The Relic Retrieval Team (3)
Cha Un-hong began by trying to change how the other man saw the matter.
“The Ogyumjam is, in truth, an object of base superstition. It is not, in itself, anything especially precious. But because it has been enshrined in the academy with such solemn ceremony, people have come to believe it must truly be a sacred relic.”
Just as Sashimi and Wasabi had gone from being nothing more than border brokers to becoming Katsu Kaishu and Sakamoto Ryoma, agents of the shogunate breaking through Tsushima’s interference, value was often decided by who was on the other side of the exchange.
A box sealed tight with holy chants and consecrated relics may testify to the majesty of the Church, but by the same token it also testifies to the existence of the demon inside it.
In other words, it made the faith of the heathen real.
“You must be well read in the histories, so you know the Imperial Seal of the Warring States. People treated it as though it held the Mandate of Heaven, but if you think about it, the man who carved it out of the world in the first place was that tyrant Qin Shi Huang.”
Now that Tae-su knew who Qin Shi Huang was, his face took on an expression of sudden understanding.
It was true enough. If there was a name synonymous with tyranny, it was Qin Shi Huang. Across the whole Joseon dynasty, the only person who had ever looked kindly on Qin Shi Huang’s more positive side was Sejong—because even he had once wanted to build a fortress wall himself.
Having caught the meaning, Lee Chun-deuk hurried to save face and answer back.
“And the end was the same. It vanished in a nation that had been founded by barbarians and didn’t even last as long as a boy’s age from its beginnings to its end—that is, Later Tang of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Now that I hear it, both the beginning and the end are rather ominous objects.”
“Indeed, you are remarkably learned. A seal proves belief, so faith is the thing that endures and the seal is the thing that decays. Rule a nation by virtue, not by some piece of jade—so why did every emperor, the moment they seized the Central Plains, go looking for it?”
The answer was that the Han dynasty, which had destroyed Qin, inherited the Imperial Seal and cherished it.
Just as this very Gyeonghaeng Seowon had done.
“So during the Hongwu reign of the Great Ming, even when people came forward claiming they had found the Imperial Seal, the court regarded it as nothing more than a lump of jade and paid it no mind at all. This Ogyumjam is the same sort of thing. It is not fit, from the very start, to be enshrined in an academy.”
There had even been people in Ming times who claimed they had found the Imperial Seal and wished to present it.
But the Ming court was too modern an empire to be taken in by some fly-by-night charlatan. They would offer a reward for the gesture, perhaps, but the fake seal—whose claim to be a seal was plainly false—would simply be tossed into storage as a type of jade.
Lee Chun-deuk, who knew nothing of that, hurriedly changed the subject.
“Th-then wouldn’t it be better to gather the people and burn that wicked hairpin?”
Taesu did not bother delivering the insult that asked whether he had ever even been to elementary school, much less understood that metal doesn’t burn. There was no elementary school in this era, so it could hardly be helped.
Instead, Cha Un-hong used the sort of argument that worked precisely because there was no elementary school.
“That would be the proper course, yes—but the people of Samcheok have revered the Ogyumjam for so long that we cannot touch it recklessly. If that were to stir up a peasant uprising, what then?”
It was a chillingly accurate point. That was exactly why Kim Hyo-won had written that he burned it, while in reality he was the one burning his own soul, wasn’t it?
“Even so, selling it to some merchant would be…”
“To return to Qin Shi Huang—when he destroyed the last remnant of the Zhou and seized the Nine Tripods, what happened then?”
“They sank into the river while being transported. It was Heaven’s will that the Nine Tripods should not be handed over to a tyrant.”
“That is one way to look at it. But if so, then Heaven should have returned the tripods when Han Gaozu ascended the throne. In the same way, if the Imperial Seal that was dropped into the water was returned through the Dragon King, Heaven should have done the same. Yet it did not.”
Cha Un-hong drew a slow breath and went on.
“That is because once they had fallen into the hands of someone like Qin Shi Huang, the Nine Tripods were already stained and rendered useless. In the same way, if the Ogyumjam passes into the hands of a trader and is carried from the knife market to the knife market, it will be nothing more than a hairpin. No one will think of it as a sacred relic.”
The cruelest way to profane divinity is to put a price on it. That worked especially well in Joseon, where money itself was not yet treated as some kind of god, unlike in the modern age.
“A-ah, truly, the mind is sharp indeed if one comes from Master Chusa’s school. I can’t find any flaw in that theory, though…”
Before Lee Chun-deuk could say he needed to speak with the other senior men, including Dongju, Cha Un-hong landed the final blow.
“If you do that for us, then as an apology for the incident of the other day, we will pay the academy a sum that cannot even be compared to all the fish and goods you saw today.”
“M-more than that?”
“Not just more. Several times more. If we take the Ogyumjam away and dispose of it, the Sagilchi Council will naturally scatter, and there will be no more need for the academy to keep fighting the commoners.”
Only then did Lee Chun-deuk understand.
First of all, these people were absolutely not trying to trick him with words and put the Ogyumjam back in Sagilchi.
No one who meant to do that would speak of the Ogyumjam like this. More precisely, no one who even entertained a shred of suspicion could possibly offer up this much money.
This was a negotiation to protect the Bobusang’s profits and ensure that Sagilchi, their meeting place, would no longer be violated.
Come to think of it, for the Bobusang, the market mattered; the Mountain Spirit did not.
Lee Chun-deuk made up his mind.
Here, he himself—the man in charge of operations—had to make the call.
They had already gone through enough hardship just organizing this Duseksu literary competition. They had spoken of peasant uprisings, too, and they had very nearly suffered a real one with the Buddhist warrior monks from Gwaneumsa.
They needed money.
Lee Chun-deuk now found himself wholly in Cha Un-hong’s corner.
Which was why, the moment a scream rang out from the stone chamber where that damnable hairpin was being kept, Lee Chun-deuk felt an indescribable sense of outrage.
“Fire!”
* * *
As Taesu had shown when they were eating skewers in Sagilchi, Kurama Yoshin-ryu included the use of ninjutsu.
For a master of that school like Itkyu, slipping into the academy was easy. An academy was not a military installation.
Of course, the sacred power enshrined in the place—gods such as Huh Mok, patron saint of moneylenders—did interfere with the heretical priest Itkyu to some degree, but not enough to overcome the intimidation of Park Axe.
Itkyu reached the stone chamber without difficulty, only to spot a servant walking past it.
It wasn’t as though the academy had stationed a 24-hour guard there. The fellow was literally just passing by on some errand.
But he was in Itkyu’s path.
And Itkyu had no time to waste waiting around.
Hmph… I should avoid killing if I can.
Many of the techniques in Kurama Yoshin-ryu are meant for practical use in daily life.
So among its secret forms are quite a few that involve pretending to be walking down a road and suddenly ambushing the person in front of you—or counterattacking when it happens to you.
It was a secret technique he hadn’t been able to use against Tae-su because the duel atmosphere had already been established, but now was the perfect moment.
“Hup!”
“Ghk!”
The world flipped upside down, and then a powerful impact slammed into his abdomen.
He had been lifted completely off the ground and driven down headfirst, belly-first, into the air. The servant couldn’t even breathe.
Itkyu snatched the rope the servant had been carrying before anyone could react.
By the time the servant realized this was not some natural phenomenon, Itkyu had already tied him up tight.
There was technique in tying a person up, too.
As anyone familiar with kegatsu-maki could tell you, Japan had long possessed a highly developed tradition of binding and restraint. Even the official methods used by Edo’s doshin—the police officers—included sixteen different rope-binding techniques depending on status and circumstance.
What Itkyu displayed was something even deeper: an old-school martial method of restraint.
The servant, with his eyes and mouth gagged by rope, had no idea what had happened and could only wheeze and choke.
It was such a swift subdual that he didn’t even have time to see Itkyu’s face. It was like being struck by a car accident so hard that you went flying without even catching the license plate.
Once the servant was out of the way, Itkyu blasted the door to the stone chamber apart with a single palm strike.
Though he had become a dark templar, he had originally been a high-ranking holy knight.
Finding the relic that radiated a strong aura was not difficult. In truth, it was simply sitting there in the middle by itself.
Its outward appearance was that of a wooden box.
When he shook it, it seemed a hairpin was inside.
The Ogyumjam ritual proceeded by wrapping this box, burying it in the ground, then digging it up for the rite before sealing it again.
They said the name of the god was Okdokeom.
There was the sense of a hairpin in the seal of Okdokeom, but that did not mean the hairpin itself.
That “seal” referred to the box that held the hairpin, not the hairpin.
If the body is the hairpin, then surely the god’s name ought to be hairpin as well.
Some vague topic of meditation brushed through the mind of the monk Itkyu.
But this was hardly the place for deep contemplation.
Itkyu took the hairpin box. Then he employed yet another ninjutsu.
That was fire release.
Of course, even the old martial schools did not teach fantasy like that.
This fire release belonged to the twenty-first century, an age in which humanity had acquired the power to turn fantasy into reality.
He doused the place with what remained of the gasoline left over from burning down the tavern under Kim Sang-jun’s command back in Gaeseong.
Itkyu struck the waterproof match Taesu had given him and lit it.
He felt no hesitation whatsoever about passing this off as a technique of Kurama Yoshin-ryu. After all, ninjutsu had always relied heavily on misdirection using cutting-edge techniques people of the time didn’t understand.
And before long, Gyeonghaeng Seowon in Samcheok was engulfed in the ninjutsu of the Tsushima village Hokage—Fire Shadow.
* * *
Naturally, Cha Un-hong’s grand speech had no real aim of buying the Ogyumjam.
It was a tool designed to make the other man think they were showing just enough sincerity to buy it. The huge offer was the same thing.
According to the Mountain Spirit’s “scheme,” they could simply talk their way through it and buy it back, and in fact that would have worked—but Tae-su’s borrowed scheme was a little different.
From the start, paying the academy politely and letting it do good deeds for them was the sort of idea that twisted Tae-su’s guts just to think about.
So Tae-su stole the Ogyumjam. Wasn’t it, after all, stolen goods to begin with, something Kim Hyo-won had beaten someone bloody and taken by force?
Instead, he set the place on fire so neatly that no one would ever suspect it had been stolen.
I’m not playing a win-win game with some bastard who annoys me.
If I have to bear the hassle and take the loss myself, I’ll still beat you down one way or another.
That was the relic retrieval operation as Tae-su’s values laid bare all at once.
Cha Un-hong made the same face Lee Chun-deuk had been wearing only moments ago, and made it expertly.
In other words, she played the role of a feudal lord watching Dong Zhuo’s great fire in Luoyang with admirable fidelity.
“First we have to put out the fire!”
Fire started with gasoline is hard to put out.
Still, it was lucky this place was a stone chamber.
Since the blaze had begun in a space surrounded by stone, it hadn’t spread very quickly.
Tae-su began smashing the small buildings around it—little shrine structures with ancestral tablets in them—with his bare hands and kicks, clearing them away.
Lee Chun-deuk decided this wasn’t because Tae-su disliked Kim Hyo-won or Huh Mok, but simply because it was the proper fire-control procedure. If Tae-su decided that Lee Chun-deuk himself counted as flammable material and started tearing him apart, that would be a problem.
And in fact, it worked.
Samcheok had suffered fires many times before. The blaze that had nearly swallowed the entire town was, thankfully, limited to the stone chamber and a couple of nearby annexes before it died out.
Now Lee Chun-deuk had the opposite problem: he was going to have to cling to Tae-su and Cha Un-hong instead.
Given everything that had happened so far, anyone who thought Tae-su had started the fire was a lunatic. Lee Chun-deuk, who was not a lunatic, seized Tae-su by the hand and pleaded desperately.
“Y-you saw it too, didn’t you? You saw it with me! That was a real accident! A real one! We absolutely did not set the fire to burn the Ogyumjam!”
Cha Un-hong soothed him gently.
“Who would dare suspect you? It is said that when one has a witness who saw it with his own eyes, the truth becomes clear. We’ll go and explain it properly. As for the rite, just set up the tablet and perform it that way.”
“R-right?”
“Though if possible, you should stay away from Sagilchi, lest you come to harm.”
“We didn’t exactly choose to spend days clawing our way through those horrible mountains for fun. It’s just that these days people don’t respect the academy…”
Cha Un-hong had been waiting for exactly that opening, and presented the price for Tae-su’s refusal.
“Although we did not obtain the Ogyumjam, our respect remains unchanged. We’ll leave some money before we go, even if it’s not close to the amount I mentioned earlier. It would be best to use it to repair the buildings that burned.”
And when they returned, they would also have to repair the minds of the officials who would demand to know what in the world had happened.
Lee Chun-deuk understood instantly.
The Ogyumjam had simply vanished. Lost relics were nothing unusual.
And the profit the academy had hoped to secure through the prohibition of the Ogyumjam rite was simply being paid in reduced form by those merchants. In the end, this whole affair had been about making money.
What remained was the question of faith, but with the Ogyumjam gone, the authority of the rite offered to the Mountain Spirit would decline.
Lee Chun-deuk, like Lee Jin-hong, had also thought that the villagers might create a new hairpin.
But the difference in legitimacy between a genuine relic passed down since the age when Bak Hyeokgeose was a village chief and a substitute made yesterday was obvious. The number of tourists would surely plummet.
And although no one else cared, Kim Hyo-won’s soul would also be freed from the torment of sealing the four directional spirits.
Lee Chun-deuk wept.
“Truly, a disciple of Chusa!”
Some scholars disliked Chusa because he was unusually open-minded and associated with monks like the Master of Tea, Cho-ui, but there had always been a reason for everything.
Tae-su had “donated the cost of rebuilding the academy.”
They didn’t have much money on them to begin with, and what little they had was already spent on fish and provisions.
So what Tae-su handed over was a promissory note.
Gyeonghaeng Seowon, the glorious first recipient of Park Axe’s promissory note, naturally did not doubt its value.
“I’ll explain things properly, so don’t cause trouble later. Just come quietly to Sagilchi, and the traders there will exchange it for you.”
Which was even better for Tae-su.
A promissory note used even by a seowon.
Honestly, it was probably exchangeable even within the boundaries of Samcheok county without going all the way to Sagilchi.
Lee Chun-deuk’s scholarly ability was unclear, but his practical ability was decent.
Two days later, they were granted special permission to go up to Duseksu and enjoy the scenery.
If you asked whether Duseksu belonged to the academy, the answer was no. But that did not mean you couldn’t change the seminar schedule of other scholars who had reserved it.
Itkyu had gone off to see the east-side Gwaneumsa, so only Tae-su and Cha Un-hong were there.
Tae-su plucked at a geomungo someone had set out and tried to make it sing.
It felt nothing like a guitar. He couldn’t get any sense of it at all.
But as for atmosphere, the view here already had more than enough of that.
Cha Un-hong removed the geomungo that Tae-su couldn’t even play from his lap, then burrowed into the space it left behind.
“Now you’ve made a big show of things out in Gangwon, and climbed Gangwon’s finest pavilion, too. Traveling with you feels a bit like following a great army as it crosses the world at will.”
It wasn’t entirely wrong, either, since it was conquest by another name.
Tae-su lifted his head, playing Cha Un-hong’s hair instead of the strings of the geomungo.
Because they were facing the eastern sea, they couldn’t watch the sunset sink into the water, but the shadows stretching long before them were a sight all their own.
Even as human shadows, they seemed like the shadows of natural things. A pavilion built by taking full advantage of the cliff itself had the power to draw all artifice back into nature.
He could understand why every literatus who came here ended up unable to resist writing a poem.
But Tae-su was not a literatus.
Instead of reciting poetry, he took the hairpin box in his hand.
Retrieval is not complete until the thing is returned to where it belongs.
And on that point, Lee Jin-hong and Tae-su’s ideas diverged quite a lot.
Author’s Note
1. When officials opposed Sejong’s plan to build a fortress in Pyeongan Province, he once said that even Qin Shi Huang’s Great Wall had been built for greater gain, though the people had surely suffered for it.