Something cold pressed against his cheek.
Without opening his eyes, Kang Mujin moved his fingers first. As his right index and middle fingers scraped the damp earth, something pushed beneath his nails—not ash or soot, but crumbled, rotting leaves, roots, and waterlogged moss.
He drew a breath, but there was no smoke.
The scent of wet wood reached deep into his lungs, and the sharp fragrance of some unknown plant mingled with the rich smell of soil. His breath came long and steady. His throat, which had been burning, was unharmed.
Kang Mujin slowly sat up.
Dawn light broke through the dense leaves overhead. Every tree was tall and thick; even the nearest trunk would barely fit within the outstretched arms of two grown men. Beneath unfamiliar leaves, bluish vines climbed the bark.
The workshop was gone.
There was no forge, no collapsed shelving, no final blade.
Kang Mujin pressed a hand to his chest. His heart beat steadily.
He still wore his work clothes, and they were so intact it was hard to believe they had been engulfed in flames. There was not a single scorch mark on the thick cotton. The ankle crushed by the shelving and the arm burned by the fire were both unharmed. Even the calluses pressed into his palms by a lifetime of gripping a hammer remained.
He had died. Of that he was certain.
He remembered the moment his last breath failed. His smoke-choked lungs, the strength leaving his fingers, even the sound of the hammer striking the floor—all were vivid. His death had been far too concrete to call a dream.
Kang Mujin pinched his left arm.
It hurt.
“So I’m alive.”
His low voice dispersed among the trees.
He started to stand, then stopped.
He could feel something.
A heavy sensation rose from deep underground to his right. Though he had not touched it, he could sense its rough surface and its weight. He knew it was ore embedded among earth and stone. It was not pure iron. There were abundant oxides, with sulfur and silicon mixed haphazardly through it.
There was metal closer by, too.
Eleven paces to his left, a long, thin scrap of rusty iron lay buried beneath fallen leaves. Beyond the old tree straight ahead, three small pieces of metal lay scattered. One was round, the other two flat.
Kang Mujin looked down at his hands.
It was the sensation that had first come to him in the fire.
It had not been a hallucination.
He walked to his left and stopped at the eleventh pace. Sweeping aside the leaves with his toe revealed nothing, but when he dug with his hands, dark red rust stained his fingers about two finger joints below the surface.
He pulled out the scrap of iron.
It was a fragment of a sickle, its blade almost eaten away. Only part of the tang that fitted into the handle and the inner cutting edge remained. Moisture and acids from the soil had penetrated deep into its surface, where rust had risen in layers.
Kang Mujin rubbed his thumb over it.
He could tell what lay inside without looking.
It was crude wrought iron with unevenly distributed carbon. The smith had tried to carburize only the cutting edge, but had failed to keep the fire at a steady temperature, and the hammering had been sparse. Slag that had never escaped lay trapped in rows between the folded layers.
Even so, the tool had seen long use.
The inner edge bore the traces of repeated sharpening. Someone must have kept putting an edge back on the soft iron to cut tough grass or grain.
“It served its purpose.”
The workmanship was lacking, but there were signs that its maker had thought of the person who would use it.
Holding the sickle fragment, Kang Mujin drew the grain together at its thinnest tip. The iron lost to rust did not return, but the remaining metal shifted a grain at a time, closing the gaps.
His temples throbbed. He soon released his power, scraped the edge with a stone, then pressed down on the spine.
Crack.
It fractured where he had expected. He could move the grain, but that was no substitute for heat treatment and quenching. Kang Mujin examined the broken cross section and slipped the sickle fragment into his pocket.
“So it comes at a cost.”
If anything, that reassured him. He might have gained the power to read the condition of iron, but making something useful still required fire, a hammer, and a craftsman’s judgment.
Kang Mujin tucked the broken sickle fragment into the waist pocket of his work clothes. It still had its uses. He could make it into a hook or use it as the core of a small knife. If the carbon content was too low for a cutting edge, he could make nails or clamps instead.
He checked the metal beyond the old tree as well.
Beneath the fallen leaves, he found a blackened coin and two iron buckles.
The coin bore designs he had never seen. On one side, a building resembling a tower stood in relief; on the other, a horned beast. The markings around the rim resembled no country’s script.
It was bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. The high tin content made it hard but brittle under impact, and someone had even left tooth marks along the edge.
The buckles were unfamiliar in shape, too. They were handmade, with small prongs and double clasps, but their design belonged to no region Kang Mujin knew.
He looked up at the sky between the branches.
The blue sky and sunlight were familiar. Everything else was unknown. And if someone had carried him away from the fire, that still could not explain the condition of his body or his work clothes.
He remembered the voice he had heard at the end.
Iron does not die in fire.
I bestow upon you the blessing of iron.
Kang Mujin put the coin in his pocket.
“You said you’d reforge me.”
If that meant dropping a dead man in a strange land, it was hardly considerate work. No explanation, no map, not even a sip of water.
Still, he was alive.
He still had both hands.
And there was iron.
That was enough to begin.
Kang Mujin walked toward the sound of water. When underground veins of ore and nearby iron scraps crowded into his senses all at once, he narrowed his awareness to within three paces of his feet. The pressure on his head eased.
As he quenched his thirst at a shallow stream, metal swayed rhythmically along the forest path to his left. Two iron-rimmed wheels, four rein rings, a small pot, and broken farming tools. Someone was coming this way.
Kang Mujin needed a tool in his hand before he needed a place to hide. He detached a buckle’s clasp along its fatigue cracks and made it into an awl, then lashed the sickle fragment to the end of a straight branch like a hook. This time his head did not throb. He had only broken lines that were already weak, without forcing the cold iron to stretch.
Last, near the sickle’s tang, he engraved a line with two bends and a short stroke in the middle. The bent line formed the head and handle of a hammer; the short central stroke formed the anvil beneath it. It was the same design he had left on his work all his life, the mark people would later call the little hammer stamp, or the hammer-and-anvil mark.
The sound of wheels drew closer, just one bend away. Kang Mujin leaned on his finished staff and turned toward the road.
The resonance of metal aligned with the cart tracks beside the stream, and the wind carried the smells of wet firewood and cooking grain. Kang Mujin lowered his grip on the staff with its sickle fragment, stepped to one side of the road, and showed his empty hand.
Soon an old cart appeared around the bend. A beast with faded yellow fur pulled it. It resembled a horse, but a short, blunt horn rose from its forehead.
The man driving the cart spotted him.
He pulled on the reins and rested a hand on the short blade at his waist. The boy beside him clutched a wooden box.
The man asked something in words Kang Mujin could not understand.
Kang Mujin could not answer.
The language was unfamiliar, but the wariness was clear. The man gripped his weapon’s hilt without drawing it. Inside the sheath, the blade was chipped, and red rust had spread deep between the tang and the handle.
Under strain, it would likely break.
Kang Mujin laid his staff on the ground. His intact work clothes, untouched by fire, seemed unfamiliar to the man as well. He spread both hands, then pointed to the rusty sickle fragment.
Next he pointed in turn to the broken hoe and cracked pot loaded at the back of the cart, then mimed gripping a hammer in his right hand and brought it down twice.
“Clang. Clang.”
The boy’s eyes widened.
The man looked back and forth between Kang Mujin’s work clothes and the sickle fragment lashed to his staff. His gaze paused on the small engraved mark, and his grip on the hilt loosened.
He said something brief and pointed behind the cart.
Beyond the dirt road, several trails of smoke rose above the trees.
A village.
Kang Mujin picked up his staff.
They could not understand each other. All the money he had was a single unfamiliar coin, and he did not even know whether it was used here.
But there was a broken hoe on the cart.
A cracked pot, too.
And somewhere beyond the forest, there would be fire and a hammer.
Kang Mujin bowed his head to the man and followed the cart.
Then, borne on the wind from the village, the sensations of countless pieces of iron swept over him.
Nails, sickles, knives, pots, hinges.
One among them rang with a particularly harsh resonance.
It was a cracked anvil.
Join the discussion