Shin (played by Gong Yoo) flings Eun Tak (played by Kim Go Eun) away before she can pull out the sword, then catches her before she rams into a truck. He’s hit by the realization that he’s hesitating to end his immortal life because of Eun Tak, a weighty moment set against a comically inappropriate fireball as traffic turns into wreckage behind them.
Eun Tak is badly shaken by the experience, and goes limp in his arms. Shin takes her back to the house, and it isn’t till she’s back in her bed that she comes back to herself and asks if he’s okay. He says that’s a question that ought to be reversed, but she shrugs it off and says he didn’t know either how much it would hurt, thinking he threw her aside because the act of pulling out the sword was so excruciating. She’s happy to have proof that the sword is movable, though, and that she’s the true bride. His reaction is more muted, so she asks if that’s not a good thing. Shin manages a smile and tells her that it is.
While Deok Hwa (played by Yook Sung Jae) waits for Shin to come home so he can hand-deliver the old scroll (of the Queen), he idly looks up the news and sees footage of that multi-vehicle massacre in the street. When Shin joins him in the living room, Deok Hwa asks if that was his doing. Shin just tells him to clean it up, and that he’s too tired to explain. Deok Hwa gets on the phone to his grandfather and Secretary Kim to alert them to the mess needing cleanup, and has to insist repeatedly that it’s Shin’s doing, not his.
Secretary Kim assembles a team to take down every video on the internet related to the accident. Deok Hwa goes to the scene directly to deal with the witnesses, armed with a huge suitcase and one reluctant Reaper (played by Lee Dong Wook). He directs people with damaged vehicles to line up next to him, and directs those with damaged psyches (from witnessing the scene) over to Reaper, heh.
Reaper wipes each witness’s memory and replaces them with the idea that the cars were wrecked in a “gust of wind” and the money was merely “a windfall dropped from the skies.” Hilariously, his recitation gets faster and more halfhearted the more times he has to repeat it. Deok Hwa, meanwhile, hands out literal stacks of cash. The last phase of cleanup requires wiping video files from the system, which turns out to be rather easy when you have a walking, talking, memory-wiping aide right on hand.
Back at home, Deok Hwa informs Shin of how much work they had to do because of him. Shin wearily thanks them, which Reaper wearily declines, saying that he doesn’t have the energy right now to fight with him. Shin tells him he’s even more tired, and it looks like they’re about to start another pissing contest, but Shin ends up abandoning the conversation. Lying in bed, Eun Tak replays the moment of being flung into the air and saved by Shin. She cradles her goblin plushy toy (named Mr. Buckwheat) and says happily, “We don’t have to move out now. I’m confirmed as the real bride.” She belatedly realizes she’s sore all over and sticks medicated patches all over, just as a crash sounds outside. She finds Shin slumped on the ground and Reaper cleaning up broken dishes, and worries that he’s dead.
Reaper says that he’s just medicated and leaves him there to sleep it off. Eun Tak suggests he might help carry Shin, but Reaper just tells her good luck with that. Eun Tak crouches next to Shin and asks why he’s taking medication: “Are you still in pain?”
Reaper glimpses Shin’s door ajar, and can’t resist going back for another look at the painting of the queen, wondering who she is to stir such deep feelings. Dramatic-irony cut takes us to Sunny (played by Yoo In Na), who drinks alone in her empty shop, watching people pass by, telling herself she’ll go home when she counts fifty of them.
Eun Tak ends up sitting with Shin on the ground, lighting a whole display of candles around him. She catches herself before blowing out the match, shaking it out instead, and tucks a blanket around him. She carefully places a pillow under his head and checks their respective temperatures, noting no fever, then lies down to watch him sleep.
She wryly comments on him falling unconscious so randomly, and then Shin replies, eyes still closed, “Because I’m sick.” He admits he was lying earlier when he said he was fine, and she reaches out to pat his hair, telling him to get better.
He tells her that she doesn’t know what’s paining him, and when she asks what it is, he replies, “First love hurts a lot.” Thinking he means someone from his past, Eun Tak gets pettish, saying she must have been really pretty. Shin says, “Very much… every day… it hurts.” Annoyed, Eun Tak tells him to rest up, patting his arm extra hard, telling him that’s not something you say to your bride. “If you look hard, you can see where she’s pretty,” Shin says. “So don’t go.”
We return to Subway, because Deok Hwa’s price for a bribe is apparently a five-dollar footlong. Eun Tak presents him with her notebook of hanja copied from Shin’s journal, asking him to make sense of it. Eun Tak suspects that it’s to do with Shin’s first love, and Deok Hwa confirms that it’s a love letter, confessing a sad love. He starts to read, but Eun Tak grabs the book away, stung, not needing any further confirmation. She mutters that of course it’s possible for him to have one unforgettable person in his nine hundred years, though she doesn’t quite sound as gracious as the words.
Deok Hwa is startled to hear that Shin’s name is Kim Shin (he’s using a different one now) and that he has a sword stuck in him, and pesters her to explain. He gains her interest by mentioning a secret that only he knows.
Deok Hwa tattles to Shin about Reaper crying at the queen’s portrait, and urges him to confront Reaper about it… and then cowers behind Shin’s back when he does just that. Reaper admits that he had an extremely emotional reaction but doesn’t understand why, and asks who the woman is, feeling like he’s seen her before.
Shin replies that she’s his sister. He asks where Reaper saw her, and Reaper guesses that she may be one of his reaped souls. Shin asks if she’s been reincarnated, but Reaper has taken away too many souls to remember everyone, and says that it just feels like he’s seen her before: “I don’t have memories, only feelings. I was just incredibly sad. My heart hurt.” Deok Hwa lights up with an idea, and suggests that Reaper is Shin’s reincarnated sister and urges Reaper to call Shin “oraboni” (brother). Ha, that gets him a swift synchronized shut-down. (But later in his room, Reaper tries to say the word, though he bails before making it all the way through.)
While out on duty, Reaper’s hoobae informs him of a scandal within their ranks: Another reaper found himself tasked with reaping his wife from a past life, so he filed her as a missing soul and they ran off together. Reaper is suddenly very interested and asks how the reaper recalled his past life. Hoobae says that nobody knows but that everybody’s envious, then sighs that the thought of what his past-life crime could be has driven him to drink lately. He wonders how severe that crime was, and whether it’s god’s consideration to have them atone by working in this way. Reaper says that whether one recalls anything, it just all be god’s will—but what he’s curious to know is god’s intention in returning a lost memory. Reaper heads off to usher his newest charges, a mother-daughter pair, to his teahouse. Mom tells her daughter she ordered “heaven” for her, and Reaper presents the teacup to the little girl, calling it heaven.
Eun Tak spots Shin walking down the street, and surprises him just as he’s knocking on a stranger’s door. A tired-looking man steps out, and Shin just orders him to step aside and, with a motion of the hand, sets on fire the noose hanging inside. In wish-god mode, Shin instructs the man to air out his home and hands him a sandwich, telling him he’ll need it.
He stalks off all cool-like, and Eun Tak hastens to match his swagger as the rescued man looks after them in wonder. Then he’s surprised at the sudden arrival of his (estranged, it seems) young daughter, who found her way here on her own, taking a taxi driven by Samshin Grandma. The little girl is hungry, so it’s Subway to the rescue..
Eun Tak peers back to see the man embracing his daughter, and tells Shin he was a little cool today. He says that he just gave the man a sandwich: “What saved that man was not me, but his daughter.”
Then she wonders why the sword moved when it wouldn’t before, and Shin thinks back to Reaper’s comment about it requiring something stronger than the curse—perhaps true love? Going with that theory, Shin prods Eun Tak to say whatever she’s been meaning to say, wanting to hear her love declaration.
He leans in expectantly, and she says, “I know you have a lot of money, but is it okay for you to just stay home?” He insists that he’s worked before, and we see a montage of all the retail sales positions he’s held, using the same tagline each time: “It may not be immortal, but [this product] lasts a very long time!” He’s comically bad at it. Eun Tak figures he didn’t last at the jobs because he was inadequate in some way, which has Shin huffing and puffing in denial, insisting that he’s never been called that before. Eun Tak snipes that his first love must not have told him, and he accuses her of jealousy.
Eun Tak denies it loudly, then asks if she’s from Goryeo or Joseon, and then reminds him of the old saying that first loves never come true. She storms off, telling him not to wait up for her. Shin sighs to himself that he doesn’t want that to be true about first loves not coming true.
Eun Tak runs into a familiar face at the library, who notices that the birthmark on her neck has lightened considerably. Eun Tak isn’t concerned, but the girl looks curiously bothered by it. Ah, she’s a ghost, and Eun Tak is in the habit of buying her coffee even though she can’t drink it. Passing by a mirror reveals her true appearance, bloody and ragged. Eun Tak asks why this ghost doesn’t ask her for help the way all the others do. So the girl asks her to come to see her once in her hometown, bringing flowers, and explains how she died in a traffic accident on her way to her graduation ceremony.
That night, Reaper drops by Sunny’s cafe, and he and Eun Tak gape at each other in surprise. She’s suspicions that he’s sneaking up on her, but he says he’s just here to order chicken. Just then, Eun Tak gets agitated to see Tae Hee oppa walking toward the shop with his baseball team. Reaper asks shrewdly if he’s interrupted their planned date, and Eun Tak stuffs his invisibility hat on Reaper’s head and orders him to wait quietly while she packs his order.
Reaper watches her greet Tae Hee oppa with narrowed eyes, then proceeds to bring home fried chicken every night for days on end. Finally, Eun Tak pulls him aside to ask why he keeps coming to the shop, and if he’s there for her boss. Reaper says he’s just going to look, and tells her that everything will be fine if Eun Tak just keeps her mouth shut about him. She retorts the same, telling him to keep his mouth shut about Tae Hee’s visits and how she’s been sneaking extra chicken in his order.
From alllll the way down the hall, Shin comes charging in to confront her, insisting that he was Tae Hee’s savior back in the day and that his baseball career is all his doing. (Reaper, meanwhile, preoccupies himself trying to figure out just how much extra chicken Tae Hee got, feeling huffy about not getting the same coupons.) Eun Tak argues that Shin didn’t make Tae Hee successful; that was through “my first love Tae Hee oppa’s own will.” Shin tries to bribe Reaper to help with the promise of chicken coupons, but Reaper declines, saying he has his own ways. Shin is left stewing in jealousy, and makes the sky thunder with a sudden storm. That night when Tae Hee gets home, he’s puzzled to find his old piano back in his living room.
After school, Eun Tak is approached by another student, who asks how her college entrance exam went and where she’s applied. They’re both good students, and the girl worries that Eun Tak will be in direct competition. Then she asks if the ghosts say Eun Tak will get in to her schools, and Eun Tak replies that she may see them, but they don’t tell her things. The classmate points out that they’ve been in the same class for three years and are only talking now, then wishes her well on her university interviews. Eun Tak says the same.
As she makes her way to her interview, Eun Tak is reminded of Shin running with her to the entrance exam and smiles. She’s bristly again when she finds Shin waiting for her, until she realizes he’s brought her red scarf to her before her interview. He wraps it around her neck and gives some last-minute advice not to be nervous. He asks if she’s still mad at him, and she says his scarf move has made that hard. He points out that she’s jealous (of his first love), and readily admits to liking it.
Cheer restored, Eun Tak heads off grinning and waves goodbye. As she boards her bus, a scream sounds—a woman has just been mugged by a perp who’s cycling madly away. As he bikes past, he locks eyes with Shin, and now we’re in his mind’s eye, seeing the man’s future: A short while later, the thief crashes into a vendor’s table and falls into the road, right into oncoming traffic.
A taxi plows into the cyclist and skids in the road, causing multiple cars to crash into it. A bus swerves madly to avoid it, and ends up crashing into another car instead. And then, in case that weren’t enough, the bus comes directly in the line of a Truck of Doom, and gets T-boned. The bus is a particularly dire scene, with bloody bodies thrown on top of each other, everybody fatally wounded.
We return to the present moment, about fifteen minutes before the accident, and Shin wonders why Eun Tak is in the bus when she isn’t in his premonition.
On the bus, a boy says that if he messes up this interview, his mother will kill him, and wishes for a car accident instead. His friend tells him to cut out the morbid talk, while nearby, Eun Tak smiles down at a baby in her mother’s arms.
Nearby, an army of reapers stands by, waiting to do their duty. Reaper’s mustachioed hoobae complains when the upstanding hoobae brings Reaper a coffee. Reaper states that he specifically ordered Hoobae not to get Mustache coffee, still peevish about being stuck with that dinner bill the other night. There are so many scheduled deaths that they’ve called in other departments, and Reaper is assigned multiple souls. He flips through his stack of death cards, noting the mother and daughter pair, and figures he’ll have to prepare more heaven for them.
But Shin swings into action, using his door-portal ability to shortcut himself to the street vendor and advise him to quit early today. The man protests, but Shin offers to buy all his merchandise (piles and piles of socks), trying to hurry him along—he’s only got a few minutes until the accident. Then as the thief bikes toward him, Shin kicks him over early, sending him falling onto the sidewalk rather than in the street.
The thief recognizes Shin from the bus stop and accuses him of following him, while Shin just sends the man’s bike floating into the air and crashing down before his eyes.
Shin holds up a stack of wallets the man has stolen, tossing them to him one by one as he lists the cash amounts. He adds that the man nearly took multiple lives just for that cash, and cites the series of unfortunate events that will befall the latest victim, including breaking a bone and going to work anyway because she can’t afford the lost pay. The thief brandishes a switchblade at Shin, demanding to know who he is. Shin says it’s a pity to let him live, but that he’ll consider it a side effect. He warns the man not to consider himself off the hook for his crimes, saying that he’ll have to suffer the punishment even after death.
“Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—that is my way,” Shin says grimly. “It will hurt a bit. Deal with it.”
