Zhuge Yang (5)
As the bitter cold retreated and spring coaxed tender green shoots from the soil, my body began shooting up like a bamboo stalk. A year on, I had grown noticeably bigger than the year before.
Gwak Jin, who now stood a head and a half shorter than me, was green with envy.
"Boss! What'd you eat to get so big?"
"Meat. Meat's the best there is."
About a year ago, Zhuge Yang had sold off her jewelry and keepsakes. It left me wondering how such a tiny little girl had come by that much money, but servant in name though I was, it wasn't my place to pry.
She spent that money dressing us in fine clothes and putting meat on the table every single day.
"Won! Eat up!"
"Don't mind if I do! You eat plenty too!"
Munch, munch.
Once I was getting a proper balance of carbs, protein, and fat, my body flourished.
Even back in my old world, bodies like this existed — a physique optimized for athletics that grew like crazy off nothing more than good food and moderate exercise. This Ma Won's body was exactly that.
My other achievement over the year: my head turned out to be a decent one, and I could now read and write most of what was put in front of me.
Yeon Hwa and I still hadn't grown close. She always kept a careful distance, and whenever I was savoring the meat dishes a little too much, she'd fix me with such a frosty glare that I nearly choked more than once.
Lately, I had one thing weighing on my mind. Not the trivial matter of failing to befriend Yeon Hwa — this was a far more serious problem.
"Won! Look at this! There's still a dragonfly left!"
Zhuge Yang gingerly took hold of the dragonfly's wings and held it out to show me.
"Whoa... it's still around? Autumn's nearly over..."
"Yeah! Time really flies, huh?"
Playing there with her among the reeds by the stream — her puppy fat had faded a touch, though her chubby cheeks were still adorable — I couldn't have been happier.
Just being able to watch her grow prettier by the day made me think sticking by her side had been the right call.
Before long, Zhuge Yang gently spread the dragonfly's wings and sent it fluttering up into the sky, waving after it.
"Bye-bye! Let's... let's be sure to meet again next year..."
My worry had everything to do with that voice of hers, too — the way it dwindled so quickly into the distance.
These days, she was sensitive to the passage of time.
She also pulled pranks I couldn't make sense of, now and then. No — I knew they weren't really pranks, but since she insisted on calling them that, I simply played along.
"Ahhk...! Uuugh...! Aagh...!"
"A-are you okay?!"
Out of nowhere, Zhuge Yang would clutch her chest and crumple to the ground, a scream of agony tearing out of her. But by the time I bolted over in a panic, she would burst out laughing as if it had never happened.
Stuttering, unlike her usual self.
"He, hehe, gotcha a-again! You're so naive, Won, you f-fall for it every time...!"
"...I got scared half to death, you know. This kind of thing... just stop it already."
"Don't wanna! And I'm gonna keep doing it, too? Meh~"
Without a clue how much I worried, she'd stick out her tongue in playful defiance — cold sweat beading on her brow — and dash away.
"Ahahahaha!"
Today of all days, her laughter didn't sound the least bit cheerful to me.
I'd been through one of these baffling 'pranks' three months ago, but in the past month alone, this was already the third.
A year ago, Zhuge Yang had gotten rid of every one of her medical texts.
"I don't need these anymore, so I'm using them as kindling!"
"They're still books, though. Isn't that a waste?"
"It's fine! I'm going to read different books from now on!"
"All right. I'll clear them out."
They looked like books she'd paid good money for, and I couldn't fathom why she'd burn them rather than even resell them. But she wouldn't explain, and my own curiosity got the better of me — I smuggled a few of the volumes she used to read most often into my room, planning to work through them once I'd learned my letters.
Having resolved as much, I'd then thrown myself into the fun of learning to read from new books and forgotten all about them.
Only today, with her screams and her cold sweat preying on my mind, did I finally dig the medical texts out.
The books were badly worn from how often she'd pawed through them, and as I turned the pages, certain sections showed far heavier wear than the rest.
Here was my chance to see what a year of study had bought me. Praying desperately that this difficult medical text wouldn't hold a single character I didn't know, I read on.
From the very first words — words I couldn't have read a year ago — I had a bad feeling.
Nine Yin Severed Meridians
It appears in women. With nine major meridians severed, yin energy swells unchecked, and before the age of twenty the sufferer dies in extreme agony.
The only treatment is to consume a supreme yang-attribute elixir.
If cured, exceptional comprehension and martial talent remain.
...I'd heard that term before. No — I'd run into it countless times.
Wasn't this a condition I could roughly guess at without even reading the description beneath it? In case I had it wrong, I read the explanation anyway.
A few details differed, but it wasn't far removed from the settings I knew from martial arts novels and martial arts games.
And then, all at once, the nameless oddities I'd felt in this world — this world I'd assumed was the Three Kingdoms — came flashing past my mind's eye.
Suspicion began to bloom.
Pure Yin Body
It appears in women, manifesting at an exceedingly rare probability in babies born at the hour when yin energy reaches its extreme.
A blessed constitution: those who master yin-attribute martial arts are assured remarkable achievement.
I seemed to recall hearing the name once or twice while playing murim games.
Taken on its own, there was nothing wrong with it — if anything, it looked like a blessing.
The problem, once again, was that I had never once heard of it in the Three Kingdoms.
The suspicion deepened.
The pages describing those two conditions were, in fact, a little less worn. The most worn section lay elsewhere.
Those Born with Both the Nine Yin Severed Meridians and the Pure Yin Body
It appears in women. With yin energy at its extreme, the sufferer dies in extreme agony before the age of fifteen.
If a Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng is consumed before the age of twelve, the Nine Yin Severed Meridians can be cured and the Pure Yin Body preserved.
If the ginseng's potency is halved, the Nine Yin Severed Meridians can still be cured, but the Pure Yin Body will be lost.
Past the age of twelve, only a Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng can effect a cure.
Consuming a Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng cures the Nine Yin Severed Meridians, and the Pure Yin Body evolves into the Pure Yin Extreme Body.
Why was this section worn down worse than any other?
I already knew the answer. My chest had been tightening since before I read a single word.
Lately, the intervals between Zhuge Yang's bouts of pain kept shrinking. When I set that fact beside what the text said, I arrived at one terrifying conclusion.
Zhuge Yang was... dying. Right now.
This year, she had turned thirteen, same as me.
She had put down roots here about a year ago — which meant she had already passed her twelfth birthday.
No one had ever confirmed for me that this was the world of the Three Kingdoms. I had made a fool's assumption, all on my own.
The moment I accepted that this was a world of murim, the questions that had never made sense began to untangle.
The Zhuge Clan.
Hadn't she fled that clan for some unspoken reason, with only a single escort at her side?
The past year came flooding back as well. She had wanted to burn the medical texts she'd lived by day after day, and she had sold off her precious keepsakes to wring every bit of comfort she could from the life she had left.
"Ahahahaha!!"
That bright, cheerful laugh that made anyone who heard it happy.
The moment Zhuge Yang's adorable face rose in my memory — smiling at me, praising me, looking after me — my heart began pounding like a battering ram.
Only now did I understand.
Somewhere along the way, while we lived together in this place... I had fallen in love with the girl I'd always thought of as nothing more than cute.
Age meant nothing. This wasn't some sordid feeling. I had simply become someone who could not help but love her — that was all there was to it.
Nor did I harbor any delusion of winning her over with this grotesque, scarred face of mine.
I only... I only hoped that I could go on hearing her cheerful laughter for a long, long time.
But the instant I recognized what I felt for Zhuge Yang, my spirits plunged straight into the abyss.
"...And yet, was I really going to give up on life without even trying?"
At some point, tears had begun streaming down my face.
She was a coward. Maybe she never meant to be, but she had taken my heart and gone, and now she was quietly settling her affairs — alone?
I refused to send her off like this. No — I could not send her off.
I was a transmigrator!
If this world was the world of a novel or a game, then that made me its protagonist!
There was no way the protagonist of this world couldn't solve one flimsy little trial!
And with that thought, I knew exactly what I had to do.
'The Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng!'
I had no idea how extraordinary you really were, but I would comb through every corner of the world if I had to — I swore I would find you!
The next morning, Zhuge Yang stepped out for a short walk and found Yeon Hwa in the kitchen, preparing breakfast.
"Where's Won?"
Clack. Yeon Hwa set her spatula down.
"...He has left."
"Left for where?"
"He said... he means to find the Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng."
"Wh-what did you say?"
Zhuge Yang's flustered eyes went as wide as they could possibly go.
"D-did big sis tell you...?"
"...No."
"You're lying!"
Zhuge Yang spun around and dashed to Ma Won's room.
Strewn in disarray across his floor were the medical texts she had believed burned to ash a year before.
She found the passages on the Nine Yin Severed Meridians and the Pure Yin Body spotted and warped — marks where fallen drops of water had soaked in and spread.
Tears, most likely.
She brushed her fingers slowly over those passages, and then noticed a sheet of paper lying beside them. Crooked, clumsy handwriting covered the page. It bore tear stains too, but the words were still legible.
I'm leaving without even seeing your face — because if you hold on to me, I won't be able to go. Don't you dare give up. Wait for me. I will save you. I swear it.
His face rose in her mind — covered in burn scars, tears falling as he wrote — and a dull ache spread through her chest.
"Tch... there was hardly any time left... you should've just stayed by my side..."
Then, unbidden, she recalled the reason she had left the clan.
There had once been a great fire in the martial archive, where the secret manuals of the Zhuge Clan were gathered. Trapped inside was a young maid who had been cleaning, petrified with fear.
The originals of the manuals were stored elsewhere anyway.
Zhuge Yang spurred the servants on, screaming for them to save the girl from the flames closing in on her.
"What rubbish are you spouting?!"
Just then, Zhuge Lin came running, shoved Zhuge Yang out of the way, and rounded on the servants, ordering them to quench the flames starting from the side where the manuals were kept.
The fire was extinguished without further loss, and the maid survived — but her face bore burn scars that would never fade for the rest of her days.
From then on, every glimpse of the maid's face tormented Zhuge Yang with guilt for not rescuing her sooner.
The problem was...
When word of the incident reached the clan head, Zhuge Zhongying, he had the Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng — miraculously rescued from the flames — fed to her twin elder sister, Zhuge Lin.
Having swallowed the elixir, Zhuge Lin emerged from the training chamber and preened.
"Father said so himself. If our clan is to become great, only those who cast worthless mercy aside can claim that seat. That's why it can never be you, you little fool."
That day, Zhuge Yang was murdered — deep in her heart — by her own parents.
It happened one month before Zhuge Yang's twelfth birthday.