Sichuan's Number One Nangin Ace Instructor — Settlement Arc, Part 2
Two money pouches came out of Goburin's robes. When I untied them and looked inside, the silver was split roughly half and half.
So he'd set half aside for himself, planning to skim that much off the top?
I fixed Goburin with a hard stare. He cleared his throat and looked away.
I'd deal with him later. First, I started counting the coins for an exact total.
Most nangin were first-timers at the wandering life. They might suspect a middleman was fleecing them, but without hard proof it stayed pure gut feeling — enough to grumble about, never enough to press. So the middlemen just put on their thickest faces and waited the complaints out.
But I, Ho Cheon-an, had played the middleman myself more than a few times. I knew roughly what a job of this grade paid when it came in, and what kind of costs got calculated when things went sideways.
This world of Murim Cheonha mirrored the Murim's own era down to the bone, and in this age, skimming a little off the top was simply normal. Run an honest business and people called you a fool; bragging about the suckers you'd fleeced was a merchant's badge of honor.
In a time when men sold their conscience for coin and called it business acumen, lecturing anyone about contracts and good faith with a modern man's common sense was a waste of breath.
"Heukmyo. Sit beside me."
I didn't know what scent it was, but the moment Heukmyo settled next to me, a clean, refreshing fragrance bloomed through the air. Did peerless beauties just come with a built-in mood-lifting perfume?
In a Wanderer Inn steeped in bachelor stink from nothing but men packed wall to wall, the fragrance Heukmyo occasionally let slip was so bracing it drew an involuntary sigh of appreciation.
Goburin must have caught it too. His nose twitched, and his face went scarlet.
You couldn't even make out the lines of her face, yet atmosphere, voice, scent, and figure alone were enough for the brain to slam down a verdict of peerless beauty — that was the mysterious veiled woman's charm.
Come to think of it, even if the face under that veil-like gauze turned out plain, the voice was lovely, the scent was sweet, the figure was excellent, and the presence was magnetic. Whatever the face looked like, wasn't that still a peerless beauty? Right? Or… was it?
I glanced at Heukmyo, got thoroughly confused, then looked at Goburin's flaming face — and everything snapped into focus.
A man built like a goblin king, all thick flesh and threatening features, blushing and squirming with bashfulness was a genuine hazard to eye health.
He was already an eyesore. Adding that blissful expression made me want to hit him for real.
I couldn't punch him, so I'd beat him with facts instead.
"We took a mid-grade commission yesterday. For mid-grade work, the take should look about like this."
I peeled off a clump of silver and pushed it to one side.
"And yesterday I lost my sword and had to run. On a normal job, compensation for that ends at the used market value of the blade, maybe a few tenths more."
"For a martial artist, a sword you've grown used to is worth quite a lot, isn't it?"
"Then you shouldn't have dropped it. You made the choice — why blame someone else? That's on you."
"Ah…"
"So if we treat yesterday's sword as standard expense processing, it comes to about this."
I pushed out another clump of silver.
"But if the client had any sense at all, he would have put in enough to cover a quality ready-made blade — something better than average stock. After the kind of convenience he got yesterday, even a man with no tact would cough up at least that much. So the real amount counted as my sword fee is more like this?"
I shoved another clump of silver over and added it to the sword pile.
"And haaah… just thinking about yesterday pisses me off all over again. Anyway, that bastard Kang Jun ignored basic martial courtesy — never mind orthodox etiquette, just plain common sense for a martial artist — more times than I can count. He treated a nangin who was his business partner like dirt, so we should collect an apology fee, right?"
I swept the rest of the silver across the table in one push.
"But here's the thing. The client was supposedly satisfied and paid a bonus. Where did that bonus go? Was it dust? Or some spirit treasure only visible to the eyes of immortals?"
"Oh, is there a treasure like that? What's it called?"
"Heukmyo. Read the room."
One sharp look and she shut her mouth.
Goburin's complexion was already looking very bad.
"So then. Where did the money under the heading of 'gratitude fee' disappear to?"
"Hah! Do you have any idea how many years we've worked together? This is extremely unpleasant!"
As I'd said before, the prerequisite for becoming a middleman was belonging to a family with enough pedigree that no sect's people would find it strange to visit. In other words: bloodline privilege.
Middlemen were supposed to be merchants, but in truth they were several moves behind real merchants in skill.
With conditions that favorable, no real competition, and the middlemen colluding among themselves to do business — were these merchants? They were thugs.
"What do you even know, dividing money up like that? That sword fee! No matter how satisfied Taegyeongmun was—"
"So you did everything required to earn your full cut?"
"I did!"
"Goburin of Hwanggeumga. I'll say this once. Did you perform a middleman's job properly?"
Goburin's expression froze solid.
I'd always been relatively soft on middlemen. First reason: if a middleman nursed a grudge and started omitting job intel, I was the one who'd bleed for it. Second: I already had a rough idea how much they were skimming, and a clear estimate of how much effort it would take to dig it all up.
Middlemen pretending to take a cheap commission while stuffing their back pockets was no different from haggling with market vendors who swore they were selling at a loss and refused to shave off a single coin.
And more than anything, whatever money I had just got vacuumed up as gambling stakes anyway, so I'd never been particularly sensitive about pay. Either way, I had to leave only a fraction and pour the rest into the gambling dens.
But things were different now.
Breaking out of Second-rate and into First-rate meant facing situations I couldn't predict at all — and to handle those situations, the first priority was stacking money.
People compared money to bullets.
Exactly that. The more money you had, the better — because a single round of that currency could decide whether you lived or died.
I no longer knew how much coin my path ahead would demand, so at the very least I had to stop getting shorted on my own share.
Goburin wouldn't take my words lightly.
Middlemen, more than anyone, knew exactly how far my methods could reach.
They'd watched me solve the jobs that gave them headaches with dazzling, ridiculous skill.
"Goburin. Do you know what Kang Jun of Taegyeongmun did to me at Gyeongsu Market?"
"Field work is your responsibility, not mine! Don't try to pin this on me! I collected every coin Taegyeongmun owed!"
Voices rose, and the other nangin's eyes drifted over again, curious.
A dense bastard who couldn't read a room and only knew how to throw his weight around. That was my read on Goburin.
Skimming commission fees was fine. Goburin had to eat too. Whatever he pocketed on the side, I could just take back.
But this job was one I couldn't simply walk away from.
Because this commission had been an absolute, unforgivable disaster.
Goburin's jobs had always been a mess — that much was true. The only reason nothing had blown up until now was that whenever I took work through middlemen this incompetent, I already knew the situation cold.
But the situation had changed. Jobs still had to go out, and I no longer had the luxury of watching Sichuan's currents the way I used to, while babysitting idiotic clients.
In the end, the reason I'd been blindsided by that Kang Jun of Taegyeongmun yesterday was partly that I hadn't tracked Sichuan's trends at all lately. After the Yeo Il-ye affair I'd been too busy surviving to spare a thought for the outside world, and the Heukmyo business had kept me cooped up in the Wanderer Inn for a full five days.
Lately that sect called Taegyeongmun has been expanding with a worrying momentum, and their disciples are said to be thoroughly rotten.
If I'd been living a normal nangin's life, a rumor of that caliber would have reached my ears. I'd been distracted myself, but the nangin at the Wanderer Inn had also been half out of their minds over my enlightenment and Heukmyo's beauty, so the quality of gossip circulating inside the inn had plummeted — that played a part too.
But was this normal?
Weren't middlemen supposed to screen jobs by risk and client quality, or at least hand over proper information and make sure the dangers were clearly understood? Wasn't that the middleman's role?
That was how things were supposed to work. That was a nangin's rightful due, and the service a middleman was obligated to provide.
As I started putting my hands into other matters, keeping up with the trends needed for nangin work would inevitably grow more neglected. The only way to fill that gap was to straighten out these negligent middlemen and make them do their jobs properly.
In the end, the one who sat back and let an absurd troll get delivered to my door was Goburin. If he was going to take responsibility, he should have at least cleaned up the mess — instead he'd just seen the money pouch and come running with a grin.
I needed to whip people like him into shape if Heukmyo and I were going to move on to the next stage.
Starting with Golden Goburin, now that I finally had something on him — I'd break him in properly.