Six months after his birth, the villagers began to talk about the child who never cried.
Winter had given way to spring, then summer had come with its sticky heat and flies that stuck to the open windows. Six months. One hundred and eighty-three days spent in this tiny body that refused to cooperate. One hundred and eighty-three days watching the world through eyes that saw too clearly for a baby but not clearly enough for someone who had already lived.
Because that was the real hell. Not the pain. Not the helplessness. But that mental clarity was trapped in a body that didn't know how to translate thoughts into actions. My mind understood the concept of walking, but my legs were gelatin sticks incapable of supporting my own weight. I knew how to speak—the words formed perfectly in my head—but my tongue was a piece of inert meat that produced only guttural sounds and involuntary babbling.
And I didn't cry.
Ever.
It wasn't a conscious choice at first. It was just... an absence. As if the neural wiring responsible for that primal reaction had been short-circuited somewhere between my death and my rebirth. Babies cried when they were hungry. When they were cold. When they were scared. It was their only means of communication, their survival weapon in a hostile world.
Me? I stayed silent. Even when my stomach twisted with hunger. Even when the glacial night air made me shiver. I just watched. Waited. Stared at the ceiling or at the faces that leaned over me with an intensity that, I understood now, was anything but normal.
Eunbi worried. I saw it in the way she touched me—too frequent, too cautious gestures, as if she were checking that I was still real. She wore her hair tied in a tight bun, but a few strands always escaped, framing a face marked by sleepless nights and an anxiety she tried to hide behind tired smiles.
"Are you hungry?" she would ask for the tenth time that day, lifting me up to check if I showed signs of distress.
I looked at her. Blinked. That was all I could do.
She would sigh. Nurse me anyway. And while she did, her fingers traced absent circles on my back, a repetitive movement that calmed her more than me. I drank. Because my body needed fuel, even if my mind found the whole process profoundly humiliating.
Mansoo, for his part, minimized. "He's a calm child. That's good, isn't it? Did you want a kid who screams all night?"
"It's not normal, Mansoo." Eunbi's voice carried that sharp note that preceded marital arguments. "He doesn't cry. Ever. Even when I change him and the water is cold. Even when he falls and bumps his head. Nothing."
"Maybe he's just... stoic."
"Babies aren't stoic!" She had raised her voice. Rare for her. "They're balls of needs and cries. That's how they survive. But him..."
She had stopped. Lowered her eyes to me. And in her gaze, I had seen something that looked like fear. Not the fear that I was sick or deficient. No. Something deeper. The fear that her son wasn't... her son.
I hadn't been able to reassure her. Because frankly? She was right.
. . .
The morning ritual had become sacred. Not for me—I didn't give a damn about the ritual. But for Eunbi, it was an anchor. A stable thing in a daily life that must have seemed increasingly strange to her.
She rose before dawn. I heard her bare feet on the wooden floor, the familiar creak of the third plank near the door that always protested under her weight. She lit the fire in the small terracotta brazier. Put water on to boil in a dented kettle that whistled like a wounded animal.
Then she prepared the tea.
Not the refined tea of nobles. Not those precious leaves that cost more than what Mansoo earned in a month of labor. No. Local herbs. Wild mint gathered in the hills. Dried roots whose name I didn't know but that gave off an earthy, slightly sweet smell when hot water touched them.
She sat near the window. The gray light of dawn lit her tired profile. She drank slowly, her eyes lost somewhere between the village rooftops and the mountains that rose to the north like stone sentinels.
And I, in my little woven basket beside her, watched her. Because it was all I could do. Observe. Memorize. Try to understand this woman who had brought me into the world and now wondered whether she had given birth to a child or something else.
Sometimes she talked to me. Not really to me. Rather through me. As if I were a receptacle for her morning thoughts.
"The Chens had problems with their roof again yesterday. The wind tore off half the thatch. Park Daeho says he can repair it, but it'll cost. They don't have the money." She blew on her tea. A habit. Even when it was no longer hot. "Your father says we should help them. But we don't have much either."
Pause. Sip. The amber liquid disappeared between her chapped lips.
"Kim Soyeon is pregnant again. Her fourth. I wonder how she does it. Four children, and she still smiles. Me, I have just one and I..." She stopped. Looked at me. "You're a good baby, Hyeon. You don't cause me problems. So why am I so worried?"
Because your maternal instinct is screaming at you that something is wrong, I had thought. Because you sense that the child you rock at night isn't really a child. He's a squatter. An impostor. A ghost playing at being alive.
But I couldn't say it. So I had just blinked. And she had looked away, as if staring at me too long hurt her.
This ritual was repeated every morning. The boiling water. The bitter tea. The thoughts were spoken aloud. And me, a silent witness to a one-sided intimacy that felt less like maternal tenderness than a confession before a mute priest.
. . .
The bowl incident happened on a summer afternoon when the heat transformed the air into thick syrup. Mansoo had come back from the fields, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat. Eunbi had prepared a simple meal—rice, pickled vegetables, and a clear broth with pieces of dried fish floating like miniature corpses.
They ate in silence. Not a comfortable silence. The kind that settled when two people had too much to say to each other and not enough energy to start.
I was placed in my basket near the table. At eight months, I had reached that stage where my body was beginning vaguely to resemble something functional. I could sit up. Not for long. But enough that Eunbi stopped carrying me everywhere like a fragile bag of rice.
I watched them. Noted the details. The way Mansoo held his chopsticks—efficient, precise, almost military. The way Eunbi ate without really eating, pushing food from one side of her bowl to the other as if looking for something that wasn't there.
And then... the bowl tipped.
Not Mansoo's. Not Eunbi's. A third bowl, filled with soy sauce, was placed too close to the edge of the table. A fly had landed on it. Struggled. Created just enough vibration to...
The bowl slid. Fell.
And my body moved.
Not consciously. Not as a thought-out decision where I would have said to myself, "Hey, I'm going to catch that bowl." No. It was... instinctive. As if my hands already knew the trajectory. As if my muscles had already calculated the angle, the speed, and the exact timing.
My right hand shot out. My fingers closed around the ceramic a few inches from the floor.
The bowl didn't break.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Mansoo had frozen, his chopsticks suspended halfway between the bowl and his mouth. Eunbi had dropped hers. They clattered on the table with a sound that seemed to echo like a thunderclap.
They were looking at me. Both of them. With that expression I was beginning to know well. That mix of stupefaction and something darker. More disturbing.
Because an eight-month-old baby didn't do that. An eight-month-old baby barely had enough coordination to hold a toy. He didn't calculate ballistic trajectories. He didn't catch falling objects with a trained warrior's precision.
Shit.
Mansoo collected himself first. He laughed. Too loud. Too forced. "Ha! Did you see that? His father's reflexes!"
He stood up. Came to retrieve the bowl from my hand. I let it go without resistance. My fingers were too weak to maintain a grip anyway. The whole movement had been... what? Muscle memory? A survival instinct from a past life that had leaked into this new body?
"Mansoo." Eunbi's voice was low. Tense. "That's not normal."
"Of course it is." He put the bowl back on the table. Patted my head with exaggerated familiarity. "It's just luck. The bowl fell near him. He reached out. Coincidence."
"He calculated the distance. I saw his eyes. He tracked the bowl as it fell."
"Babies track moving objects. That's normal development."
"Not like that!" She stood up abruptly. Her chair scraped the floor. "Not with that... that precision! Mansoo, look at him. Really look at your son. Do you see what I see?"
Mansoo looked at me. Really. At length. And in his eyes, I saw the internal struggle. The part of him that wanted to believe everything was fine. That his son was just a precocious child. A little strange, but nothing serious. And the other part. The one that had seen too many things in his past life to ignore the obvious.
"I see a baby who got lucky," he said finally. But his voice lacked conviction.
Eunbi sat back down. Slowly. Her hands trembled slightly. She hid them under the table. "Okay," she murmured. "Okay. Lucky."
They resumed their meal. In silence. A silence even heavier than before. And I, in my basket, stared at my own hands. These little baby hands had just betrayed the fact that I was anything but normal.
Great. Just great.
. . .
The rumors spread like a disease through the village. Slowly at first. Whispers exchanged at the common well. Sidelong glances when Eunbi went out to do her shopping at the small weekly market. Conversations that abruptly stopped when Mansoo approached.
I didn't hear them directly. Obviously. I was a goddamn baby. They didn't take me on the gossip tour. But I heard nonetheless. The snippets of conversations people had in front of me, thinking I was too young to understand. The nighttime discussions between Eunbi and Mansoo, when they thought I was asleep.
"Park Mina says her son is afraid to play near our house."
"That's ridiculous."
"She says Hyeon looks at him strangely. That it gives him the chills."
"He's a baby, Eunbi. How can he look 'strange'?"
"You know very well how."
Silence. Then:
"People always talk. It'll pass."
But it didn't pass. It got worse. Like an avalanche that begins with one snowflake and ends up burying entire villages.
"The Choi child never cries."
"He doesn't smile either."
"My sister-in-law says he has the eyes of an old man."
"Blessed or cursed?"
"Who can say? But the Guardians work in mysterious ways."
"Or he's just a strange child. It happens sometimes."
"Do you remember the Lee son? The one who never spoke? They found him drowned in the lake at seven."
"That's not the same thing."
"How do you know?"
I caught these fragments. Assembled them like a macabre puzzle. And the conclusion was clear: the village had decided I was either a divine blessing or a walking curse. And frankly? They seemed to lean toward the second option.
Eunbi suffered from it. I saw it in her hunched shoulders when she came back from the market. In the way she avoided other women's gazes. In the apologies she murmured for things that weren't her fault.
"He's just quiet. There's nothing wrong with that."
But she didn't believe it herself. Not really.
Mansoo, for his part, reacted differently. He closed off. Became more taciturn. His responses to neighbors who asked too personal questions were short. Brutal. "My son is fine. That's all you need to know."
And people stopped asking questions. Because Mansoo had that aura. That presence clearly said, "Don't push me." Even the village men, those who had spent their lives working the land and carrying loads that would have broken oxen, didn't look for confrontation with him.
Which, ironically, only fueled the rumors more.
"Choi Mansoo is hiding something."
"Of course he's hiding something. Have you seen his scars?"
"He's a deserter, I'm telling you. Or a criminal."
"And the child? What does that make him?"
"Nothing good."
I hated them. All of them. These petty villagers with their tiny lives and their even tinier fears. These people found comfort in mediocrity and a threat in anything out of the ordinary.
But I couldn't do anything. Except stay there. Observe. Memorize their faces. Their voices. Their names whispered in conversations.
Park Mina. Lee Dongmin. Kim Soyeon. Chen Jisoo.
One day, maybe, when this body worked properly, I would pay them a visit. Just to remind those pieces of shit that judging a child of a few months was exactly the kind of behavior that deserved...
No. No, calm down. You're a baby. You can't do anything. And anyway, these are just words. They can't hurt me.
Except they hurt Eunbi. And that, I couldn't ignore.
. . .
My first word came on an autumn evening when the cold was beginning to bite. Eleven months. Long enough that even the least attentive parents would start worrying about verbal development. Eunbi talked to me constantly, trying to make me say something. Anything.
"Say 'mama.' 'Mama.' Mama. Maaaaama."
Silence.
"Or 'papa'? Papa? Can you say papa?"
Nothing.
Mansoo found it less alarming. "He'll talk when he's ready. My father said I didn't say anything until I was two."
"Two?" Eunbi had gone pale. "My god..."
That evening, I watched them from my usual corner. They were sitting by the fire. Mansoo was repairing a farm tool—a chipped sickle. Eunbi was sewing. Her fingers moved with mechanical precision, piercing the fabric, pulling the 'thread, repeating the motion again and again.
And in my head, a thought. No. Not a thought. An obsession. A pressure that had been building for weeks. A need to... what? Direction? Purpose?
South.
The word existed in my mind like an arrow pointing toward something I couldn't see. The capital. Yongsong. The Dragon City. It was there. Somewhere in that direction. She was there. Serin. The woman with amber eyes whose face haunted me every time I closed my eyelids.
I didn't know why. I didn't know how I knew. But the certainty was absolute. Carved into something deeper than memory. Older than reason.
"South."
The word came out. My voice—or what passed for it. High-pitched. Childish. But clear. Undeniably clear.
Eunbi's thread slipped. The needle pricked her finger. A drop of blood beaded. She didn't notice. She was staring at me, mouth open.
Mansoo dropped the sickle. It fell with a metallic clatter.
"What did he say?"
"He... I think he said 'south.'" Eunbi's voice trembled between disbelief and something that looked like hope. "Hyeon? Baby? Can you say it again?"
I looked at her. Then Mansoo. Their faces bore that expression I had learned to dread. That fragile hope. That desperate willingness to believe that maybe, maybe, everything would be fine.
And I knew I should say something else. "Mama." "Papa." Any normal word that an eleven-month-old baby was supposed to say first.
But instead:
"South."
Louder this time. More distinct.
The blood drained from Eunbi's face. She turned to Mansoo. "Why... why would he say that?"
Mansoo didn't answer immediately. His eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that could have melted steel. He was thinking. I saw it in the way his jaw clenched. In the tic that made the muscle near his right eye twitch.
"It's just... babbling," he said finally. But even he didn't believe it.
"That didn't sound like babbling."
"What do you want it to be? An order? A prophecy?" He laughed. The sound was as hollow as an empty coffin. "He's a baby, Eunbi. He heard the word somewhere. He's repeating it. That's all."
"We never talk about the 'South' thread and the South."
"Maybe a merchant said it. Or someone in the village. Sounds travel."
She nodded. Slowly. Not convinced. But accepting anyway. Because what was the alternative? Accept that her son was speaking words that pointed toward a distant destination as if an internal compass were guiding him?
She stood up. Came toward me. Knelt down. Took my little hands in hers. "You're a mystery, Hyeon. A mystery I don't understand."
Her eyes shone. Not with tears. Not yet. But the threat was there. Hanging like a sword above our heads.
"But you are my son. My baby. And I love you. Even if you terrify me sometimes."
She held me against her. And I, in her embrace, felt the weight of that lie. Because I wasn't her son. Not really. I was an intruder. A stowaway in a body that should have belonged to someone else.
But I let her hold me. Because it was all I could do. And because a part of me—a part I didn't want to acknowledge—was beginning to understand that this woman, this Eunbi with black hair and calloused hands, deserved better than the son she had gotten.
. . .
That night, lying in my cradle, I stared at the dark ceiling and thought about that word. South. So simple. So loaded. A direction. A promise. A reminder that somewhere, out there, in a city I couldn't yet reach, someone was waiting.
Or maybe not. Maybe it was all an illusion. A remnant of corrupted memory. A sick obsession of a mind that had survived death but not South, but was intact.
But the image remained. The amber eyes. The face that had looked at me in the darkness of my rebirth.
Serin.
I would find a way. One way or another. When this body worked. When I could walk. Talk. Act.
I would find her.
"South," I murmured one last time in the silence of the night.
And the word hung in the air like a promise or a threat.