Chapter 12: The Keeper's Seat

On Sunday he woke warm, and for one long second he thought he was home.

Then he saw the gray slab over his head, and the window waiting in the air in front of it.

[Ju Gyu-ho. Keeper of an unlisted floor. Day 40.]

[Sow, Level 4. XP: 17,550 of 17,700.]

[Health: 64 of 100. Stamina: 72 of 100.]

[Hunger: none. Thirst: none.]

[Coins: 15,220. Lots per Market: 3.]

The first line had changed, and nothing else had come with it.

He didn't know what a Keeper was.

He knelt at the stove and raked out the night's fire with a cane stick.

Under the red coals lay a bed of fine gray-white ash.

Grandpa used to carry the kitchen ash out to the pepper beds every spring in a dented bucket.

"The field eats what the stove eats," he'd say, and Grandma would say the field ate better than he did.

Gyu-ho let the ash run through his fingers and thought about the Tower's grades.

Stream water had bought him Good, and his own saved seed had bought him Fine.

Nothing so far had bought him anything above Fine.

He kept the fire going two days to make enough ash, banking the coals each night.

On Monday at dusk he worked a potful of ash into a short row beside the house.

He planted it with Fine pepper seed he had saved and dried himself, and watered it from the pot.

In the morning the peppers on that row were so dark they looked black until he held one to the light.

[Tower red pepper. Quality: Prime.]

[Growth: dusk to dawn. Keeps: never spoils.]

[Eaten: keeps the eater warm for a week.]

[First harvest at a new quality. 200 XP.]

He turned the pepper over in his palm.

Grandma dried hers on the tin roof every September, and by March the last of them were dust.

This one would still be red when the persimmon bloomed.

The stone lit.

[Level 5. Ginseng seed, two thousand coins.]

Gyu-ho stood in front of it for a long time.

Geumsan was ginseng country, and the county road was lined with signs for it and with old black shade-sheds on the hills.

It took six years in Geumsan soil to make one root worth selling.

Grandma had kept a shed behind the house, and it fell down the winter after the breach took Grandpa.

He bought one seed, and two thousand coins went out of the hollow in a long brass rattle.

Grandpa had called Tower coins yeopjeon, after the old brass money in the folk museum, and had never trusted them.

Ginseng hated light, so Gyu-ho built it a lean-to of cane and long grass at the end of the radish row.

In the morning there was a root under it as thick as his thumb, pale and forked, with a fine beard of hairs.

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