Five Years of Long Enjoyment, The Lucrative Trade of the Far North, The Tent Tribe's Ferocious Surprise Attack!

The sea wind blew over more than a thousand li, from the bright-red altars of the Mountain Tribe in the south to the white, boundless ice fields of the Deer Tribe in the north. The old grandmother's cold, hoarse prayers had long since scattered into the bone-piercing wind. And where the sea wind fell, arriving at a little seaside river that had just frozen over and landing on a five-masted Zheyang Ship, it heard another devout, hoarse plea.

"O Mizutafu god who banishes evil! Please, take pity on your humble servant and remove the dead man's ill luck from me... O white-robed Guanyin who rescues the suffering! Please, save me from this voyage of misery!... Ah! This lowly Kim Seon-su kowtows to the gods and immortals!..."

The icy sea wind froze the Earth Mother, froze the northern sea, and froze the patched, dilapidated Zheyang Ship into the river that flowed into the sea. The shipwright Kim Seon-su, wrapped in a bloodstained deerskin robe, knelt on the freezing deck and kowtowed several times with bang, bang sounds before two wooden spirit tablets he had carved with his own hands. He muttered under his breath, one moment praying for good fortune to Mizutafu, the shamanic god of Joseon villages, the next praying to Guanyin Bodhisattva, rescuer of suffering and disaster, to let him return alive.

In this era, Goryeo Buddhism, which had once flourished to the height of splendor, had already been driven out of the court under the suppression of the Joseon Dynasty. Monks of the various sects fled into the mountains and forests, barely maintaining the transmission of their robes and bowls, but in the process they set aside their once lofty posture and drew closer to ordinary villagers. And in Joseon villages, all kinds of shamanic beliefs had continued