Hey, Comrade Faction, Won't You Join the Treasure Faction? -2
Midnight. A time when no one stirred.
Tang Do-gyeong arrived at midnight exactly as I had requested, and Yu Sa-yeon was there to receive him.
"So what you're saying is, you'll give me a few days' trial period to see whether I can live as a Sichuan nangin?"
"That's right. You wouldn't be volunteering as a Sichuan nangin just for the money, after all. Start by spending a few days among the nangin, and we'll talk after that."
"Hmm… very well."
Tang Do-gyeong's quarters were assigned to the third floor, out of consideration for his Super-Peak Realm status. The Wanderer Inn was a four-story building: the first floor was the common living space, the second held the nangin's rooms, the third was reserved for special suites, and the fourth was Yu Sa-yeon's private residence.
Around the Hour of the Tiger—three in the morning—I rose from bed and went out for dawn training.
"Ho-hyung, training?"
"Did the sun rise in the west today?"
"Tsk."
I knew perfectly well that I myself could no longer advance, but in the nangin's eyes I was just a lazy bastard who never trained and only gambled. The real reason I had come down at dawn to swing a sword was to observe Tang Do-gyeong—so their remarks weren't entirely wrong.
As I worked through sword forms I hadn't practiced in a long time, the nangin began filing down, and Tang Do-gyeong with them. His joining had already been announced during yesterday's sparring among the former classmates, and nangin eager to train alongside him at dawn flocked over in droves.
"Today I'll explain this form of the Fierce Tiger Fist Method for about half a shichen."
So the Fierce Tiger Fist Method was a fist art Tang Do-gyeong had created himself. Every nangin stopped training and fixed their attention on him, and I too learned the second form of the Fierce Tiger Fist Method—Twin Tiger Fist Clash.
You have understood a portion of Fierce Tiger Fist Method.
You have acquired the second form of Fierce Tiger Fist Method — [Martial Art: Twin Tiger Fist Clash].
Your realm is insufficient to use this form.
"Tch."
Martial arts performed with the bare body mostly began at First-rate. To withstand collisions with edged weapons using nothing but flesh, Qi reinforcement was essential. Practitioners who specialized in fists sometimes used hand guards or greaves, but most protected their hands and feet with little more than a single layer of leather.
Range, power, and hardness all suffered—so why fight bare-handed at all? Because it was advantageous for handling Qi. First-rate, where one could properly control Qi, was effectively the starting point of bare-handed martial arts.
The reason I had come out at dawn to swing a sword was simple: I wanted to confirm whether Tang Do-gyeong was truly teaching real martial arts to the nangin.
This body—Ho Cheon-an.
A man who had once prided himself on knowing everything about Murim Cheonha.
In truth he hadn't known everything, but he had been a veteran deep enough to claim he knew all there was to know about the game Murim Cheonha he had watched through a monitor.
When you met Tang Do-gyeong in Murim Cheonha, you only had to choose one of three options: fight him, ignore him, or recruit him. To do any of those, you needed to know his realm, his martial arts, and his traits. The key to recruiting Tang Do-gyeong was fist arts.
Gifts were the foundation of any recruitment, but hand him a fist art and Tang Do-gyeong became an ally with almost no effort. If you met him as an enemy, the easiest way to take him down was surprisingly to detonate poison bombs. His combat pattern never retreated even in the face of poison—so if you simply held out until the antidote he carried wore off, you could win more easily than expected.
His ceiling realm, his traits, the martial arts he possessed—I had all of it memorized cold.
But the human Tang Do-gyeong living in this Murim Cheonha was someone I did not know.
No matter how deep a veteran of Murim Cheonha you were, how could you possibly know every character's personal history? You only ever learned the fragments tied to the scenarios that played out in the game. And even if you knew one or two of those isolated facts, could you really claim to know Tang Do-gyeong?
Yeo Il-ye was proof enough. Because she had lost her parents to nangin, I had never once expected that giving her enlightenment would make her revere me as a benefactor. Beyond the bare fact that "she lost her parents to nangin," countless other things that made up Yeo Il-ye's inner self had combined to produce the result I was living with now.
Whether Tang Do-gyeong was freely releasing the ultimate techniques he had agonized over and sweated blood to create to a bunch of complete strangers—I could not begin to guess what was going on inside him.
Curiosity raised its head, wondering what on earth Tang Do-gyeong was thinking—but resolving curiosity came second to resolving the situation.
"I can't keep calling you without a name forever, so I'd like to temporarily call you Brother Ya. Would that be all right?"
"As you like."
"Thank you, Brother Ya."
Please don't tell me the Ya is from yabawi. At any rate, the yabawi match began. Watching Tang Do-gyeong stare with his eyes bulging in concentration, the faint remnants of conscience still lingering in my chest gave me a few pointed jabs.
The scheme of locking Tang Do-gyeong inside the Wanderer Inn was good for both him and the inn. If he actually became a Sichuan nangin, both sides would simply make each other miserable. Being captured and cooling his head in a prison cell was, for the sake of Tang Do-gyeong's own life, the better option.
Even a man of the Tang Family would not find life easy in Sichuan once word got out that he ran with the same crowd as the Sichuan nangin.
Still—deceiving a man who had walked in so boldly for a fair contest, holding him at the Wanderer Inn, and plotting to stab him in the back—I couldn't help feeling a twinge of guilt.
I would have preferred to lose the Blood Jade Tablet to him fair and square at the gambling table, too.
The reason Tang Do-gyeong could never win this match against me.
It was because this match was gambling.
A martial arts master was not a god. He was simply a master of martial arts. A master who held a great deal of that mysterious resource called Qi might find everything in this world looking easy—but there were any number of fields that sheer quantity of Qi alone could never touch.
Well, if it were the Heavenly Demon or the Sword God, who knows. At that level, the overwhelming difference in raw stats might let them snatch a single round from me.
But if I had been playing this match against Dogwi?
Just one win would end it—so even if I poured every technique I had into sleight of hand and psychology both, I probably wouldn't have lasted an hour before the Blood Jade Tablet was taken from me.
Tang Do-gyeong was a Super-Peak martial arts master, but as a gambler he was less than Third-rate. Dogwi was an ordinary man, yet among every gambler Ho Cheon-an had ever met, he was the absolute best. If gambling had realms of its own, he would have been Super-Peak at the very least.
Murim people trusted their bodies tempered by martial arts and the arts themselves, and assumed that anything physical made them the best in the world—but that was just the empty talk of amateurs.
Learn a little martial arts and your life's complete? If you want to beat a gambler at the gambling table, go learn gambling techniques.
If Tang Do-gyeong's pure goal had been to defeat me and take the Blood Jade Tablet, he would already have lost. There were only four cups at most, and if you just mindlessly pointed without caring whether you missed in the middle, you would eventually hit the right one.
Even watching gambling techniques with your eyes alone raised your gambling skill proficiency little by little. But that only rose if you were watching with the intention of learning. Watch magic videos on YouTube a hundred times for pure entertainment and would you ever see through the tricks? You had to watch with the intent to learn, eyes wide, looping at 0.25 speed over and over, before you started to grasp anything.
In the present situation—where he was trying to break my techniques with eye techniques alone, chasing them with his gaze—Tang Do-gyeong had no chance of winning.
In a hostile relationship even advice was a provocation, but right now, telling him wouldn't hurt.
Watching Tang Do-gyeong miss, miss, and miss again today, I stopped the cups.
"Tang-hyung."
"Speak."
"What is your purpose in playing yabawi with me?"
"To reclaim the Blood Jade Tablet, of course."
"I see. So you are purely focused on the contest with me?"
"Isn't that obvious? That's why I'm staring with my eyes this wide."
"And yet somehow I feel like I'm sparring a fist artist with both arms tied behind his back."
Tang Do-gyeong's face twisted. Half bewilderment, half rising anger.
"If you want to win at yabawi, you have to break the yabawi technique itself. Why are you only thinking of chasing the dice with your eyes?"
"…!"
"I am not Great Hero Tang's eye-technique training assistant. If you truly want the Blood Jade Tablet back, look at the hands—not the dice."
Tang Do-gyeong did not answer. I simply moved my hands. Until the agreed-upon hour had passed, not a word passed between us.
We only pointed at cups in silence, shuffled again, and when the time was up, stood.
What choice Tang Do-gyeong would make was something I would only know tomorrow.
"Great Hero Tang! I am Jeong Sam of the Half-Moon Blade! Welcome to the Sichuan nangin!"
"Hahaha—aren't a nangin's true names supposed to be secret? I'm still in the middle of a trial, so please hold back."
"You're already halfway a Sichuan nangin, aren't you? Whatever else, we ought to at least tell you our names!"
That bootlicking bastard Jeong Sam—I'd thought he had the face of a sycophant from the first day I met him seven years ago, and sure enough he was causing trouble. The Wanderer Inn had barely been clinging to its anonymity; the moment Jeong Sam spilled a name, the dam burst.
Whether they were Comrade Faction or Treasure Faction, both groups ultimately looked on Tang Do-gyeong with favorable eyes. Even the Treasure Faction would want to give him their names just the same.
Once the flow broke open, nangin who already liked Tang Do-gyeong scrambled over each other to reveal their names. In the end the Comrade Faction boys—by the nature of their position and the urgency of their feelings—were the ones who had no choice but to cause the first incident.
Once the rough introductions were winding down and the two factions were eyeing each other warily, I raised a hand and signaled two people.
"Ohohohoho!"
"Hothothot!"
When the two of them laughed, every gaze was briefly pulled their way.
Black Cat. Overflowing with charm even while running Shadow Image Qi Gong. Yu Sa-yeon. Just the innkeeper. Her age was the kind that could make her extremely angry if mentioned, but she took care of herself well enough—she wouldn't be treated as plain wherever she went.
Not that the nangin of the Wanderer Inn were ever going to harbor romantic feelings for Yu Sa-yeon, of course.
At any rate, the two of them laughing in an inn thick with the reek of lonely bachelors had a purifying effect on the whole picture.
"So then—what kind of man is your ideal type?"
Ears perked up.
Black Cat's ideal type? Any nangin of the Wanderer Inn would have no choice but to listen closely.
"Hmm, well. For starters, I can't stand men who cause trouble without a plan. Watching someone charge in as if pure enthusiasm alone will solve every problem just drains every last drop of affection I have. How am I supposed to trust someone like that and take his hand?"
"Hmm. Being passionate isn't so bad, is it?"
"That's different from passion. Even if there's a fire inside you, you have to know how to hold it in your chest and endure. What's attractive about a man who only talks a good game and then does whatever he feels like? Putting someone in a difficult position and then expecting them to like you—does that even make sense?"
"That's fair. Boldness and recklessness are completely different. It's hard to feel anything for someone who just throws himself into a hopeless cause with nothing but passion."
"Exactly, exactly. Even for a martial artist, people who just draw their weapons and say 'let's fight first' are kind of a turn-off."
For now, we opened with a very light check.