Crowd Favorite Tang Do-gyeong -1
Bang bang bang bang!!
Ordinarily, the Hour of the Dragon — seven in the morning — was not when I got up.
The traditional Central Plains lifestyle had people rising before dawn and turning in at sunset, but Sichuan was a bustling city where mornings came late and nights ran long. Most folks here kept hours closer to modern people, starting work around the Hour of the Snake — nine o'clock.
I usually woke around the middle of the Dragon Hour, roughly eight, stretched a little, ate breakfast, and got ready for the day.
Martial artists, however, were devout believers in that peculiar folk notion that you had to absorb the pure qi of dawn to improve. Any nangin aiming for a breakthrough typically rose between the Hours of the Tiger and the Rabbit, trained for an hour or two, and then prepared for the day's commissions.
In other words, unless they'd exhausted themselves the day before, most nangin were up between four and six in the morning.
Which meant these lunatics had started hammering on my door right when I was deepest in dreamland. I had no idea what they'd been eating.
Bang bang bang!!
"Get up! The appointed hour is nearly upon us — what are you dawdling for!"
"You sons of bitches! Whose side are you on?!"
"Come now, we're the referees. Someone has to ensure a fair wager."
The deranged nangin had started pounding on my door a full fifteen minutes before the agreed time. You bastards — I'm the nangin here, and Tang Do-gyeong is the outsider.
Feeling like a cow being led to slaughter, I dragged myself downstairs. Tang Do-gyeong was already seated, looking like he'd worked up a full sweat.
Sweat? This early?
He must have read the bewilderment on my face, because he laughed and explained.
"Hahahaha! I was so eager for today's contest that I arrived a full two hours early!"
A chill ran down my spine. Don't tell me he showed up two hours early because he was worried I'd run. He'd been camped out at the Wanderer Inn since five in the morning. That was genuinely unsettling.
"And while I was waiting, I couldn't help but notice the nangin training, could I?"
The nangin... gentlemen?
"Until now, all I'd ever heard about the Sichuan nangin were ugly rumors. But the heat rising from the training grounds at that early hour rivaled any sect I've seen!"
Well, that much was true. Even if the nangin were the kind of personality disasters who'd sell out a comrade to an outsider, their hunger for advancement ran high.
"This humble Tang had the shamelessness to observe them, and every single one trained with uncommon skill — a level of mastery no one builds in a day or two! How could I not be moved? Simply believing the rumors floating around outside and judging the nangin by them... my head hung of its own accord."
Yeah, well, the outside rumors were predictable enough. Nangin never train, they just drink until all hours — that sort of thing. The horror stories surrounding the Sichuan nangin were basically a greatest-hits compilation of every bad thing anyone had ever said about anyone.
"One would think such a foul reputation would break a man's spirit, yet watching them quietly hone their martial arts inside this inn set the heroic spirit in my chest blazing like a volcano! And so, before the appointed hour, I requested a few sparring matches and loosened up a bit."
"...I see."
Only then did I understand why the nangin had been hammering on my door since before dawn.
A Super-Peak Realm martial artist was a lofty enough height that only three such experts existed among all the countless sects in Sichuan.
At the pinnacle of thousands upon thousands of schools — the Nine Great Sects, the Five Great Clans — reaching Super-Peak in your twenties was possible. Everywhere else, it was like plucking stars from the sky. Dig through the entire history of the Sichuan nangin and you'd find only three who had ever climbed that high. Considering that the Sichuan nangin served as something of a gateway for talented rogues from across the Nine Provinces, that alone told you how remote the Super-Peak Realm truly was.
And now a Super-Peak master was offering them instructional sparring under the name of a friendly match?
And that same Super-Peak master was openly praising and acknowledging the Sichuan nangin?
Of course the nangin wanted recognition. They'd gathered here because Sichuan was the only place left that might raise their martial arts, and yes, that was a choice they'd made themselves — but the hunger to be acknowledged was one of the most fundamental human desires.
And recognition mattered, but the person doing the recognizing mattered just as much.
Of all people, the one handing out that recognition just happened to be Tang Do-gyeong — a true orthodox of the orthodox, a great hero among great heroes, the kind of man who could move nangin who'd spent their whole lives cleaning up after fake righteous sects until they were sick of it.
So the nangin, high on validation, had swarmed my room, banged on the door, and dragged me out as an offering to him.
I looked around with eyes full of betrayal.
You bastards. Seven years of life and death together, and this is how you hand me over?
I poured every ounce of that meaning into my glare, but the nangin just glared right back and pushed harder.
"What are you waiting for? Get started already."
"Can't you see the great hero Tang is waiting!"
"What do you think you're doing with the great hero Tang's precious time!"
Was this the vanity of human life? Even if it had been a side effect of my gambling proficiency, the fact remained that I'd fed these nangin silver. And yet these bastards had completely forgotten every coin and were cheerfully offering me up on a platter.
"Hahaha, I'm fine. He'll need time to warm up and prepare, of course."
"Come now! Half of a quarter of a quarter-hour has already passed since the middle of the Rabbit Hour! What were you doing that you aren't even ready!"
"I'm deeply disappointed in you!"
The barrage of brainless criticism left me reeling. Tang Do-gyeong laughed good-naturedly and tried to rein the nangin in, but the more he did, the wilder they got.
"...Fine. Let's just play yabawi."
The only thing that would shut the nangin up was starting the match. Already a limp rag at seven in the morning, I dropped the dice into a wooden cup and set up the shell game.
Once the board was laid out, the mindless abuse finally stopped. However—
"Here."
Naturally, the spot Tang Do-gyeong pointed to did not contain the dice.
"Ah...!"
"I thought it was that one too!"
The atmosphere was outright bizarre. This was clearly the Wanderer Inn, I was clearly the nangin, and Tang Do-gyeong was clearly the outsider — yet he was receiving a roaring home-crowd cheer while I felt like some villainous challenger who'd wandered into an away game.
And every time Tang Do-gyeong guessed wrong, the pained sighs only grew louder.
Watching the nangin clench their fists and tremble, or smack their own foreheads and groan whenever he missed, I finally just started laughing.
The overinvested nangin were thrashing about as if they'd put their own money on this yabawi board. Looking at them, I found myself having a little moment of life enlightenment.
A time to understand just how terrifying a person's virtue could be.
Tang Do-gyeong, newly crowned as the Wanderer Inn's crowd favorite, had already seized control of the Sichuan nangin scene. That was no exaggeration.
When the promised hour was up, Tang Do-gyeong soothed the nangin, who were grumbling as if they had lost the bet.
"Great hero Tang, we shall look forward to tomorrow's meeting."
"Of course. I'll come at the same hour tomorrow — we can discuss martial arts again then."
Seeing him stride out with both shoulders thrown wide, escorted by a throng of nangin, you could have called him the Nangin King on the spot and felt no dissonance at all.
"Senior, what's all the racket this early... huaaam."
Black Cat sat down in front of me, looking like the morning chaos had cost her sleep.
"Yeah... what was all that racket..."
I wanted nothing more than to pour my grievances into Black Cat's ear, but the morning had already wrung me so dry I didn't even have the energy left to vent.
I was listlessly shoveling down cold noodles with limp chopsticks when Yu Sa-yeon dropped into a seat looking every bit as wilted as I felt.
Tang Do-gyeong coming and going from this place had already been a headache for her. Now he was getting along so well with the nangin that they were calling each other "great hero" and "nangin sir" back and forth — how much must that be eating her up inside? Of course she looked as drained as I did.
"You look exhausted this early too, so I'll keep it short. Got a plan?"
"Did you contact the Tang Family?"
"I did, but they'd need to deploy several of their elite fighters to haul Tang Do-gyeong back. I'm not sure high-level experts like that will get sent out in a pack..."
Tang Do-gyeong was family to the Tang Clan. To subdue him cleanly and escort him home without injuring him, they'd need three to five experts of equal caliber. That was the minimum, and only under the condition that nobody got hurt on either side.
With five Super-Peak masters required, even the Tang Clan would struggle to round people up and dispatch them overnight.
"Black Cat, any bright ideas?"
"Huaaam? Beats me. If Senior Ho doesn't have a sharp solution, I sure don't."
In my desperation, the thought of leaning on Black Cat crossed my mind. She seemed to hold some kind of position in an underworld organization, after all. Maybe their help would open a path?
No — if I borrowed her faction's power for nothing, they might use the debt as a leash around my neck. I didn't know Black Cat's age, but she was young and had been deployed as a field agent, so she almost certainly wasn't high enough to steer the organization. If her people got greedy, Black Cat would end up in a tight spot, and the contract between us would start to wobble.
The reason people went through middlemen instead of visiting the Wanderer Inn in person was that merely setting foot here dealt a devastating blow to one's reputation and standing. Even with the justification of recovering the Blood Jade Token, if this situation dragged on, the perception would take hold that Tang Do-gyeong was openly fraternizing with the Sichuan nangin — a fatal stain on the Tang Clan's honor that they could never simply ignore.
If we just toughed it out for a few days, the Tang Family would handle Tang Do-gyeong on their own.
"Innkeeper, sorry about this. Just hold out a few more days."
"Aaaagh... Ho Cheon-an, you absolute bastard..."
Right. Just a few days. The Tang Family would send people and sort it out.
Three more days passed like that.
Not a word came from the Tang Family. And Tang Do-gyeong said this:
"Would it be all right if I became a Sichuan nangin and took room and board at this inn?"
Watching Yu Sa-yeon faint clean over backward, I knew with absolute certainty.
This one, I was going to have to solve myself.