The Awakening of a Girl Fan
Hwa Rin hadn’t known it, but Mount Hua’s exchanges with that peculiar man had continued, if only intermittently, over the years.
Thanks to that, finding his location through a disciple who knew where he lived wasn’t especially difficult.
Hwa Rin and Yu Hyeonju arrived beneath a remote rocky peak.
It was so out of the way, so untouched by human footsteps, that it was hard to imagine anyone had managed to discover a place like this at all.
And there, tucked beneath the cliff, stood a small cottage, quiet and unassuming.
Beside the neat wooden building, a massive plum tree spread its branches wide, as if trying to gently enfold the cottage in its arms.
Though it was late autumn and only bare limbs reached toward the sky, the picture of pale pink blossoms in full bloom with the coming spring was so vivid it seemed to hang before their eyes already.
It was a breathtaking sight.
The two of them stood there in silence for a while, simply staring.
“Did they bring a hermit here or something?”
At Yu Hyeonju’s awed murmur, Hwa Rin found herself in complete agreement.
It looked like a scene lifted straight out of a fairy tale.
As they approached the cottage, a crooked sign hanging beside the door caught their eye.
In elegant brushstrokes, it bore the name “Song Daehyun.”
The moment Hwa Rin saw those characters, she tilted her head, struck by a strange sense of familiarity.
“What is it?”
“No, nothing.”
It was probably just déjà vu.
Thinking that, Hwa Rin knocked on the door.
Knock, knock.
“Is anyone home?”
But there was no sound from inside.
When Hwa Rin gently pushed the door, it slid open without resistance.
Peeking their heads inside, the two of them found a room as tidy as the view outside.
It still carried some trace of having been lived in, but the careful arrangement of everything made it clear no one was staying here at the moment.
And on the plain table in the center of the room.
A single letter lay there, drawing both of their eyes at once.
Hwa Rin stepped forward carefully and picked it up.
Unfolded before her, on the paper, was the same graceful calligraphy she had seen on the sign outside.
Mount Hua is filled with the scent of plum blossoms, yet not a single tree truly stands there.
On the bare branches of this lonely tree, evening clouds come to rest.
So many insects lust after nothing but sweetness of fruit.
When the flowers bloom across all of Mount Hua, spring will return.
As Hwa Rin read on, her eyes shook violently.
Yu Hyeonju, puzzled by the way her friend kept silently turning the poem over in her mind, could not help asking, “What are you doing?”
“…”
But Hwa Rin did not answer.
With her eyes closed, she was taking in the weight of each line with her whole body.
Even when Hyeonju came over and took the paper from her hand, Hwa Rin didn’t move at all. She only kept her eyes closed, lost in thought.
Poetry always carries meaning beneath the surface.
The poem she had just read pierced straight through the present state of Mount Hua, exposing the festering wound beneath its skin.
Slowly, Hwa Rin turned and left the cottage.
The hem of her robe fluttered in the wind, carrying with it the faint fragrance of plum blossoms she herself had coaxed into being.
She had half-bakedly refined the Plum Blossom Sword Art and forced its scent into bloom, yet she had neglected the very branch on which those flowers ought to have opened.
The sect leader, unlike the other elders who had grown tainted by the mortal world, was trying to preserve the old ways alone.
He’s just like this tree.
Hwa Rin reached out and stroked the rough bark of the great plum tree wrapped around the cottage.
The cottage and the tree, standing all alone in that broad empty clearing, seemed to symbolize Mount Hua’s current state and the sect leader’s lonely position.
People no longer came to the main hall of Mount Hua to become proper disciples or to train in the Dao.
It was the way of the times.
The age wanted easy, fast roads, and Mount Hua’s mental cultivation methods—meant to discipline the heart first—were dismissed as tedious.
In the meantime, the elders were consumed with only one thing: increasing the number of lay disciples, taking donations, and expanding their influence.
Yet Mount Hua’s true nature was to temper the sword and free oneself from desire.
It was no wonder the sect leader opposed them.
Blooming.
It was said that when the Plum Blossom Sword Art reached perfection, petals would scatter in the air along the movement of the sword, as though flowers were bursting into life in full glory.
Mount Hua still carried on the legacy of the Nine Great Sects, and yet it had been a very long time since there had been any true “blooming” here.
Every line is like a stern rebuke aimed at the sect.
Having sorted out her thoughts, Hwa Rin walked along the narrow path beside the cottage.
At the end of it was a dizzying cliff.
Mount Hua’s grand, majestic scenery filled her entire field of vision.
Hwa Rin drew in a breath and stood still there, closing her eyes.
The mountain wind brushed past the hem of her robe, carrying with it the scent of enlightenment.
How much time passed, she didn’t know.
When she opened her eyes again, the sun had already slipped behind the western ridge.
But not a single moment of that time felt wasted.
Hwa Rin had already seen the path she needed to take.
Drive out the insects and make the flowers bloom, and then…
Spring would come.
The poem had already offered the answer.
There was no reason to hesitate any longer.
When she returned to the cottage, Yu Hyeonju was sitting by a small campfire.
The flickering flames lit her grumpy face.
“Where have you been, and why are you only coming back now?”
“Sorry.”
At the blunt scolding, Hwa Rin gave an embarrassed apology.
I forgot about Hyeonju.
To lose herself in enlightenment and forget her friend—clearly, that was her own failing.
But instead of getting angry, Yu Hyeonju simply looked up at her for a moment, then stood and brushed the dirt off her seat.
“If you’ve sorted out your thoughts, let’s go.”
“Huh?”
“Your reaction was way too different from normal. So you must’ve figured something out, right?”
Yu Hyeonju had been the one to encounter Song Hyeon that day and gain her own realization.
She had no idea what Hwa Rin had found so profound in those self-important, theatrical verses asking her to take care of the lone tree, but she was sure Hwa Rin had felt something.
That person did seem to have a habit of dressing things up in fancy language.
Though their meeting had been brief, Yu Hyeonju had read Song Hyeon with surprising accuracy.
Amused by her friend’s unexpected reaction, Hwa Rin brightened and stepped closer, slipping her arm through Yu Hyeonju’s.
At that slick, serpentine behavior, Yu Hyeonju just shrugged.
“So you figured something out too? But the Mount Hua business is a secret, okay?”
“Mount Hua? ...Well, all right.”
Their conversation was oddly misaligned.
Hwa Rin was asking Yu Hyeonju to keep Mount Hua’s internal conflict secret, while Hyeonju, having read the poem, felt no particular emotion at all.
The Song Hyeon she knew was a shameless woman with some skill who liked to strike a pose and demand payment in return.
She thought this time too it had just been a grandly worded request to take good care of the tree and help it bloom.
Plum trees were easy targets for insects and difficult to maintain, so tending to one left standing all alone like this would take a great deal of work.
“The house seems to be empty. Judging by that note, I don’t think they’ll be coming back for a while.”
Yu Hyeonju had worried that Hwa Rin would be disappointed at failing to meet the girl, but Hwa Rin looked entirely unconcerned—in fact, she seemed brighter than before.
“Yes, it does. I’d love to meet them once.”
A sly light gleamed in Hwa Rin’s eyes.
Hwa Rin always smiled lightly and brushed things off, but Yu Hyeonju had seen those eyes only twice before.
Once, when she had literally torn apart the forest bandits who kidnapped her youngest sibling.
And once, more than ten years ago, when she had fallen for a popular romance novel and muttered that she wanted to meet the author.
Both times, Hwa Rin’s desire had been laid bare in the most direct way possible.
As Yu Hyeonju recalled that memory, she suddenly looked up at the sign on the cottage door.
“Now that I think about it, I wondered where I’d seen that handwriting. It was exactly like the one in that novel, wasn’t it?”
“Huh? A novel?”
At the abrupt remark, Hwa Rin looked confused.
Yu Hyeonju searched her memory and muttered, “You know. That romance novel that was popular back then.”
At those words, Hwa Rin slowly raised her head and looked at the sign again.
Ah.
Only then did Hwa Rin understand the source of the strange sense of familiarity she had felt before.
That exact handwriting she had gone over in her mind again and again.
To run into it like this once more.
Her mouth curled upward of its own accord, a grin she couldn’t quite rein in.
The author of that novel who had once moved her so deeply and given her new insight into martial arts.
And this time, with just a few lines of poetry, she had done it again?
I want to meet them.
That single thought filled Hwa Rin’s mind.
I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them.
Her shoulders trembling with barely contained excitement, Hwa Rin’s longtime friend Yu Hyeonju watched her in silence.
Did I ever think she’d make that kind of face?
For some reason, a chill ran down her spine, and she found herself rubbing her own arm.
She had goosebumps all over.
“Uh… Hwa Rin?”
“Yes.”
“...Maybe I’m mistaken. She looked really young, after all.”
Yu Hyeonju tried to smooth things over, but Hwa Rin murmured in a voice full of certainty, “No. I’m sure of it. I could never forget. I’ve gone over it again and again. Besides, this was originally a place a man lived in. That child is probably his daughter or his disciple.”
You were blanking on it until I said something.
Yu Hyeonju desperately wanted to point that out to her friend, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak.
Something in her gut told her that if she did, that unnervingly different expression on her friend’s face would turn toward her next.
Meanwhile, Hwa Rin, oblivious to her friend’s inner turmoil, asked with sparkling eyes, “Ah, Hyeonju. Did that girl happen to say anything about her teacher or father?”
“Huh? Uh… no, she didn’t.”
“Really? That’s a shame.”
Hwa Rin ran her tongue lightly over her lips.
Yu Hyeonju was beginning to wonder whether the thing standing before her was really her friend at all.
Or whether it was some fox spirit from a legend in disguise.
Unbothered by her friend’s shock, Hwa Rin had already pieced everything together.
Did they intentionally hide away?
Martial artists never hesitate to reveal their master.
Perhaps that person had sent the disciple down the mountain and told her to keep the sect name hidden.
Whatever the reason, once she met that girl again, everything would be solved.
Whether she was that person’s daughter or disciple—
there was clearly some connection.
If the girl didn’t return to Mount Hua, then Hwa Rin would simply go find her.
A bright smile bloomed across Hwa Rin’s face.
I’ll have to ask the sect leader for permission to leave the mountain.
Right now, enlightenment or Jinshan disciples were not what mattered.
Far away, Song Hyeon, riding in a carriage, suddenly shuddered as chills raced down her back.
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