Ice Pearls

“Nice.”

As always, this latest project had turned out remarkably well.

“A person has to work up a sweat.”

“Kkung?”

“He who does not work shall not eat.”

“Kkung-kkung-kkung…?”

Honey, the sweetly colored water bird, began to tremble all over. At that questioning cry that seemed to ask, Then what about me, who doesn’t work?, Ji-oh firmly shook his head.

“Looking that cute, what on earth are you worrying about?”

“Kkuk.”

“You’re already pulling your weight just by being adorable, so don’t go fretting over nonsense.”

No matter how thoughtlessly Ji-oh lived, he was not so irresponsible that he would fail to take care of a living creature he had brought into the world with his own paint. As the son of a gourmet and a big eater like Ji-oh himself, Honey would never go hungry.

“Got it?”

Honey accepted this and sprawled out in comfort.

“But get out of there for a second.”

“Kkur.”

Of all places, it had settled right inside Ji-oh’s basket.

“I can’t get the seeds out.”

“Kkurung.”

“Who did you take after to be this stubborn?”

“Kkuk?”

“Me? What an unfilial child.”

Ji-oh bent down and rummaged through the basket. Honey’s body held only the faintest viscosity and was otherwise pure transparent water, so that wasn’t much of a problem—but the little thing had been playing with the seeds and mixed them all into a hopeless jumble.

“This is…”

“…….”

“…eggplant seed, I think.”

Fortunately, Seo Ji-oh, who came from a mountain village in Gangwon Province, could identify a seed by sight alone. Not every Gangwon native could manage that; it was possible only because Ji-oh himself was genuinely devoted to this sort of farming.

Having enjoyed farm work since childhood, Ji-oh picked up the eggplant seeds, rose, and dropped them into the holes he had already dug.

“Now it’s time to plant the potatoes.”

“Kkuruk?”

“Hm?”

There was a brief glitch in communication, but Ji-oh soon realized what Honey was questioning.

“I wasn’t saying I was going to plant Dad.”

“Kkung?”

“‘Potato’ is a nickname. Like a second name.”

His mother, who had loved potatoes, had looked at the fetal ultrasound and decided the baby looked like one, so she named him Potato in the womb. And when his grandmother first saw newborn Ji-oh, she had nodded and said, “Ate nothing but potatoes and gave birth to a potato.”

“All the grown-ups called me Potato, so until I was four I thought I actually was one.”

Maybe that was why he had grown up so healthy and harmless.

“Well, good enough.”

“Kkurrr.”

“You grow up healthy too.”

The Seo clan had, for generations, been the sort that respected a new life’s free will.

How many days had passed? At last Ji-oh succeeded in planting every last seed Yu Seong-un had given him. With potatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn—famous famine-relief crops—all in the ground, the prospect of starving to death now seemed remote.

“Though with this body, starving to death would be the harder part anyway.”

“Kkurrr.”

“No matter how hungry Dad gets, he won’t eat you, Honey.”

The crops had been planted in the vegetable garden behind the cabin.

“Honestly, at this point calling it a vegetable garden might be a stretch.”

It had gotten a little large, but it was still a vegetable garden. It was nothing like the vast fields of people who farmed for a living, so Ji-oh had his excuses ready. In any case, it was a vegetable garden.

Ji-oh was an excellent adult when it came to compromising with reality.

“All right, let’s head back.”

“Kkukkuk.”

“Right—we should try the fruit syrup I made.”

The fruit syrup he had prepared earlier ought to be nicely matured by now.

“Sweet-and-sour mangdung fruit with tart, bitter drought-mandarin—the combination alone is already excellent.”

If there was anything to worry about, it was whether the two quantities had struck the right balance, but that didn’t concern him much. With his long, thick history of living alone, Ji-oh had somehow absorbed his grandmother’s cooking instincts.

“It was only rough pinches and eyeballing, but when it comes to combining things I myself am going to eat, I can’t possibly be wrong.”

True to that pride, a wonderful fragrance was already rising from the glass jar.

“Mm.”

Stepping into the kitchen, Ji-oh blinked as he looked toward the cupboard where the fruit syrup waited.

“After working up a sweat for the first time in a while, maybe I should drink it as a cold tea.”

“Kkuruk?”

“I worked up a sweat of the mind.”

Honey pointed out that Ji-oh’s body did not actually produce waste like sweat, but hadn’t he labored all the same? A human who had done work was, by rights, supposed to drink something cool and refreshing so that efficiency would rise.

“For that, I’ll need to fetch some ice from the cold storage.”

A pig does not hesitate before food. Without even wiping the sweat that had never appeared, Ji-oh went straight down to the storage.

In the ice warehouse packed with every kind of ingredient, there was, of course, ice. The place looked almost like a cave; you could not even guess where the ice ended. In every corner, fragments of ice were visible.

“A bit cold, maybe.”

The moment he opened the heavy door and stepped inside, Honey went stiff as a board.

“Kku, kkugururuk.”

“If you’re too cold, you can wait outsi—huh.”

“…….”

“…Did you freeze?”

As Ji-oh stared with a blank face, violently shaken by the sight of Honey turned into pure transparent ice itself—

Even already frozen solid, Honey gave one fluttery shake of its body and preened its feathers.

“Pubung.”

“?”

“Kkuk.”

“Did you evolve?”

“Kkur.”

“I evolved from a human into a haunted portrait myself, so there’s no law saying a water bird can’t become an ice bird.”

He had been startled once thinking Honey had died when it froze, and startled again when it still moved so fluidly while made of ice—but if nothing was wrong, what did it matter?

Honey was cute even frozen. That settled it.

“A moving ice bird is plenty interesting.”

“Kkurrrrrrrruk!”

“You’re happy too, so this father’s heart is glad.”

Taking after its creator and born without a shred of crisis sense, Honey was simply delighted by its own change.

Even for a bird whose body was water, freezing this quickly seemed questionable—but since he himself had gone from human to portrait, Ji-oh was not especially surprised.

“When have we ever obeyed the laws of physics?”

Living long enough to ignore the laws of physics too—what an entertaining life it was.

“Anyway, the ice is…”

“Kkukkuk.”

“That way, huh. Thanks.”

Honey’s wings, now ice, no longer fused into a single mass the way they once had. As if newly grown feathers—or body parts it had never possessed—were the cause, it pointed out the ice’s location and then frantically preened itself. Maybe restlessness with one’s feathers was a species trait of birds.

It was a little less like this when it was water.

Leaving Honey on his shoulder as it was, Ji-oh slowly walked the ice warehouse.

“…….”

It was cool.

“Haa…”

His breath misted.

A breath so dense you could see it at a glance.

That meant it was cold—and yet, for some reason, Ji-oh felt no chill, and the ingredients did not freeze either.

Whether the ice warehouse was deceiving Ji-oh, or whether he and the ingredients were simply tougher than ice, he could not tell.

Probably the latter.

Ji-oh lowered his head and looked at the floor.

“…Mm…”

He muttered.

“If this cracks, it’ll be a catastrophe.”

An ice floor like an abyss stretched before him.

It looks like solid ice, but it’s so transparent it’s as if there’s a lake beneath it.

That floor was extremely clear. Ice that freezes very slowly is not opaque but clean as glass, and such ice covered the entire ground. Ji-oh could not even guess its depth.

It was a little slick, tinged with a faint blue light, and every so often clusters of sparkle glimmered deep within. Like fireflies, they lit their bodies for a few seconds and then vanished, and Ji-oh was curious what they were.

“Residents of a similar kind to the forest butterflies, maybe.”

“Kkung?”

“Or just glowing moss or bacteria, for all I know.”

They did not move. They only briefly shone and then faded.

They resembled hazy starlight.

“…….”

It was a dreamlike scene.

“The colors are similar to a glacier too.”

There was no deep scent of the sea, yet the transparent blue ice floor of unknowable depth brought a glacier to mind. He had never actually seen Earth’s glaciers, but he imagined they must look something like this.

Ji-oh lifted his head and took in the whole of the ice warehouse.

“Where on earth did all this ice come from? It’s ice in every direction.”

He wondered every time he saw it.

“You have to come a long way down from the first floor of the cabin to reach this ice warehouse. So maybe there was groundwater under the cabin.”

But that created a contradiction.

“Right—groundwater under a forest with such a mild climate freezing solid like this can’t be explained by common sense either.”

Which made it all the more mysterious.

“Nice.”

Funny.

“It’s just like a fairytale…”

He liked it.

Still expressionless and blunt-faced, Ji-oh kept walking. Honey, already adjusted to a body that no longer spread and pooled, flew about the cavernous ice warehouse with its usual cheerful cries. It was a scene out of a movie.

After walking the ice-formed hollow for some time, Ji-oh found what he had been looking for.

“Yes, that’s right. It was here.”

Ice that had grown like a stalagmite in a cave.

“This is good too.”

“Kkuk?”

“It really does look like a cave.”

It made no sense, but the ice warehouse also looked like a limestone cave made of ice. Whether the water was flowing from somewhere, melting, or drawn up like a tree along some water vein—drops fell here and there throughout the ice warehouse, and because of the low temperature they formed shoots and pillars like this.

“Ordinary limestone caves work the same way. Water heavy with lime drips and slowly builds pillars on the cave floor; the droplets splash every which way and jut out like coral, or else…”

“…….”

“Here. They remain in pearl shapes, like these.”

They were actually called cave pearls.

“Of course these aren’t cave pearls—ice pearls would be the right name… but like this, doesn’t it truly feel like a cave? Nature’s great mold.”

“Shall I take these?”

Whatever the effects, the taste was the same as real ice, wasn’t it?

“Cutting off one of those huge ice bamboo shoots would be a chore anyway.”

“Kkuruk-kkuruk.”

Honey the ice bird fluttered over and swallowed one of the roundly clustered ice pearls. Ji-oh could not help admiring how quick it was.

“You’re eating it? Going to turn into a pig?”

“Kkurrrrrr!!”

“No, misunderstanding. If it sounded like I was scolding you, that was a terrible misunderstanding. Dad likes pigs.”

Having spent most of his life raised by his grandmother, Ji-oh had inherited some of her tastes—one of which was an inability to leave a scrawny person alone.

In that sense, if Honey, whom he could call his own child, got plump, he would only be glad.

“Kids are supposed to eat a lot and grow fast.”

Become a pig. Yap.

“All right, let’s go up now.”

“Kkung-kkung-kkung…”

“I’m saying I like it, pig.”

“Kkurrrrr!!!”

“Kids are supposed to be plump so they grow well later.”

Soothing Honey as he came up from the ice warehouse, Ji-oh headed straight for the kitchen.

A fine fragrance was already rising from the fruit syrup he had taken out of the cupboard earlier; he was already looking forward to how good it would taste.

He took out a clean glass and transferred two spoonfuls of the fruit syrup into it.

“The scent really is wonderful.”

Mangdung fruit, whose fragrance grew richer the more it dried, seemed to amplify its aroma even further when put through a kind of aging process, drying or not.

Thoroughly steeped in sugar and lending its scent to it, the mangdung fruit gave off its distinctive bright, sweet fragrance.

“The drought-mandarin is a citrus fruit too, so it has that citrus note as well…”

The bitter-sour scent peculiar to lemon peel, you could say.

“I’m looking forward to this.”

The fruit syrup in the glass had artistic value all on its own.

Having drunk its fill of sugar and generously given up its juices, the syrup showed a glossy sheen. The flesh of the mangdung fruit had turned into a soft jelly, while the drought-mandarin segments—whose thin membranes he had carefully peeled one by one—had firmed a little and spread until their grains were visible.

“And drop an ice pearl in…”

“Kkokkuruk.”

“That’s the pearl you ate earlier. Put it back.”

“Kkuk?”

“I decline.”

Honey, somehow water again, tried to perform the circus act of regurgitating the ice pearl it had just swallowed, but Father’s authority stopped it. This was not penguin milk; he did not want things to go that far.

“Now if I stir it gently…”

Clink, clack.

The glass and the ice pearl struck each other and rang with a clear sound.

“Fruit tea, complete.”

“Kkak.”

“Are you a chicken?”

“Kkurung.”

“I have no idea what you are.”

The finished fruit tea was beautiful enough that he wanted to paint it once. The vermilion tea gleaming through the glass was remarkably transparent despite its deep color.

Perhaps because of the ice pearl, the sparkling blue light he had seen in the warehouse flashed and vanished like shooting stars over and over, and between those sparks the fruit flesh showed in shapes of full moons and half-moons.

He took a sip just like that…

“…….”

A rapturous flavor spread through him.

“…It’s good.”

A richness and savor he had never once tasted before.

The vermilion tea was soft and cool; just when the sweetness seemed about to become too strong, a leisurely bitterness approached and courteously settled it down. The drought-mandarin’s once-fierce sourness, meeting the mangdung fruit and sugar, felt like a child’s cute fussing.

The flesh is nice too.

The mangdung fruit, robbed of all its juice by the sugar, was just like jelly. Strictly speaking it resembled konjac jelly, but it was far softer and more yielding than that. It had the gentle yet oddly elastic mouthfeel of a grape from which the skin has been completely peeled.

The drought-mandarin had the popping burst of a grapefruit or orange segment. Like the mangdung fruit it seemed to have surrendered its juice to the sugar, yet a slight firmness remained. It was not an unpleasant firmness. The grains that gently spread through the mouth delivered a pleasant texture.

The taste and aroma are all mixed together and hard to separate, but…

The tea itself was never one-dimensional; it offered a soup-like depth of flavor, while the fruit flesh added joy to what might otherwise have been a monotonous texture. And that strange transformation that melted away on the tongue.

That small change was probably the clusters of light that had been trapped inside the ice pearl.

“…Popping candy?”

It did not exactly fizz and spread or explode like fireworks, but the blue light-clusters dotted through the tea added a subtle savor. It was a pleasure of the tongue that “sweet” or “salty” could not express.

A fruit tea that made you smack your lips for no reason.

“…….”

“Kkurruk?”

“This would be perfect for a gift.”

There was plenty of it; the thought of packaging a little of it crossed his mind.

“I should give some to Mr. Yu Seong-un.”

Wanting to share one’s cooking was a grandmother’s instinct.

Raised on his life mentor grandmother’s words—Live by giving—Ji-oh wanted to fatten Yu Seong-un up.

(To be continued)