Samsin Halmoni hesitates, clearly not receiving the reaction she was looking for. “Hwanin is a baby,” she tells him, and he manages to give her a scathing yes I am very aware sort of look. “Hwanung is—if you’re to be believed—patricidal and running from his crimes. You are next in line for the throne. You—” Her mouth works as if she’d like to spit in his face, but she spits the next words instead. “You are the heavenly emperor.”

It’s as if the world stands still at those words, as if the chaos around him freezes as realization sinks deep into his body. In the stress of the last few hours, the farthest thing from his thoughts had been Okhwang. The SRC Flatliner had taken up his mind, down to the little crevices. He hadn’t spared a thought to realize that…that he is the emperor of Okhwang.

“The interim heavenly emperor,” Samsin Halmoni hastens to add, but she’s staring at him as if he’s some sort of circus monkey who has utterly failed to perform. Instead of cackling madly like he might have some years ago, Seokga is silent. Power. So much of it at his fingertips, should he only leave the cruise ship to take his rightful place on the throne. This is what he’s desired since childhood, this is what he staged a massive fucking coup for…So why isn’t triumph welling up inside him? Why isn’t he smirking at Samsin Halmoni and telling her to kneel before him? Seokga opens his mouth to at least attempt a victorious cackle, but all that comes out is a faint sort of wheeze. Samsin Halmoni gapes as the trickster god closes his eyes, feeling rather sick.

Kisa cannot go to Okhwang, not like this. She is a gwisin bound to the SRC Flatliner, and the farthest she can go from the ship is to the fucking DAR when the cruise ends. Even if they’re able to locate Hwanung, he’s not sure that Yeomra will revise his terms to allow Kisa some other victory. But she doesn’t seem to want one anyway. She wants reincarnation.

Don’t leave me, she’d pleaded with him, and he’d sworn not to. Not until after she leaves him. Again.

She’s always leaving him. Part of Seokga wonders, bitterly, if he should be the first to vanish this time around. Before his heart can be shattered into millions of shriveled little pieces for a second time. He can self-medicate on his newfound power, his control over Okhwang, lounging in Cheonha Palace’s phoenix throne and amusing himself by ordering the other gods around like puppets. He wouldn’t have to think of her at all—

—but he would. How can he ever forget the exact color of her eyes, the gorgeous curls of her hair? The way she rambles when she’s nervous or excited, that razor-sharp intellect?