Chapter 10

Watching Myeong-joo’s face, Sangju ventured, “But… what kind of drug does the military want to test?”

Myeong-joo only shrugged. There was no new drug at all, and the reason the military wanted to study Harmonization Saturation was obvious enough. Still, there was no reason to explain the truth in detail to a civilian cousin.

“At first I thought you were trying to enlist again…” Sangju muttered.

“Enlist? Fuck that. I’d be the biggest idiot alive if I went back into the army.” Myeong-joo hawked up the phlegm clinging to his throat and spat it onto the ground.

He sniffed against the cold just as a neighborhood boy came tearing toward them from across the fields, waving one arm so wildly that his rubber shoes looked ready to fly off.

Myeong-joo broke into incredulous laughter. “Hey, you little fool—slow down before your balls fall off!”

The child, cheeks frozen scarlet, had already raced within shouting distance. “Young Master! You’ve got a telephone call!”

“A telephone call?” Myeong-joo cocked his head. He had come all the way to his hometown for the holiday; there was hardly anyone who should know where to reach him.

Before he could think of a likely caller, the boy shouted again at full volume. “What was it—ah, I remember! He said he’s an elder from the Seoksan Lee clan association! He was making a huge fuss, saying he absolutely has to speak to you and telling me to get you to the phone right now!”

The pleasant lines of Myeong-joo’s face slowly twisted. Why are they looking for me?

The first thing he had checked after returning to the past was exactly when he had returned to. In the spring of the year Myeong-in turned twenty-two, around magnolia season, the Seoksan Lee clan had invoked an old promise and sent the marriage horoscope papers. Myeong-joo had awakened again in January of that very year.

Looking suspiciously gaunt for a man who had supposedly collapsed while digging for wild ginseng, Myeong-joo had forced open a throat dried raw from days in bed and questioned Myeong-in relentlessly. His bewildered sister said no marriage proposal had arrived. The relief had nearly unmanned him; he had thought the marriage itself must have been erased along with the future he remembered. Fighting down tension fierce enough to burst his heart, he coaxed and cajoled her through her baffled questions until she assured him once more that no marriage horoscope papers had ever come.

And now, just when he had begun to believe fate had passed them by, a telephone call arrived from the Lee clan. It could hardly have sounded more like disastrous news. Had Yi-tan’s parting question at the institute meant that the clan was about to send those papers to Myeong-in after all? The weight in Myeong-joo’s chest returned at once.

“Myeong-joo, what’s wrong?” Cha Sangju took one look at his cousin’s bloodless face and asked in alarm, but Myeong-joo was already running before he could answer.

This time, even if it kills me, I will not let my sister marry into that house. He ran without stopping until his lungs felt ready to tear free, then burst into a tiled-roof house that looked remarkably substantial for a country village.

“Seong-geun!”

“Oh, Myeong-joo. You’re here.” Seong-geun greeted him with an easy smile. “Take the call.”

Seong-geun was an old schoolmate of Myeong-joo’s and came from a junior branch of the clan. Myeong-joo barely returned the greeting. Without even removing his shoes, he climbed onto the veranda on his knees and snatched up the receiver that had been set down on the floorboards.

Still panting, he pressed it to his ear. “He—hello?”

A voice came through the line.

—“Sergeant Cha?”

A faint wash of static accompanied a voice Myeong-joo knew all too well: Lee Yi-ho, Lee Yi-tan’s half-brother and a man who held an important post in the military. Myeong-joo squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. Why did it have to be this fucking bastard?

His hesitation lasted only a moment. He steadied his breathing and answered, “Loyalty! Sergeant Cha Myeong-joo speaking, sir.”

—“At ease. You’re not even in uniform anymore, but you’re still far too stiff.”

“…Have you been well, Captain?”

What bullshit. Lee Yi-ho was precisely the sort of man who would rant that once a soldier, always a soldier, discharged or not. For him to open with such indulgent pleasantries was suspicious in itself. Myeong-joo asked after him while privately hoping the bastard had been miserable. On the other end, Yi-ho manufactured a hearty laugh.

—“Same as ever. And how has our sergeant been?”

“I’m getting by as usual, sir… but what brings you to call today?”

That was enough pleasantry. Myeong-joo wanted nothing more than to learn the man’s business and slam the damned receiver down hard enough to crack it.

Even while Myeong-joo was still in the army, Lee Yi-ho had never been much of a superior to him. During recruit training, one of Myeong-joo’s peers once defended him with the careless remark that the world must truly be ending if the son of a concubine could give orders to the eldest grandson of a head family. When word reached Yi-ho, he hauled Myeong-joo—who had been innocently napping in the barracks—outside along with the offender and punished them together. After that, he found small ways to harass Myeong-joo whenever he could.

—“Still as impatient as ever, I see,” Lee Yi-ho said. “I’m calling today on behalf of the elders of the family.”

“…”

At that, Myeong-joo’s personal dislike of Lee Yi-ho ceased to matter. A chill raced sharply down his spine. In his head, plans were already taking shape for smuggling his younger sister away in the middle of the night.

Failing that, the instant he hung up he would corner Myeong-in and demand to know whether there was even one man she felt the slightest affection for. If there was, Myeong-joo would shove the pair out the door hand in hand and tell them to elope. Or perhaps he should arrange a match for her immediately…

Yi-ho cleared his throat. —“Listen without taking offense. These days, over in America… I hear even people of the same sex can marry if one is an Aberrant and the other a Harmonizer.”

“…P-pardon?”

Myeong-joo had been halfway through a plan to drag Myeong-in to the express-bus terminal and put her on the first coach to Musan, so his answer came a beat late. His former commander’s abrupt detour into same-sex marriage was too bizarre to follow.

—“Apparently it isn’t just one or two couples. They say it’s perfectly possible so long as both parties are willing. Of course, it’s almost unheard of here in Great Han…” Yi-ho continued. “Anyway, I realize this may sound unpleasant sprung on you without warning, but such marriages truly aren’t that rare. And as it happens, there is still that old, unfulfilled promise between the Seoksan Lee clan and the Gwangsan Cha clan…”

“Myeong-in is out of the question.”

The refusal came out on pure reflex. Disgust with his former self surged up before he could stop it—the man who had once driven his own sister toward death merely to honor the wishes of ancestors long since returned to dust. Myeong-joo’s voice went hard as he cut Yi-ho off.

On the other end, Yi-ho sounded genuinely puzzled. —“Myeong-in? Your younger sister? I heard her grade as a Harmonizer is so poor she’s scarcely different from an ordinary person… Mm. Forgive me. In any case, I’m not talking about your sister. I mean you.”

“…You mean me, sir?”

For a moment, Myeong-joo tried to remember whether there was some unmarried lady left in the Lee head family. But Yi-tan had only two siblings: his elder sister, Lee Seol-heon, and the half-brother currently speaking to him, Lee Yi-ho. All three of Lee Hui-eum’s children were Aberrants, and Seol-heon, the eldest, was three years older than Myeong-joo and already had three children.

Unable to find the point of the conversation at all, he asked in bewilderment, “Has Lady Seol-heon perhaps… remarried?”

—“What kind of nonsense is that?” Yi-ho exploded. “Why would my sister marry a half-wit like y— No. What I mean is, my sister and her husband get along perfectly well. The person being proposed to you is no one else. It’s my younger brother, Second Lieutenant Lee Yi-tan.”

“Who?”

He knew perfectly well how stupid he sounded, but the question escaped anyway. The Aberrant meant to marry not Myeong-in but him, and that Aberrant was Lee Yi-tan? Did this bastard go senile the moment they pinned a major’s insignia on him? What sort of bolt from nowhere was this?

—“Must you make me say everything twice?” Yi-ho snapped. “You and Second Lieutenant Lee. The two of you.”

“No, what in the world…”

Myeong-joo was too dumbfounded to finish. Irritation followed close behind the shock. Is he making sport of me? A man eats a warm meal and then sits there spouting rotten nonsense. He nearly hung up. But with nothing to his name, he could not entirely dismiss the possibility that Yi-ho’s vicious temper would turn vindictive. So instead he mouthed, Fucking bastard, without making a sound. Beside him, Seong-geun was twisting straw rope to hang blocks of fermented soybean paste and snickered at the sight.

—“I’m talking about a marriage between you and Second Lieutenant Lee,” Yi-ho went on, more persuasively now. “Yes, you’re both men, but if it isn’t unheard of in America, surely it’s worth considering. We recently ran the old reports through some new machinery imported from the States. The prediction is that your compatibility with Yi-tan may be quite good.”

“Even if you say so, sir, I still have no idea what any of this is supposed to mean.”

There was nothing to “consider” yet. What baffled Myeong-joo was why the proposed match joined him to Lee Yi-tan instead of Myeong-in. The fact that they were both men scarcely even registered. One much larger objection filled his mind: to Myeong-joo, Yi-tan was his brother-in-law, his sister’s husband. How could the two of them possibly marry? The very notion felt outrageous enough to make the grandfathers buried on the ancestral mountain rise in a ragged horde from their graves.

“Besides, I…”

He had seen Lee Yi-tan only a short while ago, and Yi-tan had said nothing whatsoever about a marriage. Myeong-joo’s own head family existed mostly in name, but Yi-tan wielded considerable influence within his clan. There was no conceivable way talks of this kind could proceed entirely behind his back. If Yi-tan had known and still said not a word, then surely he was deeply unhappy with the absurd proposal. In that case, whatever Myeong-joo himself thought, he could only respect Yi-tan’s wishes.

—“The Chief of Staff said he would call you personally, but I thought it would be easier on you if I handled it,” Yi-ho said. “You really are industrious when it comes to running around doing useless things. When did you arrange to enter the Defense Research Institute as a test subject? What business does a discharged Harmonizer have participating in an experiment? Were things truly that desperate financially? The Chief of Staff had quite a time getting you pulled out of it.”

“…What? Chief of Staff Lee did that?”

The Chief of Staff could only mean Lee Hui-eum. That he had personally intervened to overturn what had been discussed with the Special Defense Science Research Institute was baffling.

Strictly speaking, the institute fell directly under the Ministry of National Defense, and the project itself had only come down as a requirement through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Details of the experiment—much less the reason the institute wanted Cha Myeong-joo as a subject—were not the sort of information routinely shared all the way up to the chiefs of the individual services. Myeong-joo had assumed for precisely that reason that Lee Hui-eum would never hear of it. Which only made this stranger. His participation had already fallen through that day, yet from Yi-ho’s account, it sounded as though Lee Hui-eum had been the one who stopped it.

But why?

Nothing made sense.

Even in the other life, when their families had been joined by marriage, Myeong-joo had never held a long private conversation with Lee Hui-eum. And what father of Lee Hui-eum’s standing would have welcomed a moth of a man flapping across all eight provinces, trying to resurrect his ruined house by clinging to the prestige of his son?

—“That’s right,” Yi-ho said. “Second Lieutenant Lee’s situation is rather urgent at the moment.”

With that single sentence, every question crowding Myeong-joo’s head vanished. Without realizing it, he seized the telephone cord as though it were a lifeline.

“Urgent? What do you mean? What happened to him?”

Only after the words burst out did Myeong-joo realize how violently he had reacted. But Yi-tan had said nothing of the kind when they met. Confusion churned through him.

—“Of course you’re worried,” Yi-ho said, sounding pleased with himself. “You were instructor and pupil, after all. It’s only natural. When are you coming back to Seowon? I’d rather discuss the rest face-to-face.”