A Carp Would Be Wasted on a Man Like That
A carp would be wasted on a man like that.
By then, the rumor had already spread to every village and town for miles around. There was an immortal living in the mountains, it said. His paintings came to life. He commanded ten tigers and sent a dragon soaring into the heavens. With each retelling, the story grew another layer of flesh, until it had hardened into a legend that sounded almost believable.
And that legend reached the ears of the Byeokun Sect.
The Byeokun Sect was a fairly respectable power in the region. Their name meant "Azure Clouds," lofty and immortal as you please, but in truth they were closer to a local strongman dynasty — bullying their way across a handful of counties. They shook down merchant caravans, skimmed kickbacks from the market districts, and displayed their "sect's dignity" to anyone who refused to cooperate. That was what the Byeokun Sect did.
Martial arts? They had some. Second-rate or third-rate, at best. No true masters among them, but they had long practice at crushing people through sheer numbers.
And now one of the Byeokun Sect's elders, Qian Daren, was climbing the mountain.
Qian Daren was a man who lived up to his name. The character for his surname meant money, and the one for his given name meant great benevolence. On paper, he was a saint of the ages. He smiled benevolently at all times, spoke with gentle courtesy, and his manners were impeccable.
The problem was the relentless calculating spinning behind that benevolent smile.
A painting that comes to life, you say…
Riding the sedan chair up the mountain, Qian Daren stroked his beard. Even if the rumor was only half true, it would be a gold mine. Paintings that moved — seat a man who could make such things beneath the Byeokun Sect's banner, and the sect's prestige would pierce the heavens. Every other sect would bow and scrape, and the merchant guilds would trip over themselves hauling chests of silver up the mountain.
Handle him just right, and this one immortal could make the Byeokun Sect the hegemon of the entire region.
Qian Daren had brought gifts in profusion — silks and gold trinkets, the kind of things that would make the eyes of anyone living like a beggar in the mountains spin in his head.
And if he refused?
Then the approach would simply be different. The Byeokun Sect hadn't become the local bully for nothing. If sweet words failed, sour ones would do.
The sedan chair stopped in front of the house.
Qian Daren stepped down, wearing his most benevolent smile.
"Heh heh. So this is where the immortal resides, is it?"
In the courtyard, a man sat on the bare dirt, painting.
Qian Daren faltered for a moment. For an immortal… the man's appearance left a great deal to be desired. Dirt-stained hemp clothes, hair tied up carelessly, straw sandals worn to shreds. He looked exactly like a beggar on the verge of starving to death in the mountains. With his head bowed low over his brush, his face wasn't even visible.
Hah. Perhaps the rumors were exaggerated.
But Qian Daren was an old hand. He was not a man to be fooled by appearances — the stronger the master, the shabbier the robe, as the saying went. Keeping his benevolent smile in place, he approached.
"O immortal one. This humble one is Qian Daren, an elder of the Byeokun Sect."
The man didn't look up.
He just kept moving his brush, as though Qian Daren didn't exist at all.
Qian Daren's eyebrows twitched, but the smile held. With a gesture, he had the gifts unpacked. Silks were spread out, and gold trinkets glittered in the sunlight.
"A trifling token of our sincerity. The matter is this — that one of your eminence should dwell in such a squalid place is a sin against heaven itself, and so we of the Byeokun Sect wish to welcome you into our——"
"I'm not an immortal."
The man spoke for the first time. Still without raising his head.
"…I beg your pardon?"
"Not an immortal. Just a man who paints."
Qian Daren laughed heartily. He took it for modesty.
"Heh heh, how humble the immortal is. Truly, the more genuine a Daoist is, the lower he bows himself, as the saying goes."
"……"
The man resumed his brushwork as though the conversation weren't worth answering.
"In any case, I'm busy. If you have business, take it somewhere else."
Qian Daren's smile stiffened slightly. Was this upstart actually turning away an elder of the Byeokun Sect — with gifts of this magnitude laid out before him? Indignation boiled up inside, but it was still bearable. Eccentrics in the mountains always had their pride, after all.
"Heh heh, forgive the immortal for being so absorbed in his art. If you would but spare a brief moment——"
"I told you, I'm not sparing any."
"…Immortal."
Qian Daren's voice dropped a register. His patience was running out. If this was how the man responded to good words, it was time for a different approach. He glanced back over his shoulder. The Byeokun Sect fighters were waiting at the foot of the mountain. One signal and they'd come running.
"The immortal's stubbornness puts this humble one in quite a difficult position. Perhaps you are not aware of what manner of sect the Byeokun Sect is, but——"
It was the very moment Qian Daren pressed his threat.
A cold voice cut in.
"That's far enough."
Qian Daren spun around with a start.
Somehow, without his noticing, a woman was standing between him and the man.
He looked her over. A young woman, dressed in black, a bamboo hat pressed low. Half her face was hidden, but the visible line of her eyes was anything but ordinary. Cold, sharp as a blade—
A chill ran down Qian Daren's spine.
He'd been rolling in this world for decades. He knew how to read people. And right now, every instinct in his body was screaming. Do not touch that woman. No — do not so much as breathe too loudly in front of her.
Those eyes were eyes that had killed people.
Not once or twice, either. Eyes with the smell of blood soaked into them, down to the marrow.
"N-now, see here, young lady. Who might you be? We adults are in the middle of a conversa—"
He tried to bluster, invoking the Byeokun Sect's name. But the instant the woman took a single step toward him, Qian Daren's throat closed up.
Killing intent.
The thing pouring off her body squeezed his neck like an invisible hand. His legs wobbled. It was a miracle he hadn't soiled himself. Right now, this woman was genuinely weighing whether or not to kill him.
I'm — I'm going to die—
Just as the world began to whiten before Qian Daren's eyes—
The young man who'd been hunched over his brush all this while stopped, for the first time.
And slowly, he raised his head.
Qian Daren swallowed without meaning to.
The beggar's rags had hidden it until now, but face to face—
He was young.
Far too young.
And yet, incongruous with that youthful face, his eyes were profound. He had, somehow, the eyes of someone who had lived through an immense span of years — a gaze of weary indifference, as though he'd seen everything the world could throw at him and found nothing left worth wanting.
Those eyes turned toward Qian Daren.
The elder, suffocating under the killing intent and unable even to breathe, suddenly — strangely — felt his airways open. It was as though someone had raised an umbrella over him amid a savage storm of wind and rain.
I stopped my brush and took stock of the situation.
The woman had planted herself in front of the old man. Rising off her back, faint as smoke, was something I knew very well by now.
Killing intent.
I'd spent a few days around her, so I knew. Once that woman made up her mind, a human life was not something she weighed heavily. Judging by the murderous aura billowing off her back, the old man was about to collapse into a blood-soaked heap in my courtyard.
…That would be a problem.
If someone painted the yard red, cleaning it up was its own chore, and more to the point, it ruined the appetite. If blood splattered on the vegetable garden I'd worked so hard to tend, what was I supposed to tell the lettuce?
Better to end it myself before the hassle started.
"Hey. Old man."
At my call, the elder jerked around. He wore the face of a drowning man who'd just spotted a rope.
"Get going before a fight breaks out. She's deciding whether to kill you right now."
The woman glanced over at me, a little sheepish. Caught red-handed.
"In return," I said, spreading a fresh sheet of paper, "if you leave quietly, I'll give you a gift. A painting. Take it and head down the mountain like a good fellow."
Qian Daren nodded along in a daze.
Painting, gift, whatever — all he wanted was to get out from under that woman's killing intent.
Then the man raised his brush—
Qian Daren's eyes went wide.
The brush came down onto the paper.
In that instant, Qian Daren fell into a strange illusion. It didn't feel like a brush gliding across paper. It felt like something gently sweeping the ink away to reveal what had been there all along. With every stroke, it wasn't that something new was being created — it was that something long asleep inside the paper was waking up.
Slow where it seemed fast, careless where it was utterly without a single flaw. The gradations of ink breathed in and out as naturally as a living thing, and the lines undulated as though alive. Where the strength gathered and where it released, when it paused and when it surged — everything flowed together like running water. Not one wasted motion. Nothing to subtract, nothing to add. A movement already complete.
Qian Daren knew nothing about painting.
Calligraphy and painting were things you hung on a wall and put a price on, as far as he was concerned. He had no way to grasp their depths.
But even he could tell what he was seeing.
The power surging from the tip of that brush was closer to a supreme master wielding a sword — no, it was beyond even that. A sword could only take lives; that brush was conjuring lives that had never existed.
A — a divine brush…
Goosebumps crawled up Qian Daren's spine.
He had never seen brushwork like this. He'd never even imagined such brushwork could exist in this world. Would even the court painters of the imperial palace reach such a realm? This was no man wielding a brush — it was as if the brush itself were borrowing a man's hand and painting of its own accord.
There was only one phrase that could hold this sight.
The greatest Painting Immortal under heaven.
Mid-stroke, that name caught my ear.
Qian Daren. Qian Daren, was it…
Oh. That old man.
I remembered. He was one of the ones I'd painted.
Qian Daren. The greedy elder of the Byeokun Sect.
A minor character I'd sketched into the background for a few panels. That name — Money and Great Benevolence, the exact opposite of how he actually lived — I'd given him that too, because the irony of it amused me.
So I already knew exactly what kind of man this old man was.
A smiling schemer on the outside, a ledger-turner on the inside. A local tyrant who pressed his advantage by force when sweet words failed. And in the end — a man who buried himself beneath his own greed.
I'd been about to paint him a carp, but my hand turned on its own.
A carp would be wasted on a man like that. Something else suited that greedy hide of his.
A toad.
The Golden Toad, the legendary beast said to summon wealth. The kind of treasure that would make such a man grin from ear to ear the moment he laid eyes on it. Except I decided to stuff that toad's mouth full of coins. So many coins it couldn't bear its own weight — so many its belly dragged flat against the ground.
Pray for fortune, and be crushed to death beneath it. That was the idea.
Not that the old man would understand any of that.
"There. All done."
I set down the brush and slid the painting toward the old man.