Old Fellows
Baek Sang, first-class disciple of the Wudang Sect, had set out on his first true journey through the gangho — a journey he had undertaken with his younger sister Baek Seol, who had entered the sect alongside him when they were both very young.
The siblings were widely regarded as exceptionally talented, even within Wudang. Though they were the youngest of the first-class disciples, there was already talk that either of them might one day contend for the seat of Grand Disciple.
Still, the two of them had been anxious. Were they, perhaps, just frogs in a well? The gangho was famously dangerous, crawling with eccentric masters and freakish talents.
Yet once they arrived at the Martial Alliance, that anxiety melted away like snow. No matter which young prodigies of their generation they observed, the siblings came out ahead.
To be perfectly honest, with the exception of a handful of rising stars from the Five Great Clans and the Nine Sects, everyone else had seemed utterly unremarkable.
After stopping at the Martial Alliance to make the acquaintance of the great senior figures of the Orthodox Dao, they had continued on their way.
Together with Seomun Ak, Seok Tae-shin, and Tang Soyeon — friends they had made at the Alliance — they were bound for Sichuan, to attend the birthday banquet of the Poison King, patriarch of the Sichuan Tang Clan.
The journey from Hubei into Sichuan had been smooth sailing.
The occasional band of thieves or mountain bandits posed no trouble at all. At the mere mention of the Wudang Sect, the Sichuan Tang Clan, the Seomun Clan, or the Seok Clan Manor, most enemies simply fled.
They had not fought a single proper battle.
And whenever they stopped at an inn, Seomun Ak would pick fights with the waiters or the cook — exactly as he was doing now.
That scoundrel.
Each time, Baek Sang clicked his tongue inwardly.
The reason for Seomun Ak's hooliganism was obvious enough. He wanted to score points with Tang Soyeon, the young miss of the Tang Clan.
As men were wont to do, he was showing off how outrageous he could be.
But what in the world is the point of doing it to a waiter?
Baek Sang simply could not understand.
Granted, if a man only ever did understandable things, he wouldn't have earned the notorious reputation of being a supreme wastrel in the first place.
And so the party had entered an inn in a small town called Uichang, where — as always — Seomun Ak picked a pointless fight with the waiter.
Baek Sang clicked his tongue inwardly and did not step in.
To be precise, he had no reason to.
Tang Soyeon enjoyed this sort of behavior from Seomun Ak. She didn't judge him favorably as a man — she simply seemed to relish the excitement and stimulation of the spectacle.
They say the people of the Tang Clan grow up around poison and come to love anything that stimulates the senses.
The warriors of the Sichuan Tang Clan loved their food spicy, their people spicy, their situations spicy. It was surely the result of repeated exposure to intense stimulation from early childhood.
For that reason, Baek Sang could find no justification for protecting the waiter at the cost of provoking Tang Soyeon's temper.
Unlike Baek Sang, merely one disciple among many of the Wudang Sect, Tang Soyeon was a woman destined to become the next matriarch of one of the Five Great Clans.
And above all else…
Baek Sang glanced down at Baek Seol, who was clutching his sleeve beneath the table. Their family ran a business in Sichuan. There was nothing whatsoever to gain from crossing the Tang Clan's young heiress.
His younger sister was a clever woman. The look she gave him said, quite plainly: don't ruin the family over a moment's chivalrous impulse.
He was just letting out a small sigh when—
"I said bring out the cook!"
Seomun Ak bellowed again.
Every patron who had been eating in the inn had already fled out the door.
To the common folk of a village like this, the tyranny of martial artists was nothing short of a calamity — even a carelessly thrown fist from a martial artist could, with terrible luck, cost a man his life.
"Waiter Seo, don't come out. I'll handle this myself."
The waiter called that toward the kitchen.
Baek Sang sighed even more deeply. The waiter seemed determined to manage things on his own, apparently unaware that words like those would only enrage Seomun Ak further.
Indeed, Seomun Ak's face flushed red and mottled.
As Baek Sang saw it, Seomun Ak was a man who, as second son of the Seomun Clan, harbored an inferiority complex toward the Five Great Clans — and to work through it, he treated anyone he considered beneath him all the more carelessly.
Seomun Ak raised his fist. Fortunately or unfortunately, there was no internal energy in it.
Suddenly, his fist shot toward the waiter's face. Even without internal force, a man who knew no martial arts could never dodge it.
At the very least, his nose was about to cave in.
Well, if that's all that happens, we can count ourselves lucky.
Baek Sang had witnessed it in the previous town — the sight of the waiter's face turned into a bloody pulp, on the pretext that he hadn't bowed his head properly when accepting payment.
Seomun Ak took pleasure in half-destroying a man with a fist deliberately stripped of internal energy.
Crack—!
Seomun Ak's fist sliced through empty air.
In that instant, everyone's eyes went round — Baek Sang's and Baek Seol's included.
The waiter had swayed his body just slightly, and slipped past Seomun Ak's punch. By the look of it, he'd nearly toppled over in fright and dodged by sheer luck.
Which was a very bad thing.
Because now, dark red energy was gathering in Seomun Ak's blood-flushed fist. The signature art of the Seomun Clan was fist technique.
If that punch landed, the waiter would die on the spot. But soon enough, the Seomun Clan's people would come swarming in to cajole, soothe, and threaten the inn's owner into smoothing the whole affair over.
Seomun Ak would face no punishment whatsoever. Killing one waiter 'by accident' was the sort of thing a few days of reflection would wash away.
Baek Sang rose from his seat.
He was not especially given to chivalrous impulses, but this had crossed a line.
His sister, apparently thinking along the same lines, released his sleeve and rose with him.
At that very moment, Tang Soyeon spoke.
"Leave it be. Young Hero Seomun isn't a child — he clearly has everything under control. If you stop him now, you'll only deal a terrible blow to his dignity."
Baek Sang and Baek Seol turned to stare at her.
Tang Soyeon's green eyes sparkled with delight, as though this were the most interesting thing she had seen in years.
Baek Sang was confident that in a straight fight against Tang Soyeon — his equal in age — he would win six times out of ten. The problem was that she was the woman who would one day reign over Sichuan.
Wudang was in no way inferior to the Sichuan Tang Clan, but the weight of a single disciple could never match the prestige of a clan's next matriarch.
Besides, his parents' business in Sichuan was not something he could afford to ignore.
While Baek Sang hesitated for a heartbeat—
Whoosh—!
Seomun Ak's fist swung in a great arc, carrying overwhelming force and speed far beyond anything before.
If that punch connected, it might blast the waiter's head clean off his shoulders.
Baek Sang regretted his moment of hesitation.
I should have stepped in at once!
Seomun Ak's fist had already reached the very tip of the waiter's nose.
As a martial artist himself, Baek Sang could follow every motion — but the waiter simply stood there, as though he hadn't even registered that a fist was being swung at him.
Baek Sang let out a sigh. Baek Seol turned her head away. Seok Tae-shin of the Seok Clan, apparently unable to stomach cruelty, grimaced — while Tang Soyeon watched with gleaming eyes, as if determined not to miss a single instant of it.
BOOM—!
The fist struck something and erupted in a burst of captured qi.
The moment the energy dispersed, every eye went wide. A man had appeared out of nowhere, his open palm resting lightly against Seomun Ak's fist, blocking it as if it were nothing at all.
Tang Soyeon shot to her feet. The black-haired cook who had materialized so suddenly was every bit as striking in appearance as the waiter himself. Was this not, truly, a stimulating and fascinating situation?
While Tang Soyeon's eyes gleamed, the waiter spoke in a voice heavy with sighs.
"…I told you I'd handle this."
Baek Sang thought the waiter was putting on a remarkable front. Clearly the man had learned some martial arts, but who exactly was he planning to protect from whom?
Besides, cooks were, as the saying went, a rough lot — men who lived by their kitchen knives and tempers to match. Some of them had picked up their skills from third-rate street manuals sold in the market, and this cook was probably one of those.
Still, he seems remarkably gifted, for all that.
To deflect Seomun Ak's punch so lightly with such crude arts… Looking closer, the man didn't seem much older than they were.
As Baek Sang studied the cook who had appeared out of thin air, something about the man struck him as wrong.
Were those eyes truly the eyes of a cook?
Even as he thought it, sweeping his gaze over the man's entire body, he caught sight of a short blade peeking out from the man's sleeve. Whatever else it was, that was not a tool a cook had any business carrying.
A martial artist?
The moment that uneasy thought took root—
the cook looked from Seomun Ak to the rest of them and clicked his tongue.
"I knew the Orthodox Dao had its share of rabble, but I never imagined the Wudang Sect's rising stars would stoop this low."
At Seo Yugyeom's mocking voice, Baek Sang's face burned crimson.
It was a truly humiliating thing. But stronger than the shame was the alarm.
The cook had openly provoked Seomun Ak — something catastrophic was bound to follow.
Baek Sang made his decision in an instant.
However awkward the Sichuan Tang Clan and Tang Soyeon might be, now that Wudang itself had been insulted, he had no choice but to step forward.
Sure enough, wild bursts of qi erupted across Seomun Ak's enraged body. When he shifted his weight, the floorboards shattered; when he swept a hand through the air, tables and chairs exploded into splinters.
"Young Hero Seomun, please, that's far enough—"
Baek Sang had just blurted out his desperate plea when two old men suddenly stepped into the inn.
The moment he recognized them, Baek Sang's face drained of color.
Baek Seol's went beyond pale — it turned a sickly, corpse-like white.
Tang Soyeon, Seomun Ak, and Seok Tae-shin had no idea who the old men were. And so Seomun Ak opened his fool mouth.
"Hey, old fellows, business is over for today, so—"
Seomun Ak never got to finish.
The silhouette of the old man standing by the door abruptly surged — and there he was, right in front of Seomun Ak's nose.
Out of nowhere, the old man raised his hand-knife high overhead.
Just as Seomun Ak's expression turned to bemusement—
CRAACK—!
With a crisp, satisfying sound of something splitting, Seomun Ak lay flat on the floor. Blood welled up from his slightly caved-in crown.
Tang Soyeon and Seok Tae-shin were aghast.
The old man's martial prowess was astonishing in itself, of course — but more than that, they had never dreamed anyone would dare crack open the skull of the Seomun Clan's second son like a melon.
The Seomun Clan, while pressed somewhat by the Five Great Clans, was still one of the grandest noble houses of the age.
But Baek Sang and Baek Seol, as though none of that mattered in the slightest, didn't spare Seomun Ak so much as a glance. They were simply trembling where they stood.
Before long, the old man who had rearranged Seomun Ak's skull rounded on the young prodigies and let his fury loose.
"You utter lunatics! Do you have any idea where you are?!"
Hyeon Un had not been so angry his beard trembled in a very long time.
His old friend Shinmok had received an exceptionally precious vintage of fine liquor from somewhere, and Hyeon Un had come to the inn hoping to share a drink with Seongun-i.
But the moment he walked in, the scene before his eyes was a pack of Orthodox Dao rabble tormenting Seongun-i and Cook Seo.
Worse, the waiter had a short blade in his hand. If Hyeon Un had arrived even a moment later, that Seomun Clan reprobate would have had the blade through his throat.
But the gravest problem was something else entirely. Hyeon Un turned his burning gaze upon the young man and woman.
"I could overlook the rabble of the Seomun Clan, the Seok Clan Manor, and the Tang Clan — but you two dare…!"
At that, Tang Soyeon's brow furrowed.
This was Hubei, hardly far from Sichuan. And yet this old man was insulting her, of all people, in such a manner?
Displeasure flared in her instantly — but the behavior of Baek Sang and Baek Seol was so strange that she held her tongue for the moment.
Baek Sang and Baek Seol stood crushed beneath a monstrous pressure. Baek Seol, whose skill was somewhat the lesser of the two, felt as though her legs might give out beneath her at any second.
Baek Sang, for his part, managed to force out words even as his whole body shook.
"E-Elder, please, it's not what you think…"
Baek Sang felt rather wronged. He had been on the verge of stopping Seomun Ak when the Elder had appeared.
At the word Elder, Seok Tae-shin, second son of the Seok Clan Manor, likewise went green-faced. Even his father, the head of the Seok Clan, could not hold his head high before an Elder of the Wudang Sect.
Tang Soyeon alone retained some composure — the Tang Clan and Wudang stood on equal footing, with no hierarchy between them.
"Elder, please calm yourself. You'll break everything in the place."
When Jin Seongun said this, Baek Sang's eyes bulged. The waiter — daring to speak that way to anyone…
"Ah! Right, right! My apologies, my boy."
"…"
Shock spread across Baek Sang's face.
The most stubborn, unbending figure in all of Wudang — a man even the Sect Leader found difficult to handle — was the White Cloud Sword, Hyeon Un.
And yet that very Elder, at a single word from the waiter, had washed his rage away completely, his face softening into a smile. He even seemed a little wary of the man.
What is going on?
The whole scene felt like a dream to Baek Sang.
It was precisely that unreal.
Then, all at once, a frantic voice came shouting from outside the inn.
"Master! Master, I think thieves have struck Uichang! My precious Yanghe Daqu liquor—!"
The man burst in on that cry, and at the sight of his face, Baek Sang's expression grew stranger still.
"U-Uncle Cheong-woo?"
Cheong-woo was the Daoist name of Oh Jeong-san.
The man Baek Sang found most intimidating among all the first-class disciples was Oh Jeong-san himself.
Though he had become a secular disciple, Oh Jeong-san ran a formidable merchant guild — which was precisely why.
Baek Sang and Baek Seol came from a family of merchants, and so Oh Jeong-san stood as their senior and superior both in the martial world and in the world of commerce.
The newly arrived Oh Jeong-san blinked for a moment.
With a grave face, as if assessing the situation, he surveyed the interior of the inn.
First, Elder Shinmok, who kept averting his eyes. Apparently, he was the one who had made off with the liquor.
Then his master's furious expression.
Seongun-i, calm and unflappable as ever. Cook Seo, for some reason, huffing like a bellows.
The stunned faces of his fellow first-class disciples. Why on earth are they here?
And the cowardly second son of the Seok Clan Manor, along with the rabble-rousing young miss of the Tang Clan.
Finally, the one lying there half-dead is… the Seomun Clan!
Having grasped the situation in a single instant, Oh Jeong-san suddenly went wide-eyed — eyes, nose, mouth all stretching — and spoke in a trembling voice.
"Oh no. Cook Seo, you've finally…!"
A merchant's reasonable judgment, through and through.
Seo Yugyeom merely stared back at him, utterly dumbfounded.