Legend of the Blue Sea

Chapter 5

Okay, now this I want more of. Our hero turns into a hilarious bundle of contradictions today, as the romance progresses to the denial phase and he starts doing the very things he once called idiotic. Luckily for us, he doesn't seem to have the self-awareness to know why he's doing any of this, which means that hopefully his antics will just go on and on and on.

Joseon. Mermaid Se-hwa has come to land, and in no time Lord Yang sends henchmen to attack and capture her. She's about to be fileted when mayor Dam-ryung swoops in like an action hero, wielding his sword and backlit by a halo of sunlight.

The henchmen try to get through him to Se-hwa, but he blocks them with swift, high-flying moves. The men go down one by one, and Dam-ryung takes Se-hwa by the hand to run to safety.

More henchmen arrive to give chase, but Dam-ryung hides them in the field, still holding Se-hwa's hand tightly in his. Once the coast is clear, he asks if she isn't hurt, and then adds, "I missed you." *flutter*

Snowflakes shower down on them as they walk through the field, and Se-hwa stops to gaze at a little flower. He picks it for her and says that all flowers mean something, and this one stands for "something you have, and something I don't—memories."

They travel a distance on horseback, and then finally arrive at Dam-ryung's home by nightfall, where a man watches them arrive. Out in the ocean, three mermaids swim to the surface, and Se-hwa seems to sense them and stops in her tracks. Does she hear them singing, or calling to her, all the way out here?

Lord Yang gets the report that Dam-ryung brought the mermaid to the mayor's residence, and his gisaeng companion Hong-ran (Joon-jae's stepmother's doppelganger in Joseon) is pleased to hear that she walked right into their hands.

They're interrupted when a shipping merchant comes to complain that Lord Yang is holding the crew at his inn against their will so that they can't work. Lord Yang says he still hasn't received their promise to deal exclusively with him, and the merchant flips the table in front of Lord Yang, and spits that he already blocks their shipping routes and steals their livelihood, but they won't work that hard just to fill his belly. He vows to make Lord Yang's crimes known publicly.

But the very next morning, fishermen arrive at the shore and find the merchant's dead body on the beach. At the crime scene, officials tell mayor Dam-ryung that there are no clear indicators of how the man died, and rumors abound that the mermaid coming to land is the cause of this curse.

Dam-ryung notes Lord Yang smiling at him from the crowd, and declares that no funeral will be held until they investigate and find out whether this man was really cursed or murdered.

At the same time, gisaeng Hong-ran storms into the mayor's compound with a shaman in tow, who supposedly saw that the mermaid was here. She demands to search the place, and the threat of Lord Yang's power is enough to get her past the guards. One of the minion officers runs to alert Dam-ryung (ha, is that Chun Song-yi's manager?), and Dam-ryung hurries back.

Meanwhile, Se-hwa sits in a room staring at a vase—it's the one with a painting of a mermaid kissing a man who's wearing modern-day clothes, which we've seen Shi-ah uncover in the future. Dam-ryung had explained to Se-hwa that he has dreams, and in those dreams he's living in a strange world, and she's there too. The drawing on the vase is something he saw in one of his dreams.

Dam-ryung doesn't know if they're visions, or just dreams, or premonitions of another world, but he does know one thing: "The things that are happening now will undoubtedly happen then... strangely, like fate is repeating itself."