Afterlife Dating Episode 11 – Occult Blockbuster (Part 2)

“Spirits? Jieun, my soul is already on the verge of being delisted! These donations are the only CPR keeping it alive!”

Ignoring Jieun’s hysterics, I flashed a wink at the camera.

The livestream had already surpassed twenty thousand viewers.

Hyunwoo brushed the dirt off his pants and stared at me with cold disbelief.

Undeterred, I swung the gimbal toward Minsu.

Still fired up from his earlier air punches, Minsu proudly flexed his pumped-up muscles.

“Did you see that, viewers? The magnificence of our team’s tank, Minsu! What you just witnessed wasn’t CGI. One hundred percent real! Now, we’ll proceed through the mist toward the legendary Tree of Wailing!”

In truth, it was just an ordinary zelkova tree I had picked out during a daytime scouting trip.

But in this atmosphere?

It looked like a gateway straight to hell.

As we approached the tree, one of the strings on Mija’s gayageum suddenly snapped with a sharp twang!

“Ah! My finger…!”

Mija cried out and collapsed to her knees.

At the same moment, Hyunwoo’s detector began screaming again.

This time, the shrill mechanical noise was on an entirely different level.

“This isn’t some minor spirit.”

The calm expression vanished from Hyunwoo’s face.

He pulled out a red talisman and slapped it onto my chest.

“What are you doing? I’m a shaman, remember?”

“A shaman? Please. You don’t even know what’s clinging to your back right now. When you chased away those lesser spirits earlier, your greed for money was so strong that something real caught your scent and latched onto you.”

A chill ran down my spine.

Now that I thought about it, my left shoulder had felt incredibly heavy for a while.

And near my ear, I could almost hear a wet whisper:

“Crypto… all in… all in…”

[Anonymous4]: Yo, what’s that shadow behind the shaman lady? Why does it have four arms?

[Anonymous5]: Holy crap. Something’s definitely attached to her. The screen keeps glitching.

[Donation: $500]: “If this is real, I’ll donate another five hundred! Exorcist bro, save the shaman lady!”

The smell of money overpowered my fear.

With trembling hands, I shoved the gimbal into Hyunwoo’s arms.

“H-Hey… am I going to die? If I do, I at least need those donations to clear first!”

“Shut up.”

Hyunwoo stepped behind me and gripped my shoulders once more.

As his cold fingers brushed the back of my neck, a far stronger shiver than before ran through my body.

Leaning close to my ear, he whispered quietly.

“Close your eyes. Stop thinking about money. Think about the thing you want to protect most.”

He paused.

“And not your stock portfolio.”

I squeezed my eyes shut.

Protect?

What did I even want to protect?

My empty bank account?

My thoughts became a tangled mess when Hyunwoo’s voice grounded me.

“Focus. The thing behind you is a vengeful spirit of financial ruin.”

His voice lowered.

“It came to destroy your investments completely.”

At those words, something dormant inside me exploded awake.

“You dare touch my portfolio?! You filthy spirit!! Want to go bankrupt together?!”

The moment those words burst from my mouth, the talisman on my chest erupted with golden light.

Jieun screamed.

Something shattered.

The sound of a camera lens breaking echoed through the air—

And the livestream abruptly cut to black.

A moment later, silence returned to the mountain trail.

I lay sprawled on the ground, gasping for breath.

Hyunwoo looked down at me as if I were hopeless.

“Did… did I survive?”

Carefully, I asked the question.

Hyunwoo held up my shattered smartphone in front of my face.

“You survived.”

He paused.

“But your entire fortune—the gimbal and your phone—is gone. Oh, and…”

He pointed at the cracked screen.

The livestream chat was still visible.

[Anonymous99]: Did the shaman lady just shoot lasers from her eyes? LOL

[Anonymous100]: She literally awakened after hearing ‘financial ruin.’ That’s insane.

“Damn it! How many donations will it take to repair this?! My phone! My phone!!”

I clutched the broken device and wailed.

Hyunwoo clicked his tongue.

“Are you a shaman… or just a money ghost?”

From somewhere in the distance, I heard Jieun running toward us.

“Hyunwoo! Are you okay?!”

But I barely noticed.

All I could think about was my shattered phone—

and my fifty-thousand-won prayer beads, now broken into pieces.

Thus ended our midnight date:

not as a romantic outing,

but as an accidental occult blockbuster.