"I Was Too Late?" She Had Been Waiting
“You’re late? I think you have the wrong person.”
“The wrong person? The wrong person, is it.”
Ju Hwaryeon walked toward me with her hands clasped behind her back.
[Host, stay calm.]
Mumyeong must have sensed the violent upheaval in my heart; the warning was ice-cold.
For the first time in my life, I understood how hundreds of thoughts could detonate inside a single human mind all at once.
Why?
How, exactly?
My eyes raked left and right of her. I checked behind me, ahead of me. I flung my five senses wide open. I strained my hearing to its absolute limit. There was no hiding the panic on my face. A cloth mask covered the lower half of it, but behind that mask I was biting my lip hard enough to split it.
By every reasonable measure, she was a connection I should never have seen again. In fact, I had moved a full beat faster than anyone would have expected precisely so I would never get tangled with the Ju Family again.
And yet here she was, blocking my path as if she had been waiting, telling me I was late.
“There’s no point playing dumb. Don’t you know your own voice?”
“What?”
I answered in a deliberately distorted register, then hurriedly cleared my throat. Ju Hwaryeon’s sharp eyes dragged up and down my body.
“That oddly clipped ending on every syllable. That muddy voice with the rasp of iron and a mid-low tone mixed through it.”
Her lofty gaze settled on me; between brows drawn as if by a brush, cool silver eyes regarded me without blinking.
“Last time you wore an iron mask. This time it’s a cloth mask over your jaw. Still not enough to fool me. Because—”
Whump!
Ju Hwaryeon seized me by the collar. I was hauled forward as if snagged by a carriage. She leaned in and quietly took in my scent.
“The body odor unique to a man who left an impression. That’s the same too. You underestimated me badly.”
“…Body odor?”
Mumyeong muttered.
[That’s what you get for not washing more often.]
Damn it. Anyone listening would get the wrong idea.
Back then I had been fighting mixed in with dozens of martial artists. If my whole body hadn’t been soaked in sweat and bloodstains, I wouldn’t have been human. On top of that, rainwater had drenched me and was drying off, amplifying every metallic, bloody note of the smell rolling off my skin.
Ju Hwaryeon rolled on without missing a beat.
“Hmm. Height and build match as well. My shoulder was about here, and the feel of your chest against my back was about like this. Spot on.”
“That can’t count as evi—”
Her expression went flat.
“You poured a wine jar over my head to get me drunk, tore my clothes, and now the ugly bastard has the gall to deny it too?”
Something in me boiled over.
“It wasn’t a wine jar, it was a chamber p—”
Ah.
[Idiot.]
Mumyeong sighed. I shut my eyes. The second the words left my mouth, I knew the mistake. Ju Hwaryeon’s eyes lit as she looked at me.
“There’s your proof.”
[I want to die. That my host would fall for bait this cheap…]
Mumyeong heaved a long, weary breath.
“….”
The moment I decided there was no going back, my wavering pupils locked into place. The set of my eyes changed.
Snap.
I snatched her by the wrist.
“Ah!”
The rough grab tore a short cry from her.
“So. Come for revenge, have you? Sorry, but your capacity to learn is lacking. No matter how many people you brought, if you yourself walk this close—”
“I’m alone, you brute with nothing but strength.”
“….”
I blinked.
[Unfortunately true. There is no one nearby. And.]
Mumyeong added,
[Frankly, this is ugly. You might consider letting go.]
I blinked again. Ju Hwaryeon frowned.
“Let go of my wrist.”
I released her.
I couldn’t understand it. None of it made sense. With the mind I had, I simply could not grasp her actions or her thinking.
Rubbing a wrist already turning red, Ju Hwaryeon scowled.
“How is a person built so that even with a mask covering more than half his face, that vacant look still shows through completely?”
“….”
“I can read it at a glance. How did this bastard know I’d pass here and stand waiting? How did he recognize me on sight? What’s he plotting? And so on. Right?”
“…Right.”
She glanced at the sky, as if watching something, then looked back at me.
“I have no reason to tell you. But looking at you, if I don’t, your head won’t take in another word I say.”
She spoke.
“It’s simple. Based on the behaviors you showed me, I narrowed it down to seven possibilities. I ran all seven, and I’m here waiting.”
For the first time today I was listening to human speech and failing to understand a syllable of it.
“Does that even make sense? What if I slipped out some other way?”
She wagged a finger.
“There are any number of roads out of the outskirts, but they all narrow like the neck of a bottle around this area—bottleneck congestion. The places that funnel into are four. And right now, at the other three, my people have blocked the entrances with carriages whose wheels are smashed and are redirecting everyone this way.”
Ju Hwaryeon opened her palm in front of me, then closed it into a fist.
“In the end, you had no choice but to come here.”
[Host. Be on guard.]
Mumyeong’s voice inverted, a frost-edged warning. And before he even spoke, my pupils had already contracted. My sense for killing intent stood on edge.
I knew this kind of person. If there were geniuses of martial arts, there were also people of extraordinary gift in human psychology and planning. People who saw a scope ordinary men never even looked at, and moved a full step ahead. Close at hand, people like Yun Hyeon or the Namgung patriarch, Namgung Hwiyul. More broadly…
…
People like Ryu Hwasa of the Blood Sect.
I knew it by instinct. The woman in front of me was one of those.
“Who are you.”
In a flicker of an instant, dozens of expressions crossed Ju Hwaryeon’s face.
“Heh. I’m Ju Hwaryeon? Daughter of the Ju Family. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“….”
The tension that had loosened for a moment drew taut again. Watching my eyes narrow, Ju Hwaryeon said,
“There it is.”
“There what.”
“That feeling. That particular, bottomlessly uneasy, razor-sharp feeling—like walking barefoot over broken glass. When I saw that stupid face a moment ago, I honestly wasn’t sure… but I’ve never met anyone whose two sides of atmosphere were this extreme.”
“What do you want. Keep it short.”
I bit the words off and spat them. Ju Hwaryeon answered,
“I came to see your face.”
“What?”
“At first I only came in to swap the Ju Family ledgers. I was interested in those books and nothing more. But that night, of all nights, I happened to run into you.”
The woman before me was not Ju Hwaryeon. Meaning she was someone else who had been disguised as Ju Hwaryeon. From the moment I felt that wrongness, my wariness had already climbed to its peak.
“You probably took me for the real Ju Hwaryeon. I did my best to act like her, after all. Anyway. I was curious who the man was who had, for the first time in my life, handed me that kind of humiliation—and just how brazen a bastard had to be to hit the Ju Family in the middle of the capital. That was all.”
“Don’t talk garbage. Does that sound like anything that makes sense?”
I frowned.
“You have a rough mouth for speaking to a woman.”
“In front of a blade there is no man, woman, young, or old.”
She smiled thinly.
“Interesting. You really don’t feel like the same person as a moment ago. The decisiveness, the way your head turns—everything. You’re a man worth wanting, you know that? Composure and madness coexisting. Something wild about it.”
Without even breathing, I fixed on every word she said. She went on.
“Of course, as you say, that isn’t all of it. I’m also here to deliver the death sentence that’s been handed down to you. I’m still in the position of this family’s young lady for the moment, so I’ve heard everything there is to hear.”
“Death sentence?”
My heart hammered. A scrap of prophecy that had been circling the edges of my mind jabbed me again and again.
Ju Hwaryeon’s voice went cold.
“The Ju Family put up a fortune and called in an extermination squad. Because of you alone.”
Dawn was breaking.
I had come out into the outskirts. While I walked the broad plain, there was not a single other human presence around me. On the sole road cutting across the great field, I was the only one moving. Half-melted snow had pooled in the wheel ruts left by carriages and hardened into a sheet of ice. To keep from slipping, I deliberately walked the grass along the side of the road.
[That the woman went out of her way to find you and tell you this was not out of goodwill—you know that, Host.]
“Of course.”
The answer was short, but my head was full of chaos.
Ju Hwaryeon—she truly had not brought a single subordinate. Until the moment I left, she simply watched me without making a move, and then she was gone. I still didn’t know what she trusted enough to pull a stunt that bold with no escort at all, but her last words had been these:
This is the punishment I have handed down for the insult you gave me—and at the same time, my final repayment for the fact that, in the middle of that chaos, you saved me without a word. Whether you live with it or are crushed under it is your choice.
Mumyeong had warned me, but I was no fool either. If I had been a fool, I would have died back when I was crawling the bottom of the capital like a beggar.
That she had told me about the extermination squad her father had dispatched was not simple kindness. At a glance, advance information looked like a good thing for everyone. But ordinary people, hearing that human butchers had been sent for the sole purpose of killing them, would stop sleeping through the night from that moment on. They would suffer a vicious mental torment and eventually die of it. Better, perhaps, never to know—then you might live at ease until the instant of death, and die in a single stroke.
She had chosen the path that gladly pressed that suffering onto me. Of course, on the premise that I endured the mental agony, I could prepare and act—so it wasn’t entirely bad. That was why, at the end, she had spoken those ambiguous words: both a punishment and a repayment.
Extermination squad.
My steps quickened. The sound of snow crunching underfoot rang in my ears.
I wanted to deny it. I could not deny it.
Mara Jin had said that in this third punitive trial, a Tugwi would come. He had even said something that almost sounded like encouragement—survive that Tugwi and see.
And at the end, Ju Hwaryeon had said this:
I don’t think so, but you—are you Blood Sect, by any chance? My father said you might be.
Whatever the reason, the moment the words “Blood Sect” had slipped out, there was only one thing I could think of.
Hyeol-yeong-mu-hwan-sin-sul.
The Blood Sect footwork I had taken from Baekho of the Blood Death Sect. They had clearly recognized it. A technique graded first-class by the standards of the Cheonma Dae-seogo could not possibly be ordinary martial arts. And this was an extermination squad sent after they already knew I used that very Hyeol-yeong-mu-hwan-sin-sul. If anything, they would overestimate my real ability; they would never look down on me. They had money enough. In a situation like this, they would never send ordinary men.
Damn it. Of all the ways for things to knot together.
Even without being a fool, I could see it. I still didn’t know exactly what kind of existence a Tugwi was, but by the circumstances I had to assume it was inside that extermination squad. I had to deal with it somehow before I met the Tugwi.
Even now, the worst enemy of my life was drawing closer.
The night that had gone deep was brightening. The sun was rising again. Far off, a golden dawn lifted itself into the sky. Time moved, and I neither slowed nor quickened, only kept walking.
Before long the road split.
At the fork, Mumyeong asked,
[The place Cheongunryong mentioned—where another of the Oho-samhwa is—lies to the west. West means the right-hand road.]
“No. That’s not it.”
I drew a map from my robes. On it, every mural I had memorized in Yuk-bi-dong was drawn clear and sharp.
“The Oho-samhwa aren’t the problem right now. If I go that way, I die.”
[Then?]
Before leaving Luoyang, I had once shown Yun Hyeon the drawings and asked.
Looking at this, is there any terrain or building that particularly comes to mind?
Yun Hyeon had studied the picture I held out for a long time, then said,
This looks rather like a colossal Buddha composed of tombs. Behind it, sticks—or spears—standing in a straight line.
Yes.
As always, Yun Hyeon asked no reasons. Silently, for his client’s question, he simply thought and examined with everything he had. He was a man who always produced answers without hesitation, but this time he did not answer easily. He stroked his chin and sank into thought for a long while.
I don’t know if this is the answer Young Master wants, but if it is the form of a Buddha made of tombs, there is one place to the east that comes to mind.
It was only after roughly a quarter-hour that Yun Hyeon opened his mouth.
However wide the Central Plains may be, there is only one place where such a distinctive expression would apply. Honestly, I have no great confidence.
In my right hand now was the drawing Yun Hyeon had given me then. In my left was the new one I had drawn from memory of Yuk-bi-dong. I compared the two. After a final check, I tucked both away into my robes.
“If I’m going to live, right now—”
I lifted my head. I looked at the left-hand road.
“I have to find the fourth secret cave first.”