The Murderous Fiend
On the first day I came home, Gu-sam led me through the back alleys of Seochon and showed me the Black Night Gang for the first time.
After that, I kept spotting black-hearted thugs around town now and then.
Some were just local hoodlums. Some looked like members of the Black Night Gang.
As long as they didn’t get in my way, I let them pass, so we’d never crossed paths.
Of course, that didn’t mean the bastards were doing any less harm just because they hadn’t picked a fight with me.
As usual, I finished work at dawn, slept for a while, idled away the afternoon, then stopped by Poongcheon Inn for an early supper.
Unusually, the inn was loud.
The owner was nowhere to be seen, busy preparing for the evening crowd. The two farmers who always came at this hour were eating their cold wheat noodles in silence at their usual table.
The ones raising their voices and hurling insults at one another by the window were two unfamiliar thugs.
The moment I stepped inside, the room fell silent.
The men who shut their mouths and glared at me were, at a glance, shabby little trash.
Generic street toughs, stamped out somewhere to pad the Black Night Gang’s numbers.
How many men had they ever killed with the broad machetes they’d laid on the table like a display?
They might have worked on ordinary people and weaklings, but to anyone with real eyes for the martial world, they were nothing but cheap, half-baked pretenders.
The problem with men like that wasn’t that their force was weak. It was that they had no eye for judging another man’s skill.
That was why most of them didn’t live very long.
Even after they looked me over from head to toe, they didn’t look away. Instead, they narrowed their eyes and went out of their way to provoke me, exactly as expected.
I ignored them, crossed the center of the inn, and took a seat at a window on the opposite side, as far from them as I could get.
The farmers finished their noodles down to the last sip of broth, stood up, and counted out their coins to settle the bill.
Come to think of it, those same two farmers had been eating noodles in this inn on the first day I came back, when I dropped Jang Ho-dal with a single blow.
Maybe they expected another scene like that, because they grabbed their straw hats and hurried out.
Gu-sam came over carrying a teapot.
“A bowl of rice, stir-fried vegetables, and half a catty of boiled pork.”
After placing my order, I wet my throat with some tea and looked out the window.
The summer sun poured down on the street, glaring bright.
Street vendors had set up their stalls to draw in customers, pedestrians moved along the road, children ran past in all directions...
Everyone seemed to be having a decent enough day. Even the stray dogs wandering around had some small bone in their mouths.
It looked as if those two thugs wanted to end their useless lives here after spending them doing nothing but making trouble for others.
The prickle of those eyes that wouldn’t stop boring into the back of my head was starting to irritate me.
I’d slept well, gotten up, and worked hard on my sword forms. I’d planned to eat a good meal, go to a decent job, and spend the day in peace.
I didn’t have any plan to kill anyone, and I wasn’t in the mood for it either. Especially not in this inn.
If I’d known it would come to this, maybe I should have come wearing my travel robe.
I couldn’t help but glance at the willow-leaf saber propped against the side of the table.
I’d bought it for five taels of silver, planning to replace it once my long blade was finished. If you cut people down with it, or nicked the edge against another weapon, you’d naturally have a hard time getting your money’s worth.
Picking a fight was their choice, but if I didn’t even have a single tael of silver in my purse, they wouldn’t get to die nicely.
The thugs got to their feet. I set down my teacup and reached for the willow-leaf saber.
“Why’s there so much fat in the meat? And the soup’s not even seasoned right! Next time this shit happens, you can count on us shutting this place down!”
After chewing Gu-sam out for no reason, the thugs kicked open the door and disappeared.
When I looked at the table, not a single coin had been left behind.
“Did those bastards pay?”
“No.”
Gu-sam whispered with a dark little smile.
“But I did pack their food with a special kind of spit. Heh heh heh.”
“What are those guys?”
“Black Night Gang trash, what else? They came to collect their protection money and used the visit to fill their bellies.”
“Half a tael of silver?”
Gu-sam let out a sigh.
“Yeah. Business is decent enough, but they take half a tael every month, so it’s always tight.”
Even among martial artists who went around armed, the ones people cursed at without sparing a single decent word were thugs like those black-hearted idiots.
I’d heard that the Nine Sects and the Five Great Families were all hopeless bastards too, favoring fists and blades over conversation, and mad for the art of putting people in the ground with a weapon.
But wherever they went, they were still called prestigious orthodox sects and men of righteousness, and people looked up to them.
That wasn’t because their martial arts were purer.
It was because even when they extorted people, they still bothered with manners and appearances, and cared about their reputation in the world.
Even those murder-crazed maniacs didn’t kill just anyone. Under the banner of a hero’s wandering justice, they usually quenched their thirst on black-hearted thugs and bandits.
“Are those Black Night Gang fools all idiots? They only came to collect protection money, and they still had to travel in pairs.”
“They usually come alone. But the whole Black Night Gang’s in an uproar right now, isn’t it? They’ve got plenty of sins on their backs, so they’re keeping their heads down too.”
“Why’s the Black Night Gang in an uproar?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Stop dragging it out and say it.”
Gu-sam hurried to the door, checked that nobody was outside, then came back and sat across from me.
“Three Black Night Gang members got cut down overnight without a sound.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. Their bodies were found this morning, and all three had their throats slit in one clean stroke without even putting up much of a fight...”
Gu-sam was thrilled, pantomiming a hand across his throat as if the mere thought of it delighted him.
Simhyangru was a fair distance from the Black Night Gang headquarters, and a lot of buildings stood between them.
Still, if something had happened, the knife-wielding bastards would have been running around with torches, claiming to be searching for the murderer, so there was no way not to know.
When I was on duty last night, nothing happened.
It must have been discovered after I got off work, just as Gu-sam said.
“Did they catch the killer?”
“No. They seem to be grabbing anyone who had a grudge against the dead men and roughing them up, but if those people had that kind of martial skill, would they have been beaten down all this time? They say all the dead men’s silver and weapons were stripped clean too. People are saying it was the hero’s wandering deed of some wandering master who drifted into Seochon...”
Holding my teacup, I cut in flatly. “That’s robbery-murder.”
“Robbery?”
“If you kill them and take everything, it’s robbery-murder.”
Gu-sam blinked, looking displeased.
My words were correct if you looked only at the result, but he seemed to think it was unfair to call it robbery-murder.
He probably wanted to call the man who wiped out the villains a righteous hero.
“I just wish those bastards from earlier had died too. Then we wouldn’t have to pay that protection money.”
“Then some other bastards would come collect it.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Gu-sam lowered his voice.
“What if the whole Black Night Gang got wiped out? Whoever did it must be a terrifying master. Even if nobody says it out loud, everyone looks kind of secretly hopeful.”
“And you think that would mean no more protection money?”
Gu-sam tilted his head and asked back. “If the bad guys all disappear, who’d there be to extort money from?”
“You think black-hearted thugs only exist in Seochon? The moment word spreads that Seochon’s been left ownerless, the black-hearted bastards from the surrounding districts will swarm in. They’ll fight each other in broad daylight over who gets to eat first. Shops will turn into chaos, and passersby will get caught in the crossfire without knowing why. That goes on until one or two factions finally seize the back alleys.”
“...Seriously?”
“Before the Black Night Gang united everything, didn’t all kinds of black-hearted crews run wild in Seochon too?”
“Yeah. That’s what I heard.”
“Then we’d probably go right back to that time.”
“But the yamen won’t just sit there and do nothing, will they?”
“They’ll take their bribes and raise up whichever side stands to win. The losers will get dragged off and punished as the criminals.”
It wasn’t that I was especially clever. I could say it with confidence because I’d seen it with my own eyes more than once.
No matter how wide and varied the Central Plains were, the way the world worked was always the same.
Illegal or not, once there was a place to squeeze money from, only the face of the parasite changed. Nobody actually removed the rot.
Gu-sam fell silent, looking deflated and lost in thought.
Then a young cook peeked out from the kitchen.
“The food’s ready!”
Gu-sam brought over what I’d ordered.
As I picked up my chopsticks, I suddenly thought of Jang Ho-dal, the bastard who had beaten Gu-sam and extorted money from the cloth shop.
The body he’d left sprawled in the alley had been handled by the authorities. The Black Night Gang hadn’t reacted at all.
As expected, Jang Ho-dal had been nothing.
Gu-sam must have heard about that day’s events from the owner of the inn or from the cook.
He could probably guess well enough who had killed Jang Ho-dal, but he didn’t ask about it. He didn’t seem curious either.
When I acted as though nothing had happened, he was quick enough to pretend not to know and let it be.
No matter how much he admired heroes, Gu-sam wasn’t a martial artist.
Murder was a frightening thing, and maybe he didn’t know how to bear the thought that I had gotten my hands dirty because of him.
Once, I stayed for a while in a small slash-and-burn farming village.
A few bandits came looking to loot the grain the villagers needed to survive the winter, so I took them out, figuring I might as well earn my keep.
The villagers were relieved and deeply grateful. And they were afraid of me. More afraid than they had been of those bandits.
Even the village head, who had been patting my shoulder and joking with me just moments before, could no longer meet my eyes.
It was only natural. For ordinary people living ordinary lives, violence and murder were nothing but calamities to be avoided at all costs, disasters that could wreck a life entirely.
No one wanted a skilled killer living next door, someone who could take human lives as casually as slaughtering pigs and dogs.
Fortunately, Gu-sam wasn’t afraid of me. He treated me just as he always had, without reserve. That alone was enough.
Still, maybe I should show a little appreciation.
I looked at the food in front of me, then asked Gu-sam casually, “No dumplings today?”
Gu-sam narrowed his eyes and stared at me for a long moment. Only after I added one more sentence did his expression finally change.
“Ye-hyang, I saw her.”
“Really? What was she like? Like a fairy who’d descended from the heavens...”
“She looked like a deer.”
“...A deer? Wasn’t Ye-hyang human?”
“You’ll know when you see her.”
Gu-sam stared at me with a baffled expression. Suspicious, but still he eventually brought out half a plate of dumplings.
*
When I entered the central streets, I found Black Night Gang members with blades at their hips moving about in groups of three or four, stirring up trouble.
They glared at the merchants nearby, picked fights, kicked over stalls, and made the whole area feel grim and ugly.
Pedestrians hurried to avoid them, terrified of getting caught up in some fresh humiliation.
If they were really searching for the murderer who had cut down their comrades, there was no reason to vent their rage pointlessly like that.
More likely, they were trying to show they were still standing.
Three members had been slaughtered at once and the killer still hadn’t been found, so the Black Night Gang’s face had taken a serious blow.
So they wanted to remind everyone that this was still their street, and people like us could be killed whenever they pleased.
That was how black-hearted thugs always behaved, but...
This time, the Black Night Gang must have taken a heavy enough hit. The men who’d been murdered were probably middle-ranking figures.
For them to make such a fuss over a few dead foot soldiers only made them look worse.
When I went to work at Simhyangru, another escort had been posted at the main gate instead of Bang Jo-in.
“He took leave because he wasn’t feeling well. I’m telling you, that bastard Bang Jo-in is probably over at the alley gambling den, clacking bone tiles. He works just to feed money into gambling houses.”
So Bang Jo-in had definitely come into some easy money last night.
Had he sneaked into the courtesan house, the servants’ quarters, or some annex and stolen it?
If that were the case, there would have been an uproar over the missing money, but Simhyangru was quiet.
No matter how obsessed with gambling a man was, if he was this terrified of the escort bureau chief, he wouldn’t dare soil the escort agency’s name in plain sight.
There’s a superstition that money comes with bad luck and should be spent quickly.
As if proving the point, Bang Jo-in showed up the next day with a hollow face, clearly cleaned out.
The left side of his waist, where his purse would have been, was flat.
If he’d lost that much money, he might have been driven mad enough to cheat, but both his hands were intact.
The Seochon gambling scene was far nastier than I’d imagined. Bang Jo-in was even more of a coward than I’d guessed.
“Ughhh...”
Bang Jo-in leaned against the wall and let out a miserable groan, like a man laid low by a drinking binge.
Anyone who saw him might think it was just a hangover, but that kind of thing doesn’t get better with time.
It was only withdrawal, easing for a moment when he sat at the table and held the tiles.
Win or lose, real gamblers spent their lives lingering around gambling halls, drugged by that knife-edge, blood-draining thrill of the gamble.
And then they lost their property, their wives were taken away, their daughters sold, they lost fingers and eyes one by one, and in the end they drifted the streets until they became corpses.
When you broke it down, gamblers weren’t much different from opium addicts.
“I heard a few of the Black Night Gang’s men died. The gambling dens are fine, I take it?”
“Do you think the Black Night Gang would close up shop and hold three years of mourning just because a few foot soldiers got cut down? We’re all just trying to make a living.”
Bang Jo-in squinted at me with bloodshot eyes and snapped back irritably.
I asked around about who had died and whether he’d heard anything about the killer, but he only shook his head in annoyance.
Just then, a carriage rolled in.
When the driver gave his name, a servant came out and led the carriage toward the main house.
The first customer of the day was Yi Yun-jae, the giant scholar, who had also come yesterday.
Maybe he’d fallen hard for Ye-hyang’s deer-like eyes, because ever since the celebration banquet, he’d been coming to the courtesan house every single day.
He still didn’t seem to be sleeping, and his face was drawn and haggard with deep worry.
Yi Yun-jae didn’t go straight into the main house. Instead, he turned and looked this way.
It was a fair distance, and dark enough that I couldn’t see clearly, but not so dark that I couldn’t tell his glare was aimed at Bang Jo-in.
Seeing Bang Jo-in slide quietly to the side of the door and hide himself, I could tell he had something to feel guilty about too.
Not long after Yi Yun-jae disappeared into the main house, a few more carriages arrived.
Bang Jo-in fiddled with the empty left side of his waist and fell into thought.
He hesitated, wavered, and agonized over it for quite a while, then suddenly drew in a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and opened his eyes wide.
He looked like a man desperately trying to squeeze together the courage and nerve he didn’t possess so he could go through with something.
“I’m going to the latrine for a bit.”
How many people made such a solemn face while going to take a shit? Nine times out of ten, he was definitely off to try to get more easy money.
I didn’t want to get tangled up in it, but if things went wrong, the blaze could easily spread to me too.
“Brother Bang.”
When I called him in a low voice, Bang Jo-in jumped and looked back.
“What?”
“I don’t know what you’re up to, but stop it.”
Bang Jo-in glared at me with hawk eyes. When I didn’t look away, he gave a start, cleared his throat awkwardly, and turned his head.
“Ahem. You want me to pull my pants down right in front of you and shit myself? Keep the gate watched properly. I’ll be back soon after I take care of business. Might be a little late. I drank too much yesterday, and my stomach’s been in a terrible state.”
Bang Jo-in mimed clutching his lower belly and scurried away.
That was the last I saw of him.
One quarter-hour passed, and he still hadn’t returned. Two quarter-hours passed. Then three.
“Rough shift?”
A middle-aged escort who normally handled the courtesan house from the dormitory came over to relieve me during his break.
“Go eat a late-night snack and come back. Where’s Bang Jo-in gone off to, leaving you alone?”
“He went to the latrine.”
“When?”
“About half an hour ago, I think.”
The escort frowned.
“What kind of shit takes half an hour? That bastard didn’t go hide somewhere to sleep again, did he?”
Leaving the grumbling escort behind, I headed toward the dormitory.
For a small or mid-sized gang, a late-night snack was usually just hard, dried wheat cakes or a few dumplings with barely any filling.
Even that much wasn’t always provided, but Simhyangru was a pricey courtesan house, so there were at least one or two dishes that deserved to be called food.
They were leftovers too awkward to serve to guests, or dishes that had gone cold after being taken back down from the tables, but they were still better than the single-dish meals you’d buy at most inns.
“Kyaaaah!”
As I walked along, savoring the thought of food, a shriek so sharp it seemed to tear the air made me turn around.
Running to the back of the main house, I found a young maid frozen in terror, shaking all over.
I didn’t know her name, but I’d seen her face more than once coming and going.
“What happened?”
With a face pale as a ghost’s, she covered her mouth and pointed somewhere with one trembling hand.
“Th-th-there...”
A dark path leading to the annexes. Around the middle of it, someone lay face-down on the ground.
I drew the saber from my waist and quickly checked the area around us.
Starting with the man sprawled there, with no movement and no groans, I scanned under and over the annex walls, the roof, the passageways between the shadowed buildings, and the neighboring structures...
After confirming there was no one else around, I stayed alert and moved in quickly.
The man on the ground was wearing a uniform robe.
I sheathed the willow-leaf saber and rolled him over onto his back.
The fresh scent of blood, still barely dry, stung my nose.
The moment I saw his face, I knew he hadn’t been dead for more than half an hour, no matter how long it had been. That was about how long Bang Jo-in had been away, saying he was going to the latrine.
It looked as though Bang Jo-in had been caught by surprise, because his eyes hadn’t even properly closed in death.
His face and throat were intact. The blade had struck the two characters Dragon Heaven stitched on the left side of his chest.
Beneath those torn, blood-soaked letters was his heart. Since he’d been stabbed straight through the heart, of course he’d died instantly.
As I straightened my knees and tried to stand, his swollen side caught my eye. When I pulled back the hem of his clothing, his purse was stuffed full of silver.
You crazy gambling bastard. Had he really climbed over the wall to go steal something?
It was a gambler’s ending, all right, but something about it still didn’t fit.
I didn’t have time to puzzle over it.
Voices and footsteps were growing louder behind me.
If I didn’t want to be misunderstood, I had to move fast before the others gathered.
I shoved the purse back into the corpse’s robes and quickly got to my feet.