Chapter 2
"Isn’t he just a crazy bastard?”
The middle of the banquet hall turned into a funeral parlor.
The noisy hall fell silent as if by magic.
My father, my mother, and even the men who’d come to admire my beauty were all horrified.
Perhaps their reaction was only natural.
A mere fourteen-year-old girl had called an immortal a “crazy bastard.”
A moment later, the cultivator’s lips twisted.
“Did I hear that wrong?”
“No. You heard me correctly.”
“So-ha!”
My mother grabbed my arm in a panic.
“Tell him you’re sorry. Quickly!”
“Mother.”
“Quickly!”
My mother was trembling, her hands shaking.
My father was already bowing his head toward the cultivator.
“Immortal Master! She’s still a child who doesn’t know any better. Please show mercy just this once!”
“Mercy?”
The so-called immortal gave a snort of laughter.
‘So what if you laugh? There are so many people here, and you’re all alone…!’
“You must think a commoner’s life is worthless, to have no fear of Heaven.”
He flicked a finger.
Snap!
At first, I thought nothing had happened.
But a small hole appeared in the forehead of one of the warriors who had drawn his sword.
Thud.
A red droplet of blood trickled down.
The warrior’s body fell backward.
The person next to him gaped in horror.
Wham!
This time, the man beside him had his throat burst open.
The third man’s chest…
Every time something sliced through the air, another person collapsed.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
Ten people died before anyone could even take a proper breath.
They’d been alive just moments ago.
They’d come to celebrate my birthday, laughing, drinking, and carrying food.
Now they lay scattered across the ground as chunks of meat.
Blood spread between the shattered wine bottles.
The cultivator waved his hand as if brushing off blood that hadn’t even touched his fingertips.
“They deserve to die for daring to draw their weapons before this lord.”
“Ugh…”
My stomach lurched, and I bent over and threw up on the floor.
My throat burned, and tears streamed down my face.
Even so, I couldn’t take my eyes off the dead.
One of the warriors had poured me wine earlier with a smile.
Another had joked that he’d thought a celestial maiden had descended from heaven when he saw me.
There were people whose names I didn’t even know.
But they’d all died because of me.
Just because I’d gotten angry.
‘I may as well have killed them myself.’
The cultivator was the one who’d done it with his own hands.
Even so, if I hadn’t provoked him, they wouldn’t have died.
One flick of a finger.
That was all it took for ten lives to disappear.
I could call him a lunatic who couldn’t be reasoned with.
But that judgment meant nothing.
Complaining that a tiger is cruel won’t bring back the person it bit.
That man was human, but at the same time, he wasn’t.
At least to us, he was no different from a natural disaster.
Pointing a spear at a typhoon won’t make it disappear.
Insulting a lightning bolt won’t make it hold back its anger.
He was not someone I could ever dare defy.
A devil wearing a human face.
The cultivator turned his palm downward.
Boom!
An invisible pressure bore down on our heads.
Everyone was slammed to the ground at once.
Flattened like frogs, we could only groan, unable to move a finger.
For a moment, I thought someone had pressed a “Triple Gravity” button.
Crash, clatter—!
The banquet tables collapsed, and wine bottles and dishes shattered all around.
But that was only because people had fallen into them.
The buildings were unharmed.
In other words, it wasn’t gravity. It was a force that only affected people.
‘I can’t believe it. It isn’t one of the four fundamental forces? Is this the power of an immortal?’
I was sure he’d said he was a Qi Refining cultivator.
Mom had said Qi Refining was the lowest stage among cultivators.
Yet with a single gesture, he’d killed ten grown men and forced dozens of people to their knees.
Just how powerful were the ones above him?
This was only level one?
I didn’t even dare lift my head.
It was a difference between heaven and earth.
“A mere mortal dares to insult this lord.”
The cultivator’s gaze fell on me.
“If I kill only you, the others will feel wronged.”
It was an ominous thing to say.
“So I’ll kill everyone, to be fair.”
The air all around us tightened.
My skin prickled strangely.
'Something’s coming!'
I could feel a power gathering, one that couldn’t even be compared to the one from before.
'He’s insane. He really intends to kill everyone.'
I had died once before.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t afraid of death.
More than anything, it wasn’t just me who would die.
Fourteen years had passed since I came to this world.
I’d grown close enough to my new parents to truly love them.
They cherished me more than anything in the world.
Besides, taking the perverted village chief and all the villagers with me to the afterlife was a whole different matter.
The innocent didn’t deserve to suffer because of me.
Damn it, this is so frustrating!
I was miserable and terrified.
What should I do? I felt like I was about to cry.
Could even this be because I’d become a woman?
‘Think, Kim Muyeol. Think. Ryu So-ha.’
I couldn’t take back the words I’d blurted out in a fit of emotion.
If so, I had to start using my head now.
“I-I’m sorry.”
My voice trembled against my will.
“I’m sorry. Immortal Master.”
My paltry pride melted away like cotton candy in water.
I didn’t care if I had to grovel.
I wanted to save the people who were left.
There was no way I could win by force.
I couldn’t escape, either.
“If my life can appease your anger, then please take it. The others haven’t done anything wrong.”
“The crime of insulting this lord cannot be paid for with your life alone.”
I had to find a reason he’d have to spare us.
‘First, let’s sort out what I know for certain.’
When there’s too much you don’t know, you have to separate what you know from what you don’t.
First, that cultivator had come straight to find me.
So I was his target.
But why?
Because I was a peerless beauty?
Honestly, even after all these years, I still couldn’t believe it myself.
I’d look in the mirror and think I’d have no regrets if I could date a woman this beautiful in my previous life.
I could suddenly understand why people developed princess syndrome and became narcissists.
‘Even if immortals exist, wouldn’t there be celestial maidens, too?’
I had no idea.
At times like this, I regretted how shallow my knowledge was.
I should’ve read novels instead of nothing but papers in my previous life…
If I’d read wuxia novels, I might’ve found a way out more easily.
‘Though this is a little different from the wuxia I knew. Did wuxia even have immortals? I know about ascending to immortality, though.’
My thoughts kept branching off like kudzu roots.
This wouldn’t do.
I had to follow the main thread and get to the heart of it.
Why would a cultivator want none other than me?
It definitely wouldn’t be because of my looks.
Then was it because I was “the Ryu family’s daughter”?
No, that was wrong.
If he needed a Ryu, then the others should’ve served just as well.
Would he have picked me because I was prettier? The odds were low.
Then there was only one answer.
A cauldron.
Maybe I’d gotten fixated on the word “slave,” especially the provocative term “sex slave,” and that had led me astray.
Let me retrace what the warrior had said.
He’d said he’d drain some kind of qi from me and then throw away the shell.
He was treating me like a human battery.
So he was after something inside me, not my appearance?
What had he called it?
‘Remember. Think.’
Right, I remembered.
Innate essence!
The pieces were starting to fit together.
I had no idea what innate essence was.
But I was a physicist.
If I didn’t know something, I could simply call it an unknown, x.
Whatever innate essence was, the reason he wanted x was…
It had to help with his cultivation somehow.
‘I’m a physicist, aren’t I? Then I should start by making a hypothesis!’
I started with this proposition.
「The immortal wants to use me as a cauldron because I possess x.」
It wasn’t a mathematical proposition in the strict sense, but so what?
That was good enough.
Let’s form a hypothesis based on it.
「If I don’t possess x, he won’t use me as a cauldron.」
Good. It already sounded plausible.
The problem was that I didn’t know what the unknown x was.
I had no way of knowing whether I possessed “innate essence.”
It was like wanting to measure the time without having a clock.
Anyway, all I needed was a way to test the hypothesis.
And the one who could help was right in front of me.
‘Good. I think I’m still missing one final piece of the puzzle, though.’
“W-wait a moment…”
“Are you thinking of leaving some last words?”
“Is the reason you want to use me as a cauldron because of my energy?”
He sneered at me in the most infuriating way.
“Kuhahaha! Have you finally realized your place?”
His answer missed the mark, but he didn’t deny it.
“But it’s too late.”
"...?!"
"You must pay the price for that irreverent, loose tongue of yours.”
"U..."
"I shall wipe you all out as heaven’s punishment!”
Phew, what a relief.
At first glance, it looked like a crisis with no way out.
But it wasn’t.
If he’d planned to kill us all, including me, he’d have done it already.
He was a man who could pile up corpses in a minute.
But right now, he was only making threats.
At least it seemed he was willing to talk.
So that was a relief.
'What do I have to do to survive?'
Maybe fear had left my mind not working as well as it used to.
To buy time, I steeled myself.
I rummaged through my memories of the entertainment culture I knew from Earth.
I scraped together every bit of information I could about cute-girl characters, from dramas and webtoons to web novels.
'Several people died because of me. I can be embarrassed later. First, I have to survive! Kim Muyeol—or rather, Ryu So-ha! You can do this!'
You can do anything if your life is on the line.
‘Do it. You can do it!’
And then I…
Abandoned myself.
I threw myself into it—not as someone aiming to become a World Cup coach, but as the Ryu family’s daughter.
Not for a 2-billion-won annual salary, but to save 200 lives.
I made the cutest face I could.
“Um. I-Immortal Master…”
My voice sounded so mortifyingly unbelievable, even to my own ears.
It was at least three notes higher than usual, thin as down.
“S-So-ha was sowwy.”
I wanted to bite my tongue off right then.
“I won’t say anything naughty again. Okay?”
This much embarrassment is nothing. Nothing at all.
I had to endure it.
Carefully, I pinched the edge of the cultivator’s sleeve between my fingers and tugged.
“I’m sowwy. Couldn’t this cool big brother forgive So-ha, poor ignorant So-ha, just this once?”
“O…Oppa?”
Just how far could a person fall?
I put everything I had into the performance.
It was nothing short of a state of total immersion.
‘Cute girls, lend me your strength.’
Without letting go of his sleeve, I tilted my head 15 degrees.
I added the final flourish, the finishing touch.
“Kkyu?”
“...?!”
An extreme wave of humiliation washed over me.
Today was the fourteenth birthday I’d celebrated as Ryu So-ha.
And today.
The thirtysomething Dr. Kim Muyeol (almost) died.
