Sunrise
An otherworld much like the martial arts novels I used to read in the orphanage. Minor differences aside, it wore a great many of the Chinese colors that form the backdrop of those stories.
And yet.
"...What? Why is there a car?"
I said it with a twitch of the shoulders, staring at a machine that went along with no horse to pull it.
"A self-moving carriage...? Oh—you mean a Qi-Powered Automaton Horse? A horse puppet that runs on qi?"
Qi-Powered Automaton Horse. Even the name was needlessly splendid.
I was still staring at the sight in blank disbelief when Lee Seol-ah supplied the rest.
"Long ago there was a puppeteer who, martial artist though he was, fussed over ordinary folk to a peculiar degree. The Qi-Powered Automaton Horse is his work. Some ancient worthy whose name no one even remembers."
"Even so, it looks an awful lot like the cars from my world."
The only real difference was that qi served as its motive power. In structure and in form, the thing was remarkably close.
"Hmm... they do say all streams return to a single source, don't they? Maybe it's that. One way or another, the use seems about the same."
"You think so?"
I stroked my chin and studied the car before me. No—the Qi-Powered Automaton Horse.
Well. It could be. Press the question far enough, and it was just as strange that a species called human existed in nearly every world. Environments differed from one world to the next; how could a creature with the same bodily conditions turn up in all of them? In the end you had to let it pass. Another world. These things happen.
"So. Where is that unorthodox faction?"
"I don't know?"
At my question, Lee Seol-ah shrugged.
"Then what are we supposed to do?"
"We look. Alleys where the dark path nests look exactly like back alleys. They ought to be easy enough to find."
I hummed, and nodded.
"So until then, we play a little?"
"And how does that follow?"
"Well... because I want to?"
"Fine. Do as you please."
I gave her a look that said she was beyond saving, and let out a short sigh.
"Youth really is a fine thing."
"You're in your twenties this life too."
Lee Seol-ah said it with an expression of pure disbelief.
She wasn't wrong. Count not the age of the body, but the time that had passed since this reincarnation, and I was one year old. The trouble was that the mind inside was fifty-one.
"Anyway. Shall we walk around and look for the unorthodox faction while we're at it?"
"Sure."
I answered short, and gathered Lee Seol-ah up in my arms.
"Eek?! Ah—no! You can't use lightness arts here!"
"Ah."
Fair enough. Let every passerby take to the lightness arts, and they would be crashing into one another. It was the same sort of rule as a ban on running through a public place. I nodded and set her back on the ground.
"Whew. You startled me..."
She murmured it, a hand pressed to her chest.
"Sorry."
"No, it's... you don't have to apologize."
Lee Seol-ah took the apology with a faint smile.
"In exchange, you pay for everything today."
"We pooled the money and brought it all together. What difference does it make?"
I let out a hollow laugh, and she answered with a quiet one of her own.
"Nothing tastes better than a meal someone else pays for, does it? I'm just enjoying the feeling."
"Well... all right."
I answered, a little dazed. Aside from the times I had been scouted—an offer of recruitment, to put it in this world's terms—I had never once been treated to anything by anyone. It wasn't a feeling I could share.
"Shall we eat first, then?"
"I'd like that. What do you want?"
"Anything's fine for me. Let's have whatever you feel like."
"Hmm... how about Wave Hand-Stretched Noodles?"
Pasta? Why, of all things, was there pasta?
"Wave Hand-Stretched Noodles? It's a noodle dish you make by striking the dough with your hands. It comes out curled, and they named it that because the shape looks like waves."
The explanation was plausible enough that the feeling only grew stranger. Why did it sound the same, too?
"Why the sudden look? Did your world have something like it?"
"Yeah. Down to the pronunciation."
"Ooh, how fascinating! Then Wave Hand-Stretched Noodles is all right?"
"...Sure."
Too dumbfounded to help it, I laughed. Chinese architecture and Chinese dress, sharing a street with cars and pasta? It was absurd. At least beneath the common sense I knew.
A pasta shop. No—a shop devoted to Wave Hand-Stretched Noodles.
"...An elevator?"
There it stood, painfully familiar. I lived in the mountains as a rule, but I saw one whenever I went to the state-run Hunter Association.
"Ah, you mean a Vertical Moving Room?"
"Uh... yeah."
So a car was a Qi-Powered Automaton Horse, and a lift was a Vertical Moving Room. Then why was pasta Wave Hand-Stretched Noodles? The coincidences, honestly. A ridiculous coincidence. I laughed dryly and ordered with Lee Seol-ah.
Stranger still. Carbonara? The noodles turned out to be a dish dressed in cream sauce. Why was even the seasoning the same?
"Mm. It's delicious. Brings back old times, too."
Lee Seol-ah said it around a smile that left a bitter aftertaste.
"Uh... yeah. It's good. Old times... those too."
I answered with an awkward smile of my own. Bewilderment was bewilderment, but eating pasta after so long was, in itself, welcome. Even the second world, the one that had resembled the West, had held nothing like it. To be eating it here...
I never would have imagined it. Who looks upon a culture dressed in the colors of old China and expects cars, elevators, and pasta? Absurd, yes. And yet the feeling went as far as wonder.
We ate a little pas—no, a little of the noodles—and set our chopsticks down at nearly the same moment.
"Where to next?"
"Once you've had a meal, you ought to have a snack."
Flour for the meal, and sweets on top of that? I breathed a dry laugh and went on.
"Keep that up and you'll get good and plump."
"I'm slender, though?"
My eyes traveled the length of her.
"...So you are."
"See? No problem at all..."
Before Lee Seol-ah could finish, I caught her by the arm. One knead told me everything. Soft. Entirely soft.
"Hah. Of course. Not a scrap of muscle to be found."
"...Th-then what about you!"
"Feel for yourself."
I said it and laid my arm on the table. I didn't bother putting any strength into it.
"...What is this."
Lee Seol-ah gaped, prodding an arm her fingers couldn't even properly press into.
"I'm not even flexing."
She had nothing to say to that.
"A little muscle, and the body moves as it should. Snack all day and do whatever else it is you do, and of course nothing about you improves."
"Ugh...!"
Lips pushed out in a pout, Lee Seol-ah melted across the tabletop.
"Live that way and life gets far too harsh... just like yours..."
"That's only me, living harshly."
"...Even so, a few times ought to be all right."
"No. With the Nine Yin Severed Meridians, you can't even forge a body through repetitive training. You just ate flour, and now you want sweets besides? You might as well say you won't take up a sword."
By then even Lee Seol-ah seemed to have run out of answers. Her mouth stayed firmly shut.
"...Are you my father?"
"Lord, teacher, and father are one. You know the saying."
"Nnngh..."
"Nothing left to say, I see."
I laughed under my breath and pressed a fingertip into her puffed cheek. Between the pouted lips, air leaked out in a thin pssh.
The look in her eyes had gone past sharp and into something gloomy, and for no good reason my heart gave. ...Would a single day really hurt? Unable to help it, I sighed.
"...Hah. Fine. But today only."
"Ah—really?!"
The moment the permission left me, Lee Seol-ah shot up from her seat, deep ocean-blue eyes alight.
"Yes! I'm eating forty skewers of ice-sugar gourd!"
"...If that's the ice-sugar gourd I know, you'd do better not to."
Ice-sugar gourd—the same thing as the tanghulu I had learned of through a colleague. Fruit jacketed in sugar. What had they called the effect of a thing like that? Right. A blood-sugar spike. You could fairly call it the very definition of one.
"Ah, I don't care! I'll just eat a hundred!"
Whether she knew or not, Lee Seol-ah declared it with sparkling eyes. Bright and pure was a good thing, but even so, there were lines one had to keep. I sighed and drew her soft cheeks out to either side.
"Uuugh..."
"In moderation. Moderation. All right?"
"Yesh..."
Answer secured, I snorted and let her cheeks go.
"Good. Shall we, then?"
I asked it as I rose.
"Yes!"
Both cheeks I had pinched were still faintly red, and the answer was sunny for no reason at all. I chuckled at the sight and stepped out of the shop.
We had come out and were walking the street when someone bumped my shoulder. A light thump. Honestly, I could have avoided it. I chose not to. At a glance, they looked exactly like the friends I had been looking for.
"Hey! You walking around with your eyes shut?!"
"You know who we are, huh?! Members of the Great Black Tiger Sect, that's who!"
I looked at them, and the corner of my mouth lifted, just slightly. That was them. The manner of speech belonged to the dark path and to no one else—the bluster of cut-rate thugs, line for line. One look was enough. Thanks to them, the work ahead looked ready to run smooth from the very first step.