first baby’s neck. The first baby was almost in danger. That’s likely why the delivery was more difficult.”
In an instant, Hyeong-jin’s expression hardened, and Soo-ae’s eyes trembled in shock. In both of their minds, the shaman’s prophecy from long ago came back to life with sharp clarity.
“I guarantee it. One brings fortune, and the other brings disaster. If you keep them together, both their fortune and their life force will vanish in the end. If you don’t want to lose both, choose one.”
Watching the second child being rushed away to the incubator, Soo-ae’s breath caught in the air. Despite her sweat-soaked body, the unsubsiding pain, and her fading consciousness, a single thought emerged vividly.
The child who burst into tears first toward the world, stretching her hand out strongly to grasp it—that child was ‘Joo-young’. However, the other life, which had almost choked off Joo-young’s breath even before being born, barely set foot into the world as ‘Seo-young’, barely breathing out a faint gasp.
The very first moments of the two children were starkly divided like that.
And so… The older twin, ‘Joo-young’, grew up with her name called brightly under the warm sun. While the younger twin, ‘Seo-young’, had to grow up quietly in the shadows, as if she barely existed at all.
