By Zephyria 
“You’ve come a long way. You must be exhausted.”
His eldest aunt, who lived in the countryside caring for their grandmother, came out to the yard to greet the family. As he prepared to greet his grandmother, Yoo Jiha couldn’t help but feel his heart pounding as old traumas resurfaced. He took several deep breaths, fiddling with the necklace he had received from Jeil Heon.
“Mother, I’m here.”
“Tsk. Why bother coming when you can’t even set a memorial table for your own father? Did you come to see if your tedious mother has finally died?”
“Judging by the way you speak, you’ll probably live another thirty years.”
The grandmother’s caustic voice remained unchanged, but Jiha flinched. Despite her advanced age, she had always been spirited, keeping her back straight and appearing ten years younger; however, in just a few months, she had lost weight and become completely frail. Lying on a mattress on the floor, unable to even sit up, the grandmother turned her face toward the wall the moment she saw Jiha, who had entered last. It was as if she didn’t even want to exchange another word.
The greeting was brief, but the aftermath was significant. Even after leaving the grandmother’s room, the family struggled to speak. Not only the father, but the mother and Noona also seemed distraught by the grandmother’s sudden decline. Jiha bit his lower lip. He had always imagined his grandmother would spend her entire life reprimanding him in that piercing voice.
“Noona, why did you say you wanted Jiha to come?”
“You must be hungry. Let’s eat first.”
As they ate the lunch prepared by his aunt and her husband, the only sound at the table was the quiet clinking of utensils.
Only after the table was cleared did the aunt bring up the matter.
“Adopting a poor child is a noble intention. I think it’s a wonderful thing. But I still don’t understand. Did you have to force it through, even while driving a nail into your father’s and mother’s hearts?”
Just as the father’s expression darkened at her accusatory tone, the uncle, who was slicing apples, nudged the aunt in the ribs with his elbow.
“Stop saying pointless things to your brother-in-law and Jiha, and just get to the point.”
“Ugh, alright. It’s just that my head is a mess.”
The aunt sighed repeatedly, speaking in fragmented sentences as if forcing the words up from her throat.
“I heard it from my great-aunt recently… She said she originally intended to take the secret to her grave. But seeing how that healthy mother of hers is now wasting away after surgery, she wondered how much longer either she or the great-aunt had left to live, so she told me.”
“Is it about Mother?”
“Yes… Your grandmother was a foundling. A foundling who wiped out the family line.”
In the village, there had been a baby abandoned in front of the gates of the fallen noble house known as the residence of Scholar Kim, with nothing but a single jade ring tied to the baby’s clothes. Despite his modest circumstances, Scholar Kim took in the child as a foundling and raised her like his own daughter. His grown sons also deeply cherished their young youngest sister.
However, it was a cruel era.
The second son, who had left for the independence movement before the foundling was even raised, never returned even after liberation. Had his identity been revealed, the police would have raided the main house long ago, so he likely died without even leaving a name.
The third son, who was forcibly conscripted, left behind only a single notice of death in battle.
Before the tears of blood shed for his lost children could dry, a war between compatriots broke out. The youngest son was a communist.
The People’s Army and the National Army took turns ransacking the village. At the end of the war, which seemed as if it would last forever, the youngest son, who had been stranded from the People’s Army, hid in the mountains behind the village with a few comrades. The eldest son secretly brought food to his brother. Aside from the parents and his wife, only one person—the foundling girl—had noticed.
Thanks to the youngest son’s certain level of status within the People’s Army, the village suffered no major losses even under their rule. Because of this, the foundling girl, who was merely a child, could not understand why the ‘Reds’ were said to be as evil as the Japanese. She was simply saddened that her youngest brother had to hide in the mountains without proper meals.
Then, the eldest son injured his foot. The girl overheard his wife whispering worries that the brother must be starving because he hadn’t been able to make the trek up the mountain for several days. She wanted to help her brothers. But she knew that if she offered to take the food instead, she would be scolded for being too young to step forward. She wanted to show them that she could do it on her own.
She truly wanted to do a good job.
Secretly, she boiled potatoes and packed a bundle. While struggling to carry the bundle, which was quite heavy for her small frame, she encountered a strange man on the mountain path. The man, seeing the girl carrying food, gave her some precious chocolate and asked:
If she knew where his comrades, who had fled into the mountains, were hiding.
The girl mistakenly thought he was a friend of her youngest brother.
As a consequence of that mistake, gunfire echoed through the mountains all night. As soon as dawn broke, soldiers stormed the house. Accused of being Reds who aided the partisans, Scholar Kim, the eldest son, and the daughter-in-law were brutally beaten and dragged out by their hair.
In front of the forcibly gathered villagers, the three were executed by firing squad. The two-year-old grandson, kicked by a military boot, lingered in illness before dying. Scholar Kim’s wife hanged herself, leaving behind a single suicide note filled with regret, stating that if they hadn’t raised her as a foundling, their family would not have been annihilated.
In the once-bustling residence of Scholar Kim, only the foundling girl—who shared none of the family’s blood—remained. The foundling who had wiped out the family line by acting on her own, doing something no one had asked her to do.
“Grandmother, it’s Jiha. May I come in?”
There was no answer, but Jiha quietly opened the door. The grandmother was lying with her head turned toward the wall, just as she had been before the meal. She wasn’t asleep. Her breathing became irregular at the sound of Jiha’s presence.
Until now, he had been too consumed by his own emotions to look around, but now he knew. The grandmother likely felt more uncomfortable with his presence than he did with hers. To her, he must have looked like the crystallization of the guilt that had dominated her past life.
Jiha carefully sat down near her. He agonized over many words, but in the end, only a direct approach came to mind. The relationship between him and his grandmother had never once been expressed in indirect terms.
“I heard that you were a foundling. And I heard about your family.”
The motionless grandmother shuddered violently and turned her head. Her face was filled with horror and shock that the shame she had desperately hidden from her children for so many years had been exposed. Jiha tried to meet her gaze calmly as he spoke the words he had kept in his heart.
“You might think it’s arrogant of me to say, since I didn’t experience that era myself, but I don’t think it was your fault.”
“What does a brat like you know to speak so recklessly! Not only did misfortune and ill luck follow me into that house, but I finally wiped the family out completely! With this mouth, I betrayed my brother!”
“Why is that your fault? Did you start the war? You didn’t.”
“Shut up!”
The grandmother wailed in grief, claiming that the deaths of the second and third brothers in foreign lands were also because they raised a foundling. Therefore, she claimed he, too, would eventually bring misfortune to the house. That he would end up killing the son she had struggled to give birth to just to avoid wiping out her husband’s family line.
〈Who told you to come find me? Who told you to do it! Why do you ruin everything by doing things you weren’t asked to do! Why! Why!〉
Wailing with a face that looked as if it were collapsing, just like that day.
Jiha realized that no words could make his grandmother understand. Had there really been no one over the past several decades to comfort her and tell her it wasn’t her fault?
But even those words would not have reached her. The despair of the young foundling girl, left alone in the residence of Scholar Kim amidst a deathly silence smelling of blood, still imprisoned and suppressed the grandmother like a rigid suit of armor.
Perhaps the grandmother had never once thought of escaping the poison called guilt. Even while knowing that the soul of that young foundling girl was rotting away, eroded by that poison for a lifetime.
Jiha clenched the hand he had resting neatly on his thigh. If he were his old self, he might have given up and turned away by now. In doing so, his relationship with his grandmother would have remained broken forever.
But Yoo Jiha had met Jeil Heon.