In the morning, Dae-woong awakens in an odd position — he’s hanging on a high tree branch and only remembers up to the part where he fell down the mountainside. When Mi-ho approaches, he doesn’t recognize her, even when she tells him they met last night.
(By the way, I LOVE Mi-ho’s explanation for why he’s hanging in the tree. She says matter-of-factly, “The boar wanted to eat you, so I put you up there so he couldn’t.” She’s adorable.)
However, a few key phrases trigger Dae-woong’s memory, and he realizes she was the girl on the phone. He freaks out, thinking her a ghost, but touches her cheek and confirms that she’s human. She takes that as a compliment: “Do I really look like one?”
Now he grows indignant, believing that she was playing a prank on him the night before. He leads her back to the temple to confess about the scroll, which he considers mere vandalism.
Mi-ho speaks honestly, but the story is so fantastic that Dae-woong interprets her words in more mundane ways. For example, she complains that she doesn’t like that temple — she got locked up there by ol’ grandma and finds it excessively tiresome. Dae-woong interprets that to mean that she’s a troublemaker who is serving punishment, which is easy to believe since (1) hello, crazy antics, and (2) his grandfather would do the same thing.
He asks how long she was shut in the temple, and she answers, “Five hundred years.” That stops him short, so he asks for details, and she supplies them. The grandmother spirit is a well-known story and she introduces herself as a gumiho, so he guesses she’s spinning tall tales — or crazy.
She explains that she helped him, too. The reason he isn’t in any pain is because she gave him her fox bead, which is in his chest. She reaches under his shirt to point it out, and he pushes her aside, convinced she’s literally insane. He says she should have nine tails, and she answers that they’re only visible in moonlight.
Enough is enough. Dae-woong heads off on his own, directing her in the opposite direction, and starts walking. Only… remember that pig Mi-ho mentioned? It comes back.
