Saltern Slaves
The rain that had poured for two days finally let up.
Time to get back to work at the saltern!
When I made my way out to the salt pan, I found it brimming to the edges with rainwater.
Dealing with this is easy enough now, though.
All I had to do was channel my telekinesis and scoop the water into my storage pouch. Then I'd pull out the brine I'd been drying last time and pour it back in to fill the pan.
And so the waiting game began again.
The problem, however, was that with each passing day, more and more dust was settling on the pan floor.
"Ugh. Damn dust..."
That insolent little dirt was swaying and rippling in the water, practically taunting me. Was it mocking me?
For now, I decided to gently scrape it all to one side with telekinesis.
Bloop, bloop.
I gathered it in one spot and let the water carry it away, and before me floated a water droplet the size of a human head, with the dirt suspended inside, bobbing right in front of my eyes.
Now what?
While I was busy deliberating, the dust began sinking toward the bottom of the droplet. Should I just slice off the bottom?
But throwing away the water along with it seemed like a bit of a waste...
I stared down at the hem of my garment, deep in thought.
"Huh? This is woven pretty tightly."
I held it up to the sunlight right away — not a hint of light passed through it.
"At this quality, I could use it as a sieve!"
I hurriedly pulled wooden planks out of my pouch and started building a square frame. I even made nails out of wood and hammered them in — click-clack, done in no time. To keep it from breaking, I braced the underside with support beams crossed in an X shape.
Then I wrapped the hem I'd cut off around the frame and tied it in a full circle — no extra fastening needed. Finished.
"Huh. Why am I so good at this? Do I have a hidden carpenter talent?"
In my hands I held what looked to be a tool about fifty centimeters on each side.
"Please, please filter properly."
Glug, glug, glug.
Carefully, I poured the dusty water over the sieve. And there, caught on the cloth, sat all those annoying black specks — dirt, dust, who knows what — in their entirety.
Eureka! I'm a genius!
From that moment on, my days became a war against dust.
All day long, I filtered dust through the sieve. The wretched stuff just kept coming no matter how much I strained out. It was endless...
"Wait — does anything even dry at night with no sun?"
I suppose it would dry a little overnight, but no — wrapping it up for the day. I hated the thought of the dust that would pile on overnight more.
And thus I became a true saltern slave.
The routine went like this: clock in each morning, rinse out the salt pan, pour in the seawater that was mid-drying. Then spend the whole day straining out dust, and at night, stow the water back into my pouch and clock out.
The hamster wheel of my life had started spinning.
By my rough count, about twenty days had passed since I started the saltern.
"So... bored..."
Twenty days of a beach in full sun. Any ordinary person would have shriveled up into a dried-out squid ages ago. Good thing saltern slaves aren't ordinary people, I suppose.
"So this is not easy work after all."
But looking back on it now, couldn't I have filtered this only once every few days? Talk about a belated realization.
"Jeez. I strained so much there's no dust left at all now. All that comes out is some white powder."
Shhhhrrr.
"Huh?"
Shhhhrrr.
"Wha—? S-Salt!?"
Salt began piling up on the sieve, and at last all that suffering was being rewarded.
"Ohhh... finally. Finally!"
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Maybe it was because I'd earned it through such honest toil, but the tears came before I knew it. A little of it had mixed with seawater, but it was all salty water anyway, so it should be fine, right?
I really had been through it. This was truly a battle against myself.
"But won't the salt and the dust both get left behind on the sieve together?"
I racked my brain, but no clever solution came to mind. Well, a bit of dirt like this can't hurt if you eat it, can it?
And so, about a week after the salt started coming out, the water had all but vanished from the pan.
"So that means the salt starts coming out around day twenty, and it takes about a week to fully dry?"
Knowledge to share with my friends someday. I'd have to tell them later.
Then I popped a pinch in my mouth and — uh oh. The salt was way more bitter than I'd expected...
"Hmm. I can't exactly wait years for the bittern to leach out, can I?"
Removing the bitterness naturally would only be possible after years of continuous salt production. For now, rinsing it in water was the way to go.
"First time doing it for real, but no helping it. Let's do this."
The saltern was so enormous that I'd harvested a whole truckload of salt — definitely worth running the experiment.
I picked up the sieve frame again. Nervously, I heaped the salt into a mountain, took the clean water I'd set aside earlier, and bravely readied a single drop...
"Uhhh. I can't do it."
"Haneul, what are you doing?"
"Gaah!"
SPLASH.
A great lump of water came crashing down onto the salt.
Thanks to Garungda ambushing me from behind, the water got poured after all.
Glug-glug-glug. Drip. Drip.
The water washed down through the salt, and what remained dripped slowly through the frame below. The salt pile had... shrunk dramatically. A third of it was gone, I swear.
"Haneul, what's that?"
"Ah! This is salt."
I'd been spacing out, and his repeated call snapped me back to my senses.
"Salty powder?"
"Yeah, you make it from seawater. This is the last step."
"Can I eat it?"
"Sure."
It wouldn't kill him, right? NO! Garungda was already shoving a fistful of salt straight into his mouth. Eating it like that could actually kill you!
"Ptui! Ptui! Salty — guh!"
The salt in Garungda's mouth scattered in every direction.
Ah... this kid... I was trying to live a good, honest life here...
"Salt is... you're supposed to eat just a little at a time because it's salty."
I exercised truly heroic restraint. At least there was no complaint about bitterness, so I tried a pinch myself.
"Nom nom. Huh? It really is salty. But there's no bitter taste."
It was harsher than the salt I remembered, but the bitterness had all but vanished. At this level, it was plenty edible.
Just to be safe, I rummaged around and tasted the salt from the bottom layer too — not bad at all.
"Ah, I get it. The rinse water washes down from the top, so the bottom gets rinsed a little less."
"Haneul, why eat this?"
Was this kid immune to the charms of salt?
"Mm... if you eat just a little with your food, the food tastes better. Even potatoes taste better."
"But salty?"
"That's why you eat just a little."
"Hmmm..."
Time to bestow grace upon my doubting believer.
"Here, take this and try it with your potatoes tonight. It dissolves if it touches water, so keep it somewhere dry."
"Careful with water. Got it."
I pressed a fistful of the good top-layer salt into Garungda's hand.
Ah... damn it. Garungda's hands were filthy. They'd probably be pitch black by the time he got home.
What was the point of a hundred days of filtering dust...
Ugh, whatever.
I sent Garungda off and got back to rinsing. I skimmed off the top layer of salt, piled the bottom layer back up on top, and rinsed it through again. The yield kept shrinking, but it got considerably more palatable each time.
I'd started in the morning, and before I knew it, the sun was setting. I must have repeated the process a good few hundred times — the saltern was just that vast, judging by the mountain of salt now sitting in my pouch.
"Ahhh~"
Tonight, I'm resting properly.
"HANEUL!!!"
From the crack of dawn, Garungda was raising a ruckus at my door. Doesn't he realize that's a public nuisance? Some friend.
Grroowl.
For my friend's sake, I hurried out and opened the door. Wouldn't want to catch a rock to the face in my sleep tonight.
"Yes? What is it?"
"The salt! What is that thing?"
Looking at Garungda's wide, round eyes, it seemed he'd discovered the charms of the salt I'd given him yesterday.
"Why?"
"Potatoes taste better!"
"I told you, didn't I? Try sprinkling it on meat later too — even better!"
I hadn't had a single bite of meat since coming here, and just imagining salt on roasted meat was already making my mouth water.
"Meat?"
"Those guys."
He pointed discreetly at the wild boars inside the fence, fattened round and wobbly on mountains of potatoes, waddling about.
"Ohh!!!"
"And there's this thing called salting, you know."
"Salting?"
"Yeah! If you pack food in salt and preserve it, you can keep it for a long time!"
"Ooooh!!!"
Salting — you just pack it in salt and that's it, right? That should be right... but these primitive friends of mine are so utterly unpredictable that I felt a little anxious.
"But it's salty, so you have to be careful?"
"Got it. How do you make salt?"
"I'll show you. Come with me! But it's hard work."
"Fine. People come too!"
Welcome, saltern slaves! Enrollment is open!
You chose to walk this path yourselves, so you'll bear it like the pioneers you are.
Unlike me, they had no way to stow water away in a pouch on rainy days, so after much deliberation, they decided to collect and dry it all in a single day — same-day production, same-day collection. If it didn't work out, the plan was to build barrels galore and pour everything into those instead.
First, I split them into two teams. One would haul water from outside, while the other worked inside, spreading the brine far and wide with wooden boards to dry it.
First up, everyone tromped inside—
"No! Hold it!"
"Why?"
"This is going into food! You wash before you come in!"
These people were about to walk straight into the salt pan with their filthy feet!
"Go wash in the river and come back!"
"Got it."
Off they all tromped to the river to wash. They obeyed so well. How could I possibly hate them for it?
"Aigoo..."
Back they came, in a crowd again. And—
Oh. It was pointless. Their feet picked up fresh dirt on the walk back anyway.
Fine. I'd just set water basins by the entrance and have them wipe their feet. They ate dirt straight off the ground anyway — surely it was fine?
But this was genuinely not easy.
"Hah, hah, hah."
The one hauling the water basin full of seawater looked like his soul was about to leave his body.
"You okay?"
"Hah... hah..."
He couldn't even answer. He set the water down and shuffled right back toward the sea.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
What's that sound, you ask? The sound of boards smoothing the brine across the pan floor.
"Hoo... hoo..."
These were the strongest-bodied people around, and every last one of them was dying.
Ah. But. I'm sweating too much just watching. The real problem is that sweat would drip down into the pan — seasoned broth, straight from the source. Nope. There is no way I'm eating that.
"Goodness, you poor things, working so hard."
"Hoo... hoo... I'm... fine."
So this is how convenient telekinesis made everything for me, huh?
Looking at it again, the saltern really was enormous. The friend standing at the far end looked positively tiny.
Still, it seemed worth it — far more salt was piling up than I'd expected. Done this way, we'd easily clear a basket or two in a single day.
Now that would make the suffering worthwhile.
"Ah..."
At sundown, we gathered up the day's dried salt, and my heart sank. Maybe it was just my mood, but it looked distinctly yellowish. The friends' hands and feet, on the other hand, were sparkling clean.
"So, when you first make salt, it looks like this — dirty."
"Dirty? But it's not allowed?"
"That's why you rinse it. Watch carefully."
I could guess how this would go, but I piled the salt onto the sieve and poured water over it anyway.
"Gah! Haneul, what are you doing!"
"No! The salt is disappearing!"
Oh dear. The water draining out beneath the sieve was thoroughly yellow.
"See? This is how you rinse it until it's clean."
The top layer of salt, at least, had come out fairly clean.
"Here — taste the salt underneath, then taste this one."
For my friends, still wearing long faces, I had them try both. You learn by trying, after all — dirty or not, nothing to be done about it.
"Ugh! Ptui, ptui! What IS this?"
See? Even you can't stomach the unrinsed salt, can you?
"That's why we rinse it. Got it now?"
"Got it..."
Leaving the long faces behind, I hurried and finished the rinsing myself. If I put them in charge, we'd be at it all night for certain.
"All rinsed. Let's take it home."
The friends lined their baskets — the ones they'd brought in the morning — with layers of leaves to cover the gaps, then scooped the salt in. Honestly, they were better at that sort of thing than I was.
Maybe I could store the salt for the bittern-removal process the same way someday.
Even so, we managed to fill four fairly large baskets in just one day. As expected, muscle is the foundation of everything.
A museum somewhere in the modern era.
"Alright, everyone, this here is a diorama of how people lived in ancient times."
"What are they doing in this one?"
One student was pointing at a model of a figure rinsing a pile of white powder in water and collecting it in a basket.
"Ah, that shows ancient people straining out the bitterness and impurities from salt made in their salt pans."
"Bittern?"
"Yes, something like that. Pretty remarkable, isn't it?"
"My mom removes bittern at home too."
"That's right. A method passed down for thousands of years is still in use today."
Ancient wisdom still alive in the modern world. This is one of the great many mysteries of Daehan.
A solar saltern producing sun-dried salt is marvelous enough on its own — but primitive humans who rinsed their salt to remove the bitter taste, or drew off the bittern? In that era, people ordinarily harvested rock salt or boiled down seawater to get their salt.