Tang Hwa-rin, Heroine of the Martial Arts Visual Novel
Just as she had expected.
Tang Hwa-rin studied the troubled look on Kang Yunho's face. Right up until their parting, he must have been doing his utmost to avoid any mention of his childhood friend.
She understood. He was already stretched thin dealing with the crisis of her becoming a Poison Human. With a sorrowful farewell hanging over them, he would not have wanted to drop the problem of his childhood friend into her arms as well.
Yunho always went about with a smiling face, acting as though every problem were his alone to shoulder — don't worry about a thing — but when it came to that childhood friend, Tang Hwa-rin could not bring herself to look away.
Picking open a wound of his right in front of him was wrong. But so was turning her face from a wound she knew was there.
"About that girl. In the end, you never told the Clan Head, did you?"
The failed Poison Human. The Clan Head's illegitimate daughter. Kang Yunho's closest friend. Yunho had buried her very existence so that he could become the Clan Head's false son.
"There was no way I could have told him."
Kang Yunho said it to Tang Hwa-rin with an expression that labored to hide its sorrow.
To keep Tang Hwa-rin alive, Kang Yunho's closest friend had become someone who could never be spoken of to a soul. Better if she could only grieve, only rage about it. Tang Hwa-rin's face darkened with guilt.
"I'm sorry."
She told him, and her face left no doubt that she meant it.
"It couldn't be helped. Don't let it weigh on you."
And you? You're the one who'll be carrying it, aren't you?
Tang Hwa-rin couldn't force the words out.
His face showed nothing at all. But inside, it had to be festering. He was a man who could act. He was probably pretending nothing was wrong purely to comfort her.
If she hadn't raised it herself, he would surely have meant to bury it in some corner of his heart forever.
Kang Yunho's closest friend. Her lover's first love. She had wished, desperately, to stand in that girl's place — but she had never wanted it to end like this.
As much joy as her promise to reunite with Kang Yunho had brought her, the knowledge sat in her chest as an equally enormous guilt.
Right up until yesterday, that is.
So Tang Hwa-rin resolved to confess the experience that had washed that guilt away — an absurd, impossible, miraculous experience.
"I had a dream last night."
"A dream?"
"About a girl. Mischievous, but straight as an arrow when it mattered."
A girl whose face she didn't even know. The kind of girl who, given five years, could make any man's heart race.
It was a face she was certain she had never seen, and yet somehow familiar. It couldn't have been otherwise. Ever since she had met Yunho, this was the person who had always lived in a corner of her mind — worried over, imagined, never forgotten.
"..."
Whether or not he understood who she meant, Kang Yunho's eyes went wide with shock.
As if passing along to him the gaze she had received in that dream, Tang Hwa-rin looked at her lover with tender eyes.
"She told me to say thank you. And she told me not to wear you down the way she did."
In the dream, Tang Hwa-rin had wept openly before her, apologizing over and over. Guilt and indebtedness had pressed down on her, heavy as stone.
Are you so glad to be alive thanks to me? My own father will never know I existed — does that please you? Don't you dare reach for my man. To grow happy off my death — I should curse you for it.
She could have hurled every one of those venomous words. Instead, she had thanked Tang Hwa-rin.
Tang Hwa-rin could not withstand those words.
When she wept, the girl had asked her why she was crying, and smiled as though a weight had lifted. She kept saying thank you, over and over. And because that smile so resembled the lover Tang Hwa-rin had taken from her, she wept all the harder.
"Hwa-rin."
"If, once you're at Daseogak, there's someone you truly want to make your woman — don't turn her away."
"Hwa-rin. I told you already."
Had he taken that to mean, like before, that she was telling him to go marry some other woman? Kang Yunho's voice had turned firm.
"That's not what I'm saying. I'm not telling you to marry another woman."
Tang Hwa-rin declared, chin high, the very picture of prim defiance.
"Then what are you saying?"
"The place beside you is mine. I'm saying I'll permit an empty seat next to it, that's all."
Tang Hwa-rin let out a small laugh as she watched bewilderment spread across Kang Yunho's face.
Had that girl truly been Kang Yunho's childhood friend? Or was it her own guilt that had dreamed her up?
No. It had not been a mere dream. That girl had truly come to her in the night.
Because she, too, would have done exactly the same.
You're telling me not to make things hard for Yunho. Right?
She could understand those words. Yunho had suffered more than ten years after losing her. And now Yunho might suffer ten more, waiting for her.
Thanks to Kang Yunho and to that girl, she was standing here at all — able to rest in his arms and feel his warmth. Having given her own life so that another could have him, all she asked, surely, was that she not make him suffer the same way.
She hated the thought of another woman at his side. But making him suffer — she hated that more.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Kang Yunho asked her, plainly lost.
"Exactly what it sounds like."
And don't think I'll permit just anyone. As Yunho's lover — and standing in that girl's stead — she intended to screen every candidate with merciless rigor.
"These are papers I prepared. Take them."
Tang Hwa-rin held out the documents she had readied.
"A deed of transfer for Daseogak? Hwa-rin, Daseogak is your maternal grandfather's estate."
"I'll be staying at the clan compound for my training. If a dispute over the rights to Daseogak ever turns into a quarrel, you — its manager in name only — could find yourself facing a problem your hands can't touch. You'll need this when that happens. So take it."
"But even so, Hwa-rin."
"In ten years it will be ours anyway — the two of ours. Th-think of it as a small part of the wedding gifts, delivered early."
Tang Hwa-rin said it with her head bowed, cheeks burning.
"W-well. When you put it that way..."
"And one more thing, Yunho."
Tang Hwa-rin lifted her head and looked at Kang Yunho's side.
The place at his side would always be hers. She could yield it for a little while. Even so, she refused to have it taken from her.
And how did one keep a thing from being taken?
By making him think of her, constantly. That was why she was handing over Daseogak. If he worked there rather than drifting off to some other place, he would keep thinking of her. But that alone was not quite enough.
Was there not a saying — that when the body grows distant, the heart follows?
She needed to drive herself deep into his mind.
If she gave him an experience no other woman could ever grant him, then in every such moment to come, he would think of her.
And so...
Tang Hwa-rin swallowed hard, and with great care, slid the cloth down from both her shoulders.
"Hwa-rin?"
His eyes went wide, just as they had that time before. All her past struggles flashed through Tang Hwa-rin's mind. Seriously, the man is hopeless. How many times had she worked up the courage, only to fail every single time? But what she was doing now was not seduction.
She was already Yunho's woman.
What she meant to do now was to brand herself — the woman named Tang Hwa-rin — into his mind, once and for all.
Tang Hwa-rin cast off even the black garment that had stood between him and her.
"Yunho. My chest... do you want to touch it?"
Confronted with the overwhelming sight spread before him, not the faintest thought of declining entered Kang Yunho's mind.
"So he boards the carriage, Eui-gak-ju."
Clan Head Tang Baek-ho spoke to Eui-gak-ju behind him, watching from afar as Kang Yunho climbed into a carriage to leave the Sichuan Tang Clan.
"Yes."
"Isn't it ironic? I cast aside the one I loved for the sake of my family. And that boy is casting aside everything for the one he loves, and leaving."
Giving up even his right to become Young Clan Head, giving up even his chance to be counted among the Tang Clan's direct bloodline — his son was preparing to walk away from the clan.
"You only did what had to be done."
"Which is precisely why the regret remains."
Eui-gak-ju found himself unable to answer for a long while, facing the Clan Head as the man gazed at the carriage with sorrow written across his face.
"Are you certain you don't wish to see him off?"
Eui-gak-ju asked carefully, gauging the grief on the older man's face.
"A father and son have already said everything they can say to one another. How fares the Young Clan Head?"
There had been those who, knowing full well the Clan Head would punish them for it, had foamed at the mouth and torn into Kang Yunho all the same. For the heir's safety, and to spare the Sichuan Tang Clan from strife, this much pain had to be endured.
"Thanks to Hwa-rin's treatment, every trace of poison has been purged from his body, and most of the organs it damaged have recovered as well. After a year or so of quiet convalescence, there should be nothing to keep him from training in the martial arts again."
"That is a relief."
"However, one cause for concern remains."
"A cause for concern?"
"His exposure to the poison was too prolonged. There may be problems where fathering an heir is concerned."
Under the Poison Human Tang Hwa-rin's treatment, most of his organs had been restored. But the man who had poisoned the Young Clan Head was Tang Geohu — a man who had wanted to be Clan Head.
Tang Geohu had poisoned him with meticulous care, ensuring that even were the Young Clan Head to make a full recovery, he would carry grounds for disqualification in any matter of succession.
"Hahh. Did Tang Geohu want this seat that badly?"
The Clan Head let out a long, deep sigh.
"We will have to watch how things develop, but should the question of succession ever arise..."
Eui-gak-ju spoke carefully, thinking of the other heir who might well be riding inside that carriage.
"As long as I draw breath, I have no intention of replacing the Young Clan Head. None whatsoever."
"I have spoken out of turn."
Eui-gak-ju bowed his head at once and lowered himself.
The Clan Head regarded him for a long moment, then turned his gaze back to the carriage beyond the window and spoke quietly — quietly, but loud enough for Eui-gak-ju to hear.
"By our grandsons' day, things may well be different."
"What do you mean?"
"By then, who in the clan would not look upon — if only once — a child born between the complete Poison Human of our Forbidden Garden and my own blood?"
A child born of the Clan Head's illegitimate son and the complete Poison Human. If the Young Clan Head could not carry on the line, anyone in the Sichuan Tang Clan would set their hopes upon that child.
"I will have the escort troops sent along with him remain there permanently."
Eui-gak-ju answered with a smile.
"He'll refuse them for now. But if that boy who is leaving ever needs help — today or twenty years hence — have them give it, whenever he asks. The Council of Elders would not care to see the Tang Clan's direct line severed should the worst come to pass. When that day comes, they won't have a word to say."
"Understood!"
"Come now, old friend. Just because the word pleases you, don't go barking 'Understood!' where it hardly belongs."
Having at last laid to rest the heartbreak they had buried for twenty-odd years, the two men looked upon one another and laughed — simply, as the old friends they were.
"Is something the matter with your hand? If some part of you ails, I'd be glad to take a look."
As I stared blankly down at my hand, one of the Tang Clan's people spoke up in a worried voice.
"There's nothing wrong."
"Is that so? You've been staring at it this whole while, clenching it and opening it again and again — I feared something was wrong."
"I've just had one of the most valuable experiences of my life."
Living really was the right call.
"Pardon?"
"It's one of those things."
I opened the carriage window and gazed out at the Sichuan Tang Clan as it fell away behind us.
It had been a long journey.
The Poison Human, Tang Hwa-rin.
The failed Poison Human — the ruined skin, the woman who would have lived a lifetime in agony and died cursing the world — no longer exists in this world.
All the Tang Clan has now is a Poison Human who will keep training, for the reunion that awaits her.
A success tinged with regret? Or a failure worth cherishing?
However I turned it over, I saw hope. Ours was no longer a parting without promise, but a farewell that carried the promise of reunion.
And still, no matter how I looked at it, the sorrow and the ache of parting would not settle easily.
"I'll have to make an even bigger name for myself."
For a faster reunion with Hwa-rin.
So that I never again let slip a woman who has come into my arms.
Famous enough to save the heroines driven to the brink of their tragic fates.
Time to head back. To Daseogak in Yichang.