It Just Wouldn't Be Stylish
He had been about to head straight for Cheonghae Iron Pavilion.
Jin Seongun turned his head toward the door.
It was a sensation he had never felt before, and yet somehow it struck him as uncannily familiar.
Before long the door opened and an elderly woman appeared. Like Chae Gahwi and Chae Seoryeong, she too bore a head of crimson hair.
Chae Gahwi and Chae Seoryeong rose from their seats at the same time. Chae Seoryeong was the first to speak, her face brightening.
"Grandmother!"
Jin Seongun flinched.
Chae Seoryeong's grandmother meant—
In other words, the old woman standing before him was Chae Okhyeon, the very woman of Shin Tu's past.
A quiet bewilderment stirred in Jin Seongun's chest.
Naturally, he had assumed she must already be dead. After all, he'd been told she was of Shin Tu's generation.
Master Shin Tu had passed away roughly eighty years ago. He would have been around thirty at the time.
Which meant Chae Okhyeon was now well past one hundred years old.
Her face and bearing certainly carried the weight of those years. And yet she showed no sign of frailty in her movements—her eyes, if anything, were strikingly vivid.
Chae Okhyeon returned her granddaughter's greeting with a faint smile, then turned her gaze to Jin Seongun.
He did not look away.
It felt strange to stand face to face with someone from the same era as a Martial God—someone he had always imagined existing on the far, unreachable other side of an immense gulf of time.
This family's maternal bloodline was clearly strong.
Give Chae Seoryeong twenty years and she would look like Chae Gahwi; give it another few decades, and she would wear Chae Okhyeon's face.
After a brief moment of locked eyes, Chae Okhyeon spoke.
"Are you truly Shin Tu's heir?"
Her voice was soft, layered with the passage of years.
Chae Gahwi then explained—the trial demanding the recovery of Nakhwajeong's sword from the Zhongnan Sect, and how effortlessly he had accomplished it.
Chae Okhyeon nodded slowly.
"If you are Shin Tu's heir, I suppose it was no great feat. That man could have stolen even the Heavenly Demon's sword, not merely something from the Zhongnan Sect."
Chae Okhyeon's eyes seemed to gaze at some far-off corner of the past.
Soon those eyes flushed crimson.
Nokhwa Jeomjeong—the Falling Fire Dotting the Eye. But its color was far deeper and richer than Chae Seoryeong's.
Eyes that seemed capable of seeing through all things in creation turned upon Jin Seongun.
Chae Okhyeon studied him intently, searching for something.
Little by little, her expression began to change.
Everyone held their breath and watched. After a stretch of silence, her eyes returned to their original color.
"Truly, then..."
At that moment—
her gaze sank into something strangely forlorn.
Jin Seongun took it for the grief of one who had lived more than a hundred years.
Chae Okhyeon went on, her face etched with regret.
"You have come to end the wager."
"That's correct."
Jin Seongun found himself speaking with instinctive courtesy. Given the woman's age and standing, it was only natural.
Chae Okhyeon let out a sigh before answering.
"That wager is a faded promise, a lingering obsession of a bygone age. How could I ever drive the young people of a new era into a death trap over the regrets of the old?"
Her stance, and the message behind her words, were unmistakable. For Jin Seongun, it made for a thorny problem.
Even if she were merely middle-aged, he would have pressed his will against hers without hesitation—but against a woman past one hundred, standing firm carried a different weight entirely.
Chae Okhyeon continued.
"If you are truly Shin Tu's disciple, then all the more reason you must not go."
What lived in her eyes was regret, vivid and undimmed.
For decades, that regret and sorrow had refused to fade. No—perhaps the faint blur that remained now was as much as decades of time could manage.
So thinking, Jin Seongun answered in a level tone. Not forceful, but certain.
"If you refuse to permit the wager, I will go alone. That is why I came."
"..."
Truthfully, the situation left a sour taste in Jin Seongun's mouth as well.
After all, it was Shin Tu himself who had spoken of the wager with Nakhwajeong.
Besides, only Nakhwajeong knew what exactly had to be stolen in the first place.
If they refused to tell him, then—just as he'd said—he fully intended to walk into Cheonghae Iron Pavilion alone. Observe them, coax them into conversation, and something was bound to surface. Though that conversation might grow somewhat... vigorous.
One way or another, he was going.
Granting the Martial Gods' request was no longer a matter of choice. It had become a duty stitched into the very fabric of Jin Seongun's life.
Chae Okhyeon and Chae Gahwi stared at him in silence. Both women could feel the unshakable resolve radiating off the man.
If the two of them refused, this man would march into Cheonghae Iron Pavilion alone, no matter what.
And then he would surely die.
Neither of them doubted it for an instant. Had even Shin Tu himself not met his end there?
Chae Okhyeon asked, as if the answer eluded her.
"Why go to such lengths? You were never taught by him directly—you merely inherited the arts he left behind. Taking up the techniques without claiming the lineage should raise no trouble. And if it is the rumors about Shin Tu that concern you, you needn't worry at all."
"Which rumors would those be?"
"The one that says any man who covets Shin Tu's secret chamber will die within ten years."
"..."
Jin Seongun's face went blank with disbelief.
Master Shin Tu was a thief, not a shaman.
"That is not my reason."
"Then why?"
In truth, Chae Okhyeon's assumption had been wrong at the root.
Jin Seongun had learned the martial arts directly from Shin Tu. But that was hardly something he could say aloud.
So after a moment's deliberation, groping for the right words, a memory of Shin Tu surfaced—and Jin Seongun said:
"It just wouldn't be stylish."
In an instant, Chae Okhyeon's tranquil eyes wavered violently. For the briefest moment, she could almost hear Shin Tu's voice ringing in her ears like a phantom.
It really had been the words permanently stuck in his mouth.
What's the point if there's no style in it?
That maddening, wretched, yet achingly nostalgic phrase—now being hurled straight at her by a young man claiming to be Shin Tu's heir.
Just as her heart began to roil—
Chae Seoryeong, who had been listening in silence the entire time, cut in abruptly.
"Then why have I trained all this time, exactly?"
Chae Gahwi and Chae Okhyeon turned toward her—and so did Jin Seongun.
Chae Seoryeong pressed on.
"Why do you think I hammered iron by day and practiced thievery by night? The ones who taught me that were Grandmother and Mother, weren't they?"
Chae Seoryeong herself did not know the details of the wager.
All she knew was that there was something in Cheonghae Iron Pavilion that did not belong there, and that Nakhwajeong had withered because of it.
Generation after generation, the women of Nakhwajeong had striven to take it back, and that will—that unfinished task—had been passed down intact through the ages until it reached Chae Seoryeong herself.
Now she spoke not as a reckless daughter or granddaughter, but as a woman in her own right.
"I am a woman of Nakhwajeong too."
Chae Seoryeong's eyes glowed crimson.
Watching her, Chae Gahwi felt her heart twist.
She had never inherited those eyes. And the Nokhwa Jeomjeong was an indispensable ability for carrying out the task against Cheonghae Iron Pavilion.
If she had possessed those eyes, she would have gone herself a hundred times over by now.
Her mother was elderly. She herself lacked the ability.
Which meant the only one left to inherit the task was Chae Seoryeong—the girl who still looked like a child in her mother's eyes.
And that girl was declaring herself a woman of Nakhwajeong, with eyes so vivid and so red.
I grew complacent.
Chae Gahwi felt the sting of regret. She had always known a day like this would come—she had simply believed it lay in the far, far future.
And so she had looked away for now. She had even told herself it might never need to come at all.
But looking at Shin Tu's heir who had appeared without warning, and at Chae Seoryeong watching her from beside him, Chae Gahwi understood at last.
The hour had arrived.
Chae Okhyeon had reached the same realization.
The current sweeping through that room was far too vast for either of them to hold back.
Chae Okhyeon gave a small nod.
Then she gently stroked Chae Seoryeong's shoulders, and took Jin Seongun's hand in hers for a single, brief moment.
Quietly, Chae Okhyeon left the room.
Chae Gahwi, remaining behind, spoke with the same steely, imperious expression she always wore.
"Follow me."
But Jin Seongun caught the faint tremor in her voice. No mother's heart could stay steady while sending her daughter into a death trap.
The place Chae Gahwi led them to was a forge so old and worn that even Nakhwajeong no longer used it.
Stale dust hung thick in the air. In the middle of it sat a single furnace, small and long since empty.
As if to prove that flames had once roared there, the walls all around were covered in layers of black soot.
"The fire that lived in this place—Nakhwa, the Falling Fire. That is what Shin Tu came to steal from Cheonghae Iron Pavilion."
Chae Gahwi went on to explain.
Nakhwa was an inextinguishable flame passed down through the generations of Nakhwajeong alone, said to be capable of melting anything in existence.
Indeed, by wielding that flame, Nakhwajeong had held its place as the finest forge under heaven for over a hundred years.
But then someone stole the Nakhwa away.
The thief had sealed the flame inside a lantern and extinguished the original fire for good.
"That man was a disciple of the Heavenly Demon Cult, I take it."
"He was also the son-in-law who married into Nakhwajeong."
The general shape of the story assembled itself in Jin Seongun's mind.
A woman of Nakhwajeong had fallen in love with a man of the demonic path. He would have had red hair, most likely.
Considering how deeply the Central Plains distrusted the demonic sects—far more so in those days—it had been a perilous love indeed.
The man stole the flame of Nakhwajeong and fled to Cheonghae. And Nakhwajeong could not appeal to the Wulin Alliance or any other martial power for aid.
To do so would have meant exposing the fact that the infants then living in Nakhwajeong were that man's own blood.
"So you had to retrieve it yourselves."
Why Nakhwajeong stubbornly passed down a matrilineal name. Why its women bore crimson hair. Why they honed the art of thievery. And why Chae Gahwi had guarded Jin Seongun with such wariness the moment she noticed the look in Chae Seoryeong's eyes.
It all made sense now.
"After that, Cheonghae Iron Pavilion rose from strength to strength and claimed the title of the greatest forge under heaven, while Nakhwajeong declined with every passing day."
"And Grandmother used Master Shin Tu for the sake of the family's revival."
Chae Gahwi and Chae Seoryeong fell silent at once.
There was no other way to dress it up.
Whatever remorse Chae Okhyeon had felt immediately afterward—whatever her attempts to take the request back—the plain truth remained that Shin Tu had died because of it.
In the brief silence that followed—
Jin Seongun, who had been about to nod, spoke instead.
"I understand."
There was nothing else to say.
If anyone had the right to resent Chae Okhyeon, that person was Shin Tu and Shin Tu alone.
And Shin Tu himself had said he held no regrets.
Jin Seongun couldn't begin to guess what the man had truly meant by that—but he was in no position to presume upon such a heart either way.
"At Cheonghae Iron Pavilion—"
"..."
"—steal the Nakhwa back. That is the wager, is it not?"
Jin Seongun asked point-blank, and Chae Gahwi gave a small nod.
"You will need Seoryeong's eyes."
"I see."
Jin Seongun was unimpressed.
Every formation he had witnessed so far had been remarkable in its way, but hardly threatening.
Even the formations of Sama Sega, the acknowledged grandmaster of formation arts, had been no different.
Reading that dismissiveness in him, Chae Gahwi pressed on.
"I will say it again. Elder Shin Tu himself lost his life to those formations."
Jin Seongun nodded.
Come to think of it, that did suggest the place deserved more than a casual glance.
After all, even to Jin Seongun's eyes, Shin Tu's shadow arts remained far beyond anything he could easily replicate.
"Wait here a moment."
Chae Gahwi left the room and soon returned.
In her hand was a single sword.
"The Nokhwa Sword."
Jin Seongun eyed it with mild skepticism.
Belittling another man's blade was poor form—but he had made the mistake of listening to the recent testimony of the Zhongnan Sect's Taoists, after all.
Chae Gahwi's expression turned incredulous.
"This blade was forged in the days when Nakhwajeong was still called the Nakhwa Iron Pavilion."
In other words, a sword made by the greatest forge under heaven.
That it had been treasured and passed down through the generations marked it, unmistakably, as one of their supreme masterworks.
Taking it in hand, Jin Seongun drew the blade from its sheath.
Shrring—!
Unlike its aged scabbard, the blade gleamed with a freshly honed, razor-sharp whiteness.
He swept it through the empty air a few times; the weight and balance were thoroughly satisfying.
"I'll put it to good use."
Before long, Jin Seongun and Chae Seoryeong set out from Nakhwajeong.
With their goal so clearly fixed, there was no reason to let a single hour slip away.
"We'll be back safe and sound."
Chae Seoryeong said it brightly.
Fulfilling at last the task passed down through generations. Setting out to steal the hardest thing under heaven to steal. Traveling alongside the enigma that was Jin Seongun.
All of it churned together in her heart, an intricate tangle of emotions she could not name.
Chae Gahwi gazed at her daughter for a long moment. Every fiber of her wanted to seize her hand and pull her back even now. But she knew, with perfect clarity, what she could not say.
Just as there were moments when martial artists had to draw their blades and accept death, so too were there such moments for the women of Nakhwajeong.
For her daughter Chae Seoryeong, this was that moment.
Chae Gahwi pulled Chae Seoryeong into her arms and held her once.
Watching them, Jin Seongun spoke in his flat, unhurried voice.
"I will bring Young Lady Chae back unharmed."
Light words—yet saturated with certainty.
And though the claim had no foundation whatsoever, Chae Gahwi found, for some reason she couldn't explain, that a measure of her dread quietly washed away.