Left with no other option, the peddler climbed back to the cave and set down all his belongings. He tied as many water bottles as he had around his waist, made a torch from a large branch and an old oil-soaked cloth, and threw it into the narrow crevice. Stripped to his underclothes, he opened a bottle of expensive oil from his pack.
He lavishly coated his entire body in the costly perfumed oil and pushed into the narrow cave. The oil was slippery, and although the opening was tight, the rock inside had been polished smooth by hundreds of passages by smaller people. Finding that his head would just fit, he forced the rest of his body into the gap and crawled with all his strength.
His nose and the back of his head scraped against the floor and ceiling, and the torch burned him as he crawled. He kept throwing it ahead, advancing a little at a time, until at last, after a long while, he emerged into the wider cavern.
There lay a small pool of spring water, too small to call a well but larger than a rain puddle. A snake that had arrived before him lay leisurely coiled on the bottom, its body immersed. The peddler hurriedly opened his bottles and greedily filled them. Delighting in thoughts of the fortune the water would bring, he dragged out the snake that was getting in his way and dashed it against the ground, killing it. Then he filled six bottles.
Before returning through the narrow passage, he thrust his blazing torch into the spring. He wanted all the water for himself. The large branch drove into the source, fouling the water with heat and ash, and the spring dried up in an instant.
The peddler began crawling back through the crevice, now shrouded in darkness. Halfway through, he realized that all the oil had rubbed off his body. The cave that had swallowed him so smoothly on the way in now felt nothing but cramped and jagged. Entering had been easy, but getting out was a struggle, as though the cave had hands that clutched at him.
At some point, he became wedged so tightly that he could move neither forward nor back. He couldn't turn his head. The cave seemed to press down on his entire body. He wanted to reach for the bottles at his waist and drink the spring water, but it was too tight even to lower the arms stretched above his head.
The villagers who fetched water were small adults or very young children. After so many trips, they knew the gaps well enough to navigate them with their eyes shut. Shin's daughter, too, knew every turn inside the cave by heart. The peddler did not. Crawling through the dark without a torch, he realized he had veered away from the route he had taken on the way in. Wedged between the rocks, he screamed for help. He screamed himself hoarse, but no one came.
How much time had passed? He heard someone crawling past him. He shouted for help, but received no answer. Only after a long time yelling did he hear someone crawling toward him. But the sound was strange. From far away came the scrape of metal.
Scrape! Scrrrape! Clatter! Clang! Scrrrape! Clatter!
Unable to move his face, he strained his head back and rolled his eyes upward to see what was coming. Shin's daughter was crawling toward him at speed, a torch in one hand and a kitchen knife between her teeth. The blade clanged against the cave wall. Thinking she had heard his cries and come to help, the peddler smiled and called to her.
“Cut the bottles off my waist and give me the water! Do that, and I promise to reward you when we get out!”
But Shin's daughter spat out the knife and spoke.
“You fooled me once. Do you think you'll fool me twice?”
As she approached, he saw that her left cheek and eye were red and swollen. The tiny blood vessels in her left eye had burst, and the smell of blood was strong enough to reach him from a distance. She had evidently been beaten severely. Only on hearing her cold voice did he realize she hadn't come to rescue him. Terrified, he shouted.
“If I get out, I'll give you everything I left outside!”
“I can't trust a word you say. You killed the snake and fouled the spring too, didn't you? How can I trust a promise from a man with no honor? Your greed went too far. There's nothing left for you but death.”
The terrified peddler thrashed, but Shin's daughter hurried closer with the knife between her teeth. Her hair hung loose. Her bloodless face was marked by burst vessels, and she crawled toward him in white clothes. Even the peddler, who had traveled all eight provinces with his pack and endured every hardship imaginable, could have fainted at the sight.
Reaching him, Shin's daughter cut the rope at his waist, gathered the string of bottles in her hand, and silently began making her way out.
“You haven't come to kill me?”
“What are you talking about? You're not even worth getting blood on my hands.”
Then she spoke to him one last time.
“I've left the knife. If you can give up your greed, you may live.”
The peddler screamed at her to leave the torch, but she crawled out through the rocks without another word. Trapped in darkness, he struggled until one hand barely managed to grasp the kitchen knife. Yet in that sightless dark, he couldn't bring himself to cut away an ear, his nose, his scalp, or an arm. Only then did he feel regret. If only he had a torch! If only he had brought it instead of thrusting it into the spring!
After three days without food, he was desperately thirsty. Hearing someone in the distance, he shouted for water. Heo, the small woman who regularly cleaned the spring, had entered the cave and was startled to find him there. She crawled past and discovered the fouled spring. Pulling out the branch, clearing the ash, and cleaning the pool, she shouted.
“The spring has been fouled. It doesn't flow anymore. There's no water for you!”
Through three days of starvation, the peddler remained certain that losing weight would let him escape. He even welcomed his worsening hunger. After five days without food, however, his body strangely began to swell. His arms and legs puffed up to twice their usual size.
Several villagers squeezed past the peddler, ignoring him as he lay wedged near the entrance. They hurriedly washed out the ash and removed the branch. They wrapped the dead snake beside the spring in a hemp shroud, buried it carefully, and held a rite for it. After five days, water began welling up again, but it had lost its healing power. Only ordinary clear water rose from the spring.
In ancient times, people had slaughtered dogs or pigs and thrown their bleeding carcasses into a dragon's pool to ruin it. Others had beheaded a dragon horse and stained the pond it had emerged from with its blood. The villagers believed that, like those people, the foolish peddler had polluted their spring and destroyed its powers.
Having lost their healing spring in an instant, the villagers debated what to do with the man wedged in the cave. Some argued that he should be left to die as the consequence of his actions. Others said that although the spring had been polluted, they couldn't let the cave be polluted too. More precisely, one side wanted to wait until he died, cut him into pieces, drag him out, and clean the passage and cavern. The other argued that he was still alive, and that removing him alive would at least leave less filth in the cave. Neither side would yield.
Lee, the oldest villager, listened quietly to their angry arguments, then spoke.
“However much the spring and cave matter, do you consider them more precious than a human life?”
At the elder's words, the villagers reluctantly decided to work together to rescue the peddler. From that day on, they gave him enough thin rice gruel and water to stay alive. Unable to move his head, he had to suck them through a slender reed. With food and water, his swollen body gradually subsided. Drinking the gruel Heo brought along with his tears, he asked her a question.
“Where is Shin's daughter?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I was curious.”
“I hear she left home five days ago after being beaten, and hasn't come back.”
Another five days passed with the peddler wedged between the rocks. Day and night, he pestered Heo to stay and talk whenever she came with food. When she firmly refused, he swung his kitchen knife at her. After a single scream, she never returned to the cave.
The small-framed elder Lee took the knife while the peddler slept. Left in the darkness, he begged the elder to bring a light. But a fire couldn't be kept burning in the narrow gap because of the acrid smoke and soot. Besides, no matter what he said, the elder never answered.
One day, the peddler began insisting that he could hear snakes crawling in the dark. Still wedged in place, he twisted his entire body in an effort to escape. He would suddenly convulse, claiming to hear voices where no one stood. He wept for five days in the darkness, then screamed for three days and nights, until at last he fell silent. By the time the plump cheeks and belly he had brought to the village had wasted away, he realized his body was small enough to pass easily through the cave.
But he had no strength left to crawl. The villagers took the expensive scented oils from his pack and liberally coated his upper body, the cave floor, and the ceiling. They tore all his silk into strips, twisted them into ropes, and tied them around his arms and chest. The village's able-bodied men gathered outside and pulled him very slowly toward the entrance.
The work began at sunrise and ended only just before sunset. After their long struggle, the dying peddler finally slid out of the narrow crevice, spilling into the sunlight. It was the first sunlight he had seen in a month. After a month in darkness, he screamed at the sudden light.
“Aaaaaagh! Aaaaaaaaaagh! Aaaagh! Aaaaaaaaagh!”
Urine and feces caked his lower body in a filthy black mess, and his hair and beard had grown wild. Prolonged immobility had left his skin blackened with swelling and bruises. Lying facedown, unable to move properly, he convulsed and writhed. His limbs were wasted, his skin blue or black, and he looked like a black snake squirming on the ground.
After so long alone in darkness, trembling with terror and anxiety, he was no longer the peddler he had been. As his blackened body writhed in the sun, stinking of filth and screaming, someone cried out at the sight. A snake!
“It's an imugi. Not a man, an imugi!”
The villagers who had gathered at the entrance to see the peddler fled screaming. A few stouthearted men took him to an empty house, washed him, fed him, and clothed him. But he never spoke or walked as he once had again. He lay motionless in the sun as though coiled, and when the sun set and darkness came, he wailed as though the world were ending. The villagers believed that the peddler who had fouled the spring and killed an innocent snake looked human only on the outside. He languished in illness until he climbed onto a thatched roof and died with his body twisted, gazing up at the sky.
The villagers held repeated rites before the cave, and many offered prayers, but the spring's healing powers never returned.
Then one day, a tremor shook the earth so violently that heaven and earth seemed to turn upside down. The rocks around the crevice collapsed, blocking even the narrow passage people had barely been able to squeeze through. Some said a dragon's ascent had caused it. Others thought the imugi living in the spring was raging because its waters had been fouled.
So that their folly would not be repeated, the villagers erected stone steles in the village and before the cave on the mountain. The place where those steles stand is Taecheon, the Great Sky, where legend says the heavens open wide and many dragons ascend.]
<Taecheon's Legend of the Healing Water - The Peddler and the Healing Water>
TL Notes:
TL Note: An imugi is a great serpent believed capable of becoming a dragon.