The body had stories in it that the mind hadn't told him yet.
He discovered this on the fifth afternoon, attempting to climb a rock face that
wasn't particularly difficult a series of shallow ledges, good handholds, nothing that
should have stopped him. He was halfway up when the trembling started. Not cold,
not exertion. A very specific shaking that originated somewhere in the muscles of his
upper back and spread down through his arms, a shaking that had nothing to do with
the physical situation and everything to do with something older than the current
moment.
He held himself on the rock and waited for it to pass.
It took longer than he liked.
Fear memory. Not his fear the body's fear, encoded in the muscles the way
trauma encodes itself below conscious access: the knowledge that being held against
something solid usually preceded impact, that height usually preceded falling, that
being exposed usually preceded pain. Wol ha had been beaten against walls, held
down on stone floors, once the fragment was vivid in a way that made Jaehyun careful
not to examine it too closely dropped from a height that hadn't been quite enough to
break anything but had been enough to teach the body what falling felt like.
Heights didn't frighten him. They frightened the body. That was a distinction he
would need to work with.
He completed the climb and sat at the top and examined the trembling after it
left. He had, in the aggregate, a complicated relationship with the body's history. He
had not created the damage in this frame; he had inherited it. He was responsible for
neither the injuries nor the patterns they'd left behind. And yet he was the one who
would have to work with those patterns every day going forward, which gave him a
practical stake in understanding them.
What concerned him more than the fear memory was the hunger problem.
A body this comprehensively malnourished had a different relationship with
food than the one he was accustomed to. He had been a reliably fed adult in his
previous life not wealthy, but steadily comfortable. This body had spent years in the
border zone of not quite enough, and the consequence was a metabolic system that
had learned to both hoard and to shut down, neither of which served him well now.
When food was available, the body's drive to consume was overwhelming in a
way that bypassed rational decision making and needed to be consciously managed.
When food wasn't available, the baseline functional threshold was lower than it should
be reserves depleted faster, concentration failed sooner.
He was managing by eating small amounts frequently, which required constant
foraging effort that itself cost calories.
By evening of the fifth day the arithmetic was becoming clear: two more days at
this rate, maybe three, before he dropped below a threshold where decision making
became unreliable and the mountain became genuinely dangerous rather than merely
uncomfortable.
He needed to descend.
He spent the evening doing what he could about his appearance: cut his hair
with a sharp stone edge, reducing the ragged servant's length to something shorter.
Cleaned his face and hands thoroughly in the stream. Found, half a kilometer north on
the ridge, a dead man.
The man had died of exposure, weeks ago by the look of it a traveler who had
miscalculated the mountain or had simply run out of something essential at the wrong
moment. His outer robe was worn but different from Wol ha's inn servant clothes, and
he had a leather satchel that was empty but intact.
Jaehyun took both.
He spent a moment with it: the ethics of taking a dead man's things, the small
disturbance of it, the fact that the man was past caring and the satchel was functional.
Pragmatism was not callousness. He repositioned the body to face east, as local
custom apparently indicated for the dead, and acknowledged what he could
acknowledge in the time he could afford to give it.
Then he moved on.
The sixth morning he came off the mountain.