The Contract - 2
A matchmaking meeting. For him. Kang Yunho. With Jegal Hyang.
Why? How? The echo of an unresolved question reverberated through Lim Hayeon's frozen mind.
"You're... joking, right?"
Whenever the atmosphere turned stiff, he sometimes tossed out a joke to make people laugh. Surely this was a joke too. That was the clumsy conclusion Lim Hayeon reached.
"It's the truth. The Mangeum Lord proposed it himself."
She would have preferred it to be a joke. Her clumsy conclusion was demolished just as quickly as it had been constructed.
"Why would—why would the Mangeum Lord arrange a matchmaking meeting for you?"
Lim Hayeon's voice trembled despite herself.
"I suppose he took quite a liking to me."
"These days, when the rich take a liking to someone, they steal their property and set them up on blind dates?"
"That's exactly my point. He said a man can't run a business without a woman to support him, and offered to arrange the meeting."
"A woman to support you? Why would you not have—"
That's what I've been doing, isn't it? Lim Hayeon barely stopped the words from bursting out, and stared at him with trembling eyes.
A woman who supports him. In other words, a wife.
Since she was to be the one denied, one question inevitably flashed through her mind.
What exactly were she and Kang Yunho to each other?
Was what she did for him 'supporting' him? No—were they even at that stage yet, for it to count as support? He held her up, and she held his hand. Or was she simply leaning on his kindness? And yet she'd believed she was actually helping him.
The news of Kang Yunho's matchmaking meeting threw Lim Hayeon's heart into instant disarray.
"Miss?"
"So you just listened quietly, said 'understood,' and came back?"
Lim Hayeon barely masked her confusion behind his voice.
How could this man so nonchalantly talk about attending a matchmaking meeting right in front of her? A flicker of indignation rose at his obliviousness.
"If I refuse because I dislike one meeting, how am I supposed to protect Daseogak and Miss Hayeon?"
Faced with Kang Yunho's gaze, so full of care for her, Lim Hayeon found herself swallowing a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.
This man, really.
He had a habit of saying the most disarming things at the strangest moments.
"I know that, but..."
He was attending a meeting he didn't want, for her sake. Lim Hayeon suddenly felt ashamed of the moment she had resented him.
"I'll go, since the Mangeum Lord insists, but there's no chance it'll go well anyway. I'm a black-haired barbarian, and she's the youngest daughter of the great Zhuge Clan."
Kang Yunho dismissed the very possibility with utter ease.
"......"
"To get through this trial, I have no choice but to play my best hand on the Mangeum Lord's board."
You're not going to play your best at the matchmaking meeting, are you? Lim Hayeon couldn't bring herself to ask.
By luck, he might actually become the Zhuge Clan's son-in-law. Yet even in a situation like that, his eyes were fixed on her.
"All right. I'll trust you."
On the verge of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, Lim Hayeon nodded, struggling to keep her expression in check.
Spring days had slipped past, and the nights in Wuhan were growing warmer by the day.
Unable to sleep, Lim Hayeon rose from her bed and opened the window.
"There's no chance it'll go well anyway."
He had said it so carelessly, but her heart was anything but careless about it. Lying in bed, she found that—strangely—the thought of him attending a matchmaking meeting made it impossible to close her eyes.
The great Zhuge Clan.
A martial family that could trade blows with the Sichuan Tang Clan or the Namgung Clan. People of a house so proud that even the loftiest orthodox sects dared not treat them lightly.
And Kang Yunho was to meet the clan head's youngest daughter at a matchmaking meeting.
No chance it'll go well. On one side, a despised foreigner; on the other, the youngest daughter of a noble house. The gap was far too wide.
And yet...
Lim Hayeon squeezed her eyes shut and pictured the man she had watched all this time—Kang Yunho. If, just if, the Zhuge Clan were the kind of people who judged a person rather than a hair color...
She shook her head hard, left and right, to shake off the anxiety, then stood before the full-length mirror.
"He likes me. ...There's no chance it'll go well."
The treasure of Usan Gyobang.
A beauty who believed she had never once lost to anyone in her life—silky pink hair, a voluptuous figure, and a lower body honed by lightness training that she took no small pride in.
It was no accident that he had fallen for her. This was the man who saw her face every single day. What woman could possibly appear before his eyes and matter?
— If I refuse because I dislike one meeting, how am I supposed to protect Daseogak and Miss Hayeon?
Lim Hayeon soothed her anxious heart with the words Kang Yunho had said, then lay back down and tried to sleep.
No chance it'll go well.
It won't work out.
It can't work out with the Zhuge Clan head's youngest daughter.
"...But what if it does?"
In the end, Lim Hayeon could not fall asleep easily.
The Mangeum Estate.
"Heeheeheeh."
A silver-haired beauty was failing utterly to contain a giggling fit that ill-befitted her stunning looks.
"Miss Hyang, you seem a little off. Are you feeling unwell somewhere?"
"Perhaps the incident left you in shock. Should we call for a physician?"
Outside the closed door, Jegal Hyang could hear the maids whispering, but she paid them no mind.
No, it's nothing like that.
A so-called genius utterly incapable of holding a single conversation with another person. A halfwit who couldn't even meet the eyes of someone she'd just met.
And she—a woman who surely had no appeal to men whatsoever—
"I've become a woman who's had a confession made to her, oooh!"
Overjoyed beyond all measure, Jegal Hyang bounced around the spacious, empty room.
— Would you do me the honor of courting me?
A distance close enough to feel each other's breath. The man had looked down at her with a gentle smile as he confessed. A face exotic and yet impossible to look away from. Jegal Hyang's heart hadn't just hammered—it had nearly leapt out of her chest.
"Heehee. Even just remembering it, the scene was like a painting."
Whenever she recalled that moment, it was hard to calm her racing heart.
"A confession. This is proof that I'm an attractive woman, isn't it. Heeheehee."
Her heart had pounded so hard in that instant that her memory seemed to contain a few small errors—but that didn't matter. What mattered was that Young Master Kang had confessed, and she had accepted.
"Ack! My shin! Heeheeeeh!"
Jegal Hyang attempted a dance she had no business attempting and cracked her shin against the table, but it didn't matter. The joy of having received a man's confession ruled her body far more than the pain did.
"Young Master Kang. Kang Yunho, Young Master."
Even working a rhyme into it, she murmured the name of her matchmaking partner over and over.
The ache in her shin hadn't faded, but so what. Clutching her bruised leg, she replayed, yet again, what had happened at her maternal cousin's estate—the scene she had already replayed hundreds of times.
Herself, plunged into dire, desperate peril.
And the man who had stormed into the heart of enemy territory, black hair flying, gallantly come to rescue her.
"Heeheeheeh."
And when she'd been surrounded by warriors—what then? He had moved to protect her safety before his own, without a moment's hesitation.
On top of that, with sheer logic and force of spirit, he had subdued all those warriors at once, and even her aunt, who hadn't listened to a single word anyone said.
It was like her very favorite novel. A man who would stake his very life on a woman's peril.
Wasn't he just like Dang Jeong from Dangga Pungun?
"Now that I've received a confession too... eh?"
Rolling back and forth across the room, Jegal Hyang replayed the confession scene for perhaps the hundredth time before sensing something was off.
What was it?
Rolling. That's now. No—she had rolled. Where? In the confession scene.
"Ack!"
The lazy donkey's roll—nareutagon.
Only now did Jegal Hyang remember what she had done at the moment she accepted his confession.
"Uwaaaaah! I did something mortifying right in front of Young Master Kang, oooooh!"
What was a lazy donkey's roll, if not the shame of all martial artists? The single most undignified movement a person could make.
And she was Young Master Kang's matchmaking partner. He had personally witnessed his prospective bride scramble away across the floor like an unruly child.
During a confession, no less!
To have shown him such a disgraceful display. He must have thought she had not a single ounce of feminine charm.
"Now that I think about it, I never even properly apologized for the impersonation mess, oooooh."
She had caused Daseogak enormous damage. Author Hopil must be bitterly disappointed in her. Because of her, Daseogak had even been on the verge of being taken away.
— Would you enter a contract courtship with me?
"Come to think of it, it wasn't courtship at all—he said he'd never court me, ooooh!"
To Young Master Kang, she was nothing but a walking pile of bad impressions, a walking nuisance. And wasn't she just a pitiable woman forced into a matchmaking meeting because of her grandfather, whether he liked it or not?
"Uwaaahhh. Wah! Waaah!"
I want to die. I deserve to die. He had no feelings for her at all, and she had gone and gotten the wrong idea all on her own. Jegal Hyang pounded her head against a pillar, utterly unable to contain her shame.
What flower field had she been strolling through, exactly?
There was no way she had become a popular woman.
"Miss! Why do you keep banging your head against the pillar?!"
A startled maid flung the door open and rushed in.
"I... I can't face Young Master Kang. It's too embarrassing."
"Your matchmaking partner?"
"Yeeees."
"I don't know what happened, but don't you worry. The next time you meet him, I have a way to make sure you have nothing to be embarrassed about."
"Huh? There's a way to do that?"
Could it be—some secret method of all the popular women that she herself had never known?
"Bring it in here, quickly!"
"Yes!"
"Th... this is?"
What the maids brought in were mountains of clothing—hundreds of garments or more.
"You must look lovely when you go to your matchmaking meeting, of course. We'll start today figuring out which outfit suits you best. Let's try them on one by one!"
"Ah, I, um, IIIIII prefer comfortable clothes, oooooh."
Ones you could get ink on without a care. Baggy. Easy to change into by yourself. Those kinds of clothes. Cold sweat broke out along the back of Jegal Hyang's neck before she knew it.
"Oh my, this one's pretty."
Every garment the maids sighed over was billowy and fluttering and swishing. Clothes from a world entirely apart from her own, just to look at them.
"I... I have to run away..."
"Miss! In all my long years as a maid, I have never once seen a beauty as worth dressing up as you! Steel yourself, starting today!"
"Hnnnngh."
Jegal Hyang despised wearing fluttery finery—but refusing was harder still.
"Is that child Jegal Hyang being readied properly?"
Strolling through his garden as always, the Mangeum Lord posed the question to the Chief Steward who attended him.
"Yes, my lord. This time I shall take every precaution, not only with her attire but with the guards as well."
"Good. See that there are no mistakes."
His runaway granddaughter had returned. The Chief Steward, a loyal servant who had attended the Mangeum Lord for many long years, read his master's exceptionally good mood and spoke up.
"Truly astonishing. Who could have imagined that Miss Jegal Hyang would run away rather than attend a matchmaking meeting, only to return declaring she would attend one after seeing Young Master Kang?"
"She takes after her mother. When it came to judging men, she was the best of all my daughters."
The Mangeum Lord chuckled softly, recalling the day his daughter Jang Yeongyeong had married.
Gifted as she was, she had been a wild tomboy with an unbending temper, driving teacher after teacher to despair.
She had rejected every suitor outright, to their faces, declaring none of them worthy of a second glance—and more than once soured the heart of his late wife in the process.
And then the one man that girl declared she would marry no matter what: a man of the Zhuge Clan who wasn't even the heir at the time.
The sight of his daughter demurely transforming into the perfect woman before that man remained, even after all these years, one of the few memories that had ever made the great Mangeum Lord himself yield ground.
"So that is how remarkable Young Master Kang appears even in Miss Jegal Hyang's eyes. I confess I never imagined he would storm Master Heo's estate alone, without your aid, my lord."
"Heheheh. That surprised me too. I assumed he'd come groveling at my feet, of course."
The Mangeum Lord knew perfectly well how events had unfolded.
He had set the trial—and the boy had wielded the Mangeum name with ease, borrowed the reputation of others, and published a book he himself had banned, all without permission.
Worse, fully aware he might be seen through, he had cunningly used his own maternal cousin as a smokescreen for escape. A scatterbrained grandson, certainly—but had he forgotten who it was that set the trial before him?
Ordinarily, grandson or no, he would have delivered a thunderous scolding and reclaimed the promissory note given as the trial's stake.
The only reason the Lord had left things be was that he judged that if Kang Yunho came to beg, and since Jegal Hyang bore no true fault, he could just as easily seat the two of them at a matchmaking table.
"They say he subdued dozens of armed men through sheer force of spirit alone and led Miss Jegal Hyang out by the hand. Hearing it, I am reminded, my lord, of the tale of your own youth—how you stormed a Black Path gang's den, heedless of naked blades, all to collect a debt."
"Heheh. I was young then. And I had a friend I could trust my back to."
A distant memory. The Mangeum Lord recalled the face of a friend surnamed Baek, who had followed him in his youth declaring he could not stand by and watch him die alone.
"Young Master Kang went further, you see—he roped in Young Master Jeon Gilsan and made certain that not a single copy of Dangga Pungun would be sold again."
The Mangeum Lord laughed silently to himself, picturing Kang Yunho's latest exploits as the Chief Steward laid them out.
He was resolving the trial far beyond anything the Lord himself had envisioned.
Winning over as an ally the grandson who had tormented him twice as an enemy, then turning that strength against a new adversary—it was a method that no ordinary martial artist, bound by grudges and old scores, could ever have managed.
It was the mindset of a merchant born and bred.
That the person caught in the boy's machinations happened to be his own granddaughter mattered little; the Lord was delighted all the same.
After all—what was the problem, if he simply made the boy family?
"He's earned his praise. See that the matchmaking meeting is prepared swiftly—before that child Jegal Hyang changes her mind."
"This time, I shall prepare it thoroughly, down to the last detail."
The Mangeum Lord gave no answer to the Chief Steward's words, but gazed in silence toward the western sky.
He knew his own years were flowing away like a river in spate, soon to be gone.
His form might differ—but that spirit of his, so like the one he and his friend had once shared, was a flame that needed a young man to carry it forward.