Slap. Slap.

"The Sokcho water is really something……"

"Baby~ I love you."

"Beer?"

"Deal!"

"Hahahaha."

"Hohohohoho."

Sokcho Beach in August, at the peak of vacation season.

More people crowded in once evening came than during the day, when the heat was at its worst.

Families and couples and friends spread mats on the sand and gathered in twos and threes to enjoy the sea at sundown.

The hour when the red safety line goes up and the water is closed.

The young ones paid no attention, threw themselves in, and enjoyed being young.

The people sitting around on their mats had chicken and beer, chips, soda.

A night on the water at Sokcho, as peaceful and happy as it gets.

Tramp, tramp.

A short man in a black mask, hiking boots and a black long-sleeved tracksuit is walking along the boardwalk. It was Kim Cheolsu.

He was seeing the peaceful shoreline with his own eyes and it still did not seem real to him, and it was strange.

People living on the same ground. They spend their time on the same shore and breathe the same air, and still it was like running up against a scene out of another world.

The feeling of being here and standing outside it completely, watching.

Until he set foot in the South he had never once imagined a world like this could really exist.

He went hungry from the day he was born, and from the time he could walk he was up in the mountains looking for a way out from under the hunger.

The rest of the time there was ideological instruction, and once he was grown the army made him a killing weapon.

A life in the South with not one blood relation and not one neighbor.

After he settled he simply lived. It was a world where everything he had imagined could be had and enjoyed without staking his life on it.

White rice and meat, eggs, food of every kind, and fruit he had never seen before, big and sweet. It was more than plentiful.

Air conditioning in…