Chapter 5: Cliché but Reliable - The Main House?
“I-I’m fine! Stop making a fuss and quit crying!”
Cheon Woo-jin scolded her in a deliberately stern voice, but Ella’s sobs showed no sign of stopping. If anything, she collapsed to the floor and wailed even harder.
“Waaah! How can I not cry?! You’ve been acting so weird, young master! You never talked this sweetly before, and what’s with that speech pattern?! It’s like you’re a completely different person!”
Her blunt outburst made Cheon Woo-jin’s heart skip a beat. He’d let his guard down because she was just a young maid, but she’d zeroed in on the changes more sharply than expected. If he brushed this off sloppily, it would become a major obstacle to surviving in this unfamiliar world.
Woo-jin cleared his throat and began his performance.
“…It seems I can no longer hide the truth from you two.”
His serious tone made Ella’s crying taper off. Weger swallowed hard, his face tense.
“Y-Yes…? What truth?”
“Ella, let me ask you this. Before I opened my eyes a few days ago, was there ever a moment when I stopped breathing completely?”
“!!!!”
Ella’s eyes flew wide open. She hadn’t even told Weger that the young master had stopped breathing for thirty minutes. She’d been too terrified of the blame for his death.
“Y-Yes… Young master. Your breathing definitely stopped. Your pulse too…”
Her trembling answer made Woo-jin cheer inwardly. Just as he’d suspected. Like fifty years ago when he’d fallen into the murim world, his soul had slipped into the body right after the original owner died.
Woo-jin drew on his shallow modern knowledge of medicine to craft a plausible excuse.
“Do you two know what happens to the human body if it goes without air for too long?”
“Wh-What happens?”
Woo-jin tapped his temple with a finger, speaking gravely.
“Right here. The brain suffers fatal damage.”
“The br-brain?”
“Yes. If the brain doesn’t get oxygen through the blood for an extended time, the brain cells gradually die, causing irreversible damage.”
Ella and Weger stared blankly at the unfamiliar words like “cells” and “oxygen.” But since the young master had always been holed up reading thick books, they unquestioningly accepted that he knew obscure medical knowledge they didn’t.
“S-So you’re saying there’s a problem in your head right now!?”
Weger asked, pale-faced, and Woo-jin sighed deeply with a somber expression.
“Yes… I’ve lost all my past memories. The only fragments left in my head are my name… Kael… Everything else is gone. My family name, your name Ella, yours Weger, even that furry mutt—all wiped from my memory.”
“!!!!”
“C-Can’t your memories come back like before? Sniff…!”
As Ella started sniffling again, Woo-jin slowly, firmly shook his head.
“That’s impossible… Once brain cells die, they never come back to life… My past is permanently deleted.”
A heavy silence followed.
A moment later.
“W-Waaah! Our poor young master, what do we do…! You can’t remember me! Waaah!”
Ella’s pent-up wailing resumed. Weger bit his lip, staring at the ceiling with reddened eyes.
“It’s fine. I’ve just lost some old memories from the past—nothing else about my body is wrong. If anything, it’s the opposite. Look. Doesn’t my body feel much lighter and healthier than before?”
He was right. Though his cheeks were gaunt from three days of fasting, a faint flush colored his previously corpse-pale, sallow skin. His once-dull, unfocused eyes now sparkled with vitality, and above all, his voice carried real strength instead of the feeble tremble of a candle in the wind.
“But…”
Woo-jin spoke softly to Ella, who kept wiping her tears with her sleeve.
“What’s done is done. Clinging to an irreversible past won’t change anything. The lost memories? I’ll fill them slowly with new ones alongside you two from now on.”
His words struck deep into Ella and Weger’s hearts. The young master’s mature, resolute attitude—pressing forward undeterred despite amnesia. It was a massive shift in this annex filled with death.
As if sensing the mood, Oliver, who’d been hiding behind Ella’s legs, began wagging his tail vigorously and barking.
“Woof!! Pant pant pant! Woof! Woof!”
It was as if the dog was emphatically agreeing that the young master’s words were spot on.
“So, since my memory’s not all there, I’d appreciate it if you two stuck close and helped me out from here on.”
That sealed it. Ella stared at Woo-jin in a daze, tears streaming, while Weger straightened up, pounded his chest with a fist, and saluted like a knight.
“Weger here!! I’ll stake my life to do my utmost for Young Master Kael’s health and safety!!”
“M-Me too!! You must be starving, young master!? You haven’t had a drop of water in three days! I-I’ll rush to the kitchen and bring some food right now!”
Only then did Cheon Woo-jin sense he’d safely navigated the crisis, letting out a silent sigh of relief. A cliché but reliable method had worked after all.
“Yeah, thanks. Bring plenty.”
That’s when it happened.
“Huh…? What’s that gross smell…?”
Weger wrinkled his nose, sniffing. Ella pinched her nose with her sleeve too. Oliver sniffed along before freaking out, pawing his nose and fleeing to a corner with whimpers.
“Whiiiine…”
It was the stench of the old toxins seeping from his skin after three days of circulating the Taiji Mysterious Heaven Heart Method to unblock his meridians. The amount wasn’t enough to form a black crust, but the foul odor from decades of decay in a sick body was beyond imagination.
“Y-Young master! Your clothes are soaked in sweat! Bath first—before food! You need a bath right now! I’ll wash you!”
Woo-jin frowned at Ella’s frantic cry.
“A bath…? Wh-What are you talking about? I’ll wash myself. You go prepare the food.”
“Don’t you remember!? Your body was too weak to wash alone! I always helped you bathe! Sniff, sniff! It’s true then… You’ve forgotten bathing with me too.”
As Ella geared up to squeeze out more tears, Cheon Woo-jin pressed his throbbing temple.
I bathed with a girl…?
The Heavenly Demon of the world handing his grown body over to a maid for washing? Unthinkable.
Haa… Living as this Kael guy won’t be as easy as I thought.
***
The vast main estate of the Restis Ducal Residence. In the family head’s office.
There, Silina Restis—second wife of Duke Restis and current acting head—was sifting through a mountain of territory reports. She managed all the family’s affairs in the duke’s absence.
Then, her eye caught a document buried at the bottom of the pile.
“Hm? A report from the annex?”
It was about the annex where Kael, child of the first wife, stayed—a place she’d ignored for months due to radio silence.
With intrigued red lips, Silina began reading the hastily scrawled report from Ella.
“Hmm… Came back from the dead and lost all past memories?”
Tap. Tap. Tap—
Her long red nails drummed rhythmically on the ornate desk.
“Interesting.”
Silina closed the document with a cold smile.
“You there.”
“Yes, acting head.”
A soldier entered the office briskly at her call.
“Go to the northern annex and confirm Kael’s condition with your own eyes.”
“Understood.”
***
And a few days later.
“Huff, huff, huff! Y-Young master! Pl-Please, come with me!”
On the rugged mountain path behind the annex, Weger in leather armor panted heavily.
Ahead of him, Kael—dressed in a simple tunic, sweat dripping—bounded up the steep trail like a wild animal.
Woo-jin had firmly resolved deep within to erase his old name and live fully as Kael.
“Giving up already, Weger!? What good is a guard with such pathetic stamina!”
“Huff, haaah, huff! You’re the one who’s abnormally fast, young master! How are you climbing like a squirrel with that body?!”