WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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Chapter 161: In 1934, the Regressed Gangwon Hunter (2)

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What is a king?

No work yet existed, even in the world he had reached in his previous life, that defined a king as a bird that drinks tears.[1] So Han San had to find his own answer.

Having seen many people who could be called kings since his previous life, Han San had an answer.

‘The place people look toward.’

That was a king.

Once nobody looked toward them any longer, the king was finished.

Even if no bullet struck them, even if Heaven did not punish them.

That was what had happened in Upper Hamlet.

More so than when the Mountain Lord had been pierced by bullets, more so than when Old Woman Wangdae had been struck by lightning.

Upper Hamlet had truly lost its king when blacksmith Mr. Baek removed the cloth from the Seonangdang shrine, and no one took Mr. Baek’s hand to stop him.

‘So.’

He needed to make a place for them to look toward.

And Han San had much to show them now.

The Middle Hamlet sacrificial altar.

“Sajang, I’ve gathered everyone.”

Chuk Hong-cheol, who had arrived early to bring news from town, helped restore Lower Hamlet, then received his orders, reported to him.

Han San grinned.

“Good work, Chief.”

People had gathered beneath the Middle Hamlet hodgepodge altar built last Chuseok.

The people of Upper Hamlet stood in the front row.

“Why did he call us here? Old Man Deok-tae, did you hear anything?”

“I’m not sure myself. Still, there must be a reason.”

Blacksmith Mr. Baek, Deok-tae, Jin Ssi, Ju Ssi, and even Cheol-min were there. Everyone had come except Cheol-min’s parents, who were caring for Yun Cheom-ji.

The people who had remained in Lower Hamlet stood behind them.

“If the Han family calls, we ought to come.”

“We’ve been fed and had help repairing our homes. We can’t exactly refuse...”

They had begun to assimilate into Middle Hamlet, but had only arrived from elsewhere a few years before and barely thought of themselves as people of Sebeom Valley.

Then came the people of Middle Hamlet.

“It’s rare for them to summon us instead of our husbands. It’s not even time to make holiday food.”

“Oh, that young sajang isn’t the sort to care whether someone’s a husband or a wife. He must need us for something.”

The able-bodied men, led by the Husband Youth Corps, had gone down to town, and the children were at Mogok School, so most of those gathered were women. So Seobang’s wife and Choi Seo-bang’s wife soothed them.

Lastly came the people from Ham Ssang-sim’s side of the family, along with the people of Han’s Myriad Commerce.

“If my eldest nephew says gather, then gather we shall.”

“Of course. It’s the sajang’s word.”

Before everyone who remained in Sebeom Valley, Han San stepped forward.

The murmuring died down.

He waited until it had fully stopped before speaking.

“Everyone! Thank you for coming.

As for why I called you here... Well, you’re busy, so I won’t drag this out!

Uncles. Please bring them out.”

At Han San’s words, the Inwang Gang uncles moved.

A moment later, everyone’s eyes widened.

“Wh, what are all those?”

“Those people in white clothes... Ah! Aren’t they the bastards who shot Yun Cheom-ji?”

The bodies of the remaining Baekbaekgyo members had been brought on stretchers.

True to their reputation as an elite bandit gang, the Inwang Gang had done excellent preservation work. Even in this weather, the bodies had barely decayed.

But corpses were still corpses. The people instinctively took half a step back. The bodies of the Baekbaekgyo remnants, not even covered with reed mats, were laid before the sacrificial altar.

“Baekbaekgyo.”

Han San spoke without raising his voice.

“They’re heretical cultists driven out of Gyeongseong. They snuck into our village amid the flooding... You all know better than anyone what they did. Jin Ssi, you know well too, don’t you?”

“Huh? M, me?”

Jin Ssi was startled, but when everyone’s eyes turned to him, he craned his neck and examined the bodies.

Kim Gun-ok, Baekbaekgyo’s last Great Magistrate, lay among them, but Jin Ssi’s eyes went straight to the trio that had attacked Yun Cheom-ji’s home.

Jin Ssi shouted excitedly.

“That’s them! The bastards who attacked Yun Cheom-ji’s home!

Especially that one! That’s the very bastard Yun Cheom-ji shot and brought down! Ju Ssi saw it too, right beside me!”

The Upper Hamlet people who had rushed into Yun Cheom-ji’s house that day quickly chimed in.

“That’s right! I saw the face of the bastard who got shot dead!”

“The ones beside him are the two who ran off then... Well, I thought the Han family’s young men were being reckless, chasing after them in that weather, in the middle of the night. Turns out I worried for nothing!”

Han San gave them enough time to speak among themselves, then took a step forward.

“You’re right. But that isn’t all.”

Jin Ssi hesitated.

“What?”

“Bring them.”

At Han San’s gesture, the Inwang Gang uncles carried over more stretchers.

These were covered in reed mats. But hands and feet extended beyond the stretchers.

The people of Upper Hamlet knew those hands, which had carried palanquins all their lives, and those feet, which had climbed Upper Hamlet’s slopes, all too well.

Han San briefly bowed his head in silence before speaking.

“Baekbaekgyo came to our home, too.

Park Il and the palanquin bearers bravely fought them then, but... those Baekbaekgyo bastards...”

Silence fell.

The people of Upper Hamlet looked at one another.

They had heard the fleeing men shouting that night, babbling about Old Woman Wangdae. They also knew very well whom Park Il, the man beneath that reed mat, had faithfully served.

Blacksmith Mr. Baek was the first to understand what Han San meant.

- Old Woman Wangdae had not sold out the village.

- The palanquin bearers were not traitors to the village, either.

Because all the evil had been done by those Baekbaekgyo bastards.

Yun Cheom-ji being shot, Park Il and the palanquin bearers being harmed, all of it would be laid at the feet of the Baekbaekgyo bastards who had hidden in the village amid the rain.

The conclusion was obvious.

- The people of Upper Hamlet were nothing more than victims of Baekbaekgyo.

Of course, they could be called victims even now.

Old Woman Wangdae had not consulted the people of Upper Hamlet when she set things in motion. Upper Hamlet had been swept along in Old Woman Wangdae’s wake.

But there was a difference between being victims swept up by Old Woman Wangdae and being victims swept up by an outside force, Baekbaekgyo.

Han San did not even leave Old Woman Wangdae out.

“Next.”

Another stretcher came.

This reed mat looked small, because what lay beneath it was so large.

“Old Woman Wangdae...”

“I, I heard she was struck by lightning...”

The large old woman’s hand protruded from beneath the mat. Lightning scars were branded across the back of it like a tattoo.

Han San again bowed his head briefly in silence.

“Next.”

Then came the Mountain Lord.

Every strongman in the Inwang Gang had to help. They hoisted the Mountain Lord, lashed with rope to two thick poles, over their shoulders and climbed the hill as though carrying a palanquin.

At the sharp smell of nurungji, wet fur, and the fishy, salty stench of salt packed inside it, the people inhaled despite themselves.

The Inwang Gang strongmen hung the Mountain Lord from the tree before the sacrificial altar.

They pulled.

The Mountain Lord hung upside down before the Middle Hamlet hodgepodge altar.

Its belly had already been cut open. Han San’s father had ordered the Inwang Gang men to remove its innards and pack it with salt.

Whenever a hot wind blew after the monsoon season, Creak. Creak. The ruler of mountain beasts, jaws gaping wide, swayed slowly like a hanged king.

This time, no one could even flinch. Their bodies would not move.

Han San spoke calmly.

“As you can see, it was a big one. When we cut open its belly, we found this.”

What Han San raised was an old crucifix.

“Th, that! Father Cho used to carry that...”

“Oh, Uncle!”

Father Cho’s relatives wailed. Who could have imagined that their uncle, whose whereabouts had been unknown, had ended up in a tiger’s belly?

Han San nodded deeply and continued.

“Old Woman Wangdae fell victim to this beast, too.”

No one, naturally, said anything as foolish as asking what a tiger had to do with the body of an old woman who had clearly been struck by lightning.

“But how could we let that stand? We’re all people of Sebeom Valley.”

Han San led his father out from among the people.

“My father and I avenged them.

We put an end to both the Baekbaekgyo bastards and this mountain cat.”

The hunter father and son of the Han family stood before the hanging beast’s corpse.

Jin Ssi dropped to his knees, wearing an expression that suggested he did not know why he had done it.

Soon Ju Ssi and Old Man Deok-tae did the same. Just as they had done for decades before the Seonangdang shrine tree, this time they did so before Middle Hamlet’s hodgepodge altar.

Blacksmith Mr. Baek was no exception.

When every person from Upper Hamlet had knelt, people from Lower Hamlet and elsewhere hesitantly followed suit.

The people of Sebeom Valley lowered their heads and bowed.

Because of the majesty radiating from the Mountain Lord’s corpse?

No. They prostrated themselves before the hunter father and son who had brought down the beast.

“Father.”

“Mm.”

Han San and Han Man-seok drew their knives at the same time.

Their blades entered the inner sides of the hind legs, where the hide was thinnest.

Father and son began to skin the Mountain Lord before all the people of Sebeom Valley.

Sliiip.

Following the line of the split belly and down toward the inner sides of the front legs, their knife tips cut only the membrane between hide and flesh.

“Good heavens...”

“Wow, they’re really... skinning the Mountain Lord...”

The people stared with their mouths hanging open. No one could leave.

Yet Han San himself felt little about the Mountain Lord.

If he felt anything, it was this.

‘Working together with Father!’

He remembered asking his father to teach him how to skin a badger not long after his regression.

Step by step, they had come this far, until now they were skinning a tiger together.

That was what filled him with emotion. Han San continued the work he had never once shared with his father in his previous life, before the eyes of the entire village.

When cicadas began to chirp somewhere in the distance, the work was finally done.

Flap.

Once they stripped away the hide, like a dragon robe with gold and ink-black entwined in shapes of lightning, the Mountain Lord’s naked body was merely red and hollow like that of any other beast.

“Everyone!”

Han San raised the hide. Han Man-seok held the other end to help him.

The tiger hide was large, wet, and heavy, but before the strength of a Baekdu Mountain hunter and the son who inherited his blood, it was no more than a cloak.

The people looked at the head skin drooping forward like a hood.

There was a pattern on its forehead. The pattern ancient people of the continent must surely have looked to when they created the character for king.

King (王).

“Don’t worry anymore!”

Han San shouted in a ringing voice.

“Your lives! Your property! And your safety!

From now on, I’ll take responsibility for all of it!”

The people remained on their knees, heads bowed.

Blacksmith Mr. Baek was the first to shout.

“Long live the Han family!”

Old Man Deok-tae shouted too.

“Young Han San is a great big man, and the great big Mr. Han has accomplished something beyond all measure!”

Ham Byeong-cheol shouted louder than anyone.

“I knew my younger cousin was bound to make something big, I surely did!”

Jin Ssi followed. Ju Ssi followed, as did the people of Lower Hamlet and the women of Middle Hamlet.

Even Baechil hyung bowed his head, but Cheol-min alone looked up at Han San with hesitation on his face.

- Don’t worry.

Han San smiled at Cheol-min.

- I’ll shoulder all these lies, too.

Should a king not do at least that much?

At the sight of Han San’s smile, Cheol-min’s hesitation finally disappeared. In its place came resolve.

- I’ll do it with you.

Han San’s smile deepened.

- Then I can count on you.

They did not meet each other’s eyes for long. But it was enough.

“Thank you, everyone!”

Together with his father, Han San raised the tiger hide and shouted.

“I look forward to your continued support!”

Thus, the lord of Middle Hamlet became, in name and fact, the king of Sebeom Valley.

On a hill some distance away.

Imok and the Inwang Gang members had withdrawn without a sound and watched the scene from a place overlooking the Middle Hamlet hodgepodge altar.

Clearing After Rain on Mount Inwang.[3] A painting of a mountain after rain. Holding open the folding fan bearing that painting and covering his lower face, Imok silently looked back and forth between Han San and Han Man-seok with his sharply outlined eyes.

Sang-jun spoke beside him.

“It brings back old memories, sir.”

Imok did not reply.

Baekdu Mountain. Snow. The first autumn of the Gyeongsul Year, when the royal ancestral shrine, Jongmyo, fell.[4] Beneath red autumn leaves, the eldest young master of the Lee family and his childhood friends had gathered.

[ Then the eldest young master will become commander of the Independence Army! ]

[ Doesn’t commander of the Independence Army sound a little lame? ]

[ Yeah. What should we call him? ]

[ If we’re doing this, how about king? The eldest young master is from the Lee family, same as the royal house. ]

Imok remembered listening with a wry smile. Then he had met the eyes of a man wearing the same wry smile.

Han Man-seok.

A member of an old hunter clan that lived deep in the mountains. A friend from the mountains who only occasionally came down to the village.

“The moment your feet stop, the road is already over, and the flower garden spread before you blocks your way.”

For just a moment, the sun and moon painted on the folding fan shone with longing for a golden age that would never return.

“They only wish to go further.”

“I believe so.”

Sang-jun nodded.

Cicadas sang. In the mountains after rain, the fan painted with mountains after rain folded shut.

“Let us go.”

“Is it all right not to leave a farewell message?”

“We have already said all there was to say. There will be many chances to meet again.”

Imok smiled, unusually showing his lower face, and glanced toward Sebeom Valley below.

“Rather than that, it would be courteous to leave quickly, so we do not stand in the way of a newly founded dynasty.”

The Inwang Gang members looked at one another.

Then they grinned.

The Baekdu Mountain Old Boys returned to the flower garden blooming on Stone Island.

Footnotes:

[1] The Bird That Drinks Tears is a Korean fantasy novel whose title the opening invokes as an unexpected definition of a king.

[2] The tiger's forehead markings are traditionally said to resemble the Chinese character for “king,” which is why the animal is associated with kingship.

[3] Clearing After Rain on Mount Inwang is a celebrated Joseon landscape painting by Jeong Seon depicting Mount Inwang after rain.

[4] Jongmyo is Seoul's royal ancestral shrine of the Joseon dynasty; “when Jongmyo fell” poetically evokes the dynasty's collapse.

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