You Love Me?
You love me?
"…? Congratulations?"
At Cecilia's awkward well-wishes, Hyeon clutched her head. The situation was an absolute mess. Who in the world heard someone confess to loving their master and answered with congratulations? A head full of flowers would have been one thing. This was a woman who had laid out an entire garden in there.
People said the most frightening rival was the one who did not even know how formidable a rival she was. Hyeon hadn't understood it when she first heard the saying. She had always thought the stronger love was the one that knew itself and spoke it outright. Then she looked at Cecilia, and she understood perfectly.
Cecilia lived in such a way that no one thought to be on guard, until whoever stood before her — rival or otherwise — grew careless. Because she never approached with a plan, there was nothing in her to resist. She was simply as she was, and that very fact was what opened a heart. All of it had shown itself in this one short exchange, and every piece of it was lethal.
"Um… are you angry?"
She asked it with a face that was, all over again, kind and harmless. She had worn that same face back when she was teaching Hyeon — kindness almost too complete. They said you couldn't spit at a smiling face. What a well-made saying that was. The face she spoke with looked so kind that it was hard to be angry, and hard even to cry.
Forget it. Let come what may.
Drained by that expression, Hyeon laid out their common sense for Cecilia — more precisely, the common sense of their past life. As things stood, the two of them would never even manage a conversation, let alone understand each other's hearts.
A master and a disciple were as parent and child. The moment love entered that bond, it was no different from a romance inside a family. If a disciple came to yearn for her master, private desire would bring down a sect's authority and the order of its ranks. If she harbored love, she would be judged to have turned a debt of grace into personal appetite — ingratitude, plain and simple. And there were reasons beyond those.
Cecilia, having heard them all, opened her mouth.
"Why would that be a problem?"
Why would it be a problem? Shouldn't she have asked the opposite? Spell out reasons of that weight, and even if someone then scolded her — you loved him knowing all of this? — she would have had nothing to say. Let even one of those reasons apply, and the bond of master and disciple was severed. In a severe case, one gave up one's life for the sake of sect discipline. They had only slipped past it because Cheon Hwi was slow to notice such things, and not the sort to enforce rigid rules. Had the disciples entered a place as strict as Shaolin or Wudang and cherished feelings like these for their master, they would not have remained among the living. Even had they survived, they would never have lived as ordinary people.
"You didn't understand a word I said?"
"So what you're saying is that you love Cheon Hwi. Isn't that it?"
"Hold on."
Just as Cecilia was about to confirm Hyeon's meaning once more, Seol — silent all this time — cut in.
"I like him too. Mas— no. I like Cheon Hwi."
"…What?"
"Pardon?"
At Seol's bombshell, Hyeon was not the only one to raise her voice. Even Cecilia, always composed, did the same.
Hyeon, she could understand. Was it not common enough to love the master who had raised you and looked after you? Seol, she could not. She had not the slightest wish to speak ill of him, but Cheon Hwi's conduct…
…is rather much, isn't it.
Violence in the name of teaching was an everyday affair, and the intensity of that training was beyond anything she had ever seen. To endure training like that and still love him? Unless the girl was an extreme masochist, she had to wonder if it was even possible.
Well. Love doesn't need a reason, I suppose.
Cecilia decided she would not understand, only accept, and let the conversation move on.
"So all of you like Cheon Hwi, then?"
"Yeah."
"But why do you say that's a problem?"
Hyeon could not understand Cecilia. Cecilia, for her part, could not understand those words.
Why should she? In this world, it was hardly rare for a student to like a professor. Sephirot Elijah, who taught in the Magic Faculty, was known through the Academy as a beautiful instructor; more than a few of the boys nursed a one-sided love for her, and now and then one of them even confessed. Nor was she the only one. Abel Aldridge of the Divine Faculty had taken a professor's post while still young, and with his particular gentleness and consideration he captured women's hearts without ever meaning to. Cecilia had seen such things often enough that she simply could not grasp why any of this should be forbidden.
To her it was the most ordinary life. To the disciples, their memories of a past life and this one tangled together, it was a statement that turned everything they knew on its head. Seol did not seem to have recovered her memories in the first place, so there was nothing there to make a problem of. But the reason the disciples listened to Cecilia at all—
She can be scatterbrained, and she has that artless nature, and she seems harmless, and she doesn't even know her own feelings…!
She was by no means on the foolish side. No — one would have to call her very intelligent. And that Cecilia had said what she said. Then, in this world, love between a master and a disciple was not a problem.
But if there was another problem—
"Even so, the difference in age…."
The professors she had named were all in their early twenties. Teacher and student they might be, but no one was much troubled by it; even at the widest, the gap did not come to five years. Cheon Hwi's age, if one counted his past life, was past ninety. The disciples, even with the years of that life added in, had only just cleared thirty. Not that the disciples cared how old he was. In that past life his martial arts had been so profound that his face had stopped changing somewhere in his thirties.
The problem was Cheon Hwi. Nearing ninety, he looked at anyone at all the way one looks at a grandchild. No — they truly were no different from grandchildren. Had he married at the age other men did, those grandchildren would be about as old as the disciples were now. And the pleasure houses of that past life? He had been of an age to want women then. But as the years stacked upon him, his interest in them had thinned.
Told all of this about the Cheon Hwi of their previous life, Cecilia asked a question.
"You're worried because of the difference in age between you and Cheon Hwi, aren't you?"
"That's right…."
Under the weight of memories regained, Hyeon had been counting the years of her past life as well.
"Cheon Hwi is nineteen. I'm twenty. No problem."
Seol brought up nothing but their ages in this life.
"Yes. Seol is right. If we think by the ages of this life, and not the last, isn't it all right?"
"…What?"
For a moment Hyeon could not take it in, and she asked again.
"The Cheon Hwi of your past life was certainly past eighty, but he isn't even twenty now, is he?"
"Th… that's true?"
"Go by your ages as they are, and I suspect you may be the older ones."
"Huh?"
Oh! Why hadn't she thought of that?
Now that she turned it over, line them up at the Academy and he was the youngest of all. Which was to say that no one knew how severe the gap in years truly was. And from the start, wasn't social face the very reason love between master and disciple was shunned? The moment everyone else was ignorant of that face, it ceased to be social face at all. The people involved had only to hold their tongues.
"Then the last problem. Would Master even have any interest in women…?"
By now Hyeon had given up on pressing her. She did not ask it as a challenge. She asked it with hope. Cecilia had settled the two difficult questions before this one. Surely she would have an answer for this as well.
"As a person grows older — more precisely, as the body ages — sexual interest, and any interest in the opposite sex, grows weaker."
But the answer that came back was one that bent the disciples' spirits down another notch.
"As I thought…."
They sank into disappointment and were turning over what they ought to do, when—
"But Cheon Hwi's body, as it is now, is very young. Would an interest in women not have arisen as well?"
Once again, Cecilia answered the hope Hyeon had placed in her.
"Really? You mean that, don't you?!"
"That's a relief."
"Yes? I mean — yes…."
Unsure how she was meant to respond, Cecilia only answered, and briefly.
But why in the world do they love Cheon Hwi?
If it were only goodwill, she could have understood. Had she herself not come to feel kindly toward him, for his warm comfort and for a consideration so offhand he hardly seemed to know he was giving it? But she did not hold a goodwill — no, a love — of that degree.
"But why do you like Cheon Hwi so much?"
Holding that question, she put it to the disciples.
"Well, you see."
Hyeon began to tell her, without a moment's hesitation. She seemed to choke on the words, and then she lifted her head in earnest.
"I was four when my parents threw me out. I became an orphan."
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. Was she looking back on it? The eyes that opened held a deep sorrow, and a longing.
"I'd learned nothing. I owned nothing. Not one person expected anything of me."
A bitter smile touched her mouth.
"But Master was different. Nobody would so much as look at me, and he took me as his disciple. He taught me martial arts. He fed me. When I was hurt, he treated me. So I came to love him."
Honestly, Cecilia had expected something like he's handsome, or he's strong. That was how the students of the Academy fell in love, and how they fell out of it. What she had just heard was several times heavier than anything she had imagined. Not knowing what she ought to say, she kept her mouth shut.
"I can't say my reason."
Seol, at least, would not give one.
"That can happen."
Hyeon understood the answer.
"But, Seol. Can you tell me why you're pretending you haven't gotten your memories back?"
"Huh?"
How…?
She had thought she was being careful. While Seol was still thrown, Hyeon explained.
"Every time you go to call him, you start to say Master and stop halfway. How was I supposed to miss that?"
"That was…."
Seol rushed to make an excuse, but Hyeon only added more.
"And that's not all. Your habits from our past life keep coming out. I start talking about that life and you don't even look puzzled — you just nod along, quiet. You thought you wouldn't get caught?"
Seol had no answer. There were more reasons still. The martial strength that had grown strangely fierce after her bout with Cheon Hwi; the way she faced him; the way she faced Hyeon — all of it far too like their past life. At the time Hyeon had not yet recovered her own memories, and had only thought it strange. Once she remembered, every remnant of that past life lay in plain sight.
Our dull Master probably just decided she was growing to resemble who she used to be.
Hyeon set the reasons out, and asked why Seol was pretending not to remember.
"I don't know if it's me."
The answer was nothing she had expected.
"I know my past life. I know that it was me. But I don't know if that person is who I am now."
"What are you talking about?"
Hyeon could not make sense of it. She knew her own past life, and yet did not know that it was her? What did that mean?
"May I explain?"
To settle the question, Cecilia stepped in.
"Simply put, it is a difference of method."
"Method?"
"Mm… shall I give an example? Suppose, Hyeon, that you dreamed a terribly vivid dream of being a mage. Could you say for certain that the mage was you?"
"That would be a stretch, wouldn't it?"
"Yes. It is exactly that."
If the dream had been vivid and she remembered it, she could not deny that she had dreamed. But neither could she declare that the self inside the dream and the self of the waking world were the same. Through a sacred relic, Hyeon had come to know that the self of her past life and the self of this one were one person. Seol had not learned it by any special means of that kind. A difference in perception like this could not be helped.
And then another question arose.
"Why do you like Master?"
"Seol said she wouldn't speak of—"
"It doesn't matter now."
The reason she had kept silent at first was to hide the fact that she remembered her past life. Now that she had been found out, there was nothing left to hide.
"I don't know if it's the past life, or the memories. I just like him. That's all."
They were only a few short words. Yet they leapt past memory, crossed the boundary of a self, and stood as proof of a true feeling, felt here and now. The reasons might differ, but this was something that could be called true love. As a saintess, and as a human being, she could only find it extraordinary.
"All of you truly love Cheon Hwi."
Cecilia had spoken the feeling exactly as it came to her, with nothing held back.
"…Is that so?"
In that instant a low voice reached them — a man's voice, and no one else's.
At those few short words they looked up, and Cheon Hwi's face was there before their eyes.
Every one of the disciples thought the same thing at the same time.
……We're doomed.