So Yeomgyo!?
“So Yeomgyo!?”
Without a doubt, I was the most shocked person in that place right then.
“H-how are you even here?!”
“Hm?”
Rather, So Yeomgyo blinked when our eyes met.
“Bilyu?”
It was the tone of someone double-checking whether it was really me.
Her reaction threw me into confusion instead.
“It is you, Bilyu?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Who else would it be.”
“….”
She strode straight toward me.
“You—you bitch! How dare you treat my children like this— Gah!”
So Yeomgyo flicked her hand clean.
The silver soft sword coiled around her wrist flashed.
In a single breath it traced across Ryu Cheong-jin’s throat.
“These… these dog bastards.”
Ryu Cheong-jin muttered as he collapsed with his neck sliced open.
So Yeomgyo turned a chilling gaze on him and spoke.
“You’re not even the main body anyway. At first I was going to grab you and ask about my subordinates’ whereabouts, but that doesn’t seem necessary anymore. Mind clearing out so a man and a woman can have a mature conversation?”
“I will definitely avenge this humiliation…”
Bang!
Ryu Cheong-jin went flying from So Yeomgyo’s kick, vanishing into a heap of dirt far away.
She blinked her red eyes and came toward me.
Gulp.
For no good reason I tensed even more and edged back a little.
Her hand shot out and seized me by the collar.
My retreating upper body stopped cold.
She stepped right up to me.
A faint powdery scent and the smell of her skin drifted over.
So Yeomgyo’s black hair fluttered.
Creak, creak…
The countless red lanterns hanging from the underground ceiling swayed slowly.
In that underground world steeped in red shadows, her red pupils sparkled as she looked at me.
Her eyes, lined as if with a thick black brush, looked almost catlike.
Her brows drooped slightly into a figure-eight, and she tilted her head.
“Did you get taller?”
“…What?”
Tense as I had been, I let out a short sigh at that ridiculously ordinary question.
“It’s not like I’m some kid still growing. Height doesn’t just shoot up.”
“You’re not the scrawny guy I used to know. Something about you feels bigger. What is it?”
She even raised a finger and poked my forearm.
“…What are you doing?”
“No, you just look really hard. Like when you see a block of tofu that looks extra firm—you just want to poke it with your finger, right?”
“….”
The heat that had filled my chest from the struggle until now drained away in the most absurd fashion.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose and said,
“You left so suddenly saying you were busy. What brings you here all of a sudden?”
So Yeomgyo nudged a Blood Jiangshi rolling on the floor with her toe.
“That’s what I should be asking. Why on earth are you here, and how did you get tangled up with these things… What the hell happened?”
I focused on her ankle.
Her slender white ankle was smeared with black blood that had to belong to the Blood Jiangshi.
Back when my martial arts were still low I wouldn’t have known, but now the direction of the blood spatter and the wounds on the Blood Jiangshi told me exactly what had occurred.
Mid-level kicks. At least one Blood Jiangshi finished with each kick, huh.
She had cut down dozens of Blood Jiangshi without even breathing hard.
Yet the fact that her eyes had turned into Flame Eyes—the state that appeared only when she went all out—told me those fallen Blood Jiangshi had been no pushovers.
So the talk of her being a legend among assassins, on par with a Guardian, wasn’t empty after all.
She silently looked me over, covered in dirt and wounds.
Then she took in the underground space of the Yukrim First Branch, wrecked by the fierce battle behind me.
Beyond that lay the thoroughly smashed corpses of the branch’s high-ranking officers, along with the completely destroyed pleasure den.
“Judging by the looks of it, it doesn’t seem like you came here unable to stand a lonely night and trying to hook up with a courtesan somehow.”
“No, hey. There’s no way that’s it.”
I could let other things slide, but that particular misunderstanding I hated more than death.
“I have high standards and integrity too, you know. I’m not the type who meets just any woman.”
“….”
So Yeomgyo blinked her red eyes and looked at me.
It was a look that clearly said, You?
“Hey, that look is kind of hurtful. I do have eyes for these things.”
“Fine, I’ll take your word for it.”
Feeling more and more like I was digging my own grave the longer I talked, I hurriedly changed the subject.
“Anyway, what are you really doing here all of a sudden? There’s no reason for you to be in Shaanxi—”
Thud.
So Yeomgyo held a document out in front of me.
“Ah.”
It was the carrier-pigeon letter I had sent before.
Below was my name and seal, written in my clumsy hand but unmistakably mine.
“A 4th-grade field investigator—the lowest rank in the Blood Death Sect—is running around throwing blank checks everywhere, so shouldn’t the Munju come catch him?”
“W-well, about that. What I wrote in that document isn’t a lie, but…”
Crumple.
So Yeomgyo grinned and crumpled the letter stamped with my seal.
“And where is that bitch?”
“…?”
Looking at me with eyes full of question marks, So Yeomgyo furrowed her brows and said,
“I’ve heard from more than one or two places that you’re going around with a silver-haired outstanding beauty, so why do you keep making that face like you know nothing? A 4th-grade subordinate has the Munju personally searching for him, yet he slips away and tours the jianghu flirting with a beauty?”
“…..”
I clutched my throbbing head.
“Shall we move somewhere first?”
Though it hadn’t been intentional, the Yukrim First Branch—the first of Unwol Jiju’s five branches—had been smashed beyond any hope of recovery.
It was only natural that the surroundings were in an uproar like a poked beehive.
Fortunately, Shaanxi Province was truly vast, and many small villages lay scattered around it.
To avoid further friction we first left Shaanxi completely and moved to a nearby small village.
So Yeomgyo wore a large bamboo hat that almost completely hid her small face.
We entered a small inn in the central square of the village.
“…So that’s what happened.”
I told her a great many things.
She hung her bamboo hat to one side and blinked as she listened to my story.
In a way, everything had begun with my meeting her.
In a way, it had been a fateful bad connection.
As the leader of an assassin group she had accepted a request from the Moyong Family to eliminate me; there she had been captivated by my eyes and promised that if I so much as grazed her, she would spare my life at least once.
And everything had started from there.
I had struggled desperately and left a scratch on her cheek; she had flown into a rage, lost her composure for a moment, and split my heart open.
There I had met Mumyeong through the Heavenly Demon Jade. Later, when she came to kill me again, she had subdued me in the second life-or-death battle, yet because of her promise she had gone out of her way to save me—and that was how I had come this far.
“Right. So that’s why you were running around causing all sorts of incidents. You had no choice…”
What So Yeomgyo ordered was the strongest sorghum wine the inn had.
“…Is that what you were going to say?”
“……”
I hung my head.
Drip.
The last drop fell from the sorghum wine in her hand.
For reference, five empty bottles of the same wine already stood beside her.
“So all this time you’ve been selling the Blood Death Sect’s 4th-grade status and causing every kind of trouble everywhere, huh? Our Mr. Bilyu?”
“Ah… um… well…”
“Do you know how much I’ve suffered because of you?”
“Huh?”
So Yeomgyo smiled sweetly and thrust her face toward me.
“Do you know how it feels to lead the largest assassin group in the jianghu and stay up all night buried under piles of documents that need approval? When you finish field work, documents pile up; when you finish documents, field work piles up. But oh my. Once you clear the document pile, normally it shouldn’t pile up again for a week—yet some guy living somewhere is so diligently running around doing things that dozens, hundreds of report documents come flying in?”
“Ha… haha.”
“And I get that your skills have improved by leaps and bounds. But the problem is that while going around saying you’re Blood Death Sect 4th-grade, you’ve been showing off that powerful martial arts knowingly or not—so do you know how awkward I’ve been?”
So Yeomgyo forced a bright smile as if suppressing her boiling insides and picked up the sixth wine bottle.
Looking at that, I thought,
Why on earth are all the women around me such heavy drinkers…
Both Eun Seollyeong and So Yeomgyo drank like fish, but their habits were completely opposite.
Eun Seollyeong was a big eater who enjoyed drinking with meals.
Rather than sipping strong liquor while eating huge amounts of food, she simply drank large quantities at once.
In contrast, So Yeomgyo preferred sipping the strongest possible liquor over sheer volume.
She was a light eater, and most of her food was red and spicy.
Of course, they had one thing in common.
“Does So Yeomgyo also burn the alcohol off with inner energy? Drinking like that from early evening…”
“Do you think I’d commit such a blasphemy against alcohol?!”
“….”
The terrifying point was that she was a true orthodox heavy drinker with a massive capacity.
When she got drunk, her white skin flushed red.
Her neck beneath the black hair was reddening with the rising intoxication.
“Ah, right. Come to think of it, I have to settle this too. It’s been a while. Do you know what kind of requests are pouring into our Blood Death Sect right now? Thanks to you, Baekho is dying from overwork.”
“What is it?”
I tried hard to look away from the outfit that revealed her sensual figure.
She spread her fingers and grumbled.
“The clients all heard from somewhere and every single one of them is looking for you. They want to entrust the request to that 4th-grade field investigator Bilyu who’s famous for his sharp hands these days. Even if I say the requests are already full so that guy can’t take it and we’ll proceed with someone else, they say no—they’re willing to wait… But!”
Thud.
She was about to slam the table hard but, realizing she was drunk, controlled her strength and only lightly tapped it.
“Hey. You think assassins with skills at your level are common, Bilyu? In the end Baekho has to handle all of it. So Baekho’s face is a skeleton now—a skeleton. As Munju I feel responsible for making Baekho retire from this crap and get married, but if that already ugly kid’s face becomes a skeleton, what woman would look at him?”
“…I’ll have to go apologize to Baekho separately later.”
“And that’s not the important thing. That red ring you said you found at the Unwol Jiju First Branch.”
So Yeomgyo muttered as she swept her black hair behind her ear as if her head hurt.
“That seems to be connected to me as well.”
“Huh?”
So Yeomgyo’s gaze grew serious.
“There was a request to find spies planted by the Heavenly Demon Cult and the Blood Cult inside the Orthodox factions. So during the investigation a few spies were caught by our kids and killed, and every one of them was wearing that ring.”
“….”
So Yeomgyo spoke in a calm voice while caressing her wine cup.
“The problem is that one of them belonged to Cheonsubaekryeonsa. Do you have any idea?”