Chapter 84: A Family Reunion by the Flowing Water (1)
Chapter 84: A Family Reunion by the Flowing Water (1)
No matter which province of the Central Plains you were in, there were backward rural villages. Even in modern times, most regions were slow to develop. How could the Central Plains be any different?
And among them, Hwa-eul Village was especially rural.
Its population numbered only around thirty, and most of them were old. It wasn't that there were no young people, but most of them had moved to the cities to make a living, leaving only a tiny handful behind.
If a martial artist like me, with bronze skin and blond hair, appeared in a rural village like that, there was no way I wouldn't attract attention.
'If Chi-chi or Seol Yu-ran had come, this place would've gone into an uproar.'
The villagers were wary of me, an outsider.
It was fairly uncomfortable to be surrounded by such suspicious looks, but it was something I could put up with.
What bothered me more than that was the way worthless men leered at my women.
"Excuse me. I'd like to ask you something."
"...What is it?"
Jingle.
"Ask me anything, Great Hero! I'll answer every question you have!"
After receiving some Financial Therapy, the villager had become friendly, his sharp tone from a moment ago nowhere to be seen. As expected, Financial Therapy was the best way to bring out a person's kindness.
"I heard that a woman with striking blond hair like mine recently appeared here in Hwa-eul Village. Do you know anything about her?"
"Oh. You mean that woman with the head injury?"
A woman with a head injury? What a quaint way to put it.
Though he wasn't wrong.
"Tut, tut. That poor woman. Who knows what she went through in this cruel world? There's something wrong with her head, you see."
Clicking his tongue, the villager began telling me everything about her, as if he truly felt sorry for her.
"Even if her blond hair was a little strange, most of the villagers welcomed her when such a young and lovely maiden showed up. The men are less likely to leave when there's a young, pretty woman around."
I wondered if they might try to tempt her into leaving with them instead, but I didn't point it out.
"But the few young men in the village were so taken with her looks that they went right ahead and confessed to her. And then, would you believe it... she said they shouldn't play tricks like that on an old woman like her!"
"Ah. I see."
"No, really! A maiden lovelier than my wife was in her prime said that, and everyone was so shocked their mouths fell open. But she's even more affectionate toward the old folks, so I don't think she's lying."
"So she truly believes she's an old woman."
That must have been why the villagers, feeling sorry for her, called her "the woman with the head injury."
"That's not all, either. One time, she grabbed another young man and said she thought he was her son, then hurriedly apologized and scurried away."
"Her condition is... quite serious, then."
"That's about the size of it. So... was that all you wanted to ask?"
The villager, making no effort to hide his desire to hurry home and jingle the pouch full of silver he'd just received, subtly tried to bring the conversation to an end.
That pouch of silver was mere pocket change to me, so I didn't mind. But I still had one last thing to ask.
"So, where is the house of the woman who claims she's an old woman?"
"Over there~ There's a little house beside the village headman's home. That's the one. Since she claims she's an old woman, the headman—who lost his wife a few years ago—has been making advances on her with his lower half, even though it won't stand up anymore."
The moment I heard that he'd been hitting on a candidate for my wife, murderous intent surged up inside me. If he'd really been rubbing that limp earthworm of his against her, the headman would be retiring from this world as of today.
"Hmm....Should I kill him?"
"Hmm? What was that?"
"No. It's nothing."
I'd muttered it so quietly that anyone but a martial artist would have had trouble hearing me. I gave the villager, who hadn't heard a thing, a friendly smile and brushed it off.
After that, I asked a few more questions about the "woman with the head injury." Once I pieced the information together with what I already knew, I was certain she was the woman I'd chosen as a candidate for my wife.
Apparently, she'd gone to the stream to do laundry with the village women.
Hwa-eul Village was so small that they all did their laundry together. In particular, the woman with the head injury was so strong that she was immensely popular with the neighborhood wives and grandmothers.
That made sense. Even if an expert who had undergone a return to youth hadn't specialized in external arts, she would still have reached at least the Peak Realm. It would have made no sense for her body to be weak.
Unless the side effect of her return to youth had been losing all her muscle, leaving her with a body that had perfect internal energy and zero external strength.
But if she'd suffered that kind of side effect, she wouldn't have lost her memories in the first place.
"Hehehe. You're so strong, young lady. You do laundry even better than us aunties."
"Hahaha. This bhikshuni must've done twice as much laundry as you, patron."
"Hehehe! Our Bodhisattva of a young lady has quite the sense of humor."
As time passed, the village wives and grandmothers began returning from the washing spot. They came back with their hands full of laundry, and every one of them was strong as an ox.
Could this be the strength of the aunties in a murim world where internal energy exists?
They were so absurdly strong that I couldn't help wondering if, when war broke out, the aunties might hurl boulders from atop the city walls instead of mere rocks.
But among them, the woman in the center stood out above all.
Her brilliant golden hair and golden eyes. And, beneath ordinary, worn-out clothes, a curvaceous chest and a plump ass.
With a peerless beauty like that wedged between aunties and grandmothers, it was impossible not to notice her.
I ran over, tears of joy streaming down my face, and cried out,
"Mother!"
"?????????"
The other person was thrown into confusion!
***
Didn't those old martial arts novels used to have events where a reclusive master suddenly popped out of nowhere to help the protagonist? True to the spirit of the smutty martial arts world, where tradition means tits, Wind and Cloud Harem Record is full of events and characters like that.
Among them are Super Peak masters, and the woman standing before me was one such master.
Reverend Su-yu, once known by the epithet "Mommy Divine Nun" from Hidden Strike Sect.
She was a master from the previous generation of the murim, a lay disciple of the Emei Sect who had taken the epithet Divine Nun instead of Sword Queen, and the leader of Hidden Strike Sect.
In the original story, the protagonist's group once found themselves in danger because of the Blood Cult Leader's misdeeds.
She not only rescued them, but also took a liking to one of the heroines and even taught her swordsmanship.
You could call her a textbook reclusive master, a temporary mentor who gave the protagonist a Fortuitous Encounter. Thanks to her, one of the protagonist's companions would go on to become the Sword Queen.
If we were judging talent alone, Seol Yu-ran was probably more gifted. But there was a reason people said not to underestimate experience: Reverend Su-yu's swordsmanship was probably only a hair's breadth behind Seol Yu-ran's.
And even that gap could be overturned by her sheer Super Peak-level abilities.
Though right now, her memory loss had wiped all of that away.
That really was a heartbreaking situation.
That she had undergone Reversion of Youth was, even to me, unavoidable.
And of all things, dementia.
Murim people rarely got dementia. Once fighting reached a certain level, you needed to think quickly, so the decline in brain function was delayed. And Super Peak masters were monsters who could calculate and simulate dozens of exchanges in a split second, so there was no way they could be stupid.
But that didn't make them immune to dementia. It only meant that the aging of their brain cells was slowed as much as possible.
So when Reverend Su-yu, who had withdrawn from the world and lived alone in carefree seclusion, developed dementia, she began to worry about what would happen afterward.
[What if my old personality comes back because of the dementia?]
[What if I end up suffering Qi Deviation on top of that?]
Back then, she had been such a renowned nun that she was called Divine Nun, and apparently her heart had been generous—but in her youth, she'd had quite a temper.
Why else would "Mommy" ("Demon-Forgetting") have been part of her epithet?
She'd changed so much that it was as if she'd forgotten her vicious old personality, and that was how she came to be called that.
In the end, she decided that if she was going to die, she should at least die quietly. She attempted Reversion of Youth and succeeded—but only halfway.
She'd gotten younger with the holes in her memory, left there by dementia, still there.
In other words, she had lost her memories. Because of the dementia, she thought of herself as "the person she'd been when she was young and had started a family," while at the same time retaining the awareness that she was "old."
When the Blood Cult Leader turned the Murim Alliance into a complete madhouse, the Buddhist energy within her was stirred, and some of her memories returned. She then became the heroine's temporary master.
But I knew from reading the original story that, until that happened, she'd lived in the countryside like an ordinary housewife.
And I'm going to slip through the gap in that hole.
After being invited to the shabby house where Reverend Su-yu lived, I was now sitting face-to-face with her.
She was flustered and unsure what to do, but kept glancing at me, careful about how she acted.
"Patron, you... no, you're saying that you're this nun's son?"
"Yes!"
"...No matter how I look at you, I can't see the slightest resemblance."
"Come on, how can you say something like that?!"
That genuinely hurt. Rejected by my future wife.
"Just look at this radiant golden hair and these golden eyes. I inherited them from you, Mother."
"Now that you mention it, I suppose your hair and eyes do look like mine..."
"Mother. I was so worried about you. I searched for you for ages."
"I-I see..."
I spun her the whole story of me searching for my mother, over and over, while Reverend Su-yu sat there flustered. Maybe it was because I'd slicked my tongue with honey or something.
She listened to me seriously.
No, why was she believing so readily in a story about a son who'd been carried off by a tiger, grown up, and come looking for his mother? It was true that her son had been carried off by a tiger, and that she had become a lay disciple of the Emei Sect, vowing to kill that tiger—but she was believing it far too easily.
Was this the power of Mommy's embrace?
"I'd only just found you, and then you suddenly told me you were going to undergo Reversion of Youth and disappeared. Do you know how shocked I was?"
"R-Reversion of Youth? This nun went through one of those legendary experiences?!"
Yep. You really did.