Half a Sack of Potatoes and a Ticking Time Bomb
"Aigo, my back...!"
Droplets of sweat rolled down my face as I clawed my way up the steep mountainside. The worn travel pack slung over my shoulders weighed a thousand pounds if it weighed an ounce. Sweat poured from my mouth, and my trembling thighs looked ready to declare a strike on the spot.
Hck! Dammit... isn't it industry standard to give reincarnators at least a status window or some lucky encounter?!
I could have cried tears of blood from the sheer unfairness of it all.
Yes. I was a reincarnator. Until a mere three months ago, I'd been a twenty-something young man in South Korea, tearing into fried chicken while devouring martial arts web novels and manhwa — a self-proclaimed ten-year veteran wuxia otaku of the highest order.
Then one day, while crossing at a pedestrian crossing, a drunk driver's truck plowed into me, and when I opened my eyes, I had been dumped smack in the middle of the Central Plains Murim, surrounded by towers and pavilions of blue-fired brick.
At first, my heart had swelled with grand ambition. Has the day finally come for me to gain a fateful encounter like the protagonists of my novels and command the world?!
Status window! Come out, status window! System! Quest! Help me!
...But no matter how many incantations I shouted at the empty air, not even a single fly stirred in response. I ransacked my body from head to toe and found not the first whisper of internal energy — I was a perfectly ordinary modern civilian. Grip a sword hilt and my wrist ached within five seconds; sprint a hundred meters at full tilt and my lungs felt ready to tear. My worthless modern couch-potato constitution had come along for the ride, intact.
While the heroes of my novels tumbled off cliffs, swallowed thousand-year ginseng, and inherited a century of cultivated power, I had barely managed to land a job at Manbokru, the sprawling inn that dominated the three-way crossroads at the foot of the mountain. And then the hell began.
"Hey, you! Stop standing around like a fool and scrub every last dish in that kitchen!"
"Finished chopping a hundred bundles of firewood? Then get to the back garden and empty the privy!"
The romance of the murim? The thrill of chivalry and cleaving evildoers in two with a single stroke?
Don't make me laugh.
The murim I had experienced for three months consisted of eighteen hours of dishwashing a day, scrubbing an iron cauldron the size of an oil drum, and chopping wood until my palms festered with blood and pus. In this godforsaken era, with no labor laws and no workers' compensation, I was Slave Number One in the flesh.
And then, at last, yesterday evening. The moment I hefted that grease-caked monster of a cauldron, something went off in my lower back with a crisp, unmistakable snap.
Crrrack—
That familiar, horrifying sound of something tearing. The early warning signs of a herniated disc.
If I keep working here, I'll end up half-paralyzed and dumped in the street.
Survival instinct flared through my skull. That very night, I stuffed three months' worth of hard-earned coins — twenty-three of them, to be exact — and two ragged spare outfits into my pack, hauled myself over Manbokru's back wall, and fled into the darkness. Which brought me, gasping for breath, to this very moment.
"Hah... hah..."
Long after I'd crossed the ridgeline and wandered half-lost, a strange shape emerged through the thick veil of dawn mist before my eyes — a deep valley corner, overgrown with weeds and tangled vines.
A single abandoned courtyard estate in the grand four-sided style stood forlorn and desolate, seemingly untouched by human footsteps for a good dozen years or more.
"Oh...?"
Stepping carefully, I pushed through the creaking gate and entered the courtyard. At its center squatted a monstrous ornamental boulder as large as a house, and broken bricks and rotted lumber lay scattered in every corner. One edge of the main hall's eaves had collapsed into a gaping hole, but mercifully the thick main beams and two inner rooms had somehow held together.
"Jackpot...!"
I tossed my pack onto the corridor railing and slumped to the ground. As I rubbed my aching back and looked around, a strange sense of relief washed over me — followed quickly by the cold sting of reality.
Shelter: secured. But what am I going to eat from now on?
I had exactly twenty-three coins to my name. Even stretching every scrap of food, that would last maybe half a month. And there was no way in hell I was going back down to the village to be someone's hired hand or slog through day labor again.
If I want to survive... I need to make other people work for me, instead of working myself.
My ten-years-seasoned wuxia-otaku brain cells began spinning at full throttle.
The eternal traditions and clichés of martial arts fiction. In this vast, brutal world of the Central Plains Murim, one type of person was always in limitless supply.
The poor soul with genius talent who gets scorned by his own clan because his meridians run crooked. The one whose secret manual was stolen and now burns with vengeance. The one with a peculiar constitution, shuffled around as a third-rate reject.
In a word: wounded, trusting suckers begging to be exploited!
"That's it... I'll run a con."
I would play the Taoist hermit. Put on the airs of a transcendent recluse detached from worldly matters, spout a few clouds-of-vapor pronouncements, and hook one naive sucker into becoming my disciple.
"Master, I have returned from chopping firewood!"
"Master, I have prepared your meal!"
"Master, I've collected our protection tribute from the marketplace... er, I mean, our charitable donations!"
Just imagining it made my mouth water. If I raised one good, loyal sucker of a disciple, I could lie around in my room for the rest of my life, never lifting a finger, and slurp up honey like a proper freeloader!
"Decision made. As of today, this place is my stronghold."
I went straight to work. I picked up a rotted wooden plank lying in the corner of the courtyard, brushed off the dirt, and pulled a pitch-black lump of charcoal from the fire pit.
What were the most grandiose, most impressive-sounding characters in all of wuxia fiction? The Heavenly Demon Cult? No — anything that smelled of the demonic path would get me cut down by righteous-sect elders. The Mount Hua Sect? The Wudang Sect? Those were trademark violations just waiting to get my skull cracked.
The grandest, vaguest, most cloud-touched name possible...
The hand gripping the charcoal moved in flourish after flourish. Three characters, written in one unbroken stroke, infused with the full weight of ten years of wuxia knowledge:
Cheon — Heaven
Hae — Sea
Mun — Gate
"The Cheonhae Gate...!"
A sect embracing the boundless Dao of heaven and sea. If anyone dared ask what it meant, I could just mumble something about "a sect that follows the natural order, lofty as the heavens and deep as the sea" and be done with it.
"Ha — what a name. I almost fooled myself."
I hung the rotted plaque with due ceremony beneath the eaves of my creaking mountain gate. And now, the finishing touch.
"I should change my name too. My modern one is hopelessly common."
Taking the Cheon of Cheonhae Gate, I added a pseudonym dripping with swagger — the meaning: only the divine is singular and supreme.
Cheon Yu-sin — Heaven's Sole God.
"From this day forward, I am the Founding Sect Leader of the Cheonhae Gate, the greatest hidden master under heaven — Cheon Yu-sin."
It was perfect. Now all I needed was for a sucker to wander in.
"Do you seek the Dao? No — the Cheonhae Gate seeks promising talents to receive its supreme martial teachings!"
Five days had passed since I came down the mountain and spread a worn-out straw mat in the corner of a market alley.
My salesmanship, frankly speaking, was attracting nothing but flies.
I had mobilized every modern marketing technique and ten years of wuxia knowledge to scrawl grand slogans in the dirt — "The Legendary Hidden Sect: Cheonhae Gate!" and "Recruiting the Final Disciple of the Greatest Master Under Heaven!" — but the reactions of passersby were cold as frost.
"Tsk tsk. Look at that. A perfectly healthy young man, reduced to peddling snake oil."
"Cheonhae Gate? Never heard of it. Just some no-name con artist. Go plow a field, why don't you!"
Watching travelers spit and walk past, I swallowed tears of blood. My back ached fit to kill, and I had exactly four coins left. If I didn't scrape something together by today, starting tomorrow I'd be up in the mountains gnawing on arrowroot roots until I starved.
A con? Forget it — I'd count myself lucky just not to starve.
The sun was sinking low and the whole enterprise was starting to smell distinctly of failure when it happened.
A farmer in pitiful rags, his mud-caked trouser legs rolled up, hesitantly hovered in front of my mat. And hiding behind his back was a girl, gaunt as a bundle of kindling, her cheeks hollowed out — the kind of child a stiff breeze might blow away.
"Um... Honored Taoist, sir."
The farmer glanced around nervously and spoke in a voice shrunk down to nothing.
"Is it true... that you'd take the child in and never let her go hungry?"
"...I'm sorry — what?"
In the farmer's hand was half a sack of potatoes, caked thick with dirt. His face was a tangle of deep despair and guilt.
"The drought this year has been too cruel. I can't pay my rent, and we're to be thrown off the land. There are seven mouths in my house... This one here, my second daughter — she's been coughing and wheezing since the day she was born. She can't help with the field work, and all she does is drain us dry with medicine bills."
Unable to even look at the girl's face, the farmer dropped the sack of potatoes onto my mat with a heavy thud.
"You sound like an elder of some great sect, sir. Please — take this child. Work her as a servant so long as she's fed, or beat her and teach her your arts, I don't care. If she stays here... she won't survive the winter. She'll starve before the first snow melts."
"N-no, wait, elder, please—!"
Before I could even wave my hands in protest, the farmer had already spun around and was sprinting away, kicking up dust as he fled. His retreating figure staggered and twisted, crushed under the guilt of having abandoned his own daughter.
Left alone in the corner of the alley: half a sack of potatoes.
And a girl of twelve or so, skin and bone beneath her threadbare hemp clothes, fat tears rolling down her face one after another.
"Sob... hic..."
Swallowing her sobs without making a sound, the girl looked up at me. Her eyes were so wretched, so pitiful, that they stabbed straight into the conscience of a six-day-old con artist who had been planning to leech off someone else's labor.
Hold on... I was trying to hook a sturdy servant — er, a strong disciple — who'd cook my meals and chop my firewood...
I looked back and forth between the potato sack and the child, and let out a long, deep sigh. But there was no way I could leave a kid this young on the street.
"...Hey."
"Eep! I-I'm sorry... I'll work hard, Honored Taoist... please don't throw me away..."
The girl flinched violently and dropped to her knees, and I hastily grabbed her stick-thin shoulders and pulled her back upright.
"Haah... Fine. What's your name?"
"...Yeon, sir. Soyeon..."
"All right, Yeon it is. Let's go home."
And so, after five days of tear-soaked salesmanship, what I had reeled in was a half sack of potatoes — and Disciple Number One, Soyeon, handed off to me like an unwanted parcel.
I heaved another sigh, reached out to take the girl's skeletal hand, and was just turning to lead her away when—
"Hnng—?!"
The instant her skin touched mine, a bone-deep, spine-chilling cold shot up through my fingertips. This was no mere poor circulation or hypothermia. It was a vicious, unnatural chill, like gripping dry ice barehanded and squeezing.
Only then did I truly see the girl's face.
Skin so pale it shaded toward blue. A faint pattern of frost-like veins creeping up the back of her neck. And the farmer's words — coughing and wheezing since the day she was born.
A single phrase flashed through the mind of this ten-year wuxia veteran like a bolt of lightning.
A chronic cough, a deathly pallor, a cold that freezes you to the marrow... don't tell me—
The legendary constitution that only geniuses in wuxia novels ever suffer from. Left untreated, it kills before the age of twenty — but open its sealed meridians, and the bearer can freeze the entire world.
The Nine Yin Severed Meridians.
Wait. Shit... I don't know how to cure that?!
My Disciple Number One, foisted onto me in a daze, turned out to be a walking time bomb — one that could go off at any moment.