Chapter 4

I moved like a child learning to walk, feeling the feast of flesh bouncing through my color-coordinated training clothes.
At the same time, with each step, the internal forces spread throughout his body stirred, wrestling to filter out the thick mass of waste that had filled him.
“Whoosh, whoosh.”
His breathing quickly became ragged. The fire had only just begun. The taste of sweetness and dryness filled my mouth.
Honestly, it wasn’t sweet.
In my previous life, I had washed my face in the sand every day. But here I was, just back from a long journey, lying on the rough sands of the training grounds.
“It’s only the beginning, so what’s the point?”
The scratching began.
“Go fuck yourself. You think you’re gonna get me to admit it?”
The smell of alcohol wafted in from somewhere. It was my favorite scent. He was pouring himself a drink, but not me.
“My God, my God. My sister, how could I have trusted him?”
I got drunk, and now I even mentioned my mother in the Southern Palace. For some reason, my teeth were chattering. My uncle shouldn’t have said that to me. After hearing that, I was motivated.
I was a poisonous breed. I was a poisonous breed. I had withstood all kinds of persecution from the world. I would never give in to something like this.
I returned to the family I hated so much.
At the same time, I was reborn in the body of an innocent, unknowing child.
The Grand Duke and elder brother, who I thought would have grown up happier than anyone else, turned out to be in the same predicament as me.
I don’t know what the heavens have done to bring me to this point, but I have decided to sweetly accept my fate and conform to it, and I will live my life as the South Palace Wall and the South Palace Half.
I will not hesitate to defend the old while pioneering the new.
I gritted my teeth in anticipation.
“Whoosh, whoosh.”
My strength was depleted.
“Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.”
My stamina was gone.
My head, which I needed to keep my eyes on the road ahead, began to droop, and my shoulder, which had been moving so furiously during the run, became excruciatingly painful, as if it had been dislocated.
And then, just as I was about to hit my limit.
“Gmaan.”
When she was too exhausted to lift a finger, An Bai stopped her training.
“We’ll do it again tomorrow. Don’t do anything to offend my sister.”
“Whoops, whoops.”
I was out of breath, unable to reply.
Staring at the spinning sky, I lay on my stomach and felt the pain gradually fade away.
At the same time, I could feel a clear energy enveloping my entire body. It was accompanied by a scattering of internal forces.
The results of practicing and practicing the Grand Qigong with my whole body lightened my body like a soaked cotton ball. My exhausted body was rejuvenated by the tiny energy, and the dagger that held the power of a chestnut also grew in size as it spun fiercely. It was as long as a silken fingernail.
Perhaps they know this history.
They know they must move quickly to save their master.
It was a terribly pragmatic creature, and one that resembled me.
* * *
I learned once again what it means to be mistreated.
As much as I was a dog, An Baek was a dog.
He didn’t look at me as just another fourteen-year-old nephew. He treated me as if I were on the same level as himself.
Seeing this, I didn’t know if I should be happy that he treated me so well.
Or should I cry, I ran for my life.
When I thought about it, the walls of the South Palace in my previous life were skinny and densely packed with muscles. Perhaps I had subconsciously practiced kung fu from a young age because I needed to survive.
That’s why he had no concept of making his fragile body normal.
He wasn’t used to the screaming and the pain of being beaten like a dog with a club, one after another. It was a far cry from the years of eating sword rice on bloody battlefields.
For a moment, I regretted my decision to accept the fate of the world as I had in my previous life. But it was only for a moment.
My daily routine hasn’t changed in over a month.
An Baek’s promise to focus on shedding the extra pounds has been followed by running and running and running, as if it were his life’s work. As if it were his lifelong desire.
Gritting his teeth, he persevered, and just when his obese body was about to buckle or lose its center, he was rewarded with an incredibly timely break.
Even if that break was only long enough to take a half-angled sip of water.
“Run again.”
With Anbaek’s machine-like instructions, I ran again without a word of protest. The routine was repetitive.
Of course, there were times when the waiting was worse than the short, ridiculous breaks.
The morning sun was slanting down, soaking my back with heat, and my breathing was quickening.
“Meal’s served.”
If there was one thing better than my previous life, it was the food. The food in the army was nothing compared to this.
The nanny set the table and called me over.
Thinking back to the time when I had to wait until I was a thousand men to eat human-like food, the Namgungse family was indeed the Namgungse family.
“This is different.”
As I watched the nanny slap An Baek on the back for not missing a meal, I realized that the world I knew was not the whole world.
A nutritious diet to nourish my tired body, and a cool, sweet tea made from herbs I couldn’t quite fathom where they came from. The herbs also gave me a faint, if unnoticeable, boost to my strength.
By the time I woke up, barely a month had passed, and the gossip from the nannies and servants’ mouths had diminished considerably.
The reason for this was that I had nothing to ask of them, and they were nervous that their lost memories would come back to haunt them at any moment.
And third, they were desperate for me to recognize how hard they had worked when they returned to their old lives.
Then one day.
Anbaek, who never lets a day go by without reminding me how much of an asshole I was.
“You cut off all the hair of your siblings for braiding their hair wrong.”
My past mistakes.
“You’ve never failed to spill a meal you’ve prepared.”
The sins I must pay for.
“I rode on the backs of the horsemen in the stables and whipped them.”
Wounds deeply rooted in the past.
“I ruined all my sister’s rituals. I think?”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
I’d only heard three or four of them, and already I was choking.
I’ll ask you again.
What kind of life have you been living, brother.
“You don’t just throw your hands up in the air when you don’t like what you see, but you also pounce on me like a bunch of puppets. Not to mention gambling away all the wealth and jewelry your sister saved for you, and picking fights with bullies…….”
It was a high level of wrongdoing for a prodigal son who was only fourteen years old. It was almost painful to listen to.
“Stop, stop.”
“…… Why? I haven’t even started yet.”
“That’s enough.”
“How selfish of you,” he said, ”to wipe out those memories, leaving only the victims to suffer.”
It was a sarcastic remark, but I couldn’t argue back.
It was too much to dismiss as a joke.
I wasn’t shameless enough to plead ignorance.
So I said.
“I’ll put …… back.”
I had to take responsibility.
It wasn’t a responsibility that someone else could take on. It was now mine, and no one else’s.
And.
I had to apologize to the people I had hurt.
Without apologizing to those whose hearts I had broken.
I couldn’t reach out.
Where my gaze lingered, there was the laughing South Palace Wall, and there was Ms. Baek, the mother of the South Palace Wall and my mother.
In order to approach them both, I had to be proud of myself.
* * *
Mr. Bai had been in a bad mood for a few days.
I thought that my nephew, whom I had accepted as a thunder bee, would leave me in three or four days, but he had already lasted more than a month.
Now he seemed to be enjoying it rather than enduring it.
This was not the picture she had envisioned. He was supposed to be crying and screaming and refusing to do it.
At the moment, I was still clinging to my nephew as usual, thinking that I had a modicum of pride and self-respect, and I was going to hold on somehow.
She wants me to tell her all her faults.
How stupid.
Why would I want to relive something I’ve forgotten?
What’s in it for him?
But An Baek couldn’t think of a better, more honorable way to torment his nephew.
“So you’re going to slap the nanny’s cheeks…….”
That day, the nephew went to the nanny and bowed his head to apologize. It took days and days and days before the evasive nanny truly accepted his apology.
“Slapped the backs of the horsemen in the stable with a whip…….”
The next day, she walked into the stables, which reeked of horse manure, and sincerely asked the horsemen for forgiveness, no more, no less. I helped the uncomfortable horsemen with their chores.
The smell of horse manure is unbearable.
“I still mentally…… those men you tried to intimidate,” he said. in the slums around the Southern Palace right now.”
The nephew stretched out his hand and asked me to borrow money. I laughed, but he said he’d put his title as Grand Duke of the Southern Palace as collateral, and I couldn’t resist.
He then rifled through my pockets and distributed the money through the nanny so that the frightened servants could live a little more comfortably, saying that if they saw him face-to-face, they might be even more frightened.
Whenever he recalled such things, An Baek’s expression became strange.
Once again, he remembered his nephew’s words.
“Be on my side. Stand by me, no matter how much anyone else criticizes me, undermines me, or belittles me. I want you to stand by me unwaveringly, that’s all I ask.”
At the time, he only laughed in response.
But the nephew told him to be prepared, for he would surely make him recognize himself.
He changed his mind.
Faintly.
Very tenuous indeed.
Like a pebble in a calm lake, the tiny ripples gradually swelled in size.
Little by little, Anbaek began to melt into the change.
Without even realizing it.