In Deokyang, This Is Just Daily Life
In Deokyang, this was just daily life.
Jin Seongun took a moment to study the man who had slung an arm over his shoulder. Thin limbs, a hunched posture. There was nothing intimidating in his face — nothing but a lazy, loitering air — and the qi he gave off was so faint that calling him even a Third-Rate Martial Artist would be generous.
One wrong swing and the man might actually die, so Jin Seongun glanced over at Seo Yugyeom.
So what do we do with him?
That was the question written in his eyes. Seo Yugyeom answered with a wide, thoroughly amused grin, as if nothing could be more entertaining.
Letting out a sigh, Jin Seongun let the man's grip carry his shoulder and walked down the street beside him. With his arm still draped across both their shoulders, the man kept talking.
"I get annoyed every time I see a handsome guy. I know the world was never fair to begin with, but that doesn't stop me from getting angry about it."
"……"
Jin Seongun made a face of pure bafflement. Seeing it, the man burst into a snorting laugh.
"No need to look so scared. I'm not about to do anything to you right now. Of course, not everyone in Deokyang is as gentle as me. Plenty of guys here will draw a blade on you over the most trivial nonsense."
"What is it you want?"
Jin Seongun asked in a flat, even tone. The man's eyebrows twitched for a moment, but he answered all the same.
"One nyang of silver. I don't know what business brought you to Deokyang, but this isn't a town where two scrawny pretty-boys like you can just stroll around. There's no shortage of hot-tempered brutes who don't listen to reason — and they've got real martial arts to back it up."
"So if I give you one nyang, you'll protect us? What if a stronger martial artist picks a fight with us?"
Jin Seongun asked out of genuine, simple curiosity. Confidence bloomed across the man's face.
"Plenty of guys out there are stronger than me. But that doesn't matter. I'm born and raised in this town. Which means I know lots of the big brothers in Deokyang's Four Great Black Way factions. Who'd dare touch me?"
"The Four Great Black Way factions?"
The man sighed in a voice dripping with condescension and pressed on.
"Hwanghonru, Mukyangmun, Cheonyagok, and the Saryonggangbang — the four Black Way powers that rule Deokyang. How do you not know this? Why even come to Deokyang? Fine, make it two nyang of silver."
"I don't have money."
"Don't lie to me. Who travels to a strange city empty-handed?"
"Ah — I have money, just none I intend to give to you."
"……"
The man's eyes hardened into a glare fixed on Jin Seongun. A brief staring contest ensued. When Jin Seongun simply continued gazing back with that same calm expression, the man's eyes began to ache, and he finally looked away.
"Then go die, for all I care."
Saying this, the man pulled his arms off their shoulders and turned away, cursing under his breath as he drifted further and further from the two of them.
Jin Seongun and Seo Yugyeom stood where they were, silently watching him go. Then the man's retreating footsteps slowed, little by little, until they stopped altogether. He turned his head and looked back at them.
"……"
"……"
A silence stretched between the three of them. The street was fairly busy and bustling, which somehow made the silence hanging over them feel all the heavier.
Then Seo Yugyeom murmured, low enough that only Jin Seongun could hear.
"Oh, he's conflicted. If he runs off like that, we'll look like easy marks. But if he comes back, it means he can take a hit."
Jin Seongun nodded.
The man stood there agonizing for a long while, his face twisted in torment, before he finally began walking back toward them. Before long, he held out a coin pouch to Jin Seongun and asked,
"……How did you know?"
"It would've been harder not to."
The pouch the man handed over was Jin Seongun's own. While chattering away about this and that to scramble their attention, he had tried the old pickpocket's sleight of hand.
Of course, masters of Jin Seongun and Seo Yugyeom's caliber were never going to fall victim to a cutpurse.
When the man kept staring at them in open disbelief, Seo Yugyeom offered an explanation at his side.
"First — your pouch would've gotten lighter by exactly the weight of what you took. Second — your own steps got heavier by one pouch. Third — every one of those fidgety little hand movements was in full view of us. And finally, you looked suspicious from the moment we laid eyes on you."
"……"
The man's face crumpled into an expression of wounded injustice. He could swallow the rest, but being insulted over his face felt downright unfair.
Still, he was standing before men who were almost certainly masters. So the man simply nodded with a look of admiration and said,
"Truly remarkable gentlemen, you are. As you can see, I'm nothing but a lowly worm who picks strangers' pockets on the street — I failed to recognize great heroes when I saw them. I beg your understanding."
He flattered them just enough while steering the mood away from anything dangerous — a practiced bit of patter, smoothly delivered. The man gave a single nod, then shot them a look that asked if he could be on his way now.
At which point Seo Yugyeom held out his open palm toward the man. Seeing it, the man spoke as if something utterly ridiculous were happening.
"What. I already gave it back."
"That one was ours to begin with."
"……"
The man stared at Seo Yugyeom's palm for a long moment, weighing his options, but the outcome was already decided. His money was not worth more than his life.
With a half-resigned face, he fished a coin pouch out of his coat and handed it over. Seo Yugyeom tested its weight in his hand, then wore a thoroughly satisfied expression.
"……May I go now?"
The man's shoulders slumped. Just when he'd finally scraped together a decent haul, he'd ended up robbed of everything he already had. As he filed away the constructive resolution to work even harder once he was rid of these two—
Jin Seongun held out his palm toward him. The man's eyes bulged as he glared at it.
"……"
Jin Seongun said nothing at all. But the man knew. He knew that if that palm moved and connected with his face, he might actually die.
Swearing a blue streak inside his head, the man dug out one more pouch and laid it on the open hand.
And so his entire life savings were stripped clean.
Jin Seongun gave him a single, courteous nod. Watching it, the man cursed him silently with everything he had.
Why, you little son of a—
Not that he could ever say it aloud.
Before long, the man bowed his head briefly to the two of them and disappeared.
Jin Seongun opened the pouch to check it. For all its heft, it held only a couple of silver coins — the rest was packed solid with stones. As Jin Seongun let out a hollow laugh, Seo Yugyeom spoke up beside him.
"It's a self-defense coin pouch."
"You can fight with a pouch?"
Whereupon Seo Yugyeom made as if to hand the pouch back — and abruptly swung it instead. Jin Seongun tilted his head just slightly and dodged with ease, but the pouch sliced viciously through the space where his head had been, splitting the air with a heavy, whistling crack.
"Like that. You pretend to hand it over, then swing it straight into the other fellow's skull. In Deokyang, this is just daily life."
"……What on earth is wrong with Deokyang?"
Jin Seongun found himself realizing, all over again, that a place like Yichang must be remarkably peaceful by comparison. Then again, ever since the Flourishing Society had vanished, no other Black Way organization had moved in there.
After nodding to himself for a moment, he asked,
"Are we heading straight to the Hwaun Merchant Group?"
Seo Yugyeom sank deep into thought. He had come back to Deokyang on impulse, because his unease kept deepening — but he still wasn't ready to face his sister.
To put it precisely: he wasn't ready to face the look of pure loathing she would surely send his way.
Seo Yugyeom hesitated — a rare thing for him — before answering in a careful voice.
"……Maybe we eat first?"
Jin Seongun nodded as if it were nothing. He had come all this way purely because of Seo Yugyeom, so he fully intended to accommodate him.
And so the two of them set off in search of an inn, swinging the pouches they'd received as a "gift" from a pickpocket.
Of all the establishments in the city, the two of them chose Deokyang Inn. The reason was simple: a business that staked its name on the city itself was one with long history and the approval of many.
Jin Seongun wore a fairly eager expression. Ever since he'd started running his own inn, every visit to another establishment had turned into a mental checklist of things to observe.
Sichuan was famous for its cuisine to begin with — and above all, they said even the smallest inns here in Deokyang served Yanghe Daqu. Distribution of Yanghe Daqu was all but monopolized nationwide by the Hwaun Merchant Group, and this city was precisely where the Hwaun Merchant Group had planted its roots.
"Quite a crowd in here."
Jin Seongun remarked, surveying the inn's interior. The mealtime rush had already passed, yet roughly half the tables were still occupied.
There was no waiter on hand to seat them, so the two of them found an empty table on their own. As they waited, a middle-aged man emerged from the kitchen, sweat beading down his face, and approached. He looked the two of them up and down and asked,
"Order."
The voice was somewhat curt. People naturally grow short-tempered when busy, and Jin Seongun knew this well enough not to take offense.
"One bottle of Yanghe Daqu and a bowl of hongshaorou, please."
"Ah, and a bowl of somen noodles too. Make it spicy."
Seo Yugyeom added with practiced ease. The middle-aged man gave a careless nod and headed back toward the kitchen.
"And the water?"
At Seo Yugyeom's question, the man answered without so much as turning around as he disappeared into the kitchen.
"Get it yourself and drink it. Can't you see I'm busy?"
It was a scene unthinkable at Seongun Inn, so Jin Seongun and Seo Yugyeom simply looked at each other. Soon enough, Seo Yugyeom smacked his lips, fetched the water bottle and cups sitting off to one side, and grumbled.
"Tch, terribly rude in here. Then again, places like this usually are the famous ones."
"Seems the staff is woefully short-handed for the number of customers."
Whenever the man came out, the sounds from the kitchen stopped; whenever he went in, the sounds resumed.
In other words, he was single-handedly covering both the floor service and the cooking. Even the smaller Seongun Inn kept two cooks and two waiters.
Something struck Jin Seongun as odd. He glanced around the room and said,
"There are quite a lot of murim folk here."
Several patrons had blades propped against their tables, and many more bore the unmistakable marks of trained martial arts even without one.
Granted, most of them were Third-Rate Martial Artists at best — but still, an ordinary inn packed this full of murim folk was no common sight. At least not in the town where Jin Seongun had been born and raised, nor in Yichang.
Seo Yugyeom answered him.
"Regions where the Black Way holds sway are usually like this. The Orthodox crowd trains all day and drinks now and then — the Unorthodox crowd drinks all day and trains now and then."
Seo Yugyeom's voice carried so well that a number of dangerous glares came their way from around the room. But when he responded with nothing more than a snorting little smile, none of them dared make a move. That was simply the nature of Third-Rate Black Way thugs.
They traded small talk and waited a long while, yet the food still didn't come.
Irritation was beginning to creep into Seo Yugyeom's expression too.
"They didn't forget the order, did they?"
"……Let's wait just a little longer."
"How many times has 'a little longer' been now?"
"This time I'm certain it's coming."
When Jin Seongun declared this with such conviction, Seo Yugyeom asked,
"How do you know?"
"Listen."
Seo Yugyeom turned his ear to the sounds around them. Deliberately shutting out every other sense, he began to slowly draw his hearing upward.
The chatter of the crowd, the clink of liquor cups, the rattle of dishes — it all thundered in. The Black Way thugs' rowdy conduct only made it worse.
Seo Yugyeom pushed his focus to the absolute limit, brow furrowing with the strain of it.
And then, from within the chaos — a familiar sound.
Meat sizzling in hot oil. Soy sauce bubbling down to a glaze. Faint, but unmistakably there.
It was, without a doubt, the hongshaorou they had ordered.
Seo Yugyeom looked at Jin Seongun with a face of sheer, grudging defeat.
"How in the world did you hear that?"
"It just came to my ears."
"Do you live with your senses sharpened all the time?"
It was a question of pure curiosity. Seo Yugyeom, after all, was a murim man before he was a cook.
Jin Seongun shook his head.
"Not particularly."
He meant it literally: the sound had simply reached him. Even without deliberately expanding his senses, Jin Seongun saw, heard, and felt more than those around him — the effect of Daji's Yeowol Mind Art.
"You must be exhausting to be. Remind me never to become a master."
"……"
While Seo Yugyeom muttered his nonsense, the middle-aged man finally emerged from the kitchen bearing their food.
Jin Seongun and Seo Yugyeom fixed shining eyes on the approaching dishes. The aroma and the color alone spoke volumes about the cook's skill.
Just as they were swallowing hard, a group of men strode into the inn. The cook's face stiffened slightly.
From the group, one man abruptly broke into a sprint straight toward the cook. It was a movement without the slightest hesitation.
Naturally, both Jin Seongun and Seo Yugyeom registered it — but neither could quite grasp what was happening. It was the kind of thing that would never, ever occur at Seongun Inn.
"Hey!"
With a short bark of a shout, a man somewhere in his mid-twenties launched himself into the air. To Jin Seongun, the world seemed to slow to a crawl.
Hanging in midair, the man thrust one foot forward and kicked the cook squarely, sending him flying.
Jin Seongun blinked.
The middle-aged cook crumpled where he landed, and the liquor and dishes he'd been carrying crashed to the floor with him.
Crash—!
With that sharp sound, the slowed world snapped back to its original speed.
While Jin Seongun stared in dismay at the spilled liquor and ruined food, the young man who had delivered the flying kick — in an act of truly unfilial savagery — began stomping the middle-aged cook over and over.
"You son of a—! Does our Saryonggangbang look like water to you?! Money! Money! Pay it back! Money!"
The middle-aged cook curled into a ball, shielding his head with both arms.
Despite the inn being packed with martial artists, not a single one stepped forward. On the contrary, they all just nervously watched each other, waiting to see who would blink first.
While the young man beat the middle-aged man, others wandered from table to table, helping themselves to the food as if it were their own.
From the atmosphere of the place, they were clearly one of the Black Way gangs that made its name here in Deokyang.
Seo Yugyeom clicked his tongue, short and sharp.
At that very instant, Jin Seongun rose from his seat.
And so every eye in the inn converged on him.
Jin Seongun gazed at all of them with calm, untroubled eyes, then began striding, step by deliberate step, toward the young man and the cook.
When Jin Seongun planted himself before the two of them, the whole room watched with bated breath. The young man, mid-beating, flinched and spoke.
"What do you want."
Jin Seongun stared at the man for a long, quiet moment.
Then—
Slap!
He struck him across the face. The man's head whipped around first, and his body followed, lifting off the ground.
Flying backward through the air, the man sprawled face-down atop the very dishes he and his crew had scattered across the floor moments before.