TBML 45

The man, who had been lying on the ground groaning after getting a heavy beating in the crotch from Yiyeon, belatedly dragged two more of his gang up the mountain. Huffing and and throbbing from his injuries, the man glared with fury and even called out the guy who had been rolling around at the gambling table all night long.

As they crossed over the mountain behind Yiyeon’s house, the steep slope and dense trees made curses rise to their lips. It was exhausting, and he considered turning back, but even though this was no business to be conducting openly in the village in broad daylight, he was worried about Young Master Seo, who had followed Yiyeon up the mountain at this hour and had not been heard from since. So, the man stubbornly kept moving forward.

It wasn’t so much that he was genuinely worried about Young Master Seo as he was afraid that if anything happened to Young Master Seo, he would be punished by his father, the county magistrate. In fact, the other members of the group who had climbed the mountain with him hadn’t budged an inch when Yiyeon or Byeon were mentioned, but when they heard that “Young Master Seo” had gone up with them and hadn’t come down yet, they glanced around nervously and got to their feet.

Truth be told, none of them really thought anything serious had happened. After all, it was just a matter of catching a puny little man who couldn’t even use his arms. They’d only been putting up with Yiyeon because of the money he dutifully brought them; otherwise, he was nothing more than an easy-to-handle plaything.

Even though they figured nothing serious had happened, Young Master Seo’s mood could flip six or seven times a day depending on his whim, so they worried he might fly into a rage over some trivial matter and yell at the men who weren’t there at the time, demanding to know what they’d been doing.

The men had climbed the mountain, but they were grumbling and strolling along leisurely. They assumed that the four of them, unable to contain their overflowing youthful vigor, were probably deep in the mountains, taking turns having their way with Yiyeon. Perhaps because they were naturally the type to scheme about how to take advantage of others, they grumbled nonstop. Their feet rested but their mouths never quiet, since there was no one in charge.

After barely making it over the steep hill and walking a short distance along the grassy path, so well-trodden by people it lay flat like a blanket, they saw dark spots scattered here and there on the snow. Since the sun had only just peeked out, the mountain was even darker than midnight, making it hard to see anything clearly.

Wondering if these might be traces left by Byeon, who had gone ahead to catch Yiyeon, he leaned in close. “What is this?” he thought as he examined the spots closely. Just then, a red sun slowly rose from the man’s back, illuminating the world.

The snow that had fallen a few days earlier had frozen; as it caught the rising sunlight, it shimmered and rippled like a water’s surface. And the pitch-black stain soon regained its color, becoming something one could describe as red.

Up until then, the man had casually followed the trail of blood droplets on the floor with his gaze. By the time they fled the house, Yiyeon’s lips were already split and his face swollen and bruised. A little bloodshed was nothing to him.

But as the man’s gaze followed the bloodstain, it gradually changed in size until it became a pool that greeted them. His unfocused eyes, like rotten cod eyes that seemed to reek of blood, were filled with horror.

A chunk of flesh, split in half and sprawled across the blood-soaked snow. It was Byeon. A short distance away, a corpse lay as if frozen in place, its state too gruesome for words. It was a corpse whose face had been torn off; a stranger would never have known who it was. The men’s grumbling fell silent, and a moment later, screams erupted.

One man was so startled that he fell flat on his backside. Whether it was the snow or not, his buttocks felt damp; when he hurriedly felt them with his hands, his palms turned crimson with blood.

Meanwhile, as the sun rose fully and light seeped through the trees, the gruesome scene was finally revealed in the light. Shocked by the horrific and blood-curdling sight, the men fell silent. The one man who still had his wits about him spotted the blood-stained hem of a robe and immediately shouted.

“Y-Young Master!”

Alive or dead? Either way, it was a disaster. The man who had retained his wits shouted and rushed toward the body that appeared to be Young Master Seo. He quickly flipped the face that had been pressed into the ground, revealing the gruesome ​stolen content​sight of the snake-like face – which had once been so full of itself – torn into four pieces.

He pressed his ear to the young master’s chest to confirm he was still alive. The man turned pale and shouted at his group, who were still floundering on the ground, unable to come to their senses.

“Hurry!! Young master…!”

The man shouted as he struggled to hoist the unconscious Young Master Seo onto his back. As if he had bathed in blood, Young Master Seo’s entire body was soaked in blood and slippery, making it difficult to hoist him onto his back.

After somehow managing to hoist the unconscious Young Master Seo onto his back and attempting to wrap his right and left arms around his neck, the man stared with a dazed expression at his own hands, which grasped only at thin air no matter how hard he tried.

Seo’s right arm was clearly draped over his shoulder, but no matter how hard he tried to grab Young Master Seo’s left arm, he couldn’t get a hold of it. He reached behind him to feel around, but no matter how he looked, the spot where the left arm should have been was empty. The man gaped as he stared at his group, who had somehow come to stand right in front of him.

Only then did the man, who had been rolling around on the blood-soaked ground looking like a corpse, suddenly pick up someone’s arm lying on the floor. The three men, who had arrived late, could only look at each other’s faces, unable to say a word.

All they could do was flee this horrific scene as quickly as possible, return to the village, and silently pray that Young Master Seo would survive. The three men hurriedly gathered Young Master Seo and rushed down the mountain.

Wondering how this event had unfolded, the man carrying Young Master Seo’s left arm hesitated [stolen content]as he ran. He glanced back to take one last look at the hellish scene. Excluding Young Master Seo, there were two corpses remaining. Though three people had been found, two were still missing.

They didn’t know what possessed them to make it down the mountain. All they could remember was the three men running while Young Master Seo, limp and lifeless, kept sliding down; one hoisted him onto his back, and the other two held onto his slipping body as they somehow managed to make it down.

When they arrived at the village as dawn was breaking, carrying the blood-soaked ruffian on their backs, the village was already in an uproar. This was because the man who had fled on all fours without looking back the moment Byeon was attacked had been running around the village shouting, “A tiger! A tiger!!” As a result, the villagers, who had woken up early, could only stare at the sweat-soaked man as he kept shouting. 

What were they supposed to do if a tiger appeared? It wasn’t as if this was the first time a household had fallen victim to a tiger. It was only natural that tigers lived in the mountains, and even if the villagers knew this, there was nothing they could do about it. Only those mountain hunters who specialized in tiger hunting would find such talk enticing.

When they heard the man’s cries, the villagers immediately thought of Yiyeon, but they shook their heads. He couldn’t even use one of his arms, and ever since his mother left, he’d become a virtual invalid. He was so broken that even when a fire broke out at his neighbor’s house in the middle of the night, he didn’t lift a finger or even fetch a bucket of water. “Now that he has no mother to beg for favors, does he just keep his mouth shut and ignore village affairs?” a few people grumbled excitedly.

Moreover, the man shouting about tigers was one of those who had tormented Yiyeon time and again; even if Yiyeon was obsessed with tiger hunting, it seemed unlikely he would step forward to help those guys in a situation like this. Everyone stood by, arms crossed, simply watching the man who kept pounding the ground and shouting “Tiger!” 

But when the magistrate’s second son – his face split into four strips and his left arm lost – arrived in the village, they could no longer stand by. The quickest among them was the first to run to the magistrate’s residence and pound on the door.

Unlike the father, who had been indifferent – since his second son, who had gone out for a night of drinking, hadn’t returned even after daybreak, and this was a common occurrence – the mother, who worried about her second son day and night, was pacing anxiously out in the courtyard.

As soon as a villager barged in and cried out, “Madam! The second young master…!” the mother forgot all decorum and rushed out in a panic. Servants followed in single file behind the middle-aged woman as she ran, her skirt fluttering in the wind.

Upon seeing her son in such a battered state, the mother clutched her head and passed out in the middle of the village. The county magistrate, who had assumed his son had simply gotten drunk and caused trouble again, turned pale as he saw his son’s condition. He grabbed the physician – who had been sound asleep – by the collar and forced him to his knees, demanding he do whatever it took to save the boy.

The physician sweated profusely for quite some time. Young Master Seo, who looked every bit the fool, surprisingly regained consciousness quite quickly. As soon as he opened his eyes, he screamed again from the unbearable pain and shock and fainted, but from the next day onward, instead of agonized screams that lasted all night, he spewed out curses and gibberish.

Whether he had lost his mind from the unbearable agony, Young Master Seo would open his eyes and scream at the top of his lungs until the whole village could hear him. He cursed Yiyeon and spouted bizarre claims that a tiger could speak. No matter how much the county magistrate tried to suppress it, his voice was so thunderous that the rumors began to spread beyond the village’s highest walls and into the marketplace.

The rumor went that Young Master Seo had tried to assault Yiyeon in the mountains but was instead attacked by a “tiger.” It was said that, having been struck by the tiger’s wrath, he had completely lost his mind and was now raging all night long, claiming there was a tiger ghost that spoke like a human.

Where in the world is there such a thing as a talking tiger? If his madness grew any worse, people would soon be saying the tiger had started walking on two legs.

Fearing the magistrate’s wrath, people kept their voices down, but behind closed doors, they whispered among themselves: after all that debauchery and reckless behavior, he had finally laid a hand on Yiyeon and received divine retribution.

While everyone passed news of Young Master Seo from mouth to mouth, only one man spoke of the vanished “Yiyeon.”

He went to the man who had returned alive from the wilderness and asked what had become of Yiyeon, only to be beaten severely. Unable to accept the stolen contentman’s words – who shouted, “Why are you asking such a thing? Of course he was eaten by a tiger! It’s all because of Yiyeon!” – Dusoe, his eyes black and blue from the beating, went as far as the magistrate’s residence. There, upon seeing Young Master Seo raving like a madman, he stopped speaking of Yiyeon altogether.

If even a sturdy man had ended up in such a state, what must have become of Yiyeon, whose body was not even whole? Everyone in the village, including Dusoe, believed without a doubt that Yiyeon had already ended up in the tiger’s belly.