# Chapter 4: When the Mountain Weeps
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you through Chapter 4 of *Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook*. This is the chapter where the quiet sorrow of a family cracks open into blood, fire, and fate. So take a breath, settle in, and let’s step back into a world where the mountains remember everything and the earth itself seems to grieve.
The chapter opens in a house that is already haunted, though no one has died yet. Light has drained from Dahn’s eyes, leaving a void that does not belong to this world. Myoung-Ok is grateful that Geum-Jin is mostly gone during the day, because she fears what it would do to Dahn to know his son has witnessed his transformations. To know his son has seen the bruises hidden beneath her sleeves. At night, when she believes everyone else is asleep, Myoung-Ok weeps quietly until a new mat of grass grows on the floor where her head lies.
Even though she is exhausted by Dahn, Myoung-Ok notices that Geum-Jin keeps the firewood stocked, her herb garden tended, and the yard full of pelts ready for market. Her child has become the first to rise before the sun and the last to lie down in the dark. On one of the rare evenings he returns before sunset, she sees that hair has started to grow on his lip. When Geum-Jin drops a bag of barley at her feet, Myoung-Ok takes his callused hands into her own.
“Geum-Jin-ah, I’m sorry,” she says.
“It wasn’t too heavy.” He smiles and taps the bag with his foot. “I’m the one who should be sorry I can’t do more—”
“You’re our only precious child, yet you carry all our—”
A groan comes from inside the hut. Myoung-Ok touches her son’s tanned face and walks back to care for Dahn before she can finish voicing her thoughts. That interrupted sentence hangs in the air like a wound that never gets to close.
Then the story moves to the spring market, where vendors call out for customers to browse their wares. Men and women in white traditional robes crowd about to see what their neighbors have to offer. Geum-Jin pushes through the market surge and sets his wooden carrier down to lay out his pelts for the shoemaker. Last week, the older man had requested more deerskin to fill orders from a wealthy Japanese couple who had come into possession of nearby farmland. The shoemaker is not keen on selling even his scraps to these foreign land thieves, but he knows refusing their business would only place his family in danger. He has heard that in the next town over, a man and his wife were dragged off to a city prison because the couple had accidentally brushed a Japanese official’s arm on the street. In another rumor, an official had forced an elderly woman to eat a cockroach that flitted out during a home inspection. He has no desire to test the veracity of such claims with his own life.
The shoemaker has come to enjoy buying from Geum-Jin. Although he is curious to know where the giant hunter has gone, he never inquires, as he much prefers his substitute’s friendly verbal manners. He would never have been able to gather the nerve to request anything from the giant, let alone get a fair price for it.
He hands Geum-Jin his coins and smiles. “Young man, the tailor down the road might be open to buying some of your pelts. He was telling me he needed some fur linings.”
Geum-Jin bows in thanks for the tip. As he puts the carrier straps back on his shoulders, four serious-looking men approach the shoemaker.
One man wears round spectacles and a Western-style black suit. A shorter, jittery man also dons black, though with a leather bag slung over his shoulder. The remaining two are expressionless soldiers in tan uniforms. Geum-Jin tenses his grip around his straps, remembering the first time he saw men dressed in that tan fabric. He tries to remain calm, hoping he will not draw their attention. Nearby marketgoers eye the four strangers and hurry away to a safer distance. The nervous man with the leather bag looks to his superior before turning to the shoemaker.
“The village administration will be assessing the quality of all market vendors. You will cooperate or your business will be reported for insubordination,” he announces, using many words Geum-Jin does not understand. The shoemaker gives a slight nod and gestures toward his workshop. The man starts walking inside but pauses when his bespectacled superior glances at Geum-Jin and says something curt in Japanese. The man with the leather bag turns to Geum-Jin and translates: “You, boy. How old are you? Why aren’t you in school?”
Geum-Jin regrets not having departed as soon as the officials came. He takes a few steps back. “I don’t live in this village. I was just about to leave so I can get out of your way.”
The official in glasses narrows his eyes at his aide’s translation. As Geum-Jin strides away from the group, the official clicks his tongue, sending the two soldiers rushing to grab his carrier and arms. The other vendors and marketgoers scatter out of the way as Geum-Jin flails in an attempt to break loose of the soldiers’ grasp. His pelts fall on the ground, becoming sullied by the dust kicked up in struggle. Passersby stop, whispering and watching the scene unfurl.
“Futeisenjin,” hisses the bespectacled official, spitting at Geum-Jin’s feet. He barks something at the aide, who passes him a knife from his bag. The official pulls Geum-Jin’s braid and runs the point of the blade against it. The close gleam of the knife makes Geum-Jin think of his father: hesitation could mean death. He screams and puts all the strength he can draw from the sinews of his body into headbutting the official’s face. His sleeves and carrier straps rip as he jerks free of the soldiers in their moment of shock. The crowd gasps and the official falls to the ground, dropping his knife and cracking his round spectacles. All stand stunned as Geum-Jin darts down the market street. The official clutches his bleeding nose and shouts at the soldiers to run after the boy.
Geum-Jin weaves around the marketgoers, not daring to look back at his pursuers. When he bursts out of the throng of white robes in the main market strip, he sprints to the village gate toward the mountains. He cannot think, he does not know if he is breathing, he cannot see what propels his feet forward. He only knows he cannot lead the soldiers to his home and veers westward to a forest far away. A loud pistol shot rings behind him in the open field. Once he dashes into the tree line, he zigzags in his ascent. Jagged bark hits his cheeks as a bullet clips a nearby tree. His chest burns and he feels he cannot run for much longer. When another shot rains splinters on his head, he ducks, though the force of his momentum trips him into the ground. The pounding footsteps of the soldiers grow louder as Geum-Jin tries to drag himself off the forest floor. When he looks up, his senses leave his body. A snarling tiger pushes its hot breath over his face and Geum-Jin thinks he might finally perish.
The soldiers yell upon sighting the tiger and aim their pistols at the deadlier target. The tiger growls and leaps over Geum-Jin, lunging at the armed men. The soldiers release more panicked shots, none hitting their mark. The tiger, unfazed, roars and swipes a giant paw at one of its attackers. The man’s pistol falls from his grasp as he jumps back to dodge the tiger’s claws. When the tiger crouches to pounce again, the unarmed soldier clutches a handful of dirt and tosses it into the beast’s face. The tiger thrashes and roars as the soldiers flee back down the mountain.
Geum-Jin stares in disbelief, splayed out on the ground and unable to control his fearful shaking. Twigs and leaves snap under his trembling legs and the tiger turns toward the noise. Geum-Jin sweeps the ground with his hands and grips a fallen tree branch, raising it to place something between him and the predator. The tiger growls, saliva glistening on its bared fangs. Geum-Jin swings his arm back, preparing to strike.
“Brother, calm yourself. She means no harm.”
A second tiger stalks toward him, her eyes on his. Geum-Jin drinks in rapid gulps of air and tightens his hold on the branch. Although the familiar voice dulls the crest of his panic, his fallen body will not stop shaking.
“Shh, you’re safe.” The tiger pushes her broad head into her brother’s chest until his tremors stilled.
Geum-Jin lowers the tree branch and strokes the soft fur of her neck. Had he died? Was this a dream? His mind races with questions, but he cannot yet seem to find his voice.
Met with her twin’s silence, Geum-Ja continues to speak, a low rumble in her beastly throat. “This land can no longer fend off man. Most of the tigers have gone north. We, too, will leave to join our kin. Come with us.”
“I haven’t changed my answer since you last asked.” Geum-Jin’s tongue lashes with a harshness he had not intended. He digs his fingers into the dirt and glances at the other tiger pacing behind his sister. He looks away when its yellow feline eyes meet his.
Geum-Ja sits, growling softly as her tail flicks back and forth. “Those soldiers know what you look like. Do you think you’ll be able to go back to that market ever again? How will you survive with no money?”
Geum-Jin knows she is right, but he is angry that she dares to lecture him. “You left us,” he spits. “You have no right to doubt me. I’ll find a way. I’ll hunt in other forests, I’ll find another village—”
The other tiger stops its pacing and growls at this outburst. Geum-Ja slinks over to nuzzle the tiger’s tense neck with her head. When her companion calms, she turns to her brother once again.
“Every day they cut down more trees to feed their industry, to lay their claim on the land,” says Geum-Ja. “This mountain won’t be able to support you for much longer.”
Geum-Jin turns his face to the ground and closes his eyes. He does not wish to hear any more.
“I stopped by the hut to pay final respects to our parents. They won’t be of this world much longer. The iron in Father’s shoulder is poisoning him to madness. There will be nothing left for you here.”
Geum-Jin jerks his head toward the beast before him. “How could you say that—”
“Death will free them from their pain,” she growls. “You cannot.”
He cannot accept this creature as his sister. The true Geum-Ja would never utter such a curse. He stares in disbelief as she continues her wretched speech.
“There is no medicine that can help our parents. The kindest thing you can do for them is to let them die in peace.”
Geum-Jin holds his head and buries his face in his knees. Geum-Ja sets her large paw on his feet. “This forest leaves us tigers nothing. With the power of iron, humans no longer revere the earth or fear us. The soldiers make sport of killing our young. If you must stay here, don’t let them make sport of killing yours.”
He places his hand on his sister’s muzzle and presses his forehead against the fur of her broad chest.
“I’m sorry I left you that day,” he says. “I wish I’d made you come inside. Then maybe Mother would be herself again and Father would still be strong. It’s my fault we lost you.”
“You never lost me, brother. For we are one.”
Geum-Ja puts her maw to her rear. With a sharp lurch of her jaw she rips off her tail, her pained roar echoing in the forest. Blood drips from the fur of her muzzle as she lays the torn piece of herself at her brother’s feet.
“I leave a part of me with you, should you wish to find me again.”
Geum-Ja and the other tiger slink away into the trees. Geum-Jin picks up the bloody tail and the soldier’s abandoned pistol from where it lay gleaming in the dirt. He climbs homeward, his racing heartbeat pounding in his ears.
The ominous words of his sister-creature reverberate in Geum-Jin’s thoughts. To see her whole brought him some relief from his guilt, though it did not quell his fury that she would invite death to the family with her careless tongue. She was also not incorrect: he does not know what he will do now that he cannot return to the village. His pulse thumps with the warning that the forest would ebb away and expose his family to danger. Frustrated tears leak from his reddened eyes. How will he explain to his parents what happened? He does not wish to imagine what his reactive father will do once he learns that the pelts and carrier had been lost in the market. And although his mother has never once expressed disappointment toward him, he dreads the idea that she might for the first time today. Geum-Jin is so preoccupied with his worries on the ascent home that he does not notice his mother’s screams until the collapsed roof of their hut comes into sight, its rotted straw and wood surrendered to their decaying weight in a jumbled heap.
“Mother! Father!” he calls out as he runs to his remaining family.
Spittle flew from Dahn’s roar as he swung his ax in erratic bursts. When the ax lodged into a tree, he pulled on it in a manic rage until he fell backward from the force of it coming loose. On the ground, he grabbed the nearest rock and hurled it into the tree. Myoung-Ok yelled at him to stop, trying to get closer so she could calm him as she had always been able to before. Dahn picked up another large rock and threw it at his wife. It hit her in the stomach and she, too, fell back.
“Mother!” Geum-Jin shouted as he ran to her.
Dahn jerked his head at the noise. His empty eyes fell on the Japanese pistol in his son’s hand. He released an animalistic cry, picked himself up, and charged at the boy. Geum-Jin tumbled to the ground, air forced out of his lungs by the full weight of his enormous father.
Dahn’s first punch cracked Geum-Jin’s nose. Geum-Jin stared up at his father, his shock immobilizing him against any instinct for self-preservation. Somewhere distant, his mother screamed. Dahn’s second punch made Geum-Jin’s vision turn red. The third punch drowned out all sounds but his own pulse exploding in his head. Then Geum-Jin’s world turned black.
Myoung-Ok threw herself onto Dahn’s left shoulder and tried to pry him off their son. She shouted for him to stop, but he flung her away before striking Geum-Jin once more. Blood splattered on his fist and on the leaves of the forest floor. When she saw the red pulp of her child’s face, Myoung-Ok drew on all of her resolve to do what she had known she must since the first day the light left Dahn’s eyes. She hastened to find a hunting knife near the debris of the hut and ran until its point slid into Dahn’s neck. Dahn turned to her—eyes still empty—and fell on his side.
Myoung-Ok released an earth-shaking howl and threw herself on her husband as he rolled onto his back. As his heavy breathing faltered, Myoung-Ok’s prone body rose and fell with every labored inhale and exhale. Green sprouts spread on Dahn’s chest where his wife’s weeping head lay, spilling tiny leaves down his shoulders and onto the forest floor. Guttural sounds neither beast nor human, perhaps from the earth itself, rang through the forest as Dahn bled out.
When the giant lungs beneath her eventually stilled, Myoung-Ok bellowed for the earth to grieve. The ground quivered in time with her rasping sobs, sinking Dahn’s slack form into the soil glazed red with his blood. As tears left her body they took with them her breath, her grief, her flesh, disintegrating her essence into leaves that cascaded onto the ground. Myoung-Ok let out one final wail as her body crumbled into a pall of grave dirt and grass, engulfing her lost love in a final embrace as she, too, surrendered to the earth.
When Geum-Jin woke, he did not know how long he had been unconscious. Excruciating pain throbbed in his head and he could not fully open his eyes. Congealing blood slid into the lines of his grimace as he sat up. He looked around and called for his parents. The collapsed hut roof sat rotting in the yard, but in the place where his father had fallen was a large grassy mound. Geum-Jin dragged himself to the edge of the raised earth. He knelt and bowed until his head touched the soil, watering the growing grass with tears in farewell to his buried parents.
Then the chapter shifts to Cheongju, Chōsen, Empire of Japan, 1920.
Without the tigers’ culling presence, the remaining beasts of the mountain ran free and bold. Deer picked at the sprouting crops every morning. Packs of wild boars charged into the fields, trampling the tilled soil and destroying the pigpens that jailed their sisters. Liberated sows and oxen absconded into the forest, happy to shed the domesticity that chained them to their human masters. Then came the pests. Black clouds of insects that eclipsed the sun descended on the village. Their buzzing horde consumed stalks of barley and rice before their grains could ripen. They bore holes through the wood of grain storage, devouring caches of corn and sorghum. Desperation gnawed at the empty stomachs of the villagers.
What little food the farmers managed to produce was confiscated and shipped overseas to cater to the rising needs of the Japanese Empire. They were left with meager government rations, if that, and resorted to pouring more water into their flavorless gruels to make them last longer.
When recruiters appeared in the village promising jobs for virtuous and hardworking young women, the hungry villagers shipped their daughters off to distant factories to support Japanese manufacturing. Some families were awarded bags of grain for their sacrifice. Others were not quite so lucky. All were promised money that their children would send home after settling into their work. Weeks and months passed; no family received a single coin, or even a letter to confirm their daughters’ safe passage. Everything had been taken from them, down to the very flesh between their backs and their bellies.
Hungry and humiliated, the country boiled with protest. Farmers, students, scholars, workers, poets: all linked arms to push against the emperor of Japan. They demanded liberation from the yoke of tyranny and taxation, to be able to determine their own livelihoods, to live free of discrimination, to preserve the—
And that is where Chapter 4 leaves us: with a people pushed past endurance, a boy who has lost everything, and a mountain that has swallowed a family’s last breath. It is a chapter that does not simply break your heart. It grinds it into the soil and asks whether anything can grow there again.
Reader’s Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter is devastating in the best possible way. It moves with the weight of folklore and the brutality of history at the same time. Myoung-Ok’s quiet sacrifices, Geum-Jin’s desperate sprint for survival, and Geum-Ja’s impossible choice as a tiger-sister all collide in a climax that feels both mythic and painfully human. The prose lingers on small details—grass growing where tears fall, a tail left as a token, a pistol gleaming in the dirt—and those details make the tragedy feel inevitable. The final shift to 1920 and the wider suffering of the people expands the story from a family curse into a national wound. I felt angry, heartbroken, and completely gripped.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.8 / 5 Stars
Next Chapter Prediction
After losing his parents and being marked by the Japanese officials, Geum-Jin has nothing left to return to. I predict the next chapter will show him surviving alone in the mountains, hunted and hardened, while the growing resistance movement draws him toward a larger fight. The tiger tail and the abandoned pistol will not be mere keepsakes—they will become symbols of two paths: the beast he could become and the rebel he might choose to be. I also suspect we have not seen the last of Geum-Ja, and that her warning about the forest will come true sooner than Geum-Jin expects. The next chapter may bring him face-to-face with the resistance, or with a soldier who recognizes him from the market.
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