Chapter 143
Chapter 143
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Translator: True Detective
Chapter: 143
Chapter Title: Temptation
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‘S-so embarrassing…!’
The woman sitting in thin silk robes in the room where Ja-seong was staying, Jegal Seo-hee, felt like she was dying of shame.
Thanks to the advice from her older sister and aunts, who had gone through this first(?), her lines had come out convincingly enough, but she just couldn’t pull herself together.
And who could blame her? She was currently seducing a man she was seeing for the very first time, dressed in an utterly indecent outfit.
For a virgin who had never even properly held a man’s hand, it was a difficulty level straight out of hell.
She wanted nothing more than to scream and bolt right then and there, but the backlash from that terrified her too much.
-Tonight, you must capture that man. Make him spill all his secrets to you.
Gripping her resolve by recalling her father’s terrifying face and his icy threat, Seo-hee flashed a more seductive smile and urged the man, Ja-seong, onward.
“Come here, quickly now.”
She propped herself up and reached out with both arms.
Doing her best to ignore how her bare skin would be blatantly visible through the sheer silk.
But Ja-seong didn’t approach her easily.
Seo-hee desperately hid her panic and glanced sideways.
At the end of her gaze was an incense burner rising with purple smoke.
‘The Bewitching Incense is definitely spreading, isn’t it?’
The purple Bewitching Incense faintly filling the entire room.
-The moment you inhale this scent, even a gentlemanly man turns into a beast.
According to the maids who had helped her prepare, any man who breathed in that smoke would have his lust boil over, leaving him unable to maintain his reason.
But why?
As Seo-hee floundered in confusion, Ja-seong finally shed his outer robe and slowly approached her.
‘I-it was just a delayed reaction…’
Seo-hee let out a quiet sigh of relief inwardly, but froze as Ja-seong reached right in front of her.
“Ah…!”
Her face paled as she looked up at his shadowed face, its expression obscured.
Realizing too late that this was a situation demanding tension, not relief, she squeezed her eyes shut without thinking.
‘N-no…!’
Seo-hee trembled, imagining the man’s forceful hands.
But what touched her shoulder wasn’t his hand—it was a soft piece of fabric.
“…Huh?”
Opening her tightly shut eyes at the unexpected sensation, Seo-hee discovered Ja-seong’s outer robe draped over her body.
The robe’s owner had vanished from in front of her. Looking around, she spotted Ja-seong’s back as he closed the lid on the incense burner.
“Does this stuff affect you too?”
“Y-yes?”
Dumbfounded by how the situation had veered completely off script, Seo-hee soon understood his question and shook her head.
“N-no. It arouses a man’s lust… Eep.”
She blurted it out before belatedly clamping a hand over her mouth. Ja-seong chuckled softly, sealed the incense burner’s lid, and opened the window.
And then,
-Clap!
Ja-seong clapped his hands sharply once, sending a powerful gust from his palms that blew away every trace of the smoke.
“Ah…!”
Her eyes widened in awe at the astonishing sight, a gasp escaping her lips unbidden.
Staring blankly at Ja-seong, she saw him close the window and turn back to her.
“Eek….”
Ja-seong spoke lowly as Seo-hee reflexively clutched the robe he’d given her to cover herself.
“Don’t let someone else decide your life for you because of their demands. No one has the right to force that on you—not even your parents who gave you life.”
“…….”
His words pierced straight through her heart.
They seemed to see right through her entire situation.
‘Does he… know something?’
Seo-hee looked into Ja-seong’s eyes.
Eyes of unyielding resolve.
Gazing into them, she suddenly felt not shame at her attire, but at her own fragility—at her very life.
Ja-seong turned and left the room without another word, as if he had nothing more to say, watching as Seo-hee cast her eyes down in gloom.
*
Heading back out to the guest hall, I scratched the back of my head and sighed.
“Haa….”
The great mood I’d been in just moments ago, like I could fly to the heavens, had crashed straight to the depths.
I recalled the Jegal Seo-hee I’d just seen.
Her words had flowed out skillfully seductive enough, but her body told a different story.
Her trembling, like leaves in the wind, had clearly revealed her unmasked fear and terror.
Watching her like that made me feel like I was the lecherous fiend, souring my mood completely.
What creeped me out even more was how, if I’d inhaled that purple smoke filling the room, I might really have done something unforgivable.
Good thing my instincts had me block it with Protective Membrane in time—or else… Ugh.
“…I might never have seen Hwa-ryeon’s face again.”
Imagining the irreversible consequences made something bubble up inside me.
No, how could a father order his own daughter to do something like that?
My opinion of the Jegal family head plummeted at his incomprehensible actions.
He might look the part on the outside, but inside, he was utterly rotten.
“Is asking for cooperation even the right move here?”
Even if we were desperate, this felt like crossing a line.
After agonizing over it for a while, I decided I’d talk it over with the group tomorrow and started walking again.
I couldn’t go back to my room, so tonight I’d have to crash in Master’s quarters.
Heading to Master’s guest hall, I soon ran smack into him trudging along.
“…….”
“…….”
What?
Why was Master out here instead of in his room…?
In that moment, an unbelievable—no, unthinkable—hypothesis hit me.
Master was a renowned master with the moniker Brain Flash Sword.
The Jegal family head knew his true identity and had a history of trying to extract seeds from old experts in the past.
So…?
“Nah, no way….”
“…….”
“…For real?”
“Hoo….”
Master’s sigh said it all.
That lunatic Jegal family head had sent a woman to Master’s room too.
“No, is that guy sane? Sending one to an old man who can’t even get it up anymore…!”
“You little shit…! What the hell does that mean?!”
Master exploded at my blurted-out shock, grabbing my collar and shaking me wildly.
I freaked out and held him back as he insisted he was still in his prime and threatened to prove it by dropping his pants.
After a good fifteen minutes of chaos,
We ended up pathetically squatting in a corner.
I sighed deeply, wondering why the hell I was dealing with this in the middle of the night, when Master’s voice came.
“From the looks of it, you went through something similar.”
“Don’t even get me started. They even had this smoke going.”
“Smoke?”
I explained everything in detail, leaving out only the part about Jegal Seo-hee.
Master let out a hollow laugh and shook his head.
“Honestly, even after hearing about the Jade-Faced Seductress, I thought it couldn’t be that bad. But this is worse than I imagined.”
“Yeah.”
Just how many people had sacrificed their lives under the pretext of ‘for the family’?
Wrinkle-faced with this stifling feeling, Master continued.
“It’ll probably get even worse from here. The Jegal family head seems awfully coveting of you and your martial arts.”
“Worse than this? I don’t even want to imagine….”
Another sigh slipped out—I’d lost count of how many.
Master stared at me quietly, then muttered lowly as if to himself.
“Well, there is one surefire solution….”
“Solution? What is it?”
His words perked my ears right up, and I looked at him.
What came next made me doubt my own ears.
“Simple. You stay in So-ju’s room.”
“…Pardon?”
My mind went blank for a second.
What did this guy just say? What was he telling me to do?
So-ju’s room. Meaning Hwa-ryeon’s room… so, like, that kind of thing?
That’s what he meant, right!?
“Are you out of your…?”
“I’m not crazy.”
Master cut me off, his face deadly serious.
Which only made it feel more unsettling—hell, even scary.
“…Why bring this up out of nowhere? You’re giving me chills.”
“Trying to play innocent now? After being so obvious about it all this time.”
“…You knew?”
What, I thought he hadn’t noticed since he never said anything?
But to Master, my reaction seemed utterly ridiculous.
“Of course. You two went from at each other’s throats every day to suddenly acting all meek—how could I not?”
“When did we ever go at each other’s throats… Oh.”
I started protesting the nonsense, then realized he meant back when I’d first joined Heavenly Wind Martial Hall as a kid.
But ‘at each other’s throats’? It wasn’t that bad, was it…?
My memory and Master’s apparently differed.
“Don’t make me laugh. You two snarled like mortal enemies every time you met.”
“I don’t really remember it that way.”
“As if you don’t remember….”
Master snorted at my sly dodge and kept going.
“Especially you. You’d growl whenever you saw So-ju, then one day you started tacking on that weird ‘ju-ju’ ending and grinning like an idiot.”
“That’s… I still do it sometimes. Feels satisfying.”
A tsk-tsk of tongue-clicking answered my oddly defensive excuse.
“What the hell happened back then anyway?”
“…….”
I shut my mouth at Master’s question.
Telling him what went down back then would be awkward in so many ways, right?
So I hurriedly changed the subject.
“Look, even so, moving in together out of the blue is a bit much, isn’t it?”
“You’ve already accepted her sword—now you’re saying that?”
…What? Sword? Where’d that come from?