Enlightenment Sleight of Hand -2
“Brother, I’m counting on you again today.”
An entire day had slipped away while I fretted, and in the end I faced Tang Do-gyeong across the yabawi table with eyes that had never closed.
All night long I had turned over one hypothesis after another for why yesterday’s enlightenment had failed to take root.
The first premise I had to lock down was that enlightenment itself never changed.
In more than ten years of playing Murim Cheonha, there had never once been a moment when an enlightenment failed to land. Once I started memorizing the useful characters’ enlightenments through the enlightenment quizzes, I had poured them straight into every recruitable companion the moment they joined. Not a single character’s enlightenment had ever shifted.
My first hypothesis, then, was that this real-world version of Murim Cheonha contained some alteration.
I chewed on that possibility for a long while; it had a certain persuasive weight. In the end I still had to shake my head.
For two full years I had done everything humanly possible to break past second-rate. I swallowed spirit medicines, engineered every cheap trick that might force a qi-surge phenomenon… every feasible idea I could imagine, I threw at this reality in the desperate hope of punching a hole through it. I never even glimpsed that hope.
If the living Murim Cheonha had changed, I would have felt the difference somewhere in those two years. The whole reason I had wasted two years on futile schemes was the firm conviction that now that it was real, something must have shifted, and I could exploit the crack.
Two years of risking my neck had proven the opposite. The laws of this Murim were so solid that even a ten-year veteran like Ho Cheon-an, throwing every ounce of his knowledge into finding a loophole, still failed. The notion that enlightenment itself could suddenly change was pure nonsense.
So why? Why had Tang Do-gyeong looked at yesterday’s phrase and gained nothing?
Maybe it was because it was only writing.
The second hypothesis: the delivery method yesterday had been wrong.
Handing over enlightenment through chat was, after all, a hidden piece.
The principles of martial study—true martial truth—could not be grasped merely by reading a sentence. If simply reading a line were enough to absorb martial truth, the greatest masters in this Murim would all be the librarians of the Martial Alliance’s archives or the keepers of Shaolin’s scripture vault.
Reading and understanding were different words.
Think of it like a mathematical theorem. Does reading a theorem mean you can solve the problems? Not a chance. You can mouth the letters and still have zero grasp of what they mean. Only after working problems and applying the formulas do you eventually understand the theory.
Martial truth worked the same way.
Anyone who understood a martial principle the instant they heard it already possessed the foundation needed to grasp it. All the pieces had simply happened to be in place, so comprehension arrived the moment the words did.
Could the definition of “enlightenment delivered by chat input” really be that every character automatically acquired the corresponding martial principle the moment it was typed?
In the game, chat was the equivalent of real-world speech.
So did that mean I had to speak the words aloud for Tang Do-gyeong to awaken?
“Hey, Brother, you look exhausted… Maybe we should skip today’s yabawi?”
“No. No, we shouldn’t.”
Yabawi was something I could take or leave—until yesterday, at least.
The hypothesis that enlightenment only worked when spoken aloud was the strongest contender, yet it was still only a guess. The act of “delivering enlightenment through writing” was something the game interface of Murim Cheonha never supported in the first place.
No matter how free-form a god-tier game it was, it could never implement every action possible in reality. Why would a character inside the game ever need to compose a sentence by hand? The interface simply handed you dialogue choices.
So I built a third hypothesis as well.
If there was nothing wrong with the enlightenment itself, then the problem had to lie with him.
Right now Tang Do-gyeong might be in a state where he simply could not take anything in—drifting, half-listening. When someone is fixated on one thing, or so overwhelmed they cannot focus on anything else, they can sit right next to a person shouting and still not hear a word. Words that pass through a wandering mind never become information stored in the brain.
He might look fine on the outside while his inner turmoil was so fierce that he could not accept new information at all. The environment around him was more than capable of putting him in that state.
This yabawi table was the perfect chance to test it.
If Tang Do-gyeong was not in his right mind, I would know at once.
“Here.”
The cup Tang Do-gyeong pointed to held the die.
“Oh? Finally a win for you?”
His eyes flickered. A thin thread of anger mixed into the way he looked at me, but I only smiled shamelessly.
“Brother, didn’t we agree to give it our all against each other?”
“Of course I did. That’s why you got it right, isn’t it?”
“This wasn’t my skill.”
“Luck is part of gambling too.”
“You know perfectly well that isn’t what I’m saying!”
“Brother Tang. How many rounds of yabawi do you think we’ve played by now? Hundreds at the very least, right? In a game where you pick one cup out of four, why have you never won a single round until today?”
Obviously because he had concentrated to the bitter end and still been fooled by me every time. If he had simply been guessing at random, and if I had not been running a genuine scam with empty cups, this streak of total defeat would have been impossible.
“That’s…”
“Because on the gambling table you focused on my hand movements instead of the principles of the game itself. In a gamble where winning one out of four is normal, the fact that you’ve finally reached a twenty-five percent win rate means you’ve taken a step forward as a gambler.”
His eyes shook again—this time because I was holding out the Blood Jade Plaque.
“This wasn’t a fair contest…”
“Is that for you to decide?”
My rebuke shut his mouth.
“Aren’t we gambling right now? On the first day I went easy on you more than a few times. Every single time you noticed like a ghost, got angry, and refused to pick a cup. So the next day, and the day after that, I stopped going easy and competed with everything I had. Today is no different.”
“I didn’t cut you a single ounce of slack. The fact that you still won today means you settled the match with luck rather than skill. Is a match left to luck not a match? You chose the cup yourself and you won—how can you claim it’s void?”
Tang Do-gyeong had not been focused on the contest. He had not fallen for some masterful deception of mine and picked an empty cup; he had simply lost track halfway through, had no idea which cup held the die, and stabbed at random until he got lucky.
Proof that his mind was elsewhere.
So I decided to apply a little shock therapy—hand him the Blood Jade Plaque so he could recognize his own state and recover.
Tang Do-gyeong hesitated, then wordlessly took the plaque back and set it on the table again.
“Now that I think about it… Brother, you went easy on me once, so how about we play for real from now on?”
I considered for a moment. Which choice would bring Tang Do-gyeong back to normal? Gambling carried a surprising amount of stress. The larger the stakes, the sharper the thrill—and the heavier the pressure.
“Fine. How about this, then? The Blood Jade Plaque and one hundred taels of gold. We put them up, and whenever you want, we play the final match. Winner takes all. I feel a little embarrassed going all-out against a beginner gambler anyway, and you’ll need time to grow.”
“Haha. You yourself said the odds were one in four, and now you’re proposing a bet like this?”
“A yabawi man never does anything that loses him money—that’s the iron rule. Care to take me up on it?”
“Of course.”
“Then let’s start practicing.”
An hour of practice passed.
Tang Do-gyeong beat me several times.
It looked like I was going to need a more drastic measure.
The inference that the Sichuan nangin Ho Cheon-an was somehow linked to Gijinibo Ho Cheon-an was what had turned Black Cat into a Sichuan nangin herself.
That single fact was already thrilling enough. Yet the moment she dug even a little deeper, the whole matter became as vague and slippery as the word “enlightenment” itself.
Being able to give enlightenment to someone else? Just hearing the claim was enough to make anyone’s mouth water. Applied to reality, however, it became an entirely different story.
Martial artists set their expectations for enlightenment impossibly high. A single flash of insight that raised one’s realm, perfected a technique, or granted an entirely new martial principle… yet such enlightenments were vanishingly rare in the world.
It isn’t as if enlightenments come neatly ranked—special-grade, first-grade, and so on.
Even something trivial—a sudden flash of insight about how to turn the wrist while walking down the street—still counted as enlightenment.
People might modestly call the grasping of such a minor martial principle “acquiring a martial truth,” yet others would still say, “Oh, you’ve gained enlightenment and advanced your martial arts! Congratulations!”
The truck-hit Ho Cheon-an might separate the concepts of “enlightenment” and “martial principle,” but the people of this Murim did not. Martial principle was enlightenment, and enlightenment was martial principle.
If he could hand out even minor enlightenments, how was that any different from being a master? When a master taught martial arts, the disciple naturally came to grasp martial principles as well.
That very ambiguity was what had pricked Black Cat’s curiosity enough to make her play the part of a nangin—going so far as to become the greatest Sichuan nangin—just so she could stick close to Ho Cheon-an. If he truly could transmit enlightenment, he might at least spare one for his direct junior.
I wondered for a while whether he’d given one to that Kang Jun of the Taegyeong Sect…
She had thought that any small enlightenments he might have slipped out so far had simply been too minor to notice. Investigating the Taegyeong Sect proved otherwise. Kang Jun had received every scrap of support the sect could offer thanks to his sudden fame, yet he had achieved nothing.
Until now I just watched because it was entertaining.
Day after day of dynamic life as a Sichuan nangin had been thoroughly enjoyable even for Black Cat. To her, Ho Cheon-an was a ball of yarn that revealed a new face every time it rolled.
She already knew from her information network that he frequented gambling dens, and that he always ended up broke. She had simply assumed he made frequent technical mistakes or had poor judgment and lost big, so she had not paid much attention.
I figured he’d scored a big haul at Yeongsang-ru, then tried to run from the fame and failed.
That was how Black Cat had interpreted the uproar at Yeongsang-ru when she first heard of it. A huge scene had broken out, so of course he would try to cash out with one last gambling score and disappear. He had failed and gotten stuck at the Wanderer Inn—or so she thought.
A gambler who had tried for one big score, lost his luck, and been defeated. That was all she had believed… until she saw his actual skill with her own eyes.
The gambling ability Black Cat witnessed firsthand was not the sort that could lose money on a gambling table.
Even during the sleight-of-hand performance, standing closest behind him, she had been unable to properly catch the techniques he used. At the yabawi table she had been cleanly, thoroughly deceived.
And after that? Even when Tang Do-gyeong poured every drop of his eye power until the blood vessels in his eyes burst, Ho Cheon-an had toyed with him for a full hour.
A gambler who could snatch the nose off a Super-Peak expert’s face while the man was watching with open eyes… losing money on a gambling table? He had to be throwing the matches on purpose.
But why?
Always throwing money away made a certain sense. Plenty of people preferred to remain hidden experts rather than reveal themselves. But that match at Yeongsang-ru? The match that had turned Dogwi into a gambling legend—why had he deliberately lost that one? Hadn’t it been the match meant to raise his escape funds?
Why stage such a grand board only to hand over the victory? After witnessing Ho Cheon-an’s true gambling skill, Black Cat could not stand the unanswered question and dug deeper. She investigated so thoroughly she even learned the color of the underclothes worn by every spectator who had been present that day.
In the end… he saved Dogwi, didn’t he?
There had been countless clues that would have let Ho Cheon-an know the fate awaiting a defeated Dogwi. Ho Cheon-an, who had entered and left gambling dens countless times, had met assassins at the door; he had seen Dogwi already wearing the complexion of a dead man; he would have noticed the murderous gaze of the Yeongsang-ru master.
Above all, the way the match had ended was far too irrational—and far too dramatic.
His heart had softened, and he had spared Dogwi.
Black Cat could reach no other conclusion.
Literature Day, was it…
Black Cat looked at the phrase Ho Cheon-an had written. Was that the enlightenment meant for Tang Do-gyeong? When he heard that Tang Do-gyeong had read every single line, his face had looked as if the sky had fallen; he had groaned and fretted the entire day…
And then, for some reason, he had suddenly launched into a sleight-of-hand performance.
“All right, and now the flute goes—tak!”
“What?”
“Why the flute again?!”
It was Ho Cheon-an’s tearful effort to somehow relieve Tang Do-gyeong’s stress.
“Jeong Sam, I’ll give you a special chance! The rest of you—even if you see it, keep quiet! Watch carefully! Which hand is the die in, or is it in neither?”
Ho Cheon-an slipped his hands into his sleeves and separated them with a cunning motion.
“This one.”
“Wrong. Try again.”
Another cunning separation, and Jeong Sam missed once more.
“This time watch for real, for real!”
He made exaggerated hand flourishes and, in that instant, tossed the die behind Jeong Sam. Black Cat, the silent magic assistant, quietly caught it.
“This one!”
“Haha, wrong again. Look closely.”
Ho Cheon-an opened both empty hands. Naturally there was no die.
“No waaay?!”
While Jeong Sam leapt in shock, the other nangin struggled to hold back their laughter. Ho Cheon-an glanced at Tang Do-gyeong, who was smiling faintly, felt a private wave of relief, then glared at Jeong Sam, who was obsessively rummaging through his sleeves.
“Hey now! Fine—I’ll roll them up completely.”
“Th-this can’t be…”
Ho Cheon-an shoved his sleeves all the way to his shoulders, baring his forearms, and murmured in a sinister voice,
“Actually, because you refused to believe in magic, I stuffed the earlier die into your earhole. Hey! Don’t touch your ear—you’ll hurt yourself!”
“H-how could a die fit into a person’s ear without them knowing?!”
“Honestly. This man won’t believe it until I pull it out. Don’t move—something might go wrong while I’m extracting it.”
While Jeong Sam froze in astonishment, Ho Cheon-an’s hand slipped behind the ear, and Black Cat quietly pressed the die into his palm.
“Ta-da! See? The die came out of your ear.”
“H-how is this possible?! There was nowhere to hide it, yet it really came out of my ear!”
“Puhahahaha!!!”
“Wahahahaha!!”
Jeong Sam’s eyes bulged as if they would pop from their sockets as he jumped; the nangin could no longer hold back and exploded into laughter. Tang Do-gyeong was no exception—he slapped his knee and laughed along.
After a good round of laughing, shouting, and enjoying yourself, most worries tend to melt away.
Ho Cheon-an, who had staged the entire magic show to erase Tang Do-gyeong’s anxieties, let out a quiet sigh of relief. Humans were simple creatures; even if the root cause remained, once the present emotion settled, the mind tended to empty itself as well.
Finish the show, eat a delicious lunch, then gently steer him back to looking at the phrase again.
Just as he was thinking that and preparing to wrap up the performance—
“Brother!”
Someone from the Tang family burst into the Wanderer Inn.
