Drafted into the Brocade Guard
In South Korea, being born a man is a crime. A felony, at that—punishable by two full years of hard time.
I was just another sinner saddled with a dick on that Hell Joseon peninsula, forced to waste two precious years in the prison known as mandatory military service to pay for my crime. After an agonizing crawl through time, exactly one week before my discharge date, a gas cylinder exploded in the mess hall. Just like that, I was blessed with the wondrous honor of a posthumous two-rank promotion.
People often say life begins anew after military discharge. Sure enough, I found myself living a second life right after mine. Not figuratively, mind you—quite literally.
"Young Master, are you awake?"
When I opened my eyes, I was in another world. It wasn't the high fantasy setting I was fond of, but Murim—a martial arts realm I knew next to nothing about—and there was the minor hiccup that gender roles were completely flipped upside down. But who gave a damn? It beat dropping dead a thousand times over.
Besides, the Yang Clan into which I was reborn was a prestigious family with considerable clout. Even this primitive, medieval realm wasn't half bad to live in as long as you had deep pockets. Better yet, I was an only son. It went without saying that the people around me treated me like a precious piece of jade; my jaw would ache just trying to list all the ways they coddled and spoiled me.
"Mun-gyeong, I'm bored."
"Young Master, as I have told you countless times, my name is Gyeong, not Mun-gyeong."
"That doesn't roll off the tongue. Mun-gyeong fits you much better."
"Sigh... If you're that bored, would you like to take a walk into town?"
"I'm sick of town. Once or twice was enough."
"Then how about making some friends? It just so happens the daughter of the Ye Clan is about your age."
"Playing with little snot-nosed brats is a pain in the ass."
"You are one of those little brats yourself, Young Master...?"
Of course, it wasn't as if my new life was completely devoid of problems. To someone accustomed to YouTube Shorts and endless digital feeds, this world was hopelessly bland. It suffered from a severe dopamine deficiency. To put it bluntly: I was bored out of my mind.
"Then why not try learning martial arts?"
"Martial arts?"
"Yes. Once you begin circulating your qi, the hours will fly by in an instant."
"Hmm..."
That was why the suggestion from Gyeong, my servant and bodyguard, piqued my interest. In this archaic world where everything was painfully outdated, martial arts was the one and only concept completely foreign to me.
"Wait, is a guy even allowed to learn martial arts?"
"If the child of a martial clan isn't permitted to practice martial arts, then who is?"
Given the era, I'd assumed the division between the sexes would be carved in stone, but apparently not. It seemed this gender-reversed Murim was surprisingly progressive.
"Well, whatever. Let's give it a shot."
And so, on a complete whim, I became a martial artist.
Even though I'd stumbled into it half-heartedly, it turned out to be surprisingly fun—a bit like a cross between lifting weights and playing a high-stakes focus game. There was the minor snag that a single slip-up could blow my meridians and get me killed, but just as Gyeong had promised, time melted away whenever I circulated my internal energy. It wasn't half bad at all.
"The young master's progress grows by leaps and bounds every single day."
"Hah! Even if he is a boy, the blood of a dragon still runs true."
"What a pity. If only he'd been born a girl, the mantle of Family Head would have been his for the taking..."
Strange whispers drifted my way from time to time, but I paid them no mind. Armed with the ultimate hobby to slaughter the boredom of this martial realm, I was invincible. My second life rolled along smoothly, blissfully devoid of hardship.
Or at least, that was what I thought.
"Hwado. It is about time you prepared for marriage."
About three years after my reincarnation, I found myself sharing a rare meal with the Family Head, my mother, who was usually so swamped with clan affairs that catching a glimpse of her face was a minor miracle. The spread was slightly more lavish than usual, and the portions were far more generous. To me, it had seemed like nothing more than a particularly nice dinner.
Evidently, it wasn't just dinner to the Family Head.
She broke the silence with an expression so severe it made her usual doting tenderness feel like a fever dream. "It is time you prepared for marriage."
"I just turned ten, though?"
"Ten is already late."
What kind of insane bullshit is that? I choked back the protest clawing up my throat.
Shockingly enough, she wasn't exaggerating in the slightest—it was a cold, hard fact. In modern society, it would be criminal, but in this backwards world, children were routinely betrothed around the age of five, and promises made in the womb were an everyday occurrence. In that light, I really was late. I had deliberately stalled any talk of marriage myself. After all, common sense here or not, how was someone with the soul of a 21st-century modern man supposed to accept getting hitched as a toddler? But it seemed my stalling tactics had finally hit a brick wall.
"Mother, if I give you a kiss, can we call off the marriage?"
"No."
"I'll kiss you right on the lips."
"......Still, no."
The Family Head answered with a look of pure torment, as though wrenching out her own entrails.
Good grief, even that didn't work?
I managed to squeeze Hollow Jade Fluid out of her with that trick last time!
She had clearly steeled her resolve to an absurd degree. Then again, from a parent's perspective in this world, an unmarried ten-year-old son was practically an old maid on the verge of missing his prime.
I wanted to wait until I was at least a bit older before tying the knot.
I clicked my tongue, my face souring. But what choice did I have? When she put her foot down like this, arguing was pointless.
"I have narrowed down a list of suitable candidates in advance. Look it over and choose someone to your liking."
"I actually get a say?"
"Of course. As your mother, I can grant you at least this much."
Well, as the old saying goes: if you can't avoid it, you might as well enjoy it. I pivoted my mindset and decided to look on the bright side. Snagging some stunning, voluptuous older girl—a top-tier, local S-rank beauty who checked every single box—and spending the rest of my days being pampered and spoiled rotten? Maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all.
I took the list and began inspecting the candidates one by one. Soon, my eyes narrowed into slits.
"The daughter of the Yue Clan...? Is this the kid I'm thinking of?"
"Yes. I saw her at a banquet not long ago; she looked so bright-eyed and darling."
"Mother, that was her first birthday party."
"You dislike younger girls? Then how about the eldest daughter of the Yan Clan?"
"I heard that one's celebrating her sixtieth birthday next year."
How the hell was every potential wife either a toddler or a granny?
And that was just the beginning. With every page I flipped, my expression crumpled in real time.
"Why is every single applicant on this list like this?!"
"Calling them 'like this' is terribly rude to the families who submitted their proposals."
"The rude part is that they submitted them in the first place!"
Where was my voluptuous (crucial requirement!), gorgeous beauty? Why was the roster split strictly between cradle-robbing creeps and ancient crypt-keepers?
These were bride candidates? These were tactical nuclear warheads!
"It cannot be helped," she sighed. "If we are to bring in a matrilocal daughter-in-law, we have to lower our standards a little."
"A matrilocal... what?"
"A matrilocal daughter-in-law. You are an only son—I can hardly marry you off into another household, can I?"
In the midst of daily life, I sometimes forgot that this was a world with completely reversed gender roles. Whenever reality ambushed me with a reminder like this, it made my head spin. I never dreamed I'd live to hear the term 'matrilocal daughter-in-law' in my life...
"Wait, hold on a second. Are you saying I'm supposed to make babies with one of these people right away?"
"Of course not immediately. How could you possibly father a child with a girl who hasn't even had her first period?"
Which meant that the instant she did, I was expected to get straight to work.
When did girls typically get their first period? Obviously, I had no clue, but it certainly wasn't after twenty. In short, if I married a kid, I'd be forced into the bedroom long before she was anywhere near grown! As a modern man—no, as a human being with a shred of decency—that was an option I could not, and should not, ever choose.
And what, pick the granny route instead?
That's just as batshit insane!
If one end of the spectrum hadn't even reached puberty, the other end was already knocking on menopause's door. I had to choose between the two? Ugh, fuck. Just imagining it made bile rise in my throat.
Whichever path I chose, all I saw was a catastrophe. It was an absolute trolley problem of doom. Being told to choose between Mom and Dad wouldn't have been half as agonizing—though in my case, that wouldn't have been a contest anyway, seeing as I didn't have a dad.
Fuck it, I'd rather go back to the military... Wait.
"I'd rather enlist again."
Was there any phrase in a Korean man's vocabulary that could express pure, visceral disgust more vividly than that? Of course, it was meant to be purely hyperbolic—no lunatic in history had ever uttered those words and actually reenlisted. But in that exact moment, it struck me as a genuinely viable option.
As the old saying went: hate it as you might, once more. Compared to this ruinous dilemma, enlisting looked like a golden lifeline thrown down from heaven. As luck would have it, the Yang Clan was a renowned martial family with massive clout. It would basically be like enlisting as the division commander's pampered son.
Wait... now that I think about it, isn't this actually a brilliant idea?
Screw it. I'll just grind out another two years.
Needless to say, I didn't actually want to do it. Who on earth volunteers for the military for fun? No matter how great your connections are, an enlisted grunt ranks lower than an unemployed slacker. And on top of that, there were no smartphones here.
Yet the me of that moment was trapped in a predicament far more terrifying than basic training. I figured that if volunteering was what it took to escape the clutches of toddlers and grannies, it was a price well worth paying.
"I should have just gotten married back then..."
If only I had known that military service in this world, unlike my past life, had no set end date.
That you could check in anytime you liked, but you could never leave.
If I had known that the prime of my youth—my entire teens—would be incinerated in the army...
I would never have made such a suicidal choice in a million years.
Ten years? Bullshit. I hadn't even lasted ten days before regretting my decision like a lunatic.
There was no paradise in the place I'd fled to.
The military in this gender-reversed Murim was a nightmarish hellhole far beyond my wildest imagination. Picture a solitary ten-year-old boy thrown into an army made up entirely of women—most of them burly adults in their twenties and thirties.
The isolation and terror I felt back then were beyond words.
You'd better not picture some breezy light novel fantasy like The Only Boy in an All-Girls Academy?!
The place I'd been dropped into wasn't a flower field flowing with milk and honey; it was a savage Serengeti ruled by raw lust and brutal violence. Being stranded in a pasture of muscle-bound she-beasts meant stewing in the rancid stench of stale sweat and foul musk around the clock. Surviving ten years surrounded by hungry stares and wandering hands was more than enough to turn the once-innocent Yang Hwado into a raging misandrist—or rather, a hardcore misogynist by this world's standards.
It finally taught me why female characters in classic wuxia novels always ran around harboring a burning hatred for men.
"Looking back, I should've just married the kid and hunkered down..."
If the problem was her age, I could have just waited until she grew up. Sure, people around me would have grumbled, but so what? That would have been the extent of it. If I simply ignored them, it wouldn't have amounted to anything.
To think I couldn't see something so obvious and instead chose to grind away as a grunt until I was twenty.
Was I an absolute dumbass?
Yes, I was. That was why I volunteered in the first place.
Fuck my life.
"Time to get discharged."
Whatever the hell had happened, I was finally twenty—an adult. It was the prime time to wash my hands of this and make a clean break. Time to retire and get married.
My clan was nitpicking every detail about my future spouse, but...
Honestly, I couldn't care less about status or noble bloodlines. As long as she was pretty and had huge breasts, I was happy. If she had a gentle personality on top of that, it would be icing on the cake. In a realm with a population second to none, there was no way in hell not a single woman like that existed.
I looked down at the resignation letter nestled safely inside my chest pocket and smiled blissfully.
"My Daji, my Diaochan, my Yang Guifei... just you wait."
The misery was finally over. The sweet life was about to begin.
Lord Yang Hwado is hereby appointed to the glorious Brocade Guard.
"An imperial edict has arrived from Her Imperial Majesty: Lord Yang Hwado is hereby appointed to the glorious Brocade Guard!"
"...Come again?"
"Starting today, you will be serving in the Imperial Palace. My heartiest congratulations!"
The Emperor had refused my discharge.
And just like that, I became an imperial Brocade Guard in this gender-reversed Murim.