The Treasure Map – 2
Shoichi's letter opened with greetings to the younger brother who had become head of the family in his place.
Are you well, brother?
The letter had survived in remarkable condition. Shoichi's handwriting was disciplined yet full of quiet strength.
Perfect preservation, beautiful brushwork, and a firsthand account of the era — and they're only asking twenty million won for this. The Cultural Heritage Administration official must have lost his mind.
I have arrived in Joseon, and I am witnessing strange things.
The "strange things" Shoichi described seemed to be the defiance of the Joseon people themselves.
Through the Sengoku era, Japan had developed a habit of bowing before superior force. It was a society where absolute loyalty to one's lord was taken for granted — but only so long as that lord was overwhelmingly strong. A weak lord, or a defeated one, was to be discarded; serving the powerful victor was considered the correct choice. It was the only way to survive.
And so, when a general was beheaded, his retainers scattered to the winds, and when a provincial lord was murdered by his neighbor, the people of his domain simply began serving the killer.
Joseon was different. Even when generals fell and even when the village magistrates were slaughtered, the people refused to submit. They meant to fight to the very end.
This, apparently, had struck Shoichi like a bolt from the blue.
It seems this will not end until every last Joseon commoner is put to the sword. And worse, this is not a war at all — it is nothing but plunder.
Because it had never been a war between soldiers.
When it seems the fighting will not end until every powerless woman, child, and elderly person has been killed — it would be enough to drive a man mad.
Worse still, the Japanese, who had known only the rule of force, seemed utterly astonished by Joseon's culture and civilization. Shoichi wrote of his anguish at watching Joseon's treasures, artifacts, porcelain, and gold — even its people — being abducted and carried off to Japan.
That torment was probably what drove him to become a defector in the end.
The letter laid bare the whole of his inner struggle — the moment he resolved to surrender to Joseon and take the heads of the pirates instead.
Anyway, that's the written text.
The instant my fingers touched the letter, I could see something no one else could.
I was standing in the middle of a forest road where a cart had come to a halt. Six warhorses strained against the load, huffing great white clouds of breath into the cold air.
A Japanese general clad in a thick fur coat of beast hide dismounted from the lead horse and stalked toward the cart.
"Has the cart broken down again?"
"It seems it cannot bear the weight of the gold, my lord."
Gold?
Just how much gold was loaded in that cart, that the wheels had been crushed flat?
It was already well known that Japan had carted off Joseon's treasures and human resources during the Imjin War. Above all, they had scraped together every scrap of Joseon gold for shipment home. Silver was common in Japan, but gold was scarce — and gold was the currency of power, the bedrock of accumulated wealth.
And when word of the pirate raids came, the corrupt officials hadn't fought back — they'd scrambled to hide their gold.
The pirates had tracked down that hidden gold without fail. Then, when the tide of war turned against them, they had tried to flee with every last piece.
So this is that moment.
The general turned his head toward the man standing behind him.
"Shoichi! Find out whether the cart that left ahead has any spare wheels. If it does, bring one back."
Shoichi.
There he stood — the head of the Moritake family, the husband of Lady Wolyeong.
"The cart traveling ahead carries tiger pelts and bears, my lord. I doubt they have any to spare either."
"Damn it all!"
The general kicked savagely at the splintered wheel, then barked his orders.
"Unload the gold and load it onto the horses. Whatever cannot be carried, bury it in the ground and raise a marker. Hurry!"
At the general's command, Shoichi turned and looked at the Joseon people standing with rope wound around their wrists. Men whose feet had gone black and swollen with frostbite. Faces split open by the cold, hands puffed up like loaves.
Shoichi looked at them, then unclenched his jaw and spoke.
"The ground is frozen solid — we cannot dig pits. I will search for a cave nearby instead. It will be far easier to find again than any marker."
The general knit his brows, then nodded. "Make it quick."
Clatter! The space around me shifted.
From inside a hollow just large enough for a single man, white steam came billowing out. A moment later a man who looked like one of the pirates poked his head out of the hole.
"It's spacious inside, and the walls are solid rock on every side. A fine place to hide the gold, my lord."
"Begin!"
The Joseon people came trudging up the mountain path under the weight of the chests. Then one of them, strength failing, let his load slip — the wood splintered against a tree trunk and gold came spilling out across the ground.
Crack! A whip that had been striking a horse's back came lashing down across a Joseon man's body without mercy.
"Move faster. If this isn't finished before sundown, I'll leave every one of you trussed up here as food for the wolves."
The Joseon people's hands flew. Chest after chest began stacking deep into the darkness of the cave, row upon careful row.
Watching it all from a distance, Shoichi turned his head and studied the surrounding terrain with meticulous care. Then he committed the landscape to paper.
"Draw it well enough to be found again. We must never lose the gold we scraped from Hwanghae Province."
"Yes, my lord."
Shoichi's drawing hand quickened.
So that's what this painting really is.
At a glance, it looked like a Joseon landscape painted and sent to his brother as a keepsake. In truth, it was a record of where the gold had been hidden — a treasure map.
But why would Shoichi send a treasure map to his brother?
A thought occurred to me: Shoichi must have believed Japan could not win the war. He had written, after all, that the fighting would never end until every last Joseon person was dead.
So at some point during the retreat, he must have watched for his chance to defect to Joseon. And depending on how things stood, he might have handed the treasure map over to the Joseon court — or perhaps kept it for himself.
But that day never came.
The Imjin War dragged on for a full seven years. And before it ended, Shoichi was executed.
"Am I really allowed to keep this letter?" I asked Hoyoung as I peeled off my gloves.
"We've already treated it against decay. It could still corrode over time, though, so I'm planning to install a vacuum-sealed glass tube for it."
Paintings could fade if exposed to light for too long, but this was simply a letter. Since the paper had been chemically preserved, it would remain exactly as it was now for years to come — so long as it was kept away from moisture.
The real issue was that Shoichi's letter wasn't valuable merely as cultural heritage. It was a map to hidden gold.
Of course, I doubted we could march straight to the cave using this map alone. Even so, my chest tingled at the thought of a very pleasant expedition beginning — treasure hunting, of all things.
I've still got three meteorites sitting in my personal bank safe. If a gold map lands in my lap on top of that, what am I supposed to do?
I chuckled and turned to Hoyoung. "You made the trip all the way out here — stay and eat before you go."
"Oh, I was sweating it, wondering if you'd say that or not."
He'd been dreaming of the fish dumpling soup from last time, apparently.
"Then let's do kimchi dumpling soup today. Aged kimchi broth with anchovy stock, with fresh dumplings dropped in — it's honestly incredible."
"Just hearing the recipe is making my mouth water."
I still hadn't decided whether to invite Hoyoung along on the treasure hunt or go alone. The important thing was that cashing out the gold would be anything but simple if we did find it.
In South Korea, the Bank of Korea stamps serial numbers onto gold bars to manage their circulation. In other words, melt the gold down into private bullion and try to sell it, and you'd end up in handcuffs.
And we don't even know what condition the gold is in yet.
If it turned out to be a golden Buddha statue or a golden bell, melting it down would be flatly illegal — you'd be treated as little better than a grave robber for destroying an artifact. And would the Cultural Heritage Administration recognize the full value of a golden Buddha if someone dug it up?
Not a chance!
The largest reward I'd ever heard of was fifty million won. A stone picked up from a civil engineering site in Pohang's Jungseong-ri, meant to be used as a flowerpot stand, turned out to be a Silla-era stele — appraised at a hundred million won, and the finder received fifty million. That was the whole story.
Not a single case involving expensive porcelain or precious gold, though.
Why? Because value never gets recognized, so everything trades on the black market instead. In this country, it's absurdly difficult to have something officially certified as cultural heritage and be fairly compensated for it.
First things first — there's a sick child because of the old book inside the Imari porcelain, so let's deal with that.
As for the congressman and the construction company CEO who'd massacred the villagers of the submerged region — my digging showed they were both already dead. Even so, I still needed to find out who had created the barrier.
The day of the final shoot arrived. The plan was to film the scene where Seo Jinwoo and Choi Hee-ah come under attack from the horde of petty spirits summoned by the villainous shaman in the vacant house.
"Um, Mr. Kim? This part here — I think I'm going to need your advice on it."
Director Cho Woochul was consulting me over every last trivial detail before rolling the cameras. At first he'd simply believed I was a lucky man whose mere presence brought good fortune. Now he was desperate to squeeze a single word of guidance out of me by any means necessary.
"I heard from the village chief that a shaman once came through the village causing trouble. Apparently things escalated until she was carted off to the hospital."
He was talking about the shaman and the janggu player who had summoned petty spirits to attack me and No. 1, only to end up badly injured themselves.
"Ah, those two? They probably took a nasty fall trying to climb the mountain too aggressively. I'd imagine that was it."
"So that's what happened. But you know, a director I know filmed a movie with a shaman in it, and he told me the strangest things happened that very night."
Cho Woochul was clearly terrified that some accident would mar the final shoot.
"The reflectors were set up exactly where they should have been, and the actor performed the ritual — but shadows kept appearing in the frame, and there was noise bleeding into the audio. So..."
"You want me to be near the set, is that it?"
"Would that be too much to ask? Nothing strange happens when you're around, sir. Like I said before..."
He meant the famous fortune-teller's claim that I carried an exceptionally pure energy — and Cho Woochul believed, with his whole heart, that as long as I stood nearby, nothing would go wrong.
Whether ghosts really do wander onto film sets to watch, I couldn't say. But one thing was certain: as long as I was there, nothing uncanny would happen, so I had no choice but to see this through to the end.
"How long will the filming take?"
"About three hours? I'll keep the shaman scene short."
"Jinwoo will feel more at ease with me standing nearby, so let's do it that way."
Seo Jinwoo had been swinging between calm and unease depending on whether I was beside him. A full recovery was clearly going to take a little more time.
"Thank you! Thank you so much!"
Cho Woochul bowed and scraped at me repeatedly — I doubted he'd grovel like that even to the film's investors.
Reporters had been pouring in since morning, and fans of Seo Jinwoo and Choi Hee-ah arrived in droves aboard chartered tour buses. The village chief ended up posted at the entrance of the community hall, controlling access to the village roads. Han Suja set up a stand in front of the hall selling bottled water and coffee, dragging out the folding chairs we used for village feasts — and business was booming. There was a long line of people waiting to buy coffee and water.
"There are so many people. Our village has days like this too. I like it."
"Chai will go help Ms. Han Suja, too. Looking at it now, she seems short-handed."
"Yes, sir!"
Bathed in the dazzling morning sunlight of May, I gazed at the vacant houses still scattered through the village like eyesores and murmured to myself.
"We haven't even renovated them yet, and already the camping and lodging inquiries are rolling in."
If the movie became a smash hit, just how famous would our village become? Delightful daydreams came bubbling up one after another.