IN THE HOLLOWS LIVES A CAT —
she has been promised to a god, and yet baek jinri has lived to see twenty-eight. while the being slumbers forgotten in the forest, she works at onyang's cafe. but when those antlers break free, they will see she is practical and stubborn. they will see she belongs in the trees.
everyone was surprised when baek jinri left onyang. but no one was surprised when she came back.
jinri has always been a cat-like thing — quiet, watchful, hard to read. she moved like she never fully belonged to anyone, anywhere. not even the very town she called home. she was always the kind who came and went as she pleased, slipping through cracks no one else saw. some called her distant, others called her odd. but most of the time, she was referred to as her grandmother’s shadow.
that never sat right with her.
she comes from a long line of believers, of women who bowed their heads not out of weakness, but out of survival. the baeks didn’t pass down wealth or land. instead, they passed down rituals, drilled prayers into her head as if it was the only thing that mattered. they served a god that only ever cared about obedience. something old. something buried beneath the land itself. at least, that’s what the stories say.
jinri was never a believer.
she spent countless years watching her family kneel for nothing and mourn for everything. she chose to inherit none of it. first her mother, the very image of devotion, taken too soon. then her father, a humble man who worked himself to the bone. people say he was lost to grief, then to the forest — it was never really clear to her. every time she pried, she was met with knowing stares and hushed whispers, but never the answer. all while her grandmother blamed the old god for both, “he takes,” she says, “he takes what he’s owed and what he isn’t.”
at nineteen, jinri took the first ride to seoul and never looked back — not at the altar, not at the graves.
needless to say, seoul was different. she didn’t have to worry about missing rituals and upholding routines. there was no room for superstition in a place that barely stopped to breathe. the city was fast-paced, sleepless almost — and jinri didn’t want to miss any second of it.
it was the perfect place for her. a clean slate. no one asked about her childhood, or the ghosts of her past that loom over her from time to time. because no one really cared. everyone only ever cared about moving forward. reinvention was the language, and jinri spoke it well.
she breezed through university, and landed herself straight into tv production. it was easy, fulfilling, and jinri was nothing if not ambitious. she chased work like it might outrun her, sunk her heels into the concrete streets of seoul, determined to take root and never go back. and for a while, it worked. she made a name for herself as the youngest producer to ever climb through the ranks. sure enough, her little apartment filled to the brim with accolades and awards, ears ringing from the praises of colleagues and seniors alike. it was everything jinri could ever ask for.
success has a way of thinning out when it isn’t rooted well.
losing everything was just as easy as gaining it. it didn't take long for the shine to wear off, and for her luck to dry up. every project she touched slipped through her fingers and nothing made sense. everything she worked for began to unravel before her very eyes — but it wasn’t just her career, something deeper had begun to rot, something she could feel crawling beneath her skin.
at her wit’s end, jinri decides to come back.
not because she wanted to, but because the city had finally let her go.
there was no ceremony, no collapse. just her, a few suitcases, and a key to a house that still stood, as if waiting for her all this time.
her grandmother had died a quiet death, they said — in her sleep, in the same crooked bed she’d prayed beside for decades. she left behind the house, the land, and everything tied to both. there were no notes, no messages. just the address written in her grandmother’s fading handwriting.
jinri thought she’d just come to tie up loose ends — to say goodbye — but the house had a way of holding on.
the walls still smelled of burnt herbs and charcoal, the windows still stuck in their frames. the floorboards creaked beneath her feet like old bones. the shrine remained untouched, unkempt, as if waiting for someone to kneel again. yet since coming back, jinri has taken a quieter path. she spends her days working out of the only cafe in town. she quietly bides her time, watching familiar faces pass by through the cracks she’s been accustomed to.
“she belongs here,” the town says. “always has.”
everyone was surprised when baek jinri dared to leave onyang. but no one was surprised when she came back.