The Fake — 4
“Whyyyy is this happening to meee?”
Jegal Hyang clutched her head, trapped in a predicament she had never once wished for.
Was this some sort of cosmic punishment for running away from the fate she was supposed to face, straight out of a novel?
She was passive about everything, and her conversational abilities were beyond hopeless. She'd always assumed she could simply avoid talking to others and live out her days inside the family estate—but now that she'd come of age, the unavoidable had arrived.
“I don't even have any friends my own age. A blind date is way too high a difficulty setting. Sniff...”
Get married, just like that.
Mother. Shouldn't you first check whether your daughter can even hold a conversation with a man? Not every woman is a social goddess like you.
Complaining inwardly did Jegal Hyang no good. No—complaining outwardly would have been a disaster.
She squeezed her eyes shut, imagining her mother—despite never having studied at Shaolin Temple—unleashing lion's roars at her children.
“Anyone I meet is just going to be disappointed in me...”
The Zhuge Clan, the foremost martial family in Hubei Province. Her prospective matches would surely come with expectations.
A lifelong partner. A legitimate wife. A woman to stand beside them. No one would want a broken wooden puppet or a pretty but useless doll standing before them at the altar.
Jegal Hyang painted a picture of her future blind date—a future too horrifying to even imagine.
Her match would certainly be the scion of a distinguished house worthy of the Zhuge Clan, every one of them experienced with women. And hearing she was a daughter of the Zhuge Clan, he would arrive at the meeting brimming with expectation.
'Ah, um, w-well...'
And then she would stammer and fidget, unable to answer a single one of his questions.
'What a boring woman. How could I spend my life with someone like this? A daughter of the Zhuge Clan or not, worthless is worthless.'
Jegal Hyang imagined her future match clicking his tongue and storming out of the meeting.
“Ugyaaaaaah!”
Just thinking about it felt like her heart being torn into ten thousand pieces. It was clearly a situation far beyond her capacity to endure.
“There's no way anyone could love a woman this boring...”
Struggling to soothe the wound she'd just stabbed into her own heart, Jegal Hyang muttered in a deflated voice.
Even if she married, she'd be discarded soon enough. A man who married her for her family name alone would inevitably take a concubine right away.
A blind date was too soon for her. Ten years too soon. No, if she could push it, fifty years too soon. She wanted to argue this, but her mother had been utterly unyielding.
What was she supposed to do?
So Jegal Hyang chose to run away from home again. Not that someone like her was actually capable of running away—but going to her maternal grandfather's house surely counted as a kind of escape, didn't it?
Who could have imagined that fleeing her blind date to her grandfather's house was itself her mother's trap?
Thanks to that, she'd had to stage yet another escape from an estate she barely knew. When someone accidentally tripped the formation designed to split a person's attention, there had been one heart-stopping moment where it seemed she really would be dragged off as she was.
“Thank you, mysterious young master.”
Thank goodness that gentleman with the lovely voice had looked the other way. Jegal Hyang silently wished happiness upon the gentleman whose face she'd never seen but whose voice she remembered fondly.
But her escape didn't last long.
Carefully, she approached the window and looked outside. She was, for all practical purposes, a prisoner.
Letting out a small sigh, she began to recall everything that had happened since she arrived here.
“Well, if it isn't Hyang! It's really you!”
All the trouble had begun the moment she chose her aunt's house in Wuhan as her next escape destination.
No—on reflection, the trouble had probably started the moment she decided to run away in the first place.
“H-hi... hello.”
Her aunt, whom she saw often whenever she came to Wuhan, was one of the few relatives Jegal Hyang could talk to without shrinking away.
“It's been a while.”
Her cousin, however, was not.
“Don't stand out there—come inside.”
When Jegal Hyang greeted her aunt and cousin awkwardly, the two welcomed her warmly.
“What brings you to Wuhan?”
“......”
I ran away from my blind date.
Unable to bring herself to say it, Jegal Hyang simply dropped her head. Because of that, she missed the oh, it's like this again look on her aunt's face.
“Come to think of it, Hyang—you're old enough to marry now, aren't you? How about it? Have you settled on a fiancé?”
“Ah, um, w-well... I had something come up.”
Why is it that whenever adults reunite with you, they go straight for the most painful spot? Truthfully, I don't have a fiancé. I don't even have friends.
Jegal Hyang gave a vague non-answer instead of what she couldn't say.
“Something came up? Oh! The Zhuge Clan does postpone engagements for talented children, doesn't it! You were gifted at painting and calligraphy as a girl. Do you still paint bamboo and plum blossoms? Or poetry?”
“Ah, yes.”
I'm sorry. Worthless me is currently painting unspeakable scenes from a novel I enjoyed.
“Your older sister was famous as a female poet! Why don't you follow her example—submit to some literary society and make a name for yourself?”
“I-I-I do something similar. Anonymously.”
Under a pen name, she would send letters to her favorite author, enclosing her illustrations and thoughts. A while back, she'd even received a letter of thanks.
Because it was anonymous, the letters only barely reached her through the courier station she'd sent them from—but whenever she thought back on that moment, she felt her lips curling into a giddy smile.
A letter of gratitude, received after countless letters sent. Jegal Hyang had locked it away in a safe to keep as a treasure.
“Then could you show me?”
Isn't the small-talk enough? Your face is a welcome one, Auntie, but I'd really like to be shown to my room now. I'm at my limit.
Just as she was thinking this, the bomb dropped.
“What?!”
“Isn't it in the luggage you brought? Show it to your auntie.”
“Ah, th-that's... th-th-th...”
If I show you that, forget marriage—my life will be over. She couldn't bring herself to say it.
“So you can't show your own auntie.”
Jegal Hyang wilted badly under her aunt's openly disappointed expression.
“H-here...”
For someone with catastrophically poor conversational skills, refusing was an impossibly difficult choice. But neither could she hand over an art album containing the paintings that would end her life.
After agonizing, what she pulled from her luggage was a sheet of beautifully written text.
It was a page where she'd copied out her favorite passages, meant as reference for painting scenes from the novel—something she'd had endless time for, always shut up at home.
This will do. I only copied the magnificent scenes, after all. My life won't end over this.
“This is Dangga Pungun?!”
Her choice hadn't been a bad one.
The tragic twist was that the person sitting beside them happened to be Heo Song—owner of a bookstore that had been gathering nothing but flies lately.
“Dangga Pungun? You mean that novel you wanted to publish? Wait a moment! You said Hyang writes anonymously?! Good heavens?! Then Hyang is—she's Hopil?!”
Her aunt's eyes went round as saucers as she stared at Jegal Hyang.
“What? No, that's not—”
“Hopil... Of course. That's why she used that pen name—because of the silver hair!”
Silver hair, a hair color common among people of foreign lands. Unlike black hair, it wasn't a color that invited discrimination—plenty of reason to write under a pen name like Hopil.
Heo Song wore the expression of a man struck by revelation.
“My son's sharp too! Of course. If a daughter of the Zhuge Clan were writing an erotic romance, she'd naturally hide her identity!”
“N-no, no, that's not it at all.”
“What do you mean, not! Your auntie knows everything! A woman writing an erotic romance would be embarrassed, that's all! But hiding something like that from your own family? Unforgivable!”
“Wait—is this the original manuscript of Dangga Pungun?! Mother!”
Jegal Hyang could only gape as Heo Song held up her hand-copied manuscript of Dangga Pungun and called for his mother like a man seizing his one great opportunity.
What kind of absurd misunderstanding is this?
I have to clear this up.
“Song-ah! Look at that! There's no use crying over spilled milk. Hyang! Will you help your auntie out?”
But before she could deny it again, her aunt had seized her hands.
“Yes?”
“You like staying home anyway, don't you, Hyang? Stay comfortably at your auntie's house for a while. Your cousin and I will handle the rest.”
“No, I-I really didn't—”
“Yes, yes, I know you didn't. I'll tell everyone else it isn't true!”
“I'll keep your secret too.”
“N-no, that's not what I—”
Jegal Hyang denied it as desperately as she could, but it was hopeless.
The reclusive author Hopil. The revelation that her true identity was a daughter of the Zhuge Clan. And her own disastrous conversational ability. Layered together, the misunderstanding showed no intention of untangling.
In the end, the situation spiraled far beyond anything Jegal Hyang could manage on her own.
“What do I doooo. Why won't anyone believe meeeee.”
Truthfully, it wasn't the fault of Jegal Hyang, now crumpling her pretty face in self-reproach. Anyone else would have been believed.
People, faced with greed, believe only what they want to believe.
The succession trial for Mangeum Hall. An ambitious heir—met with a bookstore where only flies gathered. And the arrival of Dangga Pungun and Hopil, which could resurrect it.
No matter what she said, that mother and son were never going to believe her. The stakes riding on Mangeum Hall were simply too enormous.
“Miss Hyang. Don't you talk to yourself an awful lot?”
“Well, she is supposedly Author Hopil. They say creative types mutter to themselves all the time.”
The murmurs of the maids outside drifted in through Jegal Hyang's ears.
“Noooo. I just talk to myself because I'm alone and there's no one to offend with my muttering, that's alllll.”
Jegal Hyang offered her meek rebuttal to the voices outside. Naturally, since being overheard would be a disaster, she muttered just loudly enough for herself alone—very much in character for her.
Was it my fault, somehow? How do you speak to people who won't believe you no matter what you say? Jegal Hyang pulled a tearful face at her brush, ink, and paper.
“What an inconvenience I've caused Author Hopil...”
She needed to write a letter of apology, and quickly. She dipped her brush into the ink and fell into thought.
How should I write something like this?
Dear Author Hopil. Please come and kill me...
No. That's not it at all.
What kind of nerve would it take to send such a horrifying letter? He might suffer such a shock that he could abandon writing his famous work at Daseogak altogether.
Better to resolve this situation first, then send a proper letter to Author Hopil.
But—
“It's not easyyyyy.”
Jegal Hyang wailed, her face a crumpled mess.
The heirship of Mangeum Hall hung on this trial. Which meant that if she insisted she wasn't Hopil, her cousin would fail the examination—wasn't that how it worked?
An inconvenience to Author Hopil, yes. But could she really ruin her own cousin's life?
For the introverted Jegal Hyang, whose conversational skills were wanting, being forced to choose was sheer agony.
Brow furrowed in that pretty face of hers, she agonized and agonized until she finally arrived at a conclusion.
“I should order food first.”
To find the courage to speak, she first needed to fill her stomach.
Eager to make use of the latest innovation, Jegal Hyang took out the homing pigeon from the corner of the room—the giosugu.
Delivery food, by courier pigeon.
Everything about being in Wuhan had been difficult, but this one thing was a blessing. Whoever had come up with this idea—how, and why?
She knew all too well how excruciating it was to order at an inn. Why did the world force people weak at conversation to order their own food?
Now, before even entering an inn, she could decide her order in her head and speak before the attendant even asked. When the delivery man arrived, she only had to say, just leave it there. Hand over exact change, no tip, no receiving change—and not a single word of conversation was necessary.
Truly, a modern invention made for Jegal Hyang.
“Your jajangmyeon is here. And some fried dumplings as well.”
The delivery man arrived with remarkable speed, as though he'd been waiting for the order.
“Huh?”
She'd only ordered jajangmyeon.
An unexpected variable had appeared. What to do? What should she say? She'd only included enough money for the noodles.
Should she say she hadn't ordered the dumplings? No—could she have ordered them without realizing? But what if she had ordered them? Then should she eat the dumplings? She wasn't that hungry. But the delivery man had made the trip, and...
Faced with this variable, Jegal Hyang's conversational nausea was already beginning to churn.
Watching her, the man smiled and spoke.
“The dumplings are a complimentary gift from a friend.”
“Yes?”
There was something familiar about the man's voice.
“How disappointing. To fail to recognize the voice of your dearest friend.”
The man tossed down before her the bamboo hat that had covered most of his face and hair.
A man with black hair? No. A dangerously handsome face—one she couldn't dare meet by accident.
“Ah, um, w-who...”
I don't have any friends, though.
This was the worst. The man had clearly mistaken her for someone else. Her worst possible match. Even as she retreated, a friendly energy kept pressing closer.
Jegal Hyang, avoiding the man's gaze, barely squeezed out a question.
“Impossible. That the great Hopil could fail to recognize the face of her one and only dearest friend.”
Hopil?
Dearest friend?
Black hair?
“Ah!”
The man who had introduced Dangga Pungun to the world. The benefactor who had staked his life for his friend Hopil. The manager of Daseogak.
A single man's name flashed through Jegal Hyang's mind.
The moment Kang Yunho met her eyes, he stood before the frozen fake Hopil—Jegal Hyang—wearing the smile of a hunter gazing with satisfaction at trapped prey.
“So you do recognize me now. Well met, Hopil. Kang Yunho of Daseogak, at your service.”