Chapter 5 - Conception

Had he perhaps not logged out yet?

The question suddenly occurred to him, but vanished far more quickly than it had come.

This excruciating pain throughout his body?

It had a vividness he had never experienced inside the game. If sensations like these could have been reproduced there... Dong Bongsu would never have logged out in the first place. He would probably still be hunting.

He strained to open his eyes wider so he could read the holographic letters. The swollen corners split, sending blood trickling down. But all that did was increase the pain; his vision grew no clearer.

'Then...'

If his eyesight was inadequate, he could simply increase the light.

Dong Bongsu turned his gaze toward the window admitting the moonlight. A brilliantly shining full moon came into view, lighting his eyes, and the contents of the translucent holographic window put the final, decisive touch on this unreal situation.

[A device malfunction has prevented you from logging out. Would you like to attempt disconnection again? Yes or No]

A device malfunction?

Dong Bongsu was puzzled. This utterly realistic scene, this intensely pungent smell. Were all these sensations, painfully constricting every inch of his body, the result of a machine error?

He could not understand it.

He would have to check.

With little hesitation, Dong Bongsu raised a hand and reached into the hologram.

BEEP.

He saw the “No” button distort, and the administrator's dry voice etched itself into his mind.

HUMMMM.

- You have selected 'No.' Returning to MURIM ONLINE. One, two, three...

A crackling mechanical noise slammed into Dong Bongsu's head. At the same time, he felt as though his brain were being torn apart, and slowly lost consciousness.

The emotionless voice of MURIM ONLINE's administrator echoed through his fading awareness.

- We hope you enjoy your time with MURIM ONLINE...

● ● ●

Machil had been in a foul mood for the past several days—two weeks, to be precise. To put it crudely, he was going out of his fucking mind.

His duties as an armory servant already kept him busy enough to kill him, and now he had been saddled with an extra nuisance. It was only natural that he felt this way. Even now, he was on his way to the stable with the thin rice gruel that served as Sosam's breakfast.

“In this whole huge Danri Family estate, am I the only one who can clean up after that bastard? Why do I always have to do this fucking bullshit?”

Two weeks earlier, on the day Sosam had accompanied him to the weapons shop to collect an order, the boy had made a mistake and suffered serious injuries.

He should have gone straight home once the work was done. Instead, he had needlessly wandered the busy streets that evening and met with disaster.

According to one of the people who had witnessed it, Sosam had suddenly blocked Paeng Doryang's path. Paeng Doryang was the bodyguard of Danri Hui, the Danri Family head's second daughter. She was such a wild girl that even her father, Danri Cheon-u, could hardly rein her in. Having obstructed the bodyguard of a girl like that, Sosam was lucky to be alive at all.

While Sosam was being beaten by Paeng Doryang, Machil had been at the Bongyang Inn, thoroughly enjoying that bitch Aeng-Aeng's bare flesh. Returning to the estate, satisfied after releasing his pent-up lust, he had discovered Sosam lying in a bloody heap. He had slung the boy onto his back and carried him home.

When he first brought him to the stable, Machil had been certain Sosam was dead. Flustered for a moment, he had simply left him there and gone out.

Yet when he visited the stable the next day, Sosam was awake.

At the time, Machil had thought the bastard was damned hard to kill. To regain his senses in a single day after ending up in that state!

But that had actually made things worse for Machil.

“It would've been so much better if that bastard Horse-Shit Sam had just croaked. Fuck.”

Because Sosam had clung to his miserable life, Machil was stuck doing his work until he recovered completely. What a shitty situation.

Finding a new horse handler would only have taken a few days. Judging by Sosam's current condition, however, it looked as though he would need at least another month to recover.

An even bigger problem was that the incident had turned Sosam into an imbecile. Not only could he no longer speak, but his memory seemed impaired as well. When he occasionally woke and Machil tried talking to him, he seemed not to recognize Machil at all, and never said a word. Machil had examined his tongue, wondering whether something was wrong with it, but there was nothing abnormal about it.

Perhaps the shock of the incident had left him unable to speak. That meant Sosam might be useless even after his injuries healed.

“Damn it! To think I, the great Master Machil, have to clean up after some worthless imbecile!”

Today, once again, all of Sosam's duties fell to Machil. On top of that, the family had left every part of Sosam's treatment to him as well.

A horse handler's work was grueling. Machil knew that better than anyone. He had been the horse handler himself until Sosam arrived more than ten years ago.

Exercising the horses, clearing away their dung, and cleaning the stable were nothing. The hardest part was occasionally accompanying members of the Danri Family on their outings as a horse attendant.

A horse attendant was what people commonly called a “human mounting block.” In short, he had to get down beneath members of the Danri Family and serve as a step when they mounted their horses. It was an immensely bothersome, irritating job. It was all right if he happened to serve one of the more decent family members, but going out as horse attendant to a piece of human trash like Danri Hui...

One wrong move could cost him his head that very day.

He had not yet needed to accompany anyone as a horse attendant, but who knew when he might be summoned? And so, however much he hated it, Machil had no choice but to nurse Sosam diligently until he recovered.

Grumbling over all these grievances, Machil arrived at the stable on the eastern edge of the estate. Just before opening the door and entering, a thought flashed through his mind.

'Should I just kill the bastard?'

Nobody in the family cared whether someone like Sosam lived or died anyway. If a new horse handler could be recruited quickly, Machil would be much better off too. Wouldn't that be the best way out of his present misery?

Machil's frozen-fish eyes glared at the stable door, flashed red for a moment, then subsided.

“No. Forget it.”

Killing someone was easy enough.

He had once trampled a begging little bastard to death for repeatedly grabbing his ankle, after all.

It was simply too risky to kill Sosam. If he made a mistake and any one of the family's warriors caught him, he could lose his own head.

“Lucky you, Horse-Shit Sam, you fucking bastard.”

In the end, he decided to put up with a month or so of inconvenience.

Killing someone like Sosam was easier than snapping an ant in two. He could always do it later, couldn't he?

CREEEAK.

When he entered the stable, Sosam was asleep as usual. His chest wound round and round with filthy twisted straw rope, he lay resting comfortably. The sight made Machil's temper flare again. Here Machil was, suffering all because of him, while the bastard lay sprawled out, sleeping without a care in the world.

“Ugh, you stupid bastard! Why couldn't you have just dropped dead back then? Why'd you have to stay alive for no fucking reason and make such a nuisance of yourself? Ugh!”

Machil all but tossed the bowl of gruel onto Sosam's chest. The bowl rocked, spilling hot gruel. The filthy straw rope wrapped around Sosam's chest grew filthier still.

Unconcerned, Machil decided he had done his part and walked straight out of the stable.

The hot gruel must have seeped through the straw rope and scalded his wounds, yet Sosam did not wake before Machil left.

Was he sleeping so deeply that he could barely feel pain?

No.

Sosam—no, Dong Bongsu—was already awake. As soon as Machil left, he quietly sat up.

“That fellow seems to keep delaying my recovery.”

The filthy straw rope was rubbing against his wounds and making them fester.

These were signs of a bacterial infection. His wounds would never heal quickly like this. But whenever he removed the rope, Machil came and wound it around his chest again before leaving. So Dong Bongsu had taken to tying it around his chest shortly before Machil was due, then undoing it after he left.

And that was hardly the only way Machil was of no help to Dong Bongsu. He had just spilled hot gruel over wounds that had yet to heal. That would set his recovery back a little further.

“Two weeks as of today?”

Two weeks had already passed since Dong Bongsu awoke here. During that time, he had gathered information about this place. He still could not fully understand Chinese, and Machil was his sole source of information, so he could not be certain of everything.

The first thing he had learned was that he had become someone else, and that this person's name was Sosam, or Horse-Shit Sam. He had not discovered this by understanding Chinese, but by hearing Machil call him those names over and over.

Second, he had realized that although people here spoke Chinese and used Chinese characters, this was not China.

Martial arts.

Techniques possible only in imagination, films, and novels.

Over the past two weeks, Dong Bongsu had witnessed martial arts alive and thriving in this world.

Every morning, he would wake to the booming sounds of warriors doing something at a training ground far beyond the stable. At first he had not known what it was, but later, when he peered through a hole in the door, he was astonished.

He was a man whom little could stir emotionally. Yet even Dong Bongsu had been astonished by this world's martial arts.

People flew through the air and moved too quickly for the eye to follow, their swords and sabers cutting through precise motions. It was like a live-action version of MURIM ONLINE. In that case, those techniques, too, must be martial arts.

Finally, there was the fact that he had not fully “logged out.” No, more precisely, he had logged out, but part of the game system was still in effect.

Even now, tiny lettering hovered far off in his field of vision.

“MURIM ONLINE.”

No. Murim.

The real Murim.

“Heh.”

“Heh heh heh.”

A world where martial arts truly existed!

And he couldn't leave?

For the first time in his life, Dong Bongsu laughed from the bottom of his heart.

Uncontrollable, wild laughter erupted endlessly inside his head.

Because he was so happy.

The ultimate hunting ground he had always dreamed of. Perhaps even a battlefield.