Father sat solemnly across from me, and beside him Mother, who had been stitching a flower pattern with her embroidery hoop in hand, fixed on her son's flawless, pitch-black eyes.
Both of them watched with tense faces, and their target was one.
Me, small and pretty, kneeling daintily before the reading desk.
I was now three years old.
I had finally left behind those tiresome diapers, could ride the wooden horse on my own, and though I toddled, I could walk with a fair bit of dignity. My hands clasped behind my back were not bad either.
Above all.
"Mun-hyeon. Will you, ah, try reading this?"
Father's eyes shone, full of expectation, and he fidgeted.
Looking at the paper on the reading desk, I saw a great many characters written in a hand like dragons and serpents soaring.
Father had written it himself for his son.
Fine calligraphy.
Wang Xizhi, the calligrapher of a fallen state, would weep and leave.
"Read it for us."
With Mother taking an interest and urging me on too, I could not pretend ignorance.
For some reason, though my mind was no infant's, I could not bring myself to ignore Mother's words.
Having been born from her womb, I must be bound to her by an unseen thread of fate.
And her surname being Baek, one could say it was not unrelated.
Perhaps somewhere down the generations our lines had been tied together.
In any case, the paper before me.
Long ago a man named Zhou Xingsi, facing the emperor's wrath, composed two hundred and fifty lines of four characters each in a single night...... and it is called the Thousand Character Classic.
And I had to read this.
It is humiliating.
I may look three, but counting this life and that, my mental age passes a hundred easily. What on earth am I doing?
A sigh escaped me, but now that I had come to feel the affection between parent and child.......
Fine. They hold me in such love, so I ought to repay it.
"Heaven, cheon. Earth, ji. Black, hyeon. Yellow, hwang......."
As I read down the page as naturally as a monk chanting sutras, my parents took boundless delight.
"Ah, I only gave it to him for fun...... That is it! Well done. Oh, what a lovely child!"
"Dwelling, u! Dwelling, ju! Vast, hong! Wild, hwang!"
Father, puffed up for no reason by his own praise and Mother's admiration, raised his voice.
Then again, is it common for a three-year-old to rattle off the Thousand Character Classic?
Even in the Jaegal Clan, where geniuses gathered who would grab you by the collar if you called them second-cleverest under heaven, it was unprecedented.
Of course, it was possible because it was me.
It was only that my talent for the martial was too outstanding. In my youth I got as far as the Lesser Learning. After I won the title of Heavenly Demon I devoured a good many classics as well.
I thought there might be another enlightenment hidden in the writing. For a man like that, what was the Thousand Character Classic?
"Mun-hyeon must be clever because he takes after you, Husband."
Father, the third younger brother of the current Clan Head, was in charge of the Jaegal Clan's Military Stratagem Hall.
A place that studied strategy and tactics.
The name Jaegal Do-yun, the Eight Gates Genius, carried a fair bit of weight even in murim. Something about how he had perfectly reproduced the Eight Formations Diagram of his distant ancestor, the Martial Marquis Jaegal.......
"Come now, wife. How could Mun-hyeon take after me? He takes after you, look how striking his features are."
"Oh, Husband, really."
Baek Su-hyeon, embroidering beside him, hid her flushed face behind her sleeve and laughed, as if embarrassed.
Baek Su-hyeon, the First Beauty of the Danjiang.
They said that in her day no one near the mouth of the Danjiang could match her looks.
'Heh heh heh.'
Of course the years had faded that beauty a little now, but so what?
Mother was pleased, and that satisfied me.
But somehow...... the mood between the two of them was odd.
I was three, an age that knows everything worth knowing.
It was certainly an age at which watching one's parents coo at each other was hard to bear.
Wait!
Going by past experience, in a situation like this?
"Ahem! Are you out there?"
"Yes, Hall Leader."
So-hye answered the voice of Father, who had suddenly cleared his throat and turned solemn.
"The night is late. Take Mun-hyeon now and put him to bed."
"Yes."
At Father's words Mother's cheeks flushed, and So-hye, who had been waiting outside the door, soon came into the room.
I knew it. There had been something in his eyes.
Late at night? What exactly was late?
It was still early evening.
Put me to bed at this hour to do what?
The answer was obvious, of course.
A second child was out of the question.
Even an old man hungers for love.
I was only now feeling their love, the kind that minds neither the wet spot nor the dry one, and already a sibling?
What selfish parents!
Until at least the age of ten I had to be showered with my parents' love. That was only proper. I had failed to ascend and been born again, so I deserved that much in compensation.
So I could not stand by and watch my parents, still burning for each other in middle age, carry on like that.
Above all, Mother was already forty. If she were to conceive, how hard would it be on her?
I had to protect Mother.
Jaegal Mun-hyeon shook off So-hye's hand and toddled over to cling to the hem of Baek Su-hyeon's skirt.
"I want to sleep with Mama."
"Hm?"
"I'm going to sleep with Mama."
"Now, Mun-hyeon, you sleep in your own room......."
"With Mama! I'm sleeping!"
"......."
"The gatehouse man said so. Once they're past forty, a husband and wife sleep apart."
"Th-the gatehouse man?"
"Mm-hm!"
Playing his part as a baby to the fullest, Jaegal Mun-hyeon carried out his sabotage as though he knew nothing at all.
"Mun-hyeon, your mother must be tired. Do not do this......."
"I said I'm sleeping with Mama! Papa, you get out!"
At the shriek, Jaegal Do-yun looked flustered.
"All right, my son. Let us sleep together. Husband, let it be so. Tonight the three of us will sleep snug together."
"Sh-shall we?"
"The child wants it so."
A loving mother indeed. She never took her son's words lightly.
Of course, in that moment Father's eyes were full of a strange sense of loss and resentment.
The gatehouse man was probably in danger.
Sorry.
But to keep from losing the love I never received in my past life, there was no help for it.
The problem came afterward.
I showed off the genius of reciting the Thousand Character Classic straight through just to be doted on, and rumors began to spread that a genius for the ages had been born in the Jaegal Clan.
Then again, I had broken record after record...... so it was understandable.
I am a talent of the Buddha's class.
And the result.
"The Lesser Learning?"
"That is right. You have already finished the Thousand Character Classic, so you may read this now. Heh heh heh!"
Father's jokes went too far.
I was only three.......
"Now then, let us begin."
Jaegal Do-yun's eyes were brimming with greed as he opened the book marked Lesser Learning on the reading desk (a low table for study).
H-he was serious?
Mother had told me that lately he grew giddy with boasting whenever the clan elders gathered.
And once he had said the basics of learning were enough, that he only wanted me to grow up healthy.
A man's heart is that fickle.
When had he become so fanatical?
Somehow I could see the future laid out plainly before my eyes.
"Son, what are you doing? Read, now."
"......."
"Read it. Hm? If you read it well, your father will take you to the market and buy you the candied sweets you love...... two of them!"
"T-two?"
"Indeed!"
Jaegal Do-yun held up two fingers proudly and nodded.
Oh no, I gulped before I knew it.
Damned body.
I may be trying to act like a child at least until I gain strength, but how can it be this faithful to instinct?
With an adult's mind in a child's body, there are times I cannot control it.
To think that the moment I heard the word candied sweets, that sweet taste would come to mind and my mouth would water.
Shameless, at my age (?).
"Heh heh heh heh. You like that? Then read."
At Father's words, Jaegal Mun-hyeon slowly began to read the Lesser Learning.
"That is it. Well done."
It was not because of the candied sweets.
It was...... because it made Father happy.
***
Sigh piled on sigh.
Father's greed became bottomless, and once I had read him the Lesser Learning he brought out the Precious Mirror of the Bright Mind.
This could not go on.
Would that be the end of it?
Once I learned the duties a man ought to keep from the Precious Mirror of the Bright Mind, next came the Four Books. And after that the Great Learning, the Analects, the Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean.......
And was that all?
It would lead on to the Five Classics in the end, as plain as fire.
And how many volumes were kept in the Myriad Books Pavilion of the Jaegal Clan, said to be the largest in the Central Plains?
Reading them all would turn my black hair to scallion root and then some.
Above all, I had no intention of becoming a scholar in the first place.
Things had twisted in a direction I never wanted, and I had suddenly undergone the strange affair of being born again. At first it was absurd, but receiving my parents' love, I had more or less made up my mind to live as a descendant of the Jaegal.
But the thought of studying nothing but letters all my life nearly brought me out in hives.
A pine caterpillar must eat pine needles.
Gorge on Confucius-says and Mencius-says without discrimination, and I would surely take ill and leak rainbow stool (that is, rainbow shit).
I had decided to live as a Jaegal, but I would live as a martial artist. Does a clan not need one bastard who is a freak of nature?
I was going to need a plan.
I had to make it so Father could no longer hope for anything from me in scholarship.
"So-hye."
"Yes, Young Master."
"Who was the fastest at learning in the Jaegal Clan?"
"Why, you are, Young Master. You broke every record there ever was. Reading the Lesser Learning at three must be the first time in history. Even now it is uncanny, talking with you. Sometimes you are like a child, and sometimes like a grown-up. Right now it feels like talking to an adult."
Because I am an adult.
This body was three; counting my whole existence I had lived several times longer than So-hye...... not that it mattered much.
However hard I worked these short legs it came to the same thing, and my parents' overprotection meant I could not even leave the residence.
I had no way to learn what went on inside the clan except through So-hye.
"Apart from me, who was the fastest?"
"Apart from you...... I believe your younger uncle's son was the fastest. Did he finish the Thousand Character Classic at four? Everyone talked about him as a genius. But lately they say he is having a dreadful time of it."
"Why?"
"Because of you, of course."
"Hm?"
"You broke the records. That is how it is for the one being chased. From what the maidservants say, he has been driving himself even harder....... In any case, the Jaegal Clan is in a frenzy over education now. I hear the Heavenly Strategy Court Head's son, born not long ago, already has a letters master assigned to him."
"A letters master? He is not even a month old."
"Do not even ask. They say the husband and wife quarrel every day over it being too much."
"Hmm......."
Jaegal Do-ung, Head of the Heavenly Strategy Court, was Father's youngest brother, and a month ago he had gained a second son.
But a letters master...... somehow it seemed I had unwittingly raised the average level of expectation placed on the Jaegal Clan's younger students.
'Tsk, tsk. Parents, comparing their children to one another. Do they know how bad that is?'
The neighbor's son, this is the problem with him.
At this rate I was going to be hated by my peers in the clan.
"So-hye. Then who was the slowest?"
"Hmm, I am not sure about that. You know how it is. Everyone hushes up the slow ones, so no rumors get out."
"That is true."
I thought for a moment, then spoke.
"Would you go and quietly find out what my younger uncle's son was reading at what age? And who was the slowest, and how far along they had studied at what age."
"Why that?"
"No reason."
"Hmm, I will."
"Thank you."
"No need for thanks. What would I not do for you, Young Master?"
Seeing her grin without a second thought, I smiled of my own accord.
That was the kind of woman she was.
One who would grant anything he wanted, no questions asked.
There was a reason he liked her best after his parents.
In any case, from now on I would do just about average.
It was good that my parents were pleased, but if I drew notice and attention for nothing, I might lose the time I would need to train in martial learning.
'Right. Just enough and no more. That will do.'
At three years old, Jaegal Mun-hyeon resolved to become a dullard who learned everything slowly.
To escape Father's clutches (?).