Bound for Yichang - 4
What exactly was Dang Hwarin still suspicious of?
She seemed to have bought my cover as the closest friend of a Dokin. So why keep doubting me?
Because my motives as a character are still too thin.
Kindness that looked a lot like what I’d shown a friend. A medicine completed with that friend. In the end those reasons all came from outside me—from relationships with other people—rather than from anything deep inside Kang Yunho himself.
Some people would call that superficial.
This was a problem a web-novel writer knew how to fix.
I needed to give myself more depth.
Time to glue a pre-written backstory onto the character.
“Actually… no.”
I was smitten with you from the start and just wanted to help. I don’t care about skin or whatever. She’d never believe a word of that.
Or: I’d like to squeeze a little of the poison out of the young lady’s off-Central-Plains poison pouch. That would get me a front-row seat to Dang Hwarin, professional poison-murderer.
“Then what?”
I couldn’t just dump it on her all at once.
I had to melt her heart first, then gently settle the real motive into the soft place that opened up.
All right. Time for the killer story.
I drew one knee up, wrapped my arms around it, and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Play the man with a past. Wear the face of someone lost in old memories.
“When I was a kid I lost my childhood friend in a freak accident. For a while I just… drowned in the grief.”
The original Kang Yunho had lost Cheon Sohee and fallen into despair. A safe opening that wouldn’t collide with any existing setting.
“Childhood friend… that Dokin friend?”
“No. Someone else. After I lost them I was walking around half-dead for days. Then one afternoon I saw a pack of kids throwing rocks at another kid. ‘Leper!’ they were yelling. ‘Little leper bastard!’”
The grieving boy found the Dokin child being tormented.
“So that kid was…”
Dang Hwarin’s face tightened with pity at the word “leper.”
Of course it hurt her. Of course she empathized. I’d built the whole story after watching people call her that.
“Maybe it was still missing my friend. Or maybe just a kid’s sense of justice. Either way I couldn’t stand watching them bully someone weaker. So I walked straight up and smashed my fist into the face of the one who looked like the gang leader. They all scattered.”
I let a small, boyish smile tug at my mouth, as if I were savoring a happy memory.
“That kid must’ve been grateful.”
“Nope. He chewed me out instead.”
“Why?”
“He said he was training martial arts and had been holding back on purpose—why the hell did I stick my nose in? Then he lectured me that you don’t treat the weak like that. Pretty stupid, right?”
My closest friend. The kind you can’t stay mad at. No matter how much I bad-mouthed him, Hwarin would never feel hatred when she looked at my face.
“Uh…”
She seemed stuck for words.
“Haha. Yeah. That was exactly the look I had. I help the guy and get yelled at. We ended up having a huge fight. And that was how we… became friends.”
First layer: flesh out the Dokin-friend story she already half-knew.
“You called him your closest friend.”
“Yeah. The one-and-only kind. I thought we both felt the same way. Later I started to doubt it.”
Now the first shock—something that would snag her attention hard.
“Doubt it?”
“The side effects of being a Dokin kept getting worse. At some point he started pushing me away. ‘I’m going to spend that time making medicine instead of seeing you. Don’t come looking for me. I don’t need the likes of you. Get lost.’ He even cursed me out. One day we had a massive fight and I stormed out screaming I’d never come back again.”
“Why would he…?”
Her voice was bitter. A girl who had never had a real friend would find it hard to understand someone rejecting one.
“Not long after that, I heard he was dead.”
Second shock.
“What?”
Her eyes went wide.
“Maybe he didn’t want me to see the end. Or maybe the pain was so bad he just shoved everyone away. Either way, I was too stupid to realize it was the moment he needed me most.”
I muttered in a voice thick with regret, speaking half to the dead friend who might be listening somewhere above us. You couldn’t even write ‘finish the medicine’ in your will?
A patient’s spite.
When the pain and the fear and the ugliness get so bad that you start resenting the friend who stays beside you until the last second.
That’s when you’re supposed to sit quietly, comfort them, stay, and watch over them all the way. Kang Yunho hadn’t known that.
He’d been young.
“…That can happen.”
What could happen—the friend, or me? She said it like she understood my past, then lowered her head and stared at the bed.
That was the sad history of Kang Yunho.
But I couldn’t stop there.
I had to forge the link between her and me.
“Why did he tell me to leave? I wanted to stay no matter what. When I wouldn’t go, he finally started throwing throwing knives. ‘Next time I’ll put it right between your eyes,’ he threatened.”
I emphasized the words “between the eyes” and looked straight at her. Hwarin jerked her head up, startled.
“That’s what I said to you.”
“Haha. Yeah. Honestly I was shocked. Never thought I’d hear those words again.”
I laughed once to lighten the air, then let the smile turn wistful. I looked at her the way a man looks at someone who reminds him of a ghost he still misses.
“I’m not your friend.”
She must have read the meaning in my eyes. A flustered expression crossed her face and she turned away.
It was working.
My painful past had softened her suspicion until it was almost pliable.
“You’re right. You’re not my dead friend. And wanting to see the medicine he finished work… that’s only a small part of why I’m helping you.”
Slide naturally into the real answer to the question she had asked.
The whole “friend’s medicine” thing was never the true reason. Drop it cold and you’d get shock and distrust. Soften the ground with the past, then land it gently.
“Then what?”
“Atonement. For myself.”
I looked at her with complete seriousness.
Not a reason borrowed from some shallow relationship—something that had always lived inside the man named Kang Yunho.
I confessed it to her face.
“Atonement?”
“For failing to stay until the end beside a friend who needed me. When I’m next to you… it feels like I can finally pay that debt.”
I gazed at the girl in front of me, packing the look with silent apology.
“….”
“At first I agonized over it. Is this really atonement? There were practical problems too. But then something funny happened. The moment you pushed me away—wow. You looked exactly like him. Someone who needs a person beside her, yet stupidly shoving them off. That was when I decided. I wanted to help you.”
So I would never make the same mistake again.
No matter what she said, Kang Yunho had come running back.
When she stayed silent I kept talking.
“I told you at the very beginning that it was pure kindness. Thinking about it now… that was the real lie. Not the fatigue recovery tonic. I wanted to help you because of my own selfishness.”
I spoke like a man making confession, unable to meet her eyes, ashamed.
Of course you couldn’t really call the desire for atonement selfishness.
And I hadn’t truly lied to her.
The goodwill toward my friend and the goodwill toward her were both still there.
I was simply adding my own atonement so the reason I helped her would run deeper.
But if I knew all that and still lowered my head, looking lost and crushed… how would she react?
“Hey. Head up. Who the hell calls that selfish?”
She took my hand and pulled me upright.
She was finally accepting my goodwill for real.
“Thanks for seeing it that way. And… sorry I couldn’t tell you sooner.”
“That kind of private story? You can’t just spill it to someone you just met.”
She was quiet for a long while, then spoke again.
Exactly. That’s why I planned to travel a bit and time the reveal.
Dang Hwarin. Now you know what’s inside me, right? Stop doubting. Doubting just exhausts both of us.
Even getting to Yichang without drama is harder than it looks.
I nodded once and wordlessly lay back down on the bed.
A bird flung out of its cage.
After being driven from the Seong Family Manor, Dang Hwarin felt as if her entire world had collapsed.
The fence that had protected her all her life vanished overnight, leaving her naked to people’s contempt and scorn.
The poison arts she had trained in her whole life turned out to be the very martial arts meant to kill her. The person she had trusted had only been using her.
A hideous bird that could no longer even flap its wings, lying broken on the ground. And then a man had reached out a hand for that bird.
Kang Yunho. A strange man.
He treated every problem that arose because of her as if it were nothing at all.
Whenever anyone else saw her bare face they looked first at her lower jaw and immediately frowned. He simply looked into her eyes, the way people look at anyone.
He treated her normally.
No—because he treated her so normally, he treated her more specially than anyone ever had.
It was the first real kindness of her life, so it felt comfortable… yet also like wearing clothes that didn’t quite fit.
People who have never properly received kindness learn to distrust it and to doubt the person offering it.
That was why, even after hearing perfectly reasonable reasons, she had spent the entire journey hunting for other motives behind his goodwill.
Does he just have weird tastes?
She had overheard servants gossiping. There were plenty of men in the world with tastes no one could understand.
Maybe he felt lust looking at her face. Or maybe at her body.
The night they ended up sharing a bed, those thoughts finally exploded.
Was he really looking at me that way?
What should she do if, in the middle of the night, he suddenly grabbed her chest? Squeal like some delicate young lady? Or just cut the hand off clean?
Worry. Anxiety. Restlessness. A night spent wide-eyed and sleepless.
But none of the things she had imagined happened. The man slept peacefully until dawn, never once seeming to notice the storm inside her head.
A guy like this… why would he even think of me that way?
She told herself she was relieved. Yet a strange dissatisfaction nestled in a corner of her chest and made her glare at him all morning.
Not lust. Judging by his skill as a Maedamja, it didn’t look like money either.
Then were the reasons he had given her really everything?
—It felt good watching people praise you and watching the medicine you made sell out.
His praise had sunk into her chest with a warm, tingling thrill. When was the last time anyone had praised her? She couldn’t remember.
Beside Kang Yunho she almost felt like an ordinary person. And the more normally he treated her, the more kindness he poured out, the larger the trembling and the anxiety grew inside her heart.
“You. What’s the real reason you’re traveling with me?”
Why does this man keep helping me? What does he think of me?
“I told you. My friend’s medicine—”
“Is that really all?”
Is it really just because of the friend?
How do you see me?
That was what she had wanted to know when she asked the question.
—Atonement for failing to stay until the end beside a friend who needed me. When I’m next to you… it feels like I can finally pay that debt.
After hearing the entire story, the emotion that filled Dang Hwarin was neither anger nor being moved.
It was envy.
She envied that person who was no longer here more than she could stand.
Kang Yunho would never understand, but as a fellow Dokin she understood his friend’s choice perfectly.
Skin you want to hide. If that skin was going to crumple and melt until you finally died… would you want the sight of your agonizing death branded into your closest friend’s eyes?
If it had been her, she wouldn’t have wanted to show it either. Yet the man had spent his whole life tormenting himself over the single fact that he hadn’t stayed for the end.
He had wanted to help a Dokin he had never even met, even when that Dokin threatened his life.
He called it selfishness rather than pure kindness.
Ridiculous.
The bond those two had shared was exactly the thing she had always longed for. How could offering her even a fragment of that bond be called selfish?
If I had met Kang Yunho first…
If in his childhood he had met her instead of that friend… would her life have turned out even a little differently?
Why had she never had a friend like that?
“Hey. Kang Yunho.”
She called to the man lying there looking lonely under the weight of his guilt.
“What.”
“You’re not pure after all.”
“I know.”
“…But I think I’m the same.”
“Huh?”
“Fuck. Listen to me spouting bullshit. Forget it. Sleep. We leave tomorrow.”
Cowardly. A cowardly thought had sprouted inside her.
If a man carried wounds like these… maybe she could approach him.
If she stayed beside him and kept helping and helping, maybe she could earn the trust he talked about.
Then instead of the friend, I could…
An impure thought.
Trying to slip into the empty place left by someone else’s wounded heart was impure.
Even so… she felt a warm little hope.
Daeheung County. Seong Family Manor.
The study of the Seong Family head.
Inside it, Seong Sehui stood fidgeting restlessly beside another man.
“It has been a long time.”
Seong Sehui forced an awkward smile, trying to hide the cold sweat running down his back.
“Where did you go?”
The man’s voice was indifferent, yet thick with restrained fury.
“Haha. Well, that is…”
Seong Sehui looked at him in open panic.
The man’s presence felt like a tiger’s, yet somehow his face gave the impression of a massive venomous snake.
A man Seong Sehui had never expected to appear here.
Purple hair. Green eyes.
His name was—
“Hwarin. Where has she gone?”
Dang Geoho of the Sichuan Dang Clan.