Chapter 1
Yeon-i dies
Squeezed out by palace politics, without a single line left about her in the chronicles. The gentle king becomes a tyrant. He starts signing petitions in blood instead of ink.
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Timeline
Events and the movement of the paper, from the palace to the far future. Relative years follow the published chronology.
Contains story spoilers. Bun-i’s age is inconsistent across the published chronology and chapters; that detail remains unresolved.
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Chapter 2
Yun-je is exiled to Jeju
For the crime of writing the truth. His writing becomes the entertainer Tal-swe's song, and that song becomes the people's roar. The uprising does not last half a day.
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Chapter 3
Yun-je is executed
One page of his last writing is left under somebody's floorboards. Nobody takes it out for forty years.
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Chapter 3
Bun-i finds that paper
Sixteen years old, cleaning under the floor. She sits at the teacher's door for three days to be taught her letters.
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Chapter 4
A ship goes down
On the northern shoal. Inside it, state documents and the bones of twelve men — together with a ledger listing the men who bought false testimony.
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Chapter 4
Su-gyeom arrives in exile and four people meet
A scholar, the smuggler Bae-swe, the old fisherman Gap-su, and the diver Ok-i. Where the land runs out.
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Chapter 5
Ok-i brings the ledger up
After the storm turns the seabed over. She leaves her abalone knife behind — today she is not going down to take, but to receive.
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Chapter 6
Three of them sail north
Ok-i goes back into the water halfway across. The three who remain find Jeong-an on Songni Mountain.
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Chapter 7
The north is breached
The Jurchen cross the Amnok and three fortresses fall in three days. The state pardons its criminals. Bae-swe lowers his sail with the ledger inside his coat and walks north.
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Chapter 7
Bun-i walks north
Forty-four years old, carrying nothing but paper and ink — to write down the name of each dying man on the day he dies.
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Chapter 8
Bae-swe stands before the king
The morning after the fighting. He puts his hand into his coat and takes it out empty. Bun-i stops him.
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Chapter 8
The ledger passes to Bun-i
Asked how long she will keep it, she answers: until there is someone left to ask.
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Chapter 9
Bun-i hands it to the soldier
Because he is twenty. Because it looks like he will live a long time. Do not ask what it is, she tells him.
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Chapter 9
The farmer finds his son
In a frozen field. He thought it was a stone. It was not a stone.
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Chapter 9
The soldier buries it in the salt jar
In his mother's kitchen. He could not read it, and because he could not read it, he kept it.
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Chapter 9
His granddaughter asks
Sixty years later. Grandfather, where is that paper? — I don't remember, he says.
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Chapter 9
Someone digs where the kitchen stood
Five hundred years later. The salt had not spoiled. The seal was still whole.
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