Servant: Jongchil, Part Two
The world of Supreme Sword Heavenly Immortal is a traditional wuxia setting dressed up with a handful of the author's own original flourishes. The most distinctive of these is the historical backdrop: a bygone China known as the Xuan Kingdom.
The Xuan Kingdom is a fictional nation that never existed in real history. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist in that other world either. The entire temporal and spatial stage of Supreme Sword Heavenly Immortal is this Xuan Kingdom, and it encompasses the whole of China's vast territory.
At present, the martial world sits in a three-way equilibrium among the Orthodox faction, the Unorthodox faction, and the Demon Cult. The Orthodox faction refers to the countless sects operating across the Central Plains, spearheaded by the famous Nine Great Sects and Five Great Clans.
They slap the character for "righteous" onto their own names and call themselves just, but looking at how they actually behave in the novel, there's nothing particularly righteous about them. Among readers, they're more notorious for their hypocrisy than their justice.
The Unorthodox faction also operates in the Central Plains, but they walk an entirely different path. With the character for "evil" sitting right there in their name, they're as treacherous and twisted as advertised. If the Orthodox are hypocrites, these people are just garbage, plain and simple.
The number of genuinely honorable, upstanding sects that appear in Supreme Sword Heavenly Immortal can be counted on one hand. Orthodox or Unorthodox, they're all the same trash. The Fairy Gate, where I currently belong, is at least relatively decent.
The Demon Cult refers to a massive sect operating not in the Central Plains but in the Xinjiang region. The "cult" in their name gives them a strongly religious flavor, but they are a martial sect through and through. Based in the enormous Hundred Thousand Great Mountains of Xinjiang, they occupy the villain's role, constantly licking their chops at the fertile Central Plains. That's pretty much the same setup you see in most wuxia novels.
Any power outside these three is called an Outer Faction. Representative examples include the Potala Palace of Tibet, the Thunder Sound Temple of Tianzhu, and the Poison Palace of the Southern Sea Islands. They don't get much of a spotlight in the novel, but they exist.
The place I currently occupy is Fairy Gate, a member of the Orthodox faction located in the Hubei region. As the name suggests, Fairy Gate is a small sect composed entirely of women.
Of course, "women" here applies only to the martial artists. For grunt laborers like me, gender is irrelevant. The work involves a lot of heavy lifting, so there are more men than women among the servants to begin with.
Fairy Gate is a fairly prominent sect in the original work. That makes sense, given that one of the heroines — Mo Seyeong, the Black Sandalwood Thorn Flower — hails from here. The protagonist Gong Woosun stops by around the middle of the story.
Starting point is Fairy Gate, huh. Not bad, except for how hard it is to snag a fortuitous encounter.
I am Jongchil, a servant of Fairy Gate. My job is chopping firewood, cleaning the training grounds, and heating bathwater. For the record, this Jongchil guy doesn't appear in the original work.
From this, I learned that I can transmigrate into characters who aren't even mentioned in the novel. Also, just like in Solari World, I have to set a checkpoint in this world before I can return to reality.
The condition for setting a checkpoint in Solari World was buying a house. Whether that same method works here, I have no idea. If it does, I could set a checkpoint right now — my inventory is stuffed with gold coins, after all. Gold has been recognized as a precious metal of value across all times and places, East and West.
I still wasn't certain about the checkpoint conditions, so I didn't make any rash moves. In a wuxia novel, a nobody walking around with a fortune is as good as dead nine times out of ten. This is a world where fists are about ten thousand times closer than the law.
Living as Jongchil, I learned this guy's daily routine. Life as a sect servant wasn't anything special. I woke at the Chen hour — seven to nine in the morning — and prepared the bathwater.
The beauties of Fairy Gate enjoyed bathing morning and evening, so preparing bathwater was important work. Two other servants besides me were assigned to it.
Once the bathwater was ready, I headed to the training grounds for a quick cleanup. Then I'd either go to the marketplace for supplies or chop firewood. I'd pass the time that way until afternoon, prepare the evening bathwater, and finally clean the training grounds after the sect members had used them. That was the end of the workday.
It wasn't particularly difficult. Most of it was physical labor, and the intensity was fairly demanding, but my current Strength is 84. That's far stronger than an ordinary adult, so menial chores didn't tire me out. I spent a few days doing odd jobs, getting a feel for the atmosphere at Fairy Gate, and, while I was at it, I made myself a little fuck-buddy.
"Slurp. Slurp. Slurp. Slurp."
A girl with neatly braided hair was sucking my cock with gusto. Her skill and technique were pretty clumsy, but there was a youthful freshness to it that I enjoyed. I placed a hand on her head and gave it a few pats.
"I'm cumming. Swallow it."
At my order, she drank down the load I shot in one go. Swallowing cum isn't as easy as people think, but she'd taken mine well from the very beginning. After gulping it down, she opened her mouth to prove it was gone, then smiled at me, bright and cheerful.
"Want to do it with my pussy now?"
Her name was Soso. A Fairy Gate servant with a dime-a-dozen name. Her job was attending to the disciples — helping them change clothes, cleaning their rooms, that sort of personal service.
"Nah. I'm good. I should head out soon."
I pulled her off me. Soso looked at my cock with a disappointed expression. It hadn't even been three days since I'd first fucked her, and she was already addicted to my dick. Then again, once you've had a taste of my cock, you'd be hooked in a day, never mind three.
Soso's face was plain and unremarkable, but her tits and ass were quite something. "Quite something" by ordinary standards, of course — they didn't hold a candle to my actual girlfriends. She was the kind of woman you fuck the way you'd snack on junk food.
The way she wiggled her ass like a dog wagging its tail every time we had sex was a pleasant sight. A dog that wags its tail at you looks cute even if it's ugly — that's just how it is.
I gave Soso's ass a satisfying smack, pulled on my pants, and left the room. My tiny room — which looked like a converted storage shed — had become Soso's and my private little motel these past few days. If word got out that two servants had a thing going, nothing good would come of it, so we had to keep our encounters out of sight, and my room was the perfect place for it.
Normally, male servants lived with male servants and female servants with female servants. I, however, had been given a converted storage room as private quarters due to a shortage of space in the dormitory. "Private quarters" was generous — it was only a slight step up from a coffin hotel — but having a room to myself was a definite advantage.
I got dressed and went outside. The hour had just slipped past Wei — one to three in the afternoon. Time to go fetch firewood.
I went to the tool shed, grabbed a felling axe and a saw, and headed to the front gate of the sect. The other servants were already gathered. Firewood gathering was usually a job for three or four people. Today it was me, a short and stocky servant, and a big, burly one — the three of us heading out to chop trees.
"You're late. What were you doing?"
The big one with a heavy dusting of freckles asked it offhandedly. I couldn't remember his name, but he seemed to have a thing for Soso. The words I was just fucking Soso nearly slipped out of my throat. No point stirring up trouble for nothing.
"Just a bit of this and that."
"We're going in pretty deep today. The Head Disciple told us to bring back Black Iron Wood. Looks like we're in for a long, hard day."
"Head Disciple" meant Mo Seyeong, the Black Sandalwood Thorn Flower. She was the highest-ranking disciple at Fairy Gate, which meant she was the next Sect Master. With the Sect Master currently away, Mo Seyeong was the one running the show. She was only seventeen, at that.
"Black Iron Wood? Can we even put a scratch in that with these dull axes? Besides, Black Iron Wood only grows in the deep mountains where people never go. Is Lady Seyeong trying to get us killed?"
"Hey! How many times have I told you to watch your mouth? The Head Disciple hates it when people throw her name around casually. She's a martial artist of the highest caliber — she might be listening in on us from somewhere right now."
We gathered our tools and headed into the mountains. And these weren't just any mountains — this was the famous Mount Wudang. Home of the Wudang Sect, a pillar of the Orthodox faction, one of the Nine Great Sects, and the eternal house of the sword. A mountain that stars in countless wuxia novels, draped in every glittering epithet the genre can muster.
Of course, Mount Wudang is an enormous, sprawling range, and the Wudang Sect occupies only a fraction of it. The area where we chopped wood was absurdly far from their territory. Even if we got hopelessly lost, there was no chance of stumbling into Wudang Sect grounds.
"Hey. Speaking of which, how's it going with Soso these days? Making any progress?"
The short one asked, and the big one answered.
"Of course. Soso's been acting different lately. I think her sensitive side is finally bursting out. All that effort I've been putting in is finally paying off, I'm sure of it."
"When are you going to confess?"
"Soso's birthday is in a week. I'll do it then. I already got her a present — a hair ornament she likes. She mentioned wanting one in passing at the market a while back. It's made of jade, so it was pretty expensive. Cleaned out my savings."
"You bastard. So that's why you stopped going to the taverns. You were saving up."
Their conversation drifted over from the side — a tale of pitiful, doomed love. Walking in silence was boring, so I chimed in now and then.
"Soso is… something else. Especially her mouth."
"Huh? Yeah. Soso's lips are as red as ripe adzuki beans. When I first saw her, I thought she must be eating mice every night."
"What? Jongchil. You after Soso too?"
"This asshole's getting cocky. I already called dibs on Soso. Not that a guy like you would get anything but shot down if you confessed anyway."
What a piece of shit.
If nobody were watching, an NPC like you would be getting a summary beheading. For the crime of pissing me off, I'm going to fuck Soso in the ass the second I get back.
While we traded this pointless banter, we arrived at the usual chopping spot. But that wasn't our destination today. We had to go deeper.
"What if we run into bandits?"
The stocky one spoke up. His gaze was fixed on the deep woods where the path ran out.
"Idiot. What lunatic would be playing bandit on Mount Wudang? Even if there were any, they'd already be dead."
"But this is far from Wudang Sect territory. You never know. They say the bigger and deeper the mountain, the more bandits there are, clinging to it like ticks on livestock."
"You've always worried too much. What we should be worrying about is whether we can even find Black Iron Wood."
We pushed deeper in. Finding Black Iron Wood, however, proved difficult. We'd walked a full half-shichen — a whole hour — past our usual chopping grounds, and there wasn't a trace of the stuff. At this rate, I was starting to doubt whether Black Iron Wood even grew on Mount Wudang.
"How long have we been walking?"
"Dunno? At least a half-shichen, I'd say."
"I'm hungry… It's almost evening. Can we just go back?"
"If you've got the guts to weather the Head Disciple's wrath, I won't stop you."
At the big one's words, the stocky one hung his head. For the record, Mo Seyeong was infamous for her monstrous temper. Her face was the kind of beauty that could bring a nation to its knees, but her filthy personality made her an object of terror and avoidance among the servants. She was a study in contrast with Seol Hwa-rin, whose face and nature were both those of a fairy through and through.
"If the Head Disciple gets angry… I'd rather run into bandits."
"Let's look around a bit more first."
And so we decided to search the surrounding area a little longer.