Closing Shop for the Day
That was it for the day's work.
Tossing my shoes carelessly into a corner, I sat back down in the courtyard. And yet, for some reason, the brush just wouldn't come to my hand today.
The sky was bright, the breeze was cool — a perfect day for painting. But somehow, I couldn't sit still. Cooped up in these mountains day after day had apparently left me restless.
Now that I thought about it, I could count on one hand the times I'd come down from the mountain since waking up in this body. A brief trip to Seokdu's village when the scarlet fever broke out, and that was it. Otherwise I'd been up here the whole time.
Every once in a while, a man ought to see how the rest of the world was living.
"...Seol-ah."
"What."
Seol-ah, who had been quietly lost in thought beside me, answered without looking up.
"How about we head down to the market town? It's been a while."
She turned to look at me. "The market town?"
"Yeah. We've been stuck at home so long it's getting stuffy. Might as well go people-watch, buy some good food, get a little fresh air."
Seol-ah took her time considering it. Honestly, her face said she couldn't imagine why anyone would bother with a place like the market town. Fair enough, I supposed — she'd been the young cult leader of the Demonic Cult, after all. What was strolling through some provincial market to her? She'd probably seen every rare treasure under heaven.
"...It's not as if I have any reason to go."
She shrugged. "But if I let you go alone, who knows what kind of trouble you'd cause. I suppose I'll tag along."
"What trouble would I cause?"
"Who knows. You're the one who doesn't know a thing about the world."
"...Me?"
I was dumbfounded. If anyone knew the ways of the world, it was me — in my past life I'd been through it all. Chased by deadlines, tortured by editors, sighing over my empty bank balance. I was a man who had tasted every bitter and sweet thing the world had to offer.
Seol-ah gave me a sidelong glance, her eyes full of doubt.
"...Well. I suppose we'll see."
And so, we went down the mountain.
The market town was a sprawling bazaar just past the village. People from every surrounding county flocked there, and they said there was nothing you couldn't buy.
The closer we got, the louder the cheerful din became. Hawkers calling their wares, buyers haggling, children shrieking as they chased each other through the crowd. The smell of human life hung thick in the air. Having grown used to the silence of the mountains, I found the bustle strangely welcome.
"Ah, it's been ages since I did some proper people-watching."
I craned my neck every which way as we entered the market. Every stall was piled with something different — vegetables, fruit, bolts of cloth, dishes. There was a stand selling dumplings with steam curling off them, another hawking taffy. Crowds thronged everywhere, haggling and chattering.
It had a different flavor from the markets of my past life. How to put it — it felt warm. Homey.
Wandering along in high spirits, gawking at this and that, I suddenly stopped in front of one particular stall.
It was a stationery shop — a jimulpo, selling ink, brushes, and paper.
She had known from the very beginning.
Known that this man cared not one whit for the ways of the world.
A hermit buried in the mountains who did nothing but paint. He drew his meals and drank water he'd drawn, conjured every necessity of life with a brush. To such a man, the concepts of money and haggling were meaningless from the start.
And sure enough.
The man standing before the stationer's stall was eyeing the brushes on display with shining eyes.
"Ooh, this is a nice one. The bristles are lovely and full."
As he picked up a brush, the shopkeeper scurried over.
"Ah, my dear customer! You have a discerning eye. That's our finest, made from yellow weasel hair. Normally I'd have to ask five silver nyang, but today, just for you — three nyang."
A transparent bit of shopkeeper's trickery: offering a one-nyang brush, generously discounted from an invented price of five. At best, that brush was worth a single nyang — and even that was a rip-off.
Any ordinary person would have done one of two things: haggled the price down, or fallen for the swindle outright.
But this man —
"Is that so? Lovely. I'll take it."
The price simply didn't interest him. No haggling, no awareness of being swindled — or more precisely, being swindled or not was beside the point. To him, whether a brush cost three nyang or five was a matter of supreme indifference.
...Honestly, what an unpredictable wonder this man is.
Just as she was clicking her tongue inwardly —
"My money... I don't have any money."
He patted through his clothes and seemed to realize he was carrying nothing at all. Well, of course. A man who conjured everything in the mountains with his brush wasn't likely to have brought coin.
Any ordinary person would have retreated in embarrassment at this point.
But this man didn't so much as blink.
"Oh, one moment. I'll make some right now."
With perfect composure, he drew out paper and a brush from his coat.
Then he crouched down right there and began to paint.
Her eyes went wide.
...Th-that lunatic!
Having no money, he intended to paint money on the spot. To sketch a bundle of copper coins and turn them into real currency to pay with.
What floored her most was his sheer calm.
Did he know where he was? Square in the middle of the market town, with eyes on him from every direction. And he meant to work the miracle of turning painted coins into real ones right there — never mind who was watching, never mind what rumors would spread. This man couldn't have cared less.
It wasn't that he didn't understand.
He understood perfectly — and simply didn't care.
However the world saw him, whatever gossip might circulate, none of it mattered to him one brush-hair's worth. He needed a brush, so he needed money; he had no money, so he would paint some. That was the entirety of his arithmetic.
Astounding, yes.
And yet, in some strange way — a way of living so free it sent a shiver down her spine.
But this was no time to be admiring that freedom.
"...Hey."
She hastily snatched the brush from his hand.
"Huh? What?"
"Stop. Don't do that here."
"What do you mean? I have to pay. It'll only take a second—"
"A second, my foot."
Gritting her teeth, she pulled a single silver nyang from her clothes and tossed it onto the stall.
"For the one brush. That settles it, right?"
The shopkeeper's face split into a grin, the sudden generosity of his fictional markdown entirely forgotten. "Oh, absolutely! Thank you kindly, customer!"
She snatched up the brush, pressed it into the man's hand, and grabbed his sleeve, hauling the still-bewildered fool along. She had to get away from that spot as quickly as possible.
"...Why didn't you just let me buy it? I could've painted the money."
After being dragged a good long way, the man finally spoke up, sounding aggrieved.
"What was I supposed to do if people saw paper turning into real money in the middle of the market?"
"So what if they saw? They'd think it was amazing."
"IF 'thinking it was amazing' is where it ended, sure."
She said flatly, "There are those who would covet that miracle and come swarming like hornets. Even now, petty thieves are crawling up the mountain eyeing a single one of your paintings. If you do it out in the open at the market, the entire martial world will come hunting for you."
Yet the man only nodded as if it were nothing at all. His face genuinely registered it as nothing. The entire martial world coming after him — and not an eyebrow twitched.
She felt her breath catch all over again.
This was the man who had sent a dragon soaring into the heavens, who knew the Demonic Cult like the palm of his own hand, who could walk generals out of a painting. And yet, while unable to figure out how to pay for a single brush at a market stall, he could only yawn at the news that the whole martial world was after him.
The most extraordinary man in the world.
And the most deranged.
And the most hopelessly guileless.
...This is exactly why I can't take my eyes off him.
The thought surfaced unbidden, and she flinched.
...No. This is simply a matter of keeping watch so that lunatic doesn't cause a disaster.
She repeated it to herself, firmly.
Though even as she did, she never once let go of the sleeve she'd grabbed — something she didn't even notice herself.
In one corner of the market town stood a dumpling stall.
The owner, steaming up fresh batches all day, greeted passersby with easy warmth. "Dumplings for sale! Fresh out of the steamer!"
To anyone watching, he was a perfectly ordinary dumpling vendor — a kindly faced middle-aged man who had been selling dumplings in this market for over a decade.
No one knew.
No one knew that this dumpling seller was one of the Demonic Cult's eyes.
The Cult's reach extended across the entire martial world — into the sects of the Orthodox faction, into the warrens of the Unorthodox, into government offices, into market towns. The Cult's eyes and ears were planted everywhere in the world, hidden among the ordinary faces of those who sold dumplings, hauled cargo, poured wine.
This dumpling seller was one of them.
Ordinarily, his job was simply to observe the comings and goings of martial artists through the market and report upward. Which sects were moving, who had passed through the county. Mostly trivial tidbits.
But today —
His hands, mid-way through pinching dumplings, suddenly stopped.
Through the crowd, a woman in black had brushed past.
A low-brimmed straw hat shadowed her face, but that stride, that bearing — and for an instant, those cold, glinting eyes.
...It can't be.
The dumpling seller's eyes narrowed.
He knew that face. No — there was no one in the Cult who didn't know that face. For the past six months, a warrant for her capture had hung over the entire Cult. It was her.
The young cult leader.
The Heavenly Demon's one and only bloodline. The one who left the Cult without a word one day and was branded a traitor for it.
Half a year since the warrant went out — but with no real urgency from above, no one had seriously pursued her. And now, that young cult leader was walking through the very heart of this market town.
...No doubt about it.
The dumpling seller swallowed. His heart hammered in his chest. He had found the young cult leader whom no one had managed to locate in half a year. With this one piece of information, his merit would be beyond measure. He might even win the position within the Cult he'd coveted for so long.
But then —
Beside her was a man.
At a glance, the man's bearing seemed out of the ordinary. Tall, with clean, handsome features — a frame you'd believe belonged to the young master of some great house, if he were washed up and properly dressed.
Except.
His disheveled appearance devoured that fine foundation entirely. Dirt-stained hemp clothes, hair tied up any which way, straw sandals worn to threads. One look told you he'd just crawled down from the mountain — a wretch. However good his bones might be, in that getup he was nothing but a shabby country bumpkin holed up in the hills.
What's more, there was no trace of martial training about him. No flow of internal energy, no coiled readiness of a conditioned body. A hollow gourd — sound bones and nothing else.
...And who might that be?
The dumpling seller found it strange that the young cult leader would keep company with such a man. The peerless young cult leader, of all people, with such an unremarkable fellow.
But that didn't matter. What mattered was that he had found her.
Feigning perfect calm, the dumpling seller kept pinching dumplings while his eyes tracked the direction in which the two disappeared.
Out of the market, toward the mountain. Presumably they were staying somewhere on that mountain together. It roughly matched the mountain that had lately been the subject of rampant rumors — the one where a mountain hermit was said to live.
...A mountain hermit, hm.
Something clicked together in the dumpling seller's mind.
The hermit who worked miracles with paintings. The shabby man the young cult leader traveled with. The two might well be connected.
But judging that was not his task.
He had exactly one job: report what he had seen, exactly as he had seen it.
Once the two had vanished completely from view, the dumpling seller quietly folded up his stall.
"That's it for today's business."
He made his way into a back alley.
In the shadow of a deserted wall, he drew a small bamboo tube from his coat. Into it he slipped a thin strip of paper, on which he wrote a few lines in tiny, precise characters.
Young cult leader located. Accompanied by an unidentified man. Heading into the western mountains.
Then he released a single carrier pigeon bearing the message tube into the sky.
The pigeon circled above the market town for a moment, then flew straight off in one direction.
Toward that western sky.
Toward the Demonic Cult.