Chapter 11

“…I would prefer that you first tell me what you mean by ‘urgent,’ sir.”

Yi-ho’s voice carried the smugness of a man convinced he had gained the upper hand. He could have no way of knowing what Myeong-joo truly felt for Lee Yi-tan. He likely believed that nothing more than deep affection between teacher and student had caught Myeong-joo in the net.

That guess was half right and half wrong. Either way, even knowing there was a trap beneath his feet, Myeong-joo could not stop asking what had happened. Until a real answer came through the receiver, the thud of his own heart seemed loud enough to fill the silence.

—“Aberrants are always in a precarious state if they go without harmonization, aren’t they? That’s all I meant,” Yi-ho said lightly. “In any case, I’ll take this as your agreement and arrange a meeting. Contact me when you reach Seowon. And don’t worry too much about the money the Defense Research Institute was going to provide.”

“…”

Even without an answer, Yi-ho apparently considered Myeong-joo’s silence sufficient consent. He simply hung up. Myeong-joo remained there for several moments with the receiver in his hand, listening to the harsh disconnected tone. At last he pressed the receiver against his brow and squeezed his eyes shut.

Seong-geun looked at him with concern. “What is it, Myeong-joo? Did something happen?”

“…What could have happened? Thanks for the phone.”

Myeong-joo gave his friend’s shoulder a light pat and stepped into the yard. On the road home, he rubbed his heavy chest several times, trying to let the conversation slide out of his mind. It refused to go.

Marriage to Lee Yi-tan. The idea that he, of all people, might make a lifelong vow with Yi-tan made no sense whatsoever. He and Yi-tan were…

No. That was not the real problem.

The immediate problem was the money.

Somehow Lee Hui-eum had learned of Myeong-joo’s plan to become an experimental subject and intervened, costing him the payment he had expected. Lee Yi-ho had said not to worry, but promises from people who had never lacked for anything could not be taken at face value. Men like that often spoke as though they would arrange everything, only to turn around later and ask why anyone would stake his life on such a trivial sum.

Myeong-joo’s harmonization grade was so low that he could not control Lee Yi-tan—he could not properly stabilize even an Aberrant of much lower rank. The doctor had recently told him to have his grade tested again, but Myeong-joo had neither the money nor the patience to indulge what he considered a quack’s nonsense. So an offer to take him, of all people, and pay extra for the privilege could not possibly sound reasonable. There were limits even to how badly one could lose on a bargain.

More suspicious still was the fact that Lee Yi-ho had made the approach. Before Myeong-joo returned to the past, Yi-ho had been openly displeased by the prospect of Yi-tan marrying Myeong-in, whose harmonization grade was exceptionally high.

Myeong-in had occasionally complained to little Myeong-hui that her husband’s elder brother made life in the Lee household miserable for her. Myeong-joo, useless older brother that he had been, learned of even that only much later. At Myeong-in’s funeral he finally lost all reason and slapped Lee Yi-ho across the face. Yi-ho moved to strike him back, only for Lee Yi-tan—standing there as chief mourner—to drag his brother away.

Lee Seol-heon scolded Myeong-joo as well, telling him that the dead should not be sent off amid a disorderly funeral. Myeong-joo clutched Seol-heon’s hand and sobbed. Then he dropped to his knees and begged like a child. “Noona, please save Myeong-in. Please… please get her out of there.”

Pain twisted Seol-heon’s face, but no amount of pity could bring Myeong-in back. She caught Myeong-joo by the collar, hauled him upright, and made him walk. He understood what she meant: pull yourself together and see your sister off properly. Thanks to her, he managed to send Myeong-in peacefully through the funeral procession. But one thing remained carved into him even now—Yi-ho had never once shown kindness to his sister.

And now Yi-ho himself was naming Myeong-joo as Yi-tan’s prospective spouse. Maybe that was the point. Perhaps Yi-ho meant to exploit Myeong-joo’s low rank. If he deliberately saddled Yi-tan, who required regular harmonization, with a partner whose ability was barely worth mentioning, he might be hoping Yi-tan would make some disastrous mistake.

Yi-ho, though born outside the formal marriage, enjoyed surprisingly strong support from his father, Lee Hui-eum. Within the military itself, however, his own influence was weak enough that he had little room to swagger. From Myeong-joo’s perspective, the motive therefore seemed obvious: Yi-tan was still only a Second Lieutenant because of his youth, but once he passed thirty he seemed destined to surge all the way toward colonel. Wouldn’t Yi-ho want to hobble his younger brother, even a little, before that happened?

“Oppa, is something troubling you?” Myeong-in asked.

Even after returning home, Myeong-joo had not crossed into the warm guest room. He remained seated on the cold wooden veranda, brooding over and over, until Myeong-in finally came to ask.

“Of course I have worries. I’m wondering when some fellow who says he likes you is finally going to appear.”

“Stop talking nonsense, wash your feet, and go to sleep.” Myeong-in sat by the threshold with one hand on the inner-room door. Behind her, little Myeong-hui caught his eye. The child lay beneath the quilt, sleeping deeply with her lips slightly parted.

“You’ll let the cold in. Shut the door quickly.”

“Go to bed soon. Tomorrow you have to take Myeong-hui and pay your respects at the junior branch house.”

“Forget it. We’re just going back up to Seowon tomorrow. Junior branch or not, I don’t even want to look at those bastards’ faces.”

“…Oppa.”

Lee Yi-ho’s call was the real reason Myeong-joo wanted to hurry back to Seowon, but everything else he had said was sincere. The clan had waited until their father died and the three siblings were left without a guardian, then stripped away their land and left them with nothing but an ancestral burial hill that was not worth a coin. If not for an aunt and uncle, Myeong-in might have had to leave school even earlier; they would not have been able to pay even her high-school entrance fee and tuition.

When Myeong-joo’s father enlisted, it was common for the name on a land register and the person who actually owned the property to be different. The clan had taken advantage of those murky arrangements and gone to the village headman.

They slipped him money and pointed to fifty thousand pyeong of land registered in Myeong-joo’s grandfather’s name, along with two wooded parcels used as the clan’s ancestral mountain. “This land has belonged to the clan for generations,” they told him. “The heir of the head family has merely managed it. Its true owner is the clan, so write us a confirmation.” They selected only the most valuable pieces of the head family’s property and took them.

The village headman immediately inserted language into the confirmation declaring the land clan property by customary practice. On the strength of that paper, the registered owner was changed with absurd ease. What the clan left Myeong-joo’s grandfather amounted to little more than worthless burial ground and scraps of steep hillside. The heir was expected to guard the ancestral graves while the clan tore apart and divided the wealth among themselves.

Myeong-joo’s grandfather had been too naive even to understand what was happening when the registrations changed. The clan, village headman, and township office were all of one mind. Because the theft rested not on a plainly forged document but on a convenient marriage of greed and customary practice, there was scarcely even a clean legal basis on which to reclaim the property.

Naturally, Myeong-joo’s father had wasted years without knowing the truth either. When arranging his marriage, he had apparently boasted to his future in-laws that he was the heir of the head family: with fifty thousand pyeong of land and the produce of the wooded mountain property, he could easily keep their daughter in comfort. Once Myeong-joo’s mother married into the house, she learned only the hollow truth—the land had already become someone else’s through a theft so simple it was almost ridiculous.

Her family declared that their precious daughter had been lured into marriage by fraud and cut off their son-in-law. They told their daughter they would accept her back only if she left the child already growing in her belly behind. Timid by nature, Myeong-joo’s mother found herself unable to choose either way. Like the celestial maiden whose winged robe had been stolen, she remained trapped in the Cha household and bore three children. Later, until tuberculosis took her life, she often sat gazing endlessly toward Bongducheon, where her own family lived.

Going to the junior branch house to bow before those clan men was therefore little different from prostrating himself at an enemy’s feet. Myeong-in watched her brother’s face harden for a moment, then sighed.

“Oppa, for now you have to stay on good terms with them. That’s how you leave yourself a chance to act later.”

“…Yes. You’re right.”

Before returning to the past, Myeong-joo would never have listened. However sensible his clever sister’s advice, he had been the sort of older brother who barked, What do you know? You’re still a child. You don’t understand anything. Looking back, Myeong-in had always been telling him to lower himself and keep his claws hidden—to wait for the right moment. It had been shrewd advice, and he had squandered one golden opportunity after another.

“Help me think through things like this sometimes,” Myeong-joo said. “You know your brother. I lose my temper, I rush headlong into things—I’m not exactly built for handling great schemes alone. You, on the other hand, are calm and clever, just as Mother always said.”

Myeong-in stared. “…What has gotten into you? Did you eat something wrong?”

By then she looked less teasing than genuinely worried. Myeong-joo let out a soft, deflated laugh and shook his head.

“Nothing. I mean it. I need you to help me. I’ve only just realized that the best revenge on those people isn’t finding some way to pay them back. It’s making sure the three of us live happily in spite of them.”

“Well… that part is true, but…” Myeong-in’s eyes rounded as she stared at the brother who was suddenly saying things he had never said in his life.

No wonder she was shocked. Until now, the mere mention of the clan had been enough to send him into a rage. But Myeong-joo remembered the life in which he had run himself ragged trying to avenge those wrongs and, in doing so, lost the very people he should have protected. However bitter and unfair the past remained, Myeong-in and Myeong-hui had to come first.

“Anyway, your brother has finally grown up. There’s nothing left for you to worry about. You only need to take care of yourself and think about how you and Myeong-hui are going to be happy.”

Myeong-in smiled at him. “That’s your New Year blessing, isn’t it? All right. Happy New Year to you too, oppa.”

The smile on his sister’s face made something in Myeong-joo’s chest crumple painfully. His eyes grew hot. Afraid the tears might spill, he carefully forced a smile of his own.

“Yes. Happy New Year, my little sister. May this year bring you every blessing.”

It was one of the things he had truly wanted to say to her. Myeong-joo was entering a New Year in which, if he died the very next day, he could still claim to have no regrets. Had he not prayed again and again that he wanted nothing more than this? And yet now there was talk of marriage to Lee Yi-tan. Bewilderment tangled with an emotion he could not name, swelling until his chest felt ready to burst.

The brief conversation he had shared with Yi-tan at the Defense Research Institute returned to him in scattered fragments, like dead leaves dropping one by one into a lonely courtyard. Had Yi-tan known then? Had he known that marriage talks were about to begin between himself and Cha Myeong-joo? Either answer was strange. Yet when Myeong-joo replayed Yi-tan’s behavior, a belated suspicion took hold that perhaps he had known.

Then why had he said nothing? He could at least have warned him: You’ll soon receive an absurd proposal, Instructor. Please reject it on your end.

Past or present, Myeong-joo could never read what Lee Yi-tan was thinking, and the uncertainty left him adrift. One more night and the New Year would truly begin, yet even after returning to the past, Myeong-joo was disappointed by how little he actually understood.

He had wanted to purchase extra coal briquettes this month. Even when he bundled the girls into the warmest spot over the ondol flue, drafts crept through the floorboards; seeing their cheeks flushed red and chapped from the morning chill broke his heart.

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