At Least Double – 7
"What's all this?"
I asked as I opened the woven net bag Grandpa Hosik had handed me. It was packed full of something that looked like black moss, with the tips of feathers poking out from underneath.
"Rock mushrooms and a pheasant."
"A pheasant?"
"A young wild pheasant, to be exact—a katuri."
Grandpa Hosik broke into a bright smile that creased his weathered face.
"Where on earth did you get all this?"
"Where do you think?"
He gazed out at the mountains spread across the front of the village. The ridge behind my backyard, at least, was well traveled—the villagers passed through often enough that proper hiking trails had formed. Front Mountain was another matter entirely. Kudzu vines tangled between ancient trees made it hard to push even a single step forward. Your phone wouldn't get a signal, and you could lose all sense of direction in there, so even the villagers rarely ventured in.
But Grandpa Hosik had swept right through Front Mountain and up toward the Baekdudaegan range, combing every inch of a mountain an acquaintance of his had purchased. Over several grueling days, he'd harvested the rock mushrooms growing there and sold them to the landowner. The man couldn't scale the sheer cliffs himself—those mushrooms were fruit hanging just out of reach—so he'd bought them gladly, paying generously and thanking him besides. Along with the payment, he'd given him two of the young pheasants raised on his farm.
And now Grandpa Hosik had brought them straight to me.
"Rock mushrooms only grow on sheer cliff faces, so anyone who can't climb rock like a mountain goat will never so much as lay a hand on one. Heh heh."
"Yes, I hear they fetch quite a price."
Grandpa Hosik nodded at my words. "They're so rare that the price is whatever someone's willing to pay. They were a grateful mushroom to me, once."
A wistful look settled into his eyes.
"Back in the lean years, whenever the rice ran out and my mother was weeping in the kitchen, I'd bolt straight up the mountain. I couldn't see two feet in front of me for the thought that if I came back empty-handed, my whole family would starve. I climbed sheer rock faces even then. And that's when I first spotted the rock mushrooms."
"Too hot a day and the mushrooms would shrivel and die, so if there were none to be had, I had to dig whatever I could find—wild ginseng, deodeok, anything. That's how I learned which spot yields what, over the years."
After a hearty chuckle, he fixed his gaze on me.
"And that's exactly why I treasure you, son."
"Excuse me?"
"In over fifty years of walking these mountains like my own backyard, I never once spotted that wild ginseng colony of yours."
"Ah, well... I stumbled on it by accident. Rolled down the slope while out picking pine mushrooms, and there it was."
Grandpa Hosik, who always humored whatever I said, shook his head this time.
"I've passed right by that spot more times than I can count. A shaded hollow on a north-facing slope—prime wild ginseng country, if there ever was any. And my eyes never saw it. Neither did any of the seasoned herb hunters."
He smiled as though to say that I'd found the ginseng patch only because the Mountain God had granted me permission.
"It happened because it was you who walked that path. Everyone in the village feels the same way."
The praise was so lavish I could feel heat rising in my face.
"Thank you for thinking so highly of me. I won't let you down."
"You're doing more than well enough already. Just look at that."
Grandpa Hosik turned his head and looked down over the village. The western sky was washing over in orange, and the houses bathed in that warm sunset glow looked like a painting come to life.
"Until you came to our village, half the houses here stood abandoned."
"They did."
Walls had crumbled and roofs sagged on more homes than I could count. Mak-sun Halmeoni's gate paint had peeled away entirely, and the drainage was so bad that a sewer stench greeted you the moment you stepped into her yard.
Now everything had been repaired and made new again. Besides her house, twelve more gleamed with freshly laid roof tiles.
"I figured that by the time I died, our village would be a place with no living soul left in it. And look at it now."
Grandpa Hosik looked at me with a warm smile.
"It's all thanks to you. The Mountain God recognized you and wanted to keep you here, so he gave up his ginseng."
If that was what he wanted to believe, then all I had to do was my part.
"Then with the Mountain God showing me such grace, I'll have to work even harder."
"Harder than what? How much better can you get?"
"I want to live diligently, planting soybeans in the fields you worked your whole life, and garlic come autumn."
"Well now. Thank you. Truly, thank you."
Grandpa Hosik let out a rolling laugh and turned to go.
"Where are you off to?"
I quickly caught his sleeve.
"First time home in a while—I ought to wash up and fix myself something to eat, shouldn't I?"
"Eat with us. You handed me all the rock mushrooms and the pheasant—what were you planning on for dinner?"
"There's plenty to eat. Zucchini, peppers. Half the garden grows itself, you know."
"We have a garden too, you know."
Chai and I had been tending our kitchen garden diligently since early spring, buying seedlings and working the soil. Lettuce, perilla leaves, peppers. Squash, chicory, even baby radishes. The oriental melons and watermelons had already set fruit, and the cherry tomatoes hung so heavy the branches bowed under their weight.
"Stay and eat with us. Besides, you can't tell me you know how to cook rock mushrooms."
"Well then... I suppose I've no choice. I'll lend a hand."
Grandpa Hosik followed me, chuckling, around to the backyard.
"Hala-bee! Hello!"
Chai greeted Grandpa Hosik with cheerful delight.
"When are you going to learn proper Korean, boy? What in the world is a 'hala-bee'?"
"Ha-ra-bee? Hal-bae!"
"Aigoo. Tsk tsk."
Grandpa Hosik clicked his tongue, then told Chai to boil water in the cauldron—hot water was essential for plucking the pheasant's feathers, he said.
Watching the two of them bustle about preparing the bird, I headed for the parked car. In all the commotion over Chai's wailing earlier, we hadn't even managed to unload the groceries.
Zzzt. Zzzt.
I'd just carried everything inside and was seasoning the beef and chicken when my phone rang. Moon Sung-il.
"He's probably calling about the gold bars."
I answered at once.
"Yes, Director Moon."
"I'm calling about the golden treasure found in Hwacheon. Is this a good time to talk?"
"Of course, sir."
Three tons of gold bars. Half of that—one and a half tons—was my share.
But converting it to cash was no simple matter.
All gold in Korea was managed by the Bank of Korea, and gold bars were stamped with serial numbers before entering circulation. Sell unmarked bullion on the private market and you could find yourself in prison for smuggling. Selling the bars privately, then, was out of the question.
Moon Sung-il said he'd move quietly to broker a deal using the Goryeo-era golden artifacts.
So what had gone wrong?
Moon Sung-il's voice came through low and heavy.
"I spoke off the record with a senior government official. They'll value the golden Buddha statue, the golden sarira reliquary, and the golden gourd bottle at scrap gold price—nothing for the artistry. As for the bars, under the Buried Cultural Heritage Act, they say they can only recognize ten percent of them as ours."
Thieves, every last one of them.
"So you're telling me they'd pay us what a golden toad trinket goes for at a Jongno pawnshop—and pocket the other ninety percent of the gold we dug out of the ground."
This wasn't the worst outcome I'd imagined, at least. They could have declared the whole of Gangwon Province a designated heritage zone and seized everything. And if they had, I certainly hadn't planned on simply handing it over with a smile.
"They seem to think finding treasure the Japanese invaders buried is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Please tell them to think it over one more time."
"I'm sorry—what?"
Moon Sung-il clearly startled at my words.
No, really—what am I supposed to do with this ability, let it rot?
He wasn't the only one who found it absurd.
"Mr. Moon, this whole affair has given me a grand vision."
"A grand vision?"
"We saw it with our own eyes—the Japanese plundered at the mere sight of gold, then had their onmyoji seal it away behind barriers. Haven't we?"
"Yes, we did."
I gave a quiet laugh at his answer.
"Which brings me to my point."
Gripping the phone, I laid it out deliberately, one piece at a time.
"I trust you've heard of Yamashita's Gold?"
"Ah—ah! Yes!"
The legend held that General Yamashita Tomoyuki had hidden the plunder he'd looted across Southeast Asia during World War II somewhere in the Philippines. Why call it a legend, though?
Because no matter how hard people searched, they couldn't turn up so much as a single silver ring—let alone gold.
Yet the records of Japan's plunder were overwhelming. Even the codename of the operation to hide the treasure was known: Kin no Yuri—the Golden Lily.
Experts valued the Golden Lily hoard at roughly one hundred quadrillion won.
"The Japanese gold we found is only the beginning. The government needs to understand that."
"Is— is that really so?"
I answered with conviction.
"Yes. And it isn't just Yamashita's Gold. There are records from the early colonial period of gold and silver being sold off to raise independence funds—shipments bound for Manchuria that simply vanished."
And that wasn't all.
"We could recover the cultural treasures and golden heritage stolen from this country. If a government that's never lifted a finger wants to take ninety percent of what we find, why would I want to negotiate with them?"
"Of course you wouldn't!"
Moon Sung-il's voice rang out firm.
"I'll negotiate with them again, quietly. And if they still won't listen to reason, I'll empty my own coffers."
"What? No, that's too much—"
"It isn't. My dream was always to live like Gansong Jeon Hyeong-pil, the man who founded the Gansong Museum of Art."
Gansong meant clear water flowing through a mountain valley, and pines green through every season. During the Japanese occupation, Jeon Hyeong-pil poured his personal fortune into collecting, preserving, and studying cultural treasures, and established the Gansong Museum of Art.
Rare heritage pieces that even the National Museum of Korea doesn't hold: the Hunminjeongeum Haerye manuscript, paintings by Kim Hong-do and Sin Yun-bok, Joseon ceramics and more. Truly priceless cultural legacies, all under one roof.
Why did they survive there?
Because after Japan's defeat, the Korean government slashed the appraised value of every cultural asset housed in the Gansong Museum.
On the promise that nothing would ever be taken abroad, countless artifacts remain in the museum's care to this day.
Moon Sung-il went on.
"Let me deal with the government, and if they still don't understand, then here's my proposal: I'll keep the golden artifacts in my custody and use them to establish a museum, and we'll move the gold bars through the Big Madam."
"How would the Big Madam manage to sell gold bars?"
"Gold goes into electronics and semiconductors."
The volume of industrial gold imported from overseas was staggering, he said. Swap in a portion of what we'd unearthed, and no one would ever notice the difference.
It made sense—but I couldn't bring myself to agree to it so readily.
"Let me think that part over."
Melt the gold down, build semiconductors and gadgets, sell them—the money would flow, sure. But the proof that here, in this land, lay the gold the Japanese invaders had looted would vanish forever. I wanted that truth known, now more than ever.
Everyone knew countless cultural treasures had been plundered during the Imjin War. But knowing a thing and seeing it with your own eyes were two different worlds.
I steadied my breath and spoke.
"As I said before—tell the government that the volume of artifacts and gold we uncover going forward will be no small matter. And if they still refuse to understand, then we'll discuss it again at that point."
"Understood."
Just as I hung up with Moon Sung-il, Chai's voice came ringing from the backyard.
"The pheasant took off its clothes! Wow, Grandpa is the best!"