It was a byproduct of politics.
The embers had been carried forward for a long time.
That the wako of today were not a current born overnight had been passed down through texts and through people's mouths.
At the beginning of the Kamakura era—
in the first year of Karoku (嘉禄),
a time which, for Goryeo, still lay before the shadow of the Mongols had fully fallen—
the Matsura band (松浦党) first crossed the sea.
It was plunder.
It was an incursion.
It was a test.
The warships they led numbered in the dozens, and their objective was plain:
Goryeo's coast,
Goryeo's grain,
Goryeo's wealth.
In Fujiwara no Sadaie's diary, Meigetsuki(明月記), a brief entry remains from the following year:
in Karoku 2, Tsushima was "in conflict with Goryeo."
Behind that single line, the trace of a sea beginning to be dyed with blood lies concealed.
There is also a record from the same period that the Matsura band led ships and struck Goryeo.
A more explicit account is preserved in the Azuma Kagami(吾妻鏡).
In Jōei 1, intercalary ninth month, seventeenth day—
at Kagami-no-yashiro in Hizen Province (near modern Karatsu)—
it is written that the master of that place crossed to Goryeo and, under cover of night, launched a raid, stealing rare treasures and fleeing.
That was the beginning.
Plunder did not end with one success.
Once it works once, the next becomes easier.
Night, the sea, and the sword—
they learned too quickly that this combination worked.
Goryeo first tried to block it with its own strength.
But the coastline was long, the ships were many, and the sea was wide.
In the end, Goryeo sent envoys to the Kamakura shogunate and demanded that piracy be suppressed.
The shogunate accepted.
On the surface, it was the pretext of establishing order.
An order was issued to Mutō Sukeyori, the shugo of Hizen, to seize ninety men of Tsushima who were suspected of being the perpetrators.
The executions were carried out publicly—
in front of Goryeo's envoys.
The blade fell quickly, and heads rolled across the ground.
Among them, more than a few must have been Matsura men as well.
Did the sea become quiet that day?
The sea took up its breath again.
People called it a crackdown,
but in truth, it was a pause granted to catch breath.
The Matsura band persisted, shifting its flow across the sea.
They scattered.
They changed names.
They went deeper into the water.
Only after hearing this did Park Seong-jin understand
why Hirado and Karatsu, Sonogi and Ōmura, and the name "Matsura" kept resurfacing.
The wako were not an occupation.
They were a tradition.
Piracy was not merely a crime.
It was a byproduct of politics.
The shogunate's enforcement stopped at the border of structure.
The Matsura band was not a single clan.
It was a composite.
A loose league of people who made the sea their livelihood—
scattering and gathering again and again.
For more than a hundred years, that league hardened into habit.
"So now the target is the Matsura band?"
"That's right. What's the point of idling? I intend to cut them down one by one."
"Impressive. Your homeland will not forget your toil, Lord Jungnang."
"That praise is excessive."
Park Seong-jin left Hirado Castle.
With so many tongues and so little substance, visits to Hirado would likely decrease.
If the island was governed properly, that alone would be fortunate.
He almost raised a message—
to manage even the other lands of Hizen across the sea with care—
then withdrew his hand.
He acknowledged only the fact itself: that a Goryeo official had come to Wa as a local magistrate.
He had been about to descend.
When the sea wind climbed the stairs and stirred his hem, footsteps overlapped from above.
Light, yet not frivolous.
Park Seong-jin lifted his head.
At the end of his gaze stood Jan van der Hoog.
"Ah, Lord Jungnang."
Jan smiled first and greeted him.
It was a face where pleasure and appraisal were set together.
Park Seong-jin turned to Yi Baek-chung, who had been standing behind him, and said,
"This is the Dutch merchant Jan van der Hoog. If you want the quickest answers about the sea, ask him."
Yi Baek-chung bowed and offered greeting.
Jan nodded as though he had already seen him many times.
"We've met a few times in Hirado. Magistrate—this land is unfamiliar, but people become familiar quickly."
The awkwardness of first meeting was thin.
The rhythm of speech, the lines of sight—
they meshed softly.
Park Seong-jin decided it inwardly.
These two fit well.
After a few words, Park Seong-jin brought out the real matter.
"You know the Matsura band."
Jan narrowed his eyes briefly, then nodded.
"I know. It's a very old name. These days it moves less like a single clan and more like a current of the sea."
He drew out a small bundle of paper.
Thin sheets, easy to fold and unfold.
Jan wrote several lines quickly.
"Here."
What he wrote were place names.
Northern Hizen, the Sonogi coast, small harbors near Ōmura, and several islands whose names did not stand out clearly.
"These are the 'band' sites where they stay. They're called Matsura, but each moves separately. Someone who might be called a sōryōexists on the mainland, but…."
Jan shrugged.
"It matters little. The men who move on the sea treat the mainland's words as conditional. If they need it, they follow. If they don't, they pretend they never heard."
Park Seong-jin took the paper and studied it.
More important than names was the flow:
where people gathered,
where ships rested,
where roads vanished at night.
"And this side?"
He indicated a spot.
"That's a storehouse. Weapons and provisions stay there for a time. You don't see many men, but many ships come and go."
Jan added,
"If you try to catch the Matsura band all at once, the road tangles. Cut the chokepoints, and they scatter on their own. They choose profit over fighting."
Park Seong-jin nodded.
The wako bastards were local warriors,
and above them sat lords.
Even an absurd world, once it gains a flow, hardens into something like order.
Jan's words were a merchant's words.
That was why they were precise.
"Thank you."
"No, not at all."
Jan smiled.
"To survive in this sea, everyone holds everyone else up a little."
Park Seong-jin folded the paper and slipped it into his robe.
Now the destination was set.
Not a man bearing the name Matsura—
but the place where they breathed.
He looked down the stairs and said,
"Then I'll go first."
Jan watched his back for a moment.
It was the back of a man in whom sea, people, and sword moved as a single current.
And, as if murmuring to himself, he said,
"This time… it will truly end."
The moment Park Seong-jin stepped off the boat, he threw his body forward without even pausing to feel the ground.
There was no gap for hesitation to slip in.
Before the eyes could measure direction, the body already knew.
That way.
When the lightness of movement unfolded, the scenery broke and rejoined.
The sensation of sand and pebbles underfoot vanished within a single breath, and in the next moment the shade of the forest brushed his face.
The sea was pushed behind him, and the damp wind changed into the smell of pine resin.
To say one crosses mountain and forest, river and sea—
that is a common figure of speech.
For Park Seong-jin now, it was literal.
He did not step on tree branches.
He did not press the earth.
He rode the currents between, piercing ridge and valley in a straight line.
The beasts noticed first.
Birds in the woods rose all at once, and a weasel in a rock cleft held its breath.
It felt less like a human presence than the terrain itself trembling.
At some point, the wind changed.
The scent of the sea mixed in again.
Not fresh salt, but the smell of old-cured salt and wet rope.
Park Seong-jin descended as though stopping in midair.
A small harbor lay ahead.
Ships were scarce, but the traces of long-staying remained.
Above it, where the forest broke, a small fortress could be seen.
It was less a castle than a low stone embankment running along the ridge, with palisades layered around it.
From the outside, it looked like an old mountain fort—
or a bandits' hideout.
Park Seong-jin read its grain at a glance.
Here.
It looked straight down on the harbor, yet from the sea it lay at an angle difficult for eyes to reach.
A forest path and a valley led up to it, yet the route had been intentionally bent.
More than anything, it smelled like a place not permanently lived in.
The smoke of cooking, the neighing of horses, the bustle of daily life—
all were thin.
But it was not an empty place.
It was a place filled when needed.
The Matsura band's way.
Jan had said they cooperated when "something big" happened.
That "something big" meant launching across to Goryeo.
Park Seong-jin paused in the shadow of rocks below the walls.
He scarcely needed to catch breath.
From a watchtower on the wall, someone was looking down.
A sentry.
Few in number, and sharp-eyed.
Park Seong-jin lifted the corner of his mouth by a hair.
He had found another.
Tsushima, Iki, Karatsu, Hirado—
and now even here.
It felt like a den of thieves.
This small fortress was not the grain of a country.
Not even the grain of a domain.
It was a lung where thieves breathed—
one of the old roots of the wako.
Park Seong-jin did not hide further.
Slowly—deliberately letting his footsteps be heard—he walked out.
In that instant, the air atop the walls changed.
The signs of bodies rising hurriedly flared.
The sound of hands taking up bows.
A suppressed ripple of unrest spread—silent, exchanged through glances.
Park Seong-jin looked up at the walls and murmured quietly,
"You hid well, all the way here."
His body became wind again.