Chapter 101
The story continues off the page
Floaties for Everyone
Swim lesson at the water park, and she's demonstrating on you
Our office has been noisy lately.
Not because we’ve been busy with work.
On the contrary, since there’s no work, everyone has too much free time and is making a racket together.
“Pfft!”
“Pff.”
“Boss! Look at this!”
“…….”
This is what’s happening right now, too.
Three people were cackling and laughing as they watched a dancing video on the computer.
Kim Yang, Baek Yeonhwa, and Renea.
Baek Yeonhwa had started showing up here at some point, but whenever I asked why she was here, she just looked at me with a ‘?’ as if it were obvious, so I pretended not to notice.
If I pressed too deeply, I felt like I might get an answer I couldn’t handle.
“L-look at those joints.”
“Oh my? That pose is adorable!”
“Hahahahaha!”
Anyway, I was watching the screen along with the three of them.
Because it was a video of me dancing.
The last time the three of them dragged me along and forced me to dance, Kim Yang had gone out of her way to save the video as a file.
“Stop it.”
Lately, I’ve been feeling like the boss’s authority has hit rock bottom.
Well, I’m an open-minded manager who tends to dislike people in higher positions forcibly pushing others around.
Once you experience that for real, it’s worse than you can imagine.
- Raychen: Consultation Room 1.
- Raychen: A customer is coming in.
“A customer’s here. Kim Yang, get in there.”
“Tch, tche.”
“Ms. Renea, did you clean the bathroom? You said you needed bleach yesterday, so clean with bleach before you leave today.”
“You bought the odorless kind, right?! The smell of bleach is too strong for me to use it!”
“…….”
“Ugh! These days there are so many products advertised as colorless, odorless, and germ-free for all kinds of races—!”
She’s 1,902 years old, yet she says “these days.” It makes me want to flick her forehead.
Anyway, Renea also left to prepare to clean the bathroom, wearing rubber gloves that perfectly matched her hair color.
That left Baek Yeonhwa and me.
“Hehe, Great Hero. We have some time to spare. Shall we do a little?”
“……Let’s.”
Baek Yeonhwa approached with a languid sway and a deep smile at the corner of her lips. She even licked her lips while looking me up and down.
I thought I’d gotten used to it, but I couldn’t help stiffening up whenever she actually came at me.
“Your body has stiffened again, Great Hero. I keep telling you that won’t do.”
Baek Yeonhwa gently swept her hand across my chest. Her fingers tapped my muscles as if taking steps, and she nodded in satisfaction.
“You never skip your workouts, do you?”
“You keep coming to find me after work.”
“Hehe! What can I do?”
Ah, I really can’t take this anymore.
“Um, Ms. Baek Yeonhwa.”
“Yes?”
“Why do you always make it feel like this before training?”
Training.
Yes, training.
Lately, I’ve been learning the Taeguk Eumyang Fist from Baek Yeonhwa.
It was a martial art from the Old Murim that placed particular importance on internal energy.
But I wasn’t from the Old Murim and couldn’t use internal energy, so I was learning it with a focus on external techniques.
Deep-rooted sects had plenty to teach even through external techniques alone.
“I read it in a book.”
“What book?”
“It’s called 101 Ways to Turn a Man into a Beast! It says subtle sensuality is important—!”
She just went ahead and copied everything she read in books.
The problem was that she was far too good at copying it.
Baek Yeonhwa should have gone to school.
She would have studied her textbooks with incredible thoroughness.
“Now, shall we get into position?”
At least the seduction ended early, and because she came from a martial sect, she took the training seriously.
At work, I wore a suit, so rough training was usually done at home.
Here, we did training that didn’t require moving around.
When Baek Yeonhwa’s palm touched my chest, two opposing energies seeped into me.
Yin and yang.
Hot, yet cold.
Cold, yet hot.
Two opposing energies.
Usually, I understood that there were points where the two clashed and became lukewarm.
But Baek Yeonhwa’s energy was precise and cleanly divided, as if cut apart by a blade.
“Close your eyes and hold your breath, Great Hero.”
“…….”
“You have no vessel inside your body to contain internal energy. In the end, the yin-yang energy I pour into you will naturally be expelled.”
A polite uninvited guest entered my body. It tapped at my organs and innards as it wandered around searching for an exit.
“So you don’t need to worry about balancing yin and yang. You only need to realize the principle.”
Baek Yeonhwa’s voice gradually grew hazy.
Yin and yang neither pushed each other away nor mixed, but their paths were the same.
Even so, each stubbornly insisted on its own path.
“Yin and yang coexist despite being different. Even without changing a single bit of their own colors, they ultimately find harmony.”
“…….”
“Taeguk doesn’t mean yin and yang merging together. Nor does interlocking make them a stronger force. It’s not that.”
“…….”
“What we need to understand isn’t strength, but boundaries.”
Simply put—
Not yin and yang.
The line drawn between them.
“Hoo!”
Unable to hold my breath any longer, I exhaled at length.
Cold and heat escaped simultaneously through my mouth and nose, and my body returned to normal.
When I opened my eyes, Baek Yeonhwa was smiling tenderly as she wiped my sweat with a handkerchief.
Fine beads of sweat had formed on my forehead without me noticing.
That was how focused I’d been.
I accepted the handkerchief and wiped my face while catching my breath. Feeling the lingering aftereffects of yin and yang, I let out a brief exclamation of admiration.
“What you wanted to show me was the center. Yin and yang, mutually opposing and refusing even to compromise, neither separate nor mix…… the center.”
Baek Yeonhwa’s smile deepened, apparently satisfied with my answer.
“You have martial talent too, Great Hero. No, since you have no internal energy, should I call it insight (悟性)?”
“Insight?”
“The nature of enlightenment. Put simply, it means the talent to realize things faster than others.”
Realizing things faster than others.
That was true.
It wasn’t wrong.
“Even though you lack internal energy, your gaze isn’t fixated on yin and yang. Most people focus on what they don’t have. Most of the disciples in my family are like that. If only yin were a little stronger; is there a way to fill the yang? But that’s not what’s important.”
She carefully took my hand and looked up at me with eyes full of anticipation.
“What matters is the center—the standard that defines it. Once you realize this, even without internal energy, the martial arts that form the foundation of the Taeguk Eumyang Fist—”
“Boss, come oooout!”
“……?”
Baek Yeonhwa and I simultaneously turned our heads toward outside the office.
Isn’t “Tell the boss to come out!” an overly textbook drama line?
“Where’s the boss? Boss, come out!”
Realizing I hadn’t misheard, I stepped outside.
There was a handsome man making a scene in the third-floor hallway.
“…….”
Kim Yang was leaning against the counseling-room door, glaring at the man with an icy stare.
I’d once heard Namgung Yeon and the son from the gukbap restaurant on the first floor say that Kim Yang had a frightening aura.
I got a small, indirect taste of what they meant from her face now.
Her blank, cold glare was genuinely chilling.
If you didn’t know her, you’d think she had a bad personality.
“Boss! Boss, come out!”
“Yes, sir. I’m Kim Juseon, CEO of Meracle.”
First of all, the man was handsome.
He was dressed casually in 3rd-floor clothes, but his tightly tied hair, neatly trimmed beard, and unmistakable bamboo-leaf scent made him stand out.
It wasn’t hard to guess that he was from the Old Murim.
For the record, the Old Murim has a lot of difficult customers.
Let me warn you in advance: it’s the sort of neighborhood where fistfights break out in shops at the slightest provocation.
“CEO? I said bring out the boss!”
“The CEO is the boss, sir.”
“Oh, really?”
Look at this.
Some people occasionally get confused over words that should be obvious.
He hasn’t been learning Third Floor speech for long, so he doesn’t know many words.
He used words strangely too, and didn’t seem to have much vocabulary.
At this point, he was 100 percent from the Old Murim.
“I! Am! Paying! Why! Can’t I?”
“Kim Yang, what happened?”
“B-boss, it’s—”
“Shut up! You shut up!”
The man pointed at her and clamped a hand over Kim Yang’s mouth.
This guy was insane.
“Leave? I’m going to pay. But you’re telling me to leave?”
“…….”
Kim Yang’s eyes grew even colder. The air turned slightly chilly.
“Is that so difficult? Introducing a bangak?”
“A bangak?”
What was a bangak?
It sounded like an Old Murim dialect.
I glanced behind me and saw Baek Yeonhwa’s expression had stiffened as well; she was glaring at him with disgust.
I leaned back slightly and asked.
“What is a bangak?”
“Ahem, Great Hero. Bangak is a dialect from the northwestern region of the Old Murim that—”
“Boss! The toilet won’t unclog!”
Just then, Renea came up the stairs to the third floor. With tears in her eyes, she came over and threw herself into my arms.
“It won’t unclog at all! That’s why I’ve told you repeatedly that trolls and ogres shouldn’t be allowed to use the bathroom!”
Fuck.
We need to call a repair company for that.
No, that wasn’t the issue.
“Ms. Renea, I’m in the middle of a customer consultation, so—”
“Bangak!”
The Murim man’s eyes lit up.
His gaze was fixed squarely on Renea.
“Bangak! You have a bangak!”
“Huh? What’s that bastard saying?”
Renea cocked her head, while the excited Murim man approached, puffing through his nose.
But Kim Yang from the side and Baek Yeonhwa from behind both reached out to stop him.
“D-don’t come any closer.”
“That’s far enough.”
Seeing that I didn’t understand, Baek Yeonhwa quietly continued her earlier explanation.
“Great Hero, bangak is a northwestern Old Murim dialect term for a child under fifteen.”
“……What?”
Oh, so that was it.
He was asking me to introduce him to a minor?
“Crazy bastard.”
“Good heavens, how could someone like this—”
“Meracle introduces bangak! You said you could handle anyone!”
Right.
We don’t discriminate among our customers.
“But you’re not a customer.”
“Kim Yang, call the police.”
* * *
After the insane bangak creep was reported for obstructing business and hauled away by the police,
“You really get all kinds at a matchmaking agency.”
Preferences should be respected, but there has to be a line.
Like how I use the nice term “wildman enthusiast” for people like Mr. Cheolsu instead of calling them furries.
“Still, kids are off-limits.”
“Y-yeah! Exactly!”
“Besides, we don’t have customers like that to begin with!”
Kim Yang and Renea nodded in agreement behind me.
Why would children ever come to a matchmaking agency?
One more case resolved today.
Usually, if something disruptive happens during the day, that’s the end of it.
Strangely enough, things become quiet afterward.
You could call it the law of conservation of difficult customers.
So I thought I’d gotten through the day more or less.
- Raychen: Boss, a customer has arrived.
The messenger was on the monitor.
Same format as always, with Raychen’s measured tone. But today, for some reason, it grated on me.
- Raychen: But.
- Raychen: There are five children.
I left my hands resting on the keyboard for a moment and stared at the screen.
Apparently, today...
wasn’t a day that would end quietly after all.