A Twist of Fate
“You’re heading to Seochon?”
“That’s right.”
“Would you mind giving me a ride?”
“Hmm, just a moment.”
Tang Hye-seo disappeared beyond the window. She spoke briefly with someone outside, then came back to the opening.
“Get in.”
“Thank you.”
The rear door of the carriage opened. I stepped up onto the footboard and climbed inside, where a wave of hot air wrapped around me like a blanket.
Tang Hye-seo was seated opposite a familiar guard, and beside her was a middle-aged woman with streaks of gray in her hair, holding a book in her hands.
Those three were the only passengers in the large carriage.
I folded my hands in a formal salute and bowed to the middle-aged woman, who looked like the highest-ranking person here at a glance.
“Thank you for the ride. My name is Jeong Dae-cheon.”
The woman gave me a long, appraising look, then asked Tang Hye-seo, “A wandering martial artist?”
“He’s a guest of Haomu Sect, Aunt. He helped us out once before.”
“I see. A wandering martial artist, then.”
As if she’d lost interest, the woman turned her eyes back to her book.
The door shut behind me, and the carriage started moving again.
I set the bundle of clothes I’d brought down by my feet, the sword I’d stuck at an angle into it still protruding near the entrance.
Tang Hye-seo glanced at it, silently asking what it was. She held her tongue, probably because her aunt was there.
I just shrugged and pretended not to know.
The weather was cold, but I’d broken a sweat climbing the mountain and fighting my way through it. There was probably still a trace of blood on my clothes too.
Thankfully, one window had been left open, maybe for ventilation, maybe because they were wary of something.
Small braziers on either side kept the carriage warm.
Now that the heat was getting back into my body, I finally felt alive again.
I reached for my waterskin, then remembered I’d left my pack behind in Haomu Sect’s carriage when I got off.
I considered asking for water, but after reading the mood, I kept my mouth shut.
As the carriage rounded the foot of the mountain, the slope where I’d chased the opium smugglers came back into view. There was no one around.
The two of Pyo Hol-deuk’s men left at the scene would’ve already been taken care of by Geuk-hwan and Bok Ha-gyu, and everyone else would have returned to Seochon by now.
I wondered what had happened to the enormous haul of opium worth tens of thousands of taels of silver.
Black Night Gang didn’t deal in opium, so Haomu Sect must have taken it.
I reached inside my clothes and checked the token and seal hidden against my chest. They were still there, solid under my fingertips.
With these, if I made the deal with Bok Ha-gyu tomorrow, I’d have a path to meeting Jeok Chu-yeong.
The whole thing had almost fallen apart when it turned out the inspector was fake, and for a second I’d thought the deal was dead. But now it looked like it would somehow go through after all, and the relief of it came up in me like a sigh I couldn’t hold back.
As the carriage swayed, my eyes slowly drifted shut.
“We’re here. That’s Seochon.”
Drawn by Tang Hye-seo’s clear voice, I lifted my head without thinking. Through my sleepy blur, the familiar streets of Seochon came into view.
I blinked dazedly, then saw the bundle of clothes and Pyo Hol-deuk’s sword by my feet, and came fully awake.
If I took those into Haomu Sect with me, they’d notice that I had Pyo Hol-deuk’s token and seal.
“I’ll get off here.”
Tang Hye-seo stopped the carriage. I thanked her and her aunt once more, gathered my things, and climbed down.
Stepping out of the carriage’s warmth into the cold air made late autumn’s chill seem to claw straight into my bones.
I watched the two carriages disappear between the buildings, then turned away.
No one was there to welcome me, but once I was home, I finally felt my shoulders loosen.
I barred the gate, set my spoils and my long saber down on the floor of the veranda, washed my hands, feet, and face, then lit the brazier and boiled some tea water.
In the warm main room, I blew on hot tea while I eased my hunger with jerky and dry rations.
After filling my stomach more or less, I sat cross-legged and checked my dantian.
The emptiness there made my vision swim. It was the first time I’d felt this kind of hollowness since I formed my dantian.
What remained of my internal energy was only about forty-five percent.
I’d burned through a ridiculous fifty-five percent of my life-giving internal energy just to kill that damned bastard of a fiend.
How was I supposed to refill this?
Stunned and blank, I finally took out the pills I’d hidden away.
Twenty pills refined from the Sun-forgetting Ginseng Geuk-hwan had obtained for me.
Because I’d been rationing them so carefully, I still had nineteen pills and a fifth of another left.
For now, I’d have to use these to replenish the internal energy I’d spent.
I put one pill and a fifth into my mouth, chewed them carefully, and swallowed.
Then I drew my internal energy upward and pulled the herb’s natural energy from the pills into my dantian.
There wasn’t much in them, so the breathing exercise didn’t take long. After settling my qi, I checked my dantian again.
The internal energy I’d recovered was barely five percent.
I’d heard that the Sun-forgetting Ginseng was a spiritual herb, but it still couldn’t compare to the Heavenly Mountain Snow Ginseng.
Twenty pills sounded like a lot, but all they really were was one ginseng root refined into medicine.
Was I supposed to eat all of these just to recover completely?
The pills were too precious, so when I tried to reach for another one, my hand hesitated.
Did I really need to fill my internal energy all the way?
I sat there staring at the pills for a long time before I finally nodded to myself.
I did.
I didn’t know when or where I might need to use my internal energy again. Hoarding pills was pointless if I died and someone else ended up with them anyway.
I shoved three pills into my mouth without further hesitation and went through another breathing session to replenish my qi. Even then, it still wasn’t enough.
Two more. Then three more.
Each time a pill disappeared, it felt like a piece of my lifespan was being carved off, and my blood ran dry with the thought.
But I didn’t stop.
Only after I’d eaten ten more did my dantian finally become as full of internal energy as it had been before I left home that morning.
That left me with only five pills.
Staring at the empty wooden box, I started shaking all over like some addict.
“Where the hell am I supposed to get more spiritual herbs now... Should I go back to Hxshi?”
I took out Pyo Hol-deuk’s money pouch and checked the contents.
There were five bank notes worth ten taels of silver each.
The large pouch held only a few small personal effects, nothing worth money.
I had thirty taels of silver on me. All told, that made eighty taels.
It was a considerable sum, but nowhere near enough to buy spiritual herbs.
The only reason I’d been able to buy the Heavenly Mountain Snow Ginseng for one hundred taels of silver was that I’d learned the seller was desperate and squeezed him hard. I couldn’t count on luck like that again.
Come to think of it, Pan Ho-yang, the man who sold that ginseng back then, was in Black Night Gang’s hands now.
Maybe I could make contact through Bok Ha-gyu and ask whether he had anything like Heavenly Mountain Snow Ginseng again.
Then again, that wouldn’t work either.
He was the bastard who’d sold the Heavenly Mountain Snow Ginseng for a song, gotten furious over it, and hired ten thugs to kill me and take it back.
If I met him, he’d try to kill me again, not sell me spiritual herbs.
Geuk-hwan had also flat-out said that spiritual herbs were hard to get and expensive.
I thought back to the fight with Pyo Hol-deuk on the mountain.
If I’d finished him quickly, with one clean strike, I wouldn’t have wasted nearly so much internal energy.
Only now did I truly understand why Do Goeng-il had told me to use internal energy only for life-saving moves.
A life-saving technique was exactly what it sounded like: a high-level move that saved your life.
It had to be short and devastating.
Just like the terrifying string of sword strikes Pyo Hol-deuk had unleashed.
I’d been holding my own until that eerie web of sword light swept through me and took a cut out of my shoulder.
If the chain of attacks had kept going, it might have punched holes through my limbs and torso alike.
Pyo Hol-deuk had less internal energy than I did, so how had he managed to pour so much of it into his forms?
The maximum amount of internal energy I could send from my dantian into my limbs, to support a technique, was about the thickness of eight silk threads.
What about Pyo Hol-deuk? Ten threads of silk, maybe more?
He’d probably beaten me in both the density and depth of his internal energy too.
And yet the one who ended up beheaded and fed to the wolves was Pyo Hol-deuk, not me.
He’d run out of internal energy while continuing the chain of attacks.
If his internal energy had exceeded mine, I would have died.
If Pyo Hol-deuk had gone all-out from the start and unleashed a killing chain of strikes, I still would’ve been cut apart before I could even use my own internal energy.
His mistake was underestimating me, cornering me, and trying to enjoy the process.
The lesson from today’s fight was plain.
From now on, if I had to use internal energy, I needed to finish things in one blow.
I had to keep finding spiritual herbs, refining them into pills, and increasing the amount of internal energy I could support in a technique. I also needed to improve the density of my internal energy and the efficiency of my circulation.
I had to condense my internal energy into a technique and create a trump card worthy of a life-saving move, one that could rival the storm of attacks Pyo Hol-deuk had shown me.
In the end, it all came down to endless training.
Even lying in the warm room, I couldn’t get the exchange from earlier out of my head. I got up and picked up my long saber.
A few rounds of breathing exercise had already worn away much of my fatigue.
I went out into the yard with my saber and carefully replayed my battle with Pyo Hol-deuk from the beginning.
Under a cloud-choked sky fading into evening with no sunset at all, I kept slashing and thrusting at the sword of a dead man, over and over into empty air.
*
So this was what they called a twist of fate...
As he walked north along the mountain path, the opium smuggler Yi Lim fell into a strange train of thought.
When he’d stabbed the Tianshan men in the back and stolen the carriage loaded with opium to make his escape, he’d felt as if the whole world belonged to him.
When the damned pack mule stumbled on the night road and the carriage tipped onto its side, he’d nearly died on the spot.
He’d gone into Seochon to sell the opium and buy a new horse, but there hadn’t been a single decent buyer. These damned country bumpkins didn’t know what opium was supposed to taste like, so he couldn’t unload it at all.
Then he’d been caught by the black-clad gangsters and beaten half to death.
When he saw the Tianshan men disguised as Martial Alliance inspectors again, the sky really did go dark.
He’d thought he was truly finished, only for a group of martial artists to spring an ambush from the mountains out of nowhere.
While those bastards tore into one another, Yi Lim had desperately watched his chance and cut through his ropes.
Everyone had been too busy fighting to pay attention, so he’d even managed to snatch plenty of opium in the chaos.
As he reached into his clothes to check the goods, a satisfied grin spread across Yi Lim’s face.
With this, he might have a chance to go back to Gansu and rebuild himself. That area was crawling with demonic-path martial artists and wandering fighters, so opium there was always in demand.
Since he’d come down this road before, Yi Lim moved quickly and without hesitation.
Unlike last time, he had no pack mule and no carriage piled high with opium, but after surviving by the skin of his teeth, his steps felt lighter than air.
He passed through a barren rocky ridge and descended into a valley when something blocked his path.
The man had the air of a wolf, but he wasn’t a wolf. He was a martial artist wrapped in a long robe, his face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.
“Who are you?”
The moment Yi Lim saw the sword at the man’s waist, he drew his own blade.
“Did you lot rob the cargo in Xinjiang?”
The deep voice of a middle-aged man made Yi Lim flinch.
This wasn’t some bandit or highway robber. This man knew who he was and what he’d done, and he’d come hunting him down.
Damn it...
What kind of twist of fate was this, and why was it so fast? How long had he even been gone before someone came after him again?
“Why did you come to Seochon of all places? Who did you meet?”
The middle-aged man seemed to have a great many questions for him.
Yi Lim shut his mouth and gripped his sword with both hands.
There was no way this man would politely let him go just because he answered nicely. He’d have to cut through him and break out.
He hadn’t dared test himself against the Tianshan men, but in Gansu he’d been a seasoned killer who’d spent years sharpening his edge with a blade.
When words didn’t work, the middle-aged man drew a curved saber too.
Yi Lim charged. He kicked dirt into the man’s face and swung his sword without restraint.
The middle-aged man dodged hard to the side and countered. Yi Lim easily knocked aside the incoming slash and felt a surge of triumph. The other man was weaker than he’d expected.
Pressing him a few more times, he quickly found an opening.
Yi Lim’s eyes gleamed as he drove his sword toward the man’s vital point. As if he’d been waiting for it, the middle-aged man thrust his curved saber out too.
Blade met blade in midair.
Just before the sword and saber collided, the saber tip subtly tilted inward. It hooked and pressed against the sword’s body, then rode it down before driving forward in a long thrust.
The sword spun sideways, twisting Yi Lim’s wrist. His elbow and shoulder folded inward as the saber drove toward his throat.
Shocked, Yi Lim let go of his sword and twisted away. The middle-aged man surged in and kicked him in the chest.
Yi Lim rolled across the ground and coughed up blood.
“Cough, cough... Rannachal? What kind of spear art are you using with a sword...”
He grimaced in pain and confusion, staring at the middle-aged man, when his eyes suddenly flew wide.
“Don’t tell me you’re from the northern army...”
Thwack!
The kick that followed turned Yi Lim’s jaw aside and knocked him unconscious where he lay.
“Get some rest. We’ll have plenty to talk about through the night.”
The middle-aged man sheathed his blade and pulled a rope from behind his waist. He bound Yi Lim’s arms and legs, then gagged him.
As he brushed his hands off and stood up, a man in a bamboo hat came hurrying down the mountain path ahead.
The middle-aged man looked back and asked, “How did it go?”
The subordinate gave a troubled glance and answered in a small voice, “...Haomu Sect took the goods.”
“What were the gate guards doing that made the response so slow?”
The middle-aged man raised the brim of his straw hat. At the cold look in his eyes, the subordinate trembled and quickly bowed his head.
“I-I’m sorry. They’re still new, so their judgment is slow.”
“At this rate, how am I supposed to trust you and leave things in your hands without worrying? Tsk. We’re taking this one back.”
The middle-aged man lowered the brim of his hat again and headed down the mountain path. The subordinate hurriedly hoisted Yi Lim onto his shoulder and followed behind.
Someone on the carriage waiting below in the valley waved to them. The two of them made their way down to it.
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