Arang and the Magistrate

Amnesia~

Eun-oh realizes that Arang is a link to his missing mother and gallops past Death to sweep her up onto his horse. Reaper Mu-young is hot on their heels, and his supernatural powers seem to give him added speed.

Arang winces as she grabs a handful of peach blossoms, since in this world they're knife-sharp to ghostly skin, and throws them behind her. Mu-young skids to a stop and shields himself, one blossom slashing his face.

When they arrive at a riverbank, he's still quite agitated and pulls the hairpin out of Arang's hair. A flashback shows us that he'd given it to his mother, and now he demands to know where Arang picked it up.

She grabs it back and replies that it's hers—she had it when she awoke as a ghost, so it must have been hers when she was living. Eun-oh thinks this means she met his mother prior to dying, but alas her pesky lost memory isn't going to provide any clues.

Arang thanks him for his help and heads off. But he calls her back and offers to find her name for her after all—maybe then she'll remember clues leading to his mother.

Arang perks up and tells him she was right all along, thinking he's really a nice, sympathetic guy despite his cold exterior: "I'm a great judge of character!" She chatters on, which he endures grudgingly, though he complains about ghosts lingering in the here instead of going on to the after.

She tells him, "If you haven't died, don't talk. Everyone's got their own desperate reason." Her name-hunt is one such instance: "Do you know how frustrating it is not to know who you are?" He notes that the Reaper called her Arang, but adds, "I won't call you by name, Amnesia."

She figures it doesn't matter, since they won't know each other long enough to be using names anyway.

Mu-young arrives in heaven to see the king and pauses to gaze out at the fairies tending the garden. Jade Emperor guesses he was thinking of his sister, and tells him that once they come here to afterlife, they must cut the ties of their earthly lives. Aw, so the Reaper has a fairy sister in heaven he still misses? That's so sad.

Mu-young reports that he hasn't yet caught the runaway ghost. Hades comes strolling up and asks pointedly how Arang's red rope got untied in the first place. Jade Emperor says she'll come of her own will—the seeds of fate have been sown, and now it's time for the buds to bloom.

To demonstrate, he touches a flower in the garden, and like a light switch, all the blooms turn white. Jade Emperor: "This is what fate is—it goes round and round and round, and at some point everything comes back to its place." Another touch, and the blooms return to color.

Back in Miryang, Eun-oh surprises Dol-swe by announcing his intent to be the magistrate after all. Dol-swe worries that his master is suffering some kind of injury, and since he's so hot-tempered and thick-headed (a dangerous? but endearing combination in the devoted lug of a servant), he blames those government idiots and runs off to find them.

Said government idiots, the Bang Trio (Lee-bang, Hyung-bang, Ye-bang), are currently worrying over the new magistrate not dying as expected. Bang No. 1 writes a letter to the king explaining how the new magistrate ran off without a care for his position and therefore shows contempt for the king. He pauses over some fancy wording—did he get it right?

Bang No. 2: "I think that's right. Isn't that what all the important people say?"

Dol-swe bursts in and grabs them by the shirtfronts, demanding to know what they did to his master. Eun-oh puts a stop to it, but aw, ya big doofus. That's so cute.

The Three Bangs sigh to themselves that their ungoverned existence is at an end. So they must have enjoyed not having officials lording their power over them and preferred their Wild West ways of self-rule.