Choice and Focus
It had already been four days since Sa Unsik began staying with Yoo Eunhyeon. As always, Yoo Eunhyeon was out in the fields, diligently working the land.
Even afterward, Sa Unsik continued to watch Yoo Eunhyeon’s every move with keen attention. Perhaps because of what had happened before, he now tossed out the occasional question as well.
Then, as the sun was nearly setting, Sa Unsik stood gazing at Yoo Eunhyeon, who was plucking peaches from the orchard trees and tossing them carelessly onto the ground.
“Little Brother. Why pluck perfectly good fruit only to throw it away?”
“Ah, these? Because they get in the way of the others.”
“Get in the way? Isn’t farming about a good, plentiful harvest in the first place? If you keep stripping them all like that, you’ll have hardly any left.”
“Well, a big harvest is nice, of course… but quality matters too, doesn’t it? When there are too many, none of them can grow properly.”
“Can’t grow properly? Once you’ve planted them and are tending them together, isn’t raising one the same as raising three?”
Ordinarily the exchange would have ended with a simple question, but Sa Unsik seemed unable to accept the answer and began pressing more insistently. Yoo Eunhyeon paused in his work for a moment and cleared his throat.
“This work is called fruit thinning. If, as you say, Lord, raising one were truly the same as raising three, that would be one thing—but a tree’s vigor… simply put, its capacity to nurture has its limits.”
“Isn’t that simply because the tree lacks ability? If one were teaching people, teaching ten at once or a hundred would be the same task.”
“Yes. That’s true enough. But… teaching many people doesn’t produce the same results, does it?”
When Yoo Eunhyeon asked as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Sa Unsik gave a firm nod.
“Of course. People differ in the innate ability of their single bodies, so even when they learn the same things, their achievements cannot help but differ.”
“Then what happens? Ordinarily… doesn’t attention naturally concentrate on those of greater ability?”
“Indeed. One of outstanding talent is worth teaching even if it costs a thousand gold.”
As he spoke, Sa Unsik regarded Yoo Eunhyeon with a peculiar look. Unaware of that gaze, Yoo Eunhyeon continued.
“But trees are uselessly fair and without discrimination. When many fruits hang upon them, they try to send nutrients out evenly. So if you leave them be, they all end up growing only halfway. In the worst case, most of the fruit that sets will be small and tasteless.”
“Indeed… Yes. Even I would rather raise one expert than ten third-rate martial artists.”
Seeing him link everything to martial arts, Yoo Eunhyeon thought, A man of the Murim is a man of the Murim after all. He looked at Sa Unsik quietly, then nodded and went on.
“But that doesn’t mean you can just pluck them at random. You have to look carefully at the tree’s vigor and choose so that the leaves growing from the extended branches don’t shade the fruit too much.”
“Recognizing talent is no easy matter.”
“Yes. And it differs every year depending on the situation. In the end, the core of the work is holding a future in mind—how this tree bore good fruit in the past under what conditions, and how I am going to raise it from here on.”
Sa Unsik fell silent for a moment at Yoo Eunhyeon’s words, then asked again as if he could scarcely believe it.
“Little Brother, you can see that? How it will grow?”
“Yes. Though it’s only been about two or three years since I could see it clearly.”
“Oho… So you can see the future, then.”
“The future? Hardly. I’m wrong sometimes too.”
In truth, when it came to farming, Yoo Eunhyeon could predict nine times out of ten… no, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. There was no need to say so, so he cleared his throat and pretended otherwise.
“In the end it’s choice and focus. You know your subject clearly, discard what must be discarded without hesitation, and take only what is worth taking. Only after you’ve imitated what came before and come to know the surrounding environment and the tree over a long time do you finally become able to discard.”
Drawing a parallel to the conversation he had had with Sa Unsik the day before, Yoo Eunhyeon spoke, and Sa Unsik murmured,
“So in the end it is choice and focus…”
Seeing him like that, Yoo Eunhyeon also paused briefly, then added as if to close the matter.
“A few days ago, Lord, you spoke of learning as well. I think farming, too, began with coming to know nature. But simply coming to know it was too vast a thing for any one person to manage, so little by little people came to follow the paths that others had accumulated.”
Sa Unsik’s eyes, which had seemed to be quietly contemplating something, turned back toward Yoo Eunhyeon.
That gaze was fixed on him, yet somehow it also seemed to be looking somewhere else entirely beyond him.
Yoo Eunhyeon simply continued, words rising unbidden as he recalled the past.
“Following along, one comes to walk one’s own path, sees a great many things, and tries blindly to chase only what is above. But that was wrong. What one needed to look at was below—at oneself. The eyes may look upward, but the mind must always remain focused on what one has chosen, what one will do for its sake, and how one will do it.”
At some point—he could not say when—Yoo Eunhyeon had clearly felt that truth.
In fact he had felt far more than this while farming, but for now this was all he could offer Sa Unsik.
As he listened to Yoo Eunhyeon’s story, Sa Unsik’s eyes were no longer on the young man but fixed upon empty air.
“I sought to possess all things under heaven, yet even that was the choosing of one single thing called ‘everything’… In the end I was so sunk in my own desire that I failed even to notice it. Hahahaha!”
Suddenly Sa Unsik threw back his head and burst into wild laughter toward the sky. In an instant his entire bearing changed—so markedly that even Yoo Eunhyeon noticed it at once.
He could not pinpoint exactly what it was, only vaguely sense the shift in that aura.
Still laughing, Sa Unsik vanished without the slightest warning.
“Wha—?!”
So swift was the movement that Yoo Eunhyeon cried out as if he had seen a ghost vanish in broad daylight.
The space around where Sa Unsik had stood fell silent as though nothing had ever happened. Yoo Eunhyeon absently scratched his head and muttered,
“I wasn’t really trying to catch him or anything… but when he just disappears like that it leaves me feeling unsettled…”
Even as he muttered, he found himself turning over the words he had spoken and lingering in their aftertaste. He had never calmly put farming into words like this before.
“Ah! But this is no time for that!”
Still scratching his head, Yoo Eunhyeon suddenly hurried back toward the peach trees.
The sun would be down soon.
That evening, seeing that Sa Unsik still had not returned, Yoo Eunhyeon muttered,
“Has he left for good? Ghostlike whether he’s coming or going.”
The thought crossed his mind that something might have happened, and a faint loneliness stirred as well, but he soon shook his head. The man had never been one who would stay long anyway.
“The Murim…”
Still, looking back, the time had been quite rewarding. He had thought it the story of another world with which he would never have any connection in his life.
And the fearsome-looking Sa Unsik, once they had lived together, had not seemed like such a bad person. Thanks to that, even the vague dread he had felt toward men of the Murim had faded.
What does it feel like to have the power to soar through the sky and split the earth? And what does one do with that kind of power? It’s not as if they’d farm like me, that’s for sure.
Farming’s hard enough—martial arts must be even harder. Never mind the martial arts; I wish I could just quit farming for a while… no, rest a little. It’s not that I hate farming, but spending my whole life like this doesn’t seem quite right either.
Of course farming, which he had done since childhood, had grown tedious, yet even if he quit this very moment he had no particular desire to do anything else.
He had only been yearning for the outside world; spending a few days with Sa Unsik had only made him more restless.
But Yoo Eunhyeon simply set the thought aside. He was not so foolish as not to know what he could do and what he ought to do.
“Hahaha. Little Brother is still the same.”
And just then, as abruptly as he had vanished, Sa Unsik appeared behind Yoo Eunhyeon.
Yoo Eunhyeon jumped again as if he had seen a ghost and, voice a little flushed, reproached him.
“I thought you had left for good, Lord.”
“Haha. When I have received so great a gift, how could I simply leave?”
The way Sa Unsik spoke, he looked as delighted as a man who had come into gold and jewels.
“Pardon? A gift? From whom?”
“Who else? From you, Little Brother.”
“I didn’t give you anything.”
At Sa Unsik’s sudden words, Yoo Eunhyeon could only look blank.
All he had done was talk with the man.
“Even if you did it without knowing, the fact that it came from you does not change, so I must repay it. Is there anything you desire?”
Whatever it was, it seemed to have been of great help to him. At Sa Unsik’s question about what he wanted, Yoo Eunhyeon fell silent in thought.
…What am I supposed to say?
Asked outright for something he wanted, nothing came to mind. Of course that did not mean he wanted nothing at all.
On a small scale there were things like hoping it would not rain tomorrow, or that the wind would not blow too hard.
And looking a little larger, hoping the weather this year would be good and bring a bountiful harvest, and so on.
Those were all that Yoo Eunhyeon wished for.
What more would a farmer wish for than that his farming go well?
“Speak what you desire.”
Sa Unsik began to look straight at Yoo Eunhyeon as if he would grant the wish no matter what. In that gaze lay the confidence that he could grant anything the young man named.
Yet somehow the look was chilling, enough to send a shiver through him. It felt like entering into a dangerous bargain in which one sold one’s soul.
After only his lips had moved for a while, Yoo Eunhyeon finally opened his mouth.
“I-I’d like to go outside once.”
Perhaps sensing the unease instinctively, Yoo Eunhyeon stammered a little. Sa Unsik asked again as if surprised.
“Go outside? Have you come to hate farming?”
“It’s not that I’ve come to hate farming, but…”
“Then is there something you wish to do?”
In truth he had never thought that far.
When Yoo Eunhyeon shook his head, Sa Unsik let out a laugh that whistled like escaping wind, as if to ease the tension.
“Haha! What good is a young man with so little desire! Think carefully. As long as one lives, there is no one without desire. A person without desire is no different from a dead man. Even those who pretend to be detached from the world have only buried it deep in their chests.”
There was a strange resonance in Sa Unsik’s words.
As if ruled by them, Yoo Eunhyeon began to call up more calmly what he truly wanted.
If it’s something I want…
It was, of course, his mother Su Hwa-seon’s health. Perhaps a martial artist as formidable-looking as Sa Unsik could cure her chronic illness.
The thought flashed through his mind, but Yoo Eunhyeon soon shook his head.
No matter how mighty a man of the Murim might be, he would not be able to cure Su Hwa-seon’s illness.
And more than anything, Yoo Eunhyeon did not want to reveal Su Hwa-seon’s existence to Sa Unsik.
Especially since he already guessed that her natal family had ties to a Murim sect.
Though Yoo Eunhyeon was not well-versed in the inner workings of the Murim, he knew well enough how tangled the grudges and debts of that world could become.
Casually speaking Su Hwa-seon’s name and having the matter spread like wildfire was something he must refuse.
“……”
When Yoo Eunhyeon kept silent, unable to answer easily, Sa Unsik stepped a little closer and spoke as if whispering.
“Heh heh. Little Brother still does not know how to properly reveal his own desires. It can’t be helped, I suppose. One who does not usually harbor great ambitions can hardly speak of such things at once. Very well. I’ll help you a little.”
“Pardon?”
Yoo Eunhyeon asked back at once, not grasping the intent of the words, but Sa Unsik, as if he would wait no longer, immediately posed the question.
“Have you no mind to follow me?”