Exile from Home
I was exactly eleven years old then.
I still remember it dimly.
The day I had to turn my back on the hometown where I was born and raised, dragged away by a distant relative after my parents died in the flood. That damned day still sits in my memory like a splinter under the nail.
I did not want to leave.
It was a wretchedly poor, miserable little village, but to me it held a small future, and that future was Soso, the older girl who lived nearby.
I had thought I’d propose to her when I grew up. Even now, I still drift into that useless fantasy from time to time.
I wonder what would have happened if that distant relative had been torn to pieces on the road by bandits, a tiger, or a venomous snake and sent stumbling off to the next world.
Then the bandits would have made a profit, the tiger would have filled its belly, and I would have grown up like a weed in my hometown and entered Soso’s house as a live-in son-in-law.
We would have had children, and we might have lived quite happily, but this dogshit world was never on my side, then or now.
Of all the bandits and beasts infesting the mountains, none of them had taken a bite out of that bastard.
He must have looked too much like worthless trash, with nothing worth eating, so even the beasts thought he wasn’t worth the trouble.
After that I regretted it a thousand, ten thousand times, grinding my teeth. I should have crept up behind him with a kitchen knife and slit that accursed throat when I had the chance.
It was too vile a thing for an eleven-year-old to do, but if I had known he was going to sell me off to a gambling den, I probably wouldn’t have hesitated to grab the blade.
That bastard, who turned out to be some sort of cousin twice removed from my father’s cousin’s cousin, was a gambling addict I had never seen before in my life.
He was human refuse, so addicted to the feel of flipping tiles and cards that he blew through his entire fortune, then sold off his wife and daughter on top of that.
He had come looking to borrow money, found me instead, a newly orphaned child, and without the slightest hesitation ruined my life for a few scraps of silver.
I naturally refused and dug in my heels. It did no good. Back then I couldn’t beat an adult man.
Even after talking to him, I wondered whether he was really a relative at all, but he had a knife at his waist, and even Soso’s family couldn’t stop him.
After a tearful farewell and a month of being dragged along while sleeping rough, I was sold to a shabby gambling den.
It was the kind of place a loser and a thug might stop by before going to meet King Yama.
That was where I was sold. That filthy distant relative of mine took a tael of silver as my price, right in front of me, and then joined the gambling table himself.
A gambling den was no place for a child to be sold into.
Compared with a bandit guild like the Assassin Society, or the demonic cults on Mount Tianshan, it might have seemed better at a glance. But in one respect, it may have been the worst of all: there was no chance there to become strong.
While kidnapped orphans became assassins in the Assassin Society and demons in the demonic cults, I did menial work in a gambling den.
I was also used in cheating schemes, slipping poison into liquor or giving the signal with a practiced gesture after peeking at a mark’s tiles.
If I did the work badly, they beat me until the sky turned black.
One day I could not stand it anymore and slipped away in secret. Security in the gambling den’s lodging was surprisingly sloppy.
I ran without looking back, straight out of the city.
While I had been trapped in the gambling den, I had been like an arrow drawn taut toward my hometown. I thought that once I was free, I would shoot back there like a streak of light.
I did run, but I did not get far.
My hometown was far, far away. I did not know the roads, and I had no money.
Even begging was not easy. Everywhere I went, there were beggars already claiming their territory. I could not even get in a single round of alms before I was bullied off someone else’s patch and had to flee.
After three days of going hungry for my freedom, I went back to the gambling den determined that if I was going to die anyway, I might as well eat my fill first.
For once, the owner did not beat me.
He looked me over in silence, then led me to the kitchen and gave me fried vegetables with white rice and tofu.
Even as I gobbled it down like a starving dog, he did not say a word. He did not need to. He knew that a single bowl of rice had fastened an invisible leash around my neck.
After that, the owner never laid a hand on me. He did not need to.
Instead, the fake relative who had sold me off was the one who beat me.
He would come by occasionally and hold out his hand, demanding a “finders’ fee” for lining me up with work. He had kidnapped and sold me in the first place, yet he acted as if he were some kind of savior.
He would steal every bit of money I had scraped together, one or two coins at a time, collected from grateful customers after I helped them sweep the table.
Then he would spend it on liquor, come back with a red face, and beat me senseless for being ungrateful.
After he did that a few times, things finally came to a head. I ended up doing what I should have done before I ever left my hometown.
When I came to my senses, that bastard was a corpse sprawled in a filthy alley.
I was standing there, panting hard like a cornered wildcat, with a kitchen knife in my hand and blood dripping from the blade.
It was my first killing.
It was late, but it was something that had been bound to happen sooner or later.
Looking back, the man was not even a martial artist.
A hopeless gambling addict. Human trash who had ruined his own life and taken out his resentment on an innocent child.
To my young self, that pathetic excuse for a man, who looked as if he would lose even to a shrewish housewife, was as terrifying as the great demons of Tianshan.
After I killed him, I began to understand the feeling from heroic tales, the feeling of a great hero cutting down a villain of the evil sect.
For several days afterward I was sick with anxiety, worried that I would be taken by the government office. Fortunately, nothing like that happened.
In the pleasure quarters, corpses turning up dead was as natural as fruit bearing on a tree.
The magistrates did not care about the death of some worthless bottom-rung life. They did not even bother trying to find the culprit. The matter was closed with the body loaded onto an ox cart, covered with a straw mat, and dumped somewhere far away.
Maybe because I had finally shed the resentment festering in my chest, things began to go strangely well after that first killing.
I was praised often for being quick and sharp, and I earned more and more loose change from customers.
The gambling den, which had once felt like a vast prison, became tolerable enough. Even my perpetually gloomy expression grew a little sly.
My body was still far from fully grown, but my mind felt as if it had leapt ahead by years.
I even found myself with a goal in life.
I practiced tile games whenever I had time, studying the faces and habits of gamblers, trying to become a technician.
About a year later, once I could roughly estimate the strength of the hand someone was holding just by looking at their face, the owner finally gave me a chance.
“I thought you were just lucky with your looks, but you’ve got good eyes too. Fine. Practice your hands a bit more and start sitting at the table next year.”
If you became a technician, one-third of what you won belonged to the house. Of course, if you lost, debt piled up to match the stakes.
I was confident. My sleight of hand was still lacking. But my ability to read tiles was far better than that of the other technicians.
When I pushed myself to the limit, I reached the point where I could tell from a person’s face not just whether they were strong, but exactly what tiles they were holding.
It might have sounded like nothing special, but even after I became a martial artist, it helped me more than once.
Whether you were fighting with tiles or swinging a blade, in the end it was all done by human beings. If you could read someone’s face and gauge what was in their heart, you could always move half a beat ahead.
That meant fewer chances of being hit from behind. It also made it easier to pull out at the worst possible moment.
I honed my tile skills every chance I got, even sacrificing sleep, dreaming of the glorious day when I would make a name for myself as a gambler, grow rich, and return to my hometown in triumph.
But I never got the chance to sit at the table.
Exactly six months later, the gambling den collapsed.
It was because they had failed to keep the water under control.
As the night deepened, in one corner of the gambling den where the air was growing hotter by the minute, some unlucky fool who had lost money flew into a rage and shouted.
That happened all the time in a gambling den. It was the sort of trivial disturbance that would usually end with a guard coming in and dragging the fool out.
No one paid it any mind, since we had all seen it countless times. Everyone was focused on the tiles in their own hands, because if you looked away carelessly, the other side might cheat.
But this time things did not go that way.
“How dare you pull a cheap trick on this one? You’d better be ready to meet King Yama!”
The middle-aged man gripping the technician’s wrist and glaring furiously looked like a fool through and through.
Slightly fat, with an ordinary build and a weak-looking face like some bookish scholar. The only unusual thing about him was that both hands were bizarrely large, too large for his body.
“Aaaagh!!”
When the fool clenched his fist, the technician’s wrist was torn away as if a tiger had bitten it clean off.
The two guards who rushed in to throw the fool out were blasted the other way. Their heads struck the wall so hard it sounded like a hammer blow, and they slumped down in blood without a sound.
I could not even see how he did it.
The gamblers holding their tiles finally sprang up in alarm.
The fool who had just crushed the technician’s skull turned around. On a face that looked as though it ought to be reciting the teachings of a noble son, there was only manic killing intent.
It was as if he meant to tear someone limb from limb while sternly judging whether they had failed to uphold the Three Bonds and Five Constants again today.
White steam rose from those grotesquely large fists.
Something beneath the shirt covering his forearms and shoulders kept bulging and shifting. It was as if his arms and shoulders were growing larger by the moment.
A monster like that should have been stopped at the entrance.
The guards at the gambling den’s gate were not merely big and mean-looking. They had sharp eyes as well. And yet they had still missed him.
The owner had missed the danger too. He watched the fool with a cool eye, then called in the blade men.
The blade men, who came running to earn their keep for once, were finished off before they could even do anything.
With a few casual punches, the heads of three blade men burst at once like watermelons. Red blood and white brain matter painted the floor, walls, and ceiling with cruel splashes.
The more the fool used his fists, the hotter and redder they grew.
Only then did someone finally scream, his face drained of all color.
“Explosive Heat Fist? Explosive Heat Fist Demon?”
“So there was still someone in this damned cesspit with enough eyes to recognize me. Fine. I’ll kill you last, specially for that.”
Explosive Heat Fist Demon Mok Sa-ryong.
Only later did I learn he was not some half-baked master of the righteous or evil schools, but a demon lord of the demonic cult.
A gambling addict who loved gambling so much he spent more days in the Central Plains than on Mount Tianshan.
A killer who never left the upper ranks of the martial world’s wanted list, where the martial alliance posted bounties on public enemies.
A figure of longing that the ambitious younger generation of the great orthodox sects dreamed of meeting, even more desperately than they longed for Hee-wol of the Cheongwol Pavilion.
His bounty alone was a full five hundred taels of silver.
Mok Sa-ryong, a walking lump of silver, stood with his back to the only exit and slaughtered the blade men and gamblers alike.
One punch shattered a head. Another tore off limbs.
When a punch landed on the torso, it was even more horrific. A fist that punched through a back and burst out through the chest ripped out the heart with it.
The scorching heat released from his fists turned the winter air in the large indoor hall hot and stifling. Wherever those fists passed, the stench of burning flesh stabbed at the nose. The smell of blood thickened the air.
It was the most terrifying and overwhelming sight I had ever seen in my life.
It felt as though hell itself had opened up.
As if an executioner risen from hell was punishing sinful gamblers. The heat of the Explosive Heat Fist set the furniture around him on fire. The room blazed like a furnace from hell.
No matter how demonic his art was, I still do not know how a human being could do that. Maybe he was something wearing a human skin.
I had been in the middle of carrying a bottle of liquor when I froze completely.
Hot blood splashed across my half-stunned face as I stood there, spellbound by fear and awe. I jerked in shock, flailing my arms, and then I understood. It was my turn soon.
That lunatic murderer would not spare a child just because he was a child.
Only then did I finally come to my senses.
I hid behind the gambling tables, watching for an opening, then darted into the kitchen. I stepped onto the unlit stove, shoved my way through a small window, and escaped outside.
The gamblers who followed after me also scrambled for the window in a panic.
I ran desperately toward the mountain, then looked back, shuddering at the awful sounds of shattered heads and desperate screams.
There was no one outside the window.
Even I, not yet fully grown, had barely managed to squeeze through it. It was impossible for an adult to get through there.
I climbed the back hill, buried myself under fallen leaves, and hid behind a rock.
As if he had killed enough already, the screams coming from the gambling den quickly faded. The door shattered with a heavy crash.
Someone came out, stepping over the broken door panel as it lay burning on the ground.
It was the dead of a pitch-black moonless night. Even so, the fierce blaze pouring from inside made his face recognizable from far away.
The Explosive Heat Fist Demon, who had turned the gambling den into a hell of fire, was now far larger than before, a frame suited to those enormous fists.
The black robe he wore, whatever it was made of, only swelled and puffed out; it did not tear, and it did not catch fire.
Mok Sa-ryong looked up toward the back hill where I was hiding.
A chilling face soaked in blood. Eyes gleaming like those of a wild beast. A cold shiver ran down my spine so hard it almost stopped my breathing. He looked ready to come charging over and smash my skull to pulp at any second.
Suppressing the instinct to run with everything I had, I curled up in the leaves.
Mok Sa-ryong turned his gaze toward the alley on the other side. The onlookers who had been peeking out shrank back in alarm and hid themselves again.
The patrol constables blew a sharp whistle. Their footsteps also grew busier.
Mok Sa-ryong kicked off the ground and leapt onto the roof of the building across the way. It was a light movement utterly mismatched to his massive build. I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
He crossed roof after roof and vanished in an instant.
The gambling den burned through the night with dozens of corpses inside it.
I did not know whether the owner had been among them. Since he never appeared the next day, he was probably dead.
The twists and turns of the more than two years since I had been kidnapped, sold off, and dragged there by that fake relative.
The bloodshot-eyed loafers and fools who spent the night kneading tiles in a local den. The hopeless marks. The half-assed guards and blade men who had no tomorrow.
The only job where I could eat two meals a day and still save a little loose change.
The future I had so ambitiously prepared for, fingertips aching from all the tile practice, as a prospective gambling technician.
All of it turned to ashes in a single night.