The storm Mr. Park had warned him about struck the very next day. But it was not some petty interference or retaliation from Professor Choi Myeong-ye.
It was perhaps the most primal of human instincts: blind greed without end.
An assault by moths drawn to the flame in pursuit of a jackpot.
Jingle, jingle—
From just after nine in the morning, the wind chime on the workshop door rang without rest. People carrying large bundles or boxes of unknown contents crowded in one after another, and the workshop soon became a madhouse.
"Boss! We used this as the dog's food bowl at home, but that bluish color has to mean it's Goryeo celadon! If you fix the crack, I'll be able to buy an apartment in Gangnam, right?"
A middle-aged man in a stretched-out shirt and dragging slippers thrust a roughly wrapped brass bowl across the workbench.
Han-gyeol rubbed his dry face and released a small sigh. Far from being Goryeo celadon, the bowl was nickel-silver tableware mass-produced in some factory during the 1980s. The bluish color came solely from green corrosion.
"I'm sorry, but this is a modern, factory-made dish with no value whatsoever as cultural heritage."
"How can you tell without even looking properly? You recognize everyone else's stuff at a glance and make them hundreds of millions, but you're ignoring mine? A young man gets a taste of money and suddenly grows so arrogant!"
The man forced the issue with veins standing out on his neck.
None of them cared about the stories or memories held within the objects they had brought. Only the vulgar question, 'How much can I get if this is repaired?' swirled chaotically through the workshop.
Han-gyeol stood with his posture unshaken and drew a firm boundary in a courteous but resolute voice before the agitated crowd.
"I believe all of you are under a misunderstanding. I am a restorer, not a magician. No matter how much care I take to restore something of no value to perfection, that will never create new value. What I repair is only the original time and story held within an object."
"What kind of nonsense is that? If it won't make money, there's no reason to fix it!"
"If you came here hoping to speculate or strike it rich by chance, you have the wrong address. It appears there are no more objects I can appraise for you, so please leave. From now on, I will accept nothing but commissions reserved in advance."
Han-gyeol's cold, overwhelming presence silenced the noisy visitors as if they had swallowed honey, and they began retreating one by one. They grumbled with faces full of resentment, but before Han-gyeol's steady eyes, they seemed unable to muster the nerve to keep arguing.
After the swarm of moths that had ravaged the workshop all morning finally passed, its usual heavy silence returned at last.
"Haa......."
Only then did Han-gyeol relax and drop heavily into his chair. Dealing with humanity's endless, blind greed was several times more exhausting than performing precision restoration work with his fingertips.
Time passed, and the sunlight streaming through the workshop's windows grew damp with the deep orange of late afternoon.
Jingle—
The wind chime gave a cautious, faint ring.
"We are closed for the day. If you would like to make a reservation, please leave your name and number......."
Han-gyeol turned to deliver the instructions mechanically, only for his gaze to stop on the man standing by the door.
He appeared to be in his early thirties.
But unlike the fortune seekers who had crowded in that morning, he looked a wreck. His inexpensive off-the-rack suit was creased all over, and thick beads of sweat ran down his forehead despite the late-autumn chill on the cusp of winter.
What captured Han-gyeol's attention above all was the look in the young man's eyes.
It was not the greed of someone seeking to become rich overnight. It was a desperate, pitiful gaze, like someone hanging from the edge of a cliff and willing to grab even a rotten rope.
The young man clutched a cardboard box nearly as large as his body so tightly it looked ready to crumple, and both hands supporting it trembled faintly like aspen leaves.
"Um...... Are you Master Lee Han-gyeol......?"
His voice was terribly hoarse.
Han-gyeol set aside the broom in his hand and approached him. Unlike his cold demeanor that morning, his gaze now carried deep sympathy and warmth.
"Yes, I'm Lee Han-gyeol. That looks heavy, so please set it down over here first."
Han-gyeol guided the young man to the reception table. He shuffled over and carefully lowered the box into the center. Even when he set it down, his trembling did not stop.
Han-gyeol slid a glass of warm water toward him.
"Please have some water first. You're sweating heavily."
"Ah, th-thank you......."
The young man took the glass in trembling hands. Some water spilled across the table, but he paid it no mind and drank slowly. Only after moistening his parched throat did he seem to calm slightly and steady his ragged breathing.
"Whew, my name is Kim Cheol-su."
The young man raised his bowed head and looked at Han-gyeol.
"I knew it was rude, but I couldn't bring myself to go anywhere else, so I came here. Master, I read the article saying you work miracles that revive even dead objects. Could you...... perhaps repair this one as well?"
His eyes as he looked at the box seemed filled with heavy remorse and desperate lingering attachment.
"Before looking at the object, I think I should hear its story. What could it be that has made you this desperate?"
At Han-gyeol's calm prompting, Cheol-su swallowed once more and forced himself to speak.
"I'm a groom-to-be. My girlfriend of five years and I need to find a home, but even after saving every last won and scraping together everything we could, we still couldn't afford the deposit on a villa at the edge of Seoul."
Cheol-su's voice was thick with tears. It was a harsh reality any young Korean could understand.
"While working two jobs day and night, I ran into a close senior from my hometown. He was a man with extensive connections in the antique world. When he heard about my situation, he made a secret proposal. He said a fallen family desperately needed cash and had put up a national-treasure-class piece of pottery, and that they had agreed to sell it cheaply in a private deal."
Antiques and an acquaintance.
It was one of the most common stories in this field.
"He said it was worth hundreds of millions, but because of a hairline crack, they were selling it quickly for fifty million won. He guaranteed that if I had it properly restored and resold it, I would get at least two hundred million."
Fifty million won. It was blood money cobbled together from every penny he had earned through sweat and toil, plus a high-interest loan.
"I lost my mind. The deadline for the housing deposit was approaching, and I felt pathetic for being so helpless. The temptation of making a nine-figure profit in one stroke made me abandon reason and stake everything I had."
Cheol-su bowed his head and shed heavy tears.
He had needed to scrape together his entire hard-earned savings from working two jobs and borrow to the limit from a secondary lender at high interest merely to assemble that blood money.
"I hesitated at first. But the deadline for the housing deposit was approaching, and I felt pathetic for disappointing my girlfriend time and again. I lost my mind. Seduced by the promise of making over one hundred million won in profit at a stroke, I abandoned reason and staked everything I had."
Cheol-su bowed his head and shed large tears.
"I handed over the fifty million and brought the object home...... but every restoration shop I visited turned me away at the door without even looking at it. Fear finally hit me, so I called my senior, but the number had already been disconnected. He had vanished."
It was a typical fraud committed by the person he trusted most when desperation had driven him into a corner.
A corner of Han-gyeol's heart sank heavily.
"......First, let me examine the object."
When Han-gyeol rose, Cheol-su tore the packing tape from the box with trembling hands and carefully removed the layers of cushioning inside.
The pottery that emerged was far larger and more ornate than expected.
Across a clean, transparent ground reminiscent of pure white skin, an enormous blue dragon saturated with cobalt pigment coiled around the body. Every scale was depicted in intricate detail, while its dynamic pose, jaws spread toward the heavens as if it might ascend at any moment, was overwhelming enough to capture anyone's gaze.
<Blue-and-White Porcelain Jar with Dragon Design>.
It was pottery of the utmost splendor, used for royal banquets and major rites in the late Joseon period.
Just as Cheol-su had said, only a single fine hairline crack ran across the middle of the dragon's body. Otherwise, the overall state of preservation appeared flawless.
"What do you think, Master? You can restore it, can't you?"
Cheol-su asked desperately, struggling not to release his last thread of hope.
But Han-gyeol could not answer. His eyes had settled into an icy calm, and his gaze at the pottery held deep wariness.
'It's too perfect.......'
For something supposedly fired with wood in a Joseon kiln, the glaze's contours and the clay's shrinkage followed patterns as uniform as if they had been stamped out by a machine. Even the natural crazing (fine cracks) and worn traces that should have shown the passage of time possessed a strangely controlled, artificial quality.
Han-gyeol reached for the white cotton gloves in his drawer, then stopped and placed his bare hand against the cold, smooth body of the blue-and-white porcelain.
In that instant.
Humm—!
A piercing ring tore through his mind and struck his eardrums, making Han-gyeol furrow his brow sharply for a moment.
It was unlike the sensation he had felt whenever he touched an old artifact or authentic work before.
The sensations flooding through his fingertips and into his brain were viciously violent and artificial.
The roar of electric motors. The dry, desolate mechanical heat pouring from a gas kiln.
Above all, what stabbed at Han-gyeol's sense of smell until it went numb was the reeking stench of harsh chemicals.
Hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, and the sour, rotten smell of potassium permanganate solution used to forcibly corrode the surface and impose the appearance of centuries upon it.
It was the smell of a lie, calculated and manipulated solely to deceive someone.
His vision turned blue, and cold lines of information appeared in the empty air before Han-gyeol.
[True Name: Modern Craftwork (Precision Imitation Forgery)]
[Date of Production: 2023 (Special Gas Kiln and Chemical Aging Treatment)]
[Condition: Surface Corroded with Strong Acid; Hairline Crack Artificially Created.]
[Current Value: 200,000 won (For Decoration and Prop Use)]
Two hundred thousand won.
The true form of fifty million won in precious housing funds was nothing more than a cheap, two-hundred-thousand-won forgery, mass-fired in a factory kiln and drenched in poison to force the grime of age upon it.
Even the fine crack on the pottery's surface had been left deliberately as an opening for repair, a cunning trap laid by the criminals to lure their prey.
The merciless text hovering in the air slowly scattered like smoke.
A heavy silence pressed down upon the workshop.
Cheol-su still clasped his hands together and stared desperately at Han-gyeol's lips. Across his sweat-soaked face, Han-gyeol seemed to see the agony of the mountain of debt he would now have to bear and the collapsing future with the woman he loved.
Han-gyeol slowly removed his hand from the pottery.
His hand tightened. As an appraiser, he had to deliver this cruel truth.
"Master...... can you...... repair it?"
Unable to endure the silence, Cheol-su asked in a trembling voice.
Han-gyeol raised his gaze and looked straight into Cheol-su's pitiful eyes. His expression hardened, cold and firm, without the slightest tremor.
"I'm sorry."
Han-gyeol's low, dry voice cut through the workshop's silence.
"I cannot repair this jar."