Meeting
“Ugh.”
Kicks rained down on every part of my body that had nowhere to flee.
“What are you looking at? If you don’t want to end up like this, keep your nose out of it.”
The three fools trampling me rolled up their sleeves and glared at the murmuring crowd. The jet-black snakes inked onto their arms marked them as members of the Black Snake Sect, the gang that had seized this area.
The infamous backing they had behind them was enough to silence most people’s consciences.
“Damn it! What, just because they’re good with a blade they can treat us like this?”
Listening to their grumbling, I finally understood why I was getting hit.
This wasn’t anything more than a way to blow off steam.
It was far too much violence for a ten-year-old boy who, like me, had grown up half-starved, but they were viciously careful to hurt me as much as possible without killing me.
If I died from it, that would be a problem, so they were restraining themselves in their own way.
“Huff.”
One clean kick to the ribs stole my breath away.
I glared at them through the pain surging up inside me, but all it did was feed their temper.
“You little shit. You looking at us like that?”
“Calm down, Brother. If he dies now, that’d be such a waste. Let’s come back tomorrow.”
“Yeah. He’s too good to just play with once and throw away!”
“Heh heh... You two really are rotten, you know that? Hey, you little brat, those eyes!”
Smack!
The man slapped my face and said, “Let’s see each other again often.”
Dammit. Looks like I’d pissed off the wrong people. If I got on the bad side of scum like that, things would get troublesome fast.
Maybe I’d have to run to another district where they couldn’t find me.
After they left, I forced my aching body to move and pulled out the food I’d hidden away. If I wanted to recover from the beating I’d taken today, I had to get something into my stomach.
As I chewed on a chicken drumstick I’d salvaged a few days ago while rummaging through trash the tavern had thrown out, I thought about them.
More precisely, their movements.
When I closed my eyes, the motions of those martial artists from earlier came back to me as clear as day.
The kicks they threw. The shifting of their weight. The twisting of their waists and the tilt of their torsos.
There wasn’t much difference between that and the kicks of some alley beggar.
Nothing to gain from that, I guess. Well, it would’ve been strange if they used martial arts to beat up a ten-year-old kid.
I’d forgotten exactly when it had started, but my eyes could follow how others moved, and once I saw a movement, it lingered in my head all day long.
Since the earliest time I could remember, I’d survived by roaming the back alleys, and thanks to that, I’d never once lost a fight to the other beggars.
After I realized I had this ability, I secretly started stealing glances at the movements of martial artists.
I copied everything I could, from the neat, disciplined forms of those training in the practice yard to the exaggerated gestures of men trying to win favor with a blacksmith’s daughter.
It wasn’t all that hard, so I’d even fallen into the delusion that I could become a martial artist easily.
But that happy illusion was shattered by a single sword stroke from the Black Snake Sect.
His swordwork was impossible to reach just by watching and imitating.
“Still... maybe someday?”
I tried to think as optimistically as possible, but I was in no position to worry about someday. I had tomorrow to survive first.
Crack.
A sound came from my body that should never have come from a body at all.
“You not getting up, you little shit?”
“You think we don’t know what you’re thinking?”
The bastards smiled with oily delight.
“No matter which alley you crawl into, you’re in the palm of our hand. Don’t get clever, you little shit!”
One of them grabbed my head and yanked it up.
Dammit, if I’d known it’d come to this, I would’ve stayed where I was.
“Brother, let’s just have our fun with him here and toss him out after.”
Then I should have stayed put and kept taking the hits there? I couldn’t believe I was even having this kind of thought. A dry laugh escaped me anyway, even though I knew better than to provoke them any further.
“You laughing? Fine. Let’s see this through today.”
In that instant, I saw a movement similar to the Black Snake Sect man’s sword stroke from earlier—still not something I could copy completely, but close.
A rotating arm, a fixed wrist, a fist filling my entire field of vision.
It was obviously nothing special, just a punch. But the speed was different. I could even feel the faint heat of it in front of my face.
This was dangerous.
I’m... I’m going to die.
Thud!
Something sticky ran down from my head. I tried to cling to consciousness, but my body wouldn’t listen. Nausea and dizziness surged up, and my vision blurred.
Was it just a hallucination at the edge of death? I saw a thin line drawn across the throats of the bastards in front of me.
“Are you awake?”
It was an unfamiliar ceiling. Not that I’d ever slept in a place with a ceiling in the first place.
Something was wrapped around my head. When I raised a hand to touch it, a voice stopped me.
“Don’t touch it. You were hit by a punch containing inner energy, so it’ll still hurt. You were lying there for three days.”
“...”
Inner energy. So that was why I couldn’t copy it just by watching. At last, it all made sense.
The Black Snake Sect man’s sword stroke, the fist that had nearly killed me, even the strange line I’d seen at the end.
Without inner energy, they’d have been nothing more than a slightly better sword swing or punch.
It was only natural that my body, which hadn’t cultivated anything at all, couldn’t imitate movements that depended on inner energy.
Lost in thought, I heard her say, “I took care of those heretics. The people backing them—Black Snake Sect, was it? I persuaded them properly, so there won’t be any retaliation.”
“...Why?”
Fine, I could understand the men who’d been beating me. But the Black Snake Sect too?
Before my questions could settle, my stomach, which had barely had anything decent in it, began to howl.
Grrrrowl.
My face flushed a little. Perhaps hearing it, she came closer.
Tap, tap.
As her footsteps drew near, I could make out her face. Sharply shaped brows, a high bridge to her nose, and beneath a neat mouth, a clean line of jaw.
Cold.
That was the impression she’d left on me the first time I met her. And yet her eyes, strangely enough, were wavering with a softness that didn’t suit her at all.
“Why did I save you? You reminded me of my past self.”
Spouting words I couldn’t make sense of, she turned and left the room.
“Rest. I’ll bring you something to eat.”
It’s delicious. Not even comparable to that leftover chicken leg.
By the time I’d wolfed it down, the food looked strangely familiar. If I’d been the one throwing this away after eating it, it would’ve been the same sort of meal I usually scavenged.
Once that thought occurred to me, it wasn’t hard to realize this was a tavern near the alley where I lived.
The thought of the trash I ate every day made my appetite vanish, and I stopped eating. Just then, I felt a gaze on me.
She was staring at me wordlessly, her expression blank as she watched me eat.
She’d saved me the first day she saw me, brought me to a tavern, and treated my injuries. That alone was strange, but she kept going out of her way to bring me food and look after me personally.
No one did things like that for no reason. The uncertainty about what she wanted from me kept growing by the minute.
The awkward life of lying in bed until she brought me food at mealtimes continued for several days, until my head finally mended.
My body was comfortable, but the more I tried to rest, the less it felt like rest, because I couldn’t make sense of her intentions.
Whether she knew what I was thinking or not, she went outside every day and swung her sword through the air. For me, who could barely manage to get up, watching her practice was the only thing I had to do.
Seeing her sword, I became certain. She was the one who had drawn those lines across the throats of the Black Snake Sect men.
An incredible master... maybe even far beyond the Black Snake Sect leader...
I couldn’t follow her sword with my eyes. It was drawn in an instant, and in the blink of an eye, dozens of sword strikes bloomed into the air.
Can things like that really be done if you learn martial arts?
I was watching her as if spellbound when she stopped and looked up this way. Even from a fairly long distance, it felt as if our eyes had met.
She sheathed her sword and came up to the room.
I must have done something wrong. Was I not supposed to watch? But she’d been practicing in front of me for a day and two already.
Afraid of the way she strode toward me, I squeezed my eyes shut.
Then, suddenly, I felt a rough hand on my cheek. Startled, I opened my eyes, and her face filled my entire view.
Flustered, I tried to pull away, but her hand clamped onto my shoulder, forcing me to keep looking at her.
“...”
“You have good eyes.”
After staring into my eyes for a long while, she went back downstairs.
She was a woman I truly couldn’t make head or tail of.
Once my body had nearly recovered and I went downstairs to eat with her, people around us started whispering.
“Is that the woman? The one who wiped out half of the Black Snake Sect...”
“She doesn’t even look twenty yet, and she did something like that...”
“Hey, don’t stare at her like that. You never know what’ll happen.”
So that’s what she meant by she’d persuaded them properly.
I still had no idea what she intended to ask of me.
She swept her gaze over the murmuring crowd.
“I should go now. People are getting uncomfortable. What do you plan to do?”
“Me?”
“Do you want to go back to where you were? Or you can come with me if you want. I’ll teach you martial arts if that’s what you’d like.”
The way she said it only made me more uneasy. I knew better than anyone that there was no such thing as kindness without a price.
“What do you want from me? Why are you helping me?”
Her eyes widened slightly. She looked startled.
Yes. Then say it straight.
“...I don’t want anything from you. I’m doing this for myself, so you don’t need to worry about it. So what will you do?”
For herself, she said. I couldn’t understand it at all. If it had been usual circumstances, I would have refused without a second thought, but—
Martial arts. Those two words bound me tight.
For a master like her to teach me martial arts...
Her image swinging that sword flashed through my mind.
“Where are you going?”
“Because I saved you, everyone around here knows about me now. You know this is Guangxi, the center of the heretical martial artists, right?”
“Like the Black Snake Sect?”
“Exactly. It wouldn’t be strange for them to come looking for me anytime. So I’m going into the mountains. If I need to, I might come down to the village once in a while.”
Going into the mountains all of a sudden?
It was probably because of me. If she were alone, slipping through a few heretical martial artists and crossing into another region would be nothing to her.
This kind of excessive kindness was even harder to believe.
I studied her slowly, from the smallest shift in her expression to the motion of her hands.
But she truly looked like nothing was wrong at all.
“...I’ll come with you.”
At my words, her face seemed to soften for an instant.
—