Let's Just Say She's Dead (2)
She nodded.
In the end, after all her wavering, she dipped her head and accepted what I had said.
"You're right. But I cannot simply take your word for it, Young Hero. I will grasp the situation in my own way."
It worked.
If things went like this, then whether I saved her or not, Jegal Yeonji would follow her twin sister's trail all the way here. Later, once I talked her around and left nothing but a trace on the bracelet—a hint that she might still be alive—the story could return to the original. And when those bastards finally showed their faces, we might even win on the strength of help no one expected from the Dark Jegal Yeonji.
A crisis is an opportunity, is that it...
Any road would do, so long as it led where I needed to go. Even if the background lore collapsed, as long as the protagonist and the broad frame stayed intact, the novel would unfold the same way. Little by little, I was starting to get a feel for how a person survived in this story.
"Then I will be in your care from now on, Young Hero Yeon."
"Yes. If it's for the sake of protecting someone precious to the Jegal Clan... yes?"
"We have not known each other long, and yet you, Young Hero... you are like someone who has been preparing against them all this time, steadily, without rest. Watching you lay out your plan without a single break in your resolve, I—forgive the impiety—found myself thinking of the wise woman of the Jegal Clan."
If the Dark Jegal Yeonji was comparing me to her own younger sister, that was the highest praise she had to give.
"So from now on, just as you say, I will hide who I am and gather the strength to stand against them beside you. I was fated to die this morning in any case. Use me as you please, Young Hero—like a dog or a horse."
I could guess, more or less, what she was really thinking. It wasn't that she truly believed I was someone extraordinary and meant to follow me with all her heart. I knew about the organization in the shadows, and I had demanded a method with uncanny precision; a little trust, and a great deal more suspicion, had made her want to watch me from close by.
But me? Look a little closer, and I was only someone who had read ahead and was spoiling the plot.
"I'm not that remarkable a person."
"Even so, I believe that if we are to stand against them, we must pool our strength among ourselves."
"......"
It was a headache in more ways than one.
No—actually... if she slips off and causes some other accident behind my back, I won't be able to control it. But if I keep her beside me and watch her, then when the time comes I can leave a trace for the Resourceful Wise Woman, Jegal Yeonji, close enough to the original to reproduce the story. Can't I?
Come to think of it, this was no longer the moment to simply tell her to stay hidden. I had to watch whether she truly stayed hidden, and whether she might secretly tip off her twin and derail the novel entirely.
Ha...
A sigh escaped me first at the sheer hassle of it, and yet if I quietly gathered a force of my own like this, I might be able to build a safer happy ending later on.
"Put that way, it's persuasive."
I slipped the bracelet I had been given back onto her wrist and held out my hand.
"Then I'll be counting on you from now on."
The party had grown, but it didn't feel any different. Aside from touring Sichuan with my junior sister as usual, and the occasional sense of being watched, nothing much had changed—and even those looks were mostly just other people staring at the two of us, a handsome man and a beautiful girl, as we wandered about.
True to a spy, she watched me from a careful distance. She seemed to think that observing from afar would let her judge me more safely and coolly than moving in the open as one of the group.
Suddenly dragging someone along at my side would be a burden for me, too.
And there was one convenient point I hadn't expected. All the fine, worldly details of this place—the sort of thing the original Yeon Cheongha picked up bit by bit while rolling around with courtesans—I could simply call her over and ask. Her skill at hiding and assassination was honestly lacking, but as a spy of the Jegal Clan, said to hold the greatest wisdom and intelligence in the murim, she had a grasp of every kind of information, and she supplied most of what I needed.
Of course, I deliberately don't ask about the protagonist, or how the story is supposed to go.
The month I was originally meant to spend tumbling about with courtesans and protecting them, I was filling just by happily sightseeing through Sichuan with my junior sister. But the hour for the protagonist to appear was drawing near, and without my meaning it, my body was growing tighter by the day.
Today of all days, I feel strange...
Watching the Hao Sect thugs clutch their chests and flee, I could tell at once. Today was the day Yeon Cheongha and the protagonist met for the first time.
So today was that day?
The day Ban Gyuseong and Yeon Cheongha first crossed paths. What would happen if I simply didn't go?
A protagonist and a rival spur each other on, training in competition until both grow stronger. If they passed each other without ever meeting... could the two of them still grow that far? I wanted to ignore it if I could, but an event from the novel was unfolding right before my eyes, as if it were openly telling me to come and see, and I couldn't look away.
"Hoo..."
If I can help it, I don't want my junior sister tangled up in this...
"Junior Sister. Want to head in first?"
"Yes? Has something happened, Senior Brother?"
"Nothing much. I was thinking of having a drink before I go in."
"Shall this girl pour you a cup?"
"Even so, it's too early for my junior sister."
I deliberately treated her like a child and pinched the bridge of her nose. She pushed her lips out in a pout, making her displeasure very plain.
"When you've grown up, we'll have a drink together."
"Senior Brother... by rights, I'm already of marrying age."
By the standards of this world, that was true. By modern standards, she was barely more than a teenager, and only just. Her body was fully grown, but the way she acted was still young, and because I had kept her with me and looked after her all this time, she felt like a cute little sister. Not an adult.
"Say what you like, but to my eyes you're still a young junior sister. I'll only drink a little, so go in and wait."
"Honestly... you won't drink too much, will you?"
"I'll just have a cup with the meal and come back."
Once I put it that way, she stopped insisting and returned to the inn ahead of me.
I don't know how this will turn out, but if the protagonist and Yeon Cheongha clash, I might end up showing her something she shouldn't see...
And if my junior sister charges in and beats the heroine down... there's a real risk she'll smash the protagonist to pieces.
For now, I would slip inside and see how things stood. Honestly, now that I had become the rival, I was curious about the fellow who was supposed to carry this novel as its protagonist. It was ridiculous to feel the itch for a fight with someone whose face I hadn't even seen, but in a way I was a reader of the original too. To claim I had no interest in the protagonist would have been a lie.
The protagonist arrives a step later than the heroine. Should I go ahead and take a seat?
The Hao Sect thugs who had just been beaten would flee and come back with a comrade, a second-rate expert. Naturally they would pick a fight with the heroine, a commotion would break out in the inn, and Yeon Cheongha—drinking himself stupid in a corner—would snarl at the noise and put down every last Hao Sect thug, along with the murim fighters who barged in partway through. Then, seeing the heroine's face as she panicked at a master's sudden intrusion, he would be struck dumb, convinced his junior sister had returned. He would seize her hand, touch her face, and try to pull her toward him, until the protagonist burst in to say she clearly didn't care for it, and a two-against-one spar would begin.
"Just a few simple side dishes..."
"Young Hero, our shop requires that you order wine. We sell the snacks cheap, so there's no profit in them."
I knew perfectly well they could get by on snacks alone, but I had no intention of bickering with the waiter, so I simply ordered the cheapest thing they had: bamboo-leaf wine.
Tch... I told my junior sister I wanted a drink, but I didn't actually mean to drink any.
Still, it would be a waste of the coin, so I might as well have a little. In real history, bamboo-leaf wine was no cheap stuff—medicinal herbs went into it, and the taste ran sweet. This world, though, followed the conventions of an average wuxia novel, which meant bamboo-leaf wine was extremely inexpensive and tasted like it.
"Kkh...!"
To put it plainly, it was just soju. I didn't drink much to begin with, so I couldn't really tell one liquor from another, but if it smelled like soju and tasted like soju, what else was there to call it?
Ugh... disgusting.
Now that I had a murim practitioner's body, there were no hangovers, no aching head after a drink. The bitterness was supposed to fade once the body grew pleasantly buzzed, but since I didn't get drunk easily, all that reached me was a thick, filthy bitter taste.
This won't do. Why should I force down bad liquor when I'm the one paying for it?
In the end I gave up on the bamboo-leaf wine cleanly, corked the bottle again, and settled in at my leisure to wait for what was about to happen.
Crash!
Almost the same moment I set the cup down, the incident began. The first thing the protagonist faced in the murim after finishing his training and coming down the mountain—and the most important thing of all, the start of that stubborn bond with the heroine.
"Boss! It's that bitch!"
"Beaten by a woman, and you run to tattle to your boss. Not a scrap of pride among you, is there?"
"So you're the brazen wench who laid hands on our little brothers?"
Mm-hm. These lines. I knew them well. Honestly, they were so obvious that the first time I read them, my toes curled.
"Pretty little face like that—we'll take the compensation out of your body!"
"Compensation? You sure you don't mean funeral money?"
Crack!
"Gyaaaah!!"
A mere second-rate expert of the Hao Sect was being demolished by the heroine, who had already surpassed first-rate and stood on the verge of the Peak Realm. Hearing that sound, the original had thought this: that he missed his junior sister so badly he was hearing her voice as if she were still alive.
The voice really is similar. It's just that her tone has far more force behind it—the timbre is about the same.
The real Yeon Cheongha, too, had felt the subtle differences every time he looked at the heroine, and suffered for it—so alike his junior sister, and yet not the same.
Clink. Clink.
Boom!
"Kyaa!"
The heroine was supposed to fall into danger at the hands of Hao Sect disciples using some underhanded trick... except that didn't happen.
Something's... different from the original?
At first I had meant only to watch and take the measure of things. The problem now was that the heroine was being driven steadily back toward me.
Should I... help? No, wait—were you always this weak?
I had thought these Hao Sect disciples wouldn't even be a match for her. While I stood there dumbfounded at how fiercely they were fighting, the heroine, shoved back by a hulking Hao Sect expert, climbed onto the very table where I had set my wine.
Tap.
"Ah."
"You little bastard... who the hell are you? Get lost."
I caught the bamboo-leaf wine as it nearly toppled, as naturally as breathing. The Hao Sect men snarled at me to disappear. Everyone else, aside from me and the heroine, had already drawn back in fear. I let out a sigh.
So I get dragged in after all... Originally I was supposed to charge in myself. Since I didn't, the story just bent this way on its own?
Well. If it was going to reproduce the original this far, I had no choice but to play along, at least a little.
"Hoo... A bunch of nobodies, ruining the taste of my wine. If you're going to brawl, couldn't you take it outside where you won't be in the way?"
I put a little weight on my tongue, as if I were slightly drunk, and let the words tangle. Then I dipped a finger in the bamboo-leaf wine and dabbed a touch of it beneath my chin, staging it so I looked like a man who had just risen from his cups. That was how the original went, so I was supposed to fight as if reasonably drunk.
I was about to recreate the first meeting between Yeon Cheongha and the Flowing Flower Sword, Han Soso.
"Who are you? You know these bastards too?"
Her voice was thick with venom, and for an instant it felt like my junior sister putting on an act. A laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it.
"You're laughing at me?!"
"Ah, I'm not laughing, but..."
While I was still denying it, my body answered on its own. I caught the blow Han Soso swung at me in furious threat with a Golden Silk Hand, tore the sword from her grip, and pinned her.
"Let go...!"
She tried to shake me off by sheer strength, but she couldn't overcome Yeon Cheongha's internal energy, and so Han Soso stayed caught. I was stuck in the middle of it, thoroughly inconvenienced, and doing my best to keep my face in order so none of that showed. Force the comparison, and it was similar enough to the original.
Then now... it's the protagonist's turn to appear?
"That will do. The young lady finds this displeasing, does she not?"
Yes. That small voice, packed tight with strength.
I turned my head. Dust clung to hair that hadn't been properly washed, and he was still short, not fully grown. But a man standing on the border between youth and boy stepped into view, eyes burning.
The protagonist of this novel had appeared.