The Slave Hunters

Slaves who ran away were rounded up by bounty hunters called chuno-kkun. “Chuno” itself is a portmanteau word combining “chase” with “slave”; hence, slave hunter.

In the Manchu war, amidst the chaos and fighting, invaders had raided homes and dragged off their inhabitants.

Chun Ji-Ho is nothing if not an opportunist. He tells his men to fire away. If he manages to kill Dae-Gil and the runaway slave, that's like killing two birds with a few dozen arrows.

Seol-hwa blocks Dae-gil’s path and refuses to budge until he agrees to bring her along on their mission to catch Tae-ha. Dae-gil is just about to turn his horse the other way, when Eop-bok fires his musket.

There is only one son of the Crown Prince left alive, and Tae-Ha must save him. Tae-Ha, with his secret message from the Crown Prince himself, must get to and save the last son of the Crown Prince and avenge his master’s murder.

Aware that they’d be overtaken easily if they tried to escape on horseback, Tae-ha sends a riderless horse galloping away to misdirect the slave hunters once again.

Choi and Wang-son cannot believe it; they’ve seen it before more than a few times. But Dae-Gil is adamant – Un-Nyun is alive!

Seol-hwa is jolted awake by the slave hunters demanding to know what she did with their horses and money. Seol-hwa says she sold the horses and spent all of the money on food and drink.

Tae-Ha was not born a slave. Rather, he chose to swear an oath to defend the Crown Prince, thus he endured the loss of his command, the torture, the permanent branding of slave symbol on his forehead, because he had a greater purpose.

Dae-gil had begged his father to allow him to marry Un-nyun, saying that he couldn't live without her. Furious, his father had ordered that Un-nyun be locked up in the storage room, where she would be left to die from dehydration.

According to Dae-gil, in this world of slavery co-existing with Neo-Confucian ideals of virtue, Good and Evil don’t really have meaning.

King Injo asks his number two man, the Left State Minister Lee Gyeong Shik, about the happenings in Jeju Island, where the last surviving son of the murdered Crown Prince So-Hyeon was supposed to be killed.