My confusion only deepened as we continued to travel on the bus for over an hour. As the vehicle slowly emptied of passengers, Heeyeon finally pressed the button to be let off at the next stop. I glanced outside to find that Seoul had long been left behind as the bus crept to a stop outside of a memorial park in the considerably smaller city of Paju.
A growing sense of realization dawned on me as I cast my mind back to the day’s date. While I hadn’t registered it at first, August 17th was the day I had died. Was I buried here? Without a body, however, I wasn’t really sure what my family had done for my funeral—I suppose they could have buried an empty casket, but it was probably more likely that they had simply paid for a memorial stone and called it a day. The powerful manipulation spell that I had cast should have ensured that a death certificate could have been successfully filed regardless of the missing body.
