From here the stories change in kind.
The eight chapters before this told how countries were founded. Someone came out of an egg, out of a chest, down from the sky.
From now on it is what happens inside a country already standing. There is a king and there are people, and when something between them goes wrong the sky marks it first.
The first of them is a story of two people disappearing.
The Rock That Carried Him
It was the reign of Adalla, the eighth king of Silla. A couple named Yeono and Seo lived on the eastern shore.
One day Yeono goes out to the sea to gather seaweed.
A rock carried him off across the water. The record also notes that some say it was a fish. Either way, he was carried by something a person cannot do anything about.
Where the rock landed was a country across the sea.
The people there saw a man arrive on a rock and decided he was no ordinary person. So they made him their king.
The record does not say that he refused.
The One Who Followed the Shoes
Seo went down to the shore to look for her husband when he did not come home.
His shoes lay on a rock at the water’s edge. She climbed onto the rock when she saw them, and the rock carries a person off again.
The people of that country were astonished and reported it to the king, and the two met again and became king and queen.
Nobody has lost anyone so far. The two were not parted, and they sat higher than before.
The one that lost was the country they left.
The Light Goes Dim
That year the sun and the moon of Silla lost their light.
Day and night were not turned around. The two lights of the sky simply dimmed, enough that people could see it had happened.
The king called the court astronomer and asked why.
The answer was this. The essence of the sun and the moon had been resting in this country, and it had now gone across the sea.
What the two of them carried away was not two people.
The king sent an envoy across at once. He was to bring them back.
The Answer That Would Not Come
The envoy found them and gave the king’s word.
Yeono’s answer was short and firm. His coming here had been heaven’s doing, and how could he go back as he pleased.
It is a refusal, and it is also the sentence the eight chapters before this kept repeating.
He did not send the envoy away empty, though. He handed over a bolt of the fine silk his wife had woven, and said a sacrifice to heaven made with this would do it.
The envoy went home and did exactly that.
The sacrifice brought the sun and the moon back as they had been. Silla put the silk in a storehouse as a treasure of the country and called that store Gwibigo. The place of the sacrifice became Yeongil.
The name means welcoming the sun.
Today, The Place a Person Leaves
There is a strange sum in this short story.
The two are king and queen across the sea and doing well. Yet in the country where they used to live the sun goes dim. The side that left lost nothing, and only the side that stayed lost.
The old word for it was essence.
Put into today’s words it is closer to a seat falling empty. Work that ran because a certain person was there only becomes visible at the moment that person is gone.
The light is invisible while it is there and visible when it goes.
What is interesting is Silla’s answer. The envoy went and failed to bring them back, and the matter was not left there either. What he sent was carried home and used for a sacrifice in their own place.
The person could not be returned; the work was carried on.
In our work too the day comes when someone leaves. Holding on to them is the first answer and it does not always work. The question left then is what carries on the work they were doing.
How long that silk would last, the record does not say.