Arang and the Magistrate

Recognition

After losing Arang in the big chase and seeing Joo-wal help her over the wall, Eun-oh wonders to himself if the guy really doesn't recognize his ex-fiancée. But he decides that was not a look of recognition on Joo-wal's face, and shakes it off.

Dol-swe comes running after master to know where he keeps dashing off to, and then kicks up a fuss when Eun-oh says he has to go do something else. He whines that they were supposed to leave town straightaway, and accuses him of making time with his new honey.

Eun-oh balks but Dol-swe says he can tell that's exactly what's going on, but his biggest heartbreak: "How could you not tell me?! What else don't I know about you?!" Oh you big lug.

Joo-wal walks away reeling, but he looks just as confused by the run-in as well. He doesn't seem to recognize Arang and yet there's a flicker of something... More importantly, she makes his Ring of Mystical Whoozit burn bright red. Not a good sign...

Eun-oh goes running back to his room where he told Arang to stay, and there she is, right where he left her. She's fast. He yells that he told her not to come to the funeral, but she swears she doesn't know what he's talking about.

He searches frantically for the clothes she must've changed out of, getting handsy and looking all around... and lifting her skirt thinking they must be there... only to find her bare legs. Hahaha.

She screams and SLAPS him across the face on reflex, and then they both freeze, stunned. She leaves a giant red handprint on his cheek to highlight his embarrassment.

She stammers, "I'm so-rry..." and he says "I'm... something similar..." and they scramble to get out of the awkward moment. He asks if she's really back to find out the truth about her death. He asks for the hairpin, and she says she left it in the afterlife—not by choice, since she was forced to come here naked.

He flares up in anger—she came here without it? She argues that it's not important anyway. Eun-oh: "That hairpin is far more important to me than a demon like you!" She looks at him with pained eyes, "Demon? How many times do I have to tell you I came back human!"

Eun-oh: "So what if your shell is a person. Do you know a person's heart?" She says defensively that she does, but even she's not convinced at her answer. He mocks her so-called beating heart at the sight of Joo-wal and says she sure picked up how to act like a person.

She glares, "You awful bastard." And then she gets him right where it hurts, eye for eye: "You were an awful bastard to your mother too, weren't you?" Ooooh. He gets up, trembling in fury and tells her to shut up.

She congratulates him on his quick wit and sharp tongue that knows how to pierce a heart. If he can say such words to her, what wouldn't he have said to his mother? "Is your mother really missing, or did she run away from you?" Ouch.

He runs out and the argument leaves them both reeling. Arang's eyes glisten with tears, and Eun-oh runs into the woods to scream and take his anger out on a tree.

Flashback to the moment he was separated from her as a child, when he cried and screamed for her but she never once turned to look at him. And then the last time he saw her, when he said it would have been better if he never had a mother.

Predictably, a wicked tongue. Arang wasn't wrong, which is of course why it cut so deep. He slumps down to the ground in tears, his hand bloody from banging it against the tree.

Arang sits up till nightfall, still sniffling back tears.

And Joo-wal sits staring at his drawing of Arang in her guard's uniform. Okay, clearly this is the guy you should've hired for the ghost sketching. And then he takes out a mysterious black cloth inside a mysterious box and looks at it mysteriously.