[TL: The title is a classical saying that a text will explain itself if read enough times.]
TL/ED – Miso
A man had died.
From nothing more than a touch.
'This is. The Star of Thousand Deaths......?'
An absurd, unreasonable power.
That cold realization brushed past him.
And Yeon So-wol threw up everything in his stomach.
It was less guilt than sheer physical revulsion turning his insides inside out.
"Hoo. Hoo."Even after retching for a good long while, still forcing down the nausea, Yeon So-wol thought.
"......Don't tell me. Am I supposed to get used to this kind of thing? Here?"
According to the common knowledge the ghosts had left in his head, that was exactly it.
The world called 'Jianghu' was
a place where seeing corpses,
becoming a corpse,
and making corpses,
all happened often enough.
From now on, it was the world Yeon So-wol had to live in.
"What the. Hell."
It was horrific.
Far too horrific.
But the most horrific part was this.
That he still wanted to live.
That he wanted to live a little longer.
Without getting screwed over this time.
Rewarded for exactly as much as he put in.
Sensibly. He wanted to try living just once like that.
Which was why his chest felt so tight.
"This is driving me crazy......."
Yeon So-wol looked down at his own hands.
"Am I going to have to keep using this power......."
The world called Jianghu didn't look like a peaceful place.
He might have to keep killing people.
To survive. To not be wronged.
He might have to kill people like they were rag dolls.
'Like just now.'
Yeon So-wol settled his churning stomach and looked around.
The skeletal old man.
The old monk with the broken neck.
Two bodies came into his view.
Reflexively, Yeon So-wol thought of what he had to do.
"That's messed up......."
The thought disgusted him.
"Hoo. Still, what has to be done has to be done."
He steeled himself.
Slowly he approached the bodies and searched inside their robes.
"Urgh."
A corpse that had not yet stiffened was shockingly soft.
He gagged again and again, but he kept doggedly searching through their clothes.
'Do what needs doing. Just do it. I have to live, don't I.'
He searched the old monk first.
Nothing much came out of him. He simply took the spare clothes and shoes from the monk's pack and changed into them. Modern clothing stood out far too much.
Next he searched the skeletal old man. The lower half of the man's robes was soaked through with waste, so he picked his way around it carefully.
The skeletal old man yielded quite a haul.
"...This is gold, and this is silver? And this is, a jewel?"
Out of the pouch tied at the waist came gold yuanbao, silver yuanbao, and beads the size of fingernails.
The yuanbao were one-tael lumps of gold and silver, about the size of abc chocolate, small enough to sit snugly in his palm. [TL: abc chocolate is a Korean snack made of small, bite-sized chocolate pieces.]
Flat on the bottom, rising at both ends and pressed down in the middle like a little boat, they stacked neatly.
Three gold yuanbao.
Seven silver yuanbao.
Three red beads.
Yeon So-wol turned over the common knowledge left behind in the ghosts' memories.
Even a rough count of the gold and silver came to a fortune that would let an ordinary farmer live for years without working.
He had no idea what those beads were worth, but even at a glance the color looked expensive.
Yeon So-wol took the whole pouch and tied it inside his own waistband. Where it wouldn't be seen from outside.
The heavy weight of it made him tense.
"Having money is good, but....... I need to be careful."
Given that this 'Jianghu' was a world with poor public order, this wealth could invite disaster.
Yeon So-wol swallowed hard and searched the skeletal old man a little more.
Feeling around the man's chest, he found a small wooden case.
"This is......."
It was an object he had memories of.
'At last, Shaolin's Great Restoration Pill is in my hands.'
The skeletal old man had said that right after stomping the old monk's neck and killing him.
"What is this thing that....... Ugh!"
As Yeon So-wol muttered, flashing memories rammed themselves into his head.
Fragments of memory left behind by the ghosts that had been destroyed inside his body.
「It's an elixir. It must be taken only in a state of perfect readiness.」
「A supreme treasure」
「If only I'd had a legendary elixir like the Great Restoration Pill.......」
「Hand it over!」
「My skill is better. It's the inner energy. If only my inner energy could keep up!」
「Aaaargh!」
Through memories thick with noise, mad voices and greed, flashing blades and screams went rushing past.
"Ugh."
Yeon So-wol bit his lip against the surging nausea. He had already vomited so much that he had no wish to do it again.
"Hoo. So. This is a treasure people called martial artists would never get a second shot at. That's what it is. Something that can make you strong in an instant."
Click.
He opened the wooden case.
Inside, contrary to its grand reputation, sat an utterly ordinary-looking round pill. If he hadn't known better, he'd have taken it for a common cow-bezoar sedative pill.
"......And it sounds like it's better to learn martial arts and be prepared before eating it, rather than just swallowing it."
Yeon So-wol looked up at the sky.
The sky he had fallen out of was a smooth, unbroken blue, as if it had never torn open at all.
"I guess I can't go home."
The sky he had fallen from was impossibly high.
This place wasn't just medieval China. It was the China of an entirely different world.
A place where ghosts truly existed, and where 'martial arts', the cultivation of energy to transcend humanity, was actually real.
He was suddenly afraid.
The feeling of standing alone at the edge of a cliff made of sky.
Yeon So-wol shivered.
He clenched the Great Restoration Pill tight.
Forcing his voice out, he made a promise to himself.
"Then. Let's become a martial artist."
They also seemed to be called Jianghu practitioners.
People who, because they held power beyond ordinary humans, could be relatively free even in this dangerous world.
In other words, people who could live in this world without getting screwed over.
'It won't be easy, though.'
Yeon So-wol was already nineteen.
Back on Earth, people who did elite athletics started in elementary or middle school, and martial arts, which handled a mysterious power, would be no less demanding than that. If anything, more.
'Maybe this is like a high school senior suddenly making a fuss about becoming a soccer player.......'
But, as if by fate, the Great Restoration Pill had fallen into his hands.
The legendary elixir that could remake a body and make it strong in a single stroke, if taken after learning martial arts.
'And I've got the power of the Star of Thousand Deaths too.'
The power that had brought a monstrously strong old man to his end in an instant.
Of course, its limits were obvious.
He had to touch someone to kill them.
Then again, a person dies from close enough contact with a blade too. Considering that, maybe it wasn't such an incredible ability in this world called Murim.
But.
'If this power and martial arts were combined.......'
Then maybe even in the Jianghu, where force was everything, he could walk with his shoulders squared.
"Let's do it. There's no other road anyway. And the situation's cooperating."
A life as a martial artist.
That was the most rational, most sensible judgment.
"Right. Let's do that."
Yeon So-wol had decided on the course of his new life.
And then he hesitated.
Was that really it?
Could he never go back to Earth?
All sorts of thoughts caught him by the ankles.
But.
In this unfamiliar world.
In a world where no one could help him.
He couldn't afford to waste time on top of everything else.
So Yeon So-wol forced his body to move.
He bit his lip once and looked up at the sky.
He pressed both hands to his forehead and made a show of bowing.
"Stay healthy......."
Because it seemed that from now on.
He would never see his family again.
Mom. Dad. Take care of yourselves. I'll survive here somehow, whatever it takes.
"......I promise. I'll live well."
An age just short of a full nineteen years.
The second act of his life, begun all at once.
His throat tightened and he nearly wept, but in the end he didn't cry, and turned his body around.
When he climbed a little way up the mountain, his view opened wide.
A small city, spread out as if cradled among the hills, came into view all at once.
Guangdong Province, at the southern tip of the Central Plains.
It was Xinxing County, the mountain city there.
Climbing a mountain was no easy thing with the pitiful stamina of a high school senior.
By the time he barely made it down, his clothes were covered in dirt.
'I made it!'
Maybe it was because he'd arrived at the end of all that hardship.
As he passed through the gate of Xinxing County, Yeon So-wol felt his tension ease a little, and even a faint flutter of excitement.
Wasn't it fascinating?
Walls built of stone and brick. Tiled roofs stretching their eaves wide above them. Oxen and horses coming and going in the streets.
The boisterous noise of the road.
He'd felt something like the fun of playing a wuxia game.
'Maybe. This could be a little fun.'
He'd never gotten to travel properly, what with all his studying. Was this what that felt like?
An exotic landscape.
The sense of some new beginning.
'Right. I ended up dropped in a place like this because of every kind of screw job, but let's not think of it as all bad. I saved my life, at least. If I work hard here too, I can probably build a decent life.'
People lived the same way everywhere.
Would a wuxia world be any different?
If he lived sensibly and worked hard, he could surely live a respectable life without much trouble.
Yeon So-wol held on to hope and firmed up his resolve.
At least until the breath of a man passing beside him hit him, whoosh-.
"Ugh!"
A smell that meant something inside a stomach or a throat was definitely rotting.
It felt like a fist to the face, and it snapped Yeon So-wol back to his senses. Blinking, he took another look at the streets of Xinxing County.
"......."
The first thing he saw was the Beijing bikini.
That fashion where men with bellies swollen like mountains somehow rolled up and knotted their unstretchable clothes to leave their hideous stomachs on full display.
"......."
And when he turned his head, he met eyes with a woman relieving herself in an alley.
"......."
When he turned away again, he saw people haggling with street vendors, shouting like they were about to come to blows.
Ear-splitting voices, two octaves' worth of tones packed into every word.
He frowned and turned his gaze, and what stabbed into his eyes was the filthy, deeply unsanitary grime dripping down the stall of a street peddler.
Thud!
A passerby slammed hard into Yeon So-wol's shoulder and kept walking.
"Hey!"
The impact was practically a punch, and when he turned in shock, the man with the bare belly glared at him.
"What're you looking at. Standing in the road like an idiot. Hrrk, ptooey."
At the sight of the man spitting a thick gob and glaring, Yeon So-wol quickly looked away. It was an old truth that one did not engage with crazy people.
But inside, he was shaking.
'That's insane.......'
A reality that no ordinary, sensible person of the 21st century could possibly handle.
'Hold on.'
That was when Yeon So-wol realized. The terrible truth.
'This is a wuxia world......?'
Which meant.
To put it another way.
This was a parallel world of ancient 'China'.
Ah.
Yeon So-wol hated the world.