UNFED

He wasn’t on social media. He had expected as much. Lee Jae-in was never one to leave a digital trail. I tried searching, but all I found was a blog post from several years ago.

It mentioned starting a community building project at an abandoned school in South Gyeongsang Province. The post was old. There had been no updates since then.

In the end, he had to go through someone else.

One of his college classmates worked in architecture. We hadn’t been in touch for a long time, but he still had his number. He called him. He answered. He seemed surprised but welcomed the call.

He asked if he knew where Lee Jae-in was. After a moment’s thought, he said he’d heard Lee Jae-in was somewhere in Hamyang— . He didn’t know the exact address. He said he might be able to reach him through someone he knew there.

That’s how, through three people, he got Lee Jae-in’s number.

He sent a text. A short one.

“Hoon, I was in the Philippines. Let’s meet up when I get back to Korea. Something important has come up.”

Two hours later, I got a reply.

“So you’re still alive. When are you coming back?”

Hoon smiled briefly as he read the text. That was just like Lee Jae-in. He didn’t ask where he’d been, what he’d been doing, or why he hadn’t been in touch. “So you’re still alive. When are you coming back?” That was all.

* * *

The day before he left, Hoon looked around the room he’d lived in for the past two years.

It was a small room. One window, one bed, one desk, one chair. Books were piled up. There were notebooks. An old radio sat on the table. Those were the traces of the past two years.

He decided to leave most of the books behind. They were things he couldn’t take with him. He packed up the notebooks—especially the old ones, the ones filled with notes on “qi,” and the new notebook he’d started after his awakening.

He decided to give the radio to the elderly neighbor.

At first, the old lady declined. Hoon insisted and handed it to her. As she accepted the radio, she asked him something. It was in Filipino. Hoon didn’t understand the words, but he could tell from her expression. She was asking where he was going.

Hoon said, “Korea.” The grandmother nodded. Then she went into the kitchen and came back out. She was holding something in her hand. It was a small bag. It contained pieces of dried mango. She told him to eat them on the road.

Hoon took it. He said thank you. He said “Salamat” in Tagalog. That was the first word he’d learned in this neighborhood. If he didn’t know how to express gratitude, he couldn’t live among his neighbors.

The old lady waved. Hoon waved back.

As he turned away, he thought to himself. This grandmother has no idea what Hoon has been doing for the past two years. Even if she knew, she wouldn’t understand.

Yet this grandmother—who sweeps her yard every morning , fills the alley with the scent of food in the evening, and expresses her gratitude while listening to the radio—had, knowingly or unknowingly, influenced Hoon’s awakening.

The weight of an ordinary day. Eating, sweeping, sharing, and sleeping. That was what humans had been doing for thousands of years. He didn’t realize the answer might already have been there.

* * *

He took a bus to the airport. It was a five-hour ride from Alaminos to Manila.

The scenery of the Philippine island of Luzon flowed past the bus window. There were rice paddies. There were coconut trees. Small villages flashed by. Children played in front of a school. An old man sold mangoes at a roadside stall. A tricycle passed by, honking its horn.

As he watched the scenery, Hoon thought to himself. The people of this land probably have no idea what the AGI declaration has to do with them right now. For a farmer in Pangasinan, AI is still a distant concept.

But it takes only a moment for a distant concept to become close at hand. That’s how it was with the internet. That’s how it was with smartphones. And when those technologies arrived, the outcomes differed between those who were prepared and those who were not.

When ASI arrives, that gap will be incomparable.

At a bus stop where the bus paused briefly, a middle-aged woman boarded. She was carrying a large basket. Inside was a chicken. A live chicken. The chicken clucked. The people around her laughed. The woman laughed too. Hoon laughed as well.

That laughter released something. It made him realize he had been overthinking things. Change always starts with small things. It can start with just one person, Lee Jae-in. He could worry about what came next later.

Seeds choose the soil. For a moment, Hoon didn’t know why that phrase had come to mind, but then he remembered it was something his grandmother used to say when he was a child. His grandmother in the coastal village.

The words he spoke every spring as he sowed seeds in the fields. Good seeds must fall on good soil. Without good soil, even good seeds are useless.

He would have to meet Lee Jae-in to know if he was good soil.

But Hoon already knew. It was a certainty born of experience. The kind of certainty that’s hard to explain but has rarely been wrong.

* * *

Manila Airport was crowded.

It was the first time he’d faced a crowd in two years. His body, accustomed to Dasol’s quiet, struggled to adjust for a moment. The noise. The smells. The movement of people. People moving in their own directions at their own speeds.

Many of them were looking at their smartphones—walking, sitting, or standing in line. Something on the screen was speaking to them: news, videos, messages, notifications. Information was pouring in ceaselessly.

Hoon stood there watching the scene. It wasn’t a judgment. He just watched. These people, too, were living connected to the world in their own ways. He simply didn’t know what structure that connection was built upon. Not knowing didn’t make them bad people.

That was the scariest part.

Well-meaning people using well-meaning services and slipping into that structure. Not feeling any reason to resist. That was the most complete form of control.

As he walked toward the boarding gate, Hoon was conscious of his bag. He had packed lightly. A few changes of clothes, toiletries, some notebooks. That was all.

He had left behind almost everything he had accumulated over the past two years. He preferred to travel light. Too many possessions become a burden, and a burden weighs down your feet.

He boarded the plane and took his seat.

It was a window seat. As soon as the plane took off, the lights of Manila faded into the distance. Hoon gazed at them. The city lights were beautiful. Each and every one of those lights represented someone’s home, someone’s evening, and someone’s day.

All those days were ending or continuing in their own way at this very moment.

Hoon closed his eyes.

Three and a half hours to Seoul. There was nothing he could do during that time. All he had to do was wait. Once he arrived, he could just start.

* * *

The morning after arriving in Seoul, Hoon boarded a bus bound for Hamyang.

He sent another text to Lee Jae-in.

“I think I’ll arrive around this afternoon. Where should I go?”

A reply came a moment later.

“The village is called Hadong-ri. Get off at the bus terminal and give me a call. I’ll come pick you up.”

Hadong-ri. Hoon wrote the name down in his notebook. He had no particular reason; he just felt like writing it down.

The bus left Seoul. The highway stretched out before him. The spring scenery of Korea passed by outside the window. Light green trees. Water was being poured into the rice paddies. In one field, an old man was crouching down, planting something.

He was planting seeds.

Hoon couldn’t take his eyes off that scene for a long time. As the bus passed by, the old man’s figure grew smaller. And then he disappeared.

He opened his notebook. He started to write down his to-do list for the day, but stopped. Instead, he just looked out the window. Spring in Korea. It was a scene he hadn’t seen in two years.

It didn’t feel unfamiliar. Yet it looked different.

Two years ago, this land was simply his homeland. Now, it looked like a place where he needed to plant something. He held a seed in his hand. The earth lay before him.

All that remained was to kneel down.

Just as his grandfather had done.

Hoon closed his notebook. He closed his eyes. He could feel the bus vibrating. The roads of Korea. The spring sunshine of Korea. It felt as though the scent of the land where he was born and raised was drifting in through the window.

It was a three-hour ride to Hamyang.

Once those three hours were over, everything would begin.