Let Me See That Bastard's Face -1
“She has declined.”
“Ugh.”
I still had no idea what had set her off at lunch yesterday, but Hyeok Gi-rin’s anger clearly had not cooled.
I sat alone with a palace meal, lost in thought. Maybe it was because I was eating by myself, but even though the food was every bit as luxurious as yesterday’s, it somehow tasted flat.
“Haa…”
I cleaned every dish without leaving a scrap, yet the meal left me just as unsatisfied as the day before. Probably because I was dining alone. Surrounded only by palace maids who treated me with a strangely hostile air, I finally understood what loneliness in a crowd felt like.
I drained the last of my Dragon Well tea and sank deeper into thought. Hyeok Gi-rin’s attitude kept nagging at me.
Which part went wrong…?
I started by reviewing the premises.
The Emperor had summoned us to the Imperial Palace specifically to meet Hyeok Gi-rin—that much was certain.
And the maids of the Palace of Clear Radiance already knew full well that Hyeok Gi-rin was a woman in male disguise and a princess.
The hairpin still sitting atop her head was clear proof. In a palace so obsessive about confiscating every outside item, the fact that they had left only Hyeok Gi-rin’s hairpin untouched was evidence that the maids knew she was both a cross-dressing woman and a princess.
Hyeok Gi-rin and I were fairly close. I already knew she was a woman in disguise. Our connection had begun with me being Yeo Il-ye’s benefactor; we had weathered the Sichuan crisis together and spent quite a long stretch of time at the Jeomchang Sect as well.
Hmm.
No matter how I turned it over, I couldn’t believe that pure, kind-hearted Hyeok Gi-rin would fly into a rage simply because I had called her a “friend.”
There had to have been some unavoidable reason.
“Hmm.”
I became conscious of the sharp gazes of the strict palace maids who were scrutinizing my every move. I had never taken the Imperial Palace lightly, but I truly had not expected it to be this suffocating.
The strictness defied imagination.
That morning I had genuinely thought I might die of asphyxiation. During audience practice, about ten maids had filed in and lined up like ministers… ten-plus pairs of eyes shooting laser beams at me until I nearly choked.
And then they measured me for proper attire—ruler to every last inch from head to toe. Why measure hair length? Why flip my eyelids and inspect the color of my tongue? Apparently all of it factored into “proper court dress,” so I could only click my tongue in disbelief.
Look—even now, during the post-lunch tea hour, more than a few maids kept slicing me with gazes sharp as blades.
I had thought I was being strict for first-day dominance, but apparently they had gone easy on me because it was the first day.
“Hmm…”
If the palace was this rigid, yesterday’s reaction from Hyeok Gi-rin made a little more sense. There were plenty of stories like that—people of high station had to be careful even about who they called friends.
I tried to look at my own position objectively.
A Sichuan nangin was still just a nangin. My martial arts sat at the first-rate level, I had no particularly famous name, and my identity was, strictly speaking, unknown.
In a palace this exacting, I fell far short of someone one could casually call a friend.
So that was why she got angry?
I put myself in Hyeok Gi-rin’s shoes for a moment. The Imperial Palace was her home, and its household rules were unimaginably strict. After so long away, of course she would want to show only her best side.
To reassure her family, and to be recognized for what she had achieved—she would want to present herself as a proper, successful martial artist of the Murim.
And yet.
Some first-rate nobody of a nangin starts acting all chummy in front of the palace maids?
Even a Sichuan nangin was still a nangin. What kind of profession was that? A pre-criminal, a potential outlaw. The sort who would cut a man down without hesitation if the pay was right, and who harassed commoners at the drop of a hat—a thug, basically.
If word got out that she was close to some first-rate nobody of a nangin with nothing to his name, how would the palace look at Hyeok Gi-rin? Even if I were the Emperor or an imperial grandson, I would cast worried glances at a Hyeok Gi-rin who associated with the likes of Ho Cheon-an.
It would be awkward for Hyeok Gi-rin, who only wanted to show her good side.
Come to think of it, Hyeok Gi-rin had already been acting strange before I even brought up the “friend” line. She had been reading my face carefully and behaving awkwardly. Maybe she had been signaling me right then, hoping I would notice the very difficulty I had just figured out.
“No matter how I look at it, that has to be it…”
Damn it, Ho Cheon-an. Your social instincts are completely dead. When someone keeps acting that strangely, you’re supposed to pick up on the hint—yet it took you a full day to catch on.
I had completely ignored Hyeok Gi-rin’s signal to stop acting close and just quietly let it pass, and instead played the close friend. So she had no choice but to feign anger and put distance between us.
I had no right to feel hurt. I was the idiot who forgot the gap in social standing. My trolling had put Hyeok Gi-rin in an awkward spot.
“Hmm…”
Right. Better not make things harder for Hyeok Gi-rin. While I was in the palace, I would just keep my head down and stay quiet.
I needed to take the lessons seriously too. My reputation could easily become Hyeok Gi-rin’s reputation, yet I had shown far too much half-hearted attitude just because I found it boring.
What was done was done—time to make up for it.
“It is time for the afternoon schedule.”
“Mm! I am ready!”
I steeled myself, put strength into my eyes, and looked at the middle-aged palace maid.
“Today we will learn about the education received by the daughters of the Imperial Palace.”
“...Mm?”
“We will examine the environment in which the palace’s young ladies are raised, the education they receive, the bridal training they undergo, and so forth.”
The maid’s oddly pressuring tone made me wonder what this was about, but I quickly brushed the question aside. The content of the lesson didn’t matter. Restoring my reputation came first.
“Mm. Understood.”
I nodded with fresh enthusiasm. The middle-aged maid studied me for a moment, muttered something under her breath, and began the lesson.
“What is this?”
Sama Gyeong-hwi, Director of the Eastern Depot and a scion of the prestigious Sama clan, bowed his head.
“I beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness.”
From the very first line, Yu Gyeong’s brow furrowed. Origin unknown? Whereabouts until age fifteen completely blank? Was this really a report from the Eastern Depot, that famed intelligence organ?
“Is there no clue from which we might infer his origins?”
“None whatsoever… Judging by the mannerisms and impressions we have collected from that period, he is more likely the child of slash-and-burn farmers or wanderers than of any great house… but that is only circumstantial. There is not a single solid lead on his background.”
As if he dropped out of the sky. The words rose to Sama Gyeong-hwi’s throat, but he did not speak them. People did not fall from the heavens. They had simply failed to find him.
“Tsk. Find out for certain.”
“At once!”
Torn between conflicting feelings, Yu Gyeong scowled as he evaluated Ho Cheon-an. He had taken considerable interest in the Sichuan Murim where Hyeok Gi-rin was active. Sichuan’s distinctive feature was Sichuan itself, and the most alien presence within it was the Sichuan nangin.
Yu Gyeong did not know everything about Sichuan nangin, but he possessed at least as much knowledge as any native of Sichuan.
Sichuan nangin are said to hide in the shadow of anonymity to get their work done. Completely concealing one’s origins… should that be praised as competence…?
The Eastern Depot had not thrown its full strength into investigating Ho Cheon-an. Even so, Ho Cheon-an was one of the people the Emperor himself would receive in audience—and a martial artist at that. No matter that he was merely Hyeok Gi-rin’s tag-along, they would not have investigated him lightly.
That he had kept his personal information safe from the Eastern Depot’s hands was a competence worth acknowledging.
Caught somewhere between the displeasure of not knowing Ho Cheon-an’s origins and the satisfaction that any future brother-in-law ought to possess at least this much ability, Yu Gyeong continued reading the report.
Halfway through, he set the document down and stared up at the sky.
Sama Gyeong-hwi, reading his sovereign’s heart, bowed even lower.
“Is this… true?”
“…There is not a single falsehood in the report, Your Majesty.”
“Haaah… haaah…”
Yu Gyeong felt a wave of dizziness and leaned his head back against the throne. The hard surface of the backrest pressed into his skull, but that was the least of his concerns.
“…After becoming a nangin, he hung around gambling dens every single day and gambled through the night?”
Sama Gyeong-hwi only bowed deeper.
“And for five years, without missing a single day, he haunted the gambling dens… always losing enormous sums?”
He bowed lower still.
“According to estimates, the vast majority of the enormous income he earned as a Sichuan nangin… was completely squandered on gambling?”
“Have mercy, Your Majesty!”
The eunuchs and Sama Gyeong-hwi all prostrated themselves as one, smashing their foreheads to the floor. For a long while no answer came from Yu Gyeong. When Sama Gyeong-hwi finally could not bear it and peeked up, the Emperor was staring blankly into empty air.
“Heh heh…”
Yu Gyeong let out a hollow laugh. Sichuan nangin… a fine name for a profession that sold a martial artist’s pride for money. Match-fixing, ambushes—in the end they either lost disgracefully on purpose or launched shameless first strikes…
Yu Gyeong knew enough about the lives of the destitute that he could understand it on an intellectual level.
But… the money scraped together by grinding that pride into the dirt—
“Gambling…”
He had gambled. Stayed up every night gambling, then taken every last coin earned by scraping his pride raw and flung it all onto the gambling table.
Two hot streams of tears rolled down Yu Gyeong’s cheeks.
Sama Gyeong-hwi and the eunuchs went pale with shock and slammed their heads to the floor again.
“Have mercy, Your Majesty!”
“Have mercy, Your Majesty!”
Even as they pounded their foreheads and begged in anguished voices, Yu Gyeong only hung his head and wept.
“All of this is due to my own lack of virtue.”
“Have mercy, Your Majesty!”
“How am I to face the late Emperor in the afterlife and lift my head?”
“Your Majesty…”
At the Emperor’s heartfelt voice, the ministers held their breath.
This Ho Cheon-an was a man whose profession was to lose on purpose and run away, a gambling addict who lost and lost again even at the tables!
And Hyeok Gi-rin had taken such a worthless man into her heart!
Yu Gyeong sincerely felt the weight of responsibility and shed tears of bitter regret. He had let her leave the palace at so young an age without ever properly establishing her view of the opposite sex; she had lived as a woman in male disguise, and so of course she had given her heart to some absurd good-for-nothing like this!
“I lacked virtue and strength, so Yu Ya had no choice but to set out for the Murim. I cast her into a situation where she could not receive a proper education as a daughter of the house; I failed to cultivate her discernment, and the disaster of her giving her heart to such a man has come to pass… If this is not my lack of virtue, then what is it…!”
“Your Majesty…!”
Sama Gyeong-hwi lowered his head with a grave expression, and hot tears welled in the eunuchs’ eyes as well.
After weeping for a time, Yu Gyeong composed himself. Fine. First he would examine this good-for-nothing called Ho Cheon-an thoroughly. The mere fact that he was a gambling addict already proved he was a wastrel who would ruin a family root and branch, but a great deal of the report still remained.
Yu Gyeong read on and burst into laughter.
“Hahahaha! Yes! He got into a quarrel while performing some street trick, and instead of drawing his sword he settled it with a shell game! Ahahahahaha!”
“Have mercy, Your Majesty!”
“Hahahaha! Look here, Director! And you eunuchs! Look at this! After being invited to the Jeomchang Sect he even taught sleight-of-hand to the senior masters! Ahahahahahaha! At the Jeomchang Sect, of all places—an ordinary nangin teaching sleight-of-hand to the senior masters! Claiming it was for the children’s education! Hahahahaha!”
Which Murim sect did the Eastern Depot stake its life on gathering intelligence about? Naturally the Jeomchang Sect. There was always the chance that Hyeok Gi-rin’s faction might extend its claws toward Jeomchang; even setting factions aside, they needed constant confirmation of any mishap that might befall Hyeok Gi-rin and of whether the Jeomchang Sect that protected her showed any unusual movements.
That was how the Eastern Depot had been able to learn exactly what Ho Cheon-an had been doing at the Jeomchang Sect.
“Khuhuhuhu! He truly seems ready to die for gambling! If passion and interest in gambling alone made one the greatest gambler under heaven, he would take the title! Khuhuhuhu…”
Whether the Emperor was laughing or crying, no one could tell; everyone simply pressed their foreheads to the floor.
“Make ready.”
At the chill in Yu Gyeong’s voice, Sama Gyeong-hwi’s head snapped up.
“…Your Majesty?”
“I will see that bastard at once.”
Yu Gyeong’s eyes were blazing.