The Guardian Who Walks Out of the Painting
This man was, without a doubt, a dokkaebi.
The man first peeled open a foil sheet and plucked out a single pill. Using water Seokdu had fetched, he propped up the woman—her throat so swollen she could barely swallow—and fed it to her bit by bit. Only after confirming that she had finally managed to get it down did he lift his head.
"Seokdu."
Then he pressed the rest of the silver-colored pills into the boy's arms.
"Take these and go around to every house in the village. Give the medicine to any household with someone sick in it, and make them take it the way I just did with that mother. Three times a day, for ten days. Got it?"
"Yes, sir, Immortal One!"
Hugging the pills to his chest, Seokdu sprinted out the door at full speed.
Watching him go, she found herself thinking.
Whenever someone with power saved another person, they always wanted something in return. To sell a favor, to buy loyalty, to expand their influence. That was the way of the world as she knew it. No one gave anything for free—and anyone who did was a fool.
And yet this man asked for nothing. Took no credit. He simply wore the expression of someone finishing up an annoying chore as he handed out medicine, as if he considered it no more taxing than watering a vegetable garden.
That unshakable calm of his—strangely, it kept nagging at her.
Before long, the man dusted himself off and rose to his feet.
"All right, that's done."
"...You're finished already?"
"Yep. Painted the medicine, and Seokdu will hand it out. There's nothing more for us to do here. Sitting around sick people all day, all we'd get is sick ourselves."
The man said it like it was nothing and started walking back toward the mountain.
"Let's go. We're about to miss the watering time for the garden."
He had just saved a village of people, and his only worry was his vegetable patch.
She watched his back for a moment, then quietly followed.
Behind the terrifying dokkaebi—whose every action, in truth, smelled more of humanity than anyone else in the world.
The miracle began that very night.
The mother's burning fever began to ease. Her forehead, once hot as a coal, grew cool, and her ragged, labored breathing gradually evened out into a steady rhythm.
Seokdu stayed at her side through the night, doing exactly as the Immortal had instructed. Three times a day, without fail, he fed her those speckled little beans with water.
The next morning—
"...Seokdu?"
His mother opened her eyes.
She had been out of her mind for days, and now she was gazing up at him with clear, bright eyes.
"M-Mom!"
Seokdu threw himself at her.
"Mom, you're awake? Do you recognize me?"
"How could I... not recognize my own Seokdu?"
His mother smiled—weakly, but unmistakably.
And Seokdu burst into loud, heaving sobs. When the wild ginseng saved her, and now this. Twice, his dying mother had come back from the brink. Both times, it had been thanks to that man.
And it wasn't just his mother.
The people who had taken the medicine Seokdu carried from door to door began, one by one, to rise from their beds.
After three days, those who had lain sick and groaning were sitting up on their own. After five, the fevers had broken and the rashes faded. After seven, the village was going about its business as if nothing had ever happened.
Laughter returned to a village where the sound of wailing had known no end.
"Well now, so you're healed too?"
"Healed clean through! Took that medicine the Immortal gave us, and it was like being washed new!"
"Ah, those speckled little beans? Good heavens, in all my years I've never seen such a wondrous medicine."
"If it weren't for the Immortal, our whole village would've been wiped out."
Whenever people gathered, they told the story of those days.
The tale of the immortal who had come down from the mountain and saved the entire village with the miraculous medicine he painted with his brush. The tale of the dying rising from their beds at a single pill.
And the story, as stories always do, grew flesh with every retelling.
"They say the Immortal only has to touch you and your illness vanishes."
"Touch, nothing. I heard a single glance from him sent the plague running."
"The way I heard it, the Immortal bargained with Death itself and won back the lives of those marked to die."
The tale swelled and swelled, until the man was no longer merely an immortal—he had ascended to the rank of a divine spirit.
And so, the Immortal gained a new name.
Uiseon—the Physician Immortal.
The immortal who cured sickness. The one up in the mountains who pulled dying souls back from the brink with nothing but a single brush.
A few days later, Seokdu climbed the mountain to offer his thanks, hauling a full load on his back—grain and wild greens that the villagers had scraped together with one heart and mind.
At the house in the mountains, the Immortal was sitting in the yard painting again, just like any other day. And beside him sat that frightening woman in black.
"Immortal One! I'm here!"
Seokdu came tumbling breathlessly into the yard.
"Mom's completely better now! Everyone in the village is too! Everyone wanted to thank you, so please—please accept this!"
He dumped the load he'd carried right onto the ground of the yard.
The Immortal paused his brush and gave the pile a glance.
"...Good grief. All this?"
Then, as if it were nothing at all, he raised his brush again.
"Your mother getting better is all that matters. From now on, boil your water before drinking, and if you're sick, don't just endure it—come up early."
"Yes, sir, Immortal One!"
To Seokdu, that indifferent face was the most reassuring thing in the whole world.
This was the man who had brought his dying mother back twice. The man who had saved the entire village. And who never once bragged about any of it.
If a man like this wasn't a true immortal, then what on earth could be?
Seokdu believed it without the slightest doubt.
Even if the Immortal himself looked like his mind was nowhere but his vegetable garden.
Even after the Physician Immortal rumors had spread, the mountain stayed as quiet as ever.
Perhaps out of gratitude for the plague he'd cured, the villagers never came up the mountain uninvited. At most, they would leave grain or wild greens at the foot of the trail now and then. And that suited me fine. Quiet, secluded—perfect for painting.
That day, too, I was sitting in the yard working on a painting.
Then Seol-ah, seated beside me, spoke up out of nowhere.
"...This house doesn't have a fence, you know."
"Huh?"
"I looked around. There's no wall to speak of. Just some brush thrown up in a rough ring. Anyone who felt like it could stroll in and out."
I set down my brush and glanced around.
Well, she had a point. I'd repaired the house nicely enough, but there was no fence. Only the undergrowth forming a haphazard boundary.
"...Ah. Now that you mention it."
It came back to me. When I first fixed this place, I'd distinctly thought, patch the roof, raise a wall, and I'm done. But when I fixed the roof, the rafters turned out to be rotten; when I replaced the rafters, there were no door panels; and one thing led to another until I'd gutted and rebuilt the entire interior.
Somewhere in all that, I'd completely forgotten about the wall.
"...I never actually built one."
"You notice this now?"
Seol-ah gave me a look of utter disbelief.
"You go all out decorating the inside, and leave the outside gaping wide open. What happens when a thief wanders in?"
"Well, nothing's happened so far."
"Nothing has happened yet."
Seol-ah crossed her arms.
"But things are different now. I heard it in the village during the plague—word's all over the region that your paintings fetch real money. They're saying a single painting of yours is worth as much as a house, ginseng and all. With rumors like that floating around, and the place wide open without so much as a fence? It'd be stranger if nobody started eyeing it."
She had a point.
There was the tiger, true. But that creature was so hopelessly headstrong that it would roam the mountain for days on end and only amble back around mealtime. Right now, too, it was off gallivanting somewhere—not so much as the tip of its tail in sight.
Absent exactly when you needed them. That was a cat for you.
"...Fair enough. Guess I should put something up."
I took a fresh grip on my brush.
Building a wall was one option. But walls could be climbed, and building one was work.
Better to have a guardian instead. One that didn't wander off at its own whims like the tiger, but kept watch over its post day and night—a reliable gatekeeper who would chase off any thief on its own.
I spread out a fresh sheet of paper.
And one figure leapt to mind—absolutely perfect for the job.
She watched the man paint from a short distance away.
This time, it was a person.
A warrior-general.
A commander clad head to toe in armor, a massive moon-bladed glaive in hand. Piercing eyes, a mouth clamped shut, shoulders thrown wide—the figure radiated an intimidation that warned all comers to keep their distance. She found herself thinking of the door gods painted on the panels of old shrine gates—the guardian deities said to drive off evil spirits.
Beneath the man's brush, the general took shape little by little.
Every scale of the armor. The pale-blue gleam along the glaive's edge. The fierce glower beneath the helmet. Down to the last strand of beard, it was rendered in living detail.
Just when the painting looked nearly complete—
The man dotted the final stroke onto the general's eyes.
And in that instant—
The general in the painting opened his eyes.
'...!'
She sucked in a breath without meaning to.
The general painted on the paper flared those fierce eyes wide open, and then—walked straight out of the page. What had been flat took on volume; what had been ink became flesh. The armor rang with a clatter of metal, and the moon-bladed glaive thudded heavily into the earth.
A general the size of a house stood towering in the middle of the yard.
That alone would have been astonishing enough.
But what came next was, in its own way, even more so.
"Right. Go guard the gate."
The man said it offhandedly, then casually propped the paper the general had emerged from upright by the front entrance.
And the general—
strolled smoothly back into the painting.
Into the very spot he had stepped out of moments before.
As if he had never left at all, the general was once more a single painting spread across the paper.
Except now, something was different.
The painted general's eyes gleamed vividly, alive with light. Even pinned to the paper, those eyes were unmistakably scanning the surroundings, as if determined not to miss so much as a shadow stirring in the yard.
She couldn't tear her gaze away from the sight.
'...This is.'
Seol-ah swallowed dryly.
She had seen living, moving paintings plenty of times by now. The carp, the tiger, the dragon. But this was different again. It came out of the painting, and then returned to it. Sitting quietly as a mere scroll the rest of the time, and only when needed stepping into the world as a real, living thing.
It was, quite literally, a divine artifact.
The Murim was full of strange treasures. Divine swords forged over a thousand years, daggers steeped in ten thousand poisons, spirit stones that stored inner energy. But none of them—not one—was half so wondrous as this.
Truly, this man was a dokkaebi beyond all doubt.
And not just any dokkaebi—the kind even Heaven itself would learn to fear.