Not My Fault
The office sat dark and masterless, and a strange standoff stretched between the two of them.
The Great Thief channeled the Falling Flower Divination and studied Jin Seongun for a long moment.
No qi at all?
Even the Falling Flower Divination, which read the flow of every current of energy in heaven and earth, could not see him. Even in a man who had never trained a single martial art, those faint traces of qi should have been visible.
She frowned briefly. The divination was not something one could use without limit. A faint burning ache spread through her eyes, and at the same time her pupils darkened once more.
Just how high a master is this man?
In all her life, she had never seen anyone gather and conceal their energy so perfectly — and this was hardly her first time laying eyes on a true master.
Jin Seongun, for his part, was observing the Great Thief with equal curiosity. She carried a deep well of internal power, and the flow of her qi was perfectly even — and yet, strangely, she did not feel like a master at all.
So the two of them stood marveling at each other, for reasons that were similar yet entirely different.
"……"
In that instant, both their expressions shifted.
As if by prior arrangement, Jin Seongun and the Great Thief moved at the same time.
Jin Seongun reached out his hand.
But the thief had already thrown herself backward, and the broad desk between them blocked his path.
"Where is the signboard?"
Jin Seongun asked again.
Behind her mask, the Great Thief wore an expression of pure exasperation.
Seriously, it's just one signboard!
His attitude made it look as though he had orchestrated this entire affair over a single wooden plaque. To the Great Thief, it was simply incomprehensible.
Then, abruptly, she pointed at a corner of the wall.
Jin Seongun glanced over naturally. There was nothing there. In that gap of attention, the thief bolted.
Of course, such tricks did not work on Jin Seongun.
THWACK—!
The palm strike caught her flush and slammed her into the wall.
It was a blow incomparably weaker than the one he had sent at Elder Byeok — if one insisted on a comparison, the difference between an adult's fist and an infant's.
Even so, it seemed to hurt terribly, because the Great Thief lay crumpled where she had fallen, writhing.
Jin Seongun ambled over and repeated himself.
"The signboard."
"……"
By now, sheer terror was closing in on the Great Thief. It was enough to summon up the ghost stories she had heard as a child.
It's not even 'hand over your leg or else'…….
She staggered to her feet. There was simply no path to victory against this man.
Before long, she drew something from inside her robe.
Jin Seongun instinctively gathered force for another palm strike, then lowered his hand when he saw that what she had produced was paper.
"What's this?"
When he asked, the Great Thief said nothing, only pointed at the paper. Then she looked up at him with mournful eyes behind the mask.
Jin Seongun was not usually the type to care much about other people's feelings, yet even he could tell she was begging for her life.
Looking closer, the paper was a map marked with numerous symbols.
"You hid the signboard here?"
The Great Thief nodded her head with all her might.
Then she even rubbed her two palms together in a shameless plea.
"……"
Jin Seongun's face went blank with disbelief.
He had expected that her martial skill would not be especially formidable, but he had never once imagined she would be this kind of person. What on earth had given her the confidence to make a living by theft? With skill like hers, wasn't every job literally a gamble with her life?
The Great Thief pointed at herself with one finger, then at the door.
Jin Seongun pondered the message for a moment before speaking.
"You want me to let you go?"
She nodded vigorously again.
And this time, Jin Seongun nodded back.
"May I?"
"……"
In the same breath, she launched herself forward.
It was a truly astonishing burst of speed.
Jin Seongun would have sworn that aside from the Martial Gods, he had never seen anyone move with lightness arts of that caliber.
And he caught her.
"?"
Bewilderment dawned in the Great Thief's eyes.
She had lunged at the precise moment he let his guard down. There had never been a single time this trick had failed.
Jin Seongun spoke as he held her by the collar.
"If you do wrong, you must be punished."
The Great Thief put on an expression of injured innocence.
At the sight of it, Jin Seongun let out an exasperated breath.
"You're arguing that no one was hurt and nothing of great value was stolen, so there's no crime?"
She nodded.
Jin Seongun nodded back.
"Nonsense."
"……"
"Do you have any idea how much grief people felt when their signboards vanished? What about all the people who wore themselves out, day and night, chasing after you?"
"……"
"Thanks to you, I was branded a thief and hauled in for questioning by an Elder of the Beggars' Sect. The tiger statue's teeth at the rich Hwang family's estate, the signboard of the Sangwon Fabric Shop, the inkstone from the magistrate's office, the ginseng wine of the Hyeongju Merchant Guild leader, the boundary stones in Yichang. Those, too, were things that mattered dearly to someone."
The Great Thief stared at him in open disbelief. Half of the items he had just listed were not things she had stolen at all.
Jin Seongun went on.
"……And if it weren't for you, I would never have had to steal any of them."
The memory of Oh Jeongsan's howls of despair over his stolen ginseng wine was still painfully vivid.
Then, in the spirit of punishing one to warn a hundred, Jin Seongun delivered a light chop to the back of the Great Thief's neck.
Her meager martial skill meant she crumpled on the spot.
He intended to hand her over to the Martial Alliance or the magistrate's office.
Slinging her carelessly over his shoulder, Jin Seongun walked out of the office.
"……"
Outside, dozens of martial artists were waiting. At the very front stood the Formation Dragon, Sama Hui.
The clash between the two of them had evidently woken the Sama Clan's fighters, who came pouring out in a crowd.
Sama Hui's brow twitched.
"Why are you the one coming out of there?"
Sama Hui had already tried once before to pin the thief's crimes on Jin Seongun.
Not wanting to invite another misunderstanding, Jin Seongun answered in a firm voice.
"I caught the thief."
With that, he gestured at the figure slung over his shoulder.
Sama Hui's eyes narrowed.
"How, exactly?"
"I judged he would show himself here tonight."
It was, of course, Shin Tu's advice.
Shin Tu's logic had been simple: figure out what the single hardest thing in Yichang to steal would be, and steer the thief toward it so she had no choice but to try.
As the contest of pride between Jin Seongun and the Great Thief had escalated, each theft grew more difficult, until at last she had been driven to strike the one place the Sama Clan had fortified and lay waiting — Muhan Bank.
"If you knew, why didn't you say so?"
Sama Hui pressed him in a distinctly aggressive tone.
Jin Seongun stared at him evenly before replying.
"Because last time, I lost him because of you."
He was referring to their first meeting, when Sama Hui and Jin Seongun had crossed paths. At the memory, Sama Hui's face flushed faintly.
By now he had no choice but to admit it — on that first night, the thief really had been hiding inside Muhan Bank.
Just tonight, after all, the man had breached a formation Sama Hui had layered upon layered, again and again, to break in.
But one question still gnawed at him, unresolved.
"Fine. I'll believe everything you say. But one thing. How in the world did you get in?"
Yes, fine — thieving was the man's trade, so he could grudgingly accept that. He was even called the heir of the Divine Thief, and a master among masters who had felled even Elder Byeok.
But how did he catch someone like that?
Sama Hui's mind churned with nothing but questions. In truth, it had been like this ever since the day he first met Jin Seongun.
Jin Seongun answered flatly.
"I flew."
"……What?"
It was true. Unlike the Great Thief, Jin Seongun had no eye for reading formations at all.
So instead of setting foot in the formation even once, he had simply stepped on empty air, again and again, and flown over it.
Sama Hui and the Sama Clan fighters strained to parse the meaning of his words.
None of them could. To begin with, the idea of a man walking across empty air defied all common sense.
For his part, Jin Seongun did not find conversation with Sama Hui particularly pleasant either. Sama Hui was a different breed of degenerate from Seomun Ak.
The kind of person who scraped at the very depths of a man's being, the sort whose mere presence provoked a peculiar irritation.
Jin Seongun soon walked away at an unhurried pace, as if to say the man wasn't worth his time.
With the Sama Clan's fighters gathered like this, the Living Gate and Death Gate of the formation would surely have stopped functioning.
Sama Hui, watching Jin Seongun's careless retreating back, remembered that first night.
Even in that first exchange of words, the man had simply rattled off whatever he pleased and then vanished, as though Sama Hui weren't worth engaging.
As the eldest grandson of the Sama Clan, as the Formation Dragon of the Five Dragons and Three Phoenixes, no one had ever treated him this way.
Not even the venerable old masters of the martial world.
Why? Because his own grandfather was Sama Baek, the Chief Strategist who pulled the strings of the entire orthodox martial world.
"Arrogant bastard……"
In an instant, the light in Sama Hui's eyes transformed.
He swept his hand through the air in a sudden, covert gesture — and at once, the Living Gate and Death Gate spread across the grounds of the bank sprang back to life.
"……"
Jin Seongun stared blankly at the ground beneath his feet.
Something was wrong with the feeling at his soles.
All at once, the entire world surged upward toward the sky.
Or perhaps he was the one plummeting toward the ground.
The sensation lurched so violently that it was hard to tell which — and there was no particular need to.
Sama Hui curled his lips upward as he watched Jin Seongun become trapped within the formation.
Even the Sama Clan fighters standing around him seemed badly startled.
"Y-Young Master!"
"The honor of the clan is at stake here. I deployed the formation to catch a thief, and that inn-boy, in his ignorance, leapt into it like a moth to a flame of his own accord. You all saw it, didn't you?"
"……"
"I asked if you saw it."
"Y-yes, we saw it……"
And so an unspoken agreement was reached: Jin Seongun had walked into the formation of his own two feet.
Jin Seongun looked around.
It was an ordinary residential quarter. Houses where people lived, winding alleys, shops, hedges and fences crowded close together in tangled rows.
"What kind of formation is this?"
It looked entirely different from the formation he had seen at the Saryong River not long ago. Back then, countless razor-sharp blades had hung precariously in the empty air.
But this place was quiet. It even looked almost peaceful.
Jin Seongun started walking.
Everything around him was so vividly rendered that he found himself sightseeing here and there, as though he had arrived in a brand-new city.
Partway through, the Great Thief, draped over his shoulder like a sack of goods, stirred awake with a groan.
"Nnngh… what the……"
Jin Seongun's brow twitched.
So you can talk.
He set her down on the ground and yanked the mask straight off her face.
"……"
"……"
Silence hung between them for a moment.
As the mask came away, hair the color of red silk spilled down past her waist.
"You're a woman?"
"……Apparently so."
The Great Thief nodded. She was a woman of roughly his own age, no less.
Jin Seongun's eyes narrowed as he studied her — and she promptly dropped to her knees on the ground, palms flat, and began to plead.
"Just let it go this once. I'll live honestly from now on, I swear. No more stealing. And there was a real reason for all of it, I'm telling you — you could tell it wasn't ordinary thieving, right? Anyone could see that……"
As she spoke, she arranged her face into an expression full of sorrowful history. The corners of her eyes even grew damp.
She knew perfectly well how striking her looks were. She knew just as well how weak young men were to a pretty face and a few tears.
What she did not know was that this time, her opponent was Jin Seongun.
"I could knock you out again, you know."
The woman sprang to her feet as quick as if she'd never knelt at all, then rounded on him.
"Isn't it dirty, impersonating me like that?"
"You're one to talk — you impersonated the heir of the Divine Thief."
"I never gave myself that title. Not that I minded hearing it, mind you……"
Jin Seongun let out a small sigh.
Getting out of this formation came first. Everything else could wait.
"Can you break the formation?"
Anyone skilled enough to slip into Muhan Bank, he reasoned, ought to manage it — and he felt a flicker of hope.
Instead, she went wide-eyed and looked around slowly.
"This is a formation?"
"It is. I was taking you out to turn you in, and the Sama Clan's eldest grandson sealed the two of us in here together."
"That guy's out of his mind."
Jin Seongun nodded in hearty agreement.
The woman swept her reddened eyes over their surroundings once more, as if to say trust only her.
Before long, her expression began to crumple.
"……This formation. There's no Living Gate."
"Then how do we get out?"
"This formation was never built to trap anyone or hold anyone hostage in the first place."
"Then what's it for?"
"Either the people inside wither away and die — or the ones maintaining the formation from outside give up first."
While Jin Seongun looked around with a dumbfounded face, her words continued.
"……There must have been several formation masters from the Sama Clan working it, right?"
"There were."
"……Then they'll take shifts keeping it running. Until we starve to death in here, or dry up like husks. There is no way out."
With that, she sank to the ground.
It was true that every theft she'd ever pulled had carried a certain measure of risk to her life.
But she had never imagined she would end up shriveling to death inside a formation like this.
Before long she spoke, her face somewhat green.
"I'm sorry. It's not right that you get tangled up with some lunatic because of me, of all things……"
She was afraid of dying.
It grieved her that she still had goals left unfulfilled.
More painful than any of it, though, was the thought that this fake-thief inn-boy would die because of her. She resented him for impersonating her, certainly — but that was hardly a crime worth dying for.
And after all, it was she who had started stealing first and set the whole thing in motion.
Just as she bowed her head low in misery—
Jin Seongun walked steadily forward.
Before long, he stepped into a shop within view.
It was a smithy. Inside, blades and spears, farming tools and the like lay scattered in artless disarray.
It struck him anew just how much care had gone into building this formation. The smithy had originally been placed here with the express wish that whatever enemies were sealed inside would fight each other to the death among its wares.
Jin Seongun took up a sword.
He swung it through the air a few times, then poured his energy into the blade. A vivid crimson flame coiled around the steel.
Whether this was a phantom sword or a real one, he couldn't say. But it was real enough to hold the crimson flame — and that was all he needed.
Carrying the sword, Jin Seongun stepped back out of the smithy.
The despairing woman looked up at him with baffled eyes.
Then Jin Seongun spoke, addressing the empty air.
"Young Master Sama. If you spread this formation for fear the thief might escape, you may release it now. There will be no escape."
Needless to say, no answer came back.
The woman turned to him, incredulous.
"You think that was a mistake? He did it on purpose, obviously. He's the Formation Dragon, hello, the Formation Dragon. If a few words like that could make him let us out, he never would have sealed us in to begin with."
"Is that so."
Jin Seongun scratched his head.
Of course he knew that.
He simply wanted it on the record.
"Well, then. This part isn't my fault."
With those words, Jin Seongun raised the sword.
In an instant, crimson flame began to coil around the iron blade.
Her eyes, snared by the sheer scale of the blaze, instinctively called up the Falling Flower Divination.
And then her eyes went wider than they had ever gone.
What… what is this…….
To the naked eye, it was simply a vast crimson flame.
But seen through the Falling Flower Divination, which traced the flow of all energy, its true nature revealed itself at last.
It was as if every current of qi in heaven and earth had been gathered into that single blade.