Shock! Horror! And Amazement!
Shock!
Horror!
And amazement!
Those were the emotions that flooded through me after reading the three novels the bookstore owner had recommended: The House of the Dao King, The Rise and Fall of the Peng Clan, and Chronicles of a Generation's Hero.
In a word?
Garbage.
Such pure, unadulterated garbage that they called to mind those infamous "Seven Forbidden Books" that used to circulate on the old internet. Wondering if the bookstore owner had simply recommended something bizarre, I stopped by other bookstores while hunting for the Four Treasures of the Study — and every single one of them recommended the same titles.
So the claim that these books sold well was probably no lie.
And yet… and yet…
"How… how could… novels like this… ugh…"
If I'd had any inner energy, I would have coughed blood on the spot. My hands trembled from the sheer severity of the internal injury.
First up: The House of the Dao King.
The overall plot followed a family of Dao practitioners who were ruined by the White Lotus Cult and sought revenge. A classic, by-the-numbers revenge story.
The problem was the pacing and the prose.
Lee Hwangho said: Mwahahahahaha! I shall kill you!
Seo Okjun said: Mwahaha! Come and try!
Dialogue so stiff it barely qualified as speech. And on every single page, without fail, some variation of "mwahaha" or "keh-keh-keh-keh" made its mandatory appearance.
Even so, trusting the bookstore owner's word that the book sold well — figuring there had to be a reason — I kept turning the pages.
I didn't make it past a third of the way through before I slammed it shut.
Danmok Pi began training deep in the mountains. Ten years passed. He completed the ultimate martial arts.
The moment I saw that sentence, I could no longer bring myself to hold onto the book.
"Huff… huff…"
I hurled it across the room, took a moment to steady my breathing, and then — with hands still shaking — picked up the next volume.
The Rise and Fall of the Peng Clan.
Still reeling from the critical damage inflicted by The House of the Dao King, I found the book almost unwilling to open.
But I had to look. This one might be different.
I opened The Rise and Fall of the Peng Clan.
It did not take long to realize this was a demonic scripture every bit as vile as the last.
Whatever grudge these authors held against the White Lotus Cult, this one was also about the young master of the Peng Clan, whose family had been wiped out by them. Only this novel was an extreme overpowered-protagonist fantasy in which the hero solved every problem by screaming, "I am the greatest under heaven!"
Whenever a fight broke out with an enemy, the battle ended in one or two exchanges. The hero was so absurdly strong that I genuinely wondered how the Peng Clan had ever been destroyed by the White Lotus Cult in the first place.
Suffering yet another critical internal injury, I hurriedly closed the book. I was in no condition to keep reading — but the blade was already drawn, and I had paid the princely sum of one silver liang for the remaining volume as well.
In the end, I had no choice but to open Chronicles of a Generation's Hero.
The opening description alone was so juvenile I didn't even want to recount it. I shut the book immediately.
"My… my silver…"
The moment the cover closed, the three silver liang I'd spent on these books flashed before my eyes.
To waste three liang on kindling this bad…
True, I still had an Eunwonbo — worth dozens of times more than a silver liang — but that didn't mean I was free to blow silver on this trash. And yet the quality of the fiction that people of the Central Plains were reading, purchased at the cost of three silver coins, wasn't merely serious. It was catastrophic.
"I get it now… the sentence craft and writing skill of the Central Plains… so dull I want to die."
Was that why?
A strange confidence welled up inside me, and nonsense came tumbling out of my mouth.
"…I can do this! If it's me!"
Thoughts of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms storyline began chaining together in my head.
Riding that momentum, I spread paper across the desk. Then I took up the ink, inkstone, and brush I'd learned to use back in elementary school, and set the brush dancing with the force of a single decisive stroke.
"…"
The brush danced.
"…"
The brush…
"This is… kinda hard?"
The ink bled so badly that most of the characters were unreadable.
I pulled out another sheet and tried again. And once more, I ruined the paper.
This time, though, it was a little better than before.
After several more sheets sacrificed to the cause, roughly an hour had passed — and I could finally write characters that were halfway presentable.
Soso, the youngest maid of the Cheonpung Merchant Group, currently had more than a few things annoying her. As the junior-most servant, her workload was piled mountain-high.
On top of everything else, she had been stuck managing the guest quarters where the freed Jaengjasu hostages were temporarily staying.
At first, she had shared the duties with the other maids. But now that the porters had all departed, the only maid left managing the place was Soso herself — the youngest.
All for the sake of a single remaining Jaengjasu!
At the beginning, Soso hadn't given it much thought. She had assumed he would leave soon enough, just like the others.
But time passed, and he did not leave.
No — if anything, he showed no intention of leaving at all, never once stepping outside his room.
He'll leave soon…
He'll leave soon… right?
Clinging to that thought day after day, a full week had already gone by. Because of it, Soso had been forced to wake a full shichen earlier than the other maids every single morning for the past seven days.
Even now, having risen that extra hour early, Soso finished her other chores and was sweeping the courtyard where Lee Munhyuk resided — eyes hollow from lack of sleep.
Then, with a sudden bang, the door to Lee Munhyuk's room flew open.
It was a door that never opened unless he was heading out for a meal or the latrine. Soso whipped her head around, hope flooding her face.
Is he leaving?
Please don't let it be the latrine! Please!
She watched, silently praying with everything she had.
"Finally finished!"
Lee Munhyuk stepped outside, stretching. Something about him felt different, and Soso sensed it at once — she scurried over in a hurry.
"What is the occasion, sir?"
Lee Munhyuk looked at her.
"Ah! I finally accomplished what I set out to do."
Color rushed back into Soso's face.
Is he finally leaving?
She asked carefully.
"Are you departing now, sir? The other Jaengjasu gentlemen have all checked out."
"Ah… well, I have been here a while. I'll let you know after I stop by the bookstore."
With that, Lee Munhyuk gathered up his materials and headed out. Watching him leave, Soso silently hoped he would just keep walking and never come back, and she resumed her sweeping.
Then, a short distance away, she spotted Branch Manager Baek Gawang passing by.
Soso bowed her head toward him from afar in greeting.
She lowered her head briefly, then lifted it — only to find Baek Gawang drawing steadily closer.
Confused as to why he was coming this way, she stood frozen in panic. By then, Baek Gawang had already arrived and addressed her.
"Is that you, Soso? What have you been doing here?"
Soso explained that one guest still remained, and that she alone was minding the place because of him.
"Is that so? And what does the fellow usually do?"
Baek Gawang asked.
"I don't rightly know what he does inside, sir, but whenever I pass nearby, the smell of ink is overpowering."
"Ohh! I see! So he truly has been studying."
Hearing Soso's report, Baek Gawang nodded in satisfaction.
"Um, Branch Manager…"
Soso ventured carefully.
"What is it?"
"The others who came with him have all left now. Might it not be better to move him to a different guest room? The weather will turn cold soon, and we may have to heat this entire building just for one guest."
Lee Munhyuk might leave soon — but if he stayed, she wasn't sure she could endure it. Seizing what she hoped was her chance, Soso pressed on quickly.
"If he continues to stay, perhaps relocating him to another guest house would be wise?"
Baek Gawang considered her words for a moment. The season when the hearths would need to be lit was fast approaching. And right now, the guest house where Lee Munhyuk stayed housed only Lee Munhyuk himself.
"No. Leave him as he is. One must not disturb a man at his studies."
He knew from experience. He himself had once studied himself half to death trying to pass the Hyangsi, and he remembered the bone-deep fatigue of having a carefully built study routine shattered. Of course, merely changing rooms might not be a great problem under ordinary circumstances.
But the Hyangsi was right around the corner. In a situation like that, even a man who was normally unflappable grew hypersensitive — reacting to the slightest sound. And this fellow never even came outside, barricading himself in his room to study and nothing else!
A man like that required even greater care.
"Yes, sir. Understood."
Soso answered with visible disappointment.
"And if that fellow asks for anything — anything you can obtain — do your best to get it for him."
"Yes…"
"And one more thing."
Baek Gawang continued.
"I shall instruct the others not to assign you any additional duties. Attend to him properly so that nothing interferes with his studies. Understood?"
"Pardon? Yes, sir!"
Don't assign her other work! The moment she heard those words, Soso shouted her assent before the opportunity could slip away. And in the same breath, she thought:
I have to keep this man here! And then she regretted it.
Ah… why did I say all that earlier…!
Why had she casually suggested that, since the others had left, he might leave too?
"Ah! You're here, sir?"
When I stopped by the bookstore, I immediately spotted the old man arranging the display stand.
"Hm?"
He didn't seem to remember me. The bookstore owner looked mildly flustered.
"I'm the one who bought those novels last time."
"I'll say this up front — no refunds."
Apparently people came back seeking refunds often enough that the old man spoke without even waiting to hear me out.
"Ahem… that's not why I'm here. I was wondering if you might read this and give me your appraisal…"
As I spoke, I held out the manuscript.
"What's this?"
The old man looked at the pages I'd handed him, then back at me with curiosity.
"I wrote a novel. Since I wrote it myself, I naturally find it entertaining — but I have no idea how others might feel, so I came to you."
A bookstore owner would certainly have read a great many books. Convinced that his critique would be reliable, I had rushed straight to him the moment the manuscript was finished.
"Hm? Sorry, but I don't read novels."
"Pardon?"
"Novels? Those are what the riffraff who fantasize about the martial world read, aren't they? The content's flimsy — why bother? You'd be better off spending that time reading the words of Confucius."
Judging by my own experience with this era's fiction, he wasn't wrong.
But… but my novel was different!
Outstanding sentence structure, line breaks tailored for easy reading — a novel that could only be called revolutionary. Granted, the content was the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so it might technically be plagiarism.
But what did that matter?
In this era, the Three Kingdoms story was barely known. That made me the original.
"My novel is different. Please, just read it once and give me your appraisal."
I kept pleading until the bookstore owner finally relented with a sigh.
"Fine, since you're begging so hard I'll take it — but I'm not reading it myself. I can bind it and let customers try it, though. Would that be all right?"
"That's perfectly fine!"
He wouldn't appraise it right now, but customers would eventually give their verdict. And as a bonus, he was offering to bind it. I offered the bookstore owner my heartfelt thanks.
"Then off you go. I've got binding to do and customers to wait for. Come back in a few days."
"Understood."
And so I handed the old man the masterpiece into which I had poured my soul over the course of a week, and left the bookstore with a heart full of anticipation.
"Let's see… once it's bound… I should clear about five hundred mun off this."
The bookstore owner muttered as much and promptly tossed the manuscript into the binding room. That very night, the binding work began.
And so it was only the next day that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms finally made it onto the display stand.
"I say, shopkeeper!"
And on the very day the book went on display, a man in a scholar's robes came calling.
"I heard you carry a collection of past Hyangsi exam solutions, so I came looking."
"My goodness, honored guest! Please, come in."
Around this time of year, with the Hyangsi underway, big fish always swam into the bookstores of Hyeongju.
And the bait the Hyeongju bookstores prepared for those big fish was precisely this: Collected Solutions to Past Hyeongju Hyangsi Examinations.
A volume compiling every Hyangsi question ever administered in Hyeongju, along with their answers. Of course, different questions would appear on the actual exam — but studying the problems and solutions allowed one to grasp the examiners' tendencies. For that reason, anyone coming to sit the Hyangsi bought this book as a matter of course.
"That'll be five silver liang."
"What? Five liang? Isn't that rather steep? Would four do?"
"Do you think this is easy to obtain? And you'll find the same price wherever you go."
The Hyeongju Bookstore Association had already locked the price at five liang across the board. The bookstore owner spoke with complete confidence.
"Five liang is simply too much… nngh… nothing for it, I suppose. Forgive me."
Just as the hooked big fish turned to leave, the bookstore owner called out after him.
"Wait! Wait a moment!"
He plucked a book from the display stand.
"I'll throw this one in as well — take both for five liang! This is the book everyone's been reading these days!"
On the cover of the book gripped in the bookstore owner's hand, the title Romance of the Three Kingdoms was written in bold, unmistakable characters.