Age, ten.
The day began earlier for the boy Lee Seon-woo than it did for others.
At dawn, before anyone else had risen.
The boy was the first to wake at Huaming Escort Bureau and headed for the well.
He had to hurry if he wanted to fill several large jars so there would be enough water for everyone to use in the morning.
He carried a shoulder frame fitted with water buckets back and forth without rest between the well and the jars behind the kitchen. When people gradually began preparing breakfast, he picked up a bush-clover broom and cleaned every corner of the escort bureau.
Afterward, he went to the kitchen, gathered the leftovers himself, and made breakfast of them for his younger sister and himself. Then he headed to the nearby Ilho Martial Academy to learn the martial arts needed to become an escort guard.
As soon as his martial arts lesson ended, he returned to the escort bureau and ran errands for the Escort Captain and the escort guards until evening.
But evening brought Lee Seon-woo no chance to catch his breath.
His cousins of the same age found fault with him over every imaginable thing and used it to provoke him.
If he fought back, the resulting disturbance might earn the hatred of his aunt, the mistress of the escort bureau, and then he might not receive money for his sick younger sister's medicine.
“You filthy beggar! Stop leeching off our escort bureau and get out!”
“Why? Do you think staying here might earn you an Escort Captain's post someday? Not a chance!”
Lee Seon-woo silently endured the mockery pouring over him.
Of course.
“If Aunt were still alive, Grandfather might have shown you a little mercy, but she is not.”
“How long must our escort bureau shelter lowborn filth who does not even know his father?”
There were times when it was difficult to endure.......
But what could he do?
Seon-woo could only clench his fists and lower his head.
“Tsk! You have no pride at all. Then again, that must be why you try to earn everyone's sympathy by doing menial work no one asked of you, all so you can pay for your meals. You must know you are only dragging our father's name through the mud.”
His cousins, the brothers Lee Seon-myeong and Lee Seon-jong, tormented Seon-woo for a long while more before they finally left.
Seon-woo released a silent sigh and looked down at his worn clothes.
He brushed off the marks left by their kicks, straightened the collar they had grabbed, and put his appearance in order.
Then he practiced a smile toward the empty space.
Only then could he enter the room and smile naturally in front of his younger sister.
Once Seon-woo had fully composed himself, he walked toward the room where his six-year-old little sister waited for him.
Seon-woo's dream was modest.
He would honor his mother's wish by learning martial arts and becoming a competent escort guard.
Then he would leave Huaming Escort Bureau with his younger sister, A-ri, buy a small house somewhere under heaven where the siblings could rest comfortably, and live without having to watch others' moods whenever they ate or slept.
He worked hard in the belief that such a day would come eventually.
And so today was the same as yesterday.
As Lee Seon-woo endured a tomorrow that would be the same as today, he found the sudden change that had come to him thoroughly unwelcome.
SWISH, SWISH—!
Sweeping before the main gate of Huaming Escort Bureau, Lee Seon-woo sensed the gaze that had clung persistently to him for the past several days and bit his lip.
It would have been uncomfortable enough if a stranger were watching him from hiding, but some man dressed like a beggar had the audacity to sit in plain view and stare only at him.......!
It bothered him.
Moreover, the reactions of the escort bureau's people were strange.
Ordinarily, they would have scolded him or picked a fight, asking why he had drawn some beggar to the escort bureau, yet they were far too quiet.
Quite a few of the escort bureau's hot-tempered martial artists disliked strangers loitering nearby and would have driven the man away themselves, but no one had even tried.
‘My aunt must have done something, must she not?’
Had she not always regarded Seon-woo and A-ri like thorns in her side?
It was obvious that she intended to somehow tie this suspicious man to Seon-woo and manufacture a problem.
“Sigh.”
Seon-woo sighed.
His maternal grandfather, confined to bed by illness after handing the Escort Bureau Master position to Seon-woo's uncle, had refrained from casting the siblings out only because he believed they might prove useful someday.
Even so, Seon-woo knew perfectly well that the old man had no intention of making him compete with his cousins and eventually inherit the Escort Bureau Master position.
‘This is all that man's fault! Why did he have to appear?!’
Seon-woo frowned and glared at him.
When Seon-woo, who had pretended not to know him and looked away all this time, finally met his eyes, the man's gaze flashed sharply through his tangled hair.
Seon-woo flinched but did not retreat.
The anger pent up inside him was about to explode.
At that moment, the door behind Seon-woo opened slightly, and a little girl poked her head through the gap.
When the girl spotted Seon-woo, she squeezed through the doorway and ran to him.
“Big Brother!”
“A-ri!”
Seon-woo turned in surprise.
When his little sister, who had just turned six, came pattering toward him, Seon-woo quickly opened his arms and lifted her.
Her tiny body dangled high in his embrace.
“Why did you come out? Did you eat? What about your medicine? You should have put on warmer clothes before coming outside.”
As his worried questions continued, A-ri smiled brightly.
“I'm okay, Big Brother. It doesn't hurt today. More importantly.......”
A-ri craned her neck past Seon-woo's shoulder and glanced at the man sitting against the wall opposite the main gate and watching them.
Then she kicked her dangling feet, asking to be put down.
Puzzled, Seon-woo lowered her to the ground, and A-ri approached the man across the way without delay.
“A-ri!”
Seon-woo shouted in alarm.
Wi So-baek silently watched the little girl approach him.
Was the round little thing not rather like a pea?
Fresh and green like a newly sprouted shoot, she was an exceedingly tiny child.
When the girl came right up to him, Wi So-baek tilted his head.
The girl mimicked him, tilting her tiny head to the side, then opened her mouth.
“Excuse me.”
“What?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was watching because there is someone I absolutely must see.”
“Do you mean... our Big Brother?”
Wi So-baek did not answer the girl.
He spoke to the boy, who had already approached, pulled the girl back from behind, and now regarded him with hostility.
“Yes. I came to see your elder brother.”
The boy clenched his molars and took one step back.
“Why would you come to see me?”
He showed fierce wariness, practically growling, but even so.
To Wi So-baek, he looked only insignificant and adorable.
Wi So-baek was so delighted and incredulous that a child resembling Se-jin was alive and breathing that he had done nothing but watch him for several days. How could the boy seem anything else?
“Because I promised I would come see you, no matter what.”
I promised your father.
At Wi So-baek's words, the boy's eyes shook violently, and he finally exploded.
“Then you should have come sooner!”
As tears filled the boy's eyes, the girl covered his cheeks with two hands shaped like maple leaves.
“Big Brother, don't cry.”
“But you know... how long Mother waited... do you not, A-ri?”
Hm?
Just as Wi So-baek decided that something about the situation was strange and tried to interject!
“But! But! He is still our dad!”
What?
What was that pea-sized thing saying?
Wi So-baek's eyes widened.
“He is Big Brother's only dad, so don't be angry. Welcome him! He cried so sadly as soon as he saw you, Big Brother. I'm sure he had a reason he couldn't come until so late!”
Huh...?
There certainly was a reason.
For one thing, Wi So-baek was not the boy's father, and he had learned that he even had a nephew only recently!
But the situation was hardly favorable for saying so.
“A reason? What kind of reason could keep him from coming even once before Mother died... only to appear like that now and make trouble for us? I will never acknowledge that man.”
A-ri recalled that no one could restrain her usually warm and gentle Big Brother on the rare occasions when he became stubborn.
A-ri pressed her lower lip with adorable front teeth like grains of rice, then whipped her head toward Wi So-baek.
As if to say that the grown-up was at fault, so the grown-up should solve it.
Looking into those star-like eyes where resentment and hope coexisted, Wi So-baek thought.
Ah......!
So this was the very kind of trial ordinary people often suffered.
How could Wi So-baek tell them that he was not even their father?!
How could he say that their father had never made it here and had ultimately left them behind only in his dying wish?!
Besides, if one examined the relationship, then from his nephew's perspective, Wi So-baek was merely a sworn uncle he had never met!
And one who was the Demon Alliance Leader of the Demon Alliance, called by the world the most terrifying villain among those considered the greatest under heaven!
‘Damn it.’
Faced with a practical problem, Wi So-baek snapped fully awake.
After Se-jin's death.
The translucent veil that had overlaid the space between himself and the world, blurring his sense of reality, finally lifted completely.
While Wi So-baek hesitated.
Seon-woo, who had inexplicably stopped and lingered instead of immediately returning, lowered his gaze.
“You said you came to see me? Then you have seen me, so please leave. You have no other reason to be here, do you?”
He adjusted A-ri in his arms so she would be comfortable and turned toward the main gate.
Wi So-baek felt a sense of crisis.
His instincts, which had always led him to the finest choice among every possibility, warned him that he must never let this moment pass.
Therefore.
“Why would I have no reason?”
“.......”
Seon-woo's steps continued carrying him away from Wi So-baek.
Wi So-baek scrubbed his face with his left hand, then finally spoke.
“I am your father.”
Seon-woo's toes trembled faintly.
He stood still for a moment, but then continued through the main gate without stopping.
Wi So-baek, however, believed it was enough to have opened a small crack before Seon-woo's heart closed entirely, so he was satisfied even with that much.
Still.
“Sigh. This is driving me mad.”
Out of nowhere, he had gained not a nephew, but a son.
And was that little fox of a daughter thrown in as a bonus?
Wi So-baek met the eyes of the pea-sized girl who rested her chin on Seon-woo's shoulder, watched him, and waved.
Unlike the innocent child she had pretended to be before her Big Brother, the sidelong gaze now sizing him up suggested otherwise.
She was no bonus.
It seemed more like a forced sale.
***
“What? That beggar told that bastard Seon-woo he was his father, is that it?”
“Yes.”
Lee Seon-jong's eyes gleamed at the new information brought by the man he had assigned to watch them.
Lee Seon-jong hurried to his mother.
He pushed past the maids who greeted him and entered his mother's room, where she was drinking tea with his elder brother, Seon-myeong.
Seon-jong resented his elder brother for cozying up to their mother while leaving him out, but it did not matter.
“Mother, that beggar finally approached Seon-woo!”
Seon-jong possessed information certain to seize his mother's attention at once.
But his mother dismissed it as nothing important.
“Why all the commotion? Something that was bound to happen someday merely happened today.”
“Exactly. The important question is how large a disturbance we must entice the beggar to cause before my maternal grandfather casts Seon-woo out for good, is it not?”
“Yes. As expected, my eldest son is clever.”
When their mother praised only his elder brother, Seon-myeong, Seon-jong clenched his fists.
Seon-myeong caught the slight change in Seon-jong's mood and deliberately brightened his voice further.
“Then, Mother, since Seon-woo's birth father has come to the escort bureau... shall we invite him inside and greet him properly? Once Seon-woo sees his father trembling before the might of our escort bureau, will that bastard not finally understand his place?”
“If that is what my eldest son thinks, then let us do so.”
When their mother smiled, Seon-myeong smiled with her.
They had no idea what sort of monster they were inviting into the escort bureau of their own accord.