The Pain of Parting from Loved Ones - 2
Up to ten years, just for training.
And here I'd thought I'd never see her again, lost to her cultivation forever. When in truth this was a span that could shrink as much as my renown grew.
"Don't mope—up you get, Hwarin."
Just as she had that time before, Hwarin had sunk down where she stood, disappointed in herself. I took her hand and drew her back to her feet.
Whether she had become a complete Poison Human of the Sichuan Tang Clan's Forbidden Garden, or grown beautiful enough to be called the greatest beauty in all Sichuan, there was no way her heart would change overnight—so I suppose this was only natural.
Before she ever met me, Hwarin had endured some ten years of Poison Human experiments—scorn, discrimination, pain—until her self-esteem crawled along the floor.
She used to hide what was inside behind a hedgehog's bristling front, but the moment something bent her spirit, she would plunge straight into negativity and self-loathing and sink right down with it.
Living with me all this while, I'd believed she had improved enormously. But it seemed that to Hwarin, this news was exactly the kind that made her want to crumple up the way she used to.
Hwarin rose holding my hand, yet she would not meet my eyes—apparently she had no intention of taking back what she'd said about us parting.
"You're really ending things over something this trivial?"
Well then, I'll simply have to change her mind.
"Trivial, you say?"
There—now she turns to look at me.
Only when I brushed off her reason for leaving as nothing did Hwarin finally lift her narrowed eyes and glare at me.
I understood her thinking, truly. Even in Korea, clear into the eighties and nineties, anyone still unmarried past thirty got branded a spinster or an old bachelor.
Even in the films, dramas, and comics of a few decades back, dashing "confirmed bachelor" leads often turned out to be shy of thirty, while heroines still in their twenties were routinely saddled with the old-maid label.
And the world I lived in now was a wuxia visual novel, no less. Hadn't the very first thing that happened to me upon falling into this world been a wedding at twenty?
Martial artists have their training to see to and age slowly, so some do marry a little late—but late only ever meant the mid-twenties at the outside.
For Hwarin to ask me to wait until she was thirty-one was, in modern terms, like a couple who fell in love at twenty doing long distance and then reuniting to wed in their forties.
In her mind, asking that of me had to seem crueler than simply saying goodbye.
"Of course it's trivial."
I have to shrink her worry down to nothing. I answered her with an easy smile, as if it were nothing at all.
"How could it be trivial, when it means you and I can't be together?"
Because next to everything we had already survived, it was.
"Hwarin. Like the day we first met—isn't there hope that you can still be cured?"
I know her pain. I remember her face when people recoiled in horror, convinced she carried a plague; the way she kept ducking her head, again and again.
How overjoyed she'd been when I appeared and the pain stopped. How we had rejoiced together when the blotches faded from her face.
"No. I can be cured."
"Then is it mortal danger, like on our journey to the Sichuan Tang Clan?"
The Tang Clan's people descending on us out of nowhere, the life-or-death road to Sichuan, the dread of walking into the tiger's den to face the tiger, the appearance of Tang Geohu and the Demonic Cult, the battles and the chase where one wrong step would have ended our travels for good.
"No. I just have to train hard, that's all."
"Or is it that we don't know each other's true feelings?"
"Absolutely not."
"Then it really is trivial."
I said it with a small snort.
"Ten whole years! I'm supposed to train for ten years!"
Hwarin cried out at me, her face twisted with anguish, as though lodging a formal protest.
"So what is it, Hwarin—planning to let your love cool off over ten years apart?"
"As if I would! I— I love you this much, and you think—!"
Hwarin's face went white with shock as she roundly denied it.
This is a world where even hidden weapons come with curveballs—isn't firing a dead-straight fastball a bit much? Still, hearing it from Hwarin's own lips felt pretty good.
"Then what exactly is the problem?"
I asked her as though I couldn't follow at all.
At that, Hwarin dipped her head a little, dodging my gaze, and answered in a pained voice.
"Ten years, Yunho. It's madness. You'll just forget about someone like me, meet a wonderful woman, court her, marry her, have children with her, be happy... be hap—"
Hwarin never finished. The tears came pouring down.
"Hwarin. Don't say things you don't mean."
When I reached out to gather her in, she slapped my hand away and, eyes brimming, dropped her bombshell.
"I... until I've mastered every last technique, I won't even be able to m-make a baby with you, Yunho!"
"Well, that IS rather a big deal..."
Oops. Her bombshell had rattled me, and my tongue slipped for an instant.
"See?! Sob— WAAAAAH!"
Whether my words were the finishing blow or not, Hwarin burst into full, wounded-animal wailing, the very picture of a soul wronged by the whole world.
"Hold on—Hwarin. Did becoming a Poison Human do something to your body? Like—well—did it stop your monthly cycles, that sort of thing?"
"No, it did not! Then how do you think I was ever born!"
Why are you snapping at me mid-sob? What a relief, though. In some wuxia worlds, infertility comes standard with the Poison Human package—apparently not this one.
"Then what is it? It's not a big deal at all, is it."
Hwarin, that is not what I meant.
Kang Yunho had called it a big deal on the question of heirs, not on the question of nighttime activities. That wasn't actually true, but to soothe her sorrow I said it with a perfectly composed face.
"You really said it was a big deal because of that?"
Whether my gambit had landed or not, Hwarin peered at me through tear-soaked eyes, doubtful.
"I did. So what exactly is the big deal, then?"
Kang Yunho is sweetly naive and knows nothing at all. An author of steamy wuxia serials, yes—but practice? He knows nothing of practice. I gazed back at her, the picture of bafflement.
"B-because it feels good, with you! And then things get all, all heated, and. I've heard people say you go soaring clear to heaven. No—I mean! I don't know, honestly!"
If anything, she was the one caught out; face blazing scarlet, she answered, drowning in her own embarrassment.
"Pfft. Hahaha."
Adorable. Simply adorable, Hwarin.
"D-don't laugh! This is really, really important!!!"
"Fine, fine. Stop crying and come here."
I spread my arms wide and made a place for her against my chest.
"But it really is important, though..."
Like a small animal trembling with unease, Hwarin crept carefully into my arms.
"It isn't."
I pulled her firmly against me and patted her back, gently, until her trembling finally stilled.
"Hwarin."
"Hm?"
Feeling Kang Yunho's hands resting firm on her shoulders, where the trembling had at last gone quiet, Tang Hwarin lifted her head.
"There's something you've got completely wrong."
What on earth could she have gotten wrong? Countless thoughts raced through Tang Hwarin's mind, none of them willing to be caught.
"Like what?"
"Why am I yours? You're mine."
Kang Yunho said it with a roguish grin.
"What?"
"I told you mine earlier, so this time it's your turn. Hwarin—whose woman are you?"
"Ugh."
This man.
Was this payback for the way she'd shrieked about how embarrassing it all was when he told her what had happened at the Council of Elders?
Of course it had been embarrassing—but she'd shrieked because she was happy, because she was overjoyed, because he'd been so impossibly magnificent. Tang Hwarin gave him a faintly aggrieved look.
"Hm? Too shy?"
"No! No! I'm... Yunho's woman."
The instant Kang Yunho let a touch of feigned disappointment into his voice, the answer sprang from her lips.
I am Yunho's woman. Saying it had mortified her—yet once the words were out, something warm seemed to fill her chest until it overflowed.
Kang Yunho met her eyes, his face gone serious, and spoke.
"That's right. You're my woman, Hwarin. And for this woman of mine, I have staked my very life."
"So what."
Tang Hwarin mounted a token resistance, but her face was already a breath away from surrender.
Between the warmth flooding her chest and the hope that this man would never give her up, it was growing very hard to keep the corners of her mouth from climbing.
To raise the girl who had once collapsed into despair, to leave her with certainty, Kang Yunho made her one final promise.
Tang Hwarin stared at him for a long moment with astonished eyes; then, heart swelling past bearing, she bowed her head and murmured.
"You have a genuinely alarming talent for making the things people agonize over seem like nothing at all."
"Hey. Was that an insult?"
"It was a compliment, so take it as one!"
Sometimes I honestly can't tell whether this man is perceptive or just shameless.
"You'll truly wait for me?"
Had she misheard? Even knowing perfectly well that she hadn't, Tang Hwarin wanted to hear it one more time, and asked as she looked at him.
"Yeah. I'll wait."
"If I train with everything I have, it might be shorter—but it truly could take all ten years."
"Won't time fly while you're buried in your writing?"
At his words—tossed off as though ten whole years were a trifle—Tang Hwarin's heart surged.
"Th-then you won't... ever stray?"
"Uh...? Ye—yes."
Kang Yunho had meant to answer at once, but thoughts of the heroines he had met—and the ones still waiting to be met—dragged the word out of him before he could stop it.
"And what, exactly, was that hesitation?"
Tang Hwarin was not the sort to let that slip past.
"Ack! No, that's not it—Hwarin!"
Kang Yunho scrambled for an excuse, but none was needed—Tang Hwarin's face was already brimming over with laughter.
She let her grumbling fall away and simply gazed at the face of the man she loved.
How could she resent a man who meant to wait ten years for her? How could she possibly not love him?
Happiness spilled from eyes that had finally stopped weeping. And happiness, they say, doubles when it is shared.
Before either of them knew it—after all the weeping and the snapping and the laughing—their faces had drawn near.
Lips that had once drifted apart came close again.
As if untying a knot only to bind it tighter, the pink thread between them was knotted fast once more.
More stubbornly, more clingingly, as though neither had any intention of ever letting go.
Inside the carriage bound for the Sichuan Tang Clan.
Even after the pink knot came undone, their hands knew nothing of parting.
However fervently you wish the day would never come, time comes all the same.
So that I could return to Daseogak without Hwarin, I set about gathering everything the Tang Clan had to teach and everything worth carrying home.
Hwarin threw herself into her training under the tutelage of the clan's masters, and in the cracks between lessons, tended the young Clan Head who lay stricken by Tang Geohu's poison.
Before long, word arrived that Hwarin had succeeded in waking him.
And then, at last, the day of parting from Hwarin came.