WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 43: Jangsalgot Submerged Site (5)
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“Dragon Palace. It does suit the place.”
“Basically, I think it’ll be no different from Jangsalgot Village…”
Looking around, the village appeared exactly as it had before. The alleyways were the same width, and the houses stood at familiar distances from one another.
“No people. And the houses... are they empty?”
I approached the nearest house. A faint light shone over it through the darkness.
“...!”
Talismans covered the gate and walls. Yellowed, faded Talismans had been pasted everywhere so thickly that they looked like wallpaper.
“Mr. Gangrim, what do you make of this?”
“They’re Talismans, aren’t they? I don’t think they’re meant to trap something inside.”
Lee Gangrim casually pulled a flashlight from his coat and inspected the Talismans from every angle. While he did that, I circled the area, checking for any sign of people.
This place was creepy beyond words. There was no wind, yet every so often I could hear the Talismans crackling and fluttering.
Creeeeak.
“Mr. Gangrim?”
What the hell was that guy doing?! Lee Gangrim tore off a Talisman, examined it, stuffed it into his pocket, then shoved the front gate open with all his strength.
“Excuse us.”
“W-Wait a second. What are you doing?”
“We need to see if there’s anything inside.”
Did the Corporation have some special procedure I didn’t know about? They had to. Otherwise, my heart wouldn’t survive this. Unless this guy was just an oblivious fool who had crawled out of hell.
Ignoring me, Lee Gangrim stepped straight into the yard and went around knocking on doors, checking whether they were open or locked.
“Rookie. Come here.”
He called me over.
“...Look at this.”
A small dining table had been set up near the kitchen. Mixed-grain rice, soybean paste soup, and vegetable side dishes. Three bowls of rice. Three sets of spoons and chopsticks. The distinctive pattern on the little table caught my eye.
“...Doesn’t that look like the same dinner menu from earlier?”
There were even traces of Yongsik’s unfinished meal. In this old, ruined village, the table had remained exactly as it was, though the food had gone cold. It was deeply unsettling.
“...Mirrors...”
Lee Gangrim, who had even turned over the rice bowls, raised his head.
“What? Mirrors?”
“This village didn’t have any mirrors, did it?”
Thanks to Lee Gangrim poking around everywhere we could look, I had remembered the strange things too.
The thing that had bothered me most was the mirrors.
“There should have been mirrors in the community hall or bathrooms, but there weren’t any. Isn’t that strange? Even if mirrors were expensive, they weren’t so expensive that people couldn’t keep one at home.”
And there was a ghost story about a mirror.
“At the time, Granny Cheong of the tiled-roof house belonged to a wealthy family in the village. They say she hadn’t been able to bring out the large mother-of-pearl dressing table she had used all her life, and regretted it ever since.”
Granny Cheong of the tiled-roof house. Couldn’t that mean the granny from the blue-tile-roof house?
“It would make sense if that house alone has a mirror. There’s likely a mirror there creating a reflection that projects the real, above-water Jangsalgot here.”
“Question. Then why make that kind of geomantic arrangement with a reflection to keep it suppressed?”
“This Jangsalgot beneath the water is itself a Dragon Palace. It’s a place full of water, so it would be affected by water. They must have looked at the water reflected in the mirror and determined that everything up to this point was water, while everything beyond it was land. Then they pinned it down that way.”
“Earth restraining Water.”
“Yes. Then if this place filled with water, the water should rise as far as the place with the mirror.”
“The water was floating there, glowing blue. I thought some idiot had thrown in a luminous lure, so I reeled in my line. There was a TV on underwater...”
“So the mirror reflected the water’s surface, and this Dragon Palace version of Jangsalgot rose into the real water.”
“Yes. The water trapped by the dam became a giant Venus flytrap, its entrance wide open. That’s probably why the village guardian tree appeared in the photos taken before the flooding. The ground was dark, so I thought the picture had been taken in the rain.”
“But none of the villagers said a word about the tree.”
“There was one other thing they didn’t want to mention at all.”
Jangsal House.
We looked at each other at the same time.
Jangsal House opposed the flooding, but no people could be seen there because nobody had lived there in the first place. Rather, it had been suppressed to keep that place dry.
“And when the drought came, the Distortion decided its territory had been taken. So it tried to swallow people up to perform its own rainmaking rite.”
Clap.
Lee Gangrim clapped once. The sound echoed as if we were inside a cave.
“So we need to find out why this place became a Dragon Palace. Wouldn’t it be solved if we beat the hell out of the toad pinned beneath the water?”
You people said you didn’t do physical exorcisms. Was this just Lee Gangrim, or was Haetae full of weird people?
— My partner has acquired some decent physical force.
No. We didn’t have what it took to control that, Hertz.
“Should we go to the blue-tile-roof house?”
“Let’s start there. We should also make a round of the village. There might be stranded people here.”
We cautiously returned to the alley.
Listening to gravel shift beneath our feet, I had no choice but to keep sweeping the flashlight over the walls and surrounding area. It felt as though something was watching us.
— You look worried that something will come out.
‘Why wouldn’t I be? Based on that footage, there should be people hanging everywhere...’
The crunch of gravel beneath my feet grew more and more eerie. The air around us made breathing feel difficult, like trying to breathe into a humidifier. We turned several more corners and passed doors hanging open with mournful creaks.
“...This is insane.”
Lee Gangrim swore under his breath. Behind him, I blinked a few times, then gaped.
“That’s the Jangsalgot Tree...”
An enormous old tree rose from the top of a towering stone cairn, its roots bulging out as it gave off a sinister aura. Sacred straw ropes, faded by blood and salt over countless years, and multicolored ribbons tangled grotesquely like cobwebs, making sounds despite the windless air.
Fruit hung in clusters from the ends of its thick, blackened branches.
No. They weren’t fruit.
They were human heads.
Shrunken, bloated, burst, and ruined, human heads hung from the tree like leaves, shaped like gourds. Dozens of heads stared into empty space with their eyes rolled back and mouths open.
‘Urgh...’
Fighting back nausea, I lowered my gaze. Talismans and sacred ropes wrapped tightly around the tree, digging all the way into the stone cairn where its roots had taken hold. Various belongings lay scattered across the cairn.
Grimy sneakers, a smartphone with a shattered screen, torn clothes, and someone’s broken glasses.
“They look like the stranded people’s belongings.”
Lee Gangrim touched a few of them. A hand came away clutching the smartphone. It was swollen and burst from the water, its fingertips rotted blue as it dangled from the phone.
‘God, seriously...’
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Aaaah!!
Eeeaaah!!
“What was that?”
A shrill sound, neither quite a scream nor a shout, struck my ears. Lee Gangrim whipped his head around, then shot toward where it had come from.
“M-Mr. Gangrim, wait for me!”
I hurried after him. The moment I climbed over the slope, blue goblin fire flickered everywhere.
“Mr. Seongun!”
Choi Seongun rolled across the ground as if breaking a fall, then sprang up and turned toward us. His face immediately brightened.
“Jaehyeon hyung?! Senior Gangrim!”
“Rookie, duck!”
Lee Gangrim’s baton sliced through the darkness. Something flashed blue, and the area lit up for a moment.
Around Choi Seongun, black woody vines throbbed like veins, endlessly pumping something as they wriggled like eels toward him from every direction.
“To the other world of Mount Qi and the Ying River, did you follow Chao Fu and Xu You?
Under Caishi River’s moonlit night, why not go after Li, the Banished Immortal?”
A tarryeong-style song rang out again.
It was Lee Gangrim singing in that folk-song cadence. Gripping his baton like a fan, he thrust his arm forward and belted out the tune.
Each time Lee Gangrim struck a vine amid the blue light, it was severed as cleanly as though cut by a blade.
The vines exposed their cross-sections, squirming as black slime sprayed out instead of blood. The last vine convulsed and sagged onto the ground. At last, the area went quiet.
Lee Gangrim’s song stopped as well.
“...Wow.”
I was genuinely impressed. The physical exorcism I had only imagined was happening right before my eyes. So this was how it was done.
Lee Gangrim shook off his baton and hooked it onto his belt before approaching Choi Seongun.
“You okay, rookie?”
“...I thought I was going to die...”
As if the tension had finally left him, Choi Seongun groaned and sat down.
“W-Where have you been? Fog suddenly rolled in, and when I opened my eyes, I was here. I kept walking around, but nobody answered, the radios wouldn’t work, things were hanging over there, and seriously...”
“Yeah, yeah. We all got dropped in different places. Where are the others?”
“Oh, right. Senior, over here.”
Choi Seongun quickly whispered something into Lee Gangrim’s ear, then shone his flashlight on one side of the boulder where he had been holding his ground.
“Eek...!”
“...Kids?”
Three young, starving-looking students were crouched there. The moment they saw Lee Gangrim and me, they began to sniffle, their faces caught between hope and tears.
‘Oh, no.’
I didn’t even need to ask what had happened.
They must have watched that video, sent an email or come looking for Jangsalgot, tried ghost hunting, and gotten swallowed by a ghost story.
Then, by sheer luck, they had ended up here.
Rescued by Choi Seongun.
“Our rookie is a genius. Good at protecting civilians too.”
Lee Gangrim rubbed Choi Seongun’s head once, then crouched in front of the students.
“Kids, where are you from?”
“Jecheon. We live in Jecheon...”
Just as I thought. They were from nearby.
Lee Gangrim seemed skilled with children too. That didn’t mean he was getting through to them, of course. Who comforted people with an interrogation-style tone like that?
“Do you remember how you got here?”
“I-I don’t know either. I just... I couldn’t sleep at night, and I was bored, so I watched the Jangsalgot camcorder video posted on an online ghost-story forum. There was a strange email address at the end of the video, so I got curious and sent a fake email saying I knew that person...”
An ordinary ghost-story courage test by immature middle school students. One of them, a little bolder than the others, had tried to “fact-check” whether it was fake.
“Then nothing happened... so I naturally thought it was fake and got on the bus. When I woke up, I was here...”
They must have swaggered around as usual, saying, See? It was fake.
Just as I had.
Then they had fallen in exactly as I had. Without a blog or any special perks. Because this was a world where ghost stories were real.
The children looked pale, and their clothes were filthy, wet, and grimy. They did not seem to have spent only a day or two here.
They had enough strength to speak only because Choi Seongun had protected them. The children clung to him and relied on him as though he were some kind of special agent.
“Good. Thank you for telling me. I’m that man’s superior. We’re getting you out of here with us, so you can listen to what I say, right?”
The students nodded hard.
That was when it happened.
“Senior, you need to come back over here for a moment...!”
Choi Seongun grimaced and swept his light around. The severed vines were wriggling as they tried to join themselves back together.
“Damn it. These disgusting bastards are persistent.”
“Just cutting them won’t solve this. Do we need to pull that village guardian tree out by the roots and burn it down?”
Fire was the solution to everything, but I didn’t think we could just set it on fire. More than anything, this place was currently considered underwater. Fire wouldn’t catch underwater.
“I think we need to find out what this sea being held down by the tree really is.”
I pointed behind the Jangsalgot Tree, at the old building crouched unpleasantly in the darkness. It was Jangsal House, and also seemed to be a shrine.
“The tree was submerged to protect it from fire. There might be something inside that house about what they’ve been doing. And we might not be harmed if we go inside.”
‘...Right, Hertz?’
— Nothing looks likely to eat my partner right now!
See? Even Hertz said so.
Besides, the hedgehog I had tucked into my clothes and half forgotten was making a motor-like sound, telling me that we should go there.
“Good. Then there’s no reason to hesitate. Kids, get up. Let’s take shelter from the rain.”
Lee Gangrim grabbed two students by the backs of their necks and pulled them to their feet. The remaining student stuck close to me.
The five of us formed up with the students in the middle and walked toward the shrine.
“Talismans...”
The yellow Talisman stuck to the door looked as vivid as if it had just been pasted on. Lee Gangrim looked at it for a moment, then tore it off without hesitation.
Slap.
The sound of waves brushed past my ears again, and the door to the shrine in Jangsal House opened.
Footnotes:
- “Cheong” can be a personal name but also means blue or green, prompting Jaehyeon’s link between Granny Cheong and the blue-tile-roof house.
- Lee Gangrim’s chant references the Chinese legendary recluses Chao Fu and Xu You, as well as Li Bai, who was known as the Banished Immortal.
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