Ipgoong Sex(Chapter 2)

[English Version]8

 

Short Story

 

Title : Ipgoong Sex*(Chapter 2)

Author : Shin Ki

 

 

 

Chapter 2. Knocking on the Gate of Entrance into the Palace

 

The penetration had occurred, yet there was no movement.

It was not merely the collision of flesh, but a halt before the doorway of some being.

I did not move within her, and she did not push me away.

In that stillness, we were both “opening and waiting” for one another’s deepest depths.

Her womb was loosely open.

Yet that openness was not a mere anatomical dilation.

It was as if, in order to welcome another life,

she extended the arms of consciousness,

like a living blossom of the body.

Her womb began to wrap around my glans with the supple motion of an octopus.

The sensation was like being guided by wet silk—

soft, yet with the decisive rhythm of ingestion.

Little by little, from the glans to the base,

she drew me in, embracing me from within.

In that moment, I no longer felt my body as my own.

Within her womb, I was not in a state of possession,

but of offering.

It was the rite of giving myself away,

the consciousness of leaving myself behind.

Within her, “I” disappeared,

and I entered the palace not as an owner, but as a being,

a man, a sinner.

What is ipgung?

Once, I imagined it as something trifling—

like a bee resting on a petal,

brushing the stamens and pistil in playful contact,

a small, passive pleasure of sexual fantasy,

a dance of genitals, a thrill of the flesh.

But now, I believe differently.

Ipgung must be approached more reverently than any other moment.

It is not the act of spilling seed,

but a pilgrimage in which one kneels with one’s sins,

a silent weeping of repentance before the innate depravity of instinct.

I had drifted through most of my life in desire and fantasy.

In my heart I had committed adultery countless times,

repeating hundreds of unjust unions in imagination.

It stained me more deeply, more persistently,

than any sin of touch committed in reality.

But now, before her womb,

I wished only to seek forgiveness as a human being.

For me, ipgung was the passage through which the accumulated filth of my life was purified,

a rite of salvation melting the shadows of instinct in the mercy of heaven.

To enter her was not merely a contact of bodies,

but a plea for the restoration of my entire being.

So I did not move.

Before moving, I wanted first to hide myself within her,

to bury my pride, fantasies, and addictions there,

and be born again.

In that moment, we were still.

The contractions of her womb ceased,

and my glans rested quietly upon her inner lining.

Two minutes—no, three.

In that long, deep pause,

our genitals simply looked upon each other’s surface.

On that surface,

we no longer felt—we remembered.

When I had first wanted to own another’s body,

when desire had become my identity.

I closed my eyes,

to feel not the friction of the surface, but the grain of existence.

Her womb quietly embraced me.

She no longer tested me,

and I no longer stirred her.

In that stillness, I wept.

Though no sound left my lips,

deep within,

a cry for forgiveness pooled like blood.

And over that silent weeping,

her womb tightened around me once more.

Now it was no longer a pressure, but an acceptance—

a mercy that knew my darkness yet received me,

a compassion that counted my sins yet released me.

In that moment, I knew:

Ipgung is never sex,

nor pleasure, nor conquest—

but repentance and salvation,

beginning and birth,

the return of the soul.

For the first time, I understood

why I had been born as a human being.

Ipgung was not the meeting of genitals,

but the baptism of the soul.

Her womb was the palace of love

that received me again.

One day, in the corner of a health magazine my wife handed me, a single word caught my eye:

Ipgung (入宮). From there, I began to change.

At first it felt strange, even ridiculous—

was there a need to describe sex in such grand terms?

But one sentence in that article strangely held me:

“Ipgung is not mere penetration, but the return of being and the linkage of souls.”

That night, for the first time,

I imagined the word womb not as a reproductive organ,

but as a chamber of the universe,

a gate of life,

the deepest center of emotion and memory.

To enter it was to step beyond bodily contact,

into lost time, closed hearts,

and the silence that had congealed between us.

I imagined ipgung.

The bedroom—long abandoned like ruins—

suddenly felt like a sanctuary.

The body of my wife, long neglected,

came alive before me like the surface of a star reborn.

When I wrapped my arms around her back,

I was not merely touching flesh,

but the years of suffering she had endured,

the loneliness borne in silence,

and the self I had unknowingly locked away deep inside.

In that moment, I was not simply entering her body—

I was returning to the forgotten us,

to the self that had grown distant,

to somewhere that held the essence of existence.

Ipgung was not entering the womb,

but the way back into the chamber of the heart.

That night, speaking only through breath,

I felt it—

that sex could be a prayer, not a sin,

that touch could be restoration, not destruction,

that my body could enter her universe

and be remade within it.

That night, I was born.

And we were connected again, as in the beginning.