Night Is a Cat's Time - 2
“You’re really someone who needs a lot of looking after, aren’t you?”
The voice that had been at his back vanished, only to reappear a short distance away. Jeon Hu-dam stayed frozen exactly as he was, not daring to move a muscle. With no idea what might happen next, he rolled his eyes downward and looked.
The lamp cast the woman’s shadow in a long, careless stretch across the floor. Her figure called to mind a gracefully curved jar, and she wore a face veil.
A rumor he had once heard flickered through Jeon Hu-dam’s mind.
This… this is…
In trades half-sunk in darkness like this one, legends of certain figures always circulated. Among thieves there was the tale of the Shadowless Divine Thief who had emptied the Imperial Palace’s secret vaults. Among assassins, stories of the Dark Emperor who had erased an entire sect in a single day without leaving a trace.
The information trade had its own such existence: the rumors surrounding a group called the Moon-Subduing Hall.
An information network that served a beauty of flower-like face and moon-like form—that was the Moon-Subduing Hall. Their skill at gathering and manipulating intelligence was said to be enough to toy with the entire realm at will.
Even though their leader was a peerless beauty the likes of which the world would never see again, not a single whisper of her appearance ever reached the Central Plains Murim. That silence itself was proof they were the greatest information network under heaven.
I thought it was just a rumor…!
Information on the greatest beauty in the world would be worth a fortune in gold. Why would any information broker keep something like that hidden? The story made no sense from any angle, so Jeon Hu-dam had never paid it any mind.
Black Cat smiled as she watched Jeon Hu-dam already pouring cold sweat.
From childhood she had possessed a power that drove people mad.
Everyone who saw her true face became so enthralled by her beauty that they burned everything they had—whether to defile her, protect her, or possess her.
Without the veil woven from thousand-year black silk, I would have met a horrible end long before I came of age.
The veil of thousand-year black silk lightened the burden of circulating Shadow Image Qi Gong, and more importantly, it softened the unique atmosphere that clung to Black Cat.
She had simply grown curious.
Just what about her drove men to such madness? That first curiosity, the one that ran through her entire life, settled deep inside her, and she began gathering information.
Black Cat found her answer.
And for the first time she felt it—the thrill that flooded her mind the moment she solved a curiosity she had yearned after her whole life.
A sense of achievement!
Her days had been spent frantically hiding her face; even her martial arts had been learned only to protect herself. Yet she never forgot the sensation of unlocking her own secret.
That was why Black Cat ran an information organization. Because she wanted to know everything in this world that piqued her curiosity. Because she wanted to feel that thrilling sense of achievement again.
I wonder if Senior Ho knows.
Black Cat thought of Ho Cheon-an. He was strange, mysterious, a man whose talents defied estimation—yet fundamentally, his nerves were not the sharpest.
“I wonder if he has any idea of the treatment I’m giving him~”
Tang Do-gyeong rose in her mind, and with him the Ho Cheon-an standing before him.
A smile came unbidden.
She remembered how Tang Do-gyeong, eyes bloodshot red from pushing his ocular arts past their limit until the capillaries burst, had glared at him—and how Ho Cheon-an’s face had gone a sickly greenish-blue.
What clever scheme will Senior Ho use to resolve this one?
Whether he truly possessed the legendary treasure called Ho Cheon-an, as his name suggested, she still did not know. But Black Cat was already curious about the man himself. The gambling techniques he had displayed stirred her interest every bit as much as the question of whether the treasure existed, and the person named Ho Cheon-an stirred it even more.
He could resolve it through enlightenment, through gambling, or by showing some other method entirely—any of it would do.
I want to see him.
He was like a ball of yarn. The longer she watched him, the more she wanted to roll him around and could not stop herself. She had approached to quench a thirst, only to find herself thirstier still.
Recalling that old thrill in her heart, Black Cat smiled.
“Who I am? Why I came here? What I want? Do I really need to put it into words?”
“….N-no, you don’t.”
“That’s right. An information broker ought to be this sharp and this quick on the uptake. Only then can you call yourself one.”
Hearing the satisfied note in Black Cat’s voice, Jeon Hu-dam trembled from head to toe. The gap between them needed no explanation. This was someone who had slipped soundlessly into the Viewing Pavilion despite every airtight secret and countless security measures he had put in place.
Even as she praised him in that condescending tone for a long while, fear outweighed any sense of humiliation.
Ho Cheon-an…
“I will forget… I will destroy every scrap of information on that man as well. To the Golden Family I will claim it was simply unknown. Beyond that… is there anything else you desire?”
“Heh heh.”
Black Cat decided she had found a useful person for the first time in a long while. Anyone in this situation would understand their life hung by a thread. Yet almost no one, under such pressure, could keep their wits and choose the proper option.
I’ll be in Sichuan for a while anyway… absorbing one person shouldn’t hurt.
Gulp.
Jeon Hu-dam’s trembling grew worse. Black Cat had moved around to stand directly in front of him. The reason he had not moved at all until now was simple: it had been the safest choice.
It was the option that let him learn as little as possible about this uninvited guest—the beauty believed to be the master of the Moon-Subduing Hall.
Kill them and silence them.
That was why no rumors of the Moon-Subduing Hall’s master ever spread. Dead men tell no tales, so no rumors arise either.
Jeon Hu-dam had refused to turn his head even once, not wanting to look toward the master of the Moon-Subduing Hall and become a target for silencing.
Yet now she deliberately stepped forward to show herself? Why reveal her own information? Was it simply because she had decided that once he was dead everything would end, so there was no need for caution? With the possibility of being silenced rising by the second, Jeon Hu-dam clenched his teeth and forced himself to look straight ahead.
In the end the woman before him held the power of life and death, and answering her intent was the choice most likely to keep him alive.
Black Cat gave a small nod to Jeon Hu-dam for making the best possible judgment.
“Correct. Excellent.”
“H-haah…”
Jeon Hu-dam staggered and sank to the floor. His brain, melted by tension, refused to decide what was correct or excellent, yet instinct still registered that he had survived. In that instant the strength left his legs and he could no longer stand.
Even so, he could not tear his gaze from Black Cat.
Even by the meager light of a single lamp, her features were impossible to look away from. The night-travel clothes she wore made the curves of her body stand out so sharply he wondered whether such lines could even exist in the world, and the hair she had pinned up for stealth was elegant beyond measure.
Regret filled his mind unbidden. She was circulating some peculiar qi art; even the parts not covered by the veil remained completely invisible.
“I’ll give you a reward.”
The veil came loose. And Shadow Image Qi Gong vanished.
Jeon Hu-dam’s eyes went wide.
A neat, refined forehead entered his sight.
And below it? Gracefully arched brows, and beneath them double eyelids that seized the gaze. Her lashes were so long and so smoothly curved.
Of course the finishing touch was those eyes.
Large and clear, they could not be described with the mere word “beautiful.” The moment Jeon Hu-dam met them, his body began to tremble. The outer beauty alone was enough to rewrite his standards of beauty.
The beauty held within those eyes completely captivated him.
The sharp bridge of her nose below them, the textured and moist lips, the slender line of her jaw—none of it registered.
Rustle.
“…Ah!”
The instant Black Cat replaced the veil and resumed Shadow Image Qi Gong, Jeon Hu-dam let out an involuntary cry of regret. She pressed something into his hand.
Whoosh!
The lamp went out and Black Cat was gone. For a time Jeon Hu-dam remained drunk on the afterimage of her eyes and that beauty. How long he stayed like that, he could not say.
Then, abruptly, he grew curious about the object she had left him.
He relit the lamp and looked down at his palm.
“Heh… heh heh…”
Jeon Hu-dam could not hold back the laughter that escaped at the sight of what rested in his hand.
Moonstone.
Not a true stone fallen from the moon, but the kind people called moonstone because its color resembled moonlight—a bead fashioned from that moonstone.
A crack ran clearly down the center so anyone could see it. Two halves of moonstone formed a single sphere; open it, and something hidden would surely be inside.
“Haha, hahahaha…”
Jeon Hu-dam knew what lay within without even looking.
Moon-Subduing Hall. Why would an information organization name itself after those who had yielded to the moon? Today he had cleanly solved that riddle. The Moon-Subduing Hall was a gathering of those who could not resist the temptation of the moonstone and had submitted.
“Hahahahahahaha!!”
He had beheld with his own eyes a beauty that deserved to be called a kingdom-toppling countenance, a flower-like face and moon-like form—yet he could tell no one. The moment the story spread he would die, and the Moon-Subduing Hall would make the tale baseless.
Just as, until moments ago, he himself had dismissed every rumor of the Moon-Subduing Hall as empty nonsense.
He had learned what the greatest beauty in this world truly was—and he could speak of it to no one.
Jeon Hu-dam remembered why he had become an information broker. He had been the village news-bearer in a rural hamlet. He had loved spreading information the villagers did not know, gathering people and sharing it with them—that was why he had become a broker.
Why do rumors travel as fast as the wind? Because the desire to pass on what one knows is every bit as fierce as the wind’s speed.
He had forgotten that while focusing only on gathering things to sell, but in this moment he realized it anew.
A face that lacked nothing to be called a kingdom-toppling beauty, a figure that lacked nothing to be called flower-like face and moon-like form, eyes whose beauty was too great even for the phrase “possessing a hundred expressions”!
He could not control the craving to speak of it, to share it with someone.
“Wahahahahahahahaha!!”
He understood why the Moon-Subduing Hall was the greatest information organization under heaven. Even he, one of the foremost brokers in Sichuan, had been helplessly drawn in by the offer. What information broker in the world could resist being pulled in? Anyone who took pride in being an information broker, anyone with the gossipy nature that wanted to share and discuss with others—
Was there anyone who could refuse this proposal?
Jeon Hu-dam gazed at the moonstone bead. To find other information brokers who, like him, had failed to resist the moonstone’s temptation. To find comrades with whom he could discuss a kingdom-toppling beauty. To talk without end and marvel together over a beauty he could share with no one else in this world.
He willingly opened the moonstone bead.