Welcome to Ganghwado (3)
Strictly speaking, all Taesu had done was throw a right straight.
But Oh Bong-gil had been sent flying nearly five paces.
Then he sprawled flat on his back and couldn’t get up. Even Taesu was shocked by the result.
Did that thing about my energy getting stronger back then turn out not to be nonsense after all?
The Mountain Spirit clicked his tongue.
[Tsk tsk. And you, of all people, call yourself suspicious. Why was it, then, that you got taken in by those local bullies back home? Didn’t you feel anything the first time you caught a wild boar?]
“Hey. I got suspicious because I got tricked. And I thought the boar was because I’d gotten younger, and because of the axe.”
[It was because of me. Because of me!]
In the meantime, bystanders had begun to gather.
They were the sort who had been glancing over at Taesu ever since Oh Bong-gil first appeared, half expecting and half dreading whatever mess he’d kick up today. Even while Taesu was fighting the Mountain Spirit, he could hear the rising murmur around him.
“Is he dead?”
“No, he’s still twitching. Tsk tsk. His nose’s caved in real nice.”
“That bastard Oh’s face was already like a pig’s head boiled for three days. Hard to tell if the nose is smashed anymore.”
“What’s that? His liver? Did he get hit so hard he coughed up his liver?”
“No, I saw it earlier. It was a pig’s liver.”
“Then it’s his own liver, isn’t it?”
[Listening to them, I can more or less tell what sort of reputation that fellow has. Well, he wouldn’t have been rampaging just today. But…]
The Mountain Spirit trailed off.
If Oh Bong-gil had kept flaunting his power while being so hated by the people in the market, then he must have had something backing him.
Sure enough, among the crowd, there were voices from the people who fancied themselves clever.
“Who wouldn’t have wanted to kill that Oh bastard? They just didn’t want to get hit with official trouble.”
“The market stall fees that Oh bastard collects are just the drinking money for the magistrate’s soldiers. What he says is as good as the law.”
“That big young man’ll be lying rotted and bloated by the shore before long.”
Yi Won-beom seemed to think the same thing.
He looked at Taesu and stammered, “W-what in the world are you doing! If you were some carefree drifter, sure, you could just run off, but what am I supposed to do about my situation here from now on…?”
Taesu looked down at the seated Yi Won-beom, his eyes moving only slightly.
Then, in a tone that wasn’t exactly contemptuous, he said, “Would your life really be any easier if that happened?”
“What?”
“If I hadn’t stepped in, and they’d taken the fish, beaten you up, dragged that woman off, and then what—would you be better off?”
Bong-i, who was holding on to Yi Won-beom, felt his body stiffen like a board.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The curse that had seeped like mist out of the storage chest wound itself around Yi Won-beom through his bloodline.
Almost all the ancestors he knew—the Crown Prince Sado, Prince Euneon, Prince Sanggye, his elder brother Prince Hwahyeong—had been executed or met miserable deaths.
The charge in every case was rebellion. But if you stretched the meaning as far as it could possibly go, the only one who had truly committed rebellion was Crown Prince Sado, and even then it was just a more violent version of the teenage cry of “I hate Dad!”
The rest had died because, by the same logic, “some royal family member sleeping at home must have done something wrong.”
In other words, the connection between sin and punishment was never there to begin with.
That was why Yi Won-beom had never even thought of things like feeling wronged by exile and trying to plead his case.
To feel wronged, exile at the very least had to be the result of a crime. Only then could one think, If I’m innocent, I won’t be exiled. It was like no one bothers arguing with an earthquake before the earth.
It was simply fate. Simply the way his destiny had been.
Yi Won-beom had found it easier to think that way.
Only then could he search for people weaker than himself and inflict the same meaningless exploitation on them.
One’s rank was something one defined for oneself. Living like that had reduced Yi Won-beom to a man who trembled before even a low-born market brute.
But the moment Taesu asked him if that was truly “easier,” something inside Yi Won-beom broke.
The erased pages of hope and ambition flashed in his mind. He even felt a strange itching in his side.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Taesu cracked his wrist as he looked around at the growing crowd.
What am I supposed to do now?
[……Are you asking me that now?]
Weren’t you supposed to be the Mountain Spirit who gives an axe to an honest man? Isn’t there supposed to be a god to help when someone does a good deed?
[You’ve gone and caused the whole mess yourself, and now you’re making a racket.]
God was dead. Useless for anything.
But in the end, people were saved not by gods, but by people.
Someone suddenly burst out from the crowd.
“Even if that man’s a penal exile, what gives you the right to turn a pig into an ox? If you’re going to make trouble, at least keep it within reason.”
He was wearing the same kind of woven hat Taesu had put on to cover his modern hair, though the cotton tufts tied to either side were unusual.
The man glanced around and went on in a threatening voice, “Our comrade here showed spirit, so if you still have any shame, that should be the end of it. If you go around reporting this carelessly, you’ll never enjoy the Ganghwa market again! Now then. Comrade, come with me at once!”
Taesu had no choice but to hesitate for a moment, despite his situation.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Unlike Taesu’s suspicion, the man wasn’t some armed guerilla or anything of the sort. This is why ordinary mountain spirits prefer history departments. Unless it’s one of those special cases where you take an axe to the head, of course.
The man, who introduced himself as Kim Sun-won, was a member of the Joseon-style merchant corps commonly known as the Bobusang. And dongmu was the title they used for one another.
“You’re a bangoe-saeng, an outsider, but there was no other way to keep you from getting dragged in. If our Ganghwa imbang seems to be taking your side, that should keep things from getting too serious. That Oh bastard’s made a lot of enemies.”
Kim Sun-won, who had led Taesu and Yi Won-beom to a tavern on the outskirts of the market, stuffed makgeolli sediment into his pipe.
Taesu declined the tobacco pipe Kim Sun-won offered after taking a long drag himself, then asked, “Why did you help me…?”
Kim Sun-won’s current age was about the same as Taesu’s had been in Korea. But thinking of his own current social and physical age, Taesu simply adjusted the end of his sentence.
Kim Sun-won grinned. “To be blunt, that bastard’s made a lot of trouble for us too, shaking down money to send to the magistrate’s office and the big shots above it. Our comrades’ll be glad to hear he got what was coming.”
The Bobusang had traditional tax rights over items sold in regional markets, especially goods under state monopoly.
For example, if one of the peddlers’ monopolized goods—say, salt—was carried around by some outsider trying to sell it, that outsider had to choose between paying a fee or getting beaten and chased off.
But this was before the founding of the Hye-sang Office, established later under King Gojong to use the Bobusang’s cohesion as a kind of reserve force and political thug squad. Their protection of commercial rights was still in a transitional phase, and the organization itself wasn’t yet tightly knit.
So even when some connected brute was tyrannizing them, they couldn’t openly step in. And then, just like that, some outsider who’d fallen out of the sky had left Oh Bong-gil in a state that would keep him recuperating for a month.
“I’m a fish-salt peddler—things like salted shrimp and premium salted shrimp. I’m from Incheon originally, but Ganghwa shrimp paste is famous all over the country, so I’ve been coming here for years now.”
After saying that, Kim Sun-won glanced at the load on the ground.
“You two came out today to sell wild boar meat, didn’t you? Well, meeting a pickled-seafood trader is a stroke of luck. I’ll give you a fair price and buy the lot.”
“……How much will you give?”
Kim Sun-won answered at once, without even pausing to think. “One nyang.”
Taesu gripped the axe handle. But then Yi Won-beom brightened and answered, “Good heavens, I’m at a loss to express my gratitude for such generosity. Please, take it at once!”
Taesu loosened his hand a little. Apparently one nyang wasn’t the petty cash he had imagined.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Kim Sun-won handed over a bundle of old coins, the sort you saw in historical dramas.
This heavy thing is one nyang? First time I’ve ever learned that.
[One coin is one pun, ten pun make one jeon, and ten jeon make one nyang. That is why one nyang is also called one kweomi. A bundle of a hundred coins.]
So it’s like the copper, silver, gold system in games. Except copper is the only currency here.
[Even a good slab of beef ribs would cost eight jeon, so paying one nyang for those scraps of meat fit only for braising was quite generous.]
Quietly, I looked down at the string of coins. I didn’t hear a word of Yi Won-beom’s voice—his little plea about getting a “commission” for bringing me to the market.
Just like I’d resolved last night with the axe in my hand, I needed to make money.
For a second, it looked like farming was the Joseon equivalent of “working at a company,” but since I have no idea how to farm, I’m rejecting that option for now.
Besides, if I think back to what the Mountain Spirit said yesterday about military tax and grain loans, farming in Joseon seems to be a kind of transparent wallet. Then again, land is easy to see.
That leaves the route of becoming one of the tax-collecting offices—meaning, taking the civil service exam and rising through the ranks as a corrupt official.
But if I were going to join a power cartel, I wouldn’t have killed prosecutors back in Korea in the first place. I’m not interested in that kind of collusion.
[As an iyaing, you can’t take the state exam anyway. Before that, can you even read the classics… no, let alone the Sohak that even Won-beom has read?]
Shut up. This has nothing to do with Hanzi. It’s a matter of my conscience. A conscientious refusal to take the civil service exam.
Coming from the twenty-first century, I’d considered the route of making inventions and selling them like an isekai hero—and then I gave that up when Won-beom started eyeing my axe.
I have factory experience too. But an engineer is someone who makes things when equipment and materials are already in place.
In a wilderness like this, the people who make things are called survival experts, not engineers. Even basic ironware is scarce in this country.
It’d be better to sell the modern survival gear in my backpack. In the end, my future lies in business.
If you ask whether I’ve ever actually run a business, I don’t have much to say about that… but there’s one thing I’m definitely better off with here than back in Korea. If push comes to shove, I’ve got the golden axe and silver axe as seed money.
A merchant, huh. Not bad.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Kim Sun-won downed a bowl of makkoli in one gulp.
“In truth, that Oh Bong-gil isn’t just some gang shaking people down for fees. By any chance, do you know Cho Deok-rim, who used to serve as magistrate of Noryeong and was dismissed by a secret royal inspector? He’s from Incheon too, not far from here, like me.”
Taesu only knew Noryeong from the azaleas in the poem, so he looked at Yi Won-beom, but he seemed to possess the same level of knowledge as a modern Korean. When Taesu shook his head, Kim Sun-won slowly explained.
Cho Deok-rim was a high-ranking official in a Confucian state. So he always guarded his spotless reputation and knew nothing at all of sordid things like trade.
And yet, somehow, Cho Deok-rim was always counted among the rich in Incheon and the western Gyeonggi region.
The secret, by the book of investing, was enormous seed capital. Cho Deok-rim had been punished for illegally collecting and dividing military grain and taxes in Noryeong to build that capital.
But a mere appearance by a secret royal inspector wasn’t enough to bring him down.
There’s no such thing as a bureaucrat whose career is finished just because an inspector caught them in corruption. That sort of thing only happens in fairy tales.
Rather than being ruined, the dismissed Cho Deok-rim was promoted and landed the post of Useungji. Sure, reinstatement was standard, but his leap to right royal secretary was the result of making profitable use of his connections with the Andong Kim clan.
And Cho Deok-rim’s money-making schemes sprouted wings again.
“That Cho Deok-rim’s illegitimate son, Cho Gwan-seop, came to Ganghwa with several large ships and a crew.”
A yangban can’t openly do business. That’s why it was fairly common for an illegitimate son or a concubine’s child—someone who was “not quite yangban”—to handle the family’s money matters.
“They say they’re selling upper-grade cotton and grain and the like, but there’s a shady crew of Songdo ginseng middlemen mixed in with them.”
[You mean the Kaesong ginseng brokers. I’ve heard they’re the sort who’ll do anything for money.]
While Taesu was still startled by the sudden national unification that had somehow happened in a single bound across the peninsula, Kim Sun-won kept talking.
“If they were simply trading ginseng, they could just do that. Ginseng isn’t supposed to be bought and sold privately, but merchants from Songdo would have a hwangcheop—a license for ginseng trade and harvesting. But they were acting suspiciously by hiding it, and eventually a message came in quietly.”
Taesu waited for the explanation, but Kim Sun-won didn’t say what that “message” was.
The Mountain Spirit noticed it first.
[Ships and ginseng… smuggling, then. I’ve heard of such things too. If you meet a Qing merchant ship at sea and hand over red ginseng, the profit is ten times what you’d make inland. But if you’re caught, it’s immediate execution. And hauling a ship out to the open sea is no small matter either.]
The ginseng brokerage syndicate that Cho Gwan-seop was investing in first decided to ignore the law of the land with pure guts.
As for the sailing problem, they’d decided to use the Bobusang of Ganghwa’s imbang. Because Kim Sun-won had tried working at sea when he was younger, he was the first person they’d approached.
“A simple peddler can’t openly stand against a high official, and with the law to fear, we’ve been putting it off day after day. But the pressure keeps growing.”
The Oh Bong-gil Taesu had beaten up was merely a kind of low-level interface for that threat. He hadn’t been bullying the market people and the peddlers just to extort pocket change.
Taesu repeated the Mountain Spirit’s words. “Can’t we report them to the authorities?”
“Just with words? If you do that, you’ll likely be accused of false reporting and taken down instead. Behind those bastards are the right royal secretary—and the power of the Jangdong family, which claims it alone can command the nation’s elite troops.”
Kim Sun-won sighed.
And then, in Yi Won-beom’s eyes, there flashed a light no one who knew him would ever have believed.
Of course, neither Kim Sun-won nor Taesu saw it. They were listening to the Mountain Spirit’s proposal.
[You said ginseng, didn’t you? I shall provide a means for you to make a great deal of money, just as you wish. I have a plan.]
Taesu was about to ask what the hell that ominous voice meant.
But this time, Kim Sun-won looked Taesu directly in the eye and said, “Anyway, you showed real spirit today. If even the firewood bundles or straw sandals from your house are hard to bring to market, we’ll buy them from you.”
The one who should have answered was Yi Won-beom, but perhaps because he was lost in thought, he didn’t say a word. Taesu clicked his tongue at Yi Won-beom’s rudeness and nodded.
“Thank you.”
Author’s Note
1. Some of the material in the middle is borrowed from Yi Sang’s novel Wings.
2. Titles such as Sanggyegun and Hwahepgun were all posthumously bestowed after King Cheoljong’s accession. They were not those titles at the time of this story, but I’ve used them for ease of understanding, given the omniscient narration.
3. Kim Sun-won, Cho Deok-rim, and Cho Gwan-seop were all real historical figures. However, Kim Sun-won was not a Bobusang.