Ai Bie Li Ku — The Pain of Parting from Loved Ones (1)
"What are you talking about?"
She couldn't come with me.
It could have simply meant she wouldn't be departing at the same time, but the sorrowful expression on Hwarin's face made it clear that wasn't what she meant at all.
"Exactly what it sounds like. From now on, I have to stay at the Sichuan Tang Clan."
"Are you sick? Did the Poison Human transformation fail?"
It wasn't as if there were no grounds for suspicion. No visitors allowed, the Medical Pavilion Head's attitude, her sudden visit, the medicine she'd taken that morning, and her strange behavior today — it all added up. What if Hwarin had failed the Poison Human experiment? The worry I'd been pushing to the back of my mind crashed over me all at once.
"No. It succeeded."
Hwarin slowly shook her head, denying my words.
"The Tang Clan won't let a Poison Human out? Or is it a deal — if the Young Clan Head can't survive, you're not allowed to leave either?"
If either were true, I'd run straight to the Tang Clan Head. If that's what you people want, allow me to show you a little Game of Thrones.
"No."
"Then what is it? Why?"
"……"
Hwarin swallowed her words, tightening the corners of her eyes as if struggling to keep her composure.
"Tell me, Hwarin."
"There's a problem with controlling my poison qi."
She bowed her head and forced the painful truth out, as though vomiting it up.
"Poison qi? You mean it goes out of control like last time — you lose consciousness, or your body starts to hurt?"
"There's nothing wrong with my health. It's just that when I'm not in an ordinary state, the poison qi slips out of control."
"Not in an ordinary state?"
When I stared at her, bewildered, Hwarin rose from her seat, put distance between us, raised her hand, and gathered poison qi into her palm so I could see.
"Yeah. The poison in my poison core is so concentrated that when my emotions run too hot to control, the poison qi leaks right out of me."
She added that the poison qi escapes her naturally — the way sweat beads on her skin when she's desperately nervous, or tears well up when she's sad.
"But you didn't become a complete Poison Human?"
Her skin was perfectly clean, after all.
"Right. My current state is what the Sichuan Tang Clan considers a complete Poison Human. Like spirit beasts that carry a poison core, I'm unaffected by the poison in my own body, I can wield poison, and if anything goes wrong physically, I release it naturally — that's the state they mean."
"Wait, you're telling me that is what they call a complete Poison Human?"
Listening to Hwarin, she hadn't become a complete Poison Human at all — she'd become a human spirit beast harboring deadly venom. Could anyone really call that a complete Poison Human? The absurdity of it made me ask again.
She said that if she'd taken her time slowly absorbing only the core of the Thousand-Year Centipede, there would have been no problem. The issue was that the situation had turned desperately urgent, and she'd been forced to absorb the cores of two spirit beasts at once.
With an expression of swallowing down her grief, Hwarin consoled me, saying that surviving this much was nothing short of a miracle.
Hwarin. I'm not the one who needs consoling here. Fine. For an ordinary person, taking in the essence of two deadly poisons — either of which would kill with a single dose — and living to tell about it is, admittedly, a miracle. Everyone would toast to a bittersweet success. But I know the truth.
This is my fault. Once again, my fame points fell short.
If a single core from the Thousand-Year Centipede might have caused no problems, that means two would have been possible if my fame points had been high enough.
In the end, it was my fault that Hwarin couldn't come back to Daseogak.
See? Again, Yoonho Oppa.
The moment Sohee left, promising we'd meet again, flashed before my eyes. Was I fated to endure another parting with no promise of return?
"……Is it my fault?"
The frustration spilled out of me before I could stop it.
I'd believed I could save Hwarin. I believed I had saved her. But in this state, even if it diverged from the original story's ending, if she could never have contact with another person again, wouldn't that simply be a different bad ending?
Famous in a great city like Yichang, renowned even within the Sichuan Tang Clan — shouldn't that grant me the ability to save at least one poor woman with a tragic fate? Just how many fame points does it take to save these women's destinies? If they'd only give me a visible number to track, I wouldn't feel so suffocated.
"Yoonho. That's not it."
Hwarin cut down my muttering with a single decisive stroke of her firm face.
"It's not. If I'd just tried harder……"
What choice should I have made for Hwarin to have gotten a happy ending? Countless what-ifs flashed by, but I couldn't give a confident answer to a single one of them.
Hwarin opened her mouth to me as I stewed in self-reproach.
"Why are you blaming yourself? You did your best, Yoonho. My everyday life is fine now. I can shed my mourning clothes and walk through the market. I can even buy food from street stalls."
"But Hwarin."
Humans are creatures who feel joy, anger, sorrow, and delight.
Sometimes we're happy beyond all restraint. Sometimes we rage past the point of control. We're beings who feel love and pleasure blooming up inside us even when we wish we could deny them.
Could simply being able to face someone bare-faced, with no gloves or veil, really be called living a proper life?
"I know you're worried, but there's a way. In the Tang Clan's secret archives, there's a martial art created specifically for Poison Humans."
"A martial art made for Poison Humans?"
"Yeah. They say that no matter how violently my emotions flare, if I deepen my mastery of it, there won't be any problem. I spent the last three days learning its fundamentals and taking the medicine the Medical Pavilion Head prescribed — that's the only reason I could come out and have fun with you today."
"Then isn't that settled?"
So that was why she'd taken the medicine. If the art and the medicine were enough to let her live a normal life, what was stopping her from leaving for Yichang?
Reading the hope blooming on my face, Hwarin looked at me with a flicker of joy — and then, her face falling into sorrow, she made her confession.
"Yes, they say mastering the Poison Human's art will fix it. So… so, Yoonho… let's break up."
"What are you saying? You just said mastering the art would fix it?!"
Hwarin's declaration of parting, delivered right on the heels of that small hope, stabbed into my chest like a dagger of despair and twisted my heart hollow.
"Because my mastery of the art and the medicine's effects aren't complete yet. I have to stay at the Sichuan Tang Clan."
"So we'll just be apart for a little while."
Being separated temporarily, I could understand. It wasn't as if we were parting because we'd grown to hate each other — so why was she talking about a breakup?
Before I could speak, Hwarin cut me off and pressed on.
"While I train the art. I can't be at your side, Yoonho. I might have to laugh at your side. I might have to grieve. I might not be able to feel joy. I might not even be allowed to be angry."
Hwarin turned her head away, dodging my gaze.
"It's just a short parting. Why are you taking it this hard?"
"It's not short. To achieve mastery it takes… it takes so… so long."
"How long, exactly?"
Decades? It could even be impossible in a lifetime. If so, I could understand her despair.
"Ten years…"
"What?"
"It could take ten whole years…"
I knew it — he's shocked.
Tang Hwarin studied the stunned look on Kang Yoonho's face.
Just as she'd predicted. No matter how deeply two people loved each other, ten years was a cruelly long time.
Most people marry by twenty-five at the latest, after all.
In a world where marriage in the late teens and early twenties was the norm, Yoonho and Tang Hwarin were both twenty-one — twenty-two before long.
Martial artists aged slowly thanks to their inner energy, but even a mere three more years would make them old maids and bachelors in everyone's gossiping eyes.
Yoonho is only going to rise higher from here.
He was a man who would flourish wherever you planted him. On top of that, he carried the renown of managing Daseogak in Yichang and of being Hopil, the author of Wind and Cloud of the Tang Clan.
His single disqualifying flaw as a first-rate suitor was that he was a black-haired man from Joseon — but soon, even that would cease to matter.
And she would have to chain down a man who could command any marriage alliance in the land for the better part of a decade. By thirty-two, most men had three children.
Could she really hold onto him? Kang Yoonho, whose fame would only climb with every passing day? When she couldn't even be certain when she would next step into the world? Tang Hwarin had no confidence at all.
Above all, she could not bear to face whatever look might be in Kang Yoonho's eyes as he gazed at her now.
She sank to the floor and, staring up at the night sky through the great window, began to speak.
"Yoonho. The truth is… I never wanted any of it. Being a member of the Sichuan Tang Clan, being a Poison Human — none of it. All I wanted… all I ever wanted was a friend."
She had wanted a friend. A friend she could open her heart to.
The stars in the sky above her glimmered, faint and distant. Whether it was a star or a friend's hand, some things stayed out of reach no matter how far you stretched toward them.
When even her own reflection made her flinch and recoil, who would ever draw close to her? Nothing so happy could possibly happen to someone like her.
And yet the miracle had come at the moment of her deepest despair.
"I must have been too greedy. I think heaven got angry with me."
Tang Hwarin bowed her head in sorrow, just as she always had, and wrapped her arms around her knees.
A man who appeared like a miracle.
Why did he help her like this? No matter how many times she pushed him away, he reached out and took her hand again. When she was with him, she felt like an ordinary person.
From an unknown country girl in Seonggajang to the Poison Human who carried the hopes of the entire Tang Clan on her shoulders — Yoonho had staked everything to help her through it all.
She had only wanted a friend.
And somewhere along the way, she had come to possess someone more precious to her than anything in the world.
"Does mastering the art really have to take ten whole years?"
Tang Hwarin flinched at the voice of the most precious person in her life, drifting over the top of her bowed head.
"It could be a year. It could be three. They say in the worst case it could be ten."
"I see…"
An unfathomably long span. Tang Hwarin writhed inside at Kang Yoonho's silence.
"I wanted someone precious. And now I can't have one."
The poison qi in her body was so immense that even the Tang Clan had no precedent for it. A short separation would be a mere gust of wind — but a ten-year one was a storm in its own right.
There's nothing left I can give Yoonho.
Binding him for a stretch that might stretch past ten years would be a sin.
He had always, always held her hand. To lean on his kindness, on his love, and give nothing back — to simply cling to him while offering him nothing — that was something she must never do.
She had to let go.
She didn't want to let go.
Why should she have to? He was this precious. She loved him this much.
Tang Hwarin pictured Kang Yoonho's wedding day.
The thought that the place beside him would never be hers burned through her more agonizingly than any poison addiction. But the thought that she herself would be the thing standing in the way of his road forward was even harder to forgive.
And so she had gone out today, one last time.
Fine clothes. Fine things. Delicious food. That was all a pathetic woman like her had left to give.
"Yoonho. Forget someone like me. Find a better woman, and…"
The words tore their way out of Tang Hwarin with a pain worse than her whole body dissolving in poison qi.
Ai Bie Li Ku — the pain of parting from the one you love. However much the separation might wound her, this was her turn to step aside, for the sake of the road ahead of the man she loved.
The hand she had always been holding — this time, she had to be the one to release it.
"Aigoo. You ridiculous woman."
But the man's hand knew nothing of letting go.
"What?"
Tang Hwarin looked up at Kang Yoonho in shock.
"And here I thought you'd caught some terminal illness and I'd never see you again. And you're about to cry over this?"
Kang Yoonho smiled at her — the woman slipping back into despair — as if to say it was nothing at all.
"Get up."
As he always had, he reached his hand out to Tang Hwarin.