12. Heh. Which Pleasure House Are You From?

It must have been around the time Yul Sogang had spent five years in training at the Blood Shadow Corps.

Counted another way, it would have been around the time five hundred trainees, after tearing at one another like ravenous demons through hell itself, had been whittled down to barely a hundred and fifty survivors.

He didn't know for certain.

He had never felt any need to count the days, or the trainees.

"Number 240. Mission."

The instructor's voice, empty of all feeling, cracked against Yul Sogang's ears.

"Yes, sir."

"Commit the letter with your orders to memory, then burn it at once. The map, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠too—burn it the moment you reach your destination."

"Yes, sir."

"Depart immediately."

"Yes, sir."

And so fifteen-year-old Yul Sogang took the thick wax-sealed letter and the map from his instructor, slipped out of the compound as though seeping into the darkness itself, and headed east.

This was his third assignment as an assassin who reeked of blood.

Having read the letter through and committed its contents to memory, Yul Sogang chewed it up and swallowed it, bite by bite.

The Great Strength Gang had been founded by a lay disciple of Shaolin, a modest sect that had put down roots in Shanxi nigh on fifty years ago.

Modest though it was, its ties to Shaolin ran deep enough to keep the patronage flowing, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠no sect in the region dared belittle or ignore it. The gilded orthodox placard hanging over its gate did its share of the work, too.

Truth be told, Yul Sogang hadn't the faintest idea what crime the gang's master, Jo Cheondo, had committed, or why he had been marked for death.

He hadn't tried to find out, and he didn't want to know.

It was a mission, and so he would carry it out. That was all.

Only—he had but recently crossed into late First-Rate himself, and being ordered to assassinate a Peak-realm master weighed on him, if only slightly.

Which was why, for once, the letter even went so far as to say he might return if the assassination proved impossible.

"Live off easy targets all your life, and living loses its flavor."

The distance being what it was, it took Yul Sogang a full ten days merely to enter the Great Strength Gang's territory at the northern tip of Shanxi Province.

Sitting far back in the corner of a reeking alley with a clean view of the gang's main gate, Yul Sogang turned, in the space of a breath, into a beggar no one would deign to glance at.

Grimy sweat streaked his face; his eyes had gone hollow and empty. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠He set out a small begging bowl, draped himself in rags, and sat nodding off in place—yet every nerve in his body lay trained on the gate like a serpent poised to strike.

Curled up like an insect, he begged from that spot for seven full days, and with every moment, every breath, his seemingly indifferent eyes combed the main gate.

The gatekeepers' faces, the rotation of shifts, the patrol routes, the hour the gang master came home—he confirmed every last detail.

Once or twice, genuine street brats came swarming to pick a fight with him, but after he obligingly snapped a few limbs in a back alley and ground them underfoot, none ever approached him again.

Jo Cheondo returned home, almost without exception, between the hour of the Dog (seven to nine in the evening) and the hour of the Pig (nine to eleven).

He always came back drunk enough to need propping up, yet the guards at either side never wavered by so much as a hair. And soon after he went inside, the lamp in the right-hand room on the second floor of the central hall would go dark.

Not once did the pattern break, in all those days.

Tedious, thankless work—but there was exactly one reason Yul Sogang had spent seven days obsessively confirming the location of that room.

Both the target and his guards ranked above him, he had judged, which would make an undetected approach difficult.

Having resolved to attempt the kill from a distance, Yul Sogang would have no chance to confirm the target's face and finish the deed up close.

With the right-hand room on the second floor confirmed beyond doubt as the gang master's quarters, Yul Sogang waited for the small hours of that same night—around the hour of the Ox, one to three in the morning—then rode a darkness stripped of even moonlight to slip soundlessly over the compound wall.

At fifteen his frame was small to begin with, and having trained in the Heavenly Demon Cult's secret martial arts and techniques—arts that erased an assassin's presence utterly—infiltrating a minor sect's laughably porous security was no trouble at all.

The scarecrows would never know he had passed through them; the only real concern were the two First-Rate masters guarding the gang master's quarters.

Yul Sogang hid himself like a speck of dust atop the roof of a small storehouse perhaps ten jang—thirty meters—in a straight line from those quarters, and buried his presence deeper still.

His existence became the darkness itself.

Perhaps an hour slipped by.

Then one of the guards, who had stood without so much as a twitch before the gang master's quarters, heaved a short sigh and shuffled off at a languid gait.

The call of nature spared neither rank nor cultivation.

The moment he vacated his post, Yul Sogang drew as far from the second guard on the opposite side as he could.

At the same time, gauging the position of the target's bed from the faint lamplight bleeding through the window, he closed to within three jang—ten meters—like a stalking wildcat, and into his ears came the steady snoring of the Great Strength Gang's master.

Up close, the murky qi he could feel, thick with the reek of wine, matched the man he had sensed at the main gate. It was him, all right.

Silently, he drew a small black dagger from inside his coat.

Forged of thousand-year cold iron and steeped in poison, the blade had already been rubbed over with charcoal so that it gave off no omen whatsoever—yet neither its killing intent nor its edge had dulled in the slightest.

Yul Sogang stilled his breath and honed every sense in his body to a razor's edge. He poured his qi into the dagger and read the flow of the air through his fingertips.

Shff—

In an instant he gathered his power into his right hand, took as his mark the dantian—where the gang master's qi pulsed strongest—and hurled the dagger toward the spot where the throat had to be.

Thwip—

Leaving behind only the whisper of something passing through thin window paper, the dagger struck its mark dead-on. The snoring never became a scream; it simply ceased.

Watching the man's murky energy disperse into the empty air like fog, Yul Sogang vaulted back over the Great Strength Gang's wall without a heartbeat's hesitation.

"Whew..."

He believed the mission complete—but he had never laid eyes on the target's face, so nothing was certain yet.

Unseen by any eye, he returned to his original begging spot, sat himself down, and began to doze once more.

Before long, a tearing shriek burst from the Great Strength Gang and shook the still air of the small hours.

"The gang master—!! The gang master, he's—!!"

When word of a mission carried out to perfection reached him from the very lips of the target's own guards, Yul Sogang rose without a shred of regret and dusted himself off.

"Those days were fun."

At some point, Soyul had perched herself atop a tree in a small wood that lay along the road to Cheongseok County.

There was simply no need to take them head-on.

At her true strength, she could have blown apart a band of that size and caliber with one hand and had energy to spare. But do that, and of course Cho Jaun would begin to doubt the martial rank she claimed, wouldn't he?

And so the answer Soyul alighted on was the memories of her childhood.

Though in truth, Soyul was in no condition to use her sword arts at the moment anyway.

No—she could use her sword arts just fine. What she lacked was the tool for them: a sword.

Her blade had been issued by the demonic cult, and so it ran the risk of being recognized—by her pursuers or anyone else.

Which was why, after meeting Taeul in the cave, she had agonized over her packing for a long while before finally leaving the sword behind.

Soyul scratched her head.

"Maybe that was a mistake. Should I go back for it? No. When would I ever find the time to travel all the way back there."

As she fiddled with the coins left over from her jujube cakes, a band of unorthodox fighters entering the wood came into view.

It was night; nothing should have been visible. Yet here were these fools, proudly hauling along a black flag with BLACK FALCON GANG painted across it. Watching them, Soyul let her presence drain away.

One of the few demonic arts Soyul had learned, the Heavenly Yin Form-Concealment Art unfurled at full power, and her body seemed to melt into the tree's shadow, vanishing as though it had never been there at all.

To avoid drawing the orthodox sects' suspicion, Soyul had learned and used nothing but their martial arts. Form-concealment, stealth techniques and the like, however, had been unavoidable.

The orthodox sects simply didn't possess such arts to begin with.

Why would a great and righteous sect ever teach the craft of skulking in like a rat—the art of assassins?

That said, past a certain threshold, the loftier an orthodox master's attainment, the far more easily they could mute their presence than any master of the demonic path; they too could manage a crude imitation of form-concealment through internal energy alone.

"Boss. Once we clear this wood, we reach Cheongseok County."

The Black Falcon Gang's master, Chu Yeongjo—One-Flash Great Saber—nodded with arrogant ease.

There were few in all of northern Gansu who could stand against him: a genuine Peak-realm, middle-stage master in name and in fact.

"The road is narrow. Stay sharp and we move slow."

"Yes, sir."

Trailing at the very rear of the column, the gang's vice-master Ham Jincheol grumbled under his breath.

"Tch, damn it all. So a few Cheongsa Society bastards got roughed up a bit—what in blazes are we marching out at this hour for?"

He had been one step away from taking Hwaryeong of the Plum Fragrance Pavilion into his arms. A courtesan she might be, but the proud Hwaryeong was famous for handpicking her patrons, and her price was beyond any common courtesan's. Her beauty was every bit as extraordinary—and she played the zither at a master's level, no less.

How much silver had he laid at her feet just to hold such a woman once?

And just as he was finally about to reap what he'd sown, along came an order summoning every last member.

"Tch, damn it. She'd better not play coy and pretend not to know me when I get back. That scheming little minx."

Trudging along and grumbling about Hwaryeong, Ham Jincheol drifted further and further behind the rest.

They were only two orthodox pups—did the whole gang really need to turn out for that? The thought kept gnawing at him, and all the while Hwaryeong's bewitching eyes and that full chest flickered before his mind's eye.

"Hwaryeong... I'll be back before you know it. Wait for me."

"Hwaryeong? How about me?"

"Hurk—?!"

He hadn't sensed a thing. A voice beside him, so clear it was uncanny, snapped Ham Jincheol's mind wide awake.

He moved to put distance between them—but the moment the other's face and figure filled his eyes, his body froze solid, half-crouched where he stood.

Hwaryeong?

Why have I been losing my mind over that hideous woman all this time?

Not when a beauty like this—name unknown, unmatched in Gansu, no, in all the world—stands right here before me in the flesh.

A woman materializing out of nowhere should have struck him as strange, and it would have been reason enough to be on his guard. But one look at that face and that soft, slender body, and Ham Jincheol's wariness melted in an instant, lust blooming across his features.

And wasn't she dressed like a courtesan, at that?

A lowborn wench who couldn't so much as scratch a man like him.

Just in case, he swept his surroundings—but beyond the Black Falcon Gang receding into the dark, there wasn't even a whisper of hidden presence, and Ham Jincheol allowed himself to relax.

"Heh. Which pleasure house did you crawl out of? Never thought I'd find a beauty like you in a backwater like this. Yes, of course—you came out to meet me yourself, didn't you? To fall into my arms?"

"Mm... I did come out to meet someone, didn't I?"

So my name carries even into a hole like this. Well—martial artists of the Peak realm aren't a common sight, after all.

While Hwaryeong—that little wench—didn't even deign to recognize this elder...

'Ah, to hell with her—I don't need that woman anymore anyway. I'll just charm this one right here... no. If she refuses, I'll simply carry her off. Who's to stop me?'

His mind made up, Ham Jincheol closed a step toward Soyul with a leering smile.

"Now, then—the elder you've been waiting for has arrived. So, what shall we do about it?"

"Like this?"

In the fights of martial artists, distance is always paramount—and between masters of equal rank, the one who strikes first from ambush holds a good thirty percent of an advantage.

And Ham Jincheol had walked, utterly unguarded, to within three paces of Soyul. That her right hand shot out with the speed of a thunderbolt and left him with no response at all was only natural.

Only when a frost-blue dagger punched into his dantian in place of the sword she didn't carry did Ham Jincheol realize a blade had been swung ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠at all.

"Guh... hurk..."

He fell, feeling the inner force he had piled up over thirty long years scatter into nothing, his eyes brimming with nothing but bafflement.

How... can a mere courtesan wield martial arts like these...

Born into an age that graded every trade noble or base, he fell for the sin of thinking far too narrowly. And when Soyul drove her heel into his head with all her strength, his skull burst apart like a smashed watermelon.

Everything Soyul had shown until now had been held precisely at the level of an early Peak-realm fighter, so Ham Jincheol would die all the more aggrieved—protesting, no doubt, that he had lost his life this easily to a mere equal.

Such was the hollow, meaningless end of the Black Falcon Gang's vice-master, the man who had all but ruled Gansu.

"Easier than I thought. Idiots."

Having smashed the unorthodox vice-master's skull without mercy, Soyul snickered and shot away into the wood where the Black Falcon Gang had vanished.