Taesung Group's headquarters, belonging to one of the highest-ranked conglomerates in Korea's business world. The private elevator ascending toward the chairman's office at its very peak was filled with suffocating silence.
Watching the floor numbers climb rapidly across the display, Chief Secretary Kim repeatedly moistened his dry lips.
His gaze remained fixed on the paulownia box held carefully in the two hands of Lee Han-gyeol beside him. The pile of gray fragments that had been shattered beyond recognition only a week ago had been restored and now lay inside that box.
The chief secretary still could not believe those fragments had regained a complete form. Yet Han-gyeol wore an expression as serene as a calm lake as he held the box, and clear confidence lay beneath it.
"Master."
Breaking the silence, the chief secretary spoke quietly.
"There is...... an unwelcome guest waiting for us."
"An unwelcome guest?"
"Professor Choi Myeong-ye. It appears word leaked while the report that I had entrusted the commission to you was making its way through the Cultural Heritage Administration. He arrived early this morning and has been insisting on waiting for you."
Han-gyeol kept his gaze forward and nodded lightly. It was not entirely unexpected. In fact, it might be for the best. If Han-gyeol placed the result directly before those arrogant eyes, Professor Choi would be unable to disparage it viciously behind the scenes.
"That's fine. Please lead the way."
Ding—
The elevator doors opened. The chairman's office into which they were shown had a wall of glass overlooking all of Seoul, and a cold tension hung in the air.
Chairman Kang, seated at the head of the room, rose with a rigid expression. Though he was an old man with snow-white hair, the pressure exuded by the head of a conglomerate was tremendous. But impatience and desperation tangled within his gaze.
And in the middle of the reception sofa sat a middle-aged man in a dark tweed jacket with his legs crossed. It was Professor Choi Myeong-ye, the absolute power of academia.
Professor Choi set down the teacup he was holding and looked Han-gyeol up and down. A venomous sneer curled across his lips.
"Good grief. I wondered what great master craftsman was gracing us with his presence, but you're just a green brat who still smells of mother's milk."
Professor Choi raised his chin without bothering to rise.
"Chairman Kang, a street repairman with no pedigree is exploiting your desperation to perpetrate a cheap fraud. I finished a detailed diagnosis using my institute's most advanced equipment and declared this artifact impossible to restore. How could a green brat like him possibly have fixed it, especially in a mere week?"
His voice brimmed with the vicious elitism of a man who believed his judgment was truth itself.
Chairman Kang said nothing and merely looked back and forth between the chief secretary and Han-gyeol.
Han-gyeol did not so much as twitch an eyebrow at Professor Choi's blatant insult. He simply approached the center of the reception table and set down the paulownia box in his hands.
"It will not be too late to decide whether this is fraud after you see it for yourselves."
Professor Choi snorted at Han-gyeol's composed words.
"You must have found a factory-made imitation or some crude celadon from a similar period and patched it up. Do you think you can fool my eyes? Open it, then! Let Choi Myeong-ye personally appraise whatever crude monstrosity you've brought!"
Han-gyeol answered only by releasing the box's clasp.
Click.
The lid opened with a light metallic sound.
Han-gyeol carefully drew aside the red silk cloth covering the interior.
For an instant, the air in the chairman's office seemed to freeze. It was as though the morning sunlight pouring through the wall of glass had been sucked into the box.
"......!"
Chairman Kang was the first to gasp. He staggered toward the table.
What emerged from the box was not the ghastly pile of fragments the chief secretary had swept up several days earlier.
Not a single trace of breakage remained. Not one proportion was out of alignment.
The flawless vessel form (shape), as though a Goryeo potter had only just drawn it from the kiln eight hundred years ago, breathed radiantly beneath the light of the twenty-first century.
"I-is this...... truly that incense burner?"
Chairman Kang's trembling hands reached toward the incense burner, only to hover in the air, not daring to touch it. His reddening eyes were filled with disbelieving wonder.
"Impossible! This...... This is impossible!"
Professor Choi sprang from the sofa like a released coil. His face had gone pale as paper.
He practically lunged at it like a beast and peered down at the incense burner inside the box.
"Where did you steal such a perfect forgery? I saw it with my own eyes. The joining surfaces of the fragments were contaminated, and more than half the lid's openwork was missing!"
With trembling hands, Professor Choi pulled an appraisal loupe from his coat. He pressed the lens close to the incense burner's surface and began searching madly for seams.
"Where are the adhesive marks? Why is there none of the shrinkage unique to synthetic resin?! And what is wrong with the color?! How did you overcome metamerism? Why doesn't the color stand out even under fluorescent light?!"
Technical terms erupted sharply from Professor Choi's mouth. His eyes probed relentlessly through the loupe at every place the fragments might have been joined, but all he saw was an unbroken sea of jade green.
The boundary between the fragments and the resin had become so perfectly unified that it was impossible to distinguish with the naked eye—no, not even with a crude magnifying glass.
Professor Choi Myeong-ye could not accept it. His arrogant pride utterly rejected the fact that this young bastard had accomplished alone, and in a single week, what his dozens of researchers and hundreds of millions of won in equipment had deemed impossible.
"This is a trick! It must be an exquisitely made plastic model or an antique you bought and recoated with glaze! Chairman Kang, do not be deceived! Shine an ultraviolet lamp on it and every blue trace of that epoxy patchwork will show!"
Professor Choi shouted until the veins stood out on his neck. He had long since cast aside any scholarly dignity. It was nothing more than an ugly struggle to avoid admitting his misjudgment.
Han-gyeol directed a cold, settled gaze at Professor Choi's mottled red face.
He did not even consider him worth an excuse or a technical argument. Scientific data about shrinkage rates and pigment refraction meant nothing before a man trapped within such stubborn prejudice.
There was another way to prove that this incense burner was genuine. It lay not in its visible shell, but in awakening the object's true essence, preserved across eight hundred years.
"Professor. When appraising cultural heritage, something matters more than ultraviolet lamps or composition analyzers."
Han-gyeol's quiet voice silenced the turmoil in the chairman's office at once.
"You must understand its origins: what it was made for, and whose heart it held."
Han-gyeol took a small wooden case from the inside pocket of his suit. Nestled neatly inside was a short incense stick made from the finest sandalwood.
"Wh-what are you doing?!"
Professor Choi tried to stop him, but Han-gyeol paid him no mind and struck a match, lighting the end of the incense.
Fsssh—
A red ember flared at its tip, and a faint, pungent trail of smoke began to rise.
Han-gyeol opened the incense burner's lid with the utmost gentleness. He carefully placed the incense inside, then closed the lid once more.
Every gaze focused on the jade incense burner in the center of the table. The silence was so taut that not even breathing could be heard.
A moment later.
Fine white smoke began slipping through the gaps in the newly made seven-treasure openwork of the lid that Han-gyeol had shaped from resin in midair.
The smoke passage Han-gyeol had carved without even 0.1 millimeters of error. Following that perfect aerodynamic channel, the trapped smoke flowed like a living organism, drawing smooth and graceful curves as it danced into the air.
Then a deep, weighty fragrance began to spread throughout the chairman's office with the smoke.
It was not only the scent of the sandalwood Han-gyeol had just lit. The gray soot he had preserved beneath a coating instead of washing it from the incense burner's inner wall. When heat touched that residue of fifty-year-old time, the distant, desperate fragrance condensed within it erupted and mingled with the present incense.
"Ah......."
The instant he smelled it, Chairman Kang's imposing frame visibly staggered.
His eyes opened helplessly wide. The face of the merciless conglomerate chairman who commanded tens of thousands of employees in the finest suit crumbled in an instant.
Time flowed backward.
A winter night in the Busan refugee settlement, bitter enough to strip flesh from bone. A cold floor in a drafty room.
It was the very scent that had touched the nose of his younger self as he gasped at death's door.
Chairman Kang as a child, too weak even to open his eyes. In his blurred vision, the back of a woman in a worn jacket remained prostrate before this incense burner, rubbing her palms together through the entire night.
'Please, just let my son live. You may take my life instead.......'
His mother's voice, crying out as though coughing blood, echoed in his ears like an auditory hallucination.
Heavy tears fell one after another down Chairman Kang's wrinkled cheeks. Forgetting his dignity and all the prestige of being chairman, he braced himself against the table and collapsed.
"Yes...... This is the smell. This was the smell......."
He tried to gather the rising incense smoke into his trembling hands. As though it were the breath of his departed mother, he bowed over and over while pouring out scalding tears.
"Mother...... Mother......."
The fierce love of a mother who had sacrificed everything to save him.
The pile of fragments Professor Choi had sentenced to death and tried to cast into the trash had returned through the hands of the young artisan named Lee Han-gyeol.
Before that sight, Professor Choi stood rigid and silent.
He stared blankly between the rising smoke and the sobbing Chairman Kang.
It was the moment he realized just how shallow and arrogant a shell his scientific knowledge and theories about ultraviolet lamps, composition analyzers, and adhesive shrinkage rates truly were.
Restoration was not simply the chemical process of joining broken stones and lumps of clay. It was understanding the human hearts and memories within them, the hopes that crossed through time, and bringing all of it back into the world intact.
It was a realm cold machines and paltry degrees could never reach.
Professor Choi's face flushed with shame and defeat. He shoved the loupe into his pocket and backed away, struggling to steady his trembling legs.
Whatever he said while remaining in that room would amount to nothing more than the pathetic excuse of a loser. Insisting the incense burner was fake before the sobbing Chairman Kang would be an act fit only for a beast.
His defeat was complete and absolute. Beyond a technical defeat, it was the utter collapse of his philosophy and emotional depth as a restorer.
"Ahem, ahem. You were...... lucky."
Unable to surrender his petty pride even at the end, Professor Choi muttered in a hoarse voice. Then, without a farewell from anyone, he hurriedly opened the office door and fled.
Chief Secretary Kim also turned his head away, his eyes red, quietly giving the chairman room to compose himself.
Han-gyeol silently took one step back.
On the table, the Goryeo celadon that had crossed eight hundred years shone brilliantly as it sent a mother's desperate prayer from fifty years ago aloft in smoke.
Han-gyeol gazed silently at the piercingly blue jade incense burner and released a deep breath of relief within his heart.
The mother's tears buried within the fragments had finally reached her son's heart intact.