Letter - 1
Every so often, the memories you can never forget come creeping back to visit you.
The bitter cold on college entrance exam day. Getting into the university I'd wanted. The morning after reporting to basic training. The day I realized that every single person who'd sworn I'd finally land a girlfriend if I just got into a good school had been lying through their teeth. Memories like those.
Where am I?
A landscape drowning in blooming pink blossoms. The moment I opened my eyes, it resembled one particular day.
In the distance stood a woman, her back to me. Who could it be? As words I never chose slipped out of my mouth, the woman turned to look back.
Ah...
There she stood — the woman I could never forget.
The woman who, even knowing she was walking straight toward catastrophe, made me want to lose myself just gazing at her the instant my concentration slipped.
Moyong Sang-ah.
The woman bound to me as husband and wife stared at me as if startled.
Is this a dream?
It wasn't that the scene was too beautiful to be real. It was that her beauty was too dreamlike. In this world, nothing could be more real than that woman's beauty — and yet hers was the most dreamlike face of all.
A memory I could never forget.
Perhaps this was my memory of the wedding, rearranged and played back for me.
I was myself, and yet I did not move as I willed. It felt like watching a film shot in first person, alone. In the dream, I said something to the woman.
The world broke apart.
The dream broke apart.
"Husband...!"
The woman's cry rang out, anguished, echoing on and on.
Huh? What—?!
A prelude to waking? As though my consciousness were being pulled somewhere, my body became mine again. The woman who had seemed so far away was suddenly near enough to touch.
A face that looked ready to crumple at any moment.
The tear that met my hand was scalding hot and ice cold all at once.
Like me on that day — the day my true heart spilled out before I could stop it. As though she would fall to pieces unless someone held her up.
"...!"
The promised catastrophe would come all the same.
The parting I had lived through would find me once more.
Those were the only words I could offer the woman in my dream.
"What kind of dream was that?"
I woke with a jolt, a strangled cry escaping me as my eyes snapped open.
Dreams were supposed to be random, sure — but for Moyong Sang-ah to appear in my sleep, of all people?
The sun had yet to rise. I needed more sleep. I forced myself to drift off again, but her tear-streaked face kept flickering behind my eyelids.
"Moyong Sang-ah..."
If someone asked me to name the greatest crisis moments of my life, my wedding night would top the list without a fight.
And not merely because my neck had been on the line.
Every plan I had prepared to survive had been clicking into place one after another — and Moyong Sang-ah's kiss hit hard enough to blast every last one of them clean out of my head.
"Even recalling it now, her beauty is simply absurd."
Had I not clung to my wits and acted desperately for my life, I would have lost my soul on the spot.
"And here I'd been trying so hard to forget..."
Somewhere along the way, quite a few women had staked their claims with kisses, but the first woman to plant her flag was not so easily forgotten.
The first woman ever to kiss me. And in my dream, that woman had been weeping.
A bitter feeling slipped out with the words. Where she was concerned, neither my thoughts nor my mouth moved easily.
Entangling myself with the Moyong Clan would do me no good. The treason affair would trail me like a label nailed to my back.
If word spread that I was alive, Moyong Bi would make a run for my neck that very day — and the standing Moyong Sang-ah had built while shouldering her infamous name could vanish in a heartbeat.
Once I was famous, we would meet naturally enough — but she was also a woman I could only ever reach by becoming famous.
"Famous it is, then."
Famous enough that neither Joseon nor the Moyong Clan could be touched carelessly.
I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.
"Guild Master! Sleep well last night?"
When I came down to the first floor of the inn, Chef An greeted me with a hale and hearty face.
"I honestly couldn't tell you when I fell asleep in the middle of work."
My eyes, steeped in fatigue, would barely stay open as I slumped into the nearest empty seat.
Why was my body this heavy? I had certainly slept. I felt like I'd just returned from some long journey. Had the weariness piled up that much?
"You're plainly worn to the bone. That's why I keep telling you — go home and sleep."
"I've been playing far too hard lately, that's the problem."
It had been fun, right up until the day Lady Ha Yeon left — but I hadn't expected the bill to come due like this.
It was like jetting off on a week of overseas travel while everyone else held down the office, then walking back in to face the reality piled up on my desk.
"With your good lady gone off like that, the burden on you can't be light."
"She said there was somewhere she had to go with my father-in-law, so what can I do? All that's left is for me to work twice as hard in her place."
I felt like the owner of a shop with fewer than five employees who'd just lost his indispensable ace. With Lady Ha Yeon gone — the woman who had shouldered every last petty chore — I hadn't realized how vast the hole she left behind would be.
Lady Jegal still helped where she could, but anything involving business partners, anything that had to be done face-to-face, left her floundering — so my workload had no choice but to balloon.
The boss at my old company, meanwhile, traded in his car every year and lived it up on golf courses and playgrounds no matter how many of us got fired or quit.
Me? A boss in name only — what I'd really become was a salaried man whose quitting time was never guaranteed.
"There, there — chin up. What will you have to eat?"
Chef An clicked his tongue in sympathy as he asked.
"I'm afraid nothing appeals to me this morning."
"If you say so. You look drained, though — I'll set something light before you."
"Really, it's fine."
"Aigoo! Rice is a Joseon man's strength! Rice!"
As the old man's insistent voice rang through the inn, the other Joseon folk on the first floor turned worried eyes my way.
Our Guild Master. Works himself ragged without so much as a bite to eat. We're scared he'll make himself ill. If the Master goes down, the Joseon Hometown Association goes down with him. Better he eats than that strangers come prowling around on account of some rumor.
Too weary to raise my head, I gave a small nod.
"Then let's keep it simple — a bowl of gukbap, please."
"Aigoo?! Gukbap, he says! A Guild Master looking this drained deserves far better than that! Wait right there!"
Chef An bustled straight into the kitchen, pulled something out, and set to work, knife rattling with brisk purpose.
A hastily scooped bowl of rice would have been plenty for me. But between the sounds of something hard cracking and being sliced, and him prodding the kitchen hands into a trot, it seemed the old man intended to prepare something grand.
"Here you are!"
Chef An presented me with the food, tray and all.
Huh? This is...?
"What... exactly is this?"
It was something I'd seen plenty of times before.
On the tray he set down before me, in a single large wooden bowl, sat a dish I knew all too well.
"What else! Food that gives you a tiger's vigor! Cereal!!!"
The dish was cereal.
"T-tiger's vigor?"
Fine, the food I could accept — but how did he know the slogan? When I stared at him open-mouthed, Chef An folded both arms as if to say you don't know this? and declared:
"Do young folk these days not know their old tales anymore? The story of the tiger that ate nothing but mugwort and garlic, I mean."
"You mean the Dangun myth?"
"The old brute grew sick to death of the fierce bite of mugwort and garlic, and the very first thing he sought once he came out of that cave was this cereal. Just as a whale takes seaweed soup after calving, so the tiger ate his fill of this cereal and won back his tiger's vigor. So the tale goes."
"I see. Of course..."
Wow. So the traditional dish the tiger ate in the Dangun myth was cereal all along. Right. Sure. A deep sigh welled up from somewhere in my gut.
"You don't believe a word of it, I can see it. Why else would it be called cereal? The tiger's soul gathers within every bite, they say — so they called it surreal — and in time, surreal became cereal."
What manner of naming scheme is that? Thanks to him, my drowsiness bolted wide awake.
"Thank you for the meal."
Startled as I was by the cereal's sudden appearance, I bore the stuff no ill will. Back in my old life, a quick bowl of cereal had been my standard grab-and-go before work.
I brought my spoon to the bowl the cereal had left behind. Whether it truly held a tiger's vigor I couldn't say — but far more care had gone into it than I'd expected.
It wasn't just cereal, either — there were nuts in it, and fruit like banana besides: a proper, honest-to-goodness cereal, the kind you only ever saw in commercials.
This is actually pretty good?
Tiger's vigor, I couldn't vouch for. Still, for a man running on empty, it made a perfect breakfast.
"I'm home."
After calling on the flagship store, the franchise branch, Daseogak, and every business partner in between, I made it back to the manor to find the sun already slouching toward the horizon.
"Young Master Kang. A visitor is waiting for you."
"A visitor?"
Who would be calling on me? As far as business went, I'd seen everyone there was to see today — there shouldn't have been anyone left over.
The maid hurried to me with quick little steps and led the way to the guest room.
"Ah! Young Master Kang! There you are at last!"
"Branch Manager of the Western Sichuan Escort Agency? What brings a man as busy as yourself all the way here?"
This was the last guest I'd expected. The visitor was none other than the manager of the Western Sichuan Escort Agency's Wuhan branch.
"I've come to offer you an apology."
The manager said, avoiding my eyes as though the words themselves embarrassed him.
"An apology? And you came in person? Don't tell me a consignment has gone missing."
Surely the cargo hadn't been stolen again.
"Not at all. Thanks to you, Young Master Kang, our escort runs haven't had a single problem of late."
The manager waved both hands as if to banish the very thought.
"Then what is this about?"
"It appears there was a mix-up concerning deliveries addressed to you, Young Master Kang, and to the author Hopil."
"A delivery mix-up between me and Hopil?"
The branch manager was one of the precious few who knew I was Hopil. For even him to insist on speaking of Hopil and me as two separate men, there had to be a reason.
"As you well know, the author Hopil's fame spreads by the day, and letters addressed to him have been pouring into Yichang of late."
"Yes. I'm aware."
"And I hear that, being as busy as you are these days, you gave orders that every such letter be kept in storage at Yichang."
"That's right. But would you care to explain what that has to do with the reason for your visit?"
Back in Yichang, reading my fan letters had been one of my small pleasures, but Wuhan kept me so busy that I had long since stopped reading them.
Still — what did that have to do with an apology?
"Well... it seems it led to some confusion in our communications with one another."
The manager pressed on, wearing a troubled expression.
"A confusion in communications?"
Now I was more baffled than ever.
"I'm told you once sent a letter through the Wushan branch of the Western Sichuan Escort Agency."
"The Wushan branch...?"
Had I ever sent a letter from Wushan — not from Yichang, not from Wuhan, but Wushan? Wushan was where I'd met Lady Ha Yeon.
Huh? Just as something began to surface from a corner of my memory — a corner half-forgotten in the rush of daily life — the manager went on.
"Of all things, the letter bore not your name, Young Master — only the signature 'Zhiyu.' Taken at face value, it could only mean a friend made of paper, a friendship bound through books — so I'm afraid the branch took it for a letter addressed to the author Hopil."
"'Zhiyu'? ...Of course."
A violent jolt, like a hammer to the back of the skull, shook me head to toe.
There was only one person in this world for whom I had ever signed the name Zhiyu.
"I apologize for the delay. Here — the letter from the Mount Hua Sect."
The original protagonist.
More than half a year had passed — and now, at last, a letter from the original protagonist had reached my hands.