Chapter 9 : Don’t Call Me

When the boy turned around, Yun-jo had already fallen into the pond and was flailing his arms, struggling.

“Oh dear, I’m dying! Someone help!”

“……”

“Help me, please help me!!”

The nearby servants heard the commotion and came running.

“Intruder!!”

Chief Pharmacist Seo also came running in a fluster.

“Young Master, are you alright!”

But faced with the unexpected scene before them, Chief Pharmacist Seo and the servants could only stop in their tracks. The people who had run over with weapons looked back and forth between the boy and the intruder in the pond, bewildered.

Chief Pharmacist Seo shouted.

“Good heavens! From the morning… what is all this?”

“……”

The boy was standing still as if nailed to the pond’s edge. His gaze was fixed on the middle of the pond, not moving from there.

“Young Master? What should we do?”

The boy, who had kept his mouth firmly shut without saying a word until then, finally spoke in a heavily restrained tone.

“Pull him out.”

“Go in and bring him out quickly!”

Chief Pharmacist Seo shouted. At his words, the servants rolled up their pant legs and jumped into the pond. In the midst of that, Yun-jo kept screaming for someone to save him. In an instant, the serene backyard felt like a completely different place from before.

The boy watched the water droplets scatter like candy powder against the sunlight. The surface, which had been calm, rippled in all directions. The lotus leaves and buds were pushed by the spray and shook relentlessly. The sight was uncomfortably vivid.

Sometimes, the appearance of just one person can make the world feel completely changed in an instant.

For him, it was now.

Everything was overwhelmingly unfamiliar.

A problem had arisen. It wasn’t an ordinary problem. This was an emergency.

Yun-jo didn’t know how to swim!

And he hadn’t realized that fact!

To be precise, it wasn’t that he didn’t know. He had never learned to swim and had never been close to water, so it was natural that he couldn’t. But he didn’t expect it to be the same here.

Thinking about it, swimming wasn’t a skill you acquired separately in the game. Horse riding, swordsmanship, javelin throwing, archery, etc., were available, but swimming wasn’t on the list. Yun-jo, accustomed to his overpowered life, only realized the fact belatedly after falling into the water, but the water was already spilled and the pond he had fallen into was already behind him.

In the end, after drinking as much water as possible, he was barely pulled out of the water. Even after that, his vision spun and he felt nauseous for a while, but after vomiting all the water he had swallowed, he came to his senses a bit.

The servants took him to a side building, spread out a bed in a guest room, and brought coarse cloth to wipe his body and dry clothes. Though it was early summer, they also brought a brass brazier with charcoal, worried about his body temperature dropping, so he quickly warmed up.

Considering he was an unauthorized intruder, the treatment was unexpectedly generous. Feeling that, Yun-jo changed clothes, dried his hair moderately, and came out.

“Are you out?”

As soon as he opened the door and came out, an elderly man approached him, as if waiting. Yun-jo recognized him. It was the old man he had met on Yulsi Mountain and greeted.

Yun-jo unconsciously bowed his head.

“Hello.”

The old man looked at him oddly for a moment.

It was too modern a greeting. He realized his mistake and felt awkward, but he didn’t know how to properly greet him again, having not paid much attention to how others greeted each other.

Thinking that an awkward imitation would look even stranger, he decided to just act naturally. If someone said something, he’d claim it was a foreign custom. Fortunately, the old man made no comment on Yun-jo’s greeting.

“The Young Master is waiting. Please come this way.”

The old man said and walked ahead.

“Ah, that’s right. I am grateful for yesterday’s matter. I didn’t recognize you at first, but the servants recognized you first and informed me. I didn’t know the noble one was coming, so I failed to greet you properly. Please forgive my rudeness.”

“No, no. I just came in on my own.”

As it turned out, the good treatment was because they recognized him from the meeting on Yulsi Mountain. Apparently, a few sharp-eyed servants had recognized Yun-jo when they pulled him out of the water.

Indeed, if you do good deeds, you get rewarded. Feeling that his help was worthwhile, Yun-jo followed the old man with pride.

Even from the brief encounter yesterday, he had felt it, but the old man’s behavior and way of speaking were different from ordinary people. The items used in the house were also not ordinary if you looked closely.

The clothes the servants brought for Yun-jo to change into were the same.

The clothes Yun-jo had been wearing until then were hastily bought from the market. Here, if people wanted new clothes, they usually bought fabric and had a seamstress sew it or made it themselves. If that wasn’t possible, they had to buy from the market. The items available in the small village market weren’t great, mostly hemp cloth or cotton jackets and pants.

The clothes the servants brought were very high-end in comparison, making it impossible not to compare.

The outer garment was a thin, soft, and lightweight half-sleeved jacket dyed in a subtle grass-green color. It was wide and long enough to reach the ankles, but with slits on both sides, it wasn’t uncomfortable to walk in. The navy waistband had an embroidered pouch hanging from it, containing medicinal incense and a few dried flowers, giving a refreshing and pleasant scent.

Socks, leggings, a hairpin to put up his hair, and a crown to place on top were all carefully prepared. Not only that, there were also accessories like narrow silk ribbons and metal rods with jade at the ends, whose use was unknown.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to use the prepared hairpin and crown, and he wasn’t interested in the accessories, so he didn’t touch them. Instead, there was a cord made of twisted fine thread, and Yun-jo tied his hair with it. A small gold bell was attached to the end, making a clear sound every time it shook.

The old man led Yun-jo to the main hall. It was the same building seen from the backyard.

A figure was sitting upright on the wooden floor. Unlike dawn, the lattice windows were all raised, casting deep shadows on the veranda, and under that, a writing desk and tea tray were placed. As he approached, the boy, sensing someone’s presence, raised his head.

“……”

The boy stared at Yun-jo for a moment. Though his face was still covered, after seeing him a few times, Yun-jo could roughly guess the direction of his gaze. Wondering why he was looking like that, he thought it might be because of the clothes again.

“The clothes are pretty. Thank you.”

After a moment, a reply came.

“…It’s repayment for what happened on Yulsi Mountain.”

Yun-jo let out a soft laugh without meaning to.

“Oh, so you did think about repaying?”

Without any particular reaction, the boy lowered his gaze to the book spread on the writing desk.

A seat was prepared with a tea tray at a slight distance from the desk. It meant ‘sit without making noise’, but Yun-jo didn’t sit there; he crossed the floor and went out to the opposite side. That side was a rather steep slope. A retaining wall was built on the slope to support the main hall, and the other end connected to a pond. It was the very pond Yun-jo had fallen into earlier.

As he leaned out and looked down, sure enough, a voice came from behind.

“If you go down like that, you’ll fall in the water again.”

“Oh.”

At that, he quickly straightened up. When he turned around, the boy’s gaze was still on the desk.

“If you want to jump in again, go ahead. But this time, I won’t pull you out. Servants are prohibited from entering here, and the physician doesn’t have the strength to save you. And I can’t go in there.”

Yun-jo laughed and replied.

“Yeah, I won’t go in anymore.”

To tell the truth, he had jumped into the pond on purpose. Even though he had never learned to swim, he figured he would float on water and wouldn’t die. He also underestimated how much water a backyard pond could have.

But the depth was deeper than expected, and the bottom was mud, so even when he stepped, his ankles sank deep. (He should have realized when there were lotus flowers planted.)

The clothes he was wearing also absorbed water and considerably hindered movement. Even though Yun-jo was relatively lightly dressed, it was still difficult. In historical dramas, the scenes where people who fall into the water swim out in their wrapped clothes turn out to be quite difficult in reality.

“……”

The boy looked up, perhaps surprised that he admitted it so easily. This time, he didn’t take his eyes off Yun-jo for quite a while, then finally spoke.

“I have something to ask you.”

“What is it?”

“Are you Manra?”

Yun-jo shrugged and replied.

“I’m Yun-jo, though?”

Then the boy frowned slightly.

“What is Yun-jo?”

“Huh?”

What is Yun-jo? Faced with an unexpected metaphysical question, Yun-jo let out a laugh involuntarily.

“Hahaha.”

“……”

At the sharp gaze, he quickly closed his mouth, but unable to completely wipe the smile from his lips, Yun-jo explained.

“No, Yun-jo is just my name.”

“You have a name?”

“Of course. In Chinese characters, it’s sunlight Yun, morning Jo, so Yun-jo.”

“Yun-jo…”

The boy murmured softly. Yun-jo thought about telling him his surname, Jeong, but stopped. It didn’t seem meaningful. Instead, he asked.

“What’s your name?”

The boy didn’t answer and turned his head to the desk. After prying for his name and identity, he won’t tell his own? Yun-jo asked incredulously.

“Isn’t that too stingy? Think about it. If I don’t call your name, what should I call you?”

Then came a reply as cold as could be.

“You have no reason to call my name.”

“We’ll see about that!”

If not his name, at least he should tell him a title. If not that, at least show his face. Yun-jo tried to convince him with various reasons, but none worked. In the end, Yun-jo raised his hand as a white flag and waved it in the air.

“Fine, if it’s better not to call each other by name, let’s do that. You can call me ‘you’ and I’ll call you ‘hey.'”

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