"Aah! Big Brother! The ground's eating me!"
SQUELCH.
Mud rose to Chilbok's ankles, swallowing his feet with a series of sticky squelches.
He shrieked and tried to pull his leg free, but the more he thrashed, the deeper he sank.
"G-Ghosts! An earth ghost has my leg and won't let gooo!"
"Quit yelling, you idiot. What ghost?"
Clicking my tongue, I walked over.
The ground beneath my feet was beyond soft—it was mushy. Black water seeped out with every step I took.
"Manseok, pull him out."
"Yes, Big Brother."
Manseok strode over.
He was built like a mountain, yet oddly enough, he barely sank into the mud. Maybe his enormous feet gave him better buoyancy.
Manseok grabbed Chilbok by the back of the neck and lifted him out like a piece of luggage.
POP!
Chilbok came free with a cheerful sound.
One of his shoes remained buried in the mud.
"My shoe! Sob... Big Brother, this place is hell. No one can live here."
Chilbok hopped about with a tearful face.
I looked around as well.
It was certainly a view that made one want to sigh.
An endless field of reeds.
The reeds, taller than a person, rustled eerily whenever the wind blew.
The ground was covered in puddles and mud.
Thick fog lay over everything, making it hard to see even ten meters ahead.
More than anything, the smell was unbearable.
"Ugh... What is that smell? It smells like a latrine."
Manseok wrinkled his face and pinched his nose.
A sour, heavy stench that stung the nostrils.
It smelled like rotten eggs and old sewers, an awful odor that dominated the entire marshland.
Now I understood why the villagers avoided this place and called it haunted land.
But.
'Hmm.'
I crouched down and scooped up the mud that had swallowed Chilbok's shoe with my bare hands.
It was cold and damp.
Black soil crumbled between my fingers.
I brought my hand to my nose.
Chilbok jumped in fright.
"Big Brother! Why are you putting something that filthy near your nose?!"
"Smell it."
"Pardon?"
"I said, smell it."
When I held my mud-covered hand beneath Chilbok's nose, he threw his head back and screamed.
"Aah! It smells like shit!"
"No."
I shook my head and smiled.
"This is the smell of money."
"M-Money? Big Brother, after getting thrown out, the shock has finally..."
Chilbok looked at me with pitying eyes.
Even if I explained it, he would not understand.
Leaf mold.
And not just any leaf mold. This was premium aged soil, formed as reeds, leaves, and all kinds of organic matter accumulated, decayed, and fermented in these wetlands at the lower reaches of the Nakdong River for thousands of years.
It was on an entirely different level from the ordinary compost spread over fields.
Nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potassium—the three primary fertilizer nutrients were densely packed into this natural mass of nourishment.
What I held in my hand was not mud.
It was black gold.
'This... is in far better condition than I expected.'
When I secretly cultivated the vegetable patch at the estate, I had gone through quite a bit of trouble gathering fallen leaves from the mountains.
But here, this stuff was everywhere.
All I had to do was scoop it up and spread it over the fields.
"First, let's find the house. The house drawn on the land deed should be somewhere around here."
"A house? There is a house in a place like this?"
We pushed our way through the reeds.
After walking for a while, a faint shape emerged through the fog.
"T-There it is!"
Manseok pointed.
Then all three of us fell silent at once.
"......"
"......"
"......"
Calling that thing a house would require a bit of conscience.
The thatch on the roof had completely rotted away, leaving holes through which the sky showed. The pillars leaned so precariously that they looked ready to collapse at any moment.
The mud had fallen from the walls, leaving behind nothing but bare wooden frames.
A door? It seemed to have been used as firewood long ago, since there was not even a trace of one.
Rather than a house... it was closer to a giant pile of garbage.
"Sob... Young Master... no, Big Brother... we're all going to die here."
Chilbok sat down on the ground and began to wail.
"We'll die sinking into mud during the day, get crushed when the house collapses at night, or get caught by ghosts and die... Sob, sob."
"We're not dying. Get up."
I lightly kicked Chilbok in the rear.
"Manseok."
"Yes, Big Brother!"
"Let's put a roof on it first. We need somewhere to shelter from the rain. There are reeds everywhere, so cut some down and bring them here."
"Understood!"
Without a word of complaint, Manseok pulled a sickle from his waist.
Simple really was best.
Before we even unpacked, we began repairs.
Whenever Manseok brought back armfuls of reeds, Chilbok twisted straw rope and skillfully wove reed mats, all while whining.
The boy had incredible dexterity.
I dug around the rotten pillars, propped them up with stones, and leveled them.
Then I scooped up mud, mixed it with water, kneaded it, and plastered it over the holes in the walls.
"Heave! Ho!"
By the time the sun began to set, the shack had at least become fit for people to enter.
It was still shabby, of course, but it seemed capable of keeping out the wind.
"Whew..."
I sat down on the narrow wooden platform—though calling it a platform felt generous.
My entire body was covered in mud.
GRRRRUMBLE.
A tremendous clap of thunder sounded. It was Manseok's stomach.
"Big Brother... I'm hungry."
Manseok rubbed his belly with a dejected expression.
Chilbok, perhaps drained of energy, leaned against one of the platform's pillars and stared blankly ahead.
The only food we had was a few tough strips of jerky and two rice balls that we had brought when we were thrown out.
We had already eaten the rice balls on the way here.
"We need to find something to eat."
I got to my feet.
"Chilbok, start a fire. Manseok, come with me."
"Where are we going?"
"To get ingredients."
The marshland was even more desolate after darkness fell.
The frogs did not call out with ordinary croaks. Their strange cries echoed through the night.
"CROAAK—CROAAK—"
"B-Big Brother. I think something's going to jump out."
Manseok grabbed the hem of my clothes. He was built like a mountain, but he was also the biggest coward.
"Quiet. You'll scare them away."
I crouched beside the water and stared at the surface.
The water was not clear, but I could see something wriggling beneath it.
I raised a sharply whittled branch.
For ten years, while playing the fool, my only hobbies had been tending the vegetable patch and hunting.
My body might have looked weak, but I was confident in my concentration.
SPLASH!
"Got one!"
A fish as thick as an adult's forearm thrashed on the end of my branch. It was a snakehead.
"Wow! Big Brother, that's amazing!"
Manseok clapped his hands.
"This isn't enough. We have three mouths to feed."
I looked around some more.
There were pointed leaves sticking up along the water's edge. Cattails.
"Manseok, pull those out."
"Why? It's just grass."
"The roots taste better than sweet potatoes. Hurry up."
When Manseok exerted some strength, long white rhizomes came streaming out of the mud.
Cattail roots were rich in starch, perfect as a famine food.
Carrying one snakehead and a bundle of cattail roots, we returned triumphantly to the shack.
In front of it, Chilbok had somehow started a fire with wet wood.
Thick, acrid smoke filled the air, but seeing the firelight put my mind at ease.
"Oh! Meat!"
Chilbok cheered when he saw the snakehead.
We placed a dented pot over some stones and boiled water.
Then we roughly chopped up the cleaned snakehead and washed cattail roots before tossing them in.
Salt? Soybean paste? We had none.
We simply boiled it in plain water.
Ah, we did shred the tiniest bit of our remaining jerky into it to add some flavor to the broth.
BUBBLE, BUBBLE.
It smelled a little fishy, but to us, starving as we were, it smelled heavenly.
"Let's eat."
Before the words had even left my mouth, Manseok buried his face in the pot.
"Ah, hot! Hot!"
Even after scorching the roof of his mouth, he did not stop.
"Hmm."
I took a sip of the broth as well.
It was bland and fishy. But as the warmth traveled down my throat, it felt as though my frozen body were thawing.
The more I chewed the cattail roots, the sweeter they tasted.
"Is it good?"
"Yes! Big Brother! It's the best! It's better than the pig slop we ate at the estate!"
Manseok looked ready to chew through even the snakehead's bones.
Chilbok only picked at his food.
"If only we had some salt... Big Brother, are we really going to live like this forever, digging up grass roots to eat?"
He was practical, so he worried a lot.
I set down my chopsticks, which I had made from branches, and looked Chilbok straight in the eyes.
"Chilbok."
"Yes."
"I told you earlier. This place is a field of money."
"That was because you smelled shit and started seeing things..."
"Once day breaks tomorrow, we're going to see the Village Chief."
"Why the Village Chief? He'll throw us out."
"To lease land."
"What?! We can't even manage the land we already have, so why are we leasing more? And we don't have any money!"
Chilbok nearly jumped out of his skin.
"We can't farm this land right now."
I pointed toward the marshland submerged in darkness.
"It'll take at least a month just to drain the water. We have to dig irrigation channels and build dikes. But what do we need right now?"
"Food."
Manseok answered. Correct.
"Right. If we don't want to starve to death immediately, we need to plant crops that grow quickly. And for that, we need dry land where the water has already drained away."
The treasures I had improved over ten years slept inside my clothes.
[Great Peace No. 1 Rice Seeds] and [Great Peace No. 3 Radish Seeds].
These little things grew at a crazy speed.
The radishes, especially, could be harvested in forty days.
Compared to ordinary radishes, which took three months, it was almost a miracle.
But if I planted them in swamp mud, they would all rot.
I needed sandy soil or a gravel field with good drainage.
"We don't have money, but we do have a way."
I grinned as I rolled the family token in my pocket between my fingers.
'Choi Clan of Cheorwon.'
The clan at the pinnacle of the military regime. Choi Chung-heon and Choi Woo. Those fearsome names.
I might have been an exiled son, but to some country village chief, the name of a central noble was more frightening than a tiger.
"Big Brother, why are you making that face? You look like you're about to pull a scam..."
Chilbok trembled uneasily. The sharp-eyed little bastard.
"A scam? This is a negotiation. A very rough negotiation."
I gulped down the remaining broth.
"Now sleep. Tomorrow is war."
We lay down in the narrow shack, relying on one another's body heat.
The wind whistled through the gaps, making the tips of our noses cold.
Outside, frogs and waterfowl still cried, and the smell of rotten soil lingered in the air.
Yet, for some reason, I slept well.
This stinking shack was far more comfortable than sleeping nervously in the clan's splendid tiled-roof house.
'My home, earned after ten years of holding out.'
I opened my mud-stained palm.
With these hands, and with this black soil, I would turn Goryeo upside-down.
First, I had to sweet-talk that old Village Chief.
***
The next morning.
Before the fog had even cleared, we left the shack.
"Big Brother, but your clothes..."
Chilbok pointed out my appearance.
After rolling around in the mud yesterday, my silk clothes had become little more than rags.
Judging by my appearance alone, I looked less like a noble and more like a complete beggar.
"Actually, this is better."
"Pardon? Being a beggar is better?"
"You have to look like a mad dog if you want people to fear you."
I roughly swept back my tangled hair and did not bother wiping the mud from my face.
Instead, I adjusted my clothes so that the old sword at my waist and the [Choi Clan Token] beside it would be clearly visible.
"Manseok."
"Yes!"
"Make a scary face."
"How?"
"Imagine someone stole your meat."
"Grrr... Bastards... I'll kill them..."
Manseok's face instantly twisted into something vicious.
Yes, that was it. With that face, even bandits would run away.
"Let's go. Time to take over the village."
We headed for Galsan Village, a small settlement on the outskirts of Gold Province.
Farmers who had come out to their fields early in the morning glanced at us.
"What are those? Beggars?"
"Aren't they the kids who entered the haunted land yesterday?"
"They made it out alive?"
Ignoring the whispers, we headed straight for the Village Chief's tiled-roof house in the middle of the village.
It was the only house in the village with a tiled roof.
"Is anyone there?!"
I shouted from in front of the gate.
A moment later, the gate creaked open, and a wrinkled old man chewing on a reed stalk stepped out.
"Who is it? Yelling outside someone else's house so early in the morning..."
The Village Chief looked me up and down.
Mud-stained clothes. Tangled hair.
"If you've come to beg for food, go somewhere else. We don't have enough to eat either."
The Village Chief waved his hand and tried to close the gate.
Thud.
Manseok caught the gate with a hand as large as a pot lid.
The gate did not budge.
"W-What? Where did this brat come from, causing trouble here?!"
The Village Chief shouted in alarm.
Slowly, and with my hands clasped behind my back, I walked forward with deliberate arrogance.
"Old Village Chief. What excellent hospitality you show your guests."
"W-What did you say? You insolent beggar..."
"Beggar?"
I snickered and held the jade token at my waist up beneath the Village Chief's nose.
In the morning sunlight, the words carved into the jade token gleamed clearly.
[CHEORWON CHOI (Choi of Cheorwon)]
The Village Chief's eyes trembled.
The reed stalk fell from his mouth.
"C-Cheorwon... Choi?"
"My name is Choi San. I came down from Gaegyeong."
I narrowed my eyes and looked down at the Village Chief.
Drawing on ten years of acting skill, I put on the expression of an ignorant, arrogant young noble who knew nothing of the world.
"Do you know who my elder uncle is?"
"Y-Your elder uncle...?"
"Lord Choi Woo."
(The actual relation is a little distant, but there is no way some country old man knows the family genealogy.)
"Gasp!"
The Village Chief's legs gave out. He collapsed onto the ground.
Choi Woo, the son of Choi Chung-heon. Those two characters were more fearsome than the King of the Underworld throughout all of Goryeo.
A butcher said to take heads just for making eye contact.
"A-Ah... I failed to recognize such a noble person... I have committed a sin deserving death!"
The Village Chief pressed his forehead against the ground.
Chilbok, who had been watching from behind, stood with his mouth hanging open.
He had the expression of someone thinking, 'Big Brother... are you really a con man?'
With a satisfied smile, I patted the Village Chief's shoulder.
"Get up. I'm not such a narrow-minded person."
"T-Thank you. Thank you."
"Since I came down here anyway, I thought I might find myself a little pastime."
"A-A pastime, you say...?"
"I'm thinking of doing a little farming. But the water hasn't drained from my land yet. Is there any unused land in the village?"
"U-Unused land? It is planting season, so there is no empty land. Everyone is busy farming..."
The Village Chief wore a troubled expression.
It was not a lie. What land would be left unused in spring?
But I knew better.
Every village had abandoned land. Land left neglected because it was difficult to farm, or because its owner had run away.
"That gravel field next to the river. It's empty, isn't it?"
The place I pointed to was a wasteland at the entrance to the village.
Whenever it flooded, water spilled over it, and it was so full of stones that no one gave it a second look. It covered roughly 1,650 square meters.
"N-No, that land... it cannot be farmed. It's a field of stones, so barren that even weeds barely grow there..."
"I'll take care of that. Lease it to me."
"B-But... the rent..."
The Village Chief hesitated as he watched my reaction.
He was asking for money. But I had none. The twenty taels I possessed had to be used for buying seeds and tools.
"Rent?"
I frowned as though angered.
"Who did I say I was?"
"F-From the Choi Clan..."
"Right. My elder uncle would be disappointed to hear of this. If he found out his nephew had been slighted in the countryside because he could not even lease a small plot of land..."
"N-No! Not at all! Please, use it! It is abandoned land anyway!"
The Village Chief frantically waved his hands. He was afraid of what might come later.
"I don't like getting something for free. I'll repay you after the harvest."
"R-Repay me? What could possibly grow from that stone field..."
The Village Chief seemed to be laughing inwardly. I could plainly see his thoughts: 'Can even a single grain of rice grow in a field like that? I'll just consider myself unlucky for stepping in shit.'
"Once the harvest is over, I'll give you one full sack of barley."
"O-One sack of barley?"
The Village Chief's eyes went wide.
A sack of barley from that abandoned stone field. To a farmer, it was an absurd claim. The land would not even repay the cost of fertilizer.
But from the Village Chief's perspective, there was nothing to lose. The land was abandoned anyway. If I did not give him anything, so be it. If I did, it would be free money.
"W-Well... since the Young Master says so, I will trust you. Heh heh."
"Then we have an agreement."
I helped the Village Chief to his feet.
"Then we'll start work tomorrow. Manseok, let's go."
"Yes, Big Brother!"
We strode away proudly, leaving the Village Chief behind.
Once we had passed the entrance to the village, Chilbok's legs gave out and he sat down.
"Big Brother... you've got real nerve. What if we fail to harvest anything and can't give him the barley? What if he reports us to the government office..."
"Don't worry."
I gripped the rice seeds in my pocket.
"I'll turn that gravel field into a golden field within a month."
"The gravel field? Are you going to use some kind of sorcery to turn stones into rice?"
"Something like that."
I looked back.
The gravel field, roughly 1,650 square meters in size, lay in the distance.
And beyond it was that foul-smelling marshland.
When those two things came together, the history of agriculture in Goryeo would change.
"Rest up today. Starting tomorrow, it'll be hellish training. Manseok, eat plenty. Starting tomorrow, you're the ox."
"Pardon? I'm an ox? Do I just go moo?"
"No. You have to plow the field. Pull the plow."
"......"
Manseok's face turned pale.
Now it began.
It was time to reap the fruit of ten years of holding out.