I Possessed a Scoundrel
I possessed a scoundrel.
There are characters like that. Born with everything, they never learn the worth of what they hold; they strut and bluster until they lose it all and come crashing down.
Now and then, one of them catches the protagonist's eye and tags along as a supporting character clear to the ending. Most of the time, though, they turn up as one-off extras in the early or middle stretch of a story, mouth off at the hero without the faintest idea who they're dealing with, and get thoroughly put in their place.
This one was unmistakably the latter.
Jin Muwon.
Born the only son of a mid-sized sect of no small renown in Sichuan, he was arrogant, lazy, and dissolute. He threw his station around to torment the weak, yet was so idle about the martial arts themselves that his skill never rose above second-rate. Wine and women were all he ever sought, and not a day passed that he failed to darken the door of a pleasure house.
In the end his father, judging that Jin Muwon had no quality fit to inherit the sect, accepted a marriage proposal from the Tang Clan.
Tang Soye.
A woman of a Tang branch family, she had stepped forward of her own will to be engaged to Jin Muwon. Why, I never knew. Through years of her fiancé's neglect and infidelity she refused to let him go, and in the end she died in his place when he came within a breath of death at the protagonist's hands.
Faced with Tang Soye's death, the protagonist abandoned his judgment of Jin Muwon and walked away.
And the Jin Muwon left behind—what of him? Astonishingly, he did not suffer so much as a scratch upon his heart. If anything, he was glad the nag was gone. He plunged even deeper into luxury and pleasure, and met the worst possible end at the final boss's hands.
When I had read every last line, only one question remained. Had Jin Muwon been worth a life that noble?
No—before that, why hadn't she given up on him? Hadn't she already been wounded as deeply as a person could be? Wouldn't it have been all right for her to be happy in her own way?
But the novel ended before it could unwind any more of those two. Who, after all, would trouble themselves over a pair who had shown up as disposable extras to begin with?
I, at least, wanted the reason. I wanted to know why Tang Soye had clung to Jin Muwon. I wanted the story of the two of them that I had never been given.
The reason...
I didn't know.
Thwack!
The crack of a strike rang out across the empty training ground at dawn. For a martial artist it was a pitiful blow, yet the man only kept driving his body at the wooden dummy.
Thwack!
Had anyone else laid eyes on the sight, they would likely have dropped where they stood. The young master of the sect—who in his entire life had never once managed to be on time—out training earlier than anyone...
That's right.
The man training before anyone else in the thin light of dawn was named Jin Muwon.
And...
"It's me now..."
A week had passed since I possessed Jin Muwon.