The Shadow Behind the Walls
Everyone who remembered Granny Yoon-hwa in her prime had lamented, deeply and often, that her adopted granddaughter possessed no divine gift.
Lee-seol, too, had once grieved the fact that she could not carry on her grandmother's legacy. But now she felt differently.
She counted herself quietly lucky that she had no shamanic aptitude whatsoever. If she had been blessed with such a gift, she would surely have been bound to this mountain for the rest of her life.
"You have no fear, do you."
He let out a low hum, then gave a small nod. Lee-seol, walking ahead, quickened her pace and drew close to the tree stump. The rubble of the toppled stone shrine still lay scattered at its base, and the stacked rings of weathered wood laid bare the long years this tree had quietly accumulated.
She lowered herself slowly to her knees and ran her fingers lightly over the cut surface. Nothing came back to her but the faint prickling texture of sawed wood — no presence, no residue of anything. A chill wind swept through, alone and sudden, tousling her hair before moving on.
"You're braver than you look."
"Am I?"
"The workers won't even come near this spot. Weren't these men supposed to be hardened laborers? I'd say you have more nerve than the lot of them, Ms. Shin Lee-seol."
The idle jest drew a small laugh out of her. It was unlikely to accomplish much, but still — if she could return to Granny Yoon-hwa and say she had seen the stump with her own eyes, something might come of it. Perhaps whatever faint presence still clung to the old woman's body would be enough to resolve this.
"Then I have some business to attend to. Wait by the car, please."
Tae-shin suggested she return to the vehicle. Lee-seol hesitated briefly. Having come this far together, she thought it might be worth following him — if only to hear, firsthand, from someone who had actually been on this site when it happened.
"Would it be all right if I came along?"
"By all means."
To her surprise, he agreed without any fuss. Following him, she arrived at a gray container office parked behind the excavators. A small wooden sign reading Site Management Office stood outside, suggesting that workers had once occupied this place back when the construction was in full swing.
As she approached the container, the thick smell of stale cigarettes stung her nostrils. A man in his late fifties, his skin bronzed and creased from years of labor under the sun, was puffing away at a cigarette.
He had been drawing hard on it, cheeks hollowed deep with wrinkles, when he seemed to sense their presence. Glancing over with visible irritation, he hastily ground the cigarette out against the sole of his work boot.
"Ah! Director, sir — you've come."
As he bowed deeply at the waist, fawning, a yellow armband reading FOREMAN was visible on his left sleeve. He was evidently the man in charge of the site — the work foreman.
"Yes, Foreman. It's been a while."
"Word came that you'd be visiting the site, so I've been waiting for you. Please, come inside. And the young lady with you, may I ask...?"
The foreman, obsequious and grinning before Tae-shin, let his gaze drift slowly toward Lee-seol.
His eyes traveled up and down her with unmistakable crudeness, curiosity clinging to them in layers. Something distinctly impure lurked in that look — the naked curiosity of a man wondering who this random young woman was, appearing at the side of Haeun Construction's Executive Director Woo.
"I'm not familiar with the area yet, so I asked her to show me around."
"Ah, of course, of course. That makes sense. Forgive me — I thought perhaps you'd been sent by that mansin."
Tae-shin brushed the question aside cleanly. Lee-seol had no need to open her mouth and make things awkward. Cowed by the cold glint in his eyes, the foreman pressed no further, mumbled something adequate by way of explanation, and swung the container door wide open.
Ugh — the smell.
Lee-seol's brows pinched together almost reflexively. Inside the container hung, quite literally, the reek of a bachelor's den: the sour staleness of old sweat, fine grit of sand and dust, billowing clouds of cigarette smoke, and the rotten stench rising from instant-noodle containers left piled up, never once cleared away.
Though a clothing rack stood there in plain sight, clothes lay strewn carelessly everywhere, and in one corner a green blanket and a deck of hwatu playing cards were scattered in disarray. Along the edge of the room, empty green soju bottles stood lined up in a slovenly row.
"Ha, forgive the state of it — this was never a place built for receiving guests. Really... please, do come in."
The foreman scratched the back of his head sheepishly. With every step he took, the cheap linoleum flooring creaked and crackled beneath his boots.
It's filthy in here....
She hovered at the threshold, unable to bring herself to step inside — and then felt it. A sidelong glance from Tae-shin, flicking over her from behind. As if to say, if you can't manage this, go back to the car. Her stubbornness flared, quite against her will.
"Here we are — have a seat, have a drink."
She swallowed dryly, then stepped lightly inside and lowered herself onto a sofa so ancient that its yellow sponge padding showed through everywhere. The foreman brewed cups of instant coffee mix from a machine that rattled violently with every press of the button, and set one down before each of them.
...Is it actually safe to drink this? Lee-seol took hold of the paper cup with poorly concealed skepticism.
"How have things been lately?"
Tae-shin accepted his cup with perfect composure, took a slow sip, and asked while gazing out through the barred window. The foreman, who had flopped down onto the sofa across from them, scratched the back of his head awkwardly before answering.
"Same as ever, sir. I've never seen a dongti this vicious in all my years. One day after the next, the men keep swearing they've seen some ghost of a man—"
"Hm."
"I know this is unfortunate business, but watching a man's fingers fly off isn't exactly an everyday occurrence either, you understand."
The foreman launched into an endless string of excuses for why the site had sat stalled for so long.
"I see. I understand perfectly."
Tae-shin answered flatly, rolling his eyes half a turn to sweep the interior of the container. It was a space that offered very little evidence to support any expectation that honest work had ever been done here.
"Thank goodness you granted us the extension, sir — saying our Director deserved to rest easy and take his time."
"Ah. Yes."
Tae-shin responded to the vapid flattery with a flavorless murmur.
Convinced that no less a figure than Executive Director Woo himself had taken his side, the foreman all but sprouted wings from his back. He leaned further into the sofa with comfortable ease — and the backrest emitted a distinctly unpleasant noise.
"Anyway, sir, do please tell the Director to stop humoring that old woman up in her mansion! Men are getting hurt, and she just sits there doing nothing — tsk tsk tsk...."
The foreman twisted his face into an open scowl and clicked his tongue in contempt. At the phlegm-thick venom in his voice, heat flared violently across Lee-seol's face.
Something surged up with it — she couldn't tell whether it was rage or shame.
In all her years living in Eulju-ri, not once had Granny Yoon-hwa of the old Sehwawon manor ever been slighted or taken lightly.
Everyone feared her. Everyone regarded her with something close to awe. And the people of Eulju-ri had all treated Lee-seol — for all purposes the old woman's own granddaughter — with unfailing warmth.
Her grandmother had been the queen of her own small world. This kind of contempt was nothing short of a shock.
"I did a little eavesdropping in the village, you see — turns out she's just some old biddy in the back room whose powers have long since dried up! Wouldn't it be better for you to come down off this mountain, Director, and stop wasting your effort? Surely there's no shortage of other people to find?"
Everything the foreman said after that became even harder to believe.
...So the people of Eulju-ri talked about Granny Yoon-hwa that way, behind her back?
The hand holding her paper cup trembled with betrayal. And then, all at once, Lee-seol understood.
The reason the villagers had clacked their tongues so freely about Granny Yoon-hwa in private, yet never dared mistreat the household of Sehwawon — it had never actually been because of Granny Yoon-hwa herself.
What they had truly feared was something else entirely.
A chaebol patriarch so mighty he could hand over a grand old manor to a favored mansin without so much as a flicker of hesitation.
What they had truly feared, what they had bowed and scraped before, was not the old woman quietly shut away in her mansion — it was the power standing behind her.
Chairman Woo Kyung-hwan of Haeun Group.
Which meant that she — all this time — had been living off Tae-shin's family's charity.
No one had ever said a single word against her, and yet she felt as though she had been scorned from head to toe all the same. Lee-seol let her head drop slightly and bit down hard on her lower lip.
She felt suddenly, faintly ashamed — of herself, of the narrow little world she had lived in, seeing only what had been shown to her. Some part of her was certain he was looking at her now as something utterly laughable.
Tae-shin glanced briefly at her face, and his eyes darkened in an instant. A low, contemptuous snort escaped his lips.
"Foreman."
"Y-yes, sir. Speak freely."
"These men of yours — so terrified of a dongti that they won't set foot on the site — none of them are afraid to run their mouths about a mansin with decades behind her?"
Tae-shin smiled, dry as ash.
The corner of his mouth curved crookedly upward, but there was not the slightest trace of laughter in his eyes.