The Road That Leaves No Trace
Daemyeong Pungwhajeon had all sorts of sects and great families, and even the bit-part characters ran well past a hundred.
Of course, that meant there were the likable ones and the ones nobody could stand.
Among them, Jegal Yeona belonged squarely in the latter camp, though whether she truly deserved the label was a matter of fierce debate.
She was the sort of character who drove both fans and haters to the brink of madness.
Was she ugly? No.
As Yu Seojin had said, Jegal Yeona was a cute, elegant girl who brought to mind a marten.
There were even people who ranked her as the most beautiful woman in Hubei.
Did she have a terrible personality? No.
In a martial world where the average personality was somewhere between a gang boss and a bandit chief, Jegal Yeona actually ranked rather high.
Was she powerless and useless? No.
Just as her epithet, Cheongi, suggested, Jegal Yeona often played a key role in certain hidden quest lines.
Then was she arrogant, rude, insolent, and pathetic? That one was half and half.
She was rude, but not arrogant. Insolent, but not pathetic.
So why did she end up on the list of characters people wanted to avoid?
Because she loved playing pranks.
Really. A lot.
Insanely a lot.
And even setting aside situations like that, there were several bad endings in the game where you got dragged into Jegal Yeona’s pranks and died because of them.
Worse yet, her pranks got meaner the higher your affection, morality, and cultivation were.
On the other hand, if you were wicked, fake, or violent and savage, she kept her distance and treated you politely.
In other words, she only played pranks after judging whether you were the sort of person worth teasing.
A character like that ought to have been filed under the category of “personality trash,” but the reason she wasn’t came down to two things: first, her morality wasn’t actually that bad, and
second, she was cute.
If you were cute, everything was forgiven.
In the end, the world worked on a simple principle: if you had the looks, you could get away with anything.
Even if you were nothing more than data made of zeroes and ones.
Much less in a world where that data had become reality.
I shuddered after hearing Yu Seojin’s story.
If there was any silver lining, it was that Yu Seojin mistook my trembling for cold and added more grass to the campfire.
As a result, the smoke in the cramped cave grew even thicker.
"Cough, cough!"
Yu Seojin coughed at the peppery smoke and fanned herself with a hand, though she was still grinning from ear to ear.
"Ah, I’m sorry. This humble one isn’t very good at controlling it... I thought Wolyeon Daehyeop might be feeling cold, so I wanted to make it a little warmer for you."
I couldn’t very well tell her that I was shivering because I’d just remembered the rumors about the person she was looking for, so I kept my mouth shut.
Not that I could have said it anyway.
I shook my head at Yu Seojin.
I meant to answer the question she’d asked me earlier.
"...You mean you haven’t seen her?"
Yu Seojin asked, wiping at the corners of her eyes.
I looked back at her and shook my head again.
"Ah, so you didn’t see her after all. This humble one must have been too greedy. I heard only that Yeona had gone toward Zhangjiajie, so I set out blindly without thinking."
Zhangjiajie?
For a moment, a dry swallow lodged in my throat.
I coughed, thumping my chest hard, and Yu Seojin hurriedly held out some water.
"Wolyeon Daehyeop! Are you all right? Did it go down the wrong way? Water, water!"
I waved her off and took a few deep breaths.
Even then, my mind was already spinning.
Jegal Yeona had gone to Zhangjiajie?
There was nothing there.
No, to be exact, it was just a rugged mountain region where there was nothing known to the world.
And even the unknown had long since been reduced to ashes in truth.
The reason Bang Chunghyun had searched Zhangjiajie was because he was someone who had once been connected to Master.
In other words, people who didn’t know Master, or who had only a shallow connection to him, wouldn’t even know what had once been hidden in Zhangjiajie.
Outwardly, it was known only as a treacherous but auspicious mountain, a place where at best herbal gatherers and leisurely eccentrics came and went.
And the Jegal Clan’s treasured daughter had gone there of her own accord?
No way.
A bad feeling ran through me.
If Jegal Yeona had seen something with that strange ability of hers,
and if she’d gone running off to Zhangjiajie because she’d become obsessed with it—
Cold sweat trickled down my back.
If she found the stone tomb
and, driven by her endless curiosity, tore through the place.
But I couldn’t just turn around and go back to Zhangjiajie right now.
I hadn’t even found a way to heal Master’s body, and I couldn’t reverse course simply because of a vague hunch that the seal might come undone.
"Wolyeon Daehyeop, your energy’s gone out of balance. Wouldn’t it be better to take a sip of water?"
Thankfully, Yu Seojin still thought I’d merely choked and handed me the waterskin.
This time I took it, drank a mouthful, and listened to the rest of her story.
"Anyway, if you want to go from Xiangyang to Zhangjiajie, you have to pass through Yichang no matter what, so I thought I’d go to Yichang first and ask around. Yeona’s body is frail, so she can’t use martial arts, which means she must have secretly sent servants ahead and traveled by carriage. But then I got lost and somehow wandered all the way here."
Yu Seojin scratched her head, looking embarrassed.
This place was far south of Yichang; she’d clearly gone much farther than she meant to.
Was it because she was blind and couldn’t see the road?
"That girl said she was going to find the stars in Zhangjiajie. Some nonsense about the Plough, or maybe the Heavenly Striker Star. I think she’s probably gone off to cause trouble again. Last time she scribbled all over the Namgung Clan’s sword tomb and caused an uproar."
Just as I thought.
My guess had been right.
The whole story about the stars was just an excuse; she had definitely gone in search of something fun.
"Wolyeon Daehyeop, you probably don’t know this, but that girl is horribly mischievous."
Yu Seojin let out a long, exasperated sigh and wrapped her arms around her knees.
I know. I know very well.
Maybe better than you do.
She’d made me how many manuals out of trash already?
I nodded emphatically to myself and flipped the meat over over the fire.
"She’s been like that since she was little. She’d lead me down the wrong road just because I couldn’t see, or mold hundreds of grains of rice out of mud and give them to me as a meal..."
Molding hundreds of grains of rice out of mud must have been hard work, too.
That kind of prank was almost respectably devoted.
"There was even one time she secretly threw my sword into a snake den. Then she stood there laughing and said, ‘Seojin, look! The snake stole your sword with hollow-space grasping!’ And I was bitten by the snake and nearly died."
...That wasn’t a prank. That was attempted murder.
She was even more vicious than the Jegal Yeona I knew from the game.
Or maybe it was a childhood black history episode the game had never bothered to render.
I immediately took back my inner claim that I might know her better than anyone.
"And yet... I can’t hate her."
Yu Seojin’s expression softened strangely.
"Even when she’s being awful, she’s always the first one to run over whenever I’m truly in danger. It was Yeona who carried me to the physician during the snake den incident. She ran until her legs were so swollen she was crying her eyes out, and after she’d saved my life, the first thing she said when I woke up was, ‘You idiot, who told you to jump in for real? I don’t want to use my good deeds on this kind of thing and end up reincarnated as a pig!’"
The expression that had just softened on Yu Seojin’s face quickly hardened again.
A shadow began to settle between her brows.
"It’s the same this time. The day we were stargazing together, she suddenly got excited and ran off first, saying she’d go in alone, and the next day she vanished, leaving only a single letter behind. It said, ‘Hear me, Head of the Jegal Clan! I have taken the Wudang Sect Master hostage! Once I find the stars in Zhangjiajie, I’ll come back of my own accord, so don’t bother looking for me!’"
Yu Seojin shook her head in disbelief.
"I have no idea what Master is thinking, always going along with her antics. Yeona is old enough to marry now; we can’t keep letting her act like a child forever, can we?"
Master, she must have been talking about the Wudang Sect Master.
The face I’d glimpsed so faintly when I was still a baby drifted through my memory.
If I remembered correctly, the reason Jegal Yeona turned out to be such a little troublemaker was all because of that man, so maybe he was the one who enjoyed playing along with her antics.
When she finished speaking, Yu Seojin clenched her fist as though making a vow.
"So I have to go and stop her. I’ll find her no matter what and drag her back! And then I’ll haul her to Wudang Mountain and make her copy the Dao De Jing a hundred times! Then she’ll understand what she’s done."
That sounds like something you should do. It would be good for your studies, too.
Yu Seojin opened and closed her fist a few times, then suddenly let out a deep sigh and hugged her knees again.
What followed was the long tale of all the suffering she’d endured at Jegal Yeona’s hands.
Her complaints went on without end.
Jegal Yeona drawing a turtle in ink on Yu Seojin’s face while she slept.
Jegal Yeona serving monkey urine to guests of the Jegal Clan while claiming it was Hwaju.
Jegal Yeona laying bamboo shoots beneath the cushions where the Wudang priests sat in meditation, causing dozens of them to collapse clutching their anuses.
Especially at the last part, I could almost feel my own backside start to ache.
Even in a martial world where a lucky painkiller and traditional medicine could cure small wounds with ease, the agony of hemorrhoids and a blocked bowel would be beyond words.
Listening quietly, it sounded as though if this priest only kept up his training, ascension into the heavens might not be a dream at all.
How on earth was anyone friends with a human being like that?
After chattering for quite a while, Yu Seojin abruptly fell silent.
Only the crackle of firewood and the sound of rain remained inside the cave.
"Ah... I’m sorry. You can’t even speak, and I’ve just been talking to myself the whole time."
She buried her face in her knees.
"I suppose I was lonely. Wandering around in a strange place where I couldn’t see, didn’t know the road, and didn’t know a single person... I guess I wanted to complain to someone, anyone. But you just sit there and listen so quietly that I ended up talking without meaning to."
I tore a nicely roasted piece of tiger meat off the skewer and placed it in her hand.
Then I tapped the back of her hand lightly, meaning for her to be careful because it was hot.
"Oh. Ah, thank you..."
Yu Seojin took the meat and carefully bit into it.
It was tough and dry, the taste of the wild, but hunger is the best seasoning, as they say. She chewed and swallowed with no trouble at all.
"It’s delicious. Really delicious."
Her voice had taken on a faintly wet quality.
Hearing her say that, I tried the tiger meat myself.
And immediately frowned.
The rank smell hit me all at once.
The stale, gamey scent peculiar to a carnivore spread across my tongue.
The fibers were far more rigid than the rabbit meat from earlier, lodging between my teeth.
If rabbit meat was somewhere between gum and the bottom of a shoe,
then tiger meat was like chewing a rubber basin.
Simply chewing and swallowing it was a trial in itself.
I stole a sidelong look at Yu Seojin.
She was ripping into a tiger leg as though it truly were delicious.
***
How much time had passed? The rain began to let up.
Faint moonlight seeped in from outside the cave. The clouds were clearing.
I brushed the wetness from my clothes and stood up, and Yu Seojin did the same, straightening her robe and readjusting her bamboo hat.
"The rain has stopped. I should be going now."
Yu Seojin started toward the mouth of the cave, then hesitated.
She turned back.
Of course, her eyes couldn’t see me, but her whole body was turned in my direction.
"Um, Wolyeon Daehyeop."
A bad feeling passed through me.
No way.
"You said you were headed to Yichang, right?"
Yes.
"If you don’t mind... could I ask you to travel with me as far as Yichang?"
We’d already passed Yichang. Why?
I tilted my head, and Yu Seojin lowered hers even further, looking more embarrassed than before.
"My traveling money has run out."
Ah.
"And I’ve given away all my food to the birds and wild animals along the way."
I thought of her tossing rice balls to the tiger.
So it hadn’t just been the tiger.
"Besides, I’m not even sure whether Yeona is still in Yichang, or whether she’s staying there, or whether she’s already passed through."
And then another name flickered through my head: Jegal Yeona.
Getting tangled up with her was exhausting.
Traveling with Yu Seojin would inevitably raise the chances of crossing paths with Jegal Yeona.
And that would directly threaten both my life and my mental health.
It was not an easy question to answer.
When I still didn’t react after a long while, Yu Seojin’s expression darkened little by little.
Her cloudy pupils growing clear and bright like a deer’s, she met my gaze.
"Is that not all right...?"
I looked at her face. That expression, mixed with desperation and embarrassment.
The faint tremor of someone afraid of being left alone.
Honestly, I was busy and it was a hassle.
Saving Master came first.
I had no room to worry about anyone else’s troubles.
I should shake my head firmly and go my own way.
But—
That would not be righteousness.
I remembered the vow I had made while banging my head before Master.
Never to be ashamed of Master’s teachings, but to extend my hand to all under heaven, speak of justice, and punish what was wrong.
Master had sacrificed everything to save me.
That Zhangjiajie immortal had spent half his life remaining in Wuling, never refusing even the humblest task, and had personally gone out of his way to help the common people.
If such a man opened his eyes and learned that his disciple had turned away from someone in trouble simply because it was inconvenient, what would he say?
Tsk. You foolish disciple. You’ve been swallowing your master’s words through your ears and out the other side.
I could almost hear the reprimand, along with the click of Master’s tongue.
He would have helped.
Even if he were tired and worn out, he would not have left a lost blind woman to fend for herself.
Helping the weak and blessing the good is Heaven’s will,
and upholding Heaven’s will is the righteousness of the Ink Sect.
So the disciple must act in a way that brings no shame to his master’s teachings.
I slowly walked over to Yu Seojin.
She seemed to have taken my silence for a refusal and was already letting her shoulders droop, preparing to turn away.
I caught hold of her sleeve.
"Oh?"
She lifted her head in surprise.
Then I pointed north with my scabbard and tapped the ground twice.
Let’s go together.
Yu Seojin’s eyes went wide. Her mouth seemed unable to close.
"R-Really? You’ll really go with me?"
I gave one firm nod.
"Ah! Thank you! Thank you so much, Wolyeon Daehyeop!"
Yu Seojin jumped with joy. She looked as bright and innocent as a child.
She grabbed my hand and bounced in place, bowing over and over in thanks.
"This humble one will make sure to earn my keep and repay the cost of food and lodging! I may not know the road, but I can carry luggage, and I can chase away tigers... no, most wild beasts! I’ll talk so you won’t be bored! Ah, but you can’t speak, so I’ll just talk twice as much for you!"
I stood beside Yu Seojin as she began chattering before we’d even taken a step.
The rain had fully stopped, and moonlight gently shone on the wet forest path.
The weight of my Master on my back remained the same, and my vague unease about Jegal Yeona still hovered somewhere in the distance, but
the noisy voice beside me somehow made me feel as if I could forget that burden for a little while.
Jegal Yeona or whatever else—when the time came, I’d deal with it then.
For now, all I had to do was safely escort this hopelessly directionless priest to Yichang.
After all, Yichang wasn’t the destination, only a stop along the way.
Once I dropped off Yu Seojin, I could set out at once for the capital of Daemyeong.
Strangely enough, my steps felt just a little lighter than when I had been walking alone.
We set off down the road again.
Two shadows walking side by side.
One was silent.
The other talked without ever stopping.