The Image Breaker
While Taesu was away in Samcheok for several days, Sagilchi JwaejuLee Jinhong quickly had a new gold hairpin made.
There was no gold, of course, but the craftsman had long since been found.
As for the hairpin’s design, which Lee Jinhong had no way of knowing because it had been sealed away two hundred years ago, that too was decided on the night Taesu left town.
The Mountain Spirit appeared in a dream and specified everything in such fine detail that, frankly, it might as well have been a blacksmith’s order form.
But the spirit’s taunting, slippery mouth left Lee Jinhong unable to harbor even the tiniest trace of suspicion.
“The Jade-Sword has lost its power, so I have come in its stead. I have long been on intimate terms with the Jade-Sword, and I have heard of your years of devotion, which has moved me deeply, so I have made this special descent. Do not doubt and obey this command.”
That wasn’t all.
Auspicious five-colored mist and a violet radiance wrapped around the divine being, while thunder and lightning boomed and cracked through the heavens.
Dreams, after all, allow for every sort of impossible nonsense. Lee Jinhong even found himself tempted to switch allegiances to this mountain spirit on the spot and crawled forward to submit.
The fastest way to get a hairpin, a doujinshi, or a commission finished was not intimidation or canned goods.
Nor was it an absurd amount of money.
The trick was simple: a detailed order.
So the hairpin was ready by the time Taesu returned.
* * *
“I’m glad you were able to settle things with the shrine. That ought to cut down on those bastards’ antics for a while.”
And once the new Ogyumjam was unveiled, it would naturally bow before the overwhelming divine power of the Jade-Sword. What on earth could a mere instant dynasty of not even five hundred years compare to a thousand-year-old Silla?
Beaming, Lee Jinhong was about to puff himself up when Cha Un-hong pinned him down with a single nail.
“I spent quite a bit of money. As you know, being the Dobansu of Songdo doesn’t mean the property along the route belongs to me, so this is a serious loss.”
In truth, the profits from shipping Samcheok seafood inland had more than covered it.
But Lee Jinhong could not have guessed that far. And even if he had guessed, he could not say so aloud.
“I-I know that. I was going to take care of everything myself. If Sagilchi prospers, the Dobansu will profit plenty too.”
Cha Un-hong replied with a knowing look.
“Then let us hope it prospers indeed.”
“Leave that to me.”
In fact, Lee Jinhong had gathered quite a crowd in Sagilchi—peddlers and villagers alike.
And from the murmuring around them, it did seem that Lee Jinhong had not betrayed them after all. Everyone recognized Park Do-kkwi.
Lee Jinhong cleared his throat and resumed the dignified air of a shaman.
“Just as I said, the Mountain Spirit took pity on our plea and sent the Ganghwa Park Axe. With its help, we may once again enshrine the divine body.”
There was no need to explain what kind of help that had been.
No church ever says, “By your faith, dear believers, we raised a new holy temple”; they say, “Thanks to your donations, after tax, we covered this much of the construction cost.” That is not transparent management. It is betrayal of faith.
Sure enough, as Lee Jinhong had predicted, the people assumed the mountain spirit had dispatched Park Do-kkwi and sent the divine body along with him. What the mountain spirit and the divine body actually were was the point; the rest was just details.
Lee Jinhong pressed on to the main matter.
“It is time for the Mountain Spirit to depart the government warehouse filled only with corrupt officials and come anew to us. We shall properly build a new shrine, wrap it in a hundred layers of mourning cloth according to the customs of a thousand years, and enshrine it with all due reverence, so everyone must spare no devotion.”
Wrapping it in a hundred layers of mourning cloth would take a lot of money. The people raced to offer their donations.
* * *
A feast table heavy with beef, as was Sagilchi custom, had been laid out, and the clanging of brass gongs and drums rang out loudly.
The one serving as the officiant was Lee Jinhong’s daughter-in-law.
The Mountain Spirit, who had returned to Taesu, said:
[Hmm. So they mean to restore all the old rites with this opening. Crude opportunists though they are, they do have sincerity.]
So they’re not just trying to make their descendants shrine priests for generations?
[And why should that be a problem? Even kings keep their line for generations. In particular, the Silla royal house was originally a family of shamans. Did I not once tell you about the Chachaung?]
He had indeed compared Yi Seong-nyeo to that.
But that was back when Taesu knew who Namhae Chachaung was.
Uninterested in whatever knowledge the mountain spirit tried to feed him—Cha Un-hong might have cared, but Taesu did not—he changed the subject.
Either way, we’re here to smash that thing, right? Can I step in now?
[No. Wait a little longer. There will likely be a stage where they take out the divine body.]
Sure enough, Lee Jinhong soon came out carrying a box with great reverence.
Inside was the new Ogyumjam.
It was a hairpin that shone suspiciously, almost offensively, bright.
But the people were overwhelmed by that golden radiance.
“Ooh, that is…!”
“I lived beneath Mount Taebaek past my sixtieth year, and this is the first time I’ve seen it!”
“My grandfather said he’d never seen it either!”
Of course they had never seen it. It had never once been publicly displayed.
Lee Jinhong had aimed for the golden allure of the relic and even unveiled the divine body for the first time, reaping some effect from it, but he had made a far larger mistake than that.
As Itkyu had figured, the Jade-Sword was not a hairpin but a box.
That was why it had to be kept in a wooden casket and wrapped in a hundred layers of mourning cloth. Only through that act of wrapping could the Jade-Sword’s divinity be completed.
The Jade-Sword’s divinity was that of a Silla princess.
In later ages, after the hairpin disappeared, she would be transformed into an old woman with white hair—but originally, that was what she was.
The goddess was not the hairpin itself, but the princess who wore the hairpin, who pinned it to her hair.
By revealing it, Lee Jinhong had accomplished a feat worthy of the inquisitor Kim Hyo-won.
He had desecrated the divinity. He had stripped and humiliated the princess. With the king standing before him, he had bowed to the king’s discarded ikseongwan.
Two hundred years was more than enough time for the true essence of precious inherited wisdom to be lost.
As the Mountain Spirit had assured him, Lee Jinhong did possess a faint thread of divine sensitivity.
And yet right now, he seemed to feel his confidence evaporating.
He was almost right. He had lost the qualifications of a priest.
And in his place, a new priest—or perhaps a destroyer of faith—appeared before him.
Taesu stepped forward and said, “That’s a fake. The real Ogyumjam is right here.”
* * *
Taesu felt nostalgic.
His hometown pastor, drunk more often than not, used to suddenly break out in speaking in tongues.
Lee Jinhong was so startled, and had so many questions, that all of them burst out at once. His daughter-in-law panicked too and stopped dancing, wondering if the spirit’s aim had gone astray and hit somewhere over there instead.
“W-What in the world are you—! N-no, that’s fake. No. This is. They said not to steal it from the shrine in the first place, a-ah, no, that’s not it either! What is this supposed to mean… what the hell are you doing!”
As always, Taesu explained what he was doing not with words, but with action.
When he opened the box, the hairpin was dragged out from inside.
Compared to the new Ogyumjam, it looked pitifully plain.
Its color was a dull black, and unlike the new Ogyumjam, which had large dangling ornaments and a decorative plate, its embellishment was simple.
Someone shouted, “What nonsense is that! That’s the fake! Just look at the color—it isn’t gold at all!”
Cha Un-hong stepped forward and answered for him.
“That is precisely proof that it’s real. Do you even know what this divine body’s name means?”
Ogeum. Black gold.
If you thought about it, there was no reason for pure gold to turn black. Gold’s value lies in the fact that it does not change.
Ogeum was not element number 79, Au. The very idea that a single name defines a single essence was, in the first place, rather nineteenth-century.
Ogeum could also refer to gold oxidized by mixed base metals, and sometimes even simply iron.
But usually, it meant dark reddish copper.
When they said it was the hairpin of a Silla princess, they should have approached it historically, not mystically.
This Ogyumjam, said to date back to the days of Hyeokgeose, naturally possessed only the metalworking technology of Hyeokgeose’s era.
Of course, gold was one of the first metals humankind ever handled. If the people of Park Hyeokgeose’s town had concentrated all their efforts, they could probably have made a pure gold hairpin.
But the chances of a village chief’s daughter owning one were not particularly high.
The ruler of early Silla was not even a “king,” and his daughter was not yet a “princess.” There was no way the local headsmen would have tolerated wasting valuable village development funds on such nonsense.
Still, Lee Jinhong’s despair—and that of a few others—was deeply unfair.
The fact that this hairpin was red copper rather than gold did not diminish the value of the Jade-Sword.
The Jade-Sword was not the hairpin; it was the deity in the hairpin. It was a maternal longing reaching back to the pale dawn of antiquity, to the time before your world was even a child, before the faiths brought in from elsewhere came to watch over you.
The hairpin was merely evidence. A residence contract written on recycled paper does not make the apartment any less valuable.
It may even have been this truth that the “mountain spirit who sent Park Do-kkwi” had wanted to convey.
* * *
Though they could not have put it into words, most of the people here understood as much.
This was less a modern, enlightenment-style smashing of superstition than the revival of a forgotten morality.
The Joseon people, unlike modern men, were ashamed of how they had been lured by gold. Wasn’t plainness and thrift the true mark of nobility?
Taesu said, “What the mountain spirit desires is your prosperity. So long as you prosper and do not forget the deity, that is enough. Isn’t this copper hairpin proof enough? The deity does not desire gold, silk robes, or coins.”
Since Lee Jinhong himself had elevated Park Do-kkwi to the status of an emissary of the mountain spirit, Taesu could say such things with a straight face.
[I would like to desire them.]
Shut up.
But the mountain spirit’s “final stratagem” was now something they could not avoid.
He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but Lee Jinhong had deployed the very rebuttal the mountain spirit had anticipated.
“Don’t spout nonsense! I made this hairpin after receiving a revelation from the divine one in my dreams! How else could I have decided on such precise ornamentation and inscriptions?”
Those words were true, and that truth made Taesu feel almost sympathetic.
Still grim-faced, Taesu proceeded to utterly ruin Lee Jinhong.
“Look at the inscription said to be engraved on that gold hairpin.”
Cha Un-hong took the hairpin and read it aloud.
“Moonlight fills the forest path; a beauty comes. No, this is….”
Lee Jinhong hurriedly said, “That means a beauty walking into the woods on a moonlit night. Only the princess who dwells on this Mount Taebaek could use such a phrase. How could a man like me have composed those words? It was all commanded by the god!”
Yes, commanded by a god. By a messenger, in fact.
Cha Un-hong said with grave disappointment, “That’s a line from the Ming poet Gao Qi, written when he was gazing at plum blossoms.”
Any peddler worth his salt knew that Silla fell, and then even Goryeo fell after it before the Ming came into being. One person here didn’t know that, of course.
Truthfully, if they had simply made a gold hairpin and claimed it had been infused with new divine presence, they might have gotten away with it by pretending not to know. The real historical Ogyumjam cult, after all, kept reviving itself in exactly that way to resist government suppression.
But to inscribe a Ming dynasty verse on it yourself—what were you thinking?
Just before the people’s disbelief curdled into anger, Taesu delivered a small act of revenge on Ganghwa Namsan Mountain Spirit and brought things to a close.
“Your words are not a lie. But if the Jade-Sword has lost its power, how could it appear in a dream? That must have been the trick of some wicked evil spirit.”
Ignoring the protest of that wicked spirit, Taesu held up the real Ogyumjam.
“The Jade-Sword has not lost its power because this divine body was missing.”
The people were stunned, but this part had the backing of the Namsan Mountain Spirit.
[I only learned it later, but if a divine body goes two hundred years without being worshiped, it will inevitably lose power. Even a woman’s hairpin, if left unused long enough, gets packed away in its case and forgotten. The reason the Jade-Sword never truly vanished, even in weakened form, wasn’t because of the hairpin—it was because the people here, in their own crooked way, never entirely forgot it.]
Taesu translated that into simpler terms.
“It was only because the people’s hearts grew hard and their nature turned cruel that they brought about their own decline.”
If man depends on the god, then the god depends on man.
How many deities had been defeated in war and vanished along with their entire peoples?
In effect, Taesu was saying that your prosperity is the deity’s prosperity.
So long as you do not forget the god—that is, not that you must keep performing rites, but that you must not let the world sweep you away until you forget what a human being is at root—he would help you as best he could.
After the daughter-in-law, who had been staring blankly at Taesu with no idea of where she stood anymore, even Lee Jinhong finally understood.
He did not believe in gods. From the start, the reason he had done all this was for human prosperity.
Park Do-kkwi had made that possible.
The peddlers, united not by Lee Jinhong’s hand but by Park Do-kkwi’s, would bring a fresh wind to the withering trade of Gwandong. No further explanation was needed—the people gathered here were proof enough.
Park Do-kkwi, emissary of the god and destroyer of faith, said, “This divine body will only be toyed with by a cunning man’s hands if it remains here. I will return it to the depths of Mount Taebaek, where it belongs.”
* * *
Lee Jinhong was crying.
“I understand now. Everything I’ve done was pointless. If your companions beat me to death before the gate now, I’ll have to accept it.”
Taesu looked at him, but he did not erect a gate.
“No. It wasn’t pointless. You’re the one who gathered these people. You’re also the one who protected them until now so they could be gathered.”
With eyes clouded by tears, Lee Jinhong looked at the peddlers.
They, too, were not shouting that they would kill him on the spot.
This trade route was theirs. Which meant they, too, had joined in the Ogyumjam cult while knowing something was off and had helped contribute to this decline. Responsibility lay with the owners.
The peddlers and villagers who still understood the importance of face were also ashamed.
Cha Un-hong said, “Still, it will be hard to hold your head up here any longer, won’t it? Leave the shrine to your daughter-in-law and come north.”
“North…? To a foreign land?”
“Even if it is foreign, Gangwon-do has scattered settlements and wide-open land, so peddlers travel back and forth over long distances. If you work in Chuncheon, you’ll still be able to make use of your reputation. The dealers you meet will be much the same.”
Before Taesu’s reforms, peddlers were simply merchants who traveled from market to market.
But in Gangwon-do, where wealth was not concentrated in a single great merchant center, the land was vast, and the population sparse, that “local market” was practically the whole province.
Thus Lee Jinhong of southern Gangwon could take charge of Chuncheon in the north, which Taesu had already planned as a Baekimbang location for Gangwon-do.
Taesu did not say that yet.
Instead, as Dobansu, he accepted Lee Jinhong as a comrade.
Then he encouraged the Taebaek peddlers who had agreed to escort Lee Jinhong on his trade journey to Chuncheon.
* * *
Taesu did not travel with them.
The peddlers each had their own business plans and signature goods to push.
Goods were not something that, with a click, could be shifted to inventory and turned into gold whenever you liked, so each peddler followed a different route according to his own plans.
Taesu did not mind.
As he headed toward the Yongwol area, where Prince Danjong met his end, he did not even think of Taebaek’s other god, Danjong.
When he stopped at a wayfarer’s inn, Itkyu volunteered to go into the side room, saying he needed to finish organizing the new fire-based hobeop of Kurama Yoshin-ryu after his meditation.
So the room belonged to the two of them.
When Cha Un-hong loosened the braid she’d made so she could comb her hair, Taesu suddenly reached out and touched it.
Rather than flinching, Cha Un-hong simply closed her eyes and let him.
And before long, in the hair at the back of her head—made more like a ponytail than a proper chignon—the Ogyumjam was inserted.
Cha Un-hong burst out laughing.
“There’s still that gold hairpin Lee Jinhong gave back to me, so why copper?”
Taesu did not tell her that even in fifty years this one would be far more expensive than gold.
“I just thought it suited you better.”
Cha Un-hong turned around where she sat and threw her arms around him.
“That’s what I think too.”
Author’s Note
1. The earliest Silla gold relic confirmed by excavation dates to around the fifth century. Of course, since pure gold relics already existed in Nangnang during the Park Hyeokgeose era, Silla could probably have made them too if it had wanted. Whether it had the authority and concentrated wealth to do so is another matter.