Translator: Wan ED/PR: Personal Ghost
⟨Chapter 62⟩
Silence fell.
“Why are you keeping your mouths shut?”
The old potter shrugged.
“Anyway, I’m going to make pots now, so leave.”
“….”
“You don’t want to leave? What for would you loiter around this small old man? Though there is nothing better to do in this hell…”
Yu Dan raised his head at those words. The yokai also exchanged glances with dubious faces. Chaeseol carefully raised her hand.
“I have a question.”
“What are you curious about again?”
“Grandpa keeps saying it’s hell, why is that?”
“Didn’t you see when looking around? It’s full of all kinds of scary monsters. They disappeared for a moment, but they will flock again soon.”
Baek Ran shook his head, and said:
“Those aren’t the hell’s monsters. Those are spirits pulled in because of You, potter elder. Drawn in by the artisan’s powerful devotion, the powerful object spirits of the artworks are dragged in one after another.”
“Okay?”
The potter shrugged.
“I thought they were monsters flocking to try to torment me again. Well, even without it, isn’t this place hell?”
“Why do You think so?”
“Look, isn’t this place full of low-quality murky color pottery to cause me pain?”
At the old potter’s words, the yokai made confused faces. Yu Dan was also dumbfounded.
“What are you talking about? Elder-nim, this is…”
“Wait a moment.”
Baek Ran cut him off.
“Potter elder. Can You leave the spinning wheel for a moment and come out?”
“Uh? Why?”
“Please come here for a moment.”
In the gloomy corner of the exhibition hall, Cheonho-nim’s golden eyes flashed. Perhaps thinking that’s some serious matter, the old potter left his imaginary spinning wheel and stepped out in bewilderment.
Only when he saw the potter’s soul up close, he realized.
Both of his eyes were dim and fogged. Working hard his old and weak body, his eyes ended up injured. That pain was even left on the soul, but it seemed that the man himself was too concentrated on making pottery, that he didn’t even know.
So that was why he was talking nonsense, huh?
Everyone were at a loss what to say and stared at the potter. Perhaps feeling that something was strange, he looked around with his blurry eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
“Ehem, potter elder…”
The fox yokai carefully spoke up.
“In fact we are not dead. We’re alive. A long time passed since the elder’s era.”
“I know.”
“A very long time passed. Almost close to a thousand years. And this place is not hell.”
“Then where is it?”
Baek Ran looked at the twins instead of replying.
“Can You help?”
“Yes. We will heal this Person.”
The twins stood in front of the old potter’s soul, stretched out their hands at the same time and quickly touched the eyes that became foggy.
“It probably was very uncomfortable.”
“It will be fine now.”
The moment the two wild ginseng yokai’s fingertips touched the potter’s eyes, the murkiness dispersed like fog, and the eyes became clear. He blinked and stepped back.
“What did you do to me?”
When he blinked, the focus clearly entered his eyes. The old potter looked around with a confused face. Under the light in the faint darkness, he saw clear and blue pottery, and was shocked.
“No! This can’t be!”
The potter dashed in front of the pottery.
“This! This is! This is the color I wanted to make! The blue color of the only one pot in the world! The color that contained the soul of the sky itself! That’s here! How can it be? Where the hell is this place?”
“It’s the museum.”
Baek Ran replied.
“It’s a place that exhibits the treasures of the past, so the future generations like us can see them. This particular room is the celadon room. It gathers the precious Goryeo celadons.”
“Goryeo celadons…?”
“Yes. This beautiful pottery is called Goryeo celadons.”
A smile appeared on the fox’s face.
“The blue color of Goryeo celadons stole people’s souls. This color was called bisaek, and was praised for its beauty. Everyone competed in making Goryeo celadons instead of Yue ware. It was naturally the case in Goryeo, but even the in the Song Empire, that could be called the progenitor of pottery, that ware was widely recognized. Even in the books listing the Song Empire’s biggest treasures, it’s recorded that Goryeo celadons had no match. Not their own Yue ware.”
“Lies. Lies…”
The potter kept shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe it all. The fox yokai smiled kindly.
“It’s true. Even now, after thousand of years, the Goryeo celadons are selected as the biggest treasures. Who was it thanks to? Pioneers always have difficult lives. Therefore the effort of the potters like elder, who made the celadons that suppressed the Yue ware, was not in vain.”
Tears welled up in the eyes of the old potter. He wiped his eyes with the palm of his hand. His eyes skimmed through each one of the pretty Goryeo celadons that filled the exhibition room, sparkling like a young child.
“I wasn’t wrong.”
He turned to look at everyone with a face overflowing with joy.
“We did it in the end! Look, master-nim! I wasn’t wrong! I kept the promise of showing that color of the sky! How long I suffered without even knowing it! Look, everyone! That pretty bowl I made became the country’s treasure!”
The potter threw back his head and laughed. Infinitely clear laughter.
The booming echo filled the whole room. When the last of it disappeared…
He was already gone.
“Where did he go?”
The twins looked around. Then Chaeu noticed something and ran to the side.
“Isn’t it it?”
Everyone approached.
Inside the glass, one bowl was modestly placed.
Its color was different from the other, deeper and clear blue.
Was that how the sky looked in the past? The white ivy pattern inside the bowl looked like clouds floating lightly.
“It’s a national treasure. Among those the age of which we can estimate, this is the oldest celadon.”
“Among everything I saw today, this one is the prettiest.”
The twins mumbled. Baek Ran nodded slightly.
“They say that the hidden secret behind this beautiful bisaek of this goryeo celadon wasn’t revealed yet. Human ashes were discovered in that celadon, so there was even the theory that the potter perhaps commited human sacrifices. And there was a legend passed down of the potter, who agonized that he couldn’t achieve the color he wanted, threw himself into the kiln in the end. It would mean it was this hard to achieve this bisaek.”
No one said a word, and stared at the celadon bowl.
Abruptly, they heard footsteps behind their back.
Everyone were startled and stepped away from the glass. Turning back, they saw the museum employee approaching them.
Yu Dan’s heart sunk.
“Wh-what’s wrong?”
“The visiting hours ended.”
The employee replied with a smiling face and headed to a different exhibition room. At last everyone calmed down.
“’What’s wrong? Were You in the right mind?”
“I was as surprised as you!”
“Let’s go out first. There is no one but us here.”
“What to do?! There is no way they will lock us up, right?”
As they hurriedly exited the building, it was already dark. He was shocked where all that time went.
“I wanted to see more.”
The twins kept looking back in disappointment. On the other hand, Baek Ran had a very satisfied face.
“I got to see to my heart’s content.”
“What did you see to your heart’s content?”
“This and that.”
Looking closely, he seemed to be in a good mood, if not excited. Yu Dan took off the hood that covered the fox’s head. The ears that had been drooping at some point perked up. There was not even a trace of suffering from heat.
“I’m glad that you got better, but be frank. You wanted to see the ghost, not relics, yeah? Didn’t you try to see the museum ghost by following me? If you came alone, you wouldn’t be able to see it well.”
“What does it matter what this and that was? Moreover, since when are You so eager to interrogate others? I guess You decided on the subject of Your homework already.”
“Heuk!”
Yu Dan stopped in his tracks in shock. The twins were also shocked.
“How could it be! We forgot! But it’s fine. We were semi-coerced into diligently examining one relic. If You talk about the Goryeo celadon, won’t You receive a good score?”
“Right! Ack, wait! You have to be careful! What will you do if you write too much and get a bad score, because of suspicion?”
“Don’t worry. I won’t use it. I was thinking of just mixing strange words that didn’t appear in text books anyway. Also, I’m going with just a hand ax.”
“Luckily I took a picture of it. Just to be sure.”
“Okay. I have no one but you.”
They climbed down the stairs, passed the pond and left the museum.
Because he couldn’t eat anything after entering, he was hungry. He did well predicting it would turn out like this and eating the lunch boxes beforehand.
As he thought abut it, he solved things quite well. They didn’t skip lunch, they basked in the harmful rays to their hearts’ content, the heat disease got better, he got the yokai to go sightseeing in the museum and nothing particularly annoying…
At that moment a thought flashed in his head. Yu Dan checked his pocket and screamed.
“My phone!”
After Baek Ran used it as the soul wave emitter and placed it on the exhibition room entrance, no one picked it up. With no one paying attention to it, it just disappeared into the oblivion.
The twins looked at Baek Ran with pale faces.
“What should we do if someone took it?”
“That would be rather good. No one was calling You anyway.”
“Cheonho-nim.”
“Why are You searching ‘When will Korea fall?’ on the internet? ‘I hate to move once I get home, is that a disease?’. And all kinds of unhealthy things besides that, which I don’t even dare to speak of…”
“Cheonho-nim.”
“… I’ll go search for it right away.”
Baek Ran turned around and quickly strolled towards the museum.
“He completely recovered”
Yu Dan looked at the twins with a sour face.
“But in case you misunderstood…”
“Don’t worry. Wasn’t it a lie?”
“We also often get through that.”
The three looked at the fox yokai’s back in the distance for a while, and then tottered behind him.
Yu Dan unlocked the smartphone’s password in front of the storage room employee.
“Okay. Sign this and You can take it.”
“Thank You.”
He took the phone and headed out.
They returned right away yesterday, but they naturally didn’t open the door. And they told them to come back tomorrow. It was Sunday, but he had to wake up at dawn and go to the museum again, so he couldn’t help but grumble. Whose fault was it? What if he too wanted to have a hysterical mental breakdown and lay down?
The walk from the museum’s main building, past the pond, to the entrance was really long. He didn’t realize it yesterday. Walking now, he was sweating.
Just as he was passing through the entrance, he ran into a group of old men. They were old men in short pants and colorful t-shirts, with sunglasses hanging from their collars, at a glance looking like foreign tourists. They were looking around and whispering, and when they saw Yu Dan, they joyfully approached.
“That’s National Central Museum, correct?”
“Correct.”
“We really found it! How to get to the Buddhist paintings room?”
“I’m not quite sure. Please ask someone else.”
“Ah, you don’t know, huh? Okay then.”
They whispered to each other again and walked away.
There was seven of them, and they were walking around without any guide? He thought to himself ‘what guts!’, as he left the museum. He looked around, checking if the bus was coming, but a poster caught his eye.
「After half a century, the precious — stolen out of the country — Joseon Buddhist Painting ‘Seven Star Gods[1]’ special exhibition」
In the painting, seven aged gods, wearing crowns on their heads, were sitting together. The benign face of the god that sat in the middle, overlapped with the tourist elder that asked for directions a moment ago.
“Uh?”
Yu Dan blinked.
There was no way that was the case, right? That was a delusion, right?
However, it bothered him too much. He walked a few more steps and in the end turned around, entering again.
Sure enough, the seven elders were still wandering around. It seemed that they couldn’t imagine that the enormous building in front of them was the museum.
“Excuse me. I wish to ask for directions.”
That person spoke up to someone, but no one could see him and passed him by. It seemed like he was invisible. They completely lost their way and in the end set out in some strange direction.
As expected…
Yu Dan ran to them.
“That’s the direction of the parking lot! That’s the museum!”
The elders looked back in surprise. Recognizing the male student, who left a moment ago, they smiled brightly.
“Sorry. We were originally following your direction. But we ended up distracted while sightseeing and got lost.”
“You can’t help but be distracted. It’s truly developed so beautifully while we were away. I’m very happy to return and see it in person.”
“I’m glad. It became such a good country to live in.”
That’s not right all. How the hell did they remember this country?
Yu Dan brought the seven old men, who kept looking around, marveling, inside the museum.
“Let’s look. The Buddhist painting room… is on the 2nd floor. You can use those moving stairs.”
“Okay. Thank you. Thanks to you, we got in safely.”
Everyone smiled, and waved their hands.
The seven old men used the escalator and while chatting with joy, they went up. Their backs suddenly disappeared among the visitors.
If a human really put their heart into them, the artworks also had souls.
He marveled at that fact again.
Yu Dan stood in place for a while, and then turned around and left.
*~*~*
[1] Seven Star Gods — 七星神, in shamanism, seven gods that preside over humans’ lifetime and happiness.
Translator’s note: Pretty sure Baek Ran wanted to see the painting, not the ghost. End of the ‘One Pot of Blue Sky’ story.
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