This House Is Not a Warehouse
“So. There is one thing I figured out for sure.”
“So what is it? Stop beating around the bush and spit it out. It better not be something trivial.”
Under Yoo Eunhyeon’s badgering, Ju Yu-ryeon nodded and pressed on.
“It’s simply this… nothing’s more stimulating than something new! Same places every day, the same old faces—then you meet new people somewhere you’ve never been, and it’s a whole different rush.”
She announced it as if she had made some groundbreaking discovery. Yoo Eunhyeon’s face soured on the spot. Ju Yu-ryeon paid him no mind; her cheeks still glowed with leftover excitement, as though her heart had not yet settled.
“I was an idiot for expecting anything. Real smooth. Fine for me, but aren’t you a little ashamed to face Mother after that?”
“Oh, come on. What’s the big deal? Auntie never nags, does she?”
“And you aren’t worried it’ll reach Auntie Yeo U-hui’s ears later?”
“If I’m going to get scolded anyway, I might as well go all out. Once, ten times, a hundred times—it’s all the same. The lecture won’t suddenly become a hundred times worse. Two or three times at most? In that case, doing it a hundred times is the better deal, right?”
Yoo Eunhyeon snorted at her strangely logical reasoning. Ju Yu-ryeon lifted a finger again and launched into more sophistry.
“Besides, forgiveness is easier than permission. Don’t you know? Just do it first and deal with it later.”
“In my case I end up having to stop people like that whether I want to or not… Anyway, help with the work!”
Yoo Eunhyeon shouted as if every second wasted was a crime, but Ju Yu-ryeon only clicked her tongue, far from finished.
“Tsk tsk. Of course that wasn’t all. It was information gathering too, you know? Did you really think I just went out to play?”
“If this turns out to be another joke, I really won’t let it slide.”
“Listen. While I was out yesterday I asked the people I met whether they knew anything about this place. Not everyone, but a few of them did. They went, ‘That warehouse?’ and so on.”
“Tch. Calling someone else’s house a warehouse…”
Yoo Eunhyeon grumbled. Ju Yu-ryeon lowered her voice toward him.
“But some of what they said was odd. Everyone insisted this was just an ordinary warehouse, yet detailed reports about it are going all the way up the merchant guild’s chain of command.”
“Hmm? Don’t reports usually get filed?”
“They do. But you don’t send daily status reports on something this minor, do you?”
Yoo Eunhyeon’s eyes widened a fraction. She was right—there was no reason to file day-after-day reports on a warehouse full of junk with no one even stationed there.
“And people don’t even come every day. So what are they reporting?”
“The details? I have no idea. Could just be a rumor.”
“……I’ll have to ask Mother about it too.”
In the end the two of them alone could reach no conclusion. Yoo Eunhyeon tossed the thought out lightly and rose to his feet again. Ju Yu-ryeon, knowing it was time to move her body rather than keep joking around, followed after him.
The two of them spent roughly two shichen tidying the fields. Yoo Eunhyeon glanced up at the sky for a moment, then got to his feet.
“That’ll do for today.”
“Already? There’s still a while before the sun sets.”
Ju Yu-ryeon asked back in surprise at the unexpected suggestion, but Yoo Eunhyeon had his reasons.
“Mother said she’d be back from the village around now. No point leaving the house empty for long.”
In truth, leaving the house empty had once been everyday life for them. Lately, though, Yoo Eunhyeon had arranged that at least one of the three always stayed behind. The people who had been treating the place like a warehouse would certainly return someday.
“Really? What for?”
“Obvious, isn’t it? More information gathering.”
Su Hwa-seon’s trips down to the village had grown more frequent for the sake of collecting intelligence. She had far more experience than the two of them, and as an outsider in Doryeonhyeon the villagers treated her as just another traveler, making it easier for her to move about.
“She’s already left? Did we miss each other on the road?”
Apparently they had crossed paths with Su Hwa-seon heading down to the village; the house was empty when they arrived. Yet she could not have been gone long—the dumplings she had left for them as a snack were still steaming hot.
“That’s Auntie for you. How did she know we’d be worn out from yesterday?”
Ju Yu-ryeon’s face lit up at the sight of food and she reached for a dumpling—only for her hand to freeze midair. At the exact same moment Yoo Eunhyeon turned toward the door.
“Tch. Of all times.”
Ju Yu-ryeon clicked her tongue lightly and turned as well. Moments later the sound of people murmuring outside the door began to rise.
—Huh? What the—there’s no lock?
—That stuff sitting outside looks like it came from the warehouse, doesn’t it? What’s going on? Was someone else supposed to be using it?
—No way. I never heard anything like that. Geontaek, open it.
The muttering did not last long. Soon the door swung open.
Bang.
Two middle-aged men stood outside. They were clearly the ones who had just been talking. Behind them two more middle-aged men pulled a cart loaded with broken picks and shovels.
“…….”
“…….”
Through the open doorway Yoo Eunhyeon and the men stared at each other in silence for a beat.
Yoo Eunhyeon had more or less expected this, so he was not startled; only the men seemed unable to process the situation. Naturally there was no thought of exchanging polite greetings. Yoo Eunhyeon fixed the outsiders with an intimidating glare, determined not to be pushed around. The man in the lead flinched at the force of it, yet opened his mouth all the same.
“Who the hell are you? Why are you inside someone else’s warehouse? And how did you open the lock?”
Yoo Eunhyeon looked young, and the person beside him was a woman—Ju Yu-ryeon—so the man shouted at him in a high-handed tone, as if refusing to back down. Yoo Eunhyeon had not even put inner energy into his gaze, and the men outnumbered them by a wide margin; that seemed to have given the fellow courage.
“Someone else’s warehouse? This place?”
Naturally Yoo Eunhyeon’s attitude turned equally crooked. His still-youthful voice only seemed to embolden the men further.
“Well now. They’ve gone and set up house completely. Foreman Yongpyeong, these two look like a married couple to me.”
“Some pair of criminals who ran off into the mountains after committing a crime? Tch. What a nuisance. Listen here. We’re workers of the Black Lotus Merchant Guild. This warehouse belongs to the Black Lotus Merchant Guild, so get out at once.”
The man called Yongpyeong waved his hand as if shooing away an annoying fly. Watching him, Geontaek complained.
“Eh? You’re just going to let them go?”
“And if I don’t? Don’t go starting useless trouble.”
Yongpyeong frowned and warned Geontaek, who had been staring openly at Ju Yu-ryeon. Geontaek immediately waved both hands in vigorous denial.
“It’s not like that, sir. Look what a mess they’ve made of the warehouse—shouldn’t they at least restore it first? If we have to clean all this up ourselves it’ll take us till dawn.”
“Hmm…… you’ve got a point. You two—take your belongings and get out.”
Yongpyeong turned away from the silent Yoo Eunhyeon, still sounding thoroughly irritated as he issued the hurried warning. He had been somewhat flustered by Yoo Eunhyeon’s attitude at first, but work apparently mattered more.
“These people aren’t listening to a word we say.”
“That’s why they were using someone else’s house as a warehouse in the first place.”
Ju Yu-ryeon whispered to Yoo Eunhyeon in disbelief. Yoo Eunhyeon, equally floored by the two men’s behavior, simply watched.
Of course he had no intention of putting up with such nonsense. He clapped his palms together lightly as if to call for attention, then spoke.
“Quit the useless talk and get out yourselves. And take every last bit of that junk you left outside with you.”
“What did you say?”
Yongpyeong’s head snapped around, his expression turning ugly. Naturally Yoo Eunhyeon did not so much as blink as he repeated himself.
“I said take that trash outside and leave.”
“Ha…… listen to the mouth on this little brat.”
Geontaek muttered as if he could not believe his ears. He looked ready to charge forward at any moment, but Yongpyeong blocked him once more.
“I know the world’s gone to hell these days, but I never imagined people this shameless existed. My patience is pretty good, but it isn’t endless.”
“That’s why I’ve been telling you to leave since earlier—why should we be the ones to leave?”
“Do you have any idea how long we’ve been using this place as a warehouse? Over a year. If you had eyes when you walked in, you must have seen the cargo that was already here.”
Yongpyeong muttered as if he were the one who could not believe it—yet the one truly stunned was Yoo Eunhyeon.
“You’re the ones who have no idea how long we’ve lived here. At least forty years. Even without eyes you ought to be able to tell this was a house people lived in.”
“Hear, hear!”
Ju Yu-ryeon stretched both hands out in cheering support. Yongpyeong paused for a moment at Yoo Eunhyeon’s words, then opened his mouth again.
“Don’t give me that rubbish. This place was empty from the start. No one had lived here for at least a year.”
“Listen. Just because you leave a house empty for a while, does that mean the owner disappears? If you leave something sitting in your house for a year and someone else picks it up, does the ownership change? By that logic if you deposit money with a pawnbroker for a year the money becomes the pawnbroker’s. The original owner is still the owner, isn’t he?”
Yongpyeong closed his mouth, apparently at a loss for words. Of course even if the owner left something abandoned for decades rather than a single year, that did not mean anyone else could simply take it and claim ownership. That would simply be robbery.
“And where did this ‘forty years’ suddenly come from? The two of you look twenty at most.”
When Yongpyeong fell silent, Geontaek stepped in roughly to argue. Yoo Eunhyeon only shrugged, as if wondering what the problem was.
“That’s because our grandfather’s generation lived here, of course. You saw the fields around here, right? You didn’t think they grew there by themselves, did you?”
“Obviously people made them. But that doesn’t prove you made them. You think you can just walk into an empty house and claim it was yours all along and that’ll fly?”
Geontaek spoke with full confidence. Yoo Eunhyeon looked briefly flustered—not because he had no answer, but because he had not expected Geontaek to say something quite so stupid.
“Then you don’t have any proof this was your warehouse either. You admitted yourselves you just occupied an empty house and used it as a warehouse. We got here, found nobody home, and decided to live here. Same thing, isn’t it?”
“Are these people idiots?”
Ju Yu-ryeon whispered, equally dumbfounded. Yongpyeong pressed a hand to his forehead, but Geontaek rushed to speak again.
“The lock! There was a lock on the door! We at least leave evidence!”
“A lock? There was one of those?”
At Geontaek’s frantic shout Yoo Eunhyeon cocked his head in genuine puzzlement and looked at Ju Yu-ryeon. She shook her head.
“There wasn’t anything like that.”
“She says there wasn’t. How about bringing that evidence you like so much?”
Yoo Eunhyeon grinned mockingly at Geontaek. Geontaek, left with nothing to say, trembled with rage.
“You insolent little brats!”
Unlike Yongpyeong, who preferred persuasion, Geontaek was a man who could not control his temper. His voice alone was master-class; he bellowed loud enough to shake the house, seized a shovel whose front end had snapped off into a sharp edge, and charged at Yoo Eunhyeon.
Yoo Eunhyeon still could not move his body properly. He could only watch the sharp iron blade flying toward him.
Whoosh!
In that instant, only air as thin as ice cut between the two of them.