Episode 4: Why Am I a Busboy Again?
A silent dawn.
I woke to the sound of rain.
A yellowed ceiling paper met my eyes, the air thick with the musty smell of mold.
For the first time in what felt like forever, the headache that had tormented me all my life… was gone.
That alone was strange enough.
But what was stranger was the familiarity of everything—the smell, the room, the view.
This shabby, poverty-soaked atmosphere—I knew it too well. No matter how I looked at it, this was my old home.
To be precise, this was the cramped little room in Jaha Inn (Jaha Gaekjan), the inn my grandfather left to me.
My name, Lee Jaha, came from this very inn.
“…Why am I here?”
I couldn’t possibly be mistaken. After Jaha Inn burned down, I never again had a proper roof over my head.
The mysterious man’s voice echoed in my mind.
“This is your last lifeline. Never swallow a Heavenly Jade again.”
How could I possibly swallow a Heavenly Jade twice?
Not unless I went back to the past.
“Wait… the past?”
Now that I noticed, my body felt… fine.
The headache was gone, the wounds from breaking through the cheon-ra-ji-mang trap had all vanished. Only my face felt sore, as if someone had punched me recently.
I opened the door to check my surroundings.
There it was: the old, worn-down interior of Jaha Inn.
Putting together that man’s words and what I was seeing, there was only one answer:
Even if I returned to the same moment in life, I was not to swallow the Heavenly Jade again.
Which meant that this “now”… was clearly my past.
I was so rattled I didn’t realize right away what a blessing this was.
“What the hell is going on…”
I’d always thought of Jaha Inn as a cramped, grimy hellhole, but seeing it again after so long… it felt quiet. Serene, even.
Beyond the entrance, dawn was breaking over the ridgeline just after the rain had stopped.
“Mmm…”
I watched that sight for a long time.
Until the faint morning light slowly filled the quiet inn—
It was the first real peace I’d felt in ages.
Still, there was one thing that tugged at me.
Why this time?
There was no sign of my elderly grandfather.
If I’d gone back even further, maybe I could’ve seen my parents at least once. The thought flickered by.
But Grandfather always said their health was poor. That they’d died young.
Seeing them might only have hurt more.
A dull ache rose in my chest.
As I stared outside, my right eye began to throb.
Looked like I had a bruise.
There was no mirror, so I had no choice but to leave the inn.
I told myself that walking around would help jog my memory, that I could piece together what point in time this was.
…Bullshit.
First, I sprinted straight to the stream to check my face.
“…”
Even I was shocked by the face in the water.
All the old scars were gone; what stared back at me was a surprisingly gentle-looking young man. Only my right eye was ringed in blue, as if I’d been punched recently, and my lip was split.
When did I get hit like this again…?
Judging by the face, I was in my early twenties.
I’d had so many disasters back then that it was hard to place exactly when this was.
I stared at my reflection every time the ripples calmed, lost in old memories.
In any case, this was definitely my hometown—on the southern edge of Ilyang County (Ilyang-hyeon).
Anywhere people live, a sort of local jianghu forms. There were no great sects or noble clans here, but a tangled mess of so-called righteous and so-called unrighteous types all mixed together.
From the perspective of the man once called the Mad Demon, it was simple:
A place full of idiots.
And among such places, Ilyang was particularly rich in pathetic fools.
There was a reason—the town’s pleasure houses thrived.
Since I was a kid, local thugs had roamed in packs, doing things not even a third-rate gang would bother with. Their grand dream was to get noticed by some outside underworld sect and be accepted as proper black-path goons.
Looking out at the sleepy Ilyang streets, I suddenly bellowed:
“You bastards! I’m back!”
From somewhere nearby, a man who’d barely fallen asleep at dawn shouted back from inside his house:
“Shut up, you lunatic! If you’re drunk, go home quietly for once! Damn it!”
“Sure thing, sweetheart,” I muttered.
That voice—the same old crank who always cursed at me from his house when I made noise.
That was when I truly understood:
I really had come back to the past.
Was this divine favor because I fought the Demonic Cult so hard?
Or was it because of that strange man?
Either way, my grudge against the ma-gyo and a freak stroke of fortune had intertwined to create this miracle.
At this time in my life, I’d deliberately played the role of inn boy—a mere busboy of Jaha Inn.
If I went around saying I, a brat, was the owner, people would take advantage or cause trouble. So I claimed I was just looking after the inn for a distant relative.
The townsfolk who’d been close to Grandfather knew I was the real owner, but they kept quiet. Everyone else just called me “Jaha,” the inn boy with the Lee family name.
It was a time when I couldn’t even call my own property mine.
Those memories flashed past like a lantern-lit reel.
I found myself grinning.
“…It’s good to be back.”
The thought of living again—redoing everything—made my body itch already.
In my previous life, I only started seriously training martial arts long after this point. Now I was back seven or eight years earlier.
Who knew how strong I could become this time?
In terms of taking insults, beatings, humiliation, and petty abuse, being an inn boy is the pinnacle of professions in the jianghu.
But things would be different this time.
That same inn boy once survived long enough to clash with the Martial Alliance and collide head-on with the Demonic Cult.
To stir up my memories, I took a full walk around Ilyang.
Everywhere my gaze fell, old scenes resurfaced from where they’d been hiding.
Filthy alleyways, the fishy stench wafting from the seafood stall, the giant lid on the dumpling steamer, the windbreak cloth covering street vendors’ stands, that strange soup shop I used to frequent.
Ordinary streets, ordinary smells—and yet they dragged old feelings out of me one by one.
The more I remembered, the more forgotten emotions resurfaced.
The town was full of shops, but aside from the occasional meal at Chunyang Restaurant, I didn’t really have anywhere I “enjoyed” going.
As I walked, my mouth kept twisting.
I’d been too poor to spend recklessly; I’d hoarded every coin like a miser.
I remembered the shame of having protection money stolen.
There weren’t many “fond” memories in these streets.
Sure, I owned an inn when I was still young, but I lived like a beggar of the Beggar’s Union—too busy scraping together food to get sentimental. I never wasted money, so customers often called me a stingy bastard for fun.
The bruises on my face now came from something related.
Once, a customer asked me what I was saving my money for, looking at me like some penny-pinching freak.
To be honest, the question stunned me.
Why?
Because I was an orphan.
Of course I saved every coin. Unlike the bodyguard who worked at the pleasure house, throwing money around, I didn’t have the luxury.
So, in a moment of childish stupidity, trying to be funny…
I said:
“I’m saving up so I can one day listen to a song from Chae-hyang of Maehwa-ru.”
That was supposed to be a joke.
People laughed exactly as I expected, clutching their stomachs.
But when the story spread, the “it was a joke” part quietly vanished.
That’s when I learned: once a rumor passes through people’s mouths, it changes shape.
“My only wish is to hear her sing one song” somehow turned into “I want to sleep with her.”
Impressive, isn’t it?
The rumor spread through Ilyang like wildfire, east to west, north to south.
Nowhere did anyone mention that it had been a joke.
“You hear about that inn boy from Jaha Inn? Supposedly he’s saving every coin just to sleep with Chae-hyang from Maehwa-ru.”
“So he was a lunatic. I always wondered why he was so stingy.”
“Pathetic bastard.”
“As if she’d ever sleep with him. She’s not even a courtesan, that would insult her. Especially with how proud she is. And he’s not the only one after her.”
Thinking about it now still makes my guts twist.
“It was a joke, you bastards,” I muttered. “A joke…”
Every time the rumor circled back to my ears, I wanted to tear my hair out.
Then again, it was the kind of stupid, funny story people love.
The joke I made to get a laugh turned into the reason I was supposedly saving money. The tale spread across all of Ilyang until it became something like a local legend.
Some idiots even joked that the rumor would reach the Martial Alliance someday.
I stopped in front of Maehwa-ru, the Plum Blossom Pavilion, where pale blue lanterns hung from the eaves.
Here, a blue lantern meant there were courtesans inside.
A red lantern meant “don’t come looking for courtesans here.”
The meanings change from region to region, and later they twisted even more, but that’s how it worked here.
Old memories flickered by.
When the guards at Maehwa-ru heard the rumor about the inn boy supposedly desperate to bed Chae-hyang, they came over to my inn just to mess with me.
My face had gone stiff the moment they started joking.
So of course, it began with a few punches to my face and ended with me getting kicked around on the floor.
They had plenty of reasons.
Maybe they were mad I’d “treated” Chae-hyang like a whore.
Maybe they wanted to show off in front of her.
Maybe they were just idiots.
Judging by my bruised face in the water earlier, that incident must have happened just a few days ago.
It had been so long I’d almost let it go. But now that I was really back here, the memory wouldn’t stop replaying.
Back then, the reason my face had gone rigid was simple:
They’d actually brought Chae-hyang with them just to humiliate me.
How was I supposed to describe that suffocating shame?
Whether my original comment had been a joke or not probably didn’t matter to them.
What mattered was that some inn boy had the audacity to set his eyes on the prettiest woman in Maehwa-ru.
I first saw Chae-hyang that day.
She was beautiful. No denying that.
But there’s nothing more humiliating than seeing that beauty twisted into an expression of anger and contempt directed at you.
Now that every detail of that day was back, a smile tugged at my lips.
If they embarrassed me in front of an audience, then I’d return the favor in front of an audience.
I decided I’d visit Maehwa-ru this evening—when the streets were most crowded.
It was time to turn that “legendary rumor” back into what it truly was:
A joke.
I was still staring at Maehwa-ru when a voice called out from across the street.
“You gonna burn the place down with your eyes? What are you glaring at so hard, you pathetic brat?”
It was the clerk from the fabric shop opposite.
His voice was full of that uniquely annoying tone reserved for losers.
Truth be told, I had been pathetic at this point in my life.
But what mattered more than that was this:
I was still pathetic now.