Murim Alliance Library
As long as I bore the name Byeokun, I was supposed to be perfect in every respect.
It was something I’d heard so often that my ears had practically grown calluses from it ever since Byeok Unseong was old enough to understand right from wrong.
“Unseong, you inherited the name Byeokun, so you must be perfect. You must never let anyone look down on you, and you must never shame your ancestors.”
Byeok Ungang would grip Byeok Unseong’s shoulders and say those words every day.
To young Byeok Unseong, his father had been a perfect man, the very image of everything worth admiring.
He was flawless in all things, a kind and attentive father, and gentle even with the servants.
No one could have imagined that such a man would be attacked by thieves during a springtime stroll.
“Khk, gkhaaaah!”
“F-Father!”
Byeok Unseong reached out again and again toward his father, who had been struck down in the ambush.
But with his tiny child’s hands, there was nothing he could do to overcome that hopeless situation.
“S-Someone help! Guards! Where are the guards!”
So he screamed until his throat was raw, calling for the guards.
But that day, his father had sent them all away, saying he wanted to spend some quiet time alone with his son.
And so the guards who should have come running like the wind the moment they were called never appeared, no matter how desperately Byeok Ungang shouted for them.
Minutes passed like that.
Then the thing standing in his father’s place rose up from where he had fallen.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
“That thing peeled my father’s skin off right in front of me.”
Byeok Unseong was shaking so badly I could see it with my own eyes.
If he had truly witnessed his father’s skin being flayed away and worn before him, then that memory was probably a needle in his mind, stabbing him every time it turned.
But I’m not a therapist.
I had no way to fix Byeok Unseong’s trauma.
Sure, I was human too, so I could reach out and comfort a trembling child if I wanted to.
But was that actually necessary? No.
What I needed to do now was simply ask the right questions and make the situation clearer.
To be honest, Byeok Unseong’s story still didn’t sound all that believable.
“Then why didn’t he kill you?”
“He’s enjoying himself.”
“Enjoying himself?”
That was a strange way to put it.
“He likes watching me struggle to kill him.”
“What a nasty hobby.”
The picture was starting to come into focus.
If that’s true, then this is seriously dangerous.
My mouth had gone dry.
Just having martial skill would already have made things difficult, but if he had intelligence and cruelty to go with it, there was no way I could handle him in my current state.
“So, I need your help, as a warrior of the Paeng Clan….”
Of course, Byeok Unseong knew that better than anyone.
What he needed from me was never “Paeng Yeohun” in the abstract, but “Paeng Yeohun of the Hebei Paeng Clan.”
“There’s one thing I need to make clear.”
“What is it?”
Byeok Unseong’s eyes went wide at my words.
“It’s going to be hard to get help from the Paeng Clan.”
I answered honestly.
When had it been since I’d cut ties with the Paeng Clan? At this point, I’d be lucky if all I got for knocking on their door was a scolding instead of a fistful of salt in my face.
“T-Then….”
His shoulders visibly sank at my answer.
He’d trusted me enough to drag out the memory he’d buried deep in his chest, only for my reply to be negative. Of course his mind would start spinning with a hundred useless thoughts.
“It’s not like there’s no way.”
“What?”
“Why so surprised? It’s just that the preparations are a little complicated….”
I eased into it carefully. If you wanted to fish, you had to cast the right bait.
“Preparations?”
Byeok Unseong tilted his head.
“Want to hear it?”
The bait had been taken.
Watching his puzzled expression, I let a thin, sly smile curl at the corner of my mouth.
I’m going to wring him dry to the bone.
I’d hooked myself a sucker.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Jingle.
The little metal pass chimed between my fingers.
“So this is the Murim Alliance Library pass.”
The Murim Alliance Library pass that the servant sent by Byeok Unseong had brought me this morning.
The small iron plate was engraved with elaborate patterns, the kind that naturally drew admiring gasps from anyone who saw it.
You might wonder why they’d put so much effort into making something as mundane as a library pass look so ornate.
But once the name Murim Alliance was attached to it, the library was no place just anyone could enter.
That only made sense. In a world where paper was valuable, they couldn’t exactly let random riffraff wander into an archive stuffed with priceless books.
“There’s ‘that thing’ in the library.”
True to the reputation of the Murim Alliance, the library held dozens of manuals for inner and outer martial arts that would help early-game players, and among them were several powerful inner arts worthy of being called hidden pieces.
One of those was what I was after.
“The problem is that ‘that thing’ is there too.”
The library had “that thing.”
The most vicious NPC in the game, the one whose answer to a single wrong line would drag the player straight down a path to hell.
What made this route especially vicious was that you only realized you’d taken the wrong turn right before the final act.
By then, you’d already walked too far to turn back, and countless players had ended up swallowing their tears and seeing an ending they never wanted.
Because of that, it wasn’t rare to see people on the Cheongyeoljeon community venting their fury over the wasted hours of playtime, spewing long, vicious curses at the NPC who’d caused it all.
I got screwed by it on my first run too.
The shock of realizing, right before the ending, that the entire picture I’d been building had been torn to shreds.
Even now, when I thought back to it, the back of my head still tingled.
Well, if I don’t talk to it, there shouldn’t be a big problem.
Fortunately, as long as you didn’t attract its attention, “that thing” was harmless.
I still remembered getting absolutely wrecked by it, so getting tangled up with it again didn’t seem like a wise move.
By the time I reached the Murim Alliance Library at a leisurely pace, the building was already projecting the lofty dignity of a place that had stood on history and tradition for ages.
I feel like I’m being crushed before I even get to the door.
Looking at the library’s unnervingly immaculate exterior, I felt like a black stain on a sheet of pure white paper.
I need to get this done and leave fast.
When I’d seen it in the game, I’d thought it was beautiful. But now that I was standing in front of it, all I could think was that, as I’d said before, I felt like filth had somehow gotten under my skin.
Still, I couldn’t turn back now. No point dragging my feet. I might as well get in, handle the business, and leave.
“You’ve come at last….”
I burst through the library doors with all the swagger I could muster and came face-to-face with “that thing.”
“…You’re not someone I’ve seen before.”
Snap!
“That thing” shut the book she’d been reading with a sharp crack. The woman with snow-white hair and an expression colder than ice slowly lifted her green eyes, empty of all feeling, and looked at me.
And I knew her name. I couldn’t not know it.
Yu Seollin.
The true master and sole librarian of the library where tens of thousands of books slept.
It wouldn’t have been an exaggeration to call the Murim Alliance Library a remote castle built solely for her.
And, as far as I know, she’s the most dangerous warrior in the Murim Alliance.
Yu Seollin was quiet, and at times she seemed almost emotionless.
In fact, the fluctuations of her feelings were so weak they were barely there at all.
That was why the quest she gave to players who visited the library, a place with very few visitors, was to make her heart thud once, hard enough that she could feel it.
Who could have guessed that would lead to a mass-murder ending, for heaven’s sake.
To accept her request, players would go through all sorts of absurd trials.
They’d try to startle her, search for the lost letter her father had misplaced long ago, or even fall in love with her and become her lover.
But all that effort was pointless. Yu Seollin still couldn’t find her feelings. She couldn’t.
How could she possibly search for something she had never possessed for even a single moment since the day she was born? It was like trying to find a needle in a desert, or pouring water into a jar with no bottom.
And so, when every attempt by the player had gone nowhere, in the final moment she would, ironically, come to understand emotion—the evil in human hearts.
Despair. Resentment. Hatred.
She despaired over being unable to possess what others had, resented the parents who had given birth to her this way, and hated the player who had planted false hope in her, and the world that had brought that player to her.
And once she reached the depths of that despair, she came to understand the fate laid upon her: the Heavenly Massacre Star.
She would throw herself into the Demonic Cult and try to make the Murim Alliance, and then all of Beijing, her final companions on the road to destruction.
This was one of the evil-ending routes in Cheongyeoljeon, the Heavenly Massacre Star route.
What makes it nasty is that this ending is stupidly faster to reach than the others.
The only condition needed to trigger it was completing Yu Seollin’s quest.
So if you handled her request without thinking too hard about it, before you knew it you’d either be standing beside Yu Seollin, hand in hand, destroying Beijing, or with a blade buried in her heart.
That was the developers’ malice at its finest, serving the players a big fat screw-you.
Didn’t expect to run into her the moment I walked in.
Since she usually busied herself all over the library, the chance of running into her unexpectedly wasn’t all that high.
In a way, maybe I should consider myself lucky that I’d met her like this.
“…Is there something on my face?”
“Ah, no.”
I must’ve been staring too hard.
Maybe because it felt strange to see a character I’d only ever seen in a game actually breathing in front of me.
Before I knew it, I’d spaced out and was simply staring at Yu Seollin’s face, dragged back into old memories.
“What brings you here?”
“I came to read books. What else would I come here for?”
Rule number one for dealing with Yu Seollin: keep the conversation to an absolute minimum.
If talking was unavoidable, choose the coldest option possible so her favorability would drop.
Following the rule I’d built on the players’ tears and blood, I gave her a rather curt reply and naturally moved past her toward the stacks of books piled high in the archive.
Or at least, I tried to.
Step.
Before I could even take one stride, Yu Seollin spread both arms and blocked my way.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Before that, how did you get into the library?”
Standing in my way, Yu Seollin gave me a once-over from head to toe before speaking.
That was pretty rude, but I supposed it made sense from her perspective. To her, I probably looked like the sort of bum you’d see on the street any day of the week.
“I’m an authorized library user, too.”
I held up the library pass in front of her face like I was showing off.
“That….”
With emotionless eyes, Yu Seollin looked back and forth between the pass shoved up under her nose and me.
Eventually, she snatched the pass out of my hand and stared at it hard.
“…It’s real.”
Maybe it was my imagination, but did her voice carry a hint of disappointment when she returned it?
“Welcome to the library.”
Once she confirmed that the pass wasn’t fake, she finally stepped aside.
“Thank you.”
I gave a polite enough reply and strode forward with confidence.
And then, after ten minutes or less had passed.
“How am I supposed to find a book here?”
I was clutching the hem of Yu Seollin’s pants and begging for help.
The reason was simple.
The walls of the archive stretched on and on without end, and I had no idea where I was supposed to start.
Even when I played the game, getting a manual here wasn’t easy.
Thinking about it now, even during manual rerolls it had been a miracle to get the one you wanted.
It had already been hard enough in a game where all you had to do was click a few times.
Now that the game had become reality, how much harder would it be to find the book I wanted in this library?
I don’t want to get involved, but I don’t have a choice.
The trigger for Yu Seollin’s story line starting was, naturally, talking to Yu Seollin.
So I’d decided to avoid talking to her and keep my distance as much as possible.
But, as I’d said, the massive shelves practically rivaled the Great Wall of Qin Shi Huang, so there was nothing I could do.
Nothing bad will happen, right? This is the Murim Alliance. They’ll know my name….
Besides, I wasn’t completely out of options.
The three characters in the name Paeng Yeohun had more than enough weight to shake off anyone clinging to me like a nuisance, and that should be true even with Yu Seollin.
“What book are you looking for?”
Yu Seollin finally looked up from her book and at me.
“I’m looking for a text written by Hua Tuo, the divine physician.”
I looked straight into her eyes, but her expression still didn’t change at all.