Good Morning, Señorita Murim
Good morning, Señorita Murim.
When I opened my eyes, there was an unfamiliar ceiling above me. An unfamiliar ceiling... I almost said it in that painfully familiar way, like something I’d heard and seen somewhere before.
This isn’t my room. Where am I? Kidnapped? That didn’t seem likely, considering how annoyingly loose and free my body felt.
Voices drifted in softly from outside.
“Yeonhwa! How long are you planning to sleep? Get out here, now!”
“Y-yes!?”
I answered before I even realized it.
Yeonhwa? Yeonhwa. Me. Huh? No, wait. My name is... Yeonhwa. As if my memory had been flipped around, only that name came to mind.
And this thin, clear voice like a jade bead rolling along a plate—wait. No, seriously? Yeonhwa sat there for a long moment, staring down at her hands. Small, delicate hands. So this was that too, then. Possession?
Then she tried to get up and immediately froze again, struck by a sense of wrongness. Her chest felt heavy. Once she became aware of it, it seemed as though something soft and weighty was lying over her lungs every time she breathed in and out.
She glanced downward, and the swollen curve beneath her line of sight blocked out everything below her stomach. Pretty big...
She slowly lifted a hand and touched it. Soft, squishy. Eek. Her body gave her a very natural kind of sensation. Wait. I’m a guy, though? What did I even do?
What was I doing again? I was eating pizza with way too much cheese stretching off it while reading a martial arts novel. Then I’d fallen asleep. And after that, I was here.
Not under a fluffy blanket, but on a rough, plain sleeping mat, inside a wooden room that looked like it belonged in an old historical drama.
She slowly moved her hands and arms, her waist and legs. Strangely enough, they felt light and small, and yet they also felt unquestionably like her own body.
Even her sense of balance was different. The moment she tried to stand, she swayed and nearly toppled over. Her hips felt heavy. Her chest felt heavy too.
The insides of her thighs rubbed together, and the skirt that kept fluttering around her ankles caught at the edge of her vision. A skirt. She stood there blankly, clutching the hem of the rough cloth for a long while.
When she finally went outside, the servers and cooks were all bustling around everywhere.
“Yeonhwa, you feeling better now?”
“Yeonhwa, wash those dishes!”
“Yeonhwa, take the order!”
Yeonhwa stood there, dazed. Yeonhwa. Was that me? It was a name I was hearing for the first time, and yet my mind had already stamped it in as my own. But what was I supposed to do, when everything here was so unfamiliar?
Still, my hands moved on their own. This body knew the place. It knew where the bowls were, where the flour was kept.
For the first few days, I thought it was a dream. How could something like this happen? A Murim-style restaurant with scooters?
Sword qi, sword force, Peak, First-class... From what the customers and the servers said, this world was definitely a martial arts one.
So what the hell was this? Martial arts? Pizza in a brick oven? Bread? Pasta? What kind of messed-up fusion was this? Had I gone crazy? Was I actually hospitalized for a mental illness? Did I lose my memory because I ate pizza wrong or something?
Aha! It’s just a dream! I told myself.
But even after days passed, I still didn’t wake up. Only then did I finally admit it, just a little.
Ah. I really have fallen into this bizarre fusion Murim world.
What had been hard for Yeonhwa wasn’t the fact that this world was a chimera of martial arts and chaos.
When she lay down at night, the weight of her chest made it hard to sleep. She didn’t know how to turn onto her side, so she woke over and over again, staring into the dark.
Changing clothes was hard too. I mean, I’d never worn women’s clothes in the first place, much less clothes from an age like this. The body’s lingering memories helped a little, but my clumsy hands still felt awkward no matter what.
When I went to the well and looked at my reflection, the black hair and black eyes were the same, but the face staring back at me was a pretty little girl, from the delicate arrangement of her features to the placement of her eyes, nose, and mouth. I stared for a long time before my lips moved in a whisper.
“...Yeonhwa.”
The name rolled around in my mouth.
Yeonhwa had learned to cook a little in her previous life. That was before she became Yeonhwa. Before she entered this fusion Murim world.
She wasn’t a professional cook, but as a hobby she’d sometimes try following one recipe or another.
So one day, when one of the assistant cooks happened to be absent and Yeonhwa, a mere server, helped out with the cooking, the old master cook watching her asked,
“Where did you learn this?”
He was asking a little girl where she’d learned to cook. Western dishes, no less.
That kind of thing really was very Murim. Women should live as women, men had men’s duties, and so on.
“I once worked with a wandering merchant caravan when I was young. We traveled through the western regions...”
Honestly, I wasn’t sure it would work, but some of Yeonhwa’s remaining memories were actually true. I really had been with a caravan when I was young. Not the western regions, but still—what did it matter? My old world was a place where cultures had mixed from every direction anyway, so half of it might as well count as western.
He looked at Yeonhwa for a while, then nodded. From that day on, she was allowed into the kitchen’s deepest inner sanctum. She had been recognized as one of the cooks.
And that was all?
For some reason, whenever ingredients touched Yeonhwa’s hands, even wilted greens would turn bright and fresh again, and the color and quality of the ingredients would improve. Ah. This. My cheat from my past life? Is that you? Nice to see you.
For some reason, even though I had no idea why a Murim novel world had dungeons, the power to drive away the eerie energy of the blood gates and purgatories—those disasters out in the Jianghu—seemed to reside in Yeonhwa. Food touched by her hands didn’t spoil easily, and when people ate it, it replenished their energy and even helped in battle or dungeon raids, becoming something greater than a miraculous medicine.
So day after day, the restaurant was noisy, busy, and thriving. Delivery orders and walk-ins were always packed to the rafters.
And so, Mugung Hyeoptak became the greatest inn in all of the Central Plains!
Though, of course, that was a story for later. For the time being, Yeonhwa kept her abilities hidden as much as possible, afraid people might think she was using some strange sorcery. The old master cook looked suspiciously like he’d already noticed something.
For a while, people looked at Yeonhwa oddly. She was too casual around men, and her behavior lacked the modesty expected of a girl, so they probably found her strange.
But it wasn’t just that they saw her as strange. A lot of them looked at her like she was a girl trying to act tough so she wouldn’t be looked down on, or like a runaway daughter. Extremely stressful, honestly.
And at the same time, some male customers’ stares were deeply uncomfortable.
Eyes brushing her chest, sticky gazes sliding over her waist. Every time that happened, chills ran over her skin. It was a kind of look I’d never once received in my previous life.
Back when I was a man, I used to wonder what people meant when they said they could feel others’ eyes on them. Now that I’d experienced it, I could say most of it was more unpleasant than I could ever have imagined.
Once, a customer had carelessly said,
“Young Lady Yeonhwa, you shouldn’t bend over so easily.”
After I realized what he meant, I started tying my sash tighter around my waist.
What a bunch of sleazy creeps. Even though this wasn’t even my body. It was embarrassing, and all I could think about was other people’s eyes. With my face burning red, Yeonhwa stoked the kitchen fire higher and slammed the dough down harder.
As time passed, her body gradually grew more familiar.
She learned how to walk without swaying, and she no longer startled so much when she stood before a mirror.
Mm. That’s how it should be. Bathhouses and places like that were still a little—no, a bit—no, a lot embarrassing, so she couldn’t go.
The memory of having fallen into another world faded little by little, like a dim mist. In its place, today’s orders became clearer.
Ring-a-ding~
Baedal-ui Hojok order~
Now Yeonhwa naturally picked up the order plaque and read the menu. Her hands didn’t tremble anymore.
“Order up.”
The voice that said it was no longer strange.
Still, when the night grew deep, she sometimes wondered. Had I gotten used to this body? Or had I just accepted it because there was nothing else I could do?
Even when people called her Yeonhwa, it didn’t make her think, Huh? Who?
From the very first time she was called that, she had known it was herself, but acting on that knowledge from the depths of her heart was another matter entirely.
One thing she did know for certain, though, was that this place wasn’t fake. This was a real world, one where blood flowed and people died and some never came back.
A customer she used to see often would stop coming by, while a new face would appear and stay for a long time. Sometimes people would get into fights in the restaurant and end up on the verge of death, though the old master cook usually threw them out or the government troops dragged them away.
The desire to remember her past self remained only as a tiny irritation in the back of her mind. Yeonhwa soothed that ache by standing in front of the fire.
Even now, the stares of men still made her uncomfortable, but these days she sometimes met them head-on and thought, I am kind of pretty. Don’t just sneak glances—look properly... No, okay, that’s a little much.
“Are you ready?”
At the voice from beyond the kitchen, Yeonhwa answered briefly.
“Almost. Just a moment.”
The heat from the kitchen brushed across her cheeks. The geon-rak melted gold, flowing like it was swimming through the sky; the noodles fused seamlessly with the milky sauce; the soup slapped and surged like the Yangtze River. Yeonhwa slowly handed over the packed box.
“Off you go. Don’t let it get cold.”
After handing the food to the delivery messenger, Yeonhwa waited for the next order.
It had been a bewildering world at first, but as she took up a ladle simply to survive, she found herself growing accustomed to this tangled, absurd universe.