Oh My, Goodness. What on Earth Is Going On? (3)
Everyone kept looking back and forth between the grand hall and Jo Gul.
Their unfocused gazes shifted between the two spots again and again. Jo Gul, who had become the object of those stares, covered his mouth with a fist and gave a low, awkward cough.
“This place?”
“Yeah.”
“Here?”
“I’m telling you, yes!”
Chung Myung’s jaw dropped.
“...So Jo Gul Sahyung is the son of this place? Not just some servant or something?”
“It’s our house, you know?”
Chung Myung shook his head and clapped a hand on Jo Gul’s shoulder.
“No way. Think about it again, Sahyung.”
“Think about what?”
“People’s lives show on their faces in the end. Who’d look at Jo Gul Sahyung’s face and think, ‘Ah, this is some rich family’s son’? Anyone can tell he’s from some backwater village out in the sticks…”
“You little—!”
Jo Gul finally lost his temper and kicked Chung Myung so hard he went flying.
“What! Is it that weird that I’m from a wealthy family?”
“Very weird.”
“Extremely.”
“Seriously. It’s really weird, Jo Gul.”
Even Baek Cheon was looking at him with pure disbelief, and Jo Gul’s head drooped.
And these are the people I call my martial brothers.
Something stung his eyes.
“Jo Gul. Be honest with me. Is this really your home?”
“Sahyung…”
Even Yoon Jong asked in an unbelieving tone, and in the end Jo Gul grabbed his own head. Yoon Jong, still looking flustered, said, “No, but you told me your family was just a small merchant house out in the countryside.”
“...It was a little difficult to explain.”
“Huh. It suited you so well I believed it without question.”
“No, do I really look that poor? Is it really that strange?”
“N-no. It’s not that it’s strange, exactly…”
“Your face is saying it’s strange right now!”
“Uh… Is it?”
Yoon Jong looked visibly rattled.
And that only made Jo Gul even more miserable.
Just then, Chung Myung, who had been kicked in the butt and sent flying, rushed back to his place.
“No, no. It makes sense. Things like that happen all the time. The overlooked son of a successful family runs away because he can’t stand it anymore…”
“Y-you swine…”
Baek Cheon gritted his teeth and trembled.
“Ah, I wasn’t talking about you, Sasuk.”
“You damned brat!”
Apparently their ruckus could be heard from inside.
“Who dares make such a racket in front of the Sahaesanghoe?”
The huge gate was thrown open, and an old man with sharp features rushed out. He shot the Mount Hua disciples a fierce glare.
Then, after a beat…
“Huh? Eh? Y-young master!”
Young master. Young master.
Chung Myung leaned toward Yoon Jong and whispered, “I heard that right, didn’t I?”
“I think so. I’m getting the urge to dig my ears out, so yes.”
The old man hurried over to Jo Gul.
“No! No! Not young master! Second Young Master! You’re the Second Young Master! My goodness! You’ve become so upright and handsome!”
Chung Myung whispered again.
“In Sichuan, ‘upright and handsome’ seems to mean something totally different.”
“I think so too. Maybe it’s a dialect thing?”
“I can hear you, you know! I can hear all of it!”
Jo Gul glared at the two of them, trembling with indignation. But the old man didn’t seem to notice any of the other Mount Hua disciples. With tears practically spilling from his eyes, he hugged Jo Gul tightly.
“Second Young Master! You’ve really come back safely! Truly!”
“S-Samchongwan! Calm down a little!”
Chung Myung whispered into the side of Yoon Jong’s ear again.
“Looks like he really is the son of a rich family. He’s talking informally to his grandfather.”
“Mm. Really, that… no, wait. Isn’t that the last thing you should be saying?”
Even so, Yoon Jong still couldn’t let that one slide and shot him a look.
“Hey! Over here! Go tell everyone at once that the Second Young Master has returned! Right this instant!”
At the old man’s booming voice, the servants rushed inside in a flurry.
Chung Myung clicked his tongue and looked at Jo Gul, who was busy trying to calm the old man down.
No matter how much people said you couldn’t know someone by their looks, who would have thought Jo Gul was the son of a rich household like this?
“Yoon Jong Sahyung. Do you have some hidden background too? Like some high official’s son or something?”
“...I’m an orphan.”
“Right. That’s usually how it goes.”
How strange.
The tearful reunion went on for quite some time before Samchongwan finally turned his attention to the others.
“And these fine gentlemen are…?”
“They’re fellow uncle-disciples and martial brothers from my sect.”
“Ah!”
Baek Cheon cupped his hands and bowed to Samchongwan.
“I am Baek Cheon, second-generation disciple of Mount Hua. Due to unexpected circumstances, we have come to visit our junior brother’s family. I apologize for not sending word in advance and for arriving so abruptly.”
“Not at all! How could you say such a thing? We are truly grateful that you’ve come all this way.”
Samchongwan wiped at the corners of his eyes with his sleeve.
“After the Second Young Master went to Mount Hua, we heard nothing from him for years, so we worried terribly. If not for the family head’s orders, I would have gone to look for him several times already.”
Jo Gul waved his hands helplessly and pushed at Samchongwan’s back.
“Let’s go inside first, let’s go inside. It’s rude to leave an uncle-disciple standing out here like this.”
“Ah, yes. I was so happy I seem to have lost my head for a moment. Please, come in!”
Samchongwan led them into the guild. The Mount Hua disciples all had the same thought as they passed through the huge main gate.
This seems bigger than Mount Hua’s front gate.
I’ve lived this long and never seen a house this grand.
Good grief, he looks like a different person now.
The Mount Hua disciples, having lived without much, were highly sensitive to money. Because of that, Jo Gul, the son of a wealthy family, seemed to practically glow.
And then—
“Gul!”
Two people came running barefoot toward them. A middle-aged woman in a silk gown and a middle-aged man in a red silk robe.
At that point, there was no way not to know who they were.
The woman rushed in and grabbed Jo Gul in a tight embrace.
“You ungrateful brat! Why are you only coming back now?”
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
The man clasped his hands behind his back and turned his head sharply away. He was probably trying to hold back tears.
How should he put it…
It was too lavish to simply call this warm and happy, and the surroundings were far too splendid. In any case, it was a scene so tender it was almost unbearable.
The three orphans and one runaway standing like folding screens all developed bulging veins on their foreheads.
Life is unfair, damn it!
We thought he was in the same miserable boat as us, so we treated him well!
Fraud! Fraud!
Even Chung Myung trembled as he watched the scene.
Some people are reborn in a beggar’s den, and some people get a family like this!
If he’d been born into a household like this, the road here would have been ten times easier!
Thus one Mount Hua disciple was reunited with his family, and the remaining four Mount Hua disciples got stomachaches from jealousy over their martial brother’s happiness.
* * *
“...So,”
Chung Myung stared at the feast laid out before him, then jerked his head up to glare at Jo Gul.
Jo Gul flinched under the look.
“You must’ve had a lot of money, huh?”
“...”
“Wow, and I had no idea! Such a young master from a rich house! Right, you were a young master! And I had no idea!”
Jo Gul coughed loudly.
“Once you join a sect, everyone is just a fellow martial brother. Why would something like family background matter?”
“It matters! I don’t have a family!”
“Neither do I.”
“Same here.”
“Uh, I… well…”
When Baek Cheon hesitated slightly, Chung Myung nodded with exaggerated sympathy.
“It’s okay, Sasuk. Sasuk got kicked out, after all.”
“I left on my own! On my own!”
Chung Myung cheerfully ignored Baek Cheon’s protest and trembled with outrage.
“So you had all this money and still didn’t put in a single coin when Mount Hua was going to hell, huh?”
“No, no! How old do you think I am that I could just use the family’s money? Was that my money? Was it really my money?”
“You could’ve asked! We could’ve lived off charity and still survived!”
“Traitor.”
“Fraud.”
At the sharp accusations from his martial brothers, Jo Gul’s stomach roiled.
They didn’t know what they were talking about.
If Jo Gul had sent word at the time, asking for support from the family because Mount Hua was on the verge of collapse, his father would have come straight to Mount Hua, dragged him back to Sichuan, and that would have been the end of it.
His father was a merchant too.
He wasn’t the sort to spend a single coin on something with no investment value.
“Anyway.”
Seeing how troubled he was, Baek Cheon stepped in to mediate.
“Don’t press him too hard. We misunderstood him. It doesn’t seem like he was trying to hide it from us.”
But public opinion was not on Jo Gul’s side.
“Look at those rich boys helping each other!”
“Orphans, gather here!”
“Then I’ll take this spot.”
Baek Cheon cleared his throat, his face flushed.
“That’s not what I mean! That’s not the important part right now. What matters is finding a way into Yunnan, isn’t it?”
Grrr…
Chung Myung considered giving them another scolding—something like, “You all still have somewhere to go even if Mount Hua goes under”—but in the end he held it back with a low groan.
“So what did your father say?”
“I haven’t been able to talk to him yet.”
“...Why not?”
“Well, that’s because…”
Jo Gul let out a long sigh.
“The period I’d originally promised to stay at Mount Hua has already passed. If things had gone according to plan, I should have returned to the family last year and started helping with the household business.”
“Then why didn’t you go back?”
“Because…”
You showed up.
But he didn’t want to say that to Chung Myung.
“Anyway, that’s how it turned out. So my father thinks I’ve already come back to the family for good. I need to clear up that misunderstanding first, don’t I?”
“No, it’s fine. We can just go ourselves.”
“What are you talking about? I’m a disciple of Mount Hua! I’m going to follow you to Yunnan even if I die for it!”
“Why would someone of your esteemed status bother doing that?”
Chung Myung shrugged.
Then Yoon Jong asked quietly, “Is Jo Gul’s status really that high?”
“Tch. Sahyung. Can’t you tell just by looking? I don’t know exactly what this place is, but from the scale of it, it doesn’t seem much smaller than the Eunha Sangdan. That means Jo Gul Sahyung is at least the young lord of the Eunha Sangdan! Right! He’s at the level of Young Lord Hwang Jong-ui, at the very least!”
Chung Myung pointed at Jo Gul with absolute certainty.
“So Jo Gul Sahyung is at minimum at Young Lord Hwang’s level—wait. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s not such a big deal?”
“Right?”
“Yeah, I’m kind of feeling that too.”
Imagining Hwang Jong-ui, who bent so low whenever he came to Mount Hua that his forehead practically touched the ground, made the whole evaluation plunge in value.
“Ah, so it’s nothing special.”
“I thought it was something impressive.”
“Hah. Jo Gul suddenly seems familiar again.”
The Mount Hua disciples tossed around words that would have made Hwang Jong-ui foam at the mouth if he’d heard them.
And this time, Jo Gul started trembling instead.
When they’d been praising him, it had been suffocating, but now that they were dismissing him again, for some reason it made him strangely angry.
“Hngh… anyway.”
Jo Gul sighed and said, “I’ve arranged to have dinner with my family later, so I’ll ask them about a way to get to Yunnan then, Sasuk.”
“Mm.”
Baek Cheon nodded.
“It won’t be easy, but I’m counting on you. Whether we negotiate with the Southern Barbarian Beast Palace or sneak into the Purple Wood Grass habitat, being watched from the moment we step into Yunnan would make both options equally impossible.”
“I understand.”
“If there’s anything we need to do, tell us anytime.”
“Yes, Sasuk!”
After taking one more look around at his martial brothers, Jo Gul let out a low sigh.
“Then…”
“Ah, Sahyung.”
“Hm?”
“Send someone to bring some wine here.”
“...”
“Tch. You’re not even ignoring Taoists, and you still won’t serve us wine? Look at all this food you’ve laid out. Get me some wine. The expensive kind.”
“...”
“Sahyung. I’m telling you again!”
Chung Myung said with an utterly serious face,
“Make sure it’s the expensive stuff!”
What was a ghost doing, anyway…
for not dragging that bastard off yet?