You're Eating This?

In a great pavilion with room enough for twenty men and more, Mak Ji-mong turned to the man seated opposite him and spoke.

“See here, Hwang Gok. Does the thing make any sense at all? I’ve no idea why my father keeps setting some scholar fellow on me to make me study. Am I to hold forth on Confucius and Mencius? I, Mak Ji-mong, the Soul-Snatching Little Conqueror, hero of the unorthodox sects!”

Hwang Gok played along on the surface of it, but inside he was rotting away.

It’s so that you might turn into a human being that the Supreme keeps setting scholars on you…

He cursed the man inwardly the whole while, and his hand never once paused in filling Mak Ji-mong’s cup.

“Enough of that. Hwang Gok’s done now — let So-ye do the pouring.”

“Young Sect Leader, my sister is not good at pouring drink.”

“Then why did you bring her along?”

Mak Ji-mong retorted sullenly.

“Ah, as to that. We came to pay our respects to the Supreme.”

“Not to see me?”

“It seemed it would be too much of a crush to present our gift at the sixtieth-birthday feast, so we came ahead of it.”

“When does So-ye come and live with me?”

Hwang Gok answered in a cold sweat.

“If you enter into a betrothal with my younger sister, you may live together well enough.”

The trouble was that Mak Ji-mong meant to keep Hwang So-ye as a favored concubine and live with her without so much as a betrothal.

“Greedy, the Geumak Sect is.”

Mak Ji-mong was about to launch into a lecture when he saw a man coming toward the pavilion, and he set his cup down.

“Here he comes, the master of letters. They tell me my father picked this one himself. Shall we make a wager? On when he dies?”

Hwang Gok forced a laugh and played along, but Hwang So-ye’s smile came out bitter.

If a man like this becomes sect leader of the Hyeoncheon Sect, the unorthodox sects will fall to pieces.

Her father, Hwang Yeong, had pushed so hard to make the match with Mak Ji-mong, but it was for just such things as this that Hwang So-ye could not open her heart to him.

“Come along, Scholar. Come over here and have a cup with us.”

Cheon Tae-san answered as he stepped up into the pavilion.

“Shall I?”

“Mm?”

“You said we’d have a cup.”

Cheon Tae-san said it as he took his seat.

“Come, pour me one. You did call me here.”

Cheon Tae-san held his cup out toward Mak Ji-mong, and the man stared at him as though at a ghost and blinked. Long ago Namgung Mu-baek had worn just such a face, and Cheon Tae-san remembered it. When a thing turns out wholly beyond expectation, a man drops all at once into a panic and cannot so much as get a curse out.

“Eh? Haa. What is this — a madman?”

“What sort of manners is it, to invite a man over and start in with curses?”

Cheon Tae-san answered as he poured his own cup.

“You know who I am, I take it?”

“I do. But do you know who I am?”

Mak Ji-mong let out an empty breath and spoke.

“The scholar who’ll shortly die by my hand?”

Cheon Tae-san threw the drink back in one long draught.

“No. Your master of letters.”

“Bwahahaha! You want to be treated as a master of letters? By me, of all people?”

“Don’t come whining to me. If you must whine, do it at your father, who invited me here as your master of letters.”

Mak Ji-mong turned sideways in his seat and let out an exclamation.

“Whoa! This scholar fellow really is mad! How has he survived in this rough world until now? No ability to him at all, and a nerve as wide as this.”

By this point even Mak Ji-mong could not keep back his admiration for the scholar’s nerve.

To Hwang Gok the scholar’s answers sounded like plain abuse thrown in Mak Ji-mong’s face. It had never once occurred to him that there might be a man who would spit out, aloud and in front of Mak Ji-mong, the very words he had only ever said inside his own head.

Is he allowed to do that?

In his eyes the scholar looked like a man about to die.

Hwang So-ye was startled quite as much. Nobody who knew Mak Ji-mong could possibly have spoken such words. And on top of that, the tone of a man addressing an inferior. She shook her head slowly from side to side.

That scholar has no hope of living long. He must think the Supreme will shield him. The Supreme does not care in the least what his son does.

Whatever care he had went no further than setting a scholar on Mak Ji-mong, and by her judgment that only bent the man further out of true.

Cheon Tae-san kept a close watch on Mak Ji-mong’s blood flow. He might well come to harm at the man’s hands, so he kept his eyes on it by way of preparation.

When a man’s temper is up and he means to raise a hand, the flow at the head quickens and the flow in the hands rises. And there is nothing of the sort here.

It is the way of the mind, too: the more bewilderment a man meets to his face, the less able he is to raise a hand.

What in the world does he have behind him, that he can carry on like this? Thinking that, a man grows the more cautious.

Cheon Tae-san was working both of these on Mak Ji-mong at once, so the man must have been every bit as bewildered and at a loss himself.

“I’ve looked into you a little as well. Cheon Tae-san, is it? Threw so many fool stunts at the Murim Alliance that you were run out, begged your rice off the Namgung Clan for a while, and then when my father called you came trotting up like a puppy — that’s the story? He’ll have promised you a great deal of land and money, I expect. Why do you suppose he did that?”

Cheon Tae-san took up the bottle and set himself to pour, and Mak Ji-mong laughed as though at the sheer absurdity of it and held out his cup.

“Fine. Well, why shouldn’t I take a cup from a man who’ll be dead soon? My father did it because he knows you won’t live long. Once you’re dead he takes it all back again, and there’s an end of it.”

“I take your meaning, so let it drop. It spoils the drink. And once the sixtieth-birthday feast is over the lessons begin at once, so make yourself ready for it. Take my teaching for one month, no more. If after that you still have no liking for me, then cut my head off or carve me into pieces, it makes no difference to me. If you have no liking for me then either, you may kill me and welcome.”

Mak Ji-mong took up the bottle to pour for Cheon Tae-san, held it out, and checked.

“Eh?”

The truth was that Mak Ji-mong had meant to pour out his killing intent, deal the scholar a blow to the mind, and leave him half a cripple. That was why he had taken the scholar’s drink; he had every preparation made to loose the killing intent at the man while pouring in return. The black killing intent was in itself an energy that worked like a hidden weapon.

But the man had spoken of death outright and made of his own life a pebble in his pocket, and at that Mak Ji-mong grew genuinely curious. Killing a scholar like this so simply would be a waste.

“Well, now. Truly.”

Gathering the black killing intent back in, Mak Ji-mong clicked his tongue.

“Not bad at all. I think I see why my father went so far as to send an invitation and bring you here.”

Only now did he meet the man’s eyes, and something in his manner granted him a little.

“Isn’t that a father’s heart? He wants his son to grow up properly. I’d wager even the Demonic Cult Leader wants his own child to grow up straight.”

“Wahahaha! Right now, in the middle of all this, you’re running down me and my father both at once?”

“What of it? I only stated a fact. And the ones I ran down were the Demonic Cult Leader and his son.”

“Whoa, you really do talk like a man who lives for today alone. And by your eyes it isn’t bluster, either.”

Cheon Tae-san drained a cup at a draught.

“Good liquor. Take a cup yourself.”

Mak Ji-mong, who had been gazing steadily at him, held out his cup.

“Hwah! I swear, in all my life — drink poured for me by a scholar.”

As he poured, Cheon Tae-san thought of dropping the Flying Dantian into the cup. A man with sharp eyes could make it out, so he meant to do it at some moment of confusion. Mak Ji-mong’s martial standing had not yet reached the first-rate level of attainment, and that was what gave him the courage to try. Hellions everywhere are men mad for amusement rather than training, and their level of attainment stays low.

But no opening presented itself.

Cheon Tae-san put the Flying Dantian into a very small jade bottle, meaning to look for his chance once Mak Ji-mong was further into his drink. Mak Ji-mong was taking a cup from Hwang Gok; Cheon Tae-san had the jade bottle out, the Flying Dantian in it, and was on the point of tucking it into his robes.

— Clack!

Mak Ji-mong had seized his wrist.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing much.”

“It wouldn’t be poison you’ve got ready to kill me with, would it?”

“I’ve not enough of a connection with the Young Sect Leader yet to go poisoning him.”

Cheon Tae-san made to tuck the jade bottle away, and Mak Ji-mong used his internal qi to draw the hand back out of the robes again.

“More suspicious still. What is it you prize so?”

The more distress Cheon Tae-san showed, the more Mak Ji-mong’s eyes glittered; he wore the face of a man delighted to have found something to torment the scholar with. In the end he drew the jade bottle out of the scholar’s robes.

“Give it back. It is a thing of great importance to me.”

“Is it? All the more reason to be curious, then.”

Without so much as Cheon Tae-san’s leave, Mak Ji-mong opened the jade bottle and took out the Flying Dantian inside.

“What’s this! A poison pill?”

He held the Flying Dantian up, smelled it, and started in surprise.

“There’s a thick internal force coming off it. It feels like some five years’ worth of internal force in here.”

Mak Ji-mong looked at Cheon Tae-san and gave a sly, underhanded smile.

“Now I see it — the scholar’s a decent sort after all. You meant to give me this spirit medicine?”

“What are you talking about. It’s mine.”

Cheon Tae-san put out his hand, and Mak Ji-mong grinned. A smile smeared with mischief and brimming with ill will filled the line of his mouth.

“I’ll eat it.”

Mak Ji-mong flicked the Flying Dantian into his mouth and swallowed it. He watched Cheon Tae-san’s face twist, savored it, and laughed like a man hugely gratified.

“Bwahahaha! Looking at that crumpled face of yours, at last something inside me comes unstopped. Well then — I’ve eaten a spirit medicine, so shall I digest it a little?”

Mak Ji-mong folded himself into the lotus on the spot and went into working the power. In less than a quarter of an hour he opened his eyes and muttered.

“What sort of spirit medicine is this? Why doesn’t the energy spread through the body? This isn’t a false spirit medicine, is it?”

Cheon Tae-san answered as though he had given it up for lost.

“Leave that one alone and the energy loosens of itself. Trying to work the power at it for nothing only makes it worse.”

“No wonder. I thought there was something strange about it.”

The sight of the scholar hard done by seemed to amuse Mak Ji-mong, and he only went on grinning, with the look of a man who thought he had landed one on him.

“I’ll have every bit of it back out of you.”

“Do that, if you can.”

Since it had come to this in any case, Cheon Tae-san put on a wronged face and glared at him. That seemed to please Mak Ji-mong the more, and he drank on, humming to himself.

“Kwaah! Good liquor.”

Mak Ji-mong’s eye fell on the qin set to one side of the pavilion, and his smile thickened.

“But listen.”

“Mm? What?”

He let the scholar’s talking down to him pass as nothing, perhaps having grown used to it by now. Toward a man who outstrips one’s own thinking, a certain generosity creeps in without one’s knowing it.

“From what I hear, you play the qin uncommonly well too. So they tell me you were the musician who made a matched pair of jades with Cheong Yo in Hefei.”

That he knew a thing like this meant Mak Ji-mong had done at least the minimum of looking into the man who was to be his master of letters. The remark itself, though, came close to an insult. Telling one’s own master of letters to strike up a tune at a drinking table was a roundabout way of saying he was no different from a performing courtesan, and nothing more.

Cheon Tae-san saw through to that meaning as well and let out a snort of laughter. At that, Hwang So-ye stepped forward.

“As for the qin, this girl can manage a tune. Will you hear this girl’s qin?”

Hwang So-ye could play the qin well enough, and it beat pouring drink for a man she had no feeling for. If the scholar dug his heels in and refused to play, Mak Ji-mong was the sort who could beat him to death on the spot for having spoiled his mood.

“Never mind that. It’s my own master of letters’ playing I want to hear. Right now.”

There was killing intent in his eyes, and Cheon Tae-san let out a snort of laughter at it. Killing intent of that order could not frighten him.

“It’s the legendary music I want to hear — the one where butterflies gather in when the qin is struck. Music that truly calls butterflies! Pah! It’s an idle rumor, and that’s why you can’t bring yourself to play. Butterflies gathering the moment the qin is struck? Somebody’s been telling a lie that won’t stand up. I’ve listened to the music of the most famous musicians under heaven all my life and I’ve never once seen such a thing.”

Cheon Tae-san watched Mak Ji-mong making his unreasonable fuss, then caught sight of an object hanging from the eave-end of another pavilion far off, and laughed inwardly.

Right. I think I’ll teach this one a lesson.

This time Cheon Tae-san was the one who grinned.

Gooseflesh rose on Hwang Gok at the sight of it. A moment ago the man had picked up the scholar’s spirit elixir and eaten it without leave, leaving the scholar bursting with indignation, and now he had gone so far as to order him to play the qin.

Just so — the very act of an utter hellion of the unorthodox sects.

And yet the scholar, having had such a thing said to him, grinned and went on grinning instead of losing his temper, and that was the more frightening of the two. Something of the stillness before a storm hung in the air.

Which was why, to him, the fierce baijiu¹ tasted like plain water.