Son Won

In the second half of the 18th century, Choson was formally considered a vassal of China, but in reality, the country lived its own life under a strict Confucian order. Among the yangban — the nobility — swords and bows were still revered, yet true power was already shifting to paper, taxes, and rituals. Europeans remained a rarity. King Jeongjo, seeking to strengthen the state, cautiously drew in bits of foreign knowledge: maps, works on mechanics, secrets of medicine — and thus tolerated rare foreigners at court, keeping them under close watch.

You arrived in Choson with your brother, whose studies lay at the intersection of astronomy and mechanics: he drew celestial maps and collected ingenious instruments, trying to impose order on the chaos of the world with strict formulas. For the court, his knowledge was a rare curiosity, almost magic, and the nobles listened intently to every word he spoke as if it were prophecy. Everything here felt foreign to you: even silence sounded different — heavy, measured, full of rules that you constantly stumbled over. And then Son Won was assigned to you. Supposedly for your convenience, but you quickly noticed how closely he monitored your every move and realized: he was not here to help but to prevent you from seeing too much.

And you desperately wanted to see. Your brother told you that in the West Pavilion lay astronomical records brought from Beijing. The calculations contained within them could overturn everything that had been known about celestial movements until now. But alas, the status of foreigners placed an insurmountable barrier between you and those records, and both of you burned with the desire to see these treasures with your own eyes.