Translator: Wan ED/PR: Personal Ghost
⟨Chapter 46⟩
⟨Peach Blossom Spring⟩
Long time ago, a woodcutter was cutting wood in the mountains, when a deer appeared. The woodcutter followed the deer and entered a dark cave. Unexpectedly, that place was not a cave, but another world dense with peach blossoms.
After he grabbed an inhabitant and asked what is that place, the person replied ‘Peach Blossom Spring’. Long time ago they entered this village to avoid the chaos, and they lived like hermits, eternally young.
The woodcutter received a dream-like reception in that place, and after leaving, he took his family and headed to the Peach Blossom Spring again. But no matter how long he searched, he couldn’t find that place the second time.
『On the origin of all things』
“Please come in.”
The clerk in a formal dress bowed and greeted him.
Yu Dan pushed the shopping cart, while entering the mart.
There was always food in the refrigerator. Thanks to the housekeeper, who his father found for him, while going to China, who came to help on weekdays mornings, everything was prepared so he had to just reheat it in the microwave and eat it. They lived in a different location, and left everything clean without any need for him to bother with anything. But as if they were tipped about what kind of personality he had, he never saw their face.
So it wasn’t necessary to go buy groceries, but Mia always nagged him. Before you’re a boy, you’re a human. At least replenish daily necessitates. So when things like water, milk or toothpaste run out, he would visit a general mart. Because it was too crowded on the weekends, he would usually go on the Friday night.
There were quite a lot of people who came to do groceries alone at this time. Perhaps they were filling up the refrigerators ahead of the weekend. Wasn’t that how people, who live alone, usually were?
Yu Dan first put a pack of six mineral water bottles in the cart. As he walked, looking around, an energy drink with stimulating effects caught his eye. If he drank this, he wouldn’t sleep. Didn’t the long-distance truck drivers in the England put in the PET bottles, put a straw in and drink it, while driving? When he heard that, he thought that was pretty cool. He wanted to be a long-distance truck driver…
Anyhow, it was impossible to realize that right now. But opportunely it was a Friday night, so how about he drank this and stayed up all night? While thinking so, he grabbed the can, but someone passed him, when he was putting it in the shopping cart.
At that moment.
A certain smell wafted over. No, a fragrance. It was a wonderful fragrance, that he never smelled before. Wind, trees, sunlight, grass… Such images flashed incoherently.
Yu Dan looked back.
He saw the back of middle-aged man, pushing the cart full of all kinds of things. He seemed to be a company employee who just left work.
His heart was racing fast. He felt strange.
Was it perhaps a supernatural creature?
He hastily followed after him.
“Excuse me.”
The middle-aged man’s shoulders flinched. Then he suddenly broke into a run.
As expected, it was someone suspicious.
“Stop there!”
Yu Dan threw away the cart, and he ran after the man. The man broke through the people and ran to the escalator leading to the basement parking lot.
Keeeihk!
Luckily, the approaching car, suddenly stopped. He hastily used the gap to catch the surprised man.
“Caught!”
“Aaack!”
He screamed like a shriek.
It was a somewhat timid looking man, with receding hair and horn-rimmed glasses. An ordinary company employee uncle, who sometimes met every day in the apartment complex.
But he had an irking feeling of discomfort. A clear feeling of supernatural.
“What is your identity?”
“Do-don’t!”
The man gripped his chest with a trembling hand. There was something there.
“What?”
After he suddenly jerked his arm, a button fell off and his chest was exposed.
Yu Dan was startled.
A monster.
That’s what he thought at first.
The chest of this middle-aged company employee changed strangely, as if it was a monster. It was because of a necklace he wore. Small root-like things sprouted from the droplet shaped green pendant and burrowed into the man’s chest.
The already occupied parts became hard and shriveled like wood bark. The more he looked, the creepier it became. It looked like it was impossible to remove this necklace and roots, which spread out in the four directions and dug into the flesh.
Yu Dan asked with a frighted face.
“What is that?”
“I-I don’t know! I heard it’s just a health necklace, so..”
“It doesn’t look healthy at all!”
“Anyways, he said he bought it under such a name! I got it as a gift from a subordinate, who came back from a business trip!”
The man shouted with a pale face.
“I thought I had nothing to lose and decided to put it on just once! But because my head somehow cleared, my heart relaxed, and my stress seemed to decrease, I kept wearing it day and night… I don’t know when it became like this! I didn’t do anything! I have a family! The company won’t do without me! Please don’t report me! I don’t want to be dragged away and dissected!”
“…uh?”
What was that about dissection just now?
It seemed there was a big misunderstanding here. Yu Dan looked at the man with an absurd face.
What are you thinking?
Anyhow, it seemed he was a victim. It was necessary he was dealt with a bit more softly.
“I’m not going to report You.”
“You aren’t?”
“This is a supernatural thing. One of the strange things that wander this land since ancient times. It can be solved if we know what it is and send it back to its original place, so…”
“It can be solved?”
The man was shocked.
“You mean you can cure it?”
“Maybe? If it goes well?”
“Please save me! My wife and two daughters went to America! The children’s future is in my hands! I have to work hard to earn money to send it to them!”
At that moment a white passenger car approached. A woman in the driving seat looked at them strangely.
Looking now, it would look like a highschooler, looking to have a bad temper, was blackmailing a frightened uncle in the parking lot corner. They might cause some kind of misunderstanding, so they should leave and then talk.
He turned around and waved, and the man hastily followed.
“It’s terrifying. Those roots are gradually spreading. Every time I dream that strange dream.”
“Strange dream?”
“I always go to the same location. At first, I thought it was foreign country, but that’s not it. It’s another world.”
“Like a fantasy world?”
“Similar. There is always a warm spring there. Everything, whatever it is, is soft. The ground is soft, the wind is soft. The flowers always blooming on the trees, and the air has a sweet scent.”
The man closed his eyes for a moment.
“The people are wearing clothes like the Chinese from old times, and everyone has happy faces. The children sung songs, while running around. I don’t understand their language, but it’s a nice song. In that place, people have no worries. So I forgot all my worries with them. The company work, the family and children, the money problem, the car problem, the insurance problem. I forgot them all and became comfortable. It’s a paradise.”
At that moment the necklace made a ‘thud-thud’ sound and wriggled like a racing heart. The man, who was telling the story as if drunk, was startled.
“Anyways, when I have such a happy dream, those strange root-like things gradually stretch out more. They go faster as they move. When I noticed it, they already burrowed into my flesh and I couldn’t take it off. Fearing I may become a research subject, I didn’t go even to a hospital.”
His body trembled.
“What did I become now…?”
Yu Dan fell into thoughts, while looking at the man’s pale face.
***
It rained in the yard.
Last spring rain. The raindrops poured relentlessly over an old tree and a pond. Piano music kept flowing out since a moment ago from the turntable in the corner of the maru[1].
He heard a familiar melody at a certain point. Yu Dan leaned his ears to the piano music that felt like droplets hitting the ground for a while.
Was that piece called Raindrop Prelude? Where did he hear it?
The fox yokai was resting his chin on his hand and sitting at the desk placed on the maru. He kept that posture since they came out to the backyard.
Then he abruptly opened his mouth.
“Lotus eaters…”
“Lotus eaters?”
“Long time ago, sailors drifted around and arrived in a certain country. It was a place where the people eating fruits of lotus lived. The lotus eaters offered the lotus’ fruits to the sailors. After eating them, they became drowsy as if dreaming and forgot all their anxieties. They even forgot about their journey home and wanted to live in that country for eternity. Because of that, the sailor’s captain had to catch them, tie them up and forcibly drag them back.”
Baek Ran finished the story and looked at him.
“That’s a Greek story. To be precise, it’s『 Odyssey』.”
“Ah, it wasn’t a legend from our country?”
Yu Dan shrugged, and looked at the yard in the rain again.
“But then what about it?”
“It just came to mind.”
Baek Ran also looked at the yard.
“The easiest way to find happiness may be oblivion. Because in the place where the reality can be forgotten, anyone can be happy. Wherever such a legend about a utopia exist, the content is similar. Someone lost their way and by coincidence they entered a different world. That place would be a pretty and comfortable paradise, separate from the mundane world. They would stay for a while and then leave to find this place again, but they wouldn’t be able to find it the second time…”
“I know that one. The Land of Peach Blossom. I heard about it in school.”
“Yes. The paradise, where peach blossoms fully bloom is called Peach Blossom Spring. That strange necklace is a seed that came from that very Peach Blossom Spring.”
“Seed?”
“The seed of a tree in the Peach Blossom Spring. I had one in the past, I lost it. I don’t know where it is.”
Baek Ran took out one of the books piling up at the side of the desk and opened it. It was a book depicting various bizarre plants. Page after page, he browsed through the paintings, looking for something.
“Is it this one?”
“Yeah.”
The painting in the book was exactly like the pendant of that middle-aged company worker. He thought it resembled a droplet, but hearing the story and looking at this, it resembled a seed.
“This seed, which entered this world by coincidence, was mistaken for a jewel and someone made it into a necklace. It wasn’t intentional, but it was truly lucky. Because it sprouts in the body of a living being.”
He recalled the chest that became like that of a monster. The tissue stretching out of the necklace and the man’s vessels integrated, and the skin hardened and wrinkled, changing into a wood bark.
“It looks like it sprouted, huh?”
“To put it differently, it looks like it’s dreaming.”
“Dreaming?”
“Like a woodcutter, it lost its way and by coincidence entered a Peach Blossom Spring. It’s exactly like that for this seed. It lost its way and by a coincidence it entered our world.”
The fox yokai’s gaze turned distant for a while.
“Before the tree of the Peach Blossom Spring dies, it sends out a seed. This seed wanders around while sleeping, then, if it discovers its own Peach Blossom Spring, it sprouts.”
“This… A Peach Blossom Spring?”
Yu Dan looked at the world around with rain pouring from thick clouds.
Beyond the raising wet fog. Beyond the traditional giwajibung[2] lining up the Pagoda Tree street was the black forest of skyscrapers and apartments.
“Really? Such a world?”
“We can’t judge it by our standards. Because it’s a life from another world, it will see things differently. I also belong to this world, so I have no idea about it, but isn’t it similar to when You change camera lenses, the scenery completely changes? This world of lights and noise may appear quite marvelous and pretty to it.”
The scenery of the city twinkled as everything smooshed together.
He had an auditory hallucination. It sounded like someone giggling, and bubbles bursting underwater.
The scenery soon disappeared.
“When a human dreams of the Peach Blossom Spring, the tree dreams of the human world. The seed takes nourishment from that dream and gradually grows.”
“So, what if it grows all the way up?”
“Then it’s born into this world. In exchange, the person is born in the another world. They exchange places.”
“That uncle will die?”
“His existence will disappear, so it isn’t wrong to say that he will die. But no corpse will remain. He will be treated as if he disappeared from this world. As a forever unresolved incident, but as it’s related to supernatural, everyone will soon forget about it. You remember that abandoned house, where the Gokdugi was playing hide-and-seek, correct?”
Does that mean that because it would be pushed into the back of their consciousness, even though he would abruptly disappear, everyone would just shrug and not look for him? There would be no sadness or pain?
“That’s too steep of a price for wearing one wrong necklace.”
The appearance of the middle-aged company worker, who trembled in fear not knowing what will happen to him in the future was vivid in his eyes. He told him to go to the shop where they solve such incidents together, but he couldn’t come out of fear.
Could he tell him all of this?
“Is there nothing we can do to turn it back?”
He asked it at the beginning, but he asked again.
Instead of an answer, he heard the sound of the rain and pit-pat of the footsteps.
A slim woman holding an umbrella walked up to them. It was Heuk-yo.
“I’m done with preparations. I moved all the troublesome things.”
“You have worked hard.”
Baek Ran stood up.
“There is a way to turn it back… Didn’t You ask about something we can do here? Please follow me.”
With the serpent yokai in the lead, they circled the building and went down to the basement.
In the gloomy corridor, wooden doors lined up on both sides. It was a basement room and some other place, which he sometimes followed Do-ssi down.
Heuk-yo opened one of the doors.
It was a very wide space. All four walls were full of all sorts of bottles. Pottery bottles, gourd bottles, glass bottles, metal bottles… there was an enormous amount of them.
“What is all of this?”
“Alcohol.”
“You have such a hobby? I heard it’s difficult to escape.”
Heuk-yo looked back at him. Her eyes were chilling.
*~*~*
[1] maru — open floor.
[2] giwajibung — tile-roofed house.
[*] Plum Blossom Spring — similar how the fictional place Utopia, became a word for paradise in English and many other western languages, Plum Blossom Spring became a word for paradise in Korean and other eastern languages.
Translator’s note: Imagine if we had no truck-kun, but seed-kun. The fans of plant horror would have a blast with it.
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