The Journey Home
Kim Usam, the commanding officer in charge of Wonnam Port, found himself wrestling with a most troublesome problem.
No fewer than forty-eight of his men were requesting transfers. All at once.
It had been fifty-three, but five had decided to settle down here, whittling the number down.
There was nothing he could do about men who arrived with plump, well-fed wives in tow — he could hardly scold them or beat them back into service.
“Whew… I hope you all live well.”
“Thank you, sir!”
Left with no choice, he sent word to Sinju and requested rapid reinforcements. There were no particular threats to speak of, but a thin staff meant crushing fatigue for everyone left behind.
“Go on, then. Be happy out there.”
“Sir, yes sir!”
The young men were all grinning ear to ear about their pretty new wives, and it was such an insufferable sight to behold.
“Out! Now! Go sort your gear!”
He barked the order, but watching them practically skip with joy reminded him of when he'd met his own wife here, and a faint warmth crept into his scowl.
Lee Yung, too, hurried off toward Rari's home. Once the ship's departure was set, they would have to leave immediately.
“Dad! Leave that behind, I'm telling you!”
“What's wrong with it?”
“We'll buy new things when we get there!”
Rari's family consisted of just her father and herself.
Her mother had died giving birth to her long ago, and her father had raised his daughter alone ever since.
That was why Rari had insisted on bringing him along.
“Then let's take only Mother's things.”
“Yes….”
Her father had longed for her mother his whole life, and she couldn't bring herself to stop him even there.
Before long, the two of them boarding the ship to Daehan carried nothing but a single bag apiece on their backs.
Everything one small family owned in the world fit into one little bag. It spoke to how barren the land they came from was — and, since a long journey lay ahead, they had also lightened their load deliberately.
“Kyaa! So this is a ship!”
“My stomach's all wobbly and strange.”
The two of them had only ever seen ships from a distance — this was their first time aboard — so Lee Yung did his best to explain things to them.
They had a month of sailing ahead of them. He could only hope they wouldn't get seasick.
“Ahem. Do you suppose I might share a cabin with you two?”
“Hahaha! Let's all get closer this trip!”
“Mm-hm.”
With three berths to a cabin on a four-to-a-room ship, the three of them ended up rooming together. It seemed better than sharing with strangers, after all.
“Hwahaha! You're telling me a ship made of iron floats on water?”
“Kyahaha, Lee Yung, you're so funny!”
He had spent a good month trying to explain Daehan to them, but the two women simply refused to absorb any of it.
Lee Yung found himself looking forward to that day a month from now.
They weathered two rather rough storms along the way, but the Horned Whale shrugged them off as if they were nothing and arrived at Ara Southern Port.
“….”
“….”
The moment the two women laid eyes on the southern port, they forgot how to speak.
Neither had ever seen so many people in their entire lives, and the port itself was simply enormous.
Even just the docking area seemed larger than all of Wonnam, where they had spent their whole lives.
“Daehan really is vast — and crawling with people!”
“Th-that's right? There are more people than even you said, Dad.”
Lee Yung had explained things on the way over, so they assumed this must be what Daehan was like — a land teeming with people.
But then again…
“This is just a small port, you say?”
“What? It's not?!”
“A small port?”
The two women's eyes went perfectly round — in exactly the same way. Lee Yung decided that his swarthy, near-black-skinned father-in-law was actually rather adorable.
“Right, no time to dawdle. Let's catch a train and head to Sinju first.”
“Oh! You mean the famous train, the one from all the stories!”
Rari simply could not believe that a house-sized lump of iron could run fast, no matter what people said.
Lee Yung, on the other hand, was already chuckling to himself in anticipation of just how astonished these backwater women would be.
“Shall we?”
And so they stood among the crowd waiting at the train station.
There were a great many people there from Wonnam — the well-fed wives and their families, all of them.
A special train had even been arranged just for this group.
WHOOOOOOONK
“Hm? What is that sound?”
“Is there some strange beast that cries like that?”
“Haha. Daehan is a land of wonders, isn't it?”
The train, having finished its warm-up in the yard far behind, was rolling toward them with its whistle blaring — and the people assumed it was some kind of animal.
Chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga.
“Oh? Is someone playing an instrument somewhere?”
“It sounds like some kind of instrument — the rhythm's so steady, and sort of cheerful, isn't it?”
The train drew steadily closer, swung around in a wide arc, and began pulling into the station.
“….”
“What is that?”
“Good heavens….”
The hundreds of people from Wonnam — everyone except the forty-eight Daehan soldiers — thought their eyes must be deceiving them.
A massive lump of gleaming metal was bearing down on them.
THUD
“Mother of mercy….”
“A-are we being taken away?”
“Waaah!”
Some collapsed where they stood in fright, and children burst into tears.
“Everyone, please calm down. It's just a vehicle. Think of it as a llama. Or an alpaca.”
“A thing… like that?”
“We ride them all the time, so don't worry. It's really nothing at all.”
After much coaxing and comforting, the people finally managed to climb aboard, and the passenger cars, as always, were lined with rooms neatly finished in wood, each furnished with sleeping berths and simple storage cabinets.
The people filed into their rooms.
“Oh? What a soft chair this is!”
“That's a berth. It's for sleeping. We have days of travel ahead, so you'll be doing quite a lot of it.”
“We have to sleep too? It must be slower than it looks, then.”
As the people marveled at passenger cars far finer appointed than anything back home, the train began to move.
WHOOOOOOONK
“Honestly! That thing is loud.”
Now that they'd heard it once, far fewer people were startled by it.
SCREEECH — clunk-clunk.
“Oh! It's really moving!”
“And carrying this many people, too — hahaha. That's actually fun.”
As the train slowly got under way, the cars were packed with people marveling all over again at the miracle of motion.
Chugga-chugga, clunk-clunk.
But the train kept picking up speed.
“Um… e-excuse me? It's getting a little scary. Could we go slower?”
“We're going to go even faster than this.”
The train had only just begun moving faster than a jogging pace, and already they were growing anxious.
After all, the fastest things these people had ever known in their lives were arrows and the great beasts that sprinted through the forest.
Clunk-clunk.
“It's… it's a bit frightening.”
“This much is nothing….”
As the speed climbed, so did the trembling in their legs. Too frightened to look directly, they stole glances out the windows.
Five full days of running from Ara Southern Port to Sinju, and by the end the passengers had mostly adjusted, watching the scenery pass with calm eyes.
“What kind of farmland is this vast?”
“Haha. If you count what's beyond the horizon, it's far bigger still.”
“No wonder there's never a shortage of food….”
Gazing out over the Central Plains, the people finally understood where all that mountains of food Daehan shipped to Wonnam actually came from.
“Haha. Wonnam really was a tiny little patch of dirt, wasn't it!”
Above all, the land they had raced across for five straight days had been staggering in its size. And even at this speed, the land simply refused to end.
“What—what is that?”
“Good heavens….”
“Could a god truly dwell here?”
And when they witnessed the centerpiece of it all — the Tree of Sinju — even those who had never known faith found it taking root in their hearts.
“So this is a land watched over by the gods?”
“The gods really do exist?”
“Oh, come now. Gods, really?”
“Then look at that tree. Have any of you ever seen a tree even half that size — no, even a tenth of it?”
The Tree of Sinju boasted a size that utterly crushed the imagination. Its crown towered so high it seemed to brush the clouds themselves.
* * *
“Rari, Father — you two need to get off now and prepare.”
“Prepare for what?”
“You need to prepare clothing.”
“Oh! Right — you said it gets cold enough to freeze to death.”
Even the highland desert of Wonnam grew quite cold at night, but the northern regions they were about to ascend to was a brutal, incomparable deep freeze.
If they climbed up in the clothes they had now, they might end up crossing the sea as frozen fish.
And so they disembarked with the others and headed out to see the market.
“Wow! This place is packed with people too!”
“Careful.”
“But Yungie will catch me, won't you?”
When Rari stumbled, jostled by the crowd, Lee Yung caught her in his arms and scolded her — only for her to lean right into him.
Behind them, the father-in-law watched his daughter receive such loving care, his face brimming over with nothing but a gentle smile.
“Wow. There are so many clothes!”
“Pick out whatever you like.”
“Oh!”
And Rari truly did begin picking out whatever she liked.
She tried on this outfit, then that one, spending hours in a daze of nothing but clothes-shopping — and in the end, bought only a handful of garments.
Watching her buzz around the stalls, chattering away without a hint of fatigue despite her full belly, Lee Yung and his father-in-law could only marvel.
“Remarkable….”
“I never knew she was like this….”
“But you two really should pick out some warm clothes. It gets truly cold up there.”
“Haha! Cold means nothing to a warrior!”
The old man had chosen only a couple of outer coats, which left Lee Yung feeling a little uneasy, so he quietly slipped a padded garment into the pile.
The women here were already rubbing their arms against the chill — the far north was something they could scarcely imagine.
Soon Lee Yung and his father-in-law were hauling armfuls of clothing back onto the train, and his fellow soldiers were all in much the same state.
“Haha….”
“You too?”
“Look around. Everyone.”
“Kukukuk.”
Looking at one another, their faces were exhausted — but the smiles on those soldiers' faces looked truly, genuinely happy.
They all silently resolved never to accompany their women to a market again, of course.
With its passengers accounted for, the train now set off toward the great white north.
***
RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE.
A shaking like an earthquake coursed through the passenger cars.
“Father? You're cold, aren't you?”
“N-no! This much is nothing!”
“Dad! I told you to put on more clothes!”
Whether it was a man's pride or a warrior's, one man was well on his way to freezing solid.
“Pssh, nonsense!”
“Dad! What if you catch a cold? You'd pass it to me, wouldn't you?”
“Oh! Well, that I can't do — not for the child's sake!”
Handed a perfect excuse, he reversed course without a moment's hesitation and began digging out his clothes.
But all he had bought were outer coats. Layering them on did little to warm him.
He was still shivering away, chattering teeth and all, when—
“Father, I bought this in advance. Try layering it under. It's truly warm.”
“W-well then. A warrior mustn't fall ill! Health above all!”
Lee Yung held out a Kkalkkali — Daehan's special-issue padded jacket, stuffed tight with the finest cotton. Thin as it was, it was packed with pressed quilting, the supreme cold-weather garment.
“Sniff… Thank you, son. I've got no one but you.”
Once he had it on, the old man could not have been happier. The bone-boring cold had vanished before he knew it.
“From now on, I'll listen to everything you say.”
“Don't mention it — you didn't know. It's cold now, but there are even colder places ahead.”
“What? Colder than this?”
For now the passenger cars blocked the wind, but shortly they would cross a short stretch of sea route — a truly fearsome place where the wind threatened to peel your nose and ears clean off.
Perhaps, in that brief moment of stepping off the train and onto the ship, he would get a taste of hell itself.
* * *
The people of Wonnam were pushing through cold harsher than any they had known in their lives, crossing the continent toward Sinsi.
“Seriously? Everything we've passed so far — all of it is Daehan's land?”
“There's plenty of unsettled territory left, but yes, you could think of it that way.”
“Wow….”
The train thundered on across a land with no end in sight.
And at last, they arrived at the grasslands.
“Wow! There's land like this too!”
“It's like our home — but with so much more grass!”
The northern reaches of the Sinsi Plains sat at a fair altitude as well, but unlike the Andes, here the land was thick with lush grass everywhere you looked.
Gone was the dry, dust-choked smell of Wonnam; in its place, air heavy with the scent of grass, rich with moisture, almost humid.
“Look, it's raining again!”
“Haha. To think there's a place with water this plentiful.”
To people who had lived on arid wasteland, the abundance of water was almost beyond imagining.
Run a little while and you crossed a river; rain fell at all hours — it was a land made for living.
The stickiness and damp might feel uncomfortable, but water in plenty was the greatest blessing they could have wished for.
And as they drew nearer to Sinsi, the crowds grew thicker, and the sight of people farming peacefully across the plains brought a dampness to the two travelers' eyes.
“I really do believe it now — this is a land under the gods' care.”
“So that's how it is….”
“This is Sinsi.”
And before their eyes spread a colossal city, vast as the sea.
Everywhere hung the savory aroma of potato pancakes frying, the sweet drift of sugar on the air.
Fields turned not by human hands but by noisy, tireless machines.
Thus began the Sinsi life of the people who had come from the far side of the world.