Park Min-seok stood with his mouth half-open like a fool, unable to immediately comprehend the meaning of the young appraiser's words.
Bewilderment and doubt rose across his face at those unreal words, the sort found only in old tales and utterly incongruous with the hideous iron club that had nearly been thrown onto a waste-disposal truck.
"Master, you're not...... joking right now, are you? A tiger? Isn't this just a chunk of rusted rebar?"
Han-gyeol slowly withdrew his hand from the iron club's surface before speaking.
"This is no joke. As an appraiser, I am merely telling you the facts I have seen."
Han-gyeol walked around the table and stood directly before Min-seok.
"This must not be thrown away. It could become a national treasure."
Min-seok sucked in a startled breath at Han-gyeol's firm declaration.
"What? This lump of iron?"
Instead of answering Min-seok's question, Han-gyeol took a silver cylinder about the size of a grown man's thumb from the toolbox behind his workbench. It was an industrial, ultra-powerful neodymium magnet, a tool with enough magnetic force to yank even a thick steel plate toward it at frightening speed and make it snap into place.
"If this were an ordinary lump of iron or piece of rebar, it should fly toward this magnet at terrifying speed and stick to it the moment the magnet came near."
Han-gyeol slowly brought the magnet toward the hideous iron club. Ten centimeters, five centimeters, one centimeter.
The magnet drew so close it nearly touched the surface, yet the expected sharp metallic snap never sounded. Even when Han-gyeol placed the magnet directly against the iron club, it merely rested there as though it had met plastic.
"Huh......? Isn't it iron?"
"It is. The magnetic force simply cannot reach it."
Han-gyeol easily removed the magnet and explained.
"The rust covering it has built up so thickly that even the magnetism cannot penetrate it. Over hundreds of years, layer upon layer of iron oxide accumulated until it became a single, hard shell of stone."
Min-seok swallowed dryly. A shell of time so thick that even a magnet could not properly cling to it.
Han-gyeol's demonstration did not end there. He set down the magnet, then picked up a precision loupe and a pointed dental scaler.
Han-gyeol fixed his gaze upon one end of the iron club, at what appeared to be the guard where the handle joined the blade. Rotten wood and red rust had clotted together like mud until the original shape was impossible to discern.
Then he began using the scaler to very carefully scrape away the swollen rust from the surface.
Scrape, scrape.
Rust powder fell for a while. After roughly five minutes of precise scraping, Han-gyeol's hand stopped.
He gently blew away the dust, then held the loupe out to Min-seok.
"Come over here and look closely at the area I scraped."
As though entranced, Min-seok approached, placed the loupe to his eye, and examined the spot Han-gyeol had worked upon. At first, he saw nothing but a rough red surface, but the instant the lens came into focus, his eyes nearly popped from their sockets.
Deep within the ravines of red and black rust, a faint but unmistakable silver line gleamed.
"W-what is that? Is it silver?"
"It is. A trace of silver-wire inlay."
Han-gyeol continued his explanation in a calm voice.
"It is a supreme metalworking technique in which intricate grooves are carved into the surface of iron, then filled by hammering in silver wire thinner than a human hair to create a pattern. During Joseon, it was reserved for objects used by the royal court, the highest nobility, or at major state rites. No one would have inflicted such brutally demanding manual work upon a lump of scrap metal no better than construction waste."
Silver-wire inlay. The royal court. And the general his grandfather had cried out for.
The realization that the object his relatives had mocked as garbage, and that even he had considered a burden, actually held centuries of history shattered his prejudice.
"Grandfather...... knew."
The strength seemed to leave Min-seok's legs. He collapsed into a reception-room chair and roughly rubbed his gaunt face with both hands.
He remembered his grandfather's gaunt hands, hands that had refused to let go even within the darkness of dementia. Though the old man had forgotten his family's names, the weight of this treasured sword, guarded by their bloodline, had remained engraved upon his soul. Min-seok could not raise his head, overwhelmed by shame and self-loathing for having nearly thrown his grandfather's final possession into a dump.
"Master."
After a long silence, Min-seok looked up at Han-gyeol with reddened eyes.
"Can you remove all this rust and draw the sword? I want to see...... the Big Dipper inside it with my own eyes. I want to show it in its restored form before my grandfather's portrait and apologize."
Han-gyeol nodded lightly at Min-seok's desperate request, though his expression hardened.
"Removing the rust is possible, but drawing the sword is impossible for now."
"Why? Wouldn't it come free if we gripped the scabbard and pulled hard?"
"Absolutely not."
Han-gyeol spoke firmly.
"The blade and scabbard have been fused into one body by rust."
"Then if we force it......."
"It will break."
Min-seok's face went pale. A chill swept down his spine at the thought that his ignorance could have destroyed his grandfather's keepsake forever.
Han-gyeol drew the restoration blueprint in his mind.
"We must completely exclude physical impacts or force. We need to separate only the iron oxide clotted between the scabbard and blade, little by little. It will be precision work requiring a long time."
Han-gyeol stepped closer and met Min-seok's eyes.
"Naturally, the restoration cost will not be insignificant either."
Min-seok clenched both fists. He could not erase his grandfather's sorrowful final smile from his mind.
Neither cost nor time mattered. If he gave up here, it felt as though he would spend the rest of his life with nothing but an empty shell.
"Please do it."
Min-seok bowed deeply to Han-gyeol.
"I'll find the money somehow. I don't care how long it takes...... Please restore my grandfather's vindication and this sword's true form."
Han-gyeol accepted Min-seok's resolve and drew up the contract.
"I will bring it back into the world by the safest, most perfect method possible."
After hearing Han-gyeol's confident answer, Min-seok left the workshop standing straight, unlike when he had entered.
Once Min-seok departed, Han-gyeol immediately rolled up the sleeves of his work clothes and headed for the sealed room at the back of the workshop.
It was a climate-controlled chamber where light could be completely blocked and temperature and humidity precisely regulated. It was a private space his grandfather, Lee Tae-jun, had used only when handling the most demanding objects in his lifetime.
Han-gyeol set up a massive special acrylic tank as tall as a grown man at the center of the chamber, then put on a dust mask and thick chemical-resistant rubber gloves. He took a container of purified water and a reagent bottle filled with white powder from a shelf and brought them beside the tank.
With physical impact forbidden, chemical separation was the only way to part the scabbard and blade. A simple rust remover would dissolve the silver-wire inlay and the iron surface along with the corrosion, so he needed a precise chemical solution that would selectively break down the iron oxide's structure while protecting the base metal.
Han-gyeol checked the reagent bottle's label.
'EDTA.'
It was a compound that bonded with metal ions to form water-soluble complexes, an ingenious chemical cleaner that left the iron skeleton untouched while selectively seizing and pulling away the swollen rust particles parasitizing it.
Han-gyeol carefully poured the powder into the tank filled with purified water.
If the concentration rose even slightly too high, it risked corroding the base iron; if too low, the fused rust would not release. He checked the scale down to the microgram and set the concentration at exactly 5 percent.
Once he finished mixing the solution, Han-gyeol turned on the tank heater.
The red line on the thermometer slowly began to rise. After confirming it had reached exactly 24 degrees, Han-gyeol locked the heater at that temperature.
Everything was ready.
Han-gyeol stepped outside the chamber, carefully lifted the Four-Tiger Sword from the workbench with both hands, and returned.
"All right. Time to wake from your long sleep."
With a soft splash, the enormous rusted iron club, more than a meter long, sank completely into the lukewarm solution.
Han-gyeol removed his gloves and pressed both hands against the tank glass, holding his breath as he watched for a change.
At first, the iron club lay motionless in the clear solution like dead scrap, showing no change whatsoever. Not a single bubble rose. Silence hung in the sealed chamber.
But after approximately five minutes.
Blup.
A single tiny bubble formed within a crack in the rough, swollen red rust covering the iron club. Then, as though taking their cue from it, countless bubbles began blooming simultaneously across the entire knotted surface.
The bubbles burst, unveiling a strange chemical reaction before his eyes.
Ssssss.
Beginning with the outermost layer of hardened rust, dark-red corrosion slowly seeped into the clear solution in wavering threads, like a spool coming undone. The thick shell of time was collapsing as it reacted with the solution.
At that moment, Han-gyeol's eyes narrowed sharply.
Near the handle, where the scabbard's wood had rotted away, tar-black bubbles rather than red rust fiercely boiled up like viscous sap.
Acidic substances leaching from the wood had met the corroded iron and triggered a runaway chemical reaction. At this rate, the silver-wire inlay patterns enduring inside could dissolve completely or sustain damage.
"Damn."
Han-gyeol raced to the reagent cabinet, rapidly mixed a mildly alkaline buffer solution to serve as a neutralizer, and filled a long, thin glass syringe with it before hurrying back to the tank.
Reaching over the tank, Han-gyeol carefully inserted the syringe needle into the gap at the handle where the black bubbles were seething.
Hiss—!
The instant the neutralizer entered the water, the black ooze began subsiding as though releasing white smoke. The immediate crisis had passed, but he could not relax completely. There was far too much decayed material tangled around it.
Han-gyeol immediately donned long chemical-resistant rubber gloves that reached his shoulders and took up a broad brush made from soft badger hair. He plunged both arms deep into the solution and began gently brushing the handle of the Four-Tiger Sword.
He followed the grain of the decayed matter softened by the chemical solution, using minute vibrations of the brush tip to physically sweep it away.
Scrape, scraaape.
Each time the submerged brush swept over the rotten wood and rust, a dark-red cloud bloomed. Han-gyeol closed his eyes and focused every nerve solely upon the minute friction transmitted through the bristles. Instinctively distinguishing the sensation of hard metal from crumbling rust, he carefully controlled his strength.
How much time had passed?
Plop.
The brush met a peculiar resistance, and then a huge clump of decayed matter that had constricted the handle like a suffocating turtle shell fell away.
As the clump sank to the bottom of the tank, the murky water cleared for a single instant.
The work light's intense white beam pierced the tank water and illuminated the narrow gap newly freed of rust.
Flash—!
Within the murky, blood-colored solution, a dazzling silver gleam flashed sharply enough to hurt the eyes.
It was the first star forming the handle of the Big Dipper's ladle, one of the stars among the 28 lunar mansions inlaid upon the blade.
The night sky of Joseon, submerged in deep slumber for hundreds of years, finally opened its brilliant first eye.
"......You were still alive."
Han-gyeol's fingertips trembled as he held the brush beneath the water.