No Matter What Anyone Says

In two hours we had dug down to where the water came. The sound of three men breaking ground with sword qi had brought out every last one of the slash-and-burn farmers to watch.

The village headman, well on in years, spoke.

“From here the young men of our village will finish it.”

Namgung Cheol-ung and the other two turned to look at me, and the headman, understanding from that who led this party, spoke.

“Thank you, Scholar.”

He said it because I was wearing the kind of blue long-robe scholars favored. Add a folding fan in my hand, and anyone who looked would take me for a scholar.

I said to Namgung Cheol-ung.

“There may be people later who mean to spoil the well. So carve it onto a rock and let it be known that this well is the property of the Namgung Clan.”

It’s the small attentions that move a man. Digging the well for them was not the whole of it; the well would become the farmers’ own only once nobody could touch it. Call it a well belonging to the Namgung Clan, and who in Anhui would dare think of laying a hand on it?

“Ah, so you are of the Namgung Clan.”

The headman bowed with hands clasped and gave their thanks.

Namgung Cheol-ung fetched a flat rock, set it down beside the well, and cut the words I had given him into it with sword qi. Surely none of them had ever turned sword qi to anything so far from fighting. Yet somewhere along the way a look of pride and satisfaction had come over all three faces.

The young men of the village carried stones in from round about and built up a retaining wall to make the well, so the earth would not fall in and the water could gather.

Their drinking water was secured for the long term, but it was not enough to serve as water for daily use, and that much I could not do for them.

“Go to the government office that has charge of this and plead your case to the magistrate. That may see it settled.”

A benevolent magistrate might well hear their hardship out rather than turn his face from it.

“Thank you. We shall try that.”

I said to my party.

“Let us pack up now and set off. If we are to lodge at the inn in the next village we must go briskly.”

We had lost a day and a half here, and our steps would have to be quick to make it up.

The people of the slash-and-burn village saw us off to the end of the road. Yeo-seol could not seem to tear herself away, and would not get into the carriage. As I watched her, a great many thoughts came to me.

If Yeo-seol had fallen into the hands of the Demonic Cult or the Blood Cult, what sort of nature would she have come to have? She met good people, and learning letters and manners from me she came by degrees into a human character. If she had learned nothing but the killing of men, Yeo-seol would never have held the heart of compassion.

I thought back to how close to pure evil she had been the first time I saw her. Watching her now, I found myself thinking that human beings might lie nearer to Xunzi’s doctrine that human nature is evil,¹ since Yeo-seol, selfish and near to pure evil at the start, had come by a human nature only through following law and rule.

Their poverty must have stayed before her eyes, so that she could not bring herself to go. Seeing so admirable a heart in her, I went over to the slash-and-burn farmers.

“Headman. I am on my way to Jiangxi, and it seems I am to come into a great tract of land there. Once I have arrived and am settled enough, I shall send you a letter. My name is Cheon Tae-san. When a letter comes in my name, I ask you to give the move your careful thought.”

The headman’s eyes brimmed and they took my hand.

“Truly, thank you. You took pity on us and dug us a well, and now to trouble yourself so far as this…”

“If the land is broad enough to be worth cultivating I shall parcel it out to you and take only a small tenant’s rent. Will you come, then?”

At that the headman’s bent back bowed lower still.

“If you would do so much for us, what should we hesitate at?”

So that the letter would reach them properly, I wrote out the name of the district and the name of the mountain on paper, and sketched in roughly the lie of the hills nearby and the look of the country round about. Even a letter entrusted to an escort agency would often fail to find the place on a name alone.

Watching me take such careful pains, the headman understood that my words were not going to end as a mere courtesy, and their eyes reddened.

Only after I had promised to call them did Yeo-seol at last get into the carriage.

“Brother, thank you.”

“For what?”

“For helping those people.”

“But why are you the one thanking me?”

“Because my heart hurt. They can’t even get water properly. Brother, hurry up and get that land.”

Curious, I asked.

“Was there something you felt, watching those people?”

Yeo-seol thought a moment before she answered.

“Living with Brother, I didn’t know. That there are so many people in the world living hard lives.”

The common folk we had passed on the road from the Namgung Clan were nothing like well-off. Thatched huts and houses of wood were the most of it, and theirs were lives that could not so much as imagine three meals a day.

“Thanks to Brother, I’ve really been living in the lap of luxury.”

Yeo-seol’s vocabulary had come up far enough that she could use a phrase like ‘the lap of luxury.’

“Thank you for taking me in when I had no memory. If it hadn’t been for Brother, I’d be living a life much like theirs. If I hadn’t been Yeo-seol.”

I looked at her and said.

“Yeo-seol is my little sister now. And people know it that way too. So don’t think anything else.”

“Forever?”

“Of course.”

“Are we family?”

“Certainly. No matter what anyone says, we’re family.”

I said nothing more, and she must have felt what was in my heart anyway, because she came into my arms. Perhaps, as she grew more aware of herself, she had realized that she was alone and felt the loneliness of it.

Perhaps from the moment she first held on to me.

Whether from relief or from something else, she fell asleep there in my arms.

“You rascal.”

Everyone who had been there when Yeo-seol and I first met, I had sworn to silence: the noodle-stall couple, and Du-sik’s crowd. They were the ones who knew how the two of us had met.

Thanks to that, with no other rumor going about, the people around us knew Yeo-seol as truly my cousin. Namgung Hak still believed it too, which was proof that they were keeping their mouths shut well.

Looking up at a fairly high mountain, I said to the coachman.

“The carriage can manage it well enough, can’t it?”

“Yes. A great many carts loaded with escort goods pass this way, so mountain road though it is, the road is sound.”

At last we had reached the mountain that formed the border between Anhui and Jiangxi.

“We had best rest here a day today and set out early tomorrow morning.”

“Yes. The horses too must be well rested if they are to climb the mountain.”

We put up at the inn below the mountain. By now Namgung Cheol-ung and the two escorts trained hard without a word from me.

Yeo-seol watched them at the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique with a fixed stare, letting out a cry as though in admiration now and then, cocking her head at other moments. Afterwards she would ask me about the parts she had not understood, and I settled her questions for her.

She only watched like this because I had told her not to train at the sword technique in front of the Namgung Clan’s martial artists. Let their people so much as see her at it and there was no telling what would be said, and more than anything, if they saw her astonishing talent, trouble could come of it. So she unfolded the sword strokes only when she was in the room with me.

All afternoon, whenever I pointed out what was wanting in the three men’s work, Yeo-seol listened hard from behind. Perhaps because the three of them saw her as a little sister trailing after her brother, they made nothing of her sitting in. Merely pointing out and correcting their training was a great help to her.

The Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique stood among the higher martial arts, so genius though she was, she certainly could not grasp the whole of it at one go. Even so, she had already gone past where the three men stood in it.

When time allowed after teaching the three of them, I tried unfolding the Ghost Immortal’s martial arts. Even when we slept in the open, if I had the time I would go off alone to some out-of-the-way spot and unfold them there, looking to see whether they suited my body.

Certainly the Ghost Immortal’s martial arts suit me. Especially since I gained the three spirit energies, their power seems to have grown stronger still.

The Ghost Immortal had been a sorcerer whose name once rang through the murim in infamy, so I could understand their martial arts being treated as so much worthless miscellany. What was strange was that not one scrap of information about them survived. In all the many records of the murim, the sum of it was that they had been a demonic fiend who threw the murim into confusion with sorcery. Of their birth, their history, their house, their name, the records held nothing.

Rather, having no information at all may be the better for me in mastering these martial arts. Since there will be nobody who knows them.

I set my mind at ease and mastered the Ghost Immortal’s martial arts.

After breakfast we left the inn at once and climbed the mountain. As the coachman had said, the road here had been laid out so that carriages and carts could pass, and where there was a grade the three escorts put their shoulders to the back of the carriage and it climbed without difficulty. As it happened there was nobody on the mountain road but us, and it was still and quiet.

Crossing the summit, we came onto a downhill road that wound about the mountain like a snake. We met escort agency men who had to travel the road we had come by, and after trading news of the country round about we went carefully down.

A little further down a fairly broad flat opened out. A spring ran there and flat rocks lay scattered about like chairs, so it seemed a place travelers coming and going used as a resting spot.

“Let us rest here a while ourselves before we go on. The horses need rest too. Let us take a bite of something simple.”

I arranged the rest for the coachman, Cheong Yo’s maids and Eun-bi. We gathered at the spring and each took a piece of dried meat and tore into it. Coarse food though it was, we ate it together with the chatter going round, and the laughter never stopped.

Having spent so much time together on the way here, Yeo-seol and Eun-bi had grown close with Cheong Yo’s party, and went about calling one another Sister and little sister.

I glanced at Song-ran.

It makes no sense that she should see my dantian when she cannot see.

I believed she was acting the part of a woman who could not see. Her reason was the one thing I did not know, and I thought there must surely be some story behind it.

“Hall Master. This came flying in a moment ago.”

An underling came carrying an arrow and handed Mok Jin the slip of paper tied to its shaft.

“Where did it come from?”

“From the west, they say, but when they went there whoever it was had already covered their tracks.”

Mok Jin had been waiting to fall upon the scholar’s party as they rested, and a development he had not counted on put him on edge.

These are men who know we are here. What is their intent?

He screwed his face into a scowl and opened the paper.

“Well, would you look at that!”

He read the note through, gave a snort of disbelief, and handed it to the underling.

“Hall Master. It seems someone means to help us.”

“Idiot. There is no such thing in this world as information given for nothing. It seems these fellows are after that scholar fellow too. They haven’t the skill to deal with the hidden escorts, so they mean to shove them off onto us.”

The note’s intent had not escaped him.

“Even so, is there any other way just now?”

“Why should there not be? We ignore what they say, that is all. Their telling us about the concealed escorts means they cannot give that scholar fellow up either. Their game is to stir us up and take the fisherman’s profit.²”

Single-minded he might be, and blinded by the wish for revenge, but Mok Jin was no fool.

“We ignore the hidden escorts, kill that scholar fellow alone and pull out at once. Drive in all together and it will be done. The only ones there who can use martial arts are three escort warriors and that scholar fellow.”

He went over the plan with the underling once more.

“The man is close with the performing courtesans who came along with him. So attack the courtesans, to scatter his attention. Kill them if you like. The more painfully they die the more his attention will scatter, so see that you kill them cruelly.”

“I have it firmly in mind. Five men and I shall go and deal with the courtesans.”

“That scholar fellow may send the three Namgung Clan escorts that way. Take ten men and deal with it.”

“Understood.”

Mok Jin crumpled the note and flung it away.

“Whoever it is, playing tricks like this. Do you think I shall move as you please?”

Whoever had sent the note was at least not an enemy, so he gave it no further thought.

“Attack.”

Mok Jin took his men and ran for the spring where that scholar fellow was resting.