Traces
"Have you perhaps learned lightness skills?"
The soldier's pace was so swift that for a moment Samryong wondered if he ought to use lightfoot technique just to keep up.
"Physician Yu, thank you for all your hard work!"
"Physician Yu! Let's play dice together next time!"
"Physician Yu!"
Everywhere Samryong passed, those he had treated came up to greet him with warm familiarity.
"I'm not that kind of physician, really."
Is this why people become healers? Samryong answered each greeting with a lighthearted joke.
How long had he walked? Before him stood a tent with nothing particularly remarkable about it — merely a little larger than the ordinary sort. That made sense; in a field camp, barracks were not supposed to signify any particular rank.
"My escort duty is done, so I'll take my leave now."
"What's the rush—"
"People like me break out in hives whenever we meet someone high up. Whew, my flesh is crawling."
Leaving behind the soldier, who vanished so quickly his feet were a blur, Samryong stepped inside the tent.
Ssssaaah.
Cold air hung within the barracks, where Supreme Commander Hang Jeoksan sat in a chair, glaring ferociously at the prince who was having his wounds bandaged.
At this rate, is the prince going to die at Hang Jeoksan's hands before the enemy even gets to him? Just as Samryong was about to turn on his heel and flee the oppressive atmosphere, Yeo Cheolgi spotted him.
"Hm? Physician Yu has arrived?"
"Ah... shall I go fetch a physician for him?"
When the mood is this foul, escape is always the best policy!
Samryong made the suggestion as casually as he could, but the prince showed no intention of letting him go.
"Prince! You must punish this man! Sending someone so untested to treat Your Highness — the audacity!"
The hot-blooded bodyguard, brimming with righteous fury, raised his voice, thoroughly incensed.
Ugh, damn it... I've walked into the wrong place.
Samryong worried sparks might fly his way for no reason at all. But the playboy prince seemed to have far less on his mind than expected.
"Is he not the famous physician of the expeditionary army? He's been proven well enough."
"Still! He isn't even affiliated with the Imperial Bureau of Medicine — how can he lay hands on Your Highness's body—"
Just as the bodyguard's fit was threatening to continue, Hang Jeoksan's murderous glare turned upon the two of them. Without a word being spoken, the prince could read exactly what those eyes meant.
"Be grateful you're being treated at all."
"Your Highness the Prince!"
At those words, Hang Jeoksan slowly exhaled a long breath.
"Your Highness, if you continue to defy my orders and act on your own initiative like this, then until this expedition ends, I will have no choice but to confine you somewhere safe and comfortable."
Then, after a brief pause, he pressed on.
"What is it you truly intend? Tell me, so that I may fall in step with you."
In response, the prince played the coquette in the way only an idle good-for-nothing could.
"What other intent could there be? I'm racking up merits so I can claim the empty Crown Prince's seat."
"...Am I truly permitted to hear this?"
Samryong felt he had overheard something he should not have, yet the man himself remained utterly composed.
"You already know, don't you? Why bring it up now?"
"Officially and unofficially are two different things."
"It's fine! It's fine!"
Thankfully, things weren't spiraling into something serious — but Samryong was certain of one thing: he had gotten entangled in something supremely unlucky.
"Haah..."
Rather than offering any real response to the prince's words, Hang Jeoksan simply sighed in silence.
An awkward quiet settled over the tent. It was Yeo Cheolgi, unexpectedly, who broke it first.
"Your Highness's movements were less about earning merit... and closer to searching for something."
Yeo Cheolgi's eye for commanders and battlefields was unlike that of ordinary men. To him, the prince's conduct felt less like a man desperate for glory and more like a man hunting for something lost.
It seemed connected to the reason the prince had insisted on forming a separate detachment from the very first day he arrived. And then there was how he volunteered for every single reconnaissance mission without fail.
On the surface, he looked like a man itching for glory. But whenever he joined a scouting party, he would push beyond the designated area to explore other places, and when the remnants of Northern Yuan were captured, he would question them in Mongolian. The common soldiers might not have noticed, but to seasoned commanders, it was a string of profoundly strange behaviors.
Yet the man himself spoke as if it were nothing.
"I was just charging in blind, that's all. As for the Yuan tongue, I learned it ages ago and simply wanted the practice."
Watching him brazenly play the fool, Yeo Cheolgi opened his mouth to press further — but Hang Jeoksan stopped him. There would be no answer to be had anyway, and his message was clear: drop the matter.
"If you will not speak of it, then every time you break military orders, I will deal with you according to military law."
"Naturally, you should."
Watching the prince, Hang Jeoksan said as he strode from the tent:
"No doubt every punishment you receive will push whatever it is you're trying to do further and further behind schedule."
The prince, who had maintained his roguish facade without a crack, faltered — if only for an instant. Only three men caught it: Hang Jeoksan, Yeo Cheolgi, and Samryong.
"Eh-heh~ I'll follow orders properly from now on, alright? Hm?"
"Hmph..."
Hang Jeoksan's wordless stare bored into him. The prince scrambled to smooth things over with laughter.
"Hahaha! Got it, got it! To think our General Hang worries over me this much. Thank you!"
"...I have duties to attend to. If you'll excuse me."
"Go on! Go! Physician Yu! Come, treat me at once!"
"As I said, I'm not actually a—"
"Anyone who treats people is a physician!"
Once Hang Jeoksan and Yeo Cheolgi had gone, Samryong slowly approached the prince.
"Let me see the wound, please."
As he carefully unwound the bandages, a cut far deeper than expected came into view.
"Those cowardly Yuan remnants ambushed you even after Your Highness spared their lives!"
The hot-blooded bodyguard cried out so loudly, so full of indignation, that Samryong's ears rang.
The other bodyguard, meanwhile — the one wearing a mask — said not a word. The temperature gap between the two was the very definition of extremes.
Then, as Samryong quietly examined the wound, his expression stiffened slightly. At the sight, the prince asked with sudden, grave seriousness:
"Is it bad, then?"
"If it had gone any deeper... it would have been very bad."
"Then that means it can be treated?"
"Yes. Thankfully."
"Well, I'll just have to be more careful from now on, won't I?"
"Haah..."
Looking at the prince's carefree attitude, Samryong finally understood why Hang Jeoksan sighed every time he laid eyes on the man. Come to think of it, he wasn't a wastrel so much as simply a man utterly beyond saving.
Was this how Tang Chiyeol and Saryeong felt watching me back in my layabout days? Or Oryong?
Samryong dismissed the stray memory of the past, opened his bag, and took out a small gourd. He dabbed the medicine onto a cloth and spread it lightly over the back of the prince's hand.
"What's that for? There's no wound there."
"It's a test."
"A test?"
"I'm checking your reaction before administering the anesthetic."
"Anesthetic?"
"A diluted paralytic toxin, used to numb sensation. Sewing you up raw would hurt quite a bit, you see."
"You dare use poison on the Prince!"
Now his voice is really starting to grate.
"Your shouting is liable to tear the wound open further, so kindly quiet down. Besides, this treatment is already famous throughout the entire camp, so stop making a scene — you're embarrassing me!"
Apparently, the ringing ears were a problem for the prince as well.
"Your Highness!"
"Thankfully, there's no adverse reaction, Your Highness."
Trusting the prince, Samryong simply ignored the bodyguard and proceeded with the treatment. The guard, forbidden by the prince's own command from even drawing his sword, could do nothing but clutch the hilt and tremble with rage.
"If you try anything crooked, I will see you — and all three generations of your family — exterminated!"
"Yessir~"
He was a pain in the ears, but his loyalty was truly first-rate.
"Hm."
Tatadak!
As Samryong quietly wielded his needles, one pierced in an instant to the wound, carrying the diluted paralytic.
Stops the bleeding and numbs the pain. Two birds with one stone.
"Are you well, Your Highness?"
After some time had passed, the prince sensed an unfamiliar feeling.
"How strange. My arm has no sensation at all."
"The anesthetic has taken hold nicely. Then..."
Samryong disinfected the wound with medical spirits, scraped away the necrotized flesh, and began, slowly and carefully, to stitch the wound closed. The procedure proceeded with practiced, precise speed.
It's looking more and more presentable.
Samryong felt a quiet swell of pride at his own neat stitching. As if to answer that feeling, the prince gazed at the sutured flesh with wonder, his hand drifting toward it.
"Please don't touch it."
"Ah! It's just that I can't feel a thing there."
Leaving behind the startled prince, Samryong pressed a clean cloth gently over the wound and wrapped it.
"Shouldn't this sort of thing normally be met with... screaming, and agony? Having one's flesh pierced by a needle — and yet it doesn't so much as hurt. The sensation is simply strange."
"It will likely start hurting quite a bit once the anesthetic wears off. Please brew and take the decoction exactly as I've prescribed, and do not strain yourself."
"A true master physician! Understood!"
"Then I'll take my leave—"
"Yes, go. You have plenty of patients waiting."
"Phew~"
Having finished treating the prince and emerged from the barracks, Samryong let out a long breath of relief.
"Ah... I really must never come back here. And now it's raining, too."
Somehow, he had the feeling that he should not let himself get entangled any deeper. But the heavens, as they always did, seemed to have no intention of granting Samryong his wish.
"..."
Like a sleeping princess in the woods, as if sealed beneath some curse, a white-haired woman lay in slumber. Her features carried a subtle foreign grace, set apart from the people of the Central Plains.
The woman, lying utterly motionless like a porcelain doll, opened her eyes — slowly, so slowly, as though eons had passed since last she moved them.
An unfamiliar ceiling...
The ceiling was strange to her, but the girl quickly realized where she was: a ger, the traditional dwelling of the nomadic peoples.
"Ugh... my head!"
The last thing she could remember was the moment the Palace Master of Seolyeong had cried out for a fight to the death. Of everything after that — of how she had come to be here — she retained no memory at all.
"Ugh!"
Her entire body throbbed as though someone had taken a hammer to every inch of it. Yet she bore such pain with the ease of long habit; biting her lip faintly, she swallowed her cry.
She knocked me out... but why?
"Young Palace Master!"
As she was massaging her aching neck, a girl entered the ger. She looked to be in her late teens, wearing the garb of the North Sea Ice Palace's Seolyeong Squad.
"You're..."
The Young Palace Master knew this girl well.
"Ayoung...?"
"Young Palace Master! Young Palace Master! You've awakened!"
Watching the tearful Won Ayoung, the North Sea Ice Palace's Young Palace Master, Seol Mokyeon, first did what she could to calm her.
"I was so afraid you might never wake again. If you hadn't... if I had..."
"I'm all right... But where is the Palace Master? I must hold her to account for knocking me out."
"Well... that is... sob... hnngh... sob, sob..."
At Seol Mokyeon's words, Won Ayoung simply collapsed where she stood, unable to speak another word, weeping.
"Haah... so in the end..."
Watching the girl grieve so bitterly, Seol Mokyeon steadied her own trembling hands and drew closer. Even without Won Ayoung saying a word, she had a fair idea of what had befallen Seolyeong Squad. And now she understood why the Palace Master had knocked her unconscious.
She had been trying to save at least one of them — her.
"Ayoung..."
"The Palace Master said that at the very least, you had to survive, Young Palace Master... so I just... I just ran... sob... sob, sob..."
"I know... I know..."
Tears threatened to spill from Seol Mokyeon's eyes as well — but if she wavered now, Won Ayoung might be devoured by guilt. She had to hold firm.
Haah... I can't let myself shake either.
The life of an heir was not about leaning on someone else — it was about becoming the person others could lean on. And so, heartbreaking as it was, Seol Mokyeon had to grit her teeth and swallow her grief.
"It's all right... none of this is your fault..."
As Seol Mokyeon consoled Won Ayoung, the door of the ger swung open and someone stepped inside.
"Huh? She's awake!"
A boy brimming with mischief, his cheeks stained a bright azalea-red from the steppe cold, his face streaked with the traces of a runny nose. He mumbled something around a mouthful of something or other and called for someone.
"Mom! Mom! The pretty big sister woke up!"
In response to the boy's call, a woman entered a short while later — powerfully built, appearing to be in her early thirties, and so tall that even though the doorway was not particularly low, she had to duck her head to pass through.
I'd wager that boy will still mind his mother's every word even when he hits adolescence.
"Oh, you're awake? Your body was fine, but you wouldn't get up — you had me worried."
A cheerful woman whose brightest charm was a smile so wide it showed every tooth.