The Hunting Dog of the Prestigious Family Has Returned Chapter 54

The moment his words ended, the official’s phase power bore down on Jeong Jihoon’s entire body.

Crack!

“Ngh?!”

The young aristocrats nearby stumbled back from the phase power wave pressing down on everything around it.

A destructive force capable of crumpling solid iron.

Seeing Jeong Jihoon withstand it, a brief flicker of interest passed through the official’s eyes.

“His phase power is fairly decent…. What are you? Why are you assaulting someone minding their own business?”

A voice escaped through Jeong Jihoon’s clenched teeth.

“That it doesn’t matter…. What does that even mean?”

“……What?”

As if something might burst out of him at any moment, Jeong Jihoon’s voice began to shake.

“Th-those people didn’t… they didn’t endure that brutal examination and climb here for this. Among them, there were people far more admirable than me…. far more admirable than someone like me…! And yet, that, to do that to them……!”

“First you come at me with phase power out of nowhere, and now you’re rambling nonsense I can’t make heads or tails of. How does each batch produce more lunatics than the last…….”

As the official was grumbling, the guards on standby began moving in to intervene.

“Sir. Are you all right?!”

“We’ll subdue him on our end. First, some distance……!”

“That won’t be necessary. I’m still an official of some standing. I can’t leave teaching a junior to my servants.”

But only for a moment.

“Thirty minutes until the ceremony begins. I’ll restrain myself enough not to make a mess of the banquet hall. But….”

The official sent the guards away and looked at Jeong Jihoon, still pinned beneath his phase power, twisting the corner of his mouth.

“It’s still going to hurt like hell.”

The official’s fist drove squarely into Jeong Jihoon’s gut as he tried to lower his stance.

“Hgh……!”

With a sound like air escaping a punctured lung, Jeong Jihoon’s body rolled across the banquet hall floor.

Every time he tried to rise, the phase power bore him down. Every time he steadied his stance to fight through the pressure, a merciless beating followed immediately.

Once. Then again.

Watching Jeong Jihoon rolling around the banquet hall floor, the aristocrats who had been looking on began to mock him.

“Ridiculous. The ones who had their vocal cords ripped out are those people over there. Why is he wasting energy sticking his nose in for nothing?”

“Isn’t it that thing that’s been going around among the common people lately?”

“The ‘kind aristocrat’? You mean the one about someone pouring money into the underground district people who don’t even have citizen registration?”

“Don’t know who it is, but it’s laughable. Look at what Jo Seonghwan got up to. No telling what someone like that is plotting behind the scenes.”

That one did the wrong thing, yet somehow I’m the one taking the blame.

A wry laugh almost escaped me, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about.

‘Right. Jeong Jihoon. So it was him.’

A face that announced to anyone watching, ‘I’m a good person.’

I remembered now.

He was the legitimate son of the Haewon Jeong clan, a fallen aristocratic family. Unlike other aristocrats, he had sat the state examination himself and passed.

A prodigy who possessed high phase power without any bloodline modification, and at the same time capable enough to pass the state examination.

That was how he had caught Kim Jungheon’s eye and been recruited to a central post.

The regional private academies had had high hopes for him, calling it a dragon born from the gutter. A genuinely promising talent.

‘But that only lasted a moment.’

At the very ceremony where he was officially to be granted his post, he had gone berserk as though possessed.

The cause was phase power runaway.

Unable to control his own phase power, Jeong Jihoon had injured three scions of power clan families on the spot. He was dragged away by the royal guard on standby, and then disappeared.

‘Of course ‘disappeared’ was only on paper. In reality, he was hauled off to the Administration’s biological research laboratory and put to use as a ‘research sample.”

With that, a scene from my previous life surfaced in my mind.

‘My Jihoon! Jihoon is in there! He passed the state examination! He’s not going to have to worry about his mother going hungry anymore! That’s what the boy swore — and now——!’

‘They’re going inside! Don’t let them!’

Jeong Jihoon’s mother, rushing to the Administration demanding her son back. The Andong Kim guards stomping on that mother’s head.

And me, rising before dawn to move through every corner of Hanseong to keep that incident buried.

The reason his face had felt so strangely familiar was that memory.

‘And looking at what just happened…. I can make a rough guess as to what caused his phase power to run away.’

For instance, a few of the palace attendants who had put on the samo and disappeared were friends who had prepared for the state examination alongside him.

Seeing what had become of them and watching them vanish like that, our righteous Jeong Jihoon had lost control of his emotions and gone on a rampage.

Not content with causing a scene at the very banquet hosted by Kim Jungheon himself, he had injured scions of distinguished families.

What would happen to him after that was plain as day.

‘An idiot who can’t even get hold of his own emotions, can’t tell mud from miso, and just charges headlong. In the old days I wouldn’t have given him a second glance, but….’

Now it was a different matter.

I watched Jeong Jihoon getting kicked around the floor by the official and thought.

Unlike me, putting on a performance that doesn’t even convince anyone, a genuine ‘kind aristocrat’ who throws himself into the fire for the oppressed commoners.

A phase ability user worthy of being called a prodigy, with a state examination passing title to his name.

And a background as an aristocrat from the provinces, at that.

‘Zero marks as a worthless bureaucrat of the Administration, but a perfect score as a revolutionary who would turn Joseon upside down.’

While those thoughts were running through my head, the mockery from the aristocrats’ sons watching Jeong Jihoon was beginning to cross a line.

“Obviously a backwater aristocrat who can’t rub two coins together. Shouldn’t he be getting the same treatment as those things?”

“He thinks calling himself an aristocrat makes him a proper one. Have a look at his family registry. Who knows what you’d find in there.”

“His friend ended up like that. Shouldn’t he be bowing to us instead of getting worked up?”

“Exactly. The fact that he’s even here making a fuss is thanks to Lord Kim Jungheon picking him, isn’t it.”

“……!”

Getting beaten like a toy by the very person who turned his close friends into mutes, while the people around him offered only contempt and scorn.

Left alone like this, he looked ready to explode before long.

The official seemed to be quietly hoping for exactly that, too, but….

‘That’s not going to happen.’

The moment Jeong Jihoon gritted his teeth and was about to unleash his phase power, I stepped immediately between the two of them.

“That’ll do, senior.”

“Hm?”

I opened my mouth toward the official with a respectful manner, and both gazes turned my way.

“And who are you?”

“Forgive the late introduction, senior. I’m Kim Changwoon, recruited as a new officer this intake.”

Kim Changwoon.

When that well-known name slipped out, the official’s gaze deepened.

The fact that I was a member of the Andong Kim clan had stopped the official in my tracks.

“This intake certainly has a colorful bunch. First one tries to strike his senior out of pity for the commoners, and now another steps in to shield his classmate claiming his senior’s lesson is too harsh….”

“Did it look to you like I was shielding him?”

“What?”

At my words, the official turned to ask again, and Jeong Jihoon, having just barely caught his breath, staggered to his feet.

“They were people who shouldn’t have ended up like this…. They didn’t come here to end up like that……!”

Jeong Jihoon, already rambling as if he’d lost his mind.

He needed to come to his senses first, so I wasted no time kicking him in the stomach and driving him into the wall.

“Hgk?!”

He had outstanding phase power, but was a bookish type who had never once faced real combat.

The moment his breathing broke apart, the phase power that had been welling up to the very bottom of his core scattered harmlessly into the air.

“If you have nothing, at least have some sense. Where do you get off glaring at your senior? Do you have any idea what you were about to do?”

“Wh-what do you think you’re doing, Kim Changwoon! Ugh?!”

As I’d been taught by Taewoong in bits and pieces, I worked over his gut and jaw in succession.

Whether my actions were satisfactory to him, or whether he simply wanted to see what I was up to, the official stood with his arms folded and watched what I was doing in silence.

As the aristocrats’ sons who had gathered around Jeong Jihoon stepped back one by one, I managed to seize Jeong Jihoon, now a wreck, by the collar and haul him to a corner of the banquet hall.

‘At the very least, I’ve prevented Jeong Jihoon from being dragged off to the Royal Investigative Bureau here and now.’

In the meantime, Jeong Jihoon gritted his teeth and tried to struggle, as though his indignation was still surging.

But—

Grip!

I seized him by the collar without delay and brought my face close to his.

“Clear your head and look at the situation around you. What you’re doing right now isn’t as good an idea as you think.”

“……What?”

He looked older, so I’d better speak formally.

When my tone and manner shifted into something he couldn’t argue against, Jeong Jihoon’s movements, as though he’d been about to drive his fist into me, came to a stop.

“Throwing yourself at them here won’t change a single thing. This banquet was hosted by the Andong Kim clan, and causing a scene in a place like this won’t end well for you.”

The banquet hall was wider than expected, so my voice didn’t carry.

He was briefly thrown by the sudden change in my manner.

But Jeong Jihoon, unable to fully suppress his rage, tried to wrench my hand from his collar, twisting this way and that.

“Do you think I don’t know that?! Even you…. even you saw it! My, my friends……!”

“Are you planning to let go of the little power you hold in your hands right now, swept away by a moment’s emotion? If something happens to you here, what will become of your mother, left alone?”

Mother.

Those three words made Jeong Jihoon’s eyes go wide. He turned to look at me.

“How do you……?”

I didn’t answer.

What would I say — that I’d seen it from a future life.

He could just figure it out on his own.

Without turning to meet his eyes, I spoke.

“Now is not the time, so hide your feelings behind a mask. Do not let them know that you consider them your enemies.”

“……!”

“Bow your head, keep a blade hidden at your chest, and wait for your moment. If you nurture and sharpen what you carry inside you, a perfect opportunity to wield it will come.”

A blade. A moment.

Perhaps he sensed the razor-edged wrongness behind those words.

The expression on Jeong Jihoon’s face beside me grew stranger still.

“Who are you, exactly……?”

“….I’ll reach out when the time comes.”

I wanted to talk a little longer, but this was enough for now.

At the very least, I had kept someone alive who would have died today. That was enough.

“Remember one thing.”

I released him deliberately with a rough gesture, and opened my mouth in a low voice.

“Before long, this country, Joseon, will be turned upside down.”

From somewhere in the distance, a bell rang announcing the end of the banquet.

It took far longer than I’d expected for the stunned look on his face to settle.