I Never Expected the Plot to Turn This Way
Fortunately his body was absurdly sturdy, and the internal method he had learned was a shoddy thing. Even after the accident of his energy reversing on him in a qi backlash, the internal injury had not gone deep. There was no need to pour a great store of power into him, nor to keep channeling qi through his acupoints afterward. The internal arts that wuxia novels so casually label third-rate and second-rate have no trick for swelling one's energy in a hurry, so the climb is slow—but they gather orthodox, untainted martial power, and I doubted they would leave any other side effects behind.
His qi and blood feel a little different, though... Is the protagonist's constitution just special?
The flow of the meridians under my hands was not quite the same as what I felt when I circulated my own.
"That's enough."
"......"
I had not tended him for long, and yet Ban Gyuseong had already recovered to the point of circulating his qi on his own.
That body of his is disgustingly tough. No wonder he survived getting rolled like that.
Only after I had confirmed that he was properly regulating his qi and blood did I put some distance between us.
Is it because he's still young? Even his skin is nice.
A soft sensation lingered on my palm and left me oddly unsettled, so I scrubbed my hand against the wall until the feeling was gone.
The immediate business is finished, at least...
From beyond the door, my junior sister carefully let a thread of her presence slip free. If I had come back to myself, that was my cue to notice it and come out.
"Ha... the real problem starts now."
I glanced once at Ban Gyuseong, still sunk in his circulation, and stepped out into the corridor where she was waiting.
The latch gave a low creak. Just in case, I shut the door properly behind me—and there was Han Soso, massaging the wrist I had pinned, with my junior sister fidgeting anxiously at her side.
Seeing them like this, they really do look alike.
The resemblance was close enough that I might have taken them for identical twins.
"Senior brother. Is your hand all right?"
"You. What are you, exactly?"
Their manners of speech could not have been more different, and even the tone of their voices diverged. If either of them ever tried to imitate the other, I suspected a person could be fooled without the slightest chance of noticing—and yet their expressions and their way of talking were so wildly unlike that telling them apart was immediate.
By rights, this meeting shouldn't be happening at all.
In the original, Yeon Cheongha and Ban Gyuseong collide, Cheongha drops unconscious on the spot, and the courtesans haul him back to the pleasure house where he has been staying so he can recover from his internal injuries. He and Han Soso are not meant to meet again until much later. Only when the Resourceful Wise Woman's scheme drags him out as bait and he is on the verge of death does she make her dazzling entrance, apologize for having mistaken him, drunk, for someone she knew, and so begin their bond. There was no avoiding it now.
Nothing to be done about it, but still...
"My name is Yeon Cheongha."
"Hmph! Fight me again. You and I still don't have a result."
"......Ha."
I had known she hated losing, but I had already spent myself treating Ban Gyuseong, and I had no wish to raise a hand a second time.
"...We only collided in the middle of a mess. Let us simply let it pass."
"If a grudge could be settled with words, the world would be a good deal more peaceful than it is. Fight me properly, with no outside variables."
For an instant I thought I felt a stinging killing intent at my back, and then Han Soso quietly closed her mouth.
Hm? There was no one behind me but my junior sister. No killing intent should have come flying... Am I imagining things?
"Hmph... how dare you. A cute little brat, scowling at me?"
Their faces were alike, and their temperaments could not have been less so. Fortunately Han Soso's head seemed to have cooled; she made no further show of drawing her sword and only grumbled with her mouth, so I eased my junior sister a suitable distance away and headed off a needless clash.
"Now that I think of it—were you hurt anywhere?"
In the original I was only supposed to knock her sword aside. Ban Gyuseong would have rushed in just before I subdued her, and she should have walked away without any real injury. He had burst in a beat too late, I had pinned Han Soso myself, and I had bent her wrist in the process. The injury was one I had never meant to give her.
"As if someone of your level could injure me."
She was bluffing, but the print of my hand stood out clear on hers. Had it been anyone else I would have ignored it. A face so like my junior sister's, hiding a hurt behind empty bravado, left me guilty in spite of myself, and I could not quite look away. People in this world recovered from ordinary injuries quickly enough, but that did nothing for the pain they felt while healing.
"If you're unhurt, that's a relief."
She said it didn't hurt, so all was well. Demanding a treatment fee now that her wrist ached would have been easy enough—Han Soso was not short of money—but before I got tangled in any further nuisance, I meant to take my junior sister and run.
"Then I'll be going!"
"Wait, you—"
Before Han Soso could get the rest of it out, I had my junior sister in tow and we were clear of the inn.
What am I supposed to tell her?
The question chased me all the way back to our lodgings, and it was still there when we stepped awkwardly into the room together. I turned over answer after answer in case she asked, but she never did. She did not ask why I had done it, or what had happened. We shared the room in a silence so stiff that my chest grew tight with it, and in the end I was the one who spoke first, offering an apology to my junior sister where she sat on the bed with her eyes closed, as if deep in circulation.
"Huu... I'm sorry, junior sister."
"......"
She could not have failed to hear me simply because she was circulating her qi. If she truly were, a wash of snow-white energy would have been spilling from her, turning that beautiful black hair a shining white. She was only breathing slowly, giving me room to set my thoughts in order.
"If I explain why I—"
"Senior brother."
"Yeah?"
"You're hiding something from me, aren't you?"
The question went straight to the heart of it, and the words clogged in my throat.
"......Ah."
The original Yeon Cheongha had his reasons. He had lost every member of the family he loved most, and he had lost the junior sister who was the only person he had ever kept close to his heart. Unlike me, he had nothing left to lose, and so he threw his body around without care until he became entangled with the protagonists. But I still had my junior sister. When the clash unfolded as it had in the original, I had disappointed her as a matter of course.
"Are you disappointed?"
"......A little."
Only after she had said it did she open her eyes again, rise, and come to me.
"Senior Brother Yeon."
"Yeah."
"Please don't drink from now on."
"Ah. I'll... try."
In the original, too, Yeon Cheongha comes to his senses after taking a beating from Ban Gyuseong and gives up wine.
And I never liked the stuff to begin with...
I had been strong-armed into a single cup. Truly, just one. I had left the rest of the bamboo-leaf green wine in Ban Gyuseong's room. He would drink it, wouldn't he? What a waste.
"Then that's enough."
"You're not going to ask anything else?"
"No. People are capable of doing bad things, after all."
With that she leaned her face in close and whispered, low enough that only I could hear.
"But from now on, don't do it to anyone else. Do you understand?"
"Mm... I can't promise for certain, but I'll try not to be a burden on other people from here on, junior sister."
There were still messes waiting for me down the road. I would have to keep them from her, or else settle them gently.
"That isn't what I mean."
All at once a faint light began to spill through her hair.
"......Hm?"
"Even if a situation you can't avoid comes along, you must not lay a hand on them the way you did today. You understand?"
"Uuuhm...?"
Had she heard that I stroked Han Soso's face, and was she upset over it? I wasn't even sure the moment had been unavoidable, though from my junior sister's side of things she might well have decided I had been drunk and helpless to stop myself.
"A good deed or a bad one, you may do either to this Seolhwa, but not to any other woman. You absolutely must not. All right?"
Why would I ever do something bad to her? She was precious enough that a lifetime of doing only good by her would still fall short.
"No pretending you didn't hear. You're giving me your word."
Ah... she's got the wrong idea.
She seemed to think I had shown an interest in Han Soso and that this whole mess had come of it, and she was jealous. The way a little sister wails and fumes when her brother finds a girl and starts going out—we had grown up like blood siblings, and the notion that I might be looking at another woman had left her anxious.
"Aigoo... all right, junior sister. I understand."
Only then did the stiffness leave her face, and she gave me the bright little smile she always wore.
"Then sleep well, senior brother."
"Yeah. You sleep well too."
And so a thoroughly exhausting day drew to a close.
I barely clawed my way back to my senses, and only because my junior sister rose early, finished the Lesser Heavenly Circuit, and woke me.
"Are you all right, senior brother?"
"I'm fine... urgh."
"Honestly, why do you drink when you don't even like it..."
If I told her I had been forced into it, she was entirely capable of marching downstairs to take the matter up with the waiter, so I let it pass with an awkward smile.
"Wait just a moment. I'll fetch you some honey water, at least."
She hurried off in quick little steps to order it, and I was left alone in the room.
That Yeon Cheongha... his head for liquor is pathetic. One cup, and I'm like this.
I began to circulate my qi and draw my internal energy up, and the alcohol still lingering in my body steamed away. Heat climbed through me as if I were being boiled alive in a sauna. Until now the only person I had to measure myself against was my junior sister, so I hadn't known—but the clash with Ban Gyuseong had made it plain. I was growing far faster than the strength the novel's plot had ever assigned me.
Internal energy like this... have I already climbed back to the level of attainment from the training period, well along in the story?
It was only natural, if I thought about it. The original Yeon Cheongha had spent a year nursing his master, and the moment he descended the mountain he had taken to drink and ruined his body. For more than a year he never trained, and he did every last thing that eats away at one's martial arts. I had never once stopped honing mine alongside my junior sister. Far from deteriorating, I had only grown stronger.
Am I stronger than I ought to be?
In the original he begins with skill enough to overwhelm the protagonist, Ban Gyuseong, only to lose his composure at the sight of Han Soso and suffer defeat. After that he holds a narrow edge—close to the protagonist, never quite able to beat him—and swallows the humiliation reserved for a typical rival. Only at the very end does he call on the Pure Heart Glazed Art, outshine the protagonist, and win the admission that yes, Yeon Cheongha, you are the stronger. And then he promptly dies.
But I've already wrecked Ban Gyuseong at the starting line. I have no idea how the plot is supposed to roll from here.
Stopping the shadow organization's invasion of the Central Plains required Ban Gyuseong. His righteous chivalry was what drew together a murim split by politics and profit, gathered the scattered second Wulin Alliance, and carried the fight to the hidden faction. If the protagonist never stepped forward, the result would be...
Knock, knock, knock.
"Young hero. I have something to tell you."
Yeonji—the shadow of Jegal Yeonji—stepped in, dressed as an inn attendant.
For a second I thought she really was the waiter.
Her face was unmistakably that of Jegal Yeonji, one of the Seven Phoenixes, so she was a remarkable beauty. Expression and disguise dulled the effect, and in her own way she was...
"Also, the young lady you quarreled with yesterday is searching for where you are staying. Shall I spread false information, or cut her off, so she cannot find you?"
Han Soso is coming after me?
In the original, Ban Gyuseong asks everywhere after the vanished Yeon Cheongha, and the women of the pleasure house lie that they have never seen such a man, hiding him and putting off the reunion.
The plot has diverged far too much. Ban Gyuseong is probably too hurt to come himself, and Han Soso is searching in his place.
"Yes. I'd be grateful if you hid the information."
"Understood."
Even as she said it, Yeonji turned her clothes inside out and began to powder her face. A moment ago she had been a slender attendant. Now, before my eyes, she became a courtesan overflowing with allure, and I could scarcely believe it even while watching it happen.
More to the point, there's a man standing right here, and she's flinging her clothes off...
The setting was probably that her training as a spy had led her to cast her femininity aside. It bothered me all the same.
"I will leak false information to the woman in men's dress and send her elsewhere."
I had my doubts that Han Soso had been dressed as a man, but her temperament and her bearing were pure tomboy, so I let it pass. If it was fate, that one and I would meet again. For the time being, we were rivals.