The Piglet
The sound of rain drumming against the windows woke me before dawn.
The moment I opened my eyes, I reached into the blanket and found my saber. Keeping my head on the pillow, I twisted just enough to check that the door and window were still shut. Then I closed my eyes again and let out a long breath.
“Hoooonngh.”
I must have dreamed something, but I couldn’t remember a thing.
I lay there for a while, rummaging through the fog in my head, then shook off the blanket and got up. When I opened the window, a damp chill rushed in at once.
The dawn light was pale and blurred. Fine threads of rain fell over the autumn barley the farmers had scattered across the fields.
Children raised on farms were usually light sleepers. If a downpour hit in the middle of the night, you had to spring up, carve out drainage ditches, and bind the bundles of grain before they rotted. If a cow bawled in the stable, you had to grab a club and run out to catch the thief who’d come for it.
If your ears were dull, you didn’t survive.
I had lost my parents to a flood, so I was a little more sensitive than most.
That was why, back when I lived as a wandering drifter, I always got the first cut in on anyone who tried to quietly slip into my room and open the door. Even when I slept rough in the mountains, I was the first to sense the stealthy approach of something moving through the dark.
Seeing how cold the autumn rain was, winter had probably begun in earnest.
Shivering, I found the fire striker and lit the ashes left in the brazier.
I set water on to boil, chewed dried beef, and stared idly at the rain-swept world outside.
For the past few days, I’d shut myself inside all day and focused on training.
I replayed my bloody clash with Pyo Hol-deuk over and over, chewing on every detail. His saber style, powered by internal energy, had pushed speed, force, and chained attacks beyond common sense.
So I’d focused on that part and driven the techniques of the first eighteen forms to their limit.
Only then had I begun to feel the threads of martial principles I’d sensed in the latter eighteen forms slowly drawing out the hidden potential buried in the first eighteen.
The latter eighteen forms were an abstract martial art that condensed the Cheongsan Sect’s principles into the framework of saber technique.
Only now did I finally understand what Do Goeng-il had meant when he told me to “use the principles of the latter eighteen forms as a teacher and temper the first eighteen forms with them.”
I was making progress along that thread, but a troublesome problem kept tripping me up.
Internal energy.
Even the simple act of guiding internal energy into the forms consumed a little of it, tiny as that expenditure might be. No matter how I regulated my breathing and nourished my qi, it wasn’t enough to replenish what I had spent.
But if I didn’t feed internal energy into the latter eighteen forms, they were nothing more than a set of limp, flailing dance steps.
As a result of training with no proper plan, I was now down to just four pills and four-fifths of another.
The more time I spent training, the faster those pills would disappear.
Once I’d eaten the last crumb, I’d have to stop all training that relied on internal energy until I could find a spiritual herb.
The internal energy left in my dantian had to be reserved as a life-saving trick for emergencies.
There was no telling when and where some martial artist might suddenly start using internal energy the way Pyo Hol-deuk had.
Please, let me stumble across a spiritual herb somewhere...
For the past few days, whenever I wasn’t holding a saber, all I could think about was finding a spiritual herb.
I knew perfectly well that I was becoming obsessed with internal energy. And internal energy was worth that obsession.
If I’d never tasted it from the beginning, I might not have cared. But once I’d felt its power, I couldn’t give it up.
Hell, I’d even started thinking about entering a martial contest I’d never once cared to go near in my life.
Rainwater drifted in on the wind and seeped through the window.
Snapped out of my thoughts, I went to close it—then heard a faint squeaking sound somewhere in the distance. Small and fragile, but it kept crying out through the rain without stopping.
There was nothing out there in the soaked landscape that could have made a sound like that.
I could have ignored it, but I had nothing else to do, so I tucked my saber into my belt.
I threw on my rain cloak, crossed the yard, and opened the front gate. The wide fields beyond were empty.
The sound was coming from the foot of the mountain a little ways off.
A tiny piglet was crying as if its life depended on it.
It was the first time I’d ever heard a piglet squeal. It sounded a lot different from what I’d expected, which made it seem both strange and oddly interesting.
Was it calling for its mother? I looked around, but there wasn’t a full-grown wild boar in sight.
I’d only eaten wild boar once. It had been tough and reeked of gaminess, but it was better than starving.
After that I never had the chance again. And frankly, I didn’t want to eat it if I could help it. So I had no intention of catching the piglet either.
Just as I was about to close the gate, it met my eyes.
The piglet, after spotting me, didn’t run. Instead, it raised its voice even louder, as if it were asking for help.
It was a strange thing.
Animal young didn’t cry out around predators. Most of them kept their mouths shut and either fled or hid.
Why was this one acting like that...?
Curiosity pulled me forward, and I stepped out through the gate.
Seen up close, the piglet looked round and almost cute, unlike its vicious mother.
It trembled all over when it looked at me. Not just from the rain. Even that small, fragile thing knew instinctively that humans were dangerous.
So why had it risked its life to call me over?
The piglet darted up the mountain path. When I watched it for a moment, it stopped beside a rock and looked back.
As if to say, If you want to know, follow me.
Before I realized it, I was moving too. The little thing gathered itself and scrambled up the slope again.
Walking through the rain after a piglet had to be one of the stupidest things I’d ever done. And yet I kept following it without stopping.
At some forest on the mountainside, a strange yet perfectly foreseeable sight was waiting for me.
A huge adult boar had collapsed there, wheezing for breath.
Every time it struggled, the snare looped around its neck bit deeper under the skin and tightened its airway another notch.
The piglet circled its mother and squealed at me.
I had no idea what it wanted from me.
Was it asking me to save its mother, or to ease her suffering...?
It surely knew what humans were to them, so it was probably the latter.
No matter how much the piglet cried, I couldn’t free the mother.
The snare had probably been set by a farmer living nearby.
Just because this year’s harvest wasn’t bad didn’t mean the farmers’ lives were easy.
Once all the taxes and dues were taken out, they’d still be scraping by until barley ripened in early summer next year.
For farmers with heavy debts, winter meant cutting down on mouths to feed, just as Gu-sam had once been dumped in front of Poongcheon Inn.
To keep their families together and put even one stinking bite of meat into their children’s mouths, they’d climbed up the mountain right after the harvest and set the trap.
I wasn’t about to, on a rainy day, let some foolish sentimental mood kick over a family’s dinner table.
Still, there was something I could do.
Luckily, the rain would keep the smell of blood from carrying far.
And before the other beasts got to it, the owner of the trap would probably find the boar.
I drew my saber and drove it deep into the mother boar’s throat.
“Kweeeh...”
Perhaps exhausted from struggling all night, the mother didn’t even scream—only let out a weak, airless sound as the life went out of her.
The pain in its breathing and the frantic kicking stopped, and a languid stillness settled over it.
The piglet no longer cried. It only kept rubbing its face endlessly against its mother’s soft belly.
I wiped the blade clean, sheathed it, and went back down the mountain.
Under the loud drumming of rain against the undergrowth, my footsteps on the soaked earth rang out unusually clear.
By the next afternoon, the rain had finally stopped. It was the sort of early-winter cold that made my breath show white in the air.
After spending the morning swinging my saber and practicing my saber forms, I left the house around noon.
Won Seo-gang still wasn’t in the side house.
I left a note tucked into the crack of the door, asking him to come to Poongcheon Inn when he returned, and turned away.
My steps stopped in front of the side house where the Tang Clan people were staying. I still hadn’t been paid for escorting Tang Hye-seo to Heuksi.
They wouldn’t cheat me, would they?
I didn’t feel like going in there again and making things awkward, so I backed off.
I went to Poongcheon Inn, drank warm tea, and ate wheat cakes while taking my time to rest.
Maybe because of the chill, there were fewer people on the streets than usual, and the whole town looked gloomy.
“It’s winter, all right.”
Gu-sam nodded as he chewed a wheat cake.
“The year’s already almost gone. In just the past few days, there’ve been a lot more little beggars in the alleys of Seochon. Looks like they’ve drifted in from villages that had a bad harvest...”
More child beggars in the back alleys—that was one of the lonelier sights winter brought with it.
Gu-sam would probably have ended up living and dying on the roadside as a beggar too, if the innkeeper hadn’t taken him in.
I was thinking it might be time to get up when I drained the last cup of tea. Then Won Seo-gang came into the inn, taking off his outer cloak as he did.
Without even greeting me, he dropped into the seat across from mine and let out a tired sigh.
I poured him a cup of tea and asked, “How’s the recruiting going?”
“Managed to find one more, barely. I didn’t know it’d be this hard to dig up someone worth a damn.”
It sounded like he still had only one thing on his mind: getting over the wall of the Black Night Gang Headquarters.
“Can’t you put that off a little?”
“Our Brother Jeong, I hear you’ve been hanging around Bok Ha-gyu a lot while I’ve been away. Have you taken up residence at the Black Night Gang already?”
“I’m just doing something I don’t normally do because I want to see even the face of Jeok Chu-yeong.”
Warming himself with the hot tea, Won Seo-gang spoke in a calm voice.
“There’s an easy, fast road. Why insist on going around?”
“Jeok the gang leader is bedridden right now. Even if we went over the wall, he’s not in any condition to hold a conversation.”
“So there was a reason he’s been holed up for two years. In that case...”
Won Seo-gang lowered his voice, suddenly serious.
“Then we need to hurry even more. If the gang leader just dies on us, wouldn’t that make everything pointless?”
“He won’t die that easily.”
Bok Ha-gyu was doing everything he could to keep him alive. Even if Jeok Chu-yeong wanted to die in peace, it wouldn’t come easy.
“There are many ways a man can die. A patient bedridden with illness doesn’t necessarily die of that illness.”
“What are you saying?”
Won Seo-gang stared at me with puzzled eyes.
“You’ve been mixing around with the Black Night Gang, but you don’t really know what’s going on inside? Well, they’d hardly go around advertising their own weakness.”
“Then what is it?”
“Right now the Black Night Gang is on the verge of internal conflict. They haven’t openly clashed, but in truth they’ve split into three factions.”
Come to think of it, Bok Ha-gyu had led only the Solitary Ripping Unit and charged Blood Sand Gang by himself. So it wasn’t just that he and the others were on bad terms—they must have been genuinely at odds.
“You mean the trio of unit leaders?”
“Who else? Bok Ha-gyu was the first to follow Jeok Chu-yeong, they say. He’s stubborn and loyal, but the other two aren’t.”
“Im Ja-gyeon and Seon Do-mu?”
Won Seo-gang’s eyes turned cold.
“Those bastards are black to the bone, true-blue underworld dogs. They knelt and obeyed because they were overwhelmed by Jeok Chu-yeong’s martial skill and authority. They’re not loyal hounds like Bok Ha-gyu. Now that Jeok Chu-yeong has fallen ill, they’re starting to lift their heads and think their own thoughts. That’s how the underworld works, after all. Backstabbing is the foundation. Two years of holding back is almost impressive.”
“You know Bok Ha-gyu wiped out Blood Sand Gang this time, right?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Then those two won’t be able to move so easily, would they?”
Won Seo-gang shook his head.
“The opposite, actually. That only made things more urgent. If you were Im Ja-gyeon or Seon Do-mu, how would you feel right now? Would you just stand there and watch one of the men who’d been shoulder to shoulder with you suddenly surge ahead?”
If Bok Ha-gyu absorbed all of Blood Sand Gang’s wealth and manpower, what would happen? He’d definitely become stronger than he was now.
If Im Ja-gyeon and Seon Do-mu had any ambition at all, they’d strike Bok Ha-gyu before that happened.
In other words, whether through Bok Ha-gyu or by climbing over the wall, if I wanted to meet Jeok Chu-yeong, I had to make my move before then.
After scheming in depth with Won Seo-gang about infiltrating the Black Night Gang, I left the inn.
I headed for the brewery to look for Jin Seok-man, planning to learn the Black Night Gang Headquarters’ internal layout as thoroughly as possible.
Before I reached the bustling district, someone waved at me and walked over.
“Well, I’ll be. Long time no see. How’ve you been?”
It was Pung Chil, who’d gone off to earn wages as a day laborer in another town. Beside him stood a child who lowered his head politely.
It was Pung O-bok, now twelve years old and a proper cadet at Cheongun Martial Arts Academy after passing the entrance exam.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“I’m well, sir.”
Only a few months had passed since I’d last seen Pung O-bok, but he was clearly different now.
I didn’t know what kind of martial arts he was training in at Cheongun Martial Arts Academy, but his eyes were full of a fighting spirit and grit that didn’t belong to a child. Even the aura he carried had become surprisingly solid.
He had the air of a prematurely grown-up kid, hard to believe he was the same age as Gu-sam.
When our eyes met, Pung O-bok flinched and quickly dropped his gaze.
“O-bok got a few days off and came home. And get this—he placed first in the martial exam this time...”
Pung Chil beamed with pride, bragging about his son as though he were showing off the most precious, dazzling treasure in the world.
I stood there by the road, listening for a long while before we exchanged farewells and parted ways. Before I’d even taken a few steps, Pung O-bok called out to me.
“...Sir, wait.”
When I turned back, Pung O-bok hesitated and lowered his head again.
“What is it?”
After a long moment of hesitation, Pung O-bok forced a smile and shook his head.
“...Nothing. It’s cold out, so please be careful not to catch a chill.”
He bowed quickly and hurried after his father. He clearly had something he wanted to say, but decided it wasn’t something he should say to me.
I kept glancing back at the sight of Pung O-bok’s retreating figure. Shaking my head, I turned away.
Maybe it was just my imagination. It had to be.
What came to mind was that piglet I’d seen yesterday.