The Moonlight Is Nice
"Hahaha! Wasn't everything I said absolutely right?"
Divine Thief's laughter thundered across the vast expanse of the Martial God Realm.
At that, the other Martial Gods furrowed their brows.
"Making your own disciple commit thievery — have you no shame whatsoever!"
Sword Immortal suddenly erupted, shouting. Apparently, he had lost another game of baduk to Daji. It was always like this — Sword Immortal dodging his defeats with an outburst.
Divine Thief didn't so much as pretend to listen.
"My title is Divine Thief, after all. What else did you think I'd teach my disciple?"
"Still."
"Besides, Seongun isn't even your formal disciple, Sword Immortal, old man. What business is it of yours to go ordering someone else's disciple around, hm? Tsk."
"......"
Sword Immortal's mouth snapped shut.
Unlike the other four Martial Gods, Sword Immortal alone had never taken Jin Seongun in as a formal disciple. The reason was simple.
"You think I don't want to take Seongun as my disciple? Of course I do. But there is propriety, there is order. If I took him on, our generational seniority would become hopelessly tangled."
"What's so damned important about generational seniority anyway? You really are an old-timer through and through."
Divine Thief criticized him sharply. But Sword Immortal had no intention of backing down.
There were a rare few he had personally taught the sword. It was all a very long time ago, granted — and most of them had gone on to found sects of their own. The problem was that those sects still existed.
"So you'd have Seongun stand in the same generation as the founding patriarchs of Wudang and Mount Hua?"
"Sounds great! Divine Thief's disciple, in the same generation as Zhang Sanfeng and the patriarchs!"
"......"
Sword Immortal shook his head in a way that clearly said enough.
Divine Thief burst into another round of laughter, then continued in a somewhat more serious tone.
"So — tonight's the night you steal it, yes?"
"......Yes."
Jin Seongun answered with a deep, weary sigh.
For days now he'd been living a double life — waiter by day, thief by night. It was a small mercy that the end was finally in sight.
Divine Thief nodded with a thoroughly satisfied look on his face.
"That's right. This time, that old crone won't be able to hold back. She's bound to take the bait, so just leave it all to me."
Rare for him, Divine Thief threw his shoulders back as wide as they'd go and laughed among the Martial Gods. Who was it that shared this place with him? Sword Immortal, quite literally an immortal of the sword. Daji, creator of the greatest mind art in all of history. That somewhat wealthy Merchant fellow. And Blood Demon, called the worst Demon Sovereign of all the ages.
Jin Seongun was Divine Thief's disciple — but he was theirs as well. And that boy was carrying on his will, committing theft right to the very end. How could that not delight him?
"AHAHAHAHA! Martial Gods, my ass! You're all jokes!"
Divine Thief roared with laughter, and the outraged Sword Immortal, unable to bear it, launched the Heavenly Hidden Sword at him through sword telekinesis.
That night, praying it would be the last, Jin Seongun pulled the mask over his face once more.
"......"
At first, the mask had felt suffocating. How many times in his life had he ever covered his face with something like this?
And yet, the moment he'd slipped it on just now, an inexplicable sense of calm had washed over him. Along with it, Divine Thief's words came back to him.
The moment you truly become a thief, the mask will feel no different from your own skin!
Jin Seongun briefly considered taking the mask back off, but soon sighed and left the inn.
Meanwhile, a crowd of martial artists far too numerous to compare with the first night prowled the streets under cover of darkness. It was enough to make him wonder whether this was Yichang at all, or Wuhan, where the Martial Alliance headquarters stood.
"Over there!"
As someone shouted and sprinted off, the later-generation masters and wandering ronin nearby came stampeding after in a rush. Naturally, that was the direction Jin Seongun had thrown a pebble to make the noise.
Having brushed the warriors aside with the lightest of touches, Jin Seongun bounded freely between walls and fences.
The moonlight's nice tonight.
If night thievery had a single advantage, it was this — leaping across rooftops beneath a brilliant moon.
"......"
Jin Seongun felt a faint wave of self-loathing at the thought. It was, truly, a very thief-like thought.
He was making his slow, careful way toward the target when —
Hwisik—!
A stealthy crack of displaced air split the silence, sharp and sudden. It was so quiet he would never have caught it without his heightened senses.
Jin Seongun, mid-leap between rooftops, kicked off empty air and twisted his body. A single dagger sliced cleanly through the space he had occupied a heartbeat before.
He turned his head toward the direction it had come from.
"You're dead."
It was Seo Yugyeom.
Seo Yugyeom — bearer of the Heavenly Killing Star, trained in Salmak, and lately soaked in ice qi as well. Jin Seongun felt a dull throb in his temples and quickly resumed his run. No matter what, he could not afford to fight Seo the Great Hero.
Seo Yugyeom tailed him close and hard. Agility was his specialty — and weaving at speed through terrain cluttered like this was precisely his domain.
Fast, though.
Seo Yugyeom admitted it inwardly. The urge to catch the masked figure right now and tear that mask off surged strongly through him.
"Tang Soyeon!"
At Seo Yugyeom's shout, deep viridian poison mist erupted from the ground at Jin Seongun's feet like water from a spring.
Jin Seongun soared high into the air to evade it — and in that same instant, dozens of hidden weapons came pouring out from Seo Yugyeom and Tang Soyeon in a single wave.
There was no dodging midair. Even a fair-grade master's only option would have been to vent his qi and twist aside by narrow margins.
But Jin Seongun was no ordinary man.
He kicked off the empty sky again and again, wrenching his body through impossible angles. It was as though an invisible floor existed in the open air itself.
"Kunlun?"
Seo Yugyeom murmured. Nothing in the world could match that movement except Kunlun's Cloud Dragon Great Eight Forms.
That was the modern reckoning, of course. Traced all the way back to Sword Immortal's era, Kunlun too was merely one branch grown from a single Daoist lineage.
Having slipped through the volley by the skin of his teeth, Jin Seongun picked up speed once more. But Tang Soyeon and Seo Yugyeom chased him with the fury of two people who would rather die than lose him.
Those two aren't the problem.
The problem was the encirclement tightening around him because of them. With all this racket, every warrior in Yichang was converging on his position. Anyone else would have slipped away in an instant — but those two's lightness arts were considerable, and the terrain was so cluttered that shaking them in one clean burst was difficult.
If this were enemy territory, it would be no matter. Kill the two first, then kill everyone who came running. Simple as that.
But this was Yichang. And those two were his friends.
"......"
Jin Seongun deliberated for a moment. It didn't take him long to reach a conclusion.
Abruptly, he turned — in the exact opposite direction of the way he'd been running.
"Huh...?"
Bewilderment spilled across Seo Yugyeom's face. Tang Soyeon's mouth hung open in pure shock.
Their sprinting speed and Jin Seongun's returning speed collided — and in the blink of an eye, all three of them met face-to-face.
Thud—!
Without warning, the two of them lay sprawled side by side on the road.
Jin Seongun stared down at them for a while. Summer was coming, but the nights were still chill. Just in case, he fetched a tent canvas from a nearby street vendor and draped it over them.
"......"
Something about the tableau looked unbearably like corpses, so he took the canvas back.
Then Jin Seongun departed, calm and unhurried.
Having shaken off every martial artist in Yichang, Jin Seongun ran straight toward the Dangyang road. He had no intention of leaving Yichang entirely.
After a short run, the buildings and the foot traffic thinned away to nothing, and at last he reached the boundary of Yichang. There Jin Seongun stood still, gazing at something enormous.
Yiling Prefecture, Yichang County.
That's right — a boundary marker, standing like a monument at the edge of town, proclaiming that from here, you are in Yichang.
Jin Seongun intended to steal the boundary marker itself.
It stood taller than he did, and three grown men as burly as Seomun Ak could barely have encircled it with their arms. Jin Seongun glared at the marker for a long moment, then gripped it firmly in both hands. As he drew up his internal energy and applied force little by little, the ground began to tremble.
That was when —
Crash—!
Something came hurtling at him from behind with terrifying momentum. Jin Seongun released the marker and sprang lightly aside. The flying wooden club smashed against the boundary stone and clattered to the ground.
A moment later, a figure emerged from the shadows.
"Heh heh heh! Three hundred nyang!"
It was Elder Byeok, the Mad Hen. She advanced on him, her murderous aura blazing openly, a force far more ferocious than anything she'd shown at the inn — enough to make the very air shudder.
"......"
Jin Seongun simply stood and watched her come. At that, Elder Byeok tilted her head.
"Why aren't you running? Word is you've been slipping all over town without a trace."
He obviously couldn't answer — Elder Byeok knew his voice.
He'd already confirmed just how tenacious this woman was. And apparently she'd also caught on that he meant to steal the boundary marker itself. That left exactly one option.
Jin Seongun began walking straight toward her. The distance between them closed at an even pace, and a thoroughly poisonous smile spread across Elder Byeok's face. She, too, had evidently built up quite a temper from recent events.
"Oh-ho! Now we're talking!"
A vast yellow qi gathered in her two hands — a force that would have torn apart not just the massive boundary stone but even the most hardened external-art masters.
Jin Seongun, by contrast, had nothing. No blade. Not a wisp of qi settled into his body.
He was simply weighing his options. If he fought head-on, the Blood Demon Palm would be perfect for it. The problem was that his opponent was an elder of the Beggars' Sect. If, by some terrible chance, she recognized Blood Demon's martial art, things could get extremely unpleasant. Sheer gossip alone might draw the era's greatest luminaries flooding into Yichang — not just later-generation upstarts.
That would be the absolute worst.
He quickly reached his decision. Fight her with palm arts — but not the Blood Demon Palm.
The method was simple. He would unfold the subtle mechanics of the Blood Demon Palm — channeled not through Blood Demon qi, but through Daji's Yeowol Mind Art.
From Jin Seongun's lowered hands, pure white astral qi began to condense. Elder Byeok's eyes wavered slightly at the sight.
"So you're no common thief after all."
Astral qi was the hallmark of the Transcendental Realm. Meaning this thief — the wretched scoundrel — had reached that very realm and still went about stealing. No wonder the young masters were having such a miserable time of it. It only made sense.
Then she launched herself at him in a sudden assault. Whether her opponent wielded astral qi or stood at the Transcendental Realm — she was simply not the sort to weigh such things.
The distance between them vanished in an instant, her Subduing Dragon Palm lancing savagely toward Jin Seongun. He neither dodged nor deflected it — he met it head-on with a palm of his own. It had no name; if pressed, one might call it the Yeowol Palm.
KWAAANG—!!
White and yellow qi collided dead-on. A colossal detonation swallowed the entire surroundings.
When the explosion that had swept through the area finally subsided —
"......"
Elder Byeok lay on the ground, deep bruises mottling her face. Even so, she had deployed her Body-Protecting Astral Qi at the last moment and minimized the damage.
Jin Seongun had of course meant to hold back his strength from the start — he hadn't set out to fight her to the death. But in the final instant, Elder Byeok had grasped the gulf of skill between them and hurriedly raised her astral qi, forcing him to release his own power harder than he'd intended. Knocking her out was the goal, after all.
Jin Seongun pressed his index finger briefly beneath her nose. Thankfully, she was breathing. It seemed he wouldn't owe her those three hundred nyang after all.
Outrageous rumors swept through Yichang.
— Elder Byeok of the Beggars' Sect was defeated by the thief.
— He made off with that colossal boundary marker in one piece.
— ...This one's beyond us. Between us kids, this is beyond us.
Most of the later-generation masters had lost their fighting spirit completely. An elder of the Nine Sects and Five Noble Clans — someone who stood above even the Five Dragons and Three Phoenixes — had intervened and still been beaten. In a single night, the thief transformed in their minds from a nimble sneak with good footwork into a genuine master capable of flooring a Beggars' Sect elder.
Jin Seongun, doing his best to ignore the rumors, tended the inn as he always did.
Then abruptly, a woman with bruises scattered across her face strode into the inn.
"Jin Seongun!"
It was Elder Byeok, of course. The moment she bellowed, the martial artists eating inside scrambled out of the inn in a panic. The first rule of survival: never get entangled with a mad chicken.
Jin Seongun stared at her blankly. His face was composed, but his heart was a little uneasy. Checking in that morning, he'd thankfully found that Seo Yugyeom and Tang Soyeon seemed none the wiser. But a Beggars' Sect elder was another matter entirely.
She stomped closer, step by heavy step. Thanks, perhaps, to what he'd said to her the other day, the stench was gone. She stopped, scanned him up and down from uncomfortably close range, and then spoke.