Give Me Back My Signboard
"Give it to me."
So she found out something after all.
Jin Seongun met Elder Byeok's stare with perfect calm, while she kept hesitating, faltering over whatever it was she meant to say.
"Go ahead. Say it."
"……You've heard the rumors, I take it."
"Yes, well."
The rumor that a thief had defeated Elder Byeok. Her face had flushed a deep, mortified red, as though the very fact of it burned her.
After a moment, she seemed to reach some kind of resolution.
"……Shave a little off the bill, will ya?"
"……"
Jin Seongun blinked at her, dumbfounded.
He had never intended to collect the three hundred nyang in the first place. Well, if the elders insisted on settling their debts, he supposed he'd have to accept it—but chances were every one of them had already forgotten the amount entirely.
"I crossed blades with that bastard yesterday. Absolute madman, he was."
The so-called madman cleared his throat softly from somewhere in the room.
Elder Byeok's account continued.
"My plan was to catch the thief and collect his bounty. There's a tidy sum on his head, you see. Grew even higher after all the recent business."
"……I see."
"But fighting him yesterday, I understood. The man has undergone Transcendent Rejuvenation. Why an old master like that would play at thievery is beyond me, but one thing's certain—he's not someone the likes of me should be facing."
"How can you be so certain he's undergone Transcendent Rejuvenation? Most thieves wear masks. You wouldn't even have seen his face."
Jin Seongun asked, with a small, involuntary twitch.
Elder Byeok answered with a proud, triumphant expression.
"Not a single wrinkle on his hands."
At that very moment, Seo Yugyeom's voice rang out from the kitchen.
"Jin Seongun! Give me a hand with this!"
His stomach dropping, Jin Seongun hurried toward the kitchen before the elder could get a look at anyone's hands, calling over his shoulder, "You really don't need to pay anything."
"Oh, reeeally?"
Elder Byeok wore a dazed expression. She had never expected things to be settled quite so easily.
Jin Seongun stepped into the kitchen.
"What did you need help with?"
"Ah—never mind. It's handled."
Seo Yugyeom replied with a faint snort of laughter. Jin Seongun gave him an odd look, then nodded and left the kitchen. Seo Yugyeom studied his retreating back for a long moment before breaking into another strange smile.
Maybe I couldn't pick out anyone else, but there's no way I wouldn't recognize him.
It was practically an occupational habit at this point—cataloguing every physical trait of everyone he met.
A small lodging house in Yichang. Or to be precise, its rooftop.
How in the world did he steal it?
For days now, the Great Thief had been locked in an unspoken war of nerves with his impostor. Every time he made off with something, the other man—like some deliberate provocation—would target something even harder to steal.
The real problem was that night after night he had chased the man, and night after night the man had slipped through his fingers. He, who had spent his whole life being the one running away, was learning for the first time just how maddening it was to pursue someone.
And then there was the thing the impostor had stolen yesterday—a boundary stone so massive and heavy that it took a good dozen able-bodied men straining together to budge it. He had sat on this rooftop all day long trying to imagine how it could be done, and come up with nothing.
He's definitely a murim man, that much is sure…
Word had it he'd knocked down an elder of the Beggars' Sect. And on the quieter rumor mill, the Tang Clan's young lord had supposedly suffered at his hands as well.
A thug of a thief. He would never have handled a job that way. He had never once hurt a soul, and he avoided confrontation wherever possible. Admittedly, that was partly because his own martial skill—setting aside his lightness technique and arts of stealth—was on the low side…
You mustn't hurt people. The moment you do, you're not a thief anymore. You're just a bad person!
That stealing was itself a bad thing was apparently a thought that had never once crossed his mind.
Below the roof, young late-bloomer talents were wandering the streets. Most of them had lost their fighting spirit entirely; they drifted about listlessly, more out of reluctance to sit idle in their rooms than out of any real purpose.
I'll show you all.
Just how far I can steal.
His martial arts were too weak to make off with something as huge and heavy as a boundary stone, but he had absolute confidence in his ability to steal things hidden so deep that no one could even imagine them.
Without warning, he unfurled his bundle. Inside it was stuffed full of little notes, each one reading Justice.
The reason he had chosen that particular word was simple. It had nothing to do with grand ideology or dreams of revolution.
It just looked cool.
That was enough.
Suddenly he flung the bundle high into the night sky. The murim men shuffling through the streets with dead fish eyes looked sharply up.
"What's that?"
The warriors blinked. Something was rising high overhead, but the night was too dark to make it out. It didn't take long for them to learn its identity.
Po-ang!
The bundle burst in midair, erupting in sharp, brilliant flame. The hundreds of notes inside scattered this way and that, fluttering down as gorgeously as flower petals at winter's end.
"Wh-what is that?"
One of the murim men snatched a piece of paper out of the air. The moment he read the characters written on it, he cried out with eyes stretched wide in disbelief.
"J-Justice! It's the thief!"
Lodging houses, residences, arcade buildings, training grounds—murim men came pouring out of every building in sight. The habits drilled into their bodies over the past few days kicked in automatically.
But after Elder Byeok's defeat, not a single one stepped forward willingly. The warriors who filled the street glanced warily at one another, and a long silence stretched between them.
"……Anyone care to go together?"
"……"
No answer came. It was obvious to everyone that the thief's martial skill stood on a plane far above their own.
Who, exactly, was hunting whom here?
No fool alive would chase a petty thief at the cost of his own neck.
Having so flamboyantly seized the murim world's attention, the Great Thief slipped quietly into the darkness, swimming through it like a fish through water.
His footsteps carried not a hint of hesitation, as though his destination had been decided long ago. He passed directly over the heads of a few murim men along the way; not one of them noticed a thing.
He might not know how to fight well, but when it came to hiding and running away, he trusted himself more than anyone alive.
The Shadowless Divine Thief was said to be the same way.
The Shadowless Divine Thief—the thief hailed as the greatest in all of recorded history. Legend held that though he possessed lightness technique beyond compare, his raw martial power itself was not especially high.
That, of course, involved a certain amount of misunderstanding and exaggeration. In truth, Shintu grappled by the collar with the Merchant King, taunted the Blood Demon and lived to flee the consequences, and routinely crossed swords with the Sword Immortal's flying blades.
Watching the murim men fail to detect him, the Great Thief felt a warm surge of superiority. It was like watching his self-esteem, sagging these past few days, refill in real time.
But what in the world was that guy?
The first night he had tried to raid Muhan Bank—the first time since he'd set out on the roads of Jianghu that anyone had caught him. He'd only barely escaped, thanks to a formation that had flared to life out of nowhere…
He didn't look all that old, either.
Astonishingly, the man had seemed close to his own age. He had always considered warriors his own age beneath his notice entirely—he made a habit of robbing the elder-level patriarchs of great sects and famous clans and outrunning their fury. And so it went without saying that being detected by a warrior his own age was both shocking and deeply humiliating.
Lost in these thoughts, he settled soundlessly onto the top of a wall. For a while he simply gazed at the plaque above the main gate.
Muhan Bank — Yichang Branch.
Under ordinary circumstances, he would simply have stolen the plaque, as usual(?). But things were different now. Wasn't he locked in an invisible contest with some bizarre impostor claiming his name?
A signboard wouldn't cut it anymore. This was a man who had stolen a boundary stone—so he would have to steal something worthy of that, something perhaps even greater, to defend his honor.
He began to circulate his internal energy. Not to fight, and not to unleash his lightness or stealth arts.
Suddenly, his eyes began to redden, slowly and steadily. Unusually, they took on a brilliant luster, as though tiny flames had been kindled within his pupils. Martial arts that reddened the eyes were almost invariably demonic in nature, casting an ominous pall over their users—and this was precisely the opposite of that phenomenon.
With those burning eyes, he looked upon the interior of the bank.
The Formation Dragon really is something.
The formation spread wide and dense across the entire premises was laid bare before his sight. The ratio of live gates to dead gates was utterly unlike any formation he had ever encountered. Across all that ground, the only live gates were a few tiny circles no bigger than a thumb. In other words, so much as graze any patch of ground outside those few spots, and he would be swallowed into the formation.
Well—this was Sama Hui, who had carved his name into the Five Dragons and Three Phoenixes on the strength of his formations alone. The result of a man clawing back his pride, layering formation upon formation over the course of several days with grim determination.
So how does the bank's staff get around in here?
There had to be some method. Not that he needed one himself.
Whoosh!
He launched his body without a moment's hesitation. Terrifying speed, sweeping strides—and yet not even the sound of a single blade of grass brushing the wind rose to meet him. He bounded through the air, landing with perfect precision on nothing but the rarest, tiniest live gates.
The reason he was called the Great Thief was not simply that his lightness technique and stealth were exceptional. It was these burning eyes—Falling-Fire Eye. The art allowed him to perceive the flow of energy with absolute clarity, and it was just as useful for picking out the hidden and the hiding in the dark.
Which is exactly what makes it so strange.
Even with the Falling-Fire Eye, he had never once managed to locate the impostor who had stolen his name. Which meant the man was a master who controlled his energy to a degree approaching perfection.
But by tomorrow night, his reputation would be restored. No master alive, however skilled, could unravel the web Sama Hui of the Sama Clan had spun across these grounds—no one but himself.
So thinking, he drifted lightly across the formation. His destination was the branch chief's office.
Now where was it again…
An inkstone of fine quality sat atop the desk. The first night, he had come for that very inkstone and fled when he was discovered. An inkstone wouldn't suffice anymore.
His burning eyes soon fixed on a single spot on the wall. The flow of energy was strangely blocked there. No matter how solid a wall appeared, wood breathed—energy slipped through its hidden seams like thread, in and out, always. Which meant that behind that wall lay something hard, dense, and utterly sealed.
And naturally, that could only be a vault—the place where the most valuable possessions were kept.
Found it.
Without hesitation, he drew a tool from within his coat. With practiced, fluid motions, he lifted the panel out of the wall—and astonishingly, not so much as a single creak escaped the process. Behind the paneled surface, exactly as he'd expected, sat a mass of iron.
He laid his hand against it. A cold that bit to the bone.
Must be thick as anything.
The vault alone would rank among this bank's greatest treasures. Inside would be jewels of staggering worth, martial manuals, gold ingots, rare old books of high value.
None of which interested him in the slightest. His honor might be in tatters thanks to that impostor, but his iron rules were his iron rules.
No one hurt. No true loss suffered.
He drew another tool from his coat—a probe of extraordinary thinness, bent into a strange and cunning shape. He worked it into the keyhole, coaxing and teasing.
Click.
After a long while of picking, joy flooded his eyes all at once. He pulled the handle—
The vault's door did not open. Only the handle slid out, clean and whole.
Anyone watching would have called it a failure. But in truth, the handle itself was the thing he had come to steal.
Now that's what you call a Great Thief.
He was about to press a note reading Justice into the empty socket where the handle had been—
"……"
He'd thrown them all away earlier.
In his eagerness to make a moment of it, he simply hadn't thought that far ahead. He pondered briefly, then nodded with a look of sudden clarity.
So what was the problem? This was an office, after all.
He pulled the desk's brush and inkstone toward him and, grinning ear to ear, began to write.
J-u-s-t…
The moment he had written that much—
His hand stopped dead.
For a long moment, silence held the room. Slowly, he raised his head with trembling eyes.
Someone was standing directly in front of him, watching him with the placid composure of a man observing a street performance.
Since when? No—how?
He knew it in his bones. This was him. The impostor.
The problem was that this man was strong enough to batter an elder of the Beggars' Sect half to death.
Just as terror began to bleed into his eyes—
"……Give me back my signboard."
And the thief finally understood.
There had never been any impostor.
There had only ever been one mad inn waiter.