This Is Why You Become an Immortal
First things first — I fixed up the house.
The roof was riddled with holes that would have let the rain pour straight through, so I painted roof tiles and patched them. Now that I knew inanimate things didn't vanish once drawn, I could lay them down and relax, secure in the knowledge that they'd stay put.
Everything that went into a house was like that. The roof tiles, the rafters, the door panels. I never had to worry about them disappearing mid-project, which made the work considerably easier.
At first, I figured it would be nothing much.
Patch the roof, raise a fence, done.
Yeah, right.
I laid the tiles, and the rafters turned out to be rotten. I replaced the rafters, and there was no door. I painted a door, and this time there was no handle. I put on a handle, and cold air started seeping up through the floor of the main room.
Solve one problem and the next came bounding out of the woodwork.
I laid down an ondol floor, mended the stove, hung the pot, set out a water jar, painted a blanket, painted a pillow, painted a spoon and chopsticks and bowls…
"…Why is there no end to this?"
Even as I grumbled to myself, my hands never stopped. Somewhere in the middle of one drawing, another shortcoming would catch my eye, and once I fixed that one, something else felt lacking.
I'd done art in my past life, sure — but had I ever actually run a household? Only as I painted did I learn for the first time just how much went into making a single house livable.
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound — I decided to decorate it to my own taste.
It was a dirt-floor hut in some forgotten corner of the murim, sure, but inside I filled it with things from the era I used to live in. Instead of a squatting hearth, I painted a standing kitchen that spared my back. Instead of a hard wooden platform, I painted a plush sofa that swallowed you up. I built bookshelves into the walls, and parked a reclining armchair in the corner.
Once drawn, they stayed put and never vanished. No redrawing every day — yesterday's sofa was still there for me to sink into again today.
Just like that, in a matter of days, the abandoned shack became a respectable house.
Outside, it was unmistakably a mud-walled cottage in the mountains of the martial world; but open the door, step inside, and — surprise — modern furnishings as far as the eye could see. Anyone who saw it would have shrieked at the combination. Fortunately, there was no one around to see it.
I painted a vegetable garden in the yard, too.
When I drew seeds and planted them, though, this turned out to be different. Unlike dogs or butterflies, which would vanish one day, these took root in the ground and became real, proper things.
Living things disappeared once they breathed their last — but it seemed that if something put down proper roots in this world, from that moment on it stopped being a painting and became the genuine article.
…Well, I'd figure out the details as I went along.
Evenings, I ate rice I'd painted myself, lit a lamp I'd painted myself, and sprawled across my soft sofa doodling whatever I pleased on leftover paper.
Strangely, my heart was at ease.
In my past life, I'd always been hounded. Hounded by rent, hounded by deadlines, hounded by questions about when I'd finally make it big. I had never once painted a single picture in peace.
Here, nobody expected anything of me.
However the murim turned, whoever killed whom under whatever banner — it was none of my concern. I would live in the mountains, paint my meals, tend my garden, and draw whatever I wanted to draw. That was all.
Brush in hand, I sat out in the yard and gazed at the ridgeline darkening in the dusk.
Still a familiar ridgeline.
And still, I was doing my level best not to admit why it felt that way.
Well, no rush.
I'd be living here a long time, after all.
I had plenty of hours left in my days.
Seokdu was on his way past the edge of the village, medicinal herbs in a basket on his back, when it happened.
An old man sitting on a wooden platform leered at him.
"Hey, blockhead. Off to the mountain again today?"
A man standing nearby snickered along.
"Guess that's why they call him Blockhead — not even scared of the goblin upriver, huh."
Seokdu didn't answer.
His name was Seokdu — Stone Head — and the villagers never let him forget it. Blockhead. It used to make him cry from sheer indignation, but these days he just let it slide. If he had the energy to talk back, he was better off digging up one more root of herbs.
Head lowered, Seokdu headed home.
Before climbing the mountain, he meant to check on his mother first.
It was a single weathered thatched room. The moment he opened the door, the stale smell of medicine drifted out, along with the sound of his mother coughing.
"Hack, hack… Is that you, Seokdu?"
"Yeah, Ma. I'm off to the mountain. I'll be back."
Inside, a woman little more than skin and bones lay on the floor. Seokdu's mother. Ever since his father died she had wasted away, sighing day after day, until now she could barely sit up on her own.
"You're… going to the mountain again. Just rest today. Please."
"I've got to dig herbs so you can get your medicine, Ma."
Seokdu flashed her a grin. His mother seemed to find that smile more painful than anything, and she stretched out a gaunt hand to grasp her son's.
"There's no need anymore, Seokdu. Worry about feeding yourself first. Okay?"
"…"
Seokdu didn't answer. Instead, he gently tucked his mother's hand back under the blanket — so it wouldn't go cold while he stepped outside and came back.
"I'll be back before you know it. Today I'll dig up something really good."
"Seokdu."
He was about to step through the door when his mother called him, laboriously.
"Stay away from the upper river… It's dangerous up there."
Seokdu hesitated for just a moment.
"…Okay. I won't go."
It was a lie.
After closing the door behind him, Seokdu stood there a while without moving. From inside came the sound of coughing again. Hack. Hack. He couldn't bring himself to leave until the sound finally stopped.
Every night, listening to that cough, Seokdu would squeeze his eyes shut under the blanket and pray. Please let her get better. He prayed, though he had no idea who he was praying to.
Medicine was the only cure — but medicine cost money. When he gathered herbs on the mountain and sold them in the market town, it earned him about a bowl of porridge a day. On lucky days, a little toward the medicine, too.
That was Seokdu's life.
Twelve years old. His father had died the year before last, and now there was only his mother left in the world.
Which was why, today, he intended to climb all the way up to the upper river — the one where the goblin was said to appear.
The upper river was frightening. The mountain ran deep and wild, untouched by human footsteps — and that was exactly why the good herbs grew there in plenty. People said wild beasts prowled it. They said a goblin lived up there, too.
It scared him. But Seokdu feared something else far more than any goblin: the sound of that cough coming to a stop, one night, forever.
A single good herb root mattered more to him than any goblin did.
At that same hour, beside the stream in the upper river.
I sat perched on a boulder, watching the water flow by.
Mountain life was getting pretty comfortable. The house was coming together nicely, food was no concern — these days, my days were idle beyond measure. Whenever that happened, I made my way down to this stream. I liked the sound of the water. Listening to it trickle along, the deadlines and rent of my past life felt like things from another world entirely.
Then, out of nowhere, an old painting I'd once seen came to mind.
A painting of a deep mountain valley, where an aged immortal dipped his feet in the stream water and wandered at his leisure. The kind of painting with Washing One's Feet inscribed in the corner.
I'd envied that old immortal terribly in my past life. Struggling and scrambling through each day, I'd dreamed of someday living like that — without a care in the world.
…Which is exactly what I am right now.
A chuckle escaped me.
If I was going to play at being an immortal, I figured I might as well do it properly. I dipped my brush in ink and spread a sheet of paper across my knees.
I painted a carp.
Like the carp of old paintings — round-backed, with whiskers trailing long. I lavished care on every single scale. The powerful thrust of a body fighting upstream, the tail curved just so, even the sense that it might leap clear out of the water at any moment.
The moment I lifted the brush, the painting wriggled.
An ink-black carp slid off the paper and splashed into the stream.
Being a living creature now, there was no worry of it vanishing. The carp seemed delighted, darting up and down against the current, gliding lazily through the shallows.
I watched the scene with a contented smile.
A carp black as night swimming through a crystal-clear stream — ink and water mingling like that, the whole thing looked like an ink-wash painting come to life.
"…This is why you become an immortal."
Seokdu had just rounded a boulder on his way up the mountain when he stopped dead.
There was something in the stream.
A fish. One enormous fish — a carp, by the look of it — paddled leisurely through the shallow water.
Seokdu blinked.
It was strange. A carp that big had no business being in an upper river like this. And its color was strange, too.
Its whole body was pitch-black. Scales, fins, even its eyes. A carp black as if it had been dunked head to tail in an inkstone. Seokdu had seen plenty of fish in his life, but never one that color.
His heart began to pound.
It was frightening — yet somehow his feet carried him toward it. As if bewitched. Was this what it felt like to be charmed by a goblin? Even thinking that, Seokdu drew nearer to the stream.
One step.
Two.
The fish turned its body.
And in that instant, Seokdu's breath caught in his throat.
Seen from the side —
The fish was thin as paper.
Head-on, it was a plump, fat-bellied carp; but from the side, it was flat as a single stroke of a brush. No thickness at all. That was no fish.
It was a painting of a fish.
A painting — swimming.
Seokdu's legs went weak. Gooseflesh raced up his spine, and his fingertips shook like leaves in the wind. He tried to breathe, but his throat clamped shut, letting out only a thin, whistling rasp.
His mind went white — then filled with a single word.
Goblin.
The goblin was real. It hadn't been a story grown-ups invented to scare children. Here, in this upper river — it was real.
Then was he going to be eaten now?
Of all days — the very day he'd lied to his mother, promising he wouldn't come to the upper river. It felt like punishment for it. If the goblin devoured him here, who would look after her? Not even knowing her son had never come down from the mountain, she would lie there all alone in that room —
Thoughts like these churned and tangled in his head, but his legs had frozen solid and refused to move.
He had to run. He had to run, right now, and get back to his mother —
He knew it in his head. His body just wouldn't listen…