The Civil Engineering Fairy Descends Upon Gwangju
On the plain's hill stood one sack of food and two hammers, banging away with loud clangs, but—oh dear. Cheong felt a pang of awkwardness.
Cheong had learned carpentry in Nangnyeong. And in Nangnyeong, they built houses with wood. Yet when she looked at the Jin Family Estate to repair it, she realized with dismay that everything in sight was made of brick… Of course, they couldn’t have built everything entirely from brick. The framework was surely wooden with bricks filling the gaps. But had they just stacked bricks? What held them together? Was there wooden framing inside the walls? She’d have to tear one down to find out…
Having participated in dismantling several flood-damaged homes in the Henan style and rebuilding them from the foundation up, Cheong knew the process well.
“Patriarch, would it be alright if I dismantled one building to examine it?”
“By all means. Hmm. Try the western lower annex. That one should have the most severe damage.”
Jin Ja-gang, the head of the Jin Family, readily agreed.
In truth, he still harbored doubts about Cheong’s carpentry skills. After all, she was the young genius who had drastically shortened the record for the youngest Transcendent in the Murim. She must have slept little, eaten hastily, and devoted herself entirely to martial arts day and night. (In reality, she had slept soundly, eaten heartily in large quantities, and coasted through martial arts with cheat-like ease.)
So even if she claimed to know carpentry, he could only assume it was the level of skill one might pick up by watching over someone’s shoulder as a child. It was a perfectly natural assumption. At twenty-one years old this year, a person’s lifetime simply wasn’t long enough to master another trade to any real degree. Now, if it were a master in his sixties or seventies who had idly hammered away whenever bored and thus reached a level where he could call himself a carpenter, that would be different.
Therefore, he had held no great expectations for the reconstruction work. What pleased him more was the idea itself—of taking revenge in the exact same manner to shatter this curse.
A curse was no ordinary thing. Though its trigger had been the schemes of those Sapa bastards, it had now become a very real curse. If the Heavenly Flower Sword could provide even a small catalyst to pull them out of this quagmire, he would be endlessly grateful.
Cheong wandered around the Jin Family Estate at a leisurely pace. To outsiders, it might look improper for a guest to roam the grounds alone, but since the family head had bowed his head to a much younger junior (technically her senior by generation) and asked for understanding due to the severe lack of hands, it wasn’t such a grave breach of etiquette. Still, it was the kind of thing that would make people click their tongues.
But Cheong was the type who paid no attention to such formalities, and with the family so busy, it would be even more awkward to tie up one of them just because she was a guest. So she continued wandering the grounds, genuinely intending to physically dismantle the western lower annex to inspect it.
The Jin Family Estate was in such a state that it couldn’t even properly hire new servants, let alone construction workers, because it was known as a cursed estate. The absence of human presence made the surroundings eerily quiet, and a faint, musty rotten stench brushed against the nose unpleasantly. It was utterly desolate. Even though the day was clear and bright, the colors seemed desaturated, making everything feel gloomy and shadowy like a pale screen.
Seeing this, Cheong could understand why they had refused support from the Murim Alliance, saying it would be embarrassing to receive guests. But face was one thing—given the estate’s current condition, shouldn’t they have accepted help first and done something about it? With their current manpower, they were already overwhelmed just maintaining the grounds, to the point where everyone had gone outside and left a single guest to wander the estate alone.
It was fortunate that Cheong had come after hearing of their difficulties. Otherwise, who knew how long they would have continued slowly withering away inside this so-called cursed estate.
The family head seemed like a truly good person, speaking in such a gentle and refined manner, but perhaps he wasn’t very good at getting things done. The buildings that still reeked even when closed were already ruined—why not just tear a few of them down?
It was while Cheong was having these somewhat disrespectful thoughts that a strange sound suddenly reached her transcendent human hearing.
Sniff, sob, sniff.
It was the sound of someone crying while holding back their tears.
“Whoa.”
Cheong rubbed down her arms. What was that? A ghost? Did they really exist? In a world with Taoist temples, inner energy, and techniques like the Buddha’s Palm that summoned giant Buddha hands and temple bells, it wouldn’t be strange if ghosts existed too. Since the Buddha’s Palm carried exorcism energy, maybe it could even beat up ghosts?
Cheong cautiously approached the source of the sound.
She had always wondered why, when watching scary stories on a screen, the characters would tremble in fear at the mere appearance of the protagonist, gulp down their saliva in tension, yet still deliberately open the door and step into the haunted place. But now that she was in that exact situation, she understood. It was far scarier to run away without confirming whether it was real or what it actually was.
Following the sound, Cheong reached a building that smelled particularly foul and gently pushed open the door—
Creeeeak.
In the deathly silence, the sound of the door opening grated sharply on the nerves.
And inside the dimly lit building, there was a single boy sitting alone with his back turned.
Hmm. So it was a person after all. Well, of course it was.
“Who’s there?”
“Ah, Lady Seomun. Sniff. What brings you here?”
“Ah, you. Hwa-cheon, wasn’t it?”
Jin Hwa-cheon. She had heard he was one of the Jin Family’s sons, but with fourteen or fifteen children in that large family, she couldn’t quite remember which one he was.
“What are you doing here? Why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying.”
Jin Hwa-cheon said this with puffy, swollen eyes.
“Your eyes are red.”
“Y-you’re seeing it wrong.”
Jin Hwa-cheon said this and roughly wiped at his eyes with his sleeve.
“Alright. If you say you’re not, then you’re not.”
“I’m not crying.”
“Yeah, yeah. I didn’t see anything.”
His youthful face twitched. But Cheong simply curled the corners of her lips.
What could you possibly do by twitching like that, kid?
“What are you doing here, miss?”
“Me? I was looking for the lower annex. Everything looks so similar that I couldn’t tell which one it was. If you’re not busy, could you show me the way?”
Jin Hwa-cheon made a dumbfounded face.
“This is the lower annex.”
“Ah. It is? I came to the right place? Why am I so good at finding my way? The path I walk becomes the path itself. Hah!”
Jin Hwa-cheon’s expression changed again. Cheong realized that a person’s face could shift from one level of dumbfoundedness to an even higher one.
“So… what business do you have here?”
“Ah. I need to start construction, but I don’t know the Gwangdong style. I was planning to dismantle one building and examine it slowly as reference.”
“Dismantle… you mean you’re going to tear down a house…?”
“Yep.”
At that, Jin Hwa-cheon’s face darkened.
“You can’t.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“You can’t. You mustn’t do that. It’s not allowed.”
“What? But I already got permission from the family head.”
“But still…”
“Give it up, kid. No one can stop my destruction. I’ll tear everything down and rebuild it. Destruction is the mother of creation. Have you ever seen a phoenix rise from the ashes?”
Cheong spouted random nonsense. It was meant to sound ridiculous.
“No!”
Jin Hwa-cheon suddenly shouted at the top of his lungs.
“If you destroy the house, then… then… sniff… then…”
Then came the tears streaming down, the nostrils flaring, and a huge, shuddering inhale.
Ah. This kid’s about to cry.
Cheong realized too late, but it was already too late.
Waaaaah.
The boy burst into tears.
It took quite some time before the boy calmed down.
“This was Hye-un’s house… If you tear it down, I won’t be able to remember anymore. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
From what she heard, it seemed to have been his best friend’s house. The children of a martial family didn’t play outside the estate, so the friends they grew up bickering and roughhousing with were ultimately their collateral relatives.
“Hmm.”
Cheong reflected deeply. Not on the fact that she had made the boy cry, of course. Why would a boy cry? Crying was a woman’s ultimate trump card; men’s tears earned no sympathy. No, her reflection was on herself—how frustrated she had felt that nothing was being done despite the estate being in such a state.
The Gwangdong Jin Family was a clan. A gathering of people with the Jin surname. Even collateral branches were close—cousins, second cousins—and even more distant relatives had grown up together as neighbors, friends, and family.
It would have taken about two months to travel leisurely from Henan to Gwangdong. If they had returned in mid-August to discover this tragedy, then after performing the final forty-nine-day funeral rites of the Central Plains, only a little over three months had passed.
It was far too short a time to forget the loss of family. And this wasn’t a farewell they had slowly prepared for through illness or old age—it was a tragic, unjust massacre carried out by the surprise attack of those Blood Sect bastards.
When the Jin Family finally found the bodies, they would have been left in the humid, scorching summer heat of Gwangdong, reduced to something closer to liquid than solid in a horrific state. And during all that time while the corpses rotted, hadn’t she been off enjoying herself at the Murim Tournament?
Tear them down? To the people of the Jin Family, each and every one of these buildings must have been like a memorial monument.
Cheong could only speculate. She had no way of truly knowing how they felt.
So the current state of the Jin Family wasn’t a matter of Sapa interference or a lack of manpower. It was closer to utter helplessness or grief.
But even so, was it right to just keep taking hits?
Conveniently, the city was full of lowlifes trying to take advantage of a family plunged into sorrow from tragedy. Those dog-like bastards who didn’t hesitate to use any means necessary, even cruelly harming innocent workers.
---
Cheong changed into an outfit befitting the Civil Engineering Fairy and headed into the streets of Gwangju.
It was truly the appearance of an extraordinary figure that drew the eyes of everyone in the city.
She wore the colorful robes of a shaman adorned with five-colored cloths, a thick rope tied around her waist, and dozens of large shells strung together that scattered rainbow-colored glints with every step, clattering noisily as the shells knocked against each other.
On her head was a wide-brimmed hat plastered with talismans inscribed with scriptures in cinnabar on yellow paper, with more hanging down long from the left, right, and back, reaching her shoulders and back. With her face veiled by a thick black gauze, she looked exactly like a mystical shaman walking the streets.
But if she was a shaman, she wasn’t a carpenter. That was exactly why she had come out like this. She needed something carpenter-like, a special tool, so that people would see her and immediately think, The Civil Engineering Fairy has arrived.
A saw? She could just use sword gang. A plane? Same thing. A chisel? A gouge? Sword gang was invincible.
But she needed at least one hammer. The tenth form of her Wolgwang-geom was a five-pound heavy weapon, but its center of gravity made it awkward to use as a hammer.
Thus, in that getup, Cheong stepped into the ironworks street.
The lively clang clang of iron being hammered rang out, and the smell of burning coal hung thick in the air. Cheong strolled around, pretending to examine the iron tools laid out on the stalls. In truth, she had never done blacksmithing work, so she didn’t know much even from looking. This was simply a ploy to imprint the image of the Civil Engineering Fairy into people’s minds.
Then she approached the stall of the largest ironworks and abruptly asked in a casual tone. It was her attempt at mimicking a shaman.
“Hey, I want to see your big hammer.”
“How heavy a one are you looking for?”
“Fifteen pounds.”
“Pfft. As if we have something like that.”
“Strange. They use them in Henan.”
Of course they didn’t. Swinging a fifteen-pound hammer would make a person collapse before even lasting a single minute. Besides, heavier wasn’t necessarily better with hammers. A hammer that heavy would be closer to smashing materials than hammering. Even driving a single stake would cause it to crack from the inside before it could be driven in.
“Then what’s the heaviest hammer used in Gwangdong?”
“Eight pounds. Wait, you’re saying Henan bastards actually make fifteen-pound hammers? What in the world do they use them for?”
“What else would you use a hammer for but building houses? To crack some random bastard’s skull?”
“Hah. Even with an eight-pounder, you’d be exhausted and collapse after one minute of work. You’d be lucky to find ten of those big hammers even if you searched the whole street. And you’re saying you use fifteen-pound ones?”
“This lady worships Xiang Yu as her patron deity. Fifteen pounds is light for me. It’s a great pity that my original twenty-pound iron hammer broke.”
“Twenty pounds? Hah. Then I suppose eight pounds would feel like a mere twig to you? Alright, let’s see this marvelous hammering of yours.”
“Tsk. Watching is fine, but since you doubted me, you’ll suffer great misfortune. Still want to see?”
“Hmph. You shamans always try to bewitch people like this. Get lost, you fake—dressed up like some charlatan—”
The blacksmith’s sneer suddenly cut off.
Because a long, slender, impossibly delicate hand had lightly lifted the eight-pound hammer.
And then it bobbed up and down as casually as if she were waving a tree branch.
“It really doesn’t weigh much.”
She then tossed the iron chisel lying nearby and began lightly tapping it up and down with the hammerhead, keeping it airborne.
Hammers had different weight measurements than other tools—an eight-pound hammer referred purely to the weight of the head. She was holding the four-foot-long handle with one hand and continuously tapping the long, heavy iron chisel, bouncing it up to half a foot in the air again and again.
The blacksmith’s mouth hung wide open, his head bobbing up and down following the chisel as it flew and fell through the air.
Clang. Clang. Clang. The sound of the chisel being struck.
Combined with Cheong’s already eye-catching self-proclaimed mystical shaman attire, the ironworkers and customers of the ironworks street were now completely mesmerized, watching this divine display in stunned silence.