WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Natty

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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈

Episode 45: Jangsalgot Submerged Site (7)

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“This isn’t Jangsalgot.”

“...Huh?”

That was far too brief. I was the only one who had heard the entire book, right? I needed to explain it properly from the beginning.

“You... can read Middle Korean too?”

“Uh... more or less. I picked some up when I handled marketing for the National Museum of Korea’s Hunminjeongeum exhibit. You know, we had to provide a modern Korean translation beside the Haerye edition...”

The stare drilling into the side of my head stung.

Still, I decided to stick with the idea that marketing planners more or less did everything. Planners were supposed to know nothing, yet somehow know everything.

What mattered was having various experts examine the available material, compare opinions, fact-check it in the best way possible, and revise it.

“So, this place was not originally called Jangsalgot. After the elderly villagers left and the place was submerged, people did not realize the pronunciation had changed and simply wrote down what they heard.”

“Then what was it originally called?”

Carefully, I opened the first page of the old book again. I cleared my throat and began reading as Hertz recited the text to me.

“Generation after generation, the sky remained overcast, plants withered and died, and salt rose from dry earth. It was a strange thing. Believing the mountain spirit’s anger was killing the land, the people pitied themselves, yet had no way of learning the cause.”

“...Thereupon they summoned a spiritually gifted Taoist master, held ceremonies, and conducted a shamanic rite. The shaman said, ‘An evil thing lurks in this land, called Jamseol, the Submerged Tongue. A ravine has become a sea, and within it sits a monster with its maw open, endlessly spewing saltwater and killing people, beasts, and plants alike.’”

Each time I read the words aloud, my head felt foggier. The sound of waves rolled in from beyond the old jazz.

Hertz raised the volume to match. I barely managed to gather myself and continue.

“To perform the rite, they did as the shaman instructed. They drove a tree that had grown there into its tongue, so it could rise no farther. Wherever trees grow is land, not water, and thus the evil thing could be prevented from crawling any higher and spreading malign influence everywhere.”

“So the village guardian tree was the protective tree.”

Lee Gangrim clicked their tongue.

“The next part explains how to perform rites for the tree. It does not say anything about using human heads...”

“Then why was this never passed along to the Corporation? It was not in the Corporation’s records either.”

Choi Seongun voiced the question I had been wondering about too.

“You said the flooding happened in 1981. They were busy building dams and preparing for the Olympics then... They might have dismissed all traditions and superstitions as outdated.”

“No matter how much the elderly warned them it was dangerous, development swept it aside. It became one of those old stories people dismissed as superstition. ‘That old fool is about to die anyway and spouting nonsense,’ something like that.”

Lee Gangrim gave the old book a tap, tap, then fell silent. The Corporation’s work might erase memories as neatly as Men in Black, but someone still had to remember.

“Fine, but does it say what that monster skewered on the tree is?”

“It does not. It seems to deliberately avoid its name and only calls it Jamseol, the submerged maw.”

“You do not know its name? Then we cannot perform a salpuri rite.”

“Right. Ah, do not look at it.”

When Lee Gangrim tried to look at the Buddhist altar painting, I quickly grabbed their face and stopped them.

“If you look at the painting, it starts moving. It feels like it pulls you into that thing’s territory, so the rest of you should avoid looking at the scroll painting as much as possible.”

At my warning, Choi Seongun quickly covered the children’s eyes and turned them away. Good instincts.

‘Now that we have the materials, is it time to think this through?’

This was a world where ghost stories existed in reality. So what if a deep-sea anglerfish that had Mega Evolved somehow drifted into the middle of Jecheon, North Chungcheong Province?

‘How did it get here?’

Maybe it knew in advance that a dam would be built and the place flooded, so it had claimed the spot early. Or maybe, like Japanese waterside ghost stories and the Cthulhu Mythos, this land had been underwater long, long ago, and it had been here ever since.

It had been a sea, then became inland through crustal movement. Something like that.

Anyway, it had spread salt across the land, so they called a shaman and separated this place from the sea by arguing that wherever trees grew could not be ocean.

“That explains why there were no mirrors.”

“Yes. The land itself has to reflect the monster fish’s sea like a mirror and keep it contained in one place.”

“If it sees itself reflected in water or a mirror, the fish recognizes that as another sea it can reach.”

“They tried to stop that as much as possible. They painted trees in the shrine like a recurring motif to lock it up twice, three times over, and made the blue-tile-roof house into a kind of watchman that opened only at night and could see nothing but the mountain.”

We had clearly laid out the cause and process. The problem was the solution.

“We cannot drain the water that has already filled this place... Even if we do not know its name, it seems like we could lay it to rest and drive it out if we altered Jamseol somehow and performed another rite. But why are those human heads hanging from the guardian tree?”

Nothing as gruesome as human heads hung from the tree inside the shrine.

“I do not think they performed the rite by striking human heads like a set of bronze bells.”

Why did their mind always head in such vicious directions? Of course, I had already formed a hypothesis about that.

“Maybe... if I am right, another ghost story mixed in and fused with it.”

“Ghost stories fused?”

“The patterns appearing in the Corporation’s existing records were mirrors, the eeriness of being submerged, and the blue-tile-roof house. But you said the camcorder video we saw this time was a completely new pattern.”

“I did.”

“Then it makes sense to assume it came from another ghost story. The shared elements would be the tree, the camcorder, and human corpses.”

“What makes you think that?”

Lee Gangrim frowned.

“The same thing happened at The Mirror of the Otherworld Popup. An episode of The Mirror of the Otherworld appeared in reality, and an entirely different ghost story called Pebbles Mart Work Rules overlapped with it.”

“Ah, the one Division 3 solved. I heard you did something big there.”

“After analyzing where the ghost stories affected each other, I made the parts that could clash actually collide. At their core, ghost stories need to lure people in, so they seem to tend to move according to what the people inside them think. Back then, I was the only one judged to be alive, so I confirmed that the story could be revised to some extent in the direction I thought through.”

Ghost stories were stories in the end, and stories were battles of logic. The more plausible they were, the more real they seemed. Then, at some point, they truly became real.

Lee Gangrim let out a short, disbelieving laugh.

“So that was why Section Chief In made such a fuss about hiring a newcomer... You are thinking of something far bigger than I expected.”

Just how far had the story spread? I hoped the entire Corporation had not already heard my name, age, and criminal record.

“So, what is this tree ghost story, and how do we untangle it with the camcorder and this Dragon Palace anglerfish?”

Lee Gangrim’s eyes were shining now. Anticipation practically dripped from their voice. Whatever they were expecting, the pressure was overflowing.

At some point, Choi Seongun and the children had all drawn close to listen.

It worked out. We were the only living people in this strange space, and if we wanted to rewrite the ghost story’s rules, we all needed the same image and conviction in our minds.

“First, let us see whether any of the ghost stories we know involve human heads, trees, or found footage... Preferably recent stories that are still making the rounds.”

While everyone racked their brains and reviewed ghost stories, I quickly opened my phone and accessed the blog. The moment I entered the keywords, dozens of ghost stories appeared in neat order.

#treeghoststory #gourdhead #beheading #foundfootage #reservoir...

‘During the next feature update, make it automatically pull up relevant information when I enter. It is killing me trying to find things...’

“I will try, partner.”

When would I get a ghost-story archive ability like some overpowered game-system interface? Even with automatic sorting and retrieval, I still had to read everything and think it through myself.

As I compared the countless ghost-story entries, a cautious voice spoke beside me.

“I, I remembered something...”

It was one of the three middle school students. The one who had cried the least and seemed the most composed.

“There was a ghost story that became popular at our school last semester.”

This was the story the student haltingly told us.

There was supposedly an old tree in an abandoned neighborhood undergoing redevelopment or urban construction.

Legend said the tree had once been used as an execution ground. Dark rumors spread that if you killed yourself there, you could definitely kill the person you wanted to curse, things like that.

Then a student streamer said they would broadcast live from there. Apparently, it was such a tiny no-name stream that hardly anyone watched.

Anyway, the video supposedly showed people hanging from the tree with nothing but their heads left. After that, the streamer ran over, saying they had to die too, and hanged themself.

“...Then video links started circulating. They said there was a link where you could get the original video, the one where a corpse appears, the stream gets taken down, and the streamer hangs themself.”

After that, it followed a pattern similar to this one. The video link spread quietly through messages and group chats. Someone said, “I really saw someone die,” and the story gained strength.

Even though no one had died, a ghost story was born where dead people could appear there.

“Was it a famous ghost story?”

“No. I think it only spread through our school and a few others. It got really popular over vacation...”

If the ghost story had begun in Seoul, it could not have become entangled with the Jangsalgot Submerged Site.

But since it had begun in Jecheon, it had been lucky enough to spread during the drought, when this submerged site was exposed.

The enormous village guardian tree was both the weight keeping the deep-sea anglerfish pinned down and the gourd-head ghost tree where people hanged themselves.

The camcorder and video shared a cause with mirrors because they reflected things. They served as a passage that dragged anyone who watched the video beneath the Dragon Palace here.

“A centuries-old anglerfish gets a taste of modern life and starts combining with streaming too. This really is a new case. We cannot do a rite, and exorcism will not work either.”

Lee Gangrim cracked their neck a few times and stretched.

“Junior Number Two. You have a solution too, right? What do we need to do?”

I paused for a moment. Not for dramatic effect. I wanted to organize my thoughts one last time and hear Hertz’s feedback.

“We are going to rewrite the ghost story. Like we did before.”

First, we could not remove the tree. If we uprooted it, we had neither the means nor the equipment to deal with the anglerfish monster that would appear.

But the haunted tree was a recently formed ghost story, which meant we could record it. We would find a new ghost story that could strip away only that part, then make a path home.

“These two kinds of ghost story have no ending where you can escape once you enter the water or see the tree. We need to create an ending point too.”

“Do you have a candidate?”

“Yes. Thanks to how many stories you have recorded, this place is overflowing with ghost stories. There was one that seemed like the best fit.”

I spoke with certainty and confidence.

Footnotes:

Dragon Palace is the undersea kingdom of Korean folklore, invoked here as a joking nickname for the anglerfish.

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