The Fake — 3
Author Hopil is a woman?
Inside the mansion she had slipped into, Lim Hayeon could barely contain her shock as she studied the figure visible through the window.
At first, she had simply assumed it was the fake author, just as Kang Yunho had said. She had even teased him about it a moment ago, complaining under her breath — but no matter what anyone said, Author Hopil was supposed to be Kang Yunho's closest friend.
Yet the moment she'd infiltrated the estate, something had felt off.
The person being guarded by warriors who called them Author Hopil was a woman. As soon as Lim Hayeon confirmed that fact, her mind began to spin in complicated circles.
Everyone knew Author Hopil as a man.
If it were a fake, they would surely have put a man forward. But a woman? Unless... unless this wasn't a fake at all, but the real Author Hopil?
Lim Hayeon returned, shock still clinging to her, wearing an oddly sour expression, and asked Kang Yunho.
"The author Hopil is a woman?"
"A woman with silver hair. The kind of silver hair that's common in foreign lands."
That was another reason Lim Hayeon had come to suspect the woman in the mansion was Hopil.
Silver hair was rare in the Central Plains but common abroad. What if that was why the author's pen name was Hopil — the "foreign brush"? And what if Kang Yunho and Hopil, both foreigners, had hit it off and become close friends because of it?
If the woman she'd seen really was Author Hopil, everything fit together far too neatly.
"Silver hair? Surely not... Did you happen to catch a name?"
Why aren't you denying it? Lim Hayeon clenched her teeth without realizing it at the look on Kang Yunho's face — the look of a man who had just thought of something.
"Miss Hyang. That's what I heard them call her."
"Miss Hyang? As I suspected... I was right."
What do you mean, 'as I suspected'? Is it really Author Hopil?
Something was boiling up in her chest. Lim Hayeon clenched her fist, hiding her emotions so the man before her wouldn't notice.
Could she really be Author Hopil?
Though she grumbled at Kang Yunho about being a tyrannical merchant, Lim Hayeon by now knew his famous anecdotes better than anyone.
One such tale — the one that best defined the Kang Yunho she knew — came to her mind.
Kang Yunho of Daseogak risked his life in Hopil's stead, taken away to the Tang Clan.
Risking his life? Short of the legendary friendships recorded in ancient history, that was an act even sworn brothers would hesitate to perform.
And yet.
What if the truth was—
What if that act hadn't been done for a friend, but for a lover?
As Lim Hayeon turned over the realization she'd made at the mansion, an invisible thorn pricked at her heart. Her head went cold. Every nerve that the thorn had jabbed seemed to converge there.
When had I felt something like this before? Ah, right. When he treated me so strangely coldly while being so kind to Ha Soso.
"I don't know what misunderstanding you've fallen into, but that woman is not Hopil."
Kang Yunho dismissed her reasoning in a firm voice.
"You're only pretending you don't know because she IS the author, aren't you? Even her hair color is the kind common in foreign lands."
"Silver hair is a color seen now and then even in the Central Plains. Why — there's a famous family known for their silver hair, is there not? The Zhuge Clan."
"You're saying the person I saw belonged to the Zhuge Clan?"
Kang Yunho nodded at her question.
"That's right. The maternal granddaughter of the Mangeum Lord — Jegal Hyang, they call her. The day I visited the Mangeum Lord's estate, there was an uproar about her running away from home, so I know her face."
"The Mangeum Lord's granddaughter is impersonating Author Hopil? Why?"
"How would I know? But at least we've got a lead. Truly, thank you."
Kang Yunho rose from his seat and bowed his head courteously to Lim Hayeon.
"What's gotten into you all of a sudden?"
Flustered by this uncharacteristic gesture, Lim Hayeon waved it off with an embarrassed hand.
"I keep thinking that without Miss Hayeon, I'd never have managed to navigate all of this. Thank you, every time."
And I don't know how I'd have managed without you, either. With the thought that rose in her chest, the last lingering sliver of doubt flew clean away.
Of course it couldn't be true.
She'd suspected him for nothing. No — she couldn't even understand why she'd doubted him at all. Why had she suddenly felt so strange?
"It's nothing. I just threw a needless tantrum."
Lim Hayeon smiled brightly, her face like that of someone who'd just had a painful thorn cleanly plucked out.
So this is what it feels like to face a forced gender-swap crisis.
Slap a title like Author of the Beautiful-Girl Rouge Chronicles on me and I might shoot to fame overnight, but I had no intention of inflating my reputation stat that way.
"It's good that we've found out who the fake Hopil is, but the problem is we have to prove it in front of everyone... Wait, you're back already?"
I asked Lim Hayeon, who was wearing a strange, unreadable smile.
"That man Heo Song's house. It's nearby."
"Ah, I see."
No wonder it was quick. Still, Jegal Hyang was the fake Hopil? What a coincidence.
That old codger. Calling her a passive, introverted child.
The woman hiding in that box at the Mangeum Lord's estate must have been Jegal Hyang. I had already pieced it together, recalling our brief encounter that day.
But really — what kind of passive, introverted person pulls off a scam this brazen? And with the real Hopil living right nearby, no less.
Hold on. The fake Hopil lives nearby?
I opened the drawer beside me and rifled through the papers.
"What are you doing?"
"Solving the fake Hopil problem."
If my hunch was right, there was a way to settle this.
"You're going to write a formal letter to the Sichuan Tang Clan?"
"Even if I send word to where the Tang Clan resides and they send help, it'll take well over a month or two to arrive."
Before I could even finish debating whether to ask for help, the sheer physical distance was already a problem.
Besides, our opponent was just one bookstore in Wuhan. Better to handle this on my own turf.
"Then what will you do?"
"First, I have to meet the fake Hopil."
Thanks to Lim Hayeon, I now knew there was a fake — but I still needed a process for confronting her face to face.
Because that way, I could declare her a fake officially.
"You're going to meet her?"
"Judging by the personality everyone's described, she's hardly the type to impersonate Hopil on purpose. And they say she was apparently abducted. Meeting her first to find out what's going on costs us nothing."
The Mangeum Lord, the estate's Chief Steward, the warriors guarding Jegal Hyang — the way they all bicker and squabble. Even if only ten percent of the personality they described was accurate, the odds were high this was no woman who'd plot something so audacious.
Even if she HAD impersonated Hopil deliberately, it wouldn't matter. Once we met face to face, I could use Jegal Hyang as my trump card.
If she'd truly been abducted, then someone had dared to kidnap a daughter of the Zhuge Clan — grounds enough to bring Mangeum Seogo crashing down.
And if it turned out she really had impersonated the fake Hopil, even better. I could march straight to the Mangeum Lord and declare this entire matchmaking arrangement null and void.
And while I was at it, I could have a word with Jeon Gilsan about nudging me up the succession ladder.
"How do you plan to meet her? Kidnap her?"
This girl says the most reckless things. Our opponent was the youngest daughter of the Zhuge Clan, for heaven's sake.
"With my current lightness skill, infiltrating that estate is beyond me."
I'd have to abduct her myself.
"Breaking through her guards would be impossible."
Right — I've gotten faster lately, but overreaching into the realm of true experts is still too much, I suppose.
Not that it mattered.
"Then I suppose I'll have to walk in boldly through the front gate and bring her out."
"What? How?"
There's a way.
After rummaging through the drawer for a good while, I held up what I'd found for Lim Hayeon to see.
"We have an admission ticket, don't we?"
What I'd pulled out was a record of courier usage — delivery orders flowing to and from Heo Song's estate countless times a day.
The mansion where Heo Song, the Mangeum Lord's maternal grandson, resided.
A figure in the guest chamber cracked the window open slightly, saw that the guards were still keeping watch, and let out a small sigh.
The figure in the guest chamber — the woman — closed the window and stood before the desk.
A beauty with silver hair and blue eyes. Some might have mistaken her, at a glance, for a beauty from a foreign land.
But that silver hair was proof of the Zhuge Clan's true bloodline, passed down from the clan's ancestor Zhuge Gongming and Lady Huang, the foreign woman who had been his wife.
With a figure as elegant as the season's first snowfall at midnight, and a face that had not yet fully shed its girlishness, anyone could have sworn she was destined to become one of the most celebrated beauties in Hubei.
Her name was Jegal Hyang.
Youngest daughter of the Zhuge Clan's patriarch. The family's treasured jewel. A woman cherished and doted upon by her parents, raised as carefully as a hothouse flower.
Yet for all that careful nurturing, there was one problem that troubled even her parents. A problem born precisely of raising her too preciously.
She was, by nature, introverted.
A timid child who loved books and loved to draw, she shrank from meeting people.
It wasn't any illness, nor any particular affliction. She was simply shy.
Whenever the household held an event, she would habitually push it off onto her older siblings and slink quietly away.
When an occasion arose that required meeting people, she chose to lock herself in her room; when someone came looking for her, she perfected the arts of hiding and fleeing so they could never find her again.
In the end, the girl who preferred shutters and silence to the company of others — the girl who could flee a blind date faster than she could sit through one —
"After running, and running, and running some more! Before I knew it, I'd become the fake Author Hopil! Waaaaaaaaah!"
A visage as pristine as first snow that no one had trodden at midnight.
With an expression so blank it betrayed no trace of that beautiful face, Jegal Hyang screamed into the night.