Where Am I?
Where am I?
Seo Joo-cheon groggily opened his eyes to a clamor of busy, unfamiliar sounds. He listened for a moment, trying to place them, and found birdsong so close it seemed to be singing right beside his ear.
Clip-clop?
On top of the birds came a noise he had never heard in his life, and he focused harder.
Clip-clop. Clip-clop. Clip-clop.
Only after turning it over in his mind did he realize what it was.
What the hell? That's hoofbeats.
The sounds of horses walking and horses running blended into a peculiar rhythm. And the ceiling he stared up at from his back was a shape he had never seen before. The moment his rational mind kicked in, the horrific accident he had just been in came flooding back.
Seo Joo-cheon bolted upright with a scream.
"Aaagh!"
Someone beside him answered at once.
"Big Brother, what are you doing?"
"Huh? I'm alive?"
"What nonsense is that, Big Brother?"
Another man chided him, looking him over.
"I definitely died, though."
Seo Joo-cheon muttered it while glancing around the room.
"Heh-heh-heh."
A woman's laugh burst out, and an utterly sensual face suddenly loomed right in front of his eyes.
"What, did some chivalrous hero run you through in a dream and you kicked the bucket?"
"Hey, Fourth. What kind of way is that to talk to Big Brother—'kicked the bucket'?"
The two men and one woman stopped packing their bags to laugh at him, cackling without a shred of sympathy.
That's Chinese, all right.
Strangely, he understood every word of the Chinese they were rattling off. Unsure what to make of any of it, Seo Joo-cheon kept his mouth shut and scanned his surroundings.
This has to be a dream.
The furnishings looked like a historical drama set. The clothes and furniture were so antique they put even historical dramas to shame. And the people around him kept chattering without giving him a moment to think. Seo Joo-cheon could only blink at the bed flush against the wall, and at himself lying on it.
Then he looked down at his hands and startled all over again. Calluses covered his palms, and the joints of every finger jutted out like knobs. The sight of them left him stunned.
The woman happened to be looking into a bronze mirror, so Seo Joo-cheon sprang up and went to it. The face staring back made him recoil in shock.
"Good God!"
The woman muttered as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing.
"Big Brother, shocked by your own face, are you? What's gotten into you, looking in a mirror when you never have in your whole life? Did some heroine dump you in a dream for being ugly?"
The face in the bronze mirror was handsome, but the sharp features kept it from being particularly approachable. A broad, well-formed forehead and thick sword-like eyebrows were striking enough, yet the eyes were so cold that the whole face looked ruthless.
That's my face from back when I was working out hard and had dropped a lot of weight.
Confusion surged through him.
Is this the afterlife?
There was no other way to explain what was happening. A moment's thought, though, told him that wasn't it either.
"Our Big Brother's qi must be running low these days. Having nightmares and everything. Tomorrow we should eat beef instead of chicken."
"Beef sounds good."
One of the men chimed in, and the woman shot back at once.
"I'm having mine grilled."
As if this sort of thing happened all the time, the three of them joked and snickered. Seo Joo-cheon looked at their faces and pinched his thigh hard. If this was a hospital, he needed to wake up from this dream already.
One of them looked like a bandit, but his massive frame was packed with muscle and his skin was swarthy, and the great saber slung across his back suited that physique perfectly. The other man was the opposite—lean of body and face, with the clean-cut air of a church youth-group heartthrob. The twin swords at his hips caught the eye.
The woman's clothes clung so tightly that every voluptuous curve showed, making her strikingly attractive. A whip hung at her left hip and a row of daggers at her right, giving her a strong warrior-woman presence. Her black hair, falling to her shoulders, was loosely tied back, revealing a face rich with sensual allure. A scar jutted from her right cheek like a leech.
As he took in the three of them, Seo Joo-cheon shuddered. Every detail of their looks matched the character descriptions in his novel without a single discrepancy.
How is this possible?
One of the men finished packing his travel bag and stood.
"Big Brother, we'll go downstairs and order food. Wash up roughly and come down."
He opened the door. Barely holding down the shock, Seo Joo-cheon quietly opened his mouth to confirm whether they were truly the characters from his novel.
"Cheon-yeong."
The burly man opening the door turned his head.
"Yes, Big Brother."
Another name slipped from Seo Joo-cheon's lips.
"Ho-in."
The lean man answered.
"What's the matter, Big Brother?"
"Chu-mi."
"What is it, Big Brother?"
When all three turned to look at him with identical puzzlement, Seo Joo-cheon snapped fully awake.
"Ah—never mind. Go on down first. I'll be right there."
"Haha, honestly. Big Brother seems especially unlike himself today. Calling me by name and everything."
"You can say that again, Second Brother."
The lean man said it with a sidelong glance.
"Big Brother never calls us by name except on our birthdays. What's going on? Fourth, is it your birthday today?"
"What are you talking about, Third Brother. My birthday was ages ago."
"Right?"
Life returned to Seo Joo-cheon's dazed eyes.
"Enough noise. Get downstairs."
The cold tone made the three of them smile at last.
"That's more like it. That's our Big Brother."
Once they had left the room, Seo Joo-cheon raised his hands again, stared at them, and let out a sigh.
"What the hell is this? How am I inside my own novel?"
Ham Cheon-yeong. Dokgo Ho-in. Kang Chu-mi. He had called them on a hunch, and the names matched exactly.
How am I supposed to interpret this? And these three people… no. The four of us, including me…
Seo Joo-cheon clutched his head and groaned.
"Right. This has to be a dream. This is a dream. I got in an accident, I'm lying in a hospital, and I'm thinking about the novel I wrote. Yeah. That's it. It has to be."
He lay back down on the bed.
"This is a dream. If I go back to sleep and wake up, I'll be back in reality."
But sleep would not come. If anything, his mind grew clearer. On top of that, his bladder was full—he even felt the urge to pee. Pinching his thigh and his side actually hurt. This was absolutely not a dream.
"Ah. Goddammit. This is reality? So I died in a car accident and got dropped into the novel I wrote? For real? But why The Invincible Lay Disciple? That's the kind of setup you see in modern fantasy stories about becoming the antagonist."
Seo Joo-cheon looked at the sword lying beside the bed. A black scabbard, with a white ivory serpent crest.
"This is ironclad proof. No getting around it."
Among all the villains Seo Joo-cheon had designed, only one had a serpent crest on his scabbard. That crest was the symbol of the Unorthodox White Serpent Sect. He drew the blade a fraction and found a name engraved on it.
Po Un.
He had mashed together the names of his favorite characters—Zhao Yun and Lü Bu—and projected his own appearance onto the result. There was no way he would not recognize it.
"So I've transmigrated into a supporting character in my own novel?"
The Shaanxi Four Fiends, of whom Po Un was the eldest, were characters from the wuxia novel The Invincible Lay Disciple.
Shhhhing.
While he was at it, he drew the sword fully. A cold, keen killing intent poured from the blade, carrying a chill with it. He had written it as a famed sword forged from the ground bones of a spirit white serpent mixed with ten-thousand-year cold iron.
They appeared as supporting characters who died to the protagonist early on, but Seo Joo-cheon had put real work into designing the Shaanxi Four Fiends. That was the only way to make the protagonist shine. He had devoted a full ten pages to describing them, so he had no defense when his editor chewed him out for it.
You sure do love your extras, author-nim.
He knew it was sarcasm, but that was just how Seo Joo-cheon was. Nothing to be done about it.
As he gazed at the blade radiating that fearsome killing intent, a ringing filled his ears, and Seo Joo-cheon flinched.
Po Un's First Update will now begin.
The moment he heard that message, his head began to split with pain.
"Uuuuugh!"
He clenched his teeth against the moan leaking through them and clutched his head with both hands. It was a headache unlike anything he had ever experienced. It felt as if someone were driving a nail into the crown of his skull, and his whole body shook with it.
Then, in an instant, the pain receded like an ebbing tide—only for dizziness to take its place. It was the vertigo of too much information flooding in like a tidal wave. Starting from Po Un's past, every piece of information about the man unfurled like a panorama and began branding itself into his mind.
That was when Seo Joo-cheon felt it.
I've fully synchronized with Po Un. The level of my senses… it's on a completely different plane.
The vitality coursing through his entire body was a sensation Seo Joo-cheon, who had spent his life writing, had never felt. His sharpened nerves were keen enough to guess which branch the bird outside the window was perched on. Compared to when he had first woken and heard only birdsong, the change was astonishing.
On top of that, he felt something explosive coiled inside his body. And instinctively, Seo Joo-cheon understood that this power was the force of his dantian. No longer a modern man but a martial artist of the Jianghu, he was experiencing a completely transformed body.
What's more, his consciousness, perception, habits, and values seemed to have synchronized with Po Un's as well—the fear he had felt just moments ago had vanished. A calm composure took over. He felt a sense of alienation, yet found stability in it. Fear, terror, and anxiety all faded, and he held a composed gaze as if he truly were Po Un.
Is this the martial artist's composure that writers always describe with those tired old phrases?
Seo Joo-cheon sat there for a while, dazed by that peculiar feeling.
"So this is the world that serves as the setting for The Invincible Lay Disciple?"
If he traced his memory, there was a scene early in the novel where the Shaanxi Four Fiends stayed at an inn. The Unorthodox Yongcheon Sect of Xi'an in Shaanxi had invited the Shaanxi Four Fiends to serve as instructors, and they were lodging at an inn for a few days while passing through Weinan on their way into Xi'an.
The moment he started thinking about the novel, Seo Joo-cheon shook his head hard.
"No. What am I even thinking about right now. I need to figure out how to get home."
Muttering to himself like a madman, he began to organize his thoughts.
The Invincible Lay Disciple is a wuxia where the protagonist Jang Hyeon-nam unites the Unorthodox, the Black Path, and the Demonic Path. Nowhere in this novel did I write a setting about a modern person transmigrating or reincarnating.
The more he thought about it, the bleaker it became.
So does that mean I'm trapped in this world now, to live here forever?
No matter how much Seo Joo-cheon was a wuxia author who loved the Jianghu, it could not be better than reality. For a fleeting moment he had thought this was a great chance to experience the martial world, but that was just the occupational disease of being a writer. He did not genuinely want to stay in the Jianghu.
No. If I transmigrated as a character in a novel, there has to be a way back to reality. If there isn't, this world is a plot hole. Yeah—if this were a novel, this would be the exact kind of continuity error readers would tear apart!
Seo Joo-cheon forced himself to believe there was a way back.
"There's definitely a way. What if it's one of those common setups—conquer the martial world, or kill the greatest villain, and you go back to reality?"
The main story of The Invincible Lay Disciple was the protagonist leading three successive wars of the martial world to victory. The first was the Great War of Black and Snake, in which the protagonist joined the war between the Black Path and the Unorthodox and led the Black Path to victory. The second was the Great War of Unorthodox and Demonic. This time he joined the Unorthodox side and made his name crushing the Demonic Path. The third was the Great War of Orthodox and Unorthodox. After defeating the Demonic Path in the Great War of Unorthodox and Demonic, the Unorthodox sought to conquer the martial world—until the experts led by Jang Hyeon-nam put them down. That was the novel's central theme.
Along the way, Jang Hyeon-nam's romances doubled the novel's entertainment. For such an unassuming title, the scale was enormous—he had conceived hundreds of characters alone.
"Right. Maybe if I see the novel through to its ending, I'll be able to go back to reality."
For now, that seemed the most reasonable conclusion.
"Wait!"
As he thought, Seo Joo-cheon realized yet another plot hole.