I Returned To The Past

“…”

I opened my eyes. A table and chairs of red sandalwood, a wall hung with an ink painting. On the table, a branch of pear blossom stood in a jade vase. I nodded at the familiar sight.

A dream.

No place like this could exist in the waking world; it lived only inside my head. My room. Or, to be exact, my room as it had been before the house was wiped out. I had dreamed this same dream hundreds of times out on the battlefield, so I knew the moment was not real.

Which meant.

So I survived after all?

Arrows had been buried all through my body and a sword had run my chest through. I had never expected to live; nothing but a miracle could explain it. Then, all at once, the thing that actually mattered came to me.

I’m free.

I had survived a hell where a hundred men out of a hundred were carried out dead. At last the leash around my neck had come off.

Ten years. It had been a long time. I had held on and held on for one reason: to see my family again. And I had done it. The very fact that I was dreaming now proved I had survived.

I opened the door and stepped outside.

— Fwoosh.

Warm sunlight poured into the room. I walked on through the light, then stopped. A great pear tree stood in my path, its branches in full white bloom, giving off a faint, sweet scent.

— Whooooosh.

The wind came through and scattered the petals like snow. It was the scene I always saw in the dream, but today something was different. The scent brushing my nose and the sight filling my eyes were both unusually vivid.

Is it the thrill of having survived?

I didn’t really know why, but it wasn’t bad. If anything, it was good. My memories had done nothing but fade as the years went by; today’s dream was the opposite. It was clearer than it had ever been.

I looked up at the pure white pear blossoms crowding the branches.

“…”

An ache started up in one side of my chest, because I could not call up my family’s faces. For three years they had stayed sharp; somewhere around the fifth year their features began to blur, and now, ten years gone, I could not remember them at all. However hard I strained after them, there was nothing but thick white fog. The family I met in the dream were faceless, their features rubbed away. The one mercy in it was that their voices, at least, I had not forgotten.

Maybe today will be different?

In a dream this vivid, maybe even the faces I couldn’t remember would come back. I closed my eyes and waited. Soon it would be their turn to appear. Any moment now, it would be their turn to appear.

— Step, step.

The footsteps came closer and closer.

— Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!

And with them my heart went wild. I swallowed dryly at the presence I could feel behind me. Then a warm voice came.

“Mujin, what are you standing there staring at?”

Ah. The moment I heard the voice I knew who it was.

Father.

It was the voice of my dead father.

“The blossoms have come in beautifully. Come out on an outing with your mother.”

That was my mother’s voice, joining in.

“Good morning, Brother.”
“Brother, me too! I want to come along!”

And Ugyeom and Hayul, too. The whole family was gathered.

Is this the end…?

Always, at about this point, I would turn around, meet those faceless faces, and wake. This time would be no different.

But.

— Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump.

My heart was telling me otherwise. That this time, at least, it would be different. Trembling inside, I turned around.

“Ah.”

A short cry escaped me before I knew it.

Their faces. My family’s faces.

I can see them.

There was my father with his manly bearing; my mother with her fine-featured, girlish face; Ugyeom, the very image of Father; and Hayul, who looked the way Mother must have as a child. I could see my family’s faces clearly.

“Ah…”

I wanted to speak, but no words came. I only opened and closed my mouth like a fool. I had a mountain of things I meant to say when I saw them again, and now that I stood in front of them my mind went blank.

— Trickle.

Tears ran down my cheeks. Because I had seen my family’s faces again. Because I had brought back faces I had forgotten. And because I knew I would wake from the dream soon.

Just a little longer… an instant would do.

I wanted this moment to go on. I did not want to wake yet. Let it be an illusion; it made no difference to me that none of it was real. Phantom or not, I wanted to stay with my family a little longer.

And my wish was granted.

“…Why are you crying all of a sudden.”
“My child, does something hurt? Has something happened to you? Tell your mother.”
“Brother, is something the matter?”
“Brother, don’t cry. Hnng.”

I did not wake. My family’s worried voices echoed in my ears. Weeping, I opened my mouth.

“All of you… I missed you.”

I was sitting in the red sandalwood chair, the armrest cool against my palm.

The dream isn’t breaking.

Ordinarily I should have woken the instant I saw my family’s faces. A rule that had held unchanged hundreds of times had broken, and the dream was still going.

Maybe this isn’t a dream. Maybe it’s the afterlife.

I thought back over what had just happened. The sweet scent of pear blossom still seemed to linger in my nose, and I could still feel my mother’s soft hand on my forehead as she worried over the son who had burst into tears. It was far too vivid for a dream.

And I’ve spent more than two hours in this room.

If it were a dream I should have woken long before. It was strange, too, that I could feel time passing this clearly inside a dream. It struck me that maybe the afterlife meant being locked inside the moment you had wanted most.

I don’t know.

Whether I simply had not woken yet, or whether I had truly come to the world after death, there was no way to say for certain what was happening to me.

There was one more strange thing.

I got up, shrugged off my outer robe, and stood before the long bronze mirror hanging on one wall. A pretty boy looked back at me, pale, without one muscle on him.

This is how I looked as a boy.

I ran a hand over myself. The skin was soft, not rough, and there was even a faint scent coming off it. When was the last time I had felt anything like this? I could barely remember. On the battlefield there had never been water enough to drink, let alone to wash with.

No scars, no wounds either.

Every scar that had covered my face and my body was gone. Nothing was left of the sword that had run through my chest. And the internal energy I had piled up so doggedly over ten years was barely there at all.

Ugyeom said he was fifteen.

When I met my family, Ugyeom said he was fifteen and my younger sister Hayul nine. Which made me eighteen.

The vanished scars, the younger body, my family alive, my mother’s soft hand, the scent of pear blossom still in my nose. The clues fitted together one by one in my head until they came to a single conclusion.

I’ve returned to the past?

Was such a thing even possible? It was absurd, and I was the one who had thought of it. But going back to the past made more sense than a dream or a world after death.

Then the voice I had heard before losing consciousness came back to me.

Ah. Regression. Had I really gone back to the past?

The moment I grasped that I had returned to the past, the voice rang in my head again.

“Guh!”

Startled by the voice ringing inside my skull, I looked around. But there was no one in the room, and no one was moving about outside it either.

What was that?

It wasn’t voice transmission¹. I had heard it a few times on the battlefield, so I knew. Voice transmission did not sound like this, ringing straight inside the head. To ring in a man’s head like that, you would need something on the order of a Buddhist-school master’s Wisdom-Light Mind Speech².

“This is driving me mad.”

I had no idea what was going on. From the look of things, it did seem I had come back to the past. But I did not have the first clue how I had come back, or why any of this had happened.

I can’t even guess what set this off.

Still, I could not simply let it go. The life I had led had not been kind enough to let me shrug things off. More than once or twice on the battlefield, brushing a question aside had nearly killed me.

“Hm…”

Turn it over as I might, I could find no reason worth the name.

No idea.

I could not get so much as a handhold on how I had returned to the past. But I decided to stop clawing at it. Hanging on to a question that would not come loose was its own shortcut to death, and on the battlefield you always had to keep your thinking supple.

The reason doesn’t matter.

A god’s whim, a god’s joke. What was that to me? What mattered was that I had returned to the past.

Right. That’s enough.

A smile spread at the corner of my mouth before I knew it. Whatever the reason, everything I had wished and wished for had come back.

I looked slowly around the room. Sunlight came warm through the window and the air was sweet with pear blossom. Things I had not forgotten for a single day across ten years of blood-stinking battlefields.

And with them came the hellish days I had lived after losing all of it.

My father’s death. Ugyeom, his dantian shattered, left a broken man. And my mother and my sister, made to swallow every humiliation the debt collectors could think of.

The memories of my past life flashed before my eyes.

— Clench.

A pain like my chest tearing open stopped my breath. When I glanced at the mirror, the face in it had no trace of a smile left. Only a boy with a cold expression.

“Never again…”

I would not repeat the life I had lived before. I had felt in my bones how one wrong choice changes a life. Once is enough for a mistake like that.

Father, Ugyeom, Mother, my sister. I would protect them all.

I was no longer the powerless, foolish Yang Mujin of the past. I was the mad dog who had rolled through hell for ten years and come out alive. The Mad Dog of Blood Sand Plain, Yang Mujin.

“Hssss. Hooo.”

I breathed slow and deep, letting the boiling in me settle. What I needed now was not hot anger but cold reason.

Eighteen, then.

Roughly two years left. Two years from now, the bandit gang that took my father’s life would come to these parts. I had to act before then.

First, I take them down.

Deal with the bandits and I could stop my father’s death and the fall of the house both. That would change my mother’s and my siblings’ futures along with it.

Ways to stop them rose in my head. To the man I had been they were a terror he did not dare face; now they were nothing more than a mad dog’s prey.

But there was one problem.

As I am now, I’m nothing but an eighteen-year-old greenhorn.

There was not a scrap of muscle to be found on my body, and every trace of the internal energy I had earned on the battlefield was gone. However well I knew the future, that would not do as it stood.

Will alone isn’t enough.

I needed strength. To keep the tragedies of the past from repeating, I had to become strong enough that no threat could shake me.

For me, that was not so difficult a thing.