The Realm of Desire, Part 14
"Excuse me a moment — I need to take this call."
Without waiting for an answer, he picked up the phone. 'This is Woo Tae-shin.' After that brief greeting, he simply listened in silence to the voice on the other end, offering no words of his own. Soon he gave a curt acknowledgment and hung up.
Had something happened? Lee-seol tilted her head slightly, and Tae-shin supplied the answer soon enough.
"I should stop by the construction site. Would that be all right?"
"Go ahead."
"Could I ask you to guide me there?"
Should she? Lee-seol deliberated for a moment. He had come all this way down to Eulju-ri, after all — hadn't sharing a meal with him more than settled the debt of hospitality?
Maybe she should just say she was tired and head back…
Still, since she'd made the trip down here for the first time in a while, going to see the site with him didn't seem like a bad idea. She was curious, too, to see with her own eyes just what state the site was in — bad enough that a Managing Director had no choice but to come begging to Granny.
"It's a bit far from Sehwawon, but fine."
The Mt. Hyeonak resort construction site was about thirty minutes by car from the shop; you had to turn off partway along the road leading up to Sehwawon. She'd been there a few times with Granny Yoon-hwa, so guiding him wouldn't be any trouble.
"Then let's go."
After a brief glance at his wristwatch, Tae-shin seemed to remember something. He tapped the phone screen twice with his thumb, then held it out to Lee-seol.
On the screen, the contacts app was open to a new number entry field.
"Put it in. Your number, Shin Lee-seol-ssi."
"…"
"Is that not allowed?"
Tae-shin asked, one eyebrow slanted upward. His low, deep voice was distinctly sly. Lee-seol scratched her cheek with a slightly embarrassed air and answered.
"I don't have a phone."
"Now I'm torn between believing you and pretending I've been fooled."
"…I'm sorry, but it's the truth."
Lee-seol's voice grew dim. Granny Yoon-hwa had never once let her activate a mobile phone.
Sehwawon, to begin with, was a place that barely received an internet signal. When she'd learned that crews were planning to lay internet cable at a site not far away, it was thanks to sixth-grade Lee-seol lying on the floor and throwing a tantrum — insisting she absolutely needed it for her schoolwork — that the line had been extended to the estate as an afterthought.
In an environment like that, a phone was out of the question. As a child, whenever ads for the newest smartphone aired, she had clutched at Granny's sleeve and begged, but it was hopeless.
Granny would only say that with the internet or whatever it was, what more did she need? Who was there outside to call, anyway?
Whenever Lee-seol did need to make a call to the outside world, she had always used the landline in the second-floor corridor. As Granny's legs grew unreliable with age and she stopped climbing to the second floor, Lee-seol had quietly smuggled the receiver into her own room.
When Granny found out later, she offered a plausible excuse — that it was for quickly exchanging maintenance updates about the estate.
But Lee-seol had brought that phone into her room for one reason only: to speak with her managing editor, Jung-min, a little more comfortably.
Put another way, apart from communicating with Jung-min, she really had no use for it.
"I see. Understood."
Tae-shin didn't press further, retreating cleanly, as if cutting with a blade. He tucked the phone into his pocket and rose unhurriedly from his seat.
Lee-seol followed him outside, receiving the shop owner's send-off. Parked on the paved road in front of the shop was the black sedan he'd arrived in on the day he first visited Sehwawon.
An hour up to Sehwawon, an hour back down — and the road was rough besides. She felt a pang of sympathy, thinking how much trouble he'd have shuttling up and down that road for as long as he stayed here.
"Get in."
He opened the rear door himself and ushered her in. Lee-seol stood rooted near the shop entrance, blinking.
"Did you have the car called for me, Woo Tae-shin-ssi?"
"I couldn't very well make you walk all day."
"You have a car — surely you don't actually need my guidance?"
"Well, that's true enough."
He rested a hand on the door in a thoroughly insolent posture and said shamelessly,
"Because if I didn't say it that way, I thought you might just leave me behind and go home."
"…"
"Am I wrong?"
Hmph. Snorting through her nose, Lee-seol climbed into the back seat with an air of haughty familiarity. He slid in beside her and shut the door.
"Drive."
At that quiet command, the car pulled away smoothly. The spacious interior was unbearably awkward.
The only vehicles Lee-seol had ever ridden in were the small car that went down to Eulju-ri, Old Man Baek's Damas van, and Hyun-woo's rattling pickup truck. Every one of them jolted violently on the rough roads they climbed and descended — but this car was so comfortable, so smooth, it almost felt strange.
Tae-shin sat with his long legs crossed at ease, leaning back against the seat with his eyes closed. As if all of this were simply his due.
Glancing at him, Lee-seol kept a careful distance and gazed idly out the window at the passing scenery.
After some thirty minutes of driving, the silent car glided to a stop at the construction site.
Lee-seol knew this place. It had once been a small village of a dozen-odd households — mostly elderly people who had settled here long ago, tilling gardens in their courtyards and keeping a cow or two in modest sheds.
When they'd looked over the compensation figures Haeun Construction offered, their eyes had gone round, and every last one of them had left.
Tongyeong-daek would occasionally pass along news of how they were faring after moving to be near their children or into the cities.
Lee-seol surveyed her surroundings slowly through the car window. For all the money Haeun Construction had poured into securing this land, the site showed remarkably little progress.
A forklift and a couple of small excavators stood parked haphazardly nearby, and a blue banner reading 'SAFETY FIRST' flapped forlornly in the lukewarm breeze. It was a site with no trace of any will to work.
"That's it. The spot that caught the dongti."
Stretching his long legs out of the car, Tae-shin squinted against the harsh sunlight as he looked around, then pointed with a long finger at the bare tree stump left standing in the distance.
Lee-seol stepped out after him. She made a shade with her hand, looked where his finger pointed, and slowly searched her memory.
There had certainly been an old kalopanax tree standing on that spot. That was how she remembered it.
"There was a castor aralia about this size standing there, wasn't there?"
Lee-seol stretched out her hands to roughly gauge the tree's girth. Tae-shin nodded.
"You just cut it down? There was clearly a stone cairn in front of it, too — you removed that as well?"
"Well, yes, that's how it went. From what I hear, they battered it down with an excavator. Do you know anything about the tree that stood there?"
"Roughly, yes."
The great castor aralia, now reduced to nothing but a forlorn stump, had been older than any of the elders who lived in that village. Which meant it was at least a hundred years old.
The tree itself was so ancient that the people who had lived there worshipped it as their dangsan-namu, their guardian tree and nature spirit, with reverence. They wound sacred ropes around its trunk, piled a stone cairn before it, and some among them made devout offerings at dawn without fail.
Even an ordinary tree with no divine nature of its own, passed down through generations and receiving the prayers of so many people, gradually accumulates spiritual power.
No wonder, Lee-seol thought, there'd be trouble — they'd hacked down a tree like that without a second thought. And demolished the cairn in the most brutish way possible… She shook her head slowly.
"You did something… terribly reckless. The castor aralia is a spiteful tree."
There's an old saying: if you regret it, use a castor aralia stake. When a shaman performed an exorcism, the final threat leveled against a stubborn spirit that refused to leave and kept putting up a fight was the vow to drive a castor aralia stake through the ground.
That was the kind of tree it was — one not to be touched lightly, and never to be touched at all.
"That's why I'm here, to clean up the mess. The one person perfectly suited to resolving this matter is being spectacularly uncooperative, and it's giving me no end of trouble."
He was surely talking about Granny Yoon-hwa. Lee-seol pressed her lips together and looked at Tae-shin coldly. He merely shrugged his shoulders with easy good humor.
"May we get a little closer?"
"Will that be all right?"
"Yes. Though honestly, I have no spiritual power at all, so I won't be much help…"
Lee-seol's body carried not the slightest trace of spiritual gift. Far from divining the past or the future, she couldn't even predict the day's weather — she was forever getting caught in the rain, umbrella forgotten.
Granny Yoon-hwa was a gangsinmu, a shaman who had received her spirits through divine descent.
Even if she had been a hereditary shaman, passed down through generations, Lee-seol would never have possessed the qualities needed to inherit the spirits her grandmother served. She wasn't her grandmother's flesh-and-blood granddaughter, after all.