The 21st Century
Sunya helped Hyeon-ju with more than just clothing modeling. He took on whatever work he could find — construction day labor, loading and unloading freights, the kind of backbreaking grunt work most people avoided. For him, it was cost-effective labor: a little effort, and money came in. There were limits to what an undocumented foreigner of unknown origin could do, but he was lucky enough never to get cheated out of his wages.
He didn't simply spend what he earned on idle pleasures, either. After developing an interest in drawing through comics and the like, Sunya bought art supplies and taught himself through YouTube. That alone was enough. Within a few months, his extraordinary capacity for learning had elevated him to a professional level.
"Wait — you're telling me this isn't a photograph?"
Gyeong-seok stared at Sunya's drawing in open disbelief. Of course, the piece wasn't merely photorealistic in its clarity. It carried the sensibility and atmosphere unique to the hand that had made it — even someone with no real knowledge of art could tell it was extraordinary.
"This is the skill of someone who's only been drawing for a few months… If my little sister saw this, she'd cry tears of blood."
"You have a younger sister?"
"Yeah. We live separately now, though. More importantly — is there anything you can't do, Sunya? You picked up fluent Korean in a month, and you adapt to unfamiliar environments like it's nothing."
"Hardly. I'm only human."
"Are you, though?"
"Haha…"
It hadn't been long, but Gyeong-seok and Sunya had grown reasonably close — close enough to trade idle jokes. Even so, Gyeong-seok still couldn't bring himself to trust Sunya completely. Unconditional faith in a superhuman he'd only just met was simply out of the question. The reason he continued to let Sunya stay in his home was that he believed keeping him comfortable was the best way to prevent any sudden, unpredictable behavior. And Sunya understood that perfectly well.
He had been considering whether it was time to find a goshiwon of his own when a visitor arrived.
"Oppa, I'm home!"
Gyeong-seok's younger sister showed up at his place without any warning whatsoever.
"Huh? Who are you?"
She flung the door open without permission, spotted a strange foreigner inside, and for a moment thought she'd walked into the wrong apartment.
"What the hell? Why are you here?"
"Whew~ For a second I thought I had the wrong place."
Recognizing a familiar face, she let out a sigh of relief.
"I left home. You know — ran away."
"…You crazy little—!"
Gyeong-seok cut the curse short, glancing at Sunya, and cleared his throat.
"That's my younger sister, Gyeong-seo. Lee Gyeong-seo, introduce yourself. This is Sunya — an acquaintance I happened to meet."
"Hello, Miss Gyeong-seo."
"Whoa!"
At the sight of the silver-haired foreigner with his half-lidded eyes, Gyeong-seo's own eyes lit up. Coming face-to-face with the kind of manhwa-ripped hottie she'd only ever heard about was enough to set any otaku's heart racing.
"He's insanely good-looking."
"Hey, you—!"
Gyeong-seok flustered at her appraising his guest's looks from the very first second. Sunya only chuckled, showing no sign of offense at Gyeong-seo's rudeness.
"Where are you from, Sunya-oppa? America? Europe?"
"Hmm. If I had to say, I suppose India would be closest."
That night, Sunya, Gyeong-seok, Hyeon-ju, and Gyeong-seo went out together — the four of them drinking beer and tearing into fried chicken at a hof.
"Who would've thought that among the acquaintances of the ultimate social outcast of all social outcasts, there'd be a manhwa-ripped hottie like this!"
"I told you to stop using that weird otaku jargon!"
"What, so everything's otaku jargon to you now, Oppa? This is basically just a trendy slang. Right, Hyeon-ju-unni~~"
"Yeah, yeah. Cut him some slack. Your oppa's been living with his back to the world, after all."
"Don't exaggerate. I just don't do SNS or the internet much."
"Unni, have you seen Oppa's Naver search history? Every single thing is so boring…"
"That's enough out of you."
Watching them chatter and laugh together, Sunya found a bittersweet smile forming on his lips. Whether they felt it themselves or not, to his eyes they looked truly warm — a genuine family. The longer he watched them, the more he felt the cracks in his heart widening. He could have had something like this himself. Back then, it had been too close, too ordinary, and he had failed to understand the preciousness of those bonds. In the end, all that remained was a fool thrashing about, desperate to reclaim everything he had lost.
"So what do you do for work, Sunya?"
Hyeon-ju asked suddenly.
"It's a little embarrassing, but I don't really have a fixed profession. I just do day labor and somehow get by one day at a time. Ah — and occasionally I help Miss Hyeon-ju out with modeling work."
"Modeling? What kind of modeling?"
"Mostly clothing models, I believe."
"…Have you ever done underwear modeling?"
"Yes."
"Oh my! Don't tell me it was just the two of you…"
"That's right."
"Oh my my my! Don't tell me you two have that kind of relationship? NTR? Golden Sun? One Hitomi video and done?"
"Hey! Lee Gyeong-seo!! What the hell are you even saying—"
"She's right. It's nothing like that. And honestly, we barely even managed to take any underwear shots."
"Why not?"
"Well, you see… it was too big. Kept bulging out. Couldn't get a decent photo…"
"Oh my oh my oh my oh my!!"
"Good God almighty?! Jang Hyeon-ju! You've had way too much to drink!"
"Um… so… what is Hitomi?"
At Sunya's question, Gyeong-seo's eyes curved in a peculiar way. He felt almost sorry to think it, but something about that look unsettled him. Looking back on it later, he would realize it was something like the pleasure of showing uncensored pornography to an innocent girl.
"Want me to show you?"
"Hey, you…"
"It's fine, Gyeong-seok. Appearances aside, I've seen just about everything there is to see in this life. I doubt I'll be shocked or particularly offended."
If anything, Gyeong-seok's overreaction only made him more curious.
"See, Oppa? He asked for it himself~"
"Haa, seriously…"
In the end, Gyeong-seo pulled up a certain website on her smartphone and handed it to Sunya. He looked at the screen. And then he opened his mouth.
"What the fuck!!"
It was the first day the upright, well-mannered Sunya had ever sworn aloud.
Unless it was BL, Sunya enjoyed most genres without much discrimination. But there was one he took a particular interest in: wuxia.
The concept of xia — chivalrous righteousness — held little novelty for him. As a man of antiquity, raised in an age without codified law or human rights, such righteousness had simply been one way of living, grounded in basic moral sense. He had known many who lived by that code. What truly caught his attention in wuxia stories was the martial arts themselves.
Taijiquan. Finger Flick Divine Art. Lion's Roar. Demon-Subduing Palm. Iron Cloth Shirt. Twenty-Four Forms Plum Blossom Sword Art. Cloud Dragon Eight Great Forms. Void Stepping. Samadhi True Fire. Protective Qi. Emperor's Sword Form. Heavenly Demon Dominion Step… Most of them were techniques Sunya could reproduce without difficulty. He simply had never thought to approach them from that angle.
Do the people of this place truly not know how to handle Prana?
They called Prana "qi," chakras "meridians," and nadis "dantian" — different terminology, but the underlying concepts were roughly the same. That the people of this era could not perform the superhuman martial feats found in wuxia was likely because the methods of cultivating qi had been lost somewhere along the way. Separately from that, though, the fact that they had conceived of such things through pure imagination alone — without ever being able to wield qi — was astonishing in itself.
The sage decided to put a few techniques to the test. In the dead of night, he went out to an empty park. He felt a twinge of apology toward the public, but he deliberately released a measure of his divinity, making people unconsciously averse to setting foot there.
"Taijiquan first."
Sunya lightly dragged his foot in a circle. A vast taiji diagram etched itself into the ground with him at its center — a pattern so enormous it nearly filled the entire field, save for the outermost edges.
"Next, the Twenty-Four Forms Plum Blossom Sword Art."
With a wooden branch he had picked up somewhere, Sunya performed the Plum Blossom Sword Art as he interpreted it. Pink haze rose from the tip of the branch, blooming into plum blossoms that scattered their fragrance in every direction. He also demonstrated the Primordial Thunder Blade, wrapping lightning around the sword. Techniques like the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist, Finger Flick Divine Art, and Heavenly Demon Dominion Step were things he had always been able to do.
"…And yet they say this world has no Murim?"
What a strange world. It was as if someone had erased everything related to the martial realm. Not that he had any intention of spreading qi-based martial arts in this era.
If these things were already widely known, that would be one matter. But telling others about them now would only deepen the chaos.
With that thought, Sunya quietly took to the sky. He was heading home when he noticed someone standing on a bridge.
"Hm?"
The distance was considerable, but to Sunya's eyes it was perfectly clear. A man in a suit stood on the bridge, his face vacant. Moments later he climbed onto the railing and threw himself over the edge — and Sunya flew to him on pure reflex, snatching him out of the air.
"Wh— what? What is this?"
The man who had resolved to die looked utterly bewildered as something suddenly seized him by the scruff of the neck.
"Are you all right?"
"Y-y-you are…?"
Seeing Sunya flying through the air, holding him by the collar, the man was so shocked that he lost consciousness.