The Might Of A Scholar

The shaggy-haired man had been scratching his head with a knife shaped like a cleaver, and now his nostrils flared.

“Look here, Scholar. Have you any idea how much you have cost us?”

“What do you mean?”

Street thugs of this sort had a way about them: treat them courteously and they only trampled you the harder for it. A pack that would lie flat before a strong man and grind down a weak one, the very picture of the old phrase, spitting out the hard and swallowing the soft.

“Oho. I’ll bet you get told you’ve plenty of nerve, wherever you go.”

“I get told that a lot.”

And in fact, ever since I was marked down as a Heavenly Martial Sacred Body, I had been told over and over that I hadn’t the sense to be afraid. Which is why, during my time in the Inspection Corps, I had no qualms about opening inspections on martial artists and martial houses nobody else dared lift the lid on.

No small number of martial artists and martial houses were caught out by the Corps on my account, and the Corps became a target for it. My rotation to the Namgung Clan was itself a kindness from the Corps Chief, who judged that if I stayed on in the Inspection Corps any longer I would be assassinated. At the house holding the first seat among the Five Great Clans, he said, there would be nobody rash enough to do me harm.

And in truth, even crossing live blades in a practice bout, I felt no fear. I knew well enough, mind you, that this was not much of a virtue. I knew, too, that a man keeps his life only by submitting to the murim’s law: courage with no strength behind it is nothing but death. But even with my life on the line, what stirred in me was interest, not fear.

Hemmed in on both sides in the alley, I did not so much as flinch. The shaggy-haired man tapped the cleaver against his palm.

“Well? Didn’t you say before that the Namgung Clan collects the stall fees on Namgung North Road? The merchants won’t hand them over now, and that’s why. You’ll go back and tell them to pay their stall fees to us.”

“Why would I?”

“Because you’re the one who said it, Scholar.”

“If you want to take that up with someone, take it up with Young Master Namgung.”

“You’d do well to listen while I’m still asking nicely.”

Bit by bit the shaggy-haired man let his nature show. The viciousness of a stray dog that had not eaten in days came out of him.

“Can you handle it? Don’t you know you’re trading your lives for those stall fees? Have you worked out what it will cost you to make the Namgung Clan take back what it said?”

“Has the Namgung Clan nothing better to do than trouble itself over street thugs?”

“Listen, friend. Let me give you one warning. Don’t stake the only life you have on a stall fee.”

“The fact is we’ve laid hands on a Namgung Clan scholar before, and they paid it no more mind than if a dog that had run off from the house had taken a beating. And another thing. We’ve already had a word in our ear.”

At that I understood: Namgung Mu-baek had given them the word to do me harm.

Hellion bastards. Their little schemes really are childish, every one of them.

“That’s your last warning. Lay a hand on me and don’t come blaming me for it.”

The shaggy-haired man had not expected a lecture on top of being faced down, and it left him dumbfounded. It seemed to strike him that they had been badly underestimated, and he settled on making me a present of a suitable amount of pain. At a jerk of his chin, two of them came forward.

“A few blows and you’ll think differently, Scholar.”

Everyone knew that bookworms who did nothing but dig at books had a habit of caving at the smallest pain.

“You take a murim scholar for a joke.”

“Why? Have you learned so much as a scrap of martial arts?”

“And if I have?”

“You seem to think that kind of bluff still works. Boys — leave the face, and give the gentleman a nice massage until he’s good and tender.”

“Yes, boss.”

As the two big men closed in, I let out a sigh.

And drew out my fan.

A fan belonged to scholars and Confucian students and to nobody else, so I carried one at all times, along with my brush case. It was never out of my hand, and you could say it had grown more familiar to me than a writing brush.

“Oh-ho, going to give us a fan dance? For your information, just know you’re a long way from the first scholar we’ve beaten. And that it does no good to take a few and then get on your knees and beg.”

The big man came at me smirking, loose and careless in his walk, and drove a fist at my belly. I called up the formula Namgung Mu-baek had given me and felt the seven meridian points prickle. As the fist bored in, I brought the fan down on the back of his hand.

— Whack!

“Agh!”

His fist fell away limp, and he coughed out a gasp of empty air. With the punch knocked off line by the fan, he swung with his other hand. I watched it come flying straight at my face and swept it aside with the fan again.

“Huh!”

Short of a master’s blade-work, I could block punches at this level while yawning. I had already confirmed that the five senses of a Heavenly Martial Sacred Body outstripped those of a first-rate master. I had tested it against Paeng So-un, who was close to first-rate, and against a Daoist of the Mount Hua Sect.

The energy of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes spirit meridians expressed itself through the fan as vibration, and turned the big man’s fist aside on the smallest force.

So the energy of the spirit meridians really is vibration.

With that, I had pinned down what the energy spoken of in the Seven Stars and Seven Primes actually was.

Thinking himself disgraced, it seemed, the big man threw faster punches. To test the thing further I flicked nothing but my wrist and batted his fists aside left and right with the fan, the way you swat flies. When for all his straining he could not lay one on my face, he came charging in to take me around the waist instead. Working on the principle of the formula Namgung Mu-baek had given me, I brought the fan down without mercy on the crown of his head.

— Whack!

— Thud!

The blow to the head laid the big man out flat on the ground, sprawled like a frog.

“Why, you—!”

They came at me again, from front and back.

Useful enough for training. And here I’d been wondering what I would have to do to test the formula I’d worked out.

The energy of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes was a method of circulating qi that had no need of internal qi at all. The energy of the spirit meridians was raised by spirit force, and so it came as vibration.

— Crack! Whack! Thwack!

The sight of me toying with two big men with nothing but a fan might well have passed for a Peking opera staged in the street. It was that farcical.

When the fan came at his forehead the big man threw up both hands to block. In no time his face had swollen up so badly you could not make out its shape. The force of the vibration worked on him like a beating with a club.

I pressed the tip of the fan firmly into the big man’s solar plexus.

“Hurk!”

All at once he went over backwards and started vomiting. The spirit energy that came out through the spirit meridians took the form of vibration, so it had the same effect as being struck by a Void Shattering Palm.¹

So a Void Shattering Palm is possible too.

The Void Shattering Palm was one of those powers that even in the murim only masters of first-rate and above could use.

With four big men sprawled out flat in the alley, the shaggy-haired man hid the cleaver he had been tapping against his palm behind his back.

“We plainly didn’t show you the respect you were due, Scholar.”

By now even he would have grasped that I was far past their level.

“From here on we’ll show you respect enough. And in that spirit, we’ll be withdrawing.”

I snorted a laugh.

“Where the hell does this sudden chivalrous-hero act come from.”

“Our mistake. Get the boys up. We’re leaving.”

The others got their arms under the ones laid out.

But I had not had my fill of training yet.

“Who told you to go? I never gave permission. Who was it that said it? That a few blows and I’d think differently. Come here.”

As I came at him, he flinched back and raised the knife.

“You really mean to go to all-out war with the Du-sik Gang!”

“Are you Du-sik?”

“Th-that’s right.”

“Du-sik. All-out war.”

The shaggy-haired Du-sik, realizing he was cornered in a dead-end alley, shouted.

“Hey! All of you, attack!”

But at the shout there was no sound of movement behind me.

“Hey! You little shits. Can’t you hear me?”

“Take a few yourself and you’ll understand why they aren’t listening.”

“Wait! Scholar. No — Master Scholar. My lord Scholar. Wait! Don’t come — don’t come any closer, please!”

— Crunch!

“Pick up the knife! Come on, attack me. Call yourself a man, with no nerve in you. I’ll bet you get told you’ve got no nerve wherever you go, you little shit.”

At my cursing, Du-sik swung the knife wildly. Out of the alley came the sound of firewood being split, and along with it the sound of a pig having its throat cut in a slaughterhouse.

Had a quarter of an hour gone by? Du-sik had turned into some limp, boneless mollusk and lay squirming on the ground.

“Hey. Go and bring more of your boys. I haven’t even broken a sweat.”

“I’m, sorry. Please, spare, me.”

Du-sik’s lips had swollen up, and the words came out of him leaking at the edges.

“You there. Your legs are fine, aren’t they. Go and call the boys. Call all of them. And tell them to bring weapons.”

With half-baked amateurs like these I had to put out my strength and then check it halfway, so if anything my body felt stiffer afterwards.

“If I hear so much as a word about you lot collecting stall fees on North Road, it will not be the Namgung Clan that comes for you first. It will be me. And then I will break every last joint in your bodies and have you crawling on the ground for the rest of your lives.”

As words no one would take for a scholar’s came pouring out of me, Du-sik nodded and nodded.

“It stops here only because all you were collecting was stall fees. Had you done worse, I would have crippled the legs of every one of you. Keep my words in mind. A scholar’s promise is soft as a writing brush, but break it and it cuts sharper than a blade.”

I left them with that warning and walked out of the alley.

If they had been stronger opponents I could have tested more of the formula’s principles.

Ten men laid out and it still did not leave me feeling refreshed. A craving rose in me to go up against someone stronger.

Enough of that, Tae-san. What sort of martial artist are you supposed to be?

It had been the same back at the Murim Alliance, in my secret sparring match with Paeng So-un. Little by little I was coming to understand this thing martial artists call the will to win, the fighting instinct peculiar to males, which takes an interest in anything stronger than itself and wants to measure its own strength against it. A little of that male instinct, I realized, was stirring in me as well.

But I am a scholar by birth. My reason was too deeply steeped in ink to be swung about by an instinct that low.

— Fwiiip!

With the fan open, I could see the damage to the bamboo and the paper.

It would be strange if it came through unharmed, with the vibration of spirit energy running through it. Still, I am lucky it did not break outright. Hm — why not have a fan made of iron instead? Then it would hold up even against a swordsman or a saber-wielder.

It struck me suddenly that all I had been thinking about was fighting, and a hollow laugh came out of me. The idea of some scrap of a man of letters thinking about fighting martial artists.

My dying day cannot be far off. Here I am, thinking I could grapple with martial artists who cut through boulders the way you cut a radish, all on the strength of a spirit-meridian activation I got out of decoding one wretched formula, when street thugs are exactly the level I am fit for.

I knew my own level well enough. At the Murim Alliance I had run wild without fear because I had the Inspection Corps behind me, answering directly to the Alliance Leader; now I had no such backing, and it was time to keep my head down.

“Mm?”

A savory smell turned my head as I walked, and there was the noodle stall Namgung Mu-baek had kicked over not long ago. The husband and wife who ran it saw me and bowed from the waist. The stall looked newly bought, and the dishes looked new as well.

“Did you go to the Namgung Clan and collect the compensation?”

“Yes. We did as you told us, Scholar — showed them what you had written and explained the situation, and the next day they looked into it and paid the compensation straight away. A great house really is different, just as they say. And not knowing that, we were too frightened even to think of going. It is all thanks to you, Scholar.”

“What are you saying? It is thanks to the two of you working up the courage. Since I am here, shall I try the noodles?”

“Yes. One moment, please. We have noodles boiling now.”

A little while later a bowl of plain noodles was handed to me, and I ate. Ever since I turned twenty, my five senses had made a transcendent leap, and my sense of taste along with them, so much so that I could name the stock and every ingredient that had gone into these noodles. The trouble was that after awakening the Heavenly Martial Sacred Body I had realized I could not eat food that tasted bad. To a developed palate, bad food was nothing short of a form of torture.

So I ate about half and set down my chopsticks.

“Shall I tell you a way to make the noodles taste better?”

“This recipe we learned from a cook at an inn who is said to know his way around a kitchen. Is it not good?”

To satisfy my developed palate, I had taken to putting medicinal herbs into my food rather than cooking ingredients. Only the flavor of the herbs could prop up what the ingredients lacked. In those days nobody had yet thought of putting medicinal herbs into food at all.

“When I was at the Murim Alliance there was a noodle house with very good noodles, and I happen to know their recipe.”

“Oh! We would be grateful if you would tell us.”

The eating houses around the Namgung Clan were no worse for flavor, nobody denied that, but between them and the ones around the Murim Alliance there was a difference all the same.

“We have a connection, so I shall tell the two of you and nobody else. You use brisket for the stock?”

“Yes, that is right. It costs a bit more, but we use the meat off the cow’s breast. That is why our noodles are popular.”

“For all that, there do not seem to be any customers.”

“Ah, that is because the other places put pretty young women out front to boil the noodles, so the menfolk all go that way.”

And sure enough, at the other noodle houses it was shapely young women in loose clothing doing the boiling, no doubt a sales trick of their own.

“That is not what matters. If the taste is there, that sort of thing is wasted effort. Try putting a little astragalus, hawthorn and goji berry into the brisket stock. The flavor of the broth will come right to life.”

“Medicinal herbs?”

Astragalus and goji berry go into prescriptions as a matter of course and are well enough known among ordinary people, but using the things as food would never have occurred to them.

“Each of these herbs has an aroma of its own, and they go well with a stock. It is the secret recipe used at the finest eating house at the Murim Alliance. I am telling it to the two of you and nobody else, as a special favor.”

To lend my words some credibility, I went so far as to invent an eating house that did not exist.

“Then we shall get hold of the herbs and put them in right away.”

“If you do, I shall come and buy a bowl now and then.”

“We will, Scholar.”

When I put down the price of the noodles, the couple refused flatly to take it.

“Thanks to you, Scholar, we have a new stall and the compensation besides — how could we take money for food?”

“I have never once eaten a meal for free.”

During my time in the Inspection Corps it always seemed to me that a small thing like that would be what caught me by the ankle, so wherever I went I never once took a free drink or a free meal. It had become a habit, and I tended to pay for whatever I took.

Walking as though out for a stroll, I reached the largest apothecary near the Namgung Clan in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea.

The moment I stepped inside, my head turned of its own accord toward one spot.