I Have to Live First
They say possession is all the rage these days.
A writer who was doing perfectly well, then tossed the ending together on a whim, gets punished by becoming an extra who dies off in the very novel they wrote. Or a reader who got so furious they fired off a long complaint email is suddenly sucked inside.
So what does that make me?
I wasn't someone who wrote novels, and I wasn't the sort of reader who sent passionate emails or left walls of comments either.
If anything, I hardly commented at all. I was the type who quietly left a recommendation and moved on. What was I supposed to do if someone glanced at my account and asked, "You read stuff like that?"
"Ha... I genuinely cannot believe this."
And if I had to be possessed into something, they could at least have dropped me into a novel I was actually enjoying. Why this one, stranded in such an awkward place? It wasn't even my favorite.
Be that as it may, I am currently possessed into the world of a wuxia novel.
The man I'm inhabiting is Yeon Cheongha, more or less the protagonist's rival. If the hero is the hardworking sort who looks at only one woman and, in the end, "has no choice" but to keep three wives and four concubines and live happily ever after, then I am the genius who chases pleasure, never puts in the effort, and comes with a defective personality.
As a character, he is the rake every woman falls for—the one who exists to make the hero's uprightness shine, and to throw the heroines' unwavering devotion into relief when they refuse to be swayed by the other, comparatively superior rivals.
Beneath that, of course, lies the rest of the role. Unable to forget his first love, a fellow disciple and junior martial sister whose body was far too frail, he wanders the world, and in the end stakes his life to protect the heroine because she resembles that sister, dying in the arms of the hero and the heroine both.
This is pretty ominous.
In short, he dies young.
I only read it when I had time to spare, so the details are fuzzy... Wasn't the whole point that his constitution gathers inner energy on its own, and that he uses some half-baked, derivative martial art of his own making?
That, of course, was only because every time he unfolded his master's arts he couldn't bear the memory of his sickly junior sister. And when he finally protects the heroine, he recalls that sister and unleashes the whole of his true martial arts. There was a rather splendid scene like that.
If he'd just used them like a normal person, he wouldn't have had to die, would he?
And now that I think about it, the body I'm in is still young. This isn't the stage where he's deep in his pleasures, wagging his tail at one woman after another.
Right now I seem to be in the middle of training under my master... If the junior sister doesn't die in the first place, then the trauma and all the rest of it shouldn't be a problem, should they?
If things go that way, the rival character falls apart and I probably ruin the novel somehow. So what?
Novel or whatever else—I have to survive first.