The man's body was so large that when he set one foot down, the ground trembled. People did not believe in earthquakes. But when young Yu Han walked, it looked as though the world were coming to an end. Everyone who watched it was astonished.
He was still young, though. There was still time. His dream was to become the supreme leader of the martial world.
But if a mosquito settled on his neck, he would stumble and fall over. The sound of that massive body coming down could be heard in the far corner of the country. Perhaps that was where earthquakes came from. The body was fat and it was useless.
He knew something, though, that nobody else in the world knew. One day a man would come who would destroy Murim completely.
That traitor. The servant, the one nobody expected to amount to anything. He turned out to be incredible, and he succeeded in unifying the whole of Murim under himself. In that chaos, Han's parents were killed. That was why six masters had accepted an ordinary, weak man as their disciple. What followed was training so brutal that life was worse than death. They tried to pierce him with a living knife. They tried to freeze him alive. They tried to burn him with fire. His body endured all of it, and all of it was the masters' plan to make him enormously powerful.
Then they sent him back through time to change the fate of the world.
He had never once imagined he would open his eyes inside that fat, useless body — a young master who could not practise martial arts at all.
In the present, the doctor was treating him. Han lay there and thought about how to handle that ungrateful servant, how to defeat the man who would one day create all the chaos. Then he remembered: he had crossed paths with that servant before, and the reason was the Virgin Ginseng. It had to be obtained. The doctor and his caretaker kept arguing over his health above his head, which made it impossible to hold a thought together.
Until at last he remembered properly. In six months, that servant would take the Virgin Ginseng.
He had to do something now.
He got up at once and asked his father to take him out for a walk. Papa immediately called for people, and they brought the biggest chair available. Lifting that chair should have taken the strongest men in the household. But he refused it, because he wanted to walk on his own.
Even so, Papa called guards to help him. Watching that, the old man's eyes went moist. His son had not walked anywhere alone since the age of ten.
Over the next days Han trained hard. For a whole month he kept at it in the courtyards. But there was no sign of any change in that heavy body.
He checked himself on the scale. Even if a whole herd of pigs climbed onto it, it would not have made any difference. The rope snapped under him while he was still trying to remember the name of the servant who would bring the chaos.
His vassal comforted him. Weight loss did not happen overnight, he said. The young master would have to cut his sugar, he would have to increase his protein. Then there would be exercises to strengthen the muscles. It would take time for the young master's condition to become stable.
Han did not care about any of that. He only wanted to remember the traitor's name. It seemed the memories about that servant had been lost somewhere in the crossing back. But it did not matter. The Virgin Ginseng was in Anhui Province, and the man would come there to find it.
Perhaps he could go and find it at this very moment. He imagined the scene: himself holding the man in place with invincible strength, pressing him down, laughing with complete satisfaction. He would deal with him, and afterwards his life would be peaceful.
Was it a dream?
The vassal decided that his young master was losing weight so fast that the side effects had driven him mad. Shocked, he ran off to call the doctor and came back at a run with him.
Jang Su-yeong had sat the selection examination at the age of thirty to become a personal physician to the Emperor. He had passed through the finest tests to earn the position of doctor, and in fifty years he had come to understand the body and to develop his own medical techniques. This was Han's saviour. This was the man who would turn this body into something athletic and beautiful.
Han asked him whether there were many kinds of quick remedies for weight loss. The man said happily that there certainly were, that it was possible.
So Han asked whether it could happen in six months.
It would take three years, the doctor said, and there would have to be exercise as well.
Han found a mosquito sitting on the doctor's neck, hit it, and called him a doctor fit for noses.
But the doctor did think of a way for him to lose weight quickly. If he could not walk on land, then he should walk on water.
Eventually they came to a stream nearby. The people who had brought him there were completely exhausted. Han bent slowly and began to lower himself into the water. He thought that walking in water would relax the body, that the pressure on the joints and the muscles would be reduced.
Then he slipped and went into the deep water.
It looked as if that balloon of a belly would float him. Instead he sank like a submarine, and the vassal still did not react. The vassal thought his master was swimming happily. The poor man had no idea that what he was watching was a submarine with no oxygen in it. The vassal was thinking that the young master had the makings of a professional swimmer.
By then the other servants were shouting a warning that this river was probably deeper than expected, that there was a steep drop in it, and that the young master was going down like a submarine. The vassal drank in the words without understanding them. Then he understood: his master was drowning. He panicked and ran to save him. But he was an ordinary man with ordinary joints, and he could not even lift the weight.
Down in the water, Han's strength was leaving him. The memories of this body began to come clearly into his mind. Terrible things had been endured. His mother had given her own life to protect him.
At that very moment a girl caught hold of him and pulled him to the shore, and saved his life. He thanked her. He thanked her again. Then, finally, he was carried home.
The vassal spent that moment facing the wrath of Han's father. But when it came out that the whole thing had been the doctor's idea, the man who was very nearly finished was the doctor instead. He explained that the young master had been depressed after the rejection and had decided to lose weight. Then he mentioned the underwater method, which was in fact extremely effective.
It was Han's sister who had sent a maid after him to the waterfall, and the maid said that losing weight did not require going that deep into the water.
He woke up again in his own room and saw his beautiful elder sister. He could not believe that this girl was his sister. It was obvious that he was fat, and that he was stupid. But his sister was beautiful. She was an exceptional beauty.
The sister's maid asked whether she should help him get up. Han thought it would be impossible on his own. Then he rose easily and said it was no great matter.
The next day he was taken to a place that had been set up for his water training.
The servants were strangely cheerful. It was one thing to see a man as heavy as a mammoth. It was another thing to see him getting up happily and going. When he arrived, everyone was working on a pool for him, and it was oversized. This was obviously his elder sister's idea, so that he would have no need of dangerous streams.
It felt a little strange to Han. But the pool looked good, and he filled with joy. People walking towards him were smiling at him and congratulating him. It seemed such a pointless thing for everyone to have worked so hard over. What was the fun in it?
Then he asked the vassal about his adoptive father, the head of the family.
In the vassal's eyes that old, muscle-bound man was noble. He said the patriarch was a great senior of the discipline, a symbol whose honesty and virtue were respected by everyone. To Han his father was just an old lecher. The vassal added that whenever there was famine, the patriarch would open his stores and share out food and clothing with everyone. That was why the whole town respected him.
Han quickly realised that as a child he had been a burden. Even if he did nothing at all, as the son of the patriarch he would go on receiving food and a comfortable life for the rest of it.
He laughed out loud, which confused everyone around him.