How Can a Courtesan Be a Peak Master?
Though his brain normally turned as sluggishly as a rusted gear, with his very life on the line the chief finished sorting through his thoughts in an instant, at a speed worthy of Zhuge Liang himself, and rubbed his hands together as he spoke with an exaggerated laugh.
"Aigoo! Of course! Do you have any idea how precious and expensive these clothes are? This is the very latest fashion, all the rage across the Central Plains right now! Yes, Great Hero, this is the best we could possibly get our hands on to offer you."
"Buy? Bandits actually pay money for things?" Soyul asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
Then where the hell does she think we'd steal women's clothes from at a time like this? Yang Guwol screamed inwardly, then answered while forcing what he hoped passed for a professional(?) smile onto his face. Admittedly, the strained grin looked deeply grotesque.
"H-haha. Great Hero, naturally we purchase our goods with money too. Yes. Pillaging doesn't exactly stock every item, now does it? Haha."
"Hmm... so banditry is something to brag about now. Anyway, so everyone dresses like this?"
"O-of course. Hey, you lot, why isn't anyone answering? Answer her!"
When Yang Guwol's glare snapped them back to their senses, the bandits began chattering in one voice. Only now did they understand: if this outfit failed to please that woman, they would be badgered into fetching another on the spot, and in the worst case, their heads might roll for it.
"That's right! That's the latest fashion among the women of the gangho these days."
"Even if you wanted one, you can hardly get your hands on it."
"Exactly! I'd love to dress my own little sister in one!"
The other bandits shot that last speaker looks that screamed is this lunatic serious?, but fortunately Soyul passed over the remark without a second thought.
"Really? Well then, I'll wear it well. I should be going now. Hand over the silver I left with you."
At that, Yang Guwol respectfully held out two bundles, lovingly wrapped in clean cloth as though he had prepared them well in advance.
"Here you are! Every last coin! We didn't skim so much as a speck of dust! And this is nothing much, just some provisions and water we prepared for your journey."
"Oh... unexpected kindness. Thank you. Keep up the good work, everyone."
The moment the words left her mouth, Soyul scooped up the bundles lightly, kicked off the ground as if to launch herself, and was hurtling away at a terrifying speed, shrinking into the distance in the blink of an eye.
One of the bandits, staring blankly after her, muttered, "Wow... but washed up, she really is a breathtaking beauty."
"Haaawk—ptoo! What good is a beauty? Didn't you just watch her fly off with our fortune? Salt the ground behind her. Ugh, hell. Do you have any idea how much money we burned today? A whole day of business down the drain, plus a fortune spent buying clothes to hand over on top of it." Yang Guwol grumbled, spitting on the ground.
"Come on, Boss. At least we kept our lives, didn't we? Honestly, I was worried the whole time — that in the end she'd silence us by killing every last one of us," Jin-o said, sweeping a hand across his chest in relief.
"Enough. You're giving me a headache. Start preparing to move the stronghold."
"What? Why? The stronghold's perfectly fine," one bandit asked, puzzled. The others, worn out from a full day of grueling labor, whined and complained — but the chief's next chilling words had them packing their things without another word.
"What if that damned woman realizes, even belatedly, that we dressed her in a courtesan's clothes and comes back for us? You want to politely offer up your neck and drop dead on the spot?"
"Ah..."
After a stretch of lightfoot technique, Soyul soon gave it up and went back to walking. It was absolutely not because her internal energy was running low or because she was tired. It was simply that at high speed, the wind kept catching the damned dress, gaping it open and making it slip and slide, and the inconvenience had become unbearable.
"Damn it all. Do the women of the Central Plains actually live their whole lives in things like this?"
She remembered that the women warriors she had occasionally glimpsed back in the Heavenly Demon Cult wore nothing but sturdy, mobile black martial uniforms that made them nearly indistinguishable from the men. But what could she do? Once you entered the Central Plains, you had to follow the law of the Central Plains.
"Let's see..."
Soyul pulled out the map she had swiped from her master and tilted her head. "Strange. If I keep going this way it should be Gansu, so why isn't a single village showing up? Last time it felt like I got there in no time."
The Hundred Thousand Great Mountains, where the Heavenly Demon Cult's main seat stood, lay on the western fringe of the Central Plains. Soyul had fled the Demonic Cult and kept moving east, so by all rights she should have reached Gansu by now. Yet despite thinking she had walked quite far, there was still nothing but mountain after mountain, not even a small village — reason enough to be puzzled.
But there was one decisive difference between now and the assassination missions she had run as a child. Back then, she had sprinted at full power, pushing her lightfoot technique until her breath caught in her throat to finish each mission on deadline; now she was strolling along at half pace because her clothes were a nuisance. It took at least five hundred li — roughly two hundred kilometers — of travel to set foot in Gansu, and at this leisurely amble, the village she wanted was hardly going to appear anytime soon.
But what was there to rush for? Time was the one thing she had in abundance now. Unhurried, Soyul resumed her slow walk until she spotted a man approaching from the opposite direction.
"Hm?"
"Huh?"
The instant she came face to face with him on the narrow mountain path — a neat, clean-cut man who looked to be in his late twenties — both of them instinctively took each other's measure.
A master.
When the man flinched as his eyes rested on her, Soyul tilted her head. What's with him? It can't be that he saw through my martial arts, can it?
Soyul was currently keeping her martial arts suppressed to read as barely at the threshold of the Peak realm. Before entering the Central Plains, her master had told her that the Flower Realm masters active in the gangho numbered, all told, no more than twenty at best. If an unknown, nameless female master of the Flower Realm were to appear, the Demonic Cult was sure to hunt her down in a frenzy to confirm her identity. Knowing nothing of these circumstances, of course, the man's eyes as he gazed at Soyul wavered uncontrollably, endlessly.
What is this? How... how can a courtesan be a Peak master?
"What are you looking at? No — why are you staring at me like that?" The man's blatant stare soured her mood a little, but since this was the first genuine 'orthodox faction' martial artist she had met since entering the gangho, Soyul addressed him as kindly as she could manage.
The man answered, dodging her gaze as if somewhat flustered. "Ah... er... forgive me. I couldn't help myself. One hardly meets anyone worth greeting in such a remote mountain backwater, so I fear I committed a rudeness without meaning to."
"Ah, I see." At that clumsy excuse, Soyul nodded. The Peak realm was not a level of martial arts one stumbled upon every day, so she supposed meeting one in a mountain backwater like this could well seem remarkable. Of course, the man's flustered state had nothing to do with any of that.
He was not startled because he had met a Peak master. He was startled because he had seen a courtesan standing at the Peak realm. In the present Central Plains, where occupations were rigidly ranked high and low, a courtesan was a profoundly lowly creature — and yet here one stood, wrapped in some superior-grade martial art whose origins no one could explain. It made no sense whatsoever.
Add to that the faint fragrance of the Daoist school he sensed about her, and his bewilderment was, in a way, only natural. To be precise, Soyul had not trained in Daoist martial arts — what he felt was the immortal qi slowly spreading out from somewhere near her heart. Faced with this woman of unknown identity, the man decided, for the moment, to keep his questions to himself.
"Why are you walking this mountain road alone? Might you have a destination in mind?"
"I'm headed for Gansu. I need to reach a big city."
"Ah..." In that instant, the Illusion Ring on Soyul's finger glowed faintly, and the man's eyes grew slightly glazed as he nodded — thinking, no doubt, that a beauty like her was far too fine a talent to waste rotting in some small courtesan house.
She means to go to a grand courtesan house in Gansu and live selling her smiles?
But why, having mastered martial arts of that caliber, would she insist on the courtesan's path? Puzzled, the man asked Soyul carefully. "Why would you choose such a road? With your martial arts, surely more paths are open to you."
Here the man's 'path' broadly meant the direction of her life — her trade, her prospects, her future — but Soyul took the question entirely at face value. "Because I don't know any other way."
She only meant that she didn't know any other route to Gansu, but misunderstanding her meaning, the man's face darkened in an instant. What kind of life had she lived, that she had never even conceived of a road besides a courtesan's?
"How could..."
"Oh! Or — could you perhaps show me another way, Great Hero? Call it fate that we met... hehe." Soyul's bashful plea — asked on the off chance this fellow might know a shortcut — thawed the man's briefly frozen expression, and he nodded.
Within him blazed a sense of duty, as a martial artist and a senior of the gangho, to guide this young junior — so grievously led astray — back onto the proper road.
His name was Cho Youngbin, the True Pine Sword Emperor. Though currently a runaway from home, he was a sword prodigy produced by the True Pine Sect, a small-to-mid-tier school, and one of the precious few supreme martial artists of the gangho, having at last reached the Flower Realm in his fifties. At the moment, however, unavoidable circumstances had him disguising his martial arts to appear at early Peak at best.
Because he had fought a colossal battle with his elder brother, the clan head, stormed out of the house, and decided to make a tour of the gangho while he was at it. But as he roamed about in freedom, a worry had suddenly occurred to him: what if the beggars of the Beggar Union, with their far-reaching web of informants, or some sharp-eyed master of Transcendent Peak caliber, recognized him? His long-awaited runaway trip could not be allowed to end in futility, so he had lowered his martial arts to read as early Peak.
His appearance, he hadn't much bothered with. How vast was this land of the Central Plains? Besides, as a master from a minor school — no Namgung or Peng, no Wudang, Zhongnan, or Mount Hua — few people knew his face well, so if he simply kept his martial arts hidden, he could enjoy himself to the fullest on this runaway trip and slip back home when it suited him.
With precisely that simple logic, Cho Youngbin, just like the Kang Soyul of this very moment, had been wandering about at leisure with his martial arts thoroughly concealed — and so he had run headlong into Soyul, who appeared to stand at exactly his own realm. Of course, each had sensed only the aura the other showed on the surface; their true levels of martial arts remained utterly unknown to one another.
Such was the nature of equals: when both parties wished to hide, recognition was nearly impossible. And so, judging only by the deliberately leaked, carefully telegraphed auras each was putting out, the two had amicably concluded, Oho, so this person is also early Peak, and misunderstood each other in perfect harmony.
At this moment, Cho Youngbin — a revered senior of the murim, now an idle loafer with more time on his hands than he knew what to do with — made his decision. He would burn with righteous zeal to show this pitiful junior, who had tragically chosen the wrong path and the lowly trade of a courtesan, another road in life. Namely, a respectable profession.
"Follow me. You said you're bound for Gansu?"
"Yes."
"As it happens, I am traveling that way myself, so we shall keep company. And once there, we shall look into your path as well, young lady."
Questions did occur to her — why was he posturing so grandly when he clearly knew no shortcut and simply meant to walk the same road she was already on? And what 'path' did he intend to find for her in Gansu, of all places, which was where the road already led? — but Soyul, who had never had much interest in trading words with orthodox brats like this one, simply nodded without much thought. Her answer, accordingly, was equally thoughtless.
"Yes, please do. Thank you."
And so the two set off side by side down the main road. Before they had walked far, it was the seasoned Cho Youngbin who first broke the awkward silence.
"Shall we exchange introductions? I am called Cho... Jawoon."
Watching Cho Youngbin — or rather, Cho Jawoon — stumble slightly over his own name, Soyul offered hers in turn: the name Taeul had given her. "Ah, I'm Kang Soyul."
"Miss Kang, was it? Hmm... perhaps... this is a rather sensitive question, but may I ask just one thing?"
"Yes."
"At the place you came from, the... your master? Forgive me, I cannot think of the proper word. Your employer — did they release you? Or did you run away of your own accord? I truly cannot understand it. How could a Peak martial ar— urk!"
The moment he got that far, Soyul channeled qi into her fist and drove it into Cho Youngbin's side. Struck by the sudden blow, Cho Youngbin — or rather, Cho Jawoon — flew off in an ungainly arc and slammed into a tree.
Her abrupt reaction was, of course, only natural. How the hell was this bastard supposed to know she had run away from the Demonic Cult?