How Does Brother Namgung Know About Apple Hips…?
Somewhere in all of this, a sense of déjà vu hung in the air.
—A perfectly ordinary, handsome young man, sweet-talked and browbeaten by Brother Namgung until he caved—
After endless back-and-forth, Son Jieun finally signed the contract Brother Namgung thrust under his nose.
“Mm-hmm… Excellent.
Now. If you look at this letter, you’ll see we haven’t much time left.
To stay on schedule in a single week, we’ll have to resort to… rather radical methods.
Jieun, are you prepared?”
Brother Namgung curled the corner of his mouth into a truly wicked smile.
“Radical… methods…?”
Jieun’s voice dripped with worry at the mere sound of the words—but by then it was far too late.
After being half-shoved into signing by Brother Namgung’s endless cycle of coaxing and coercion, cold baths and hot baths, terror and reassurance, Jieun sat fidgeting, looking thoroughly unsettled.
“To surpass your mother’s feminine power, you’ll need extremely rigorous training.
And if we’re to cram it into a single week, ordinary methods simply won’t leave us enough time, will they?”
Having dropped that thoroughly ominous remark, Brother Namgung turned his head toward me.
“…From this moment on, for one week, I have somewhere to take Jieun.
As for you, Gaeul… hmm. You may do as you please.
Here—pocket money.”
He dug into his pouch and set two taels of silver in my palm.
“Huh…? Really?!”
“Would I joke about something like this?
…Take it before I change my mind.”
“Absolutely!
I’ll guard the house—er, the inn room carefully, so don’t worry!”
What a windfall…!
Watching me beam over the sudden fortune and free time—though, truthfully, I’d always had plenty of free time—Brother Namgung clicked his tongue.
“Tsk tsk. Only at times like this do you brim with energy.”
“When the Hour of the Pig arrives—between ten and eleven at night—the locks on your shoes will release automatically.
While I’m gone, don’t just stay cooped up in the room. Go outside and play a little.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it already….”
How little did he trust me, treating me like some thirty-something shut-in NEET?
Reading the dissatisfaction on my face, Brother Namgung drawled,
“…Before you went drinking with that fellow Geungwang, you spent five whole days never leaving the room, just lying there devouring snacks. Did you think I didn’t know?”
How did he find out…?
I’d assumed he was always out “busy with work” and would never notice. Misjudgment.
“Hehe, well, the light novels and comics from Why were just so fun…. And, um, I did leave the inn when I went to the book-rental shop….”
“Tsk tsk….
Ah, and one more thing…. You’ve already experienced this yourself, of course.”
Brother Namgung leaned in and whispered,
“Any problem you can’t resolve alone is a common symptom among practitioners of the Femboy Divine Art.
I’ll tell you one thing…
Receiving another’s yang energy is the easiest solution.”
“………?”
“…Heh. I’ll be off for real now.”
“Ah, um, take care—!”
I let Brother Namgung’s cryptic words go in one ear and out the other, walking him all the way outside the inn to see him off.
“…That aside, why did Brother Namgung hand the waiter so much silver…?”
After watching him leave from the entrance, I recalled what he’d done just before departing.
Right before stepping out, he’d said something like,
‘Good work. …No need for… night business… anymore… while I’m… please…’
…and pressed a whole bundle of silver—twelve taels—into the hands of the inn’s star waiter.
—The same waiter who, despite having passed twenty years of age some time ago, still enjoyed those indecent activities in the room next to mine.
“Hmm…….”
I hadn’t caught the words after “good work” clearly because of the distance, but after a moment’s thought I figured he’d simply been paying for the various odd jobs he’d had the man run these past few days.
“Man, Brother Namgung really is generous….”
That absurd open-handedness, along with all the other kindnesses he’d shown me over the years, was one of the many reasons I never packed my travel money and ran, no matter how many troublesome things he put me through.
It was absolutely not because I liked loafing around the inn.
…Really.
Click, click—
Thud—
“Haaah, so comfortable….”
Nothing beat lying on a bed.
Even if I had no choice but to lie down still wearing the high heels, it was a hundred—no, a thousand—times better than standing.
“Mm… what should I do….”
Today had thoroughly worn me out.
And no wonder: though I hadn’t explained the details to Brother Namgung—every time I mumbled, he just smirked as if he already knew everything, which was unsettling—after doing that sort of thing with Great Hero… no, Young Hero Geungwang in broad daylight, I’d come straight back to the inn only to watch Brother Namgung, calling himself a “problem-solver,” lure away a pure-hearted youth of twenty-two… or was it twenty-one?… and only then could I finally rest.
It had been a truly, truly long day.
“Whew…. I’ve got a good idea….
First, sleep on it….”
Muttering to myself, I closed my eyes, and the demon of sleep swept over me at once.
The next day. When I woke, the shoes whose locks had released while I slept lay tumbled on the floor.
“Huh……?”
I’d grumbled more than once about how uncomfortable the high heels were, but Brother Namgung would be right there saying things like,
‘Thanks to the high heels your legs look longer, so your already excellent proportions have become even more perfect,’
or,
‘The curve of your hips, lifted by the high heels, is no longer mere apple-level—it’s soap-bubble level. Truly a face that topples kingdoms,’
and other endless compliments—whose exact meaning I still didn’t fully grasp—so even though I suspected the praise was deliberate, it felt nice enough that I’d been wearing them without complaint.
Still, the desire to take them off was real.
“Ah……… Come to think of it, Brother Namgung isn’t even here. Do I really need to wear high heels…?”
He’d said he’d be gone a full week, so if I put the heels back on the day before he returned, I’d never get caught.
In other words, I can switch to comfortable shoes for a whole week and he’ll never know…?
“Yes…! Time to dig out my old leather shoes…
……Wait, why is this here?”
In the shoe cabinet where my flats should have been sat only several pairs of high heels in slightly different colors and shapes from the ones I’d been wearing… and a single note.
“……Don’t tell me…….”
I trust you would never entertain the foolish notion of abandoning your footwork training.
“Ah…….”
With no other choice I slipped on a pair of black high heels, and the now-familiar click of the locking mechanism snapping shut greeted me.
“Ugh…. So much for that.”
After putting on the heels, I changed into my usual comfortable clothes—dolphin shorts and a crop top—went down to the first floor of the inn for breakfast, and decided, a little grandly, to reaffirm my own goals.
“Egg tarts, coming right up—!”
“Ah, thank you….”
Avoiding the waiter’s coquettish eye-smile, I waited until he’d set down the plate and left, then picked up a brush and faced a blank sheet of paper.
My Goals
If you asked why I was bothering with this… well, Brother Namgung had scolded me, but looking back I really had grown far too lazy these past few days.
Loafing and eating was fun, sure, but I couldn’t spend my whole life freeloading snacks.
So I raised the brush and, beneath the large characters for “Goals,” wrote:
Survival
Yes. My greatest goal was simply to stay alive in this harsh world.
This was the Central Plains, land of chivalrous heroes—where even a power-holder who could drop birds from the sky, if notorious enough, might find some righteous man who treated his own life like a discarded shoe suddenly leaping out to separate head from body with a single stroke of the blade.
Given everything my family had done—some people even called the fallout from the Tang gold-mine scam my family had sold under false pretenses the “Ponzi Shock”—the talk I overheard at inns alone made it clear our family’s infamy was so bad that righteous men flocking from every corner would draw lines on my limbs and carve me into seventeen pieces and still feel it wasn’t enough. If my identity ever slipped out, my head would fly off before long.
And second…
Wealth and Ease
It’s different from contented poverty! Completely different…!
…Honestly, I’d lived in hiding before, but never in actual poverty, so living poor was out of the question.
“I just want to live free of trouble, safe and comfortable, making a decent pile of money, and having fun….”
A hope anyone might hold—who would throw stones at me for it?
“The problem is how to make that dream real… and I have neither capital, nor funds, nor the strength to protect them….”