A Familiar Comfort
Nakhwajeong was no small household.
It kept more than a dozen blacksmiths on its payroll, and another few dozen servants to see to the assorted chores. The number of clan members proper was never trifling either. And by the very nature of a smithy, the ringing of hammers never ceased from morning to night.
Yet now, an alien stillness had settled over Nakhwajeong.
It was only natural. Jin Seongun had just declared, with inner power laced into every syllable, that he wished to have a match with Nakhwajeong.
It was loud enough to reach the ears of a trainee pumping the bellows in a corner of the forge.
"A-a contest?"
Chae Seoryeong blinked and echoed the word. Could he possibly be angry with her? Angry enough to show up in the dead of night and demand a contest?
"That's right. A contest."
Jin Seongun deliberately did not mention Divine Thief's name. He suspected the servants and ordinary smiths had no idea about the wager between Divine Thief and Nakhwajeong.
"What kind of contest...?"
"I'll explain once I see the Manor Lord."
At that, Chae Seoryeong's face turned troubled. Come what may, Nakhwajeong was a family with history and tradition behind it. No young man could simply barge in at midnight and call out, 'Manor Lord, let's have a word.'
Considering Mother's temper...
Worse, when she recalled the fiery disposition of the Manor Lord, Chae Gahwi, she worried a clash might break out between him and her mother.
Just as Chae Seoryeong was racking her brains—
"A blacksmith, are you?"
A low, sharp voice cut through the air. Chae Seoryeong and every servant's gaze snapped toward it.
A middle-aged woman was approaching, crimson hair streaming behind her. Every stride she took exuded an elegance that could not be hidden.
Jin Seongun regarded her for a moment, then gave a small bow of his head.
"No, my lady."
"A martial artist of the murim, then?"
"I run an inn."
"..."
Chae Gahwi's face went briefly dumbfounded. An innkeeper had come to Nakhwajeong demanding... a contest?
Then it struck her.
Chae Seoryeong's story came back to her. So that's who he is. A thief more skilled than her own daughter—and the one who had, by Sama Se's account, unraveled the Grand Young Master's formation.
And with it, the words she had once tossed at her daughter as a joke resurfaced as well.
— Looks like you've become a disciple of the venerable Divine Thief.
Chae Gahwi's eyes changed. In the next breath, a rather menacing aura came pouring out of her entire body. As if that were the signal, naked killing intent burst forth from every corner of the compound, pressing down on Jin Seongun.
"W-wait a moment!"
Chae Seoryeong panicked, flailing her hands wildly at the air. To her eyes, Jin Seongun was not a bad man. She had no great evidence for it. He certainly wasn't handsome enough to be, either.
It was simply a feeling.
When she had read his energy through her Falling Fire Sight, that energy had been unmistakably the clearest and purest of anything she had ever seen.
Someone like that can't be a villain.
Chae Seoryeong was certain of it. And so, absurd as the situation was, she decided the thing to do was at least hear him out.
Jin Seongun quietly registered the pressure bearing down on his shoulders. Quite fierce energy. This was no ordinary smithy, that much was certain—it stood on par with any respectable force in the murim.
Yet when the killing intent rained down so openly and he simply stood there with an unruffled face, a flicker of intrigue crossed Chae Gahwi's eyes.
"What sort of contest do you mean?"
"As I understand it, there is one wager at Nakhwajeong that was never finished."
Chae Gahwi and Jin Seongun held each other's gaze for a long moment. The truth was, Jin Seongun did not look upon Nakhwajeong particularly fondly. His master Divine Thief's death was entwined with this place's ancestors to begin with, and Chae Seoryeong's thieving did not sit well with him either.
How much time passed like that?
"Come inside."
Chae Gahwi wheeled around and strode off. Jin Seongun watched her retreating back for a breath before following, while Chae Seoryeong and the servants could only blink at one another in bewilderment.
In the reception hall of Nakhwajeong, in a room furnished with antique grace rather than extravagance, Jin Seongun, Chae Seoryeong, and Chae Gahwi sat facing one another across a low table.
None of the three spoke. The silence held even after a servant tiptoed in, set out refreshments, stole a glance at Jin Seongun's face, and slipped back out.
Jin Seongun and Chae Gahwi both wore expressionless masks, each seemingly sunk in their own thoughts as they waited, and between the two of them only Chae Seoryeong fidgeted restlessly.
After a stretch of that, Chae Gahwi's brow twitched and she finally spoke.
"If you came all this way, you ought to state your business."
"I stated it already."
"Yes—the wager. What wager, exactly, does an innkeeper think he's making with the smiths of Nakhwajeong?"
"..."
Jin Seongun fell silent for a moment. He honestly had no idea what the wager was. Divine Thief had only told him he would know once he got to Nakhwajeong.
But blurting the old man's name outright felt awkward. Decades had passed, after all—and there was no telling whether the descendants even knew of the wager's existence. Mention Divine Thief carelessly, and he might earn nothing but a very strange misunderstanding.
So he fixed his gaze and weighed his words. The silence stretched on again.
Before long, Chae Gahwi opened her mouth with a look of disgust. She had never once lost a battle of patience in her life, and she judged that if she left this man alone, he would keep his mouth shut until morning.
"They say you claim to be that man's successor. Is that so?"
Jin Seongun's expression brightened slightly. So the descendants did know of the wager's existence.
"That's right."
Then he recalled what he had painstakingly worked out on the road here. Claiming to be Divine Thief's heir was fine—it was no lie but the truth. What mattered was the how.
'I bought an inn and it turned out martial gods were living in the warehouse, and one of them was Divine Thief. Then I became his disciple.'
Say it that way, and there was a fair chance Nakhwajeong would report a lunatic's intrusion to the authorities.
So he had built a different story.
"Some time ago, with my mind in some turmoil, I visited the Guangyun Shrine at the foot of Mount Yeo..."
A strange voice had drawn him onward, and following it, he had come upon Divine Thief's hidden residence. There he had learned the master's arts in full, and then, per the instructions left there, burned the place to the ground.
Divine Thief had left a record: that if anyone ever mastered his arts completely, they were to go to the Nakhwa Iron Pavilion and settle the unfinished wager.
"And so I came. When I asked around, I learned that Nakhwajeong's old name was the Nakhwa Iron Pavilion."
At the mention of the Nakhwa Iron Pavilion, a flicker crossed Chae Gahwi's eyes. It was an old name a young man like Jin Seongun would have found nearly impossible to know.
"I see. I understand your claim."
Chae Gahwi worded it deliberately—a claim. She could hardly take a stranger's word at face value, least of all a story like this one.
"Do you have any evidence to back it?"
"No."
"..."
Chae Gahwi wore an expression of rare, pure disbelief, looking at Jin Seongun as one looks at a madman.
"Well, you're welcome to inspect the residence beneath the Guangyun Shrine. Whether that counts as evidence, I couldn't say."
Jin Seongun had deliberately left the residence's doors standing wide open. The records etched into its floor and walls would lend credence to the claim that it had been Divine Thief's home.
Having said his piece, he quietly watched Chae Gahwi's reaction. She pretended to ponder, sipping her tea—but the strange quivering of her lips suggested she was transmitting a message to someone, somewhere.
Soon after, Jin Seongun's qi sense caught a single figure hurrying out through the gates of Nakhwajeong.
"That alone is not enough for me to believe you."
"Then how do we settle the wager?"
The frustration was mutual. If he was to fulfill Divine Thief's request, someone—Chae Gahwi or anyone—had to tell him what the wager actually was. But with vigilance this extreme, even coaxing out its contents would be an uphill fight.
These were people called Martial Gods, so he hadn't expected the request to be easy, but this particular kind of difficulty he had not foreseen.
What on earth happened back then?
He was not the one who had made the wager with Divine Thief—and if her descendants were this wary, it had to be bound up with the entire house of Nakhwajeong.
After a stretch of grave deliberation, Chae Gahwi spoke.
"If you are truly the heir of the venerable Divine Thief..."
"..."
"Then there is nothing under heaven you cannot steal."
Jin Seongun stared at her steadily. Chae Gahwi continued.
"Steal what I name for you. Do that, and I will believe you are the venerable Divine Thief's disciple."
Proving oneself the heir of history's greatest thief naturally required a test of thieving. At least, that was how Chae Gahwi saw it.
Jin Seongun mulled it over briefly, then asked.
"What should I steal?"
Chae Gahwi let out a scoffing laugh. At the very least, that confidence of his resembled the Divine Thief of the old tales she'd heard as a child.
Then, her lips curling into a provocative smile, she named her price.
"The swords of the Zhongnan Sect. Bring me twenty of them—the ones engraved with Nakhwajeong's name."
With that, she studied Jin Seongun. Where was the Zhongnan Sect? One of the great orthodox Nine Sects, holding its seat among them with pride—and, together with the Mount Hua Sect, one of the two colossal sword sects that divided the murim of this Shaanxi region between them.
Chae Gahwi expected Jin Seongun to flinch at least a little.
'Even if he truly is the venerable Divine Thief's heir...'
He looked barely older than her daughter Chae Seoryeong, after all.
But her prediction missed wide.
"By when should I have them?"
"..."
Rather, it was Chae Gahwi and Chae Seoryeong who wore startled expressions now. Chae Seoryeong tried picturing it—herself slipping into the Zhongnan Sect. As she always had, she was confident she could make off with any trifling object she pleased.
But swords were different. A sword sect like Zhongnan treated its blades differently from anyone else. The Taoists cherished their own swords beyond measure, and any sword not yet issued to a disciple would be watched over by guards. Above all—stealing not one sword but twenty was, by Chae Seoryeong's reckoning, simply impossible.
Chae Gahwi, too, gazed at him with a strange look before speaking.
"You're certainly full of confidence—"
Then it came.
A thread of transmitted thought entered Chae Gahwi's mind.
— It... it really is the venerable Divine Thief's residence.
The pupils of Chae Gahwi, who had maintained her composure throughout, trembled faintly. Mount Yeo was, quite literally, the mountain at this city of Xi'an's back door. And Divine Thief's hidden residence had lain that close all along.
Before long, Chae Gahwi, still fixing her gaze on Jin Seongun's placid face, spoke.
"By tomorrow morning."
"Yes, well..."
Jin Seongun nodded. At the sight, Chae Gahwi's brow twitched.
"That confident, are you?"
"I suppose I'll know once I try."
With that, Jin Seongun rose from his seat without a backward glance. Setting aside any feelings about Nakhwajeong, he rather liked this test.
He remembered the inn he had stopped at on the way here. He remembered the Zhongnan Taoists there, sneering at how little Nakhwajeong's swords were worth.
If he had to steal something anyway, better it be something its own owners didn't treasure.
Having left Nakhwajeong behind, Jin Seongun headed straight for Mount Zhongnan. With the task laid out so clearly, there was no reason to waste time.
When he had climbed nearly to the summit, dozens of halls and pavilions came into view.
So that's the Zhongnan Sect.
It was his first time seeing one of the Nine Sects in the flesh, after a lifetime of hearing only the name.
And naturally, two young Taoists of the Zhongnan Sect stood guard solemnly at the main gate. One of them was a man Jin Seongun already knew.
The dumpling guy.
The Taoist who had gobbled down dumplings, juice dribbling down his chin at the inn—and who had loosed those mocking remarks about Chae Gahwi and Chae Seoryeong.
Jin Seongun watched the pair for a moment from a great distance, then pulled up the mask he had brought along.
A deep, familiar comfort settled into his heart.