The Murim Scholar

At sixteen I passed the county examination and became a county graduate; at nineteen I placed in the provincial examination and became a provincial graduate.¹ Only the metropolitan and the palace examinations were left, and the only question for me was whether I would come out first as Principal Graduate or second as Runner-Up. Nothing in this world came easier to me than learning.

But misfortune follows on the heels of happiness, or so they say. Storm clouds gathered over my unbroken run of success.

My father was gone, so the household had never been comfortable to begin with, and then, knocked down and trampled besides, Mother came down with an illness no one could name, and the cost of her medicine ground us down. Unable to keep up my studies, I was in no position to do anything but take a government post and draw a stipend. A provincial graduate entering service could expect a county vice-magistracy, but even a post that low had to be bought with a bribe to some powerful house, and a bribe was unthinkable for a man without the money to eat, let alone die. Just holding Mother’s illness where it stood took a great many rare medicinal herbs, far past what an official’s stipend could cover.

In the end I never took office as a government official. I entered the service of the Murim Alliance instead, because it paid several times the stipend.²

Even the small and mid-sized sects had administrative work enough to need Confucian students and scholars. Ten at the fewest, several dozen at the most.

So how many scholars and students do you suppose the Murim Alliance needed?

And I, mind you, was a provincial graduate.

A prodigy who had passed the provincial examination, held once every three years in each province.

That’s me, by the way.

If my family had been well-off enough for me to keep studying, I would be a metropolitan graduate by now, working in the central government or the imperial palace. Instead I spent three years working for the Murim Alliance. They paid three times an official’s stipend, so there was no reason to refuse.

Still, being a provincial graduate, I was put to work in the Alliance’s Inspection Corps. The Corps handled every sort of corruption in the murim, which left it plenty of room for corruption of its own, so its assignments rotated. And my turn came around.

My first posting was set: the Namgung Clan. The Corps Chief let slip that the clan head had pushed hard for it.

Even so, at first I meant to have the posting changed to somewhere I had my eye on. But the Corps Chief asked me to look into them, and by the time I had finished looking, I was volunteering for the place myself.

I had found a reason I absolutely had to go to the Namgung Clan.

“Scholar Cheon. I called you aside privately, and the reason is this.”

Namgung Hak, head of the Namgung Clan, was renowned as one of the Three Swords Under Heaven, together with the current sect leaders of the Mount Hua Sect and the Wudang Sect.

A man of that stature receiving me alone was not what I had expected. I had assumed I would be handed off to the clan’s chief steward.

“Hoo. I did not think this would be so hard to say. I will come straight to it. My youngest son has a vile temper. He has trained nothing but martial arts since he was a boy and kept well clear of books, and the want of self-cultivation shows.”

The clan head’s youngest son meant Namgung Mu-baek. On the day I arrived, the scholar who showed me around had named him one of the three people to avoid in the Namgung Clan.

“Make a human being of my youngest, and I will see you repaid. You have my word.”

I answered evenly.

“And what talent would I have that could change the young master’s nature?”

“Haa. I have already looked into you. Did you not turn a hellion famous throughout the Murim Alliance onto the straight path?”

“Ah — if you mean Young Master Paeng So-un, there has been some misunderstanding…”

“No need for modesty with me. You made a human being out of Paeng So-un, the Alliance’s most notorious hellion, did you not? And so.”

Namgung Hak paid no attention to any of it and went on with what he had come to say.

“Make a human being of my youngest the way you did of Paeng So-un, and I will grant you anything you ask, Scholar Cheon. Want a seat in the Hanlin Academy? I will put you in it. Ask to be sent to the imperial palace and it is done. And on top of that, I will have your mother’s illness treated.”

When I stayed unmoved, Namgung Hak played his winning stone.

“The Divine Doctor could cure your mother. To that end, I will have her brought to Anhui before long.”

The Divine Doctor could cure Mother’s illness. They say the man can bring back the dead. Of everything he had put in front of me, that was the one that moved me.

Mother’s illness is all but incurable. Only the Auspicious Spirit Flower can cure it. But the Divine Doctor — couldn’t he manage it? And I would have her close enough to look after, which is no small thing either.

All through my long years at the Murim Alliance I had kept Mother in Wuhan, in Hubei. Coming alone to my posting at Hefei in Anhui and leaving her there in poor health had weighed on me the whole way. She had insisted she could not leave a place she had grown attached to, but how could I not know she simply did not want to be a burden to me? I had left a servant with her, but I worried all the same. Honestly, if it meant getting the Divine Doctor to treat Mother, I would have taken on far worse than this.

“Very well. I will try.”

Namgung Mu-baek’s temper was rubbish, and there would be moments my patience ran dry. But had I not already seen the far end of my own patience in the Alliance’s Inspection Corps? I was confident I could steer a hellion of this grade, more or less, within the lines I drew. The Murim Alliance had never been short of hellions.

All those years of hardship at the Alliance were finally about to pay off. Cure Mother’s illness and make my name in officialdom besides. Flowers laid on brocade, as they say.

“So you’re to be my master of letters?”

Talking down to me in clipped half-sentences from the very first meeting. He had earned his reputation as a hellion, all right.

Namgung Mu-baek was a hellion who wasted a fine face. He was the spitting image of Clan Head Namgung Hak: a clean brow, thick eyebrows, long lashes, a high-bridged nose. The textbook handsome face. Except that one corner of his mouth was forever twitching into a smug, derisive little sneer, deliberate or not, and it made him look cheap.

“The clan head appointed me.”

I traded on Namgung Hak’s name. With his father’s name invoked, surely he would not throw a fit. But this one exceeded my expectations.

“Father keeps sending me nothing but useless scholar-types. I’ve no idea what he’s thinking.”

I answered.

“The clan head said that his youngest son is deficient in learning and much wanting besides, and so requires a master of letters.”

— Crash!

The maidservant standing beside Namgung Mu-baek had dropped a water bowl. No one had ever spoken to him like that, and hearing it said flat to his face had startled her. She trembled, her eyes saying she thought I was about to die. Her reaction alone told me plenty about how he usually behaved.

“Whoa! Where’d you get the nerve?”

In truth Namgung Mu-baek was probably the more startled of the two, which may be why he never scolded her for the broken bowl. Realizing her blunder, the maidservant hurried to clear away the shards.

All the while he kept staring at me. A butcher’s look, working out how to break down the meat.

One of the rules I had worked out for handling hellions was to say and do the thing they never see coming. It had caught his interest.

Namgung Mu-baek grinned. I could see him weighing how to play with me and torment me rather than break me in one go.

“Good. I’ll give you credit for the spine. Nobody has ever talked to Namgung Mu-baek that way. Let’s see whether you’re fit to be my master of letters. Spend one day with me, and if you don’t run, I’ll acknowledge you as my teacher of letters. How’s that for an offer? But if you run from me, then the whole teacher business is off, and not a word of complaint out of you.”

Hellions from great houses tended, in their way, to love a wager like this, and to honor the outcome just as readily.

Call it a hellion’s romance.

“Very well. I will go along with the young master’s terms. But the young master will stand by his word as well.”

“Done.”

“Words alone will not do. Should we not each leave proof of it? A written pledge.”

“Haa. Look at this meticulous little scholar.”

He had plainly swallowed a curse. The idea of putting a thing like this in writing offended him.

“How could a matter this weighty between grown men go without one? A man who will not even leave a written pledge has a woman’s nerve.”

One light provocation and he took the bait. This was a hellion who still had the sloppiness of a young predator about him.

“A pledge? I’ll write you ten.”

This one has no idea what he has just agreed to.

I slipped it in as though it were an afterthought.

“Hold on. A plain pledge has no flavor to it. What if we add that whoever breaks the contract pays a hundred taels of silver? That way the thing actually has some force.”

“Oho! I like that. And what will you stake?”

“What is it you want? I have no money, so name something else.”

Namgung Mu-baek thought for a moment, then grinned.

“You’ll live as my slave for a year. You dared to play at being my teacher of letters — that much punishment is only fair.”

To tell a scholar to live as a slave was a worse insult than telling him to kill himself. Plenty of scholars really would take their own lives over that. But I was not a man who believed in the noble dignity of the scholar enough to stake my life on empty pride.

“Very well.”

With great spirit, the two of us wrote all of it into our contracts, tucked the pledges into our robes, and stood.

“Follow me. I’ll be the one giving Scholar Cheon a lesson — in exactly how harsh this world is.”

Namgung Mu-baek strode off ahead, arms swinging. I was half worried and half curious about what he might do. I had cleaned up after no small number of hellions at the Alliance, but this one had made up his mind, and the force of that was not to be taken lightly.

He led me out into the market street.

What did he come here to do?

I still could not read his intent. Then he walked up to a man picking out a jade hairpin at an ornament stall. A martial artist, with a sword at his hip.

— Whack!

Namgung Mu-baek had cracked him across the back of the head.

“What the — what do you think you’re doing!”

The martial artist glared at him, murder in his eyes. He had not gone for his steel first thing, so he was no unorthodox-sect man and no underworld thug. The merchants around them recognized Namgung Mu-baek and looked away. The martial artist did not know him, being new to Hefei by the look of him. Had he known who he was shouting at, he would never have spoken that way.

“Why did you hit me!”

“Take it up with this fellow.”

The martial artist’s face went red at that, then purple. Namgung Mu-baek had set out to put me in a corner. If I could not settle this here, I would be spending a year as his slave. No. Before that, I might well end up a lonely ghost on that man’s sword. For tormenting a pale-faced bookworm of a scholar, there was no better method than this.

The man’s target shifted from Namgung Mu-baek to me.

“Are you that young master’s attendant?”

Rich young masters commonly kept a big-bodied guard or a serving attendant at their heels.

“I am. A moment — this way, please. A commotion here would be an imposition on everyone else.”

From his dress and his eyes I read him as an orthodox-faction man. I had seen martial artists from countless schools and factions at the Alliance, and I had developed that much of an eye.

“Why in the world did he hit me!”

“It was not my doing, but let me apologize first.”

“What grudge could he possibly have against me? Pull that and a man can lose a hand!”

He tapped the hilt of his sword in threat. Proof his anger had not cooled.

I slid into the gap.

“Three-colored tassels wound at the hilt — you are of the Sung-ui Sect, then.”

The martial artist’s eyes had been bulging, his mouth open to bellow. They narrowed instead.

“Eh? You know our sect?”

He looked mildly surprised that a scholar knew his school.

“Of course. I am with the Murim Alliance Inspection Corps, so I know it well.”

Anything I had seen or read once, I remembered, down to every last estate across the murim, however small.

That gave the Sung-ui man a start. Scholar or not, the Murim Alliance Inspection Corps badge was the grim reaper to men like him, all the more so for a small or mid-sized sect.

“Some time back, your sect leader Jeong Chae-bong suffered considerable losses at the hands of our Elder Gal and was compensated for it — yes?”

The doubt went out of him. He straightened up and shifted into polite speech, his anger gone faster than the breath out of his nose.

“Ah — that is right. That is all but confidential, though.”

“I handled it myself, so of course I know.”

At that the Sung-ui man’s neck shrank clean into his shoulders.

“Don’t tell me — the Ghost-Trailed Scholar?³ Ah — forgive me. Would you be Scholar Cheon?”

“Has my nickname spread that far?”

“My apologies. I ran my mouth without thinking.”

He bowed his head.

“Not at all. There is no need to apologize like that.”

I brushed it aside and clapped him on the shoulder. From a certain angle it would look like a scholar dressing down a martial artist. And while I was at it, I waved to Namgung Mu-baek, watching from a distance.

“You may have heard of him — that bastard right there is the Namgung Clan’s hellion of a youngest son.”

“I heard about him coming into Hefei. The Namgung Clan’s headache.”

“He cracked you on the back of the head just now to make trouble for me.”

“Ah. So that is what this was.”

A scholar of the Murim Alliance Inspection Corps, dragged around by a great clan’s hellion. The picture seemed to strike him, and he looked at me with pity. Hostility turned to sympathy in an instant.

“Attending on a hellion like that. It must be truly hard on you.”

He was consoling me now.

“I take it as my lot. I just tell myself I am walking a mad, rabid dog.”

That got a hearty laugh out of him.

“Hahaha! I would say the Namgung house’s thoughtless young master has picked the wrong man in the Ghost-Trailed Scholar.”

Pity mixed with fellow feeling, and he was on my side in no time.

“I am Hong Jang-mok, a first-generation disciple of the Sung-ui Sect.”

“Ah, I know the name. The Crimson Flash Swordsman, famed in Luoyang, in Henan — is that not you?”

“The Alliance Inspection Corps indeed. To know even a swordsman from so out-of-the-way a place.”

“Not at all. You are a rising talent renowned for your chivalry. The Alliance has high hopes for you. Since fate has brought us together, I will put in a good word with my superiors.”

“Goodness, you need not go that far. Thank you.”

Hong Jang-mok clasped his hands and bowed deeply, and I nodded back, keeping one eye on Namgung Mu-baek.

Trading on a name or a title to throw one’s weight around. A scholar of lofty character does not do such things.

A scholar’s dignity?

A scholar’s pride?

For a plant-eater living in a world of predators, they were the thinnest of shields, finer than spider silk.

I was a deer that would bite through a wolf’s throat if that was what it took to stay alive there. That was how a man who had lived as a plant-eater survived without flinching in a Murim Alliance swarming with predators, where the law was that the strong devour the weak.

Watching the scene from a distance, Namgung Mu-baek narrowed his eyes.

It made no sense. He had expected the scholar to be taking a humiliation from the martial artist; instead the two of them stood there chatting pleasantly, and the martial artist kept bending at the waist, deferring to him. He had no idea what they were saying, and the curiosity was driving him mad.

The scholar came back a moment later, and Namgung Mu-baek asked in a cold voice.

“What in the world did you say to that man?”

“I simply apologized.”

“You apologized, and he goes off bowing to you like he’s the one who’s been honored?”

“Yes. I apologized politely.”

He wanted more, curiosity gnawing at him, but the scholar kept his mouth shut. A chill settled into his eyes.

Ha. Look at this bastard. Quick on his feet, I’ll give him that — but you’ve misjudged your man. I’ll show you exactly what sort of person Namgung Mu-baek is. I’ll make you so sick of me you’ll never want to lay eyes on me again.

What he disliked most of all was the scholar’s face. His own face had people calling him handsome everywhere he went, but when he walked beside this scholar, passersby lingered on the scholar’s face instead of his. And the admiration in those looks grated worse still. Above all, it was unforgivable that the man possessed an elegance he himself could never attain, no matter what he did.

The urge to torment the scholar further rose in him.

“Follow me.”

Namgung Mu-baek strode on, arms swinging, then stopped dead in one spot.