Notes.
The "scar of Sal-Sung" is something Yeo Cho Sang mentions in episode 2 of the drama (on Viki, see the subtitles) to explain why his son is "extremely vicious" (#daddyoftheyear). I've made some researchs on the internet but I couldn't find anything about it, so I guess it's some kind of birthmark or something close to it (maybe being born with a caul). Do I plan to use it in this story ? Oh, absolutely !
Answer to Itsrainingtacos :
I apologize so much for answering so late to all your very kind and lovely reviews, I'm so sorry ! It's a shame I can't reply automatically to the guests reviews, like for the ones with an FF account. I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to always comment this story and for being so supportive ! Thank you a thousand time as well for your review on the "Cause in the dark" oneshot, it means a lot, I'm very glad you liked that piece as well (and indeed, there is a big game of power between Woon and Kenzo, you're absolutely right XD). I remember how enthousiastic you were when I mentioned a possible relationship between Woon and Kenzo, and I thought of you while writing it (oh my, I hope this doesn't sound too awkward :P) ! Yes, definitely, Kenzo is really mistreated by Woon here ! Thank you so much for still following this story : I promise the bittersweet ending won't be as bad as it sounds (from my point of view, this is even the most optimistic ending I could come up with for this story) :D ! Yes, that's it, the third arc begins four years later. I must say that, once again, your intuitions regarding this story are really good ;) ! But you're totally right, the living here are indeed the real monsters because of the way they are with the gwishins. Haha, things won't be easy like you said for Woon and Mago to enter the city, but I promise they'll find a way :P. In the meantime, I really hope you enjoyed the last two chapters (including this one), and that they gave you the answers to some of your questions :D ! Thank you ever so much again for your kindness and interest, and see you very soon for the next chapters !
CHAPTER XLVII
"A soldier is also a human being, and people tend to forget that."
(Iouri Tyniavov, russian writer, "The death of Vizir-Moukhtar")
a. The evil demon hypothesis
Right in the middle of the patrol, one of the men began to get agitated and said that he had heard a noise, a sharp crackling sound that had echoed through the darkened forest and had been terrifying enough to cause him to warn his comrades. There were seven of them, and eight, including the captain who was leading them towards the heart of the woods, where the notion of borders, edges and endings were fading, causing anguish, anxiety and uncertainty. Seung Min knew almost like the back of his hand the layout and composition of the woodland in which they were moving during that evening, less than two kilometers east from Hanyang, and where most of the brigades were beginning their progression toward more distant and hostile lands.
As a child, he had sometimes played there with his friends, imagining himself fighting dragons, monsters, demons, coming out victorious from all these confrontations and winning a spectacular trophy, like a magic sword or a box containing rare and precious gems. Two things now differed greatly from his ambitions as a young boy : first, the fantasized monsters had become real, and in many ways more terrifying than anything Seung Min had built up in his younger mind, although he had a rather fertile imagination of which he kept traces, essentially active at night, as soon as the sun disappeared and the moon refused to show itself, leaving men in the grip of absolute darkness and all the awful things they were able to invoke in their thoughts to populate this gaping, unfathomable void, which looked like an abyss.
The anti-Gwishin brigades rarely consisted of more than ten soldiers, with the captain included. The fact was that confrontations with the gwishins that had taken place up to that time had never required the mobilization of more men, as the dead traveled very little in groups, despite the loneliness most of them seemed to suffer from, according to reports of torture sessions and interrogations. Members came from all extractions, but the hierarchical ranks were mostly equivalent and relatively low, while the Yangban monopolized the leading positions, although there was a certain disregard on their part for the function of brigade chief, which they relegated to a lesser importance compared to the professions of commanders, generals and officers, over which they had precedence.
As a result, brigade captains were often more diversified in terms of social class than their superiors and subordinates, and could be as much from the jungins as from a family of commoners. There had even been rumors about a slave fighter who had wanted to join the brigades, and whose remarkable skills developed over the waves of resurrections combined with his technical and theoretical knowledge of the territory could have propelled him directly to the position of captain, but Seung-Min hardly believed in it, firstly because the two lowest castes of society, in other words the slaves and the untouchables, were banned from armies, even though the opposite possibility was beginning to make its way as a result of the growing needs of the army, and secondly because the discrimination against them was too strong to really allow such an elevation.
At most, if the man had actually been hired, he was a low rank soldier in some brigade, and was unlikely to be able to access more power. The yangbans clung too tightly to it, and their grip was stronger than a rock.
At night, the men were infinitely more nervous, more sensitive to the slightest movement, the slightest noise, the slightest breath. Seung-Min had stopped counting the number of times he had been assigned to the night patrol, but the state of nerves of the soldiers during these missions remained unchanged, even though the night brigades had become commonplace in the four years since the Royal Decree of 1777, to the point where they were now perfectly anchored in the system of repression of the Gwishins.
There was something about the night, an atmosphere, a tension, an anxiety, old children's fears that came out of nowhere to seize you by the throat and never leave you until the first merciful glimmer of daylight. The gwishins were merely an additional threat, just another branch thrown into an already blazing inferno, consuming ancestral terrors that had been passed down from generation to generation. In truth, when Seung-Min thought about it further, he had to recognize that the dead were hardly more dangerous than any wild animal. There were exceptions, as with any self-respecting rule, but on the whole, he and his companions mostly attacked harmless individuals who were crossing the region to reach another, or allowed themselves a break in their journey to a more distant and isolated destination.
It had been instilled in their minds from the beginning of their training that gwishins were evil, vicious, bloodthirsty and hungry for human flesh, violent and unpredictable. Before beginning the patrols on the field, Seung-Min had adhered to such a vision thoughtlessly, relying for corroboration on his own experiences with the dead, which invariably involved attacks, teeth digging into a poor wretch, a furious madness as described in the Encyclopedia of the Dead, which he had read in detail like his colleagues throughout his studies.
The book was skillfully presented, clearly explained, made use of logical demonstrations and apparently rigorously elaborated reasoning by a whole conglomerate of scholars, physicians and theologians who had studied the question at the request of King Yeongjo. It was a reference for the army, especially the brigades, who had permanent access to the volume available in the royal library in the Juhamnu Pavilion. Soldiers were thus free to consult the book whenever they wished, and many of those who could read and write had visited it frequently, sometimes taking advantage of the opportunity to copy entire passages in order to preserve the information displayed and implement them with greater mastery in their daily practice.
Seung-Min hadn't taken any notes, but he had read the Encyclopedia like the others, and remembered perfectly well some sentences or statements about the gwishins, which he did his best to remember while on patrol. For example, the book stated that the dead, unable to feel pain, thirst, exhaustion, were most likely also unable to feel emotions. The theory had been proposed by a scholar who had been educated at the renowned Sungkyunkwan Institution, and whose bitter, mocking, haughty and fearsome style of writing had conquered Yeongjo while he was still reigning.
He had liked the idea of the gwishins as creatures devoid of feelings and sensations, which made them all the more antipathetic and threatening to the living, and had ensured that the idea had been incorporated into the book, despite the many controversies it had raised and continued to provoke, while the arrests against the dead and the torture showed how far they were from being the ruthless, murderous monsters described by the Encyclopedia.
Captain Baek was guiding their steps deeper and deeper into the forest and the night. They had torches and two scouts with them, who advanced a few meters ahead and kept them informed of what they saw. Usually they had only one, because they were one of the smallest brigades in Hanyang, but the recent attacks by the bogeyman had changed the situation and made the army even more cautious. Seung-Min and his men had not yet been confronted with this new danger, and Captain Baek was particularly vigilant about it.
He had gone so far as to cancel patrols over the years, which were supposed to have taken place immediately after an attack on the creature, whether it was a Gwishin or something else, and had stated as a justification that he was unwilling to risk the lives of his men of the field until the army had sent better armed and trained forces to deal with the problem. He had thus come up against the orders of several of his superiors, and had always ended up giving in and returning into the forest with his brigade, but Seung-Min knew that the men valued his solicitude, and his concern to preserve them. The brigades had indeed acquired a bad reputation as "martyr" patrols during the last decade, because they often gathered the lower castes of society and exposed them to significant risks, much more so than the command positions of the rest of the army, where soldiers were also considered as cannon fodder.
Noticing the nervousness that was beginning to spread among his men, fueled by the anguish of the one who had claimed to have heard something, Captain Baek left his leading position and walked to the frightened soldier, whose name was Ban Sang-Chul, and who was barely twenty years old. He came from a small, remote village just above Bukhansan, and had joined the army more out of obligation than out of a sense of duty.
He had told Seung-Min, during a lunch at the barracks, that his initial wish had been to become a sailor, and to travel a lot, but the gwishins crisis had been a considerable hindrance to his ambitions, and he had found himself a member of the brigade while dreaming of navigation, compass and distant lands during his entire training. He was one of the most fearful members of the patrol. There were always at least one or two in each brigade, but those considered the least honourable strangely seemed to collect this type of profile.
Captain Baek took the soldier aside, talking to him in a low voice, slowly, calmly, not hesitating to put his hands on the boy's shaky shoulders. At first, Seung-Min, infinitely disappointed by his teaching and conduct, had failed to cry foul when he was assigned to the brigade of his former instructor, who had left his position voluntarily by the end of 1777, causing a wave of relief among his students, who were hoping for a more competent and above all less alcoholic substitute.
Nevertheless, none of them had expected to find him again in command of a patrol, although he demonstrated during certain sessions of execution of gwishins a composure and an authority that his students no longer expected from him, and which left them each time flabbergasted and pleasantly surprised, despite the fact that Baek Dong Soo often resumed his bad habits and too back his soju carafe very quickly, to the great despair of his colleagues and superiors.
However, since his departure from the training team of the future soldiers of the anti-Gwishin brigades, and his appointment in another role, at the same time more field-oriented and political, the drunkard that Seung-Min and some of his comrades had known had given way to a totally different man. Oh, he still drank, it was a fact, but he drank less, and there lay the major difference.
On patrols he was serious, cautious, knowledgeable and imperious, without being unpleasant or haughty as he was during his lessons. He never hesitated to lend his flaming sword to his men, prepared scrupulous plans, moved forward carefully, did his best to limit the dangers and facilitate the executions, as well as to make them less barbaric. There were some captains, some soldiers, some brigades, who elevated the thing to the rank of a macabre and excessive ritual. Baek Dong Soo, for his part, required his men to be prompt, efficient and meticulous.
Seung-Min watched him attentively giving advice and appeasement to the soldier. While he had been a ridiculously demanding and mocking teacher, hardly a pedagogue at all, he had proved to be a good captain since Seung-Min had joined the brigade in January 1779, and rarely got angry with his men, unlike other of his colleagues whose blood was hotter and whose anxiety was greater. He never drank during patrols, or else he drank much less than during his teachings.
Seung-Min had heard that his change of attitude, totally unexplained and misunderstood by his military colleagues and members of the government, had brought him back the trust of King Jeongjo, especially since the resounding dismissal of the adviser Hong Guk Yeong in September 1779, following the very sudden death in May of the same year of Lady Hong Wonbin, his sister resolutely ignored by the family until she had won the king's affections and was appointed his concubine, in unclear circumstances which Hong Guk Yeong's political opponents had been quick to exploit, while the kingmaker was gradually losing the monarch's favor, presumably due to a declining mental health, linked to the problem of the gwishins and other obsessions of which no one had known the content, but which had ended up tiring even the sovereign of whom he had the ear.
He heard Baek Dong Soo tell Sang-Chul something like "come on, soldier, be brave, everything's going to be all right", and though the formula wasn't very original and probably quite different from reality, he saw in the boy's eyes an immense gratitude, and almost traces of a filial love filled with trust and respect. The captain then resumed his walk, torch in hand, the other on the pommel of his sword.
His men, including those who had seen him as an instructor and who had hated him in that job, all followed the brigade captain obediently and without exception.
b. Fossilization
Of the house where he had lived for twelve years with his father, Woon had mostly retained memories of sensations and impressions, rather than clear-cut, delineated images with uniform contours and no real detail. Above all, he remembered the permanent climate of tension that reigned there, within the walls, in the floor, at all hours of the day, as he and his father moved through the space like two wild beasts fighting over a territory, waiting for the other to make the first move to strike.
Clearly, Yeo Cho-Sang had taken the lead on this matter, and years later, Woon could still feel, like a phantom pain, the throbbing that had accompanied each of his father's blows, and which had become, as the child had grown older, the equivalent of a second skin, tanned like leather, kneaded with beatings, shaped to withstand wallops and fists. He was still wearing it, actually. It could have softened with age, and somehow a small part of it had mellowed under Dong Soo's hands and the time Woon had spent at the training camp.
But for the rest, Heuksa Chorong had finished solidifying its surface, and Woon now wore it like a cocoon, a placenta, whose shell would have been so solid he could never have gotten out of it, even if he had wished for it with all his strength. He was too accustomed to it to want to detach himself from it, and its protection, although sometimes suffocating, had become reassuring, familiar.
Moreover, he feared what might happen if he ever decided to let it go. Like Hanyang, like the soldiers of the anti-Gwishin brigades, like the totality of the living and the dead, no matter their birth, education, ethnicity, or ambitions, Woon had his walls, and for too long they had held back assaults and contained offensives, the scale and violence of which would most certainly overwhelm him if he abandoned his defenses.
He had returned to see his childhood home for the first time on the evening of his departure from the capital. He had contemplated sleeping there briefly, because the house was admirably isolated, lost in the middle of the forest, difficult to find unless one had precise reference points, preferably immutable, since the woods were changing spaces, versatile, never looking exactly the same. It had been built far enough away from the city to limit the passage of patrols in its vicinity, and had seemed a suitable shelter until Woon approached it and discovered its carcass, inanimate, immersed in silence and obscurity, and then reminiscences that had previously left him relatively quiet, or had manifested themselves faintly, like a whisper in the vaults of his mind, barely audible, threw themselves down his throat.
There, in front of the dead, harmless dwelling, his father had appeared, sitting, or rather vaulted, in front of his small, portable, carved wooden table that always raised his dishes to his level, on the terrace, his bowl filled to the brim with alcohol and the carafe proudly enthroned beside him, like a faithful old friend, a lover, a traitor. Woon, whose resurrection had seriously amputated the sense of touch, like the other gwishins, had nevertheless experienced again the contact of the wood of the platform where he himself had eaten several times, while his father was collapsed in another corner of the house, and he had smelled, coming out of the earth or the wooden planks of the terrace on which the liquor had dripped, the strong and acrimonious smell of alcohol, which had been part of his daily life until he joined Heuksa Chorong. Even Chun, although he was also well known for his love of wine in his spare time, had never before exuded such a smell of decay and intoxication.
To Mago who asked him questions, he answered without emphasis, without lingering, in a concise and limited way. He had lived there when he was a child, before leaving to train in martial arts with a local master. The girl had become accustomed to his brevity since their trip to the Qing, so she didn't mind, unlike the mistress of the Spring House, Gyô Hui Seon, who could hardly bear to be answered in monosyllables, and instead proceeded to unpack their luggage inside the house in order to prepare a cozy substitute room for them to rest in for the night.
As she unfolded their transport yos and conscientiously dreaded the floor covered with a thick layer of dust and dirt, she marveled at the overall good preservation of the house.
- And you're sure no one has lived here since ? she asked, shaking her yo enthusiastically to clean it a little before laying it out.
Woon, who was taking off Danggeum's bit and removing her saddle, shook his head.
- I don't know, he replied. Maybe it was inhabited in the meantime, and then abandoned.
- Because of us, Mago observed in a darker tone.
"Us" had become her official term for the gwishins. Woon, by contrast, still persisted in establishing a cautious distance between himself and the people of the dead, sometimes referring to them as "the others," but without including himself in the picture. Mago had a much more pronounced collective identity, based on stormy confrontations with the living, an experience of repression more marked than that of his companion, a generally more rebellious and expressive mind, but also less private, and by extension much more capable and willing to blend into a community if the latter shared her values and aspirations.
During their exploration of the Manchu lands, she had frequently tried to establish connections with their peers through collective consciousness, and they had even met two of them, a couple in their early twenties in appearance, who had settled not far from the small town of Pinkiang, in the cold region of Heilongjiang, as a result of exchanges Mago had had with them during her echo exercises.
The girl cleaned the interior of the house thoroughly, and showed no hesitation in moving the few pieces of furniture, a cabinet, a small swaying shelf and a dining table, to ease her cleaning frenzy. Since she was her student, she had adopted rituals and behaviors that she seemed to consider essential to maintaining her status, and accentuated some of her other habits in the process.
When they were setting up their camps, both in China and Joseon, Woon had always watched her see how the land lay with her feet to find the best place to unfold her yo, but also conduct a cursory sweep of her space, removing dead leaves and branches, which she would later reuse to fuel the fires they lit. When he had finally complied with her repeated requests to teach her martial arts, after several weeks spent being asked the question literally every day ("you still don't want to train me ?" she said, a little begging, a little childish, a little playful, to which Woon answered "no" without looking at her), she had seemed to believe that the role of a student was to look after both her master's comfort as well as her own, and she had taken charge of the preparations for their resting spots with touching thoroughness and devotion.
Woon could have taken care of it himself without difficulty, but something, a reflex in him, an appreciation, pushed him to let her do so and then to inspect the state of their shelter, obeying a form of tacit agreement, an old controversial adage and prejudice stating that students needed to express respect for their teachers by looking out for their well-being under difficult conditions, both because they were older, but also because it had been obscurely and yet uncontrollably accepted that such learning was an integral part of their training.
It was probably around minsi when the girl, hands on her hips, standing tall before the ruins of what had once been the doorway to the house, took a careful, circular look at the layout she had arranged, and then turned to her companion, an expression of immense pride engraved in her juvenile features and in her large, dead-black eyes.
- Master, she declared, the way she always did since he had given her his first real lessons. It's ready.
So Woon, rising from the ledge of the terrace where he had been sitting waiting for his student to finish dusting the house, stepped forward and watched in turn, following the same steps as in China and, since the last days, in the north of Joseon. The inside of the hanok, probably unoccupied for years, deserted, fled by all its native owners, in other words Woon and his father, had been carefully scrubbed by Mago to the best of her ability, and Woon was now able to distinguish the original light color of the floor, on which his father had several times pushed him with kicks or slaps delivered like punches.
With the suddenness of a lightning bolt tearing through the clouds, Woon's mind was struck by the memory of an evening when his lip, split open by a beating he could no longer remember the reason for, had spilled blood on the amber parquet floor in small drops, which had formed imperfect circles on its surface, of a beautiful golden-red color. You're going to become a killer, his father always told him, with his hoarse voice of a chronic alcoholic, hemmed in with a kind of devout reverence and dazed fear of his own predictions, you're going to become a killer, I've seen it, you've got Sal Sung's scar, you'll set the world on fire and blood, I've seen it.
Woon was looking at the central room that had been his main living place when he was little, now abandoned, cracked, dying, and which, thanks to Mago's maniacal care, had regained a semblance of warmth, although it was very meager. His father was still here, bent over his carafe, filling his bowl over and over again, swallowing lampets mechanically, as if it was his sole purpose.
The first time Woon had come back to see the house after his resurrection, he had stayed there for only ten minutes, frozen a few steps away, unable to cross the threshold of the fence, and then he had ended up spending the night outdoors, preferring by far the forest and its shadows, its uncertainties, its spasmodic movements during the night, rather than another grave, this time in the open air, but monstrously more oppressive and dark than the woods all around.
He turned his back to the vision of his father, crossed his arms against his chest, touching over his tunic the scar left by Dong Soo's sword (Woon-ah). It had hurt him in China, it was hurting him again in Joseon. It throbbed very gently, without violence, and when he was lying down, at night, he would pass his hand under the fabric of his garment and follow its line with his fingertips, up and down, and repeat the gesture for hours, remembering old times, conversations, silences, the passing of the seasons at the training camp and Dong Soo's arm pressed against his as they studied their lessons side by side, sitting at one of the tables in the large living room where they usually settled down after their exercises, ate and learned the content of the technical and literary books Sa-Mo had acquired to complete their education.
On the wide dirt roads of Manchuria, in the inns where they had stopped, he had wondered whether Dong Soo had received the letter he had sent him before leaving the country, and what he had thought about it, what he had felt when reading it.
He faced Mago, radiant, who was waiting for his instructions and the continuation of his teaching like every time they allowed themselves a break.
- Go get your sword, he told her, pointing with his chin at the backpack she had left near Danggeum, in the courtyard of the house. I want you to work on your parries.
She smiled at him and ran to get her weapon, the one Woon had bought her in Sokcho four years earlier and which she hadn't left since. She handled it much better now, with a grace and ease that was becoming natural. Woon sat back on the edge of the terrace and watched her do her poses, ready to stand up and correct any mistake he saw in her gestures.
We'll have to contact the others, he thought, thinking of the gates of Hanyang, the guards watching over them, and the fire test.
