Yun Sunhwa Posted Six Names on the Dormitory Door Hung With White Cloth

Yun Sunhwa posted six names in front of the dormitory door hung with white cloth.

Three people with fever. Two with wounds that had reopened. One who had shared a towel with them. She did not write the names of the illnesses. Nothing had been confirmed yet.

The quartermaster officer tried to tear the paper down.

"If you post a list of infected people on the street, the whole workshop gets shunned."

Sunhwa pressed the corner of the paper down before his hand could reach it.

"This is a quarantine list."

"It's the same thing."

"No. Don't turn people without fever into patients too."

Beside each name she wrote the time of the last examination, the porridge and water to be given, and the time of the next check. She did not disclose only who had been admitted. What each person would receive went on the same line.

Seokbeom lay at the back of the dormitory. The skin around the splinted second finger of his left hand was red, but the fever had not spread to his wrist. Sunhwa pressed his fingertip and counted the time it took for the color to return.

"How is the pain compared to yesterday?"

"It throbs."

"How many times did you wake?"

"Four times."

"Did you eat the porridge?"

Seokbeom shook his head.

"The workshop doesn't know my process."

"So you went without eating?"

"Someone should have told them, even just by word of mouth."

Sunhwa looked at the paper lying beside his right hand. The order of the jig wedges and the times for oiling were written in a trembling hand.

"Who brought this to you?"

"Master asked for it."

Sunhwa did not fold the paper. Instead she carried it out of the dormitory.

Baek Mujeong was waiting at the threshold. He did not step inside the white cloth boundary.

"Did you ask Seokbeom about the process?"

"Only the blank parts."

"Who decided which blanks belong to a sick person?"

Mujeong's mouth shut.

"I need to know it to remake the jig."

"Does it have to be today?"

"The other kids are waiting."

"Seokbeom is waiting for treatment too."

Sunhwa did not hand the paper back. It was true that Seokbeom's process knowledge was needed. But when a deadline and an apprentice's sense of duty combined, even asking a question became labor.

"Don't ask him anything more today."

"Then I'll do it myself."

"That's not allowed either."

Mujeong's eyes narrowed.

"Why?"

"If a master takes over a sick apprentice's process himself, the next time the apprentice will either have to explain while sick, or he'll be left out."

Sunhwa called the three workshop representatives together. The master craftsman's representative, the acting apprentice representative, and the transport representative. The seat Seokbeom had left empty was filled by another apprentice. Sunhwa showed them Seokbeom's paper, but kept the original stored with the dormitory register.

"Who among you knows this step?"

Two of them knew the oiling times. Only Mujeong knew how to read the wedge pressure from the ink line. Seokbeom and the bellows boy remembered the order for removing the iron rod from the jig.

"Then split it up and teach it," Mujeong said.

He did not demonstrate the finished process alone. He showed the master craftsman's representative how to draw the ink line first, and had that person show it again to the acting apprentice. When the apprentice got it wrong, Mujeong did not take the piece from his hands. He cut the test piece in half instead.

"Where's it deeper?"

"The left side."

"Why?"

"I pressed the wedge first."

"Again."

For the second test, the transport representative read out the order and the bellows boy checked the ink line. Mujeong only measured it at the end. Only after the three of them found the same margin of error did he mark a circle on the chart.

Sunhwa watched the process from outside the workshop. That Mujeong had not taken over his apprentice's seat was a small change. But Seokbeom's knowledge being shared with the workshop should not mean his share disappeared while he was under treatment.

"Whose name do we write the process usage fee under?" she asked.

The officer spoke.

"Give it to whoever taught it, I'd think."

"What about the order Seokbeom worked out first?"

Mujeong answered.

"That's Seokbeom's share."

"And a separate share for whoever taught it today."

Two new columns appeared on the wage chart: "original process record" and "reproduction training." Columns where no single person owned the knowledge, and a sick person was not erased entirely either.

In the third test, the acting apprentice read the ink line correctly but still set the screw crooked. The moment Mujeong saw the result, he picked up a file. In the past he would have snatched the piece from the apprentice's hands and fixed it on the spot.

He set the file back down.

"Where did it first go wrong?"

The apprentice went through it from the first step again. Fixing the iron rod, one drop of oil, half a turn, checking the ink line. The transport representative checked it against the record. The bellows boy said the metal sound had grown higher pitched before the second half turn.

"Why didn't you say something?" the craftsman asked.

"I thought I was the one who was wrong."

Mujeong wrote on the test chart: "Anyone may call a halt for an unusual sound." Even if the skill was shared out, if the apprentices kept waiting for the master's permission, the process still belonged to one person.

"Do it again."

This time the bellows boy heard the sound and raised his hand. The apprentice stopped immediately. A thin scrap of iron filing had wedged under the fixing pin. Once they brushed it out and ran the same sequence again, the ink line came out true.

Mujeong did not mark the pass himself. The craftsman, the apprentice, and the transport representative each checked it and stamped a dot. Only when all three dots were there did it move to the next stage.

Sunhwa brought the test piece to the window of the quarantine dormitory. She did not ask Seokbeom to explain the process. She only showed him the result.

"Who did this?"

"Three people checked it."

Seokbeom looked pleased for a moment, then hid the expression.

"Then I'm not needed anymore?"

"The process has to survive without you. That's not the same as your share disappearing."

"What if I can't use my hand again?"

Sunhwa did not promise that he would be fine.

"We check the color and the pain again in three days. Anything we still don't know after that, we write down as unknown."

Seokbeom rolled the test piece over with his right hand. Seeing his own process reproduced in someone else's hands brought relief and fear at the same time.

Before lunch, six bowls of porridge for the quarantine dormitory arrived. There were only five bowls. The quartermaster's cook said the two with the lowest fever should share.

Sunhwa did not let the porridge in.

"The list has six names."

"There aren't enough bowls."

"Is there porridge?"

"There is."

"Then bring something to put it in."

The cook suggested using the workshop's oil dishes. Sunhwa stopped him. Those dishes had touched copper dust and oil. The transport representative borrowed two earthenware bowls from the trading house upstairs. One was kept as a spare.

Sunhwa recorded six bowls, two water jugs, and a pinch of salt on the distribution chart. She counted what actually went through the door together with a worker representative. It was not the six bowls that had been scheduled, but the six bowls that had actually been received.

The quartermaster officer pointed to the blank space under the list.

"There's still no one assigned to pay quarantine wages."

"That's why it's left blank."

"If you leave a blank space out in the open, only the quartermaster's office looks bad."

"If no one shows who hasn't paid, no money ever comes."

Han Seorin arrived in the afternoon and read the blank space. The trading house would cover the earthenware and the first day's porridge transport, and the workshop's reserve fund would pay the full cost of the first watch of quarantine. After that, wages for the remaining half day would be advanced jointly by the quartermaster's office, the workshop, and the trading house, with final responsibility to be decided after the infection route was investigated.

Sunhwa did not bury that agreement on the back of the list. She attached the payment amount and the settlement date next to each name.

"Can we show all the patients' names?" Seorin asked.

"To the workshop people, yes. On the version posted outside, only numbers and payment amounts."

"Why split it?"

"The people caring for them need to know the names. The people just watching don't."

Sunhwa never treated disclosure as something automatically good. She divided the scope between the dormitory's internal list, the workshop's payment chart, and the summary posted on the street.

After the quarantine list went up, the line of people bringing goods to be repaired outside the workshop grew shorter. One telegraph operator left his device at the door without stepping inside. Another soldier said he would not drink from the dormitory well and brought his own water jug.

The officer watched this and said,

"I told you. Post names and people avoid the place."

Sunhwa did not deny it.

"If we'd hidden it, the people with fever would have kept sleeping in the workshop with everyone else."

"But the goods would still have come in."

"And the people would have collapsed along with them."

Posting the list had a real cost. Fewer repair items came in for pickup, and the well attendant's shift ran longer from washing water jugs separately. Sunhwa entered that cost on the summary chart as well. If she only left behind the claim that quarantine was the right thing to do, someone would have to quietly absorb the delay it caused.

Han Seorin looked at the reduced pickup volume caused by avoidance and revised the transport allowance. She set up an outside pickup stand that did not meet the dormitory contact team, and gave each person leaving an item two tags. One stayed with the item, one went with the operator. Only when the workshop's ledger and the outside tag matched did an item count as received.

"More tags means more chances for copying errors," the transport representative said.

"So we write down the date and any damage to the item alongside them."

Sunhwa used different colored paper so the patient list and the repair receiving chart would not get mixed up. White paper for treatment, yellow paper for goods. It was a distinction meant to keep the item records from going vague in the name of protecting names, and to keep patients from being reduced to numbers in the name of protecting goods.

At the evening examination, the number of people with fever had risen to four. One had no wound but a cough. It was not clear whether this was the same infection. Sunhwa did not put him in the same room as the wounded patients. She had him lie down separately in the empty materials room.

"There's no more room," the officer said.

"Then should we mix the new patient in with the others?"

"If we empty the production storeroom, the supplies get damp."

"If people run fevers on a damp floor, they stay down even longer."

Sunhwa checked the shelves of the materials room. The copper was already gone. All that was left were eight sacks of dry charcoal. She moved the charcoal to another storeroom and laid dry mats on the floor.

That night, the charcoal merchant came to the workshop door. He said if they wanted to move the remaining charcoal, they would have to pay for new sacks first.

"It's double yesterday's price," Seorin said.

"All the charcoal nearby has sold out."

"Who bought it?"

The merchant said the order had come through an interpreter for the Japanese expeditionary force. The name was Ito Masaru. He had paid cash upfront to buy up five days' worth of stock from all three charcoal huts around the workshop.

The quartermaster officer swallowed a curse.

"He saw us using charcoal."

Sunhwa did not draw a firm conclusion. Whether Ito was targeting the workshop's heat treatment or preparing heating for his own unit was still unknown.

The problem was the price, right now.

Heating the quarantine materials room required charcoal. Heat treating the jig test pieces also required charcoal. The remaining eight sacks could not cover both.

The officer said,

"The patients' room only needs one brazier."

Sunhwa pointed to the four names on the dormitory list whose temperatures had risen.

"That one comes first."

The heat treatment column on the workshop's production chart stayed blank.

The price of charcoal had doubled, and heating and process now stood against each other over the same eight sacks.