Notes.

Me (at the beginning of the arc) : So this arc is going to be more intimate and less focused on world-building etc...

Also me (eight chapters of world-building later) : Fuck.


CHAPTER XLVIII


"They tell me I'm too young to understand
They say I'm caught up in a dream
Well life will pass me by if I don't open up my eyes
Well that's fine by me

So wake me up when it's all over
When I'm wiser and I'm older
All this time I was finding myself, and I
Didn't know I was lost
"

(Avicii, swedish artist, "Wake Me Up")


a. Aporia

Before nightfall, Mago interrupted her training, with the consent of her dead master, and disappeared for a few moments into the adjoining woods to bring back branches and twigs in order to build a fire for their dinner. Although the weather had been a combination of polar winds and frost in the early dawn hours, she managed to find enough to make a reasonably sized, dry fire without having to go too far, and returned to the hanok which served as their shelter with arms full of her findings, having also brought back a few miraculously dry leaves to fuel the growth of the fire. Meanwhile, Yeo Woon had placed stones in a small circle on the floor of the courtyard, in preparation.

Mago dropped her load in the large main room of the house, to avoid any rain from damaging this new supply of dry wood, as it had already happened once in Qing, forcing them to eat raw meat for lunch (the problem wasn't so much in the taste or the catering capacity of this kind of dish, but more in the purely unusual aspect of it), then she made a selection among the thin branches and leaves and joined her companion, who in the meantime had brought the small cast iron pot purchased in a town called Hailanpao, located along one of the banks of a large river in the region, known as Sahaliyan ula, the "black river", in Manchu, and more generally Hēilóngjiāng in Chinese, the "river of the black dragon".

Like the Han River, it was regularly swam back up by fishermen whose nets were filled with sturgeon and salmon between summer and autumn, the period during which the fish migrated from the ocean to fresh water. Its width, sometimes much more impressive than the Han, and whose dark surface, muddy in some places, seemed to reflect the sky, had justified Mago's comparison to the long sinuous body of a dragon, and she liked to compare it to the Han, which looked more like an ambitious snake.

She had been working on her parries for almost an hour, twirling her sword between her fingers, placing it in front of her, backwards, tilted towards the sky and towards the ground according to the different situations and scenarios that Yeo Woon had taught her. She was going faster and faster after four years of apprenticeship, and her new master, who used to stop her almost every two postures in order to correct her placement and the position of her weapon, hardly intervened anymore, and thus remained mostly observing her putting his teaching into practice.

His lessons during their journey to Sokcho had had the exasperation of necessity, and the advice he had given her, although valid because of the need to keep their cover legitimate and realistic in the eyes of Captain Seol, had been much more sketchy than during their exploration of Manchuria where, freed from the obligatory and artificial aspect that had marked them at Joseon, they had become much more authentic and precise. The training sessions, improvised and awkward before their departure for China, had finally turned into a series of stages conscientiously established by Yeo Woon, and which followed, according to him, the methodology that he himself had applied and seen deployed as part of his training.

Mago began the sessions with a ten-minute warm-up, the exercises of which varied according to her master's mood, but which nevertheless always used more or less the same leg and arm muscles. She alternated between stretching, which was generally becoming more and more challenging, requiring her to touch the ground with her hands without bending her knees, or to lift her legs as high as possible, and a part that was carried out by moving around the space set aside for the session, which involved running, bending in half, or lying on her stomach and lifting herself up on her elbows to strengthen her abdomen.

At times, she was concerned that her status as a Gwishin was nipping her physical efforts in the bud, negating the strength and muscles she should have acquired throughout her education. In fact, her figure had indeed not grown much stronger, and she still looked like a slender thirteen year old girl, whose pale dead skin made her look sick, and therefore totally unable to lift even the hilt of a sword. However, it would have been inaccurate to say that the long hours spent studying under Yeo Woon's guidance had been in vain, and without result for her martial abilities.

In the first place, she felt more flexible, more agile, sharper in her movements, but also better prepared for conflict situations, and consequently calmer. While learning martial arts, she had been forced to focus her thoughts on routine sequences, strategies that were easily adaptable to a large number of confrontations, and she had developed a peace of mind that was just as helpful in managing a crisis. Secondly, her growing mastery of combat techniques, both defensive and offensive, had given her enough theoretical and practical elements to be able to protect herself without difficulty when needed.

While placing the branches and leaves together, then scraping the steel lighter they had in duplicate, one for each of them if they were to be or to separate, and which began to produce its first sparks after only a few minutes, being handled with a confident habit and thus with sufficient dexterity to light a fire quickly, the girl took a distracted look at her companion, who, sitting on the terrace of the house, legs crossed and wrists resting on his knees, had closed his eyes to more easily reach the abstract plane of the collective consciousness of the Gwishins.

Mago had made an almost abusive use of it during their trip through China, seeking to contact the dead around them, people who had settled in the country and whom she wished more than anything to meet, in order to share experiences and a conviviality that their own frequently missed, with the probable exception of Yeo Woon and a few others with naturally taciturn and misanthropic temperaments. In the Qing, they had been given more than one opportunity to sharpen their control over the consciousness, and to work on the exercises given to them by the Eye, at different intervals, but which were common to all Gwishins (immersion echo localisation the three of them one after the other never at the same time).

Because of the more pleasant travel conditions, the trouble-free stops in the country's inns and villages, and the certainty that their status was mostly unknown to the Chinese population, they had been able to take advantage of the well-being and comfort they had derived from it to exercise their two minds much more frequently than in Joseon, diving into the incessant floods of reflections and sensations that was the common consciousness, then transmitting messages within it, and, at times, searching for their congeners.

However, a major problem had arisen in Qing, which neither Mago nor her companion had anticipated, mainly due to a lack of information on the subject. The difficulty was indeed that the consciousness, while linking all the gwishins together, seemed particularly sensitive to physical distance, especially when the latter was important, such as when moving from one country to another.

Immersion was rarely a problem, as both had never encountered any notable embarrassment in blending their consciousness with those of the other dead, but receiving the echoes, sending them, and locating them was much more impacted, and in a negative way, as they moved further away from the borders of the empire with Joseon, where most of the Gwishin still lived.

Mago, quickly frustrated by her inability to get news of some of her acquaintances remaining in the territory of the kingdom, had ended up questioning her companion as they were beginning to venture into the wilder and more immense spaces of the country, and she had discovered that he too was experiencing similar difficulties.

- Did she say anything to you about it ? She had asked then, as they were taking a short break next to a lovely river that flowed between pebbles whose smooth, clear surface allowed them to see the bottom of the water, at the foot of a peak with a side covered with bushy coniferous trees, probably belonging to the same family as those that covered the Joseon mountains, but which the location in a completely different country made unusual and original. Jae-Ji, I mean. Because she didn't tell me anything about it.

From her encounter with the old shaman, whose gaze was sometimes too fixed and whose knowledge was inexplicable for a woman who didn't believe in the gods, or rather who had never really tried to contact them to find out about them due to a lack of interest and conviction, Mago only remembered the discussion about the consciousness, its mechanisms and functioning, and the name that the grandma had given her.

She hadn't added anything detailed about the limitations of the common mind shared by the gwishins, and while she might have mentioned the consequences that an increasingly accentuated physical distancing between the dead could have on their possibilities to interact with each other through the consciousness, Mago didn't remember it, which tended to lead her to believe that the subject hadn't been discussed.

- No, Yeo Woon had confessed to her, and he himself seemed to be vaguely surprised by his incapacity to be able to freely contact others. She didn't say anything to me either.

Yet they had tried many times, exhausting themselves on renewed attempts almost at each stop in their journey. Mago succeeded in perceiving some echoes, probably those of the Gwishins who had mastered the rules of the consciousness the best, but they remained however much weaker than in Joseon and especially incomplete, in the sense that she sometimes obtained only part of the information transmitted, the rest disappearing in the intelligible flow of the thoughts and impressions of the other dead, which Mago was unable to understand any more.

Yeo Woon had wanted to reach one of his acquaintances in Hanyang, the director of a gisaengs house who had taken him in and protected him after his resurrection, whose name was Gyo Hui Seon, and whom Ran Gyeong-Ja had referred to as the "Voice". He wished both to hear from her and to receive clarifications about the overall situation of the gwishins, which depended above all on what was decided at the royal palace, and thus within the capital.

He and Mago had perceived, albeit confusedly, resonances in the consciousness whose contents, scattered, had worried them by their daily increase and the anguished nature of certain sentences or words, such as "interrogation", "torture", "fire", "arrest". The first and the last one weren't really new in themselves, but the other two had awakened alarms in them that they had wanted to verify. However, his companion's attempts to contact his acquaintance had been unsuccessful, and on one occasion Yeo Woon was even ejected from the communication he had just managed to establish.

- She said she couldn't talk to me, he had explained to Mago, who was looking at him anxiously. She told me she would try to contact me again later.

But it had never happened, despite his efforts to maintain the connection. The communications between them and the gwishins of Joseon, if they managed to establish themselves, were, however, mutilated, defective, chopped up, and messages couldn't be transmitted under these conditions.

Furthermore, both were far from possessing a mastery of the consciousness as sophisticated and skillful as other Gwishins, and although their four years of travel had improved their control, they had not been able to provide them with a sufficient skill to locate a gwishin outside the borders of the country in which they were living. Yeo Woon had tried more than once, and each of his experiences had drained his energy so much that he had to interrupt them before he could get his hands on the Voice, or even on one of the Gwishin courtesans he had known and who worked for her.

Although they had more or less succeeded in establishing links with the gwishins in Qing, due to their greater physical proximity, they had been very isolated from Joseon and its business during their trip, and even the dead they had met during their exploration had told them they had difficulty contacting their own acquaintances who had remained on the territory.

When they had first set foot in Haeju, they had immediately tried to project echoes into the consciousness, but above all to receive them, and had been struck by the fact that it was filled with such a mass of suffering and cries for help that they had for a moment believed the worst. The words of the port apothecary had helped to confirm the suspicions and fears they had nourished during their four years of exile regarding the deterioration of the Gwishins' situation, but since the resonances they had been able to discern in China had been imprecise and vague, they had been far from imagining that the procedures of repression had been hardened to such an extent.

Now, as Mago was finishing preparing the fire for their dinner, she watched vigilantly Yeo Woon who was seeking help from the people of the dead to enter the capital's walls. When she had asked him why he wasn't trying to contact Gyô Hui Seon or one of her dead gisaengs, his expression had darkened, and he had then declared in a gloomy tone that he still couldn't reach them, or even locate them, and that he could only perceive the pain reflected by the other gwishins in the consciousness, which seemed to swallow up all other echoes.

He had probably tried his luck with other dead he had met in Hanyang, including the author of the second volume of the Encyclopedia, but nothing had worked. Mago, for her part, had also not heard from the couple who had lodged them in Sokcho, and never before had she felt that much like swinging on a tightrope, stretched between two sides of a precipice so deep that she couldn't have seen the bottom of it.

There must be an explanation, she now thought to herself, since their return to Joseon, to reassure herself. There has to be, someone will answer us, someone will help us. But when Yeo Woon opened his eyes again, and shook his head, indicating that his attempt had failed, Mago felt frighteningly alone for the first time since she had emerged from her grave.


b. Pharaoh's wheat

Iseul had turned thirteen in August 1781. She was at that transitional age that most adults thought spiritual to describe as "young" and, for the most comical of them, "inexperienced", on the pretext that nothing had ever been lived, seen or understood before reaching at least thirty years old, supposing that one would not die in the meantime from an illness, from an injury made in circumstances far too diverse and varied for not to be a kind of somewhat pessimistic irony of fate, or as a result of a natural disaster.

She remembered in particular a story that had been circulating in the neighborhood about a man who had been struck by lightning on a stormy night, and whose whole body was now covered with a long scarlet filament that divided into multiple branches along his arms, his neck, his torso. The mark had been designated by a local shaman, who looked completely delusional, and who was heavy-handed on booze and a whole bunch of very weird looking mushrooms, as a sign from the gods and a proof of an extraordinary destiny.

As it turned out, the guy in question, whom Iseul had met two or three times since he lived two streets away from hers, had ended up dying a few weeks later, not because of another rather mischievous lightning bolt, but because he had gone into the woods around Hanyang to chop down some wood for his home, and had accidentally met the creature known as the bogeyman. Iseul wasn't sure if it was an extraordinary destiny, and almost all the inhabitants who had heard the prediction had mocked it loudly, but in any case, she had concluded from this tale that there were individuals on whom fate could sometimes hurl itself at with a rare perseverance, and that if the notions of fate and gods could be questioned at times, the concept of tough luck, on the other hand, was fundamentally irrefutable.

The girl was thus thirteen years old, and despite the claims of the older, so-called more experienced people, and among them was the shaman who had made a scathing remark to her when Iseul had been skeptical of her omens, and whose whole experience, visibly long since deep wrinkles were digging into her frog-eyed face, had just been good at needlessly raising a man's hopes and making him believe he was invincible, which was why he had thought it wise to go alone into the woods afterwards (the gods are with me, he had said, just before he had his belly punctured by what was to some a demon in due form, and Iseul had thought, in case the shaman's statements had contained a shred of truth, that the gods could be very petty, or that the old woman had conveniently omitted to specify that those attracted to the man's case were of the bad kind), she was currently at the head of a fortune that few other teenagers of her age and extraction had gathered.

This treasure was well hidden in the false bottom of the box where she usually stored her small findings, such as leaves with peculiar shapes, stones with a slightly exotic appearance, brightly colored ribbons, all those little things that children and later adults accumulate by association, by sentimentalism, by projecting events or encounters into them. Iseul, for her part, was filling the box less and less with these unique objects, in order to leave more room for her money. Today, the amount of money in the box was just over one thousand four hundred nyang, and never before in her life had Iseul possessed such a sum of money.

The beginning of its accumulation was situated around 1778. She lived with her parents, a father who was a tanner and a mother who embroidered for the yangbans silly gooses, suffering their haughty glances while they admired the realization of her work once completed with a pride equaled only by their dumb ignorance in the art of embroidery in general. She had had a little brother since march 1780, who for the time being was a big, braying baby named Dong-hyun, and whom she adored with passion every time he smiled at her, although she wasn't quite sure he was fully aware of who she was, for babies were prodigiously naive and, above all, didn't bother to know who they were interacting with, a characteristic that made them endearing by the same token.

Iseul had promised to share her treasure, when it would be large enough, with her family, who, like all sangmin families, were always in need of money, even though their situation wasn't desperate like that of others, who had been hard hit by the appearance of the gwishins in their trade or more generally in their jobs. For the moment, she kept it a secret, in order to surprise them.

She feasted in advance on their delighted expressions, on their happiness, on the love and admiration that she could draw from it. She helped her mother with her embroidery work, but showed no interest in the activity and was only doing so to please her mother. She preferred to run around the streets of Hanyang with her friends, visiting stores and occasionally picking up a small object that she could easily slip into her pockets and that the sellers wouldn't notice was missing.

Before, Iseul had neighbors that she liked a lot, and who had moved away since the husband had been promoted, or had changed his job, she was unsure and, in truth, was only moderately interested in it. These neighbors were the Baek family, a couple with their son, Yoo-Jin, who was a year older than Iseul, but whose social skills were closer to those of Dong-Hyun, minus the smiles and credulity.

Iseul, who nevertheless thought he was a good-looking boy, had invited him several times to play with her : he always seemed relatively glad to accompany her on her adventures, but was very quiet, whereas she herself was much more talkative, and she was sorry to admit that he was really bad at stealing things from the shop. He did, however, have a touching sensitivity, a very keen eye, which noticed things most other people couldn't see, and he drew better than all the other boys his age put together.

When she had come to the Baek house to play with him, she had sometimes spent hours just watching him draw, and was fascinated by the skill of his brushstroke. His mother, now Lady Baek, was one of the most beautiful women Iseul had ever seen. A former prostitute, with sulfurous whore-like manners, the other neighbors said about her, but Iseull's mother had warned her daughter not to listen to them, and to make up her own mind. So her own opinion was that Yoo-Jin's mother was well educated, very gentle, very kind, and very pretty. What she had done before, Iseul didn't give a damn.

It was also thanks to Lady Baek that her fortune existed. The couple had indeed left the decaying hanok they occupied opposite Iseul's house in 1778, an event that had caused a great stir in the neighborhood, as social ascension always did. They had bid farewell to Iseul's parents, who had always been welcoming and courteous to them.

Before leaving, Baek Dong Soo, the husband, who had sometimes asked her for small services that were easy to perform, for which he had paid her generously, earning immense respect from the girl, had come to see her privately, telling her he had a request to make, a particular task to ask her for which she would receive a regular and negotiable payment, and that she was free to accept or not.

When Iseul, intrigued as much by the mission as by the possibility of a fixed salary, had enjoined him to give her some details, he had expressed his request in this way:

- Do you remember the man who came here with a horse about a year ago ? In the middle of the night ? He was with me, and he stayed for a while, we left together afterwards. Do you remember him ?

She remembered him, being gifted with a more than acceptable memory, and having the added advantage that their inner courtyard was relatively unfrequented apart from the inhabitants of the hanoks that composed it.

- Do you remember what he looked like ?

Iseul had nodded his head. She had looked at him carefully when he had turned to her, as Baek Dong Soo was haggling for his horse's watch, and had found him to have an unusual appearance. She remembered in particular his sunken cheeks, his plump mouth, his slightly crooked nose, his very black eyes, and his scrawny silhouette compared to Baek Dong Soo's.

She also perfectly remembered the horse, a superb animal, which she had been able to contemplate at greater length.

- I would like you, from now on, to go every day to the gates of Hanyang, and to watch the arrivals, Baek Dong Soo had then explained to her. If you ever see this man, I would like you to come immediately to warn me or my wife if I'm not here, and before that, you must go see him to tell him not to move, and to wait for me or Yun-Seo, preferably outside the city. If you manage to find him, you will receive an even larger amount of money. Can you do that for me ?

The girl had said she could, and was quick to ask about the nature of the payment.

- You will receive one nyang a day, which you can pick up at our new address I gave your parents, around sulsi. In addition, my wife has made a commitment to your parents to give you lessons or to find you a tutor in the discipline you want, to practice the profession you want. They don't know about the rest of the trade, I leave that part to you. Ideally, you should go to the doors at least three times a day, morning, noon and night, and stay there for at least several minutes, he then added. It's very important, Iseul.

The neighbor's voice took on an urgent, almost desperate tone. His eyes reflected a distress that Iseul had never seen before, and she had given her consent, considering the deal honest, but also the proposal interesting.

Three years after this conversation, she was being taught music and natural sciences, the only two fields that really awakened her interest, and she had at her service, to help her in her task which she could not accomplish permanently because of her classes at the Baek family home with a specialized teacher and her chores with her own family, a small group of children of her age or younger who took turns at the gates of the capital, provided with the description of the man and his horse.

There had been several false alarms over the years, mainly given by her subordinates, but otherwise the surveillance was well organized, and Iseul divided her treasure relatively evenly between herself and her comrades, giving herself the major part of the prize, but giving them a significant percentage. Sometimes not everyone was available, because of personal obligations, and the doors were left unguarded for a few moments, but usually there was always at least one who managed to free himself.

That evening, Iseul, sitting at her usual spot, watched the stream of visitors pouring into Hanyang, or rather into the status check barracks, with sustained attention. The man hadn't shown up in three years, or at least neither she nor her young accomplices had spotted him, and every night she went to the Baek house, and told Yoo-Jin's mother, who was waiting for her music lesson that she was giving her personally, "nothing".

Lady Baek would then smile kindly, offer her to sit down, drink hot tea and eat a cookie, thank her, and invariably give her her nyang. Her relay for the end of the night was expected soon. She had built a whole system in three years, with a well-oiled mechanism. Another day of "nothing", she thought, not without a hint of disappointment, after the appearance of the boy who was in charge of watching the doors after her, as she walked up the street and directed her steps towards her bank, in other words the new house of the Baek family.