Sichuan's Finest Nangin, Star Instructor — Settlement Arc 3
"Go Bu-rin. Do you have any idea what Gang Jun of the Taegyeong Sect did to me at Gyeongsu Market?"
"Field work is your jurisdiction! Don't try to pin this on me! I collected every last coin the Taegyeong Sect owed!"
"Right. So spit out every last coin you just collected. Not getting through, Go Bu-rin? Let me say it again. On this job, you took a commission from a sect that couldn't even clear the bare minimum of due diligence, never properly verified the request, and handed it off to me without a single word of warning. Thanks to that, I went through hell, and that bastard Gang Jun tried to kill me — put a blade right into my face."
"When you do a middleman's work, I don't complain about a middleman's cut. But on this job you were nothing more than an errand boy. I don't know how much you were cheerfully pocketing as 'your share,' but even if you added every scrap of it together, it wouldn't come close to full compensation for what happened at Gyeongsu Market."
"You brought money? A middleman who couldn't even secure the damages that were rightfully owed? A man who couldn't even collect my share properly, and you want a fee? We've got history, so I won't demand you make up the portion you failed to collect. I'll just pay you for the legwork of shuttling between the Golden Family and the Wanderer Inn. Take that and get out."
"How dare you! How dare you spout such nonsense in front of Go Bu-rin of the Golden Family…!"
"You've got two choices. Go collect proper compensation, cover the share I lost, and walk away with your brokerage fee — or spit everything out right here and leave empty-handed."
I kept my composure as I watched Go Bu-rin heave for breath, flushed with rage.
This was business.
And a perfectly reasonable demand.
I locked eyes with him, leaving not the slightest crack of room for negotiation. Sensing that I wasn't bluffing just to pressure him — that I meant every word — Go Bu-rin cooled a fraction.
"Ho Cheon-an, even if you're popular among the middlemen, if you start touching middlemen and still expect to keep working as a nangin—"
"My money."
I cut him off.
"The cash in your coat, or go collect it from the Taegyeong Sect. Until then, you are not a middleman to me. You're just a debtor who needs to pay up."
"And if I refuse?"
I smiled. There was something almost funny about Go Bu-rin putting on a brave face with that bloodless look.
"Then I'll make sure you can't live without paying. Including my daily rate for the collection work."
The hunt for Go Bu-rin had begun.
Clatter. Rumble.
"Is this a normal way to collect a debt?"
"Huh? No."
Even with Shadow Image Qi Gong running, I could feel Black Cat's eyes on me.
Her expression said she genuinely doubted this would work — but she was doing the job I'd given her, so I just clicked my tongue and left it alone.
"Still, if you work as a nangin long enough, friction with middlemen is inevitable. Their whole business model is squeezing a nangin's cut so more money sticks to them. You've got to look after your own share."
"Openly picking a fight with a middleman like this is not a wise choice."
"Fair point. But the fact that we're doing it this way is partly your fault, you know."
"Senior Ho, stirring things up however you please and then blaming me is a little low."
Caught.
"Was yesterday's incident really that big?"
"In money terms? Average, actually. Even with all the damages combined, it doesn't reach half of a major job."
"Then why go this far?"
"No time. If I crack the whip on the middlemen now, life gets easier for me later."
"No time for what? Going to a gambling den?"
"…Where did you hear that?"
"Your classmates told me."
Wow. Jeong Sam and Yeo Jinsang, those bastards — talking behind my back already? Why is it always me who ends up embarrassed whenever my so-called classmates do something stupid.
"Senior Ho, be honest. What's your real agenda?"
"Why do you never trust me? I'm freely handing out tricks you couldn't learn anywhere else. Just say thank you and focus on absorbing them."
"And what exactly about this is worth learning?"
Black Cat fluttered a flyer at me, then grabbed a fistful and flung them into the air. I watched the leaflets clump and tumble and wanted to say something — but she'd at least kept her hands moving, so I let it go.
"First: you get to see the real face of the middlemen who swagger around the Wanderer Inn like high officials."
You couldn't become a middleman without noble blood. Not martial blood — the lineages of great houses that dealt in letters, office, and commerce. Only the scions of families with reputations so solid that even the rumor of associating with nangin couldn't touch them were allowed to work as middlemen.
But think about it coldly.
In the end, a middleman's activities still stained a family's name. The middlemen themselves strutted around insisting their blood and houses were far too grand to be touched by mere gossip — but did their own families really look on them so kindly?
A middleman's income was usually nothing to sneeze at, but for a great house prestigious enough to field middlemen in the first place, that money wasn't particularly attractive.
They probably just thought of it as giving a family member a job, and put up with the inconvenience.
"Second: you get to learn how to land an unblockable skill on the middlemen who run wild through the Wanderer Inn like Lü Bu himself."
"Hmm."
Black Cat's sulky attitude straightened a little.
"I never much liked that Go Bu-rin fellow… but middlemen are a kind of information broker, and men like him plant the ugly prejudice that information people just freeload… anyone who ruins the reputation of the information trade needs to be dealt with—"
"What was that?"
"Nothing. Understood, Senior. I'll learn properly."
Whoosh—flutter—scatter!
Suddenly motivated, Black Cat mixed hidden weapons technique with palm force and launched the flyers. The leaflets shot high into the sky, clumped into a ball in midair, then burst apart and rained down in every direction.
People began to murmur as they saw the flyers falling like snow from the heavens.
"By the way, what are these strange characters?"
"Special symbols designed to catch the eye and stick in the memory. They're so effective that countless people have adopted them."
"Oh…"
We reached the Golden Family. A merchant house worthy of the name Golden — the number-one commercial clan in Sichuan, a family that could fairly be said to hold the province's wealth in one hand. Just standing before the gates and looking at the palace-like estate was enough to feel the sheer scale of their fortune.
An overwhelming main gate wide enough for sixteen horses to enter abreast, and beyond the open doors, countless buildings that could rival a royal palace.
I stopped the cart I'd been pulling and stood before it.
"Famous house or not — once you take delivery of a truck, no, a cart, you're not going anywhere."
Goblin hunting was best done by roadkill.
The Golden Family.
It was, to be fair, a merchant house of long standing.
That didn't mean it had never faced a crisis.
The Golden Family owned the Golden Merchant Group, called the greatest trading house in Sichuan — but a look at its history left clear scars of every storm it had weathered. Filthy ways of making money despite already being fabulously rich, and the side effects of octopus-like expansion driven by nothing but capital.
In the face of greedy investment they had pulled funds from all sorts of places, made enemies, and committed more than a few shameful acts.
To Yeo Il-ye, the Golden Family's glittering grounds looked as if they were stained with every kind of filth.
Even walking behind the steward who led the way, she felt as though a stench trailed after him.
Being granted a direct audience with the family head is unexpected.
The Golden Family's influence reached across all of Sichuan. As the province's foremost merchant, the family poured vast wealth into maintaining friendly relations with the martial sects.
The Diancang Sect, too, had received countless gifts from the Golden Family. Suitable exchanges among Sichuan's notables were a matter of course. Yeo Il-ye had bullied a junior disciple who'd been assigned a routine letter-delivery errand, seized the correspondence, and come to the Golden Family herself — but even so, a personal meeting with the family head was more than she had expected.
Was it the treatment due a name that had been rising rapidly of late?
Or was he truly connected to what had happened back then?
Pointless speculation.
Yeo Il-ye shook her head. The head of the Golden Family was not a man just anyone could meet. She had earned the right only by stepping into the Super-Peak Realm and proving her skill by defeating one renowned Sichuan expert after another.
Even if the family head were connected to that incident, a Peak Realm Yeo Il-ye would never have been granted an audience.
When things reach an extreme, they reverse. Forge in fire; cool in ice.
Yeo Il-ye once more recalled the teaching her benefactor had given her, and settled her heart. She did not close her eyes, yet the landscape of her inner mind unfolded as clearly as if she had.
A vast structure forged from refined metal. A building no smaller than the great halls of the Golden Family itself — solid and unyielding, too sturdy to be called a mere house.
But at its base, an enormous hole remained.
Attachment? Obsession? Regret?
She had burned so hot that she had poured indiscriminate hatred onto a nangin and spun her wheels, and so now no one stood at Yeo Il-ye's side. Ever since she had lost her parents, she had let no one near — baring her teeth, raking with her nails — and no one had been able to approach her.
The hole torn open the day the manor burned still gaped in place, even after Yeo Il-ye's heart had been newly forged and cooled.
Revenge.
Whether revenge could fill that hole, Yeo Il-ye herself did not know. But she had truly loved her parents, and she had loved that estate as well. The maid who had secretly slipped her sweets behind her mother's back. The servants who had fretted and run after her whenever she raced through the gardens or climbed the trees, terrified she would fall and hurt herself.
All of it had burned away to nothing, and Yeo Il-ye could not bring any of them back.
So there was no choice left but to soothe their bitterness with blood.