For the Masters Who Hesitate
The south-central reaches of the Central Plains. Guangdong Province.
Guangdong — the gateway at the southern edge of the Central Plains, where the land opens its arms to the great ocean and foreign ways arrive before anywhere else in the world.
The deepest hour of dawn.
Ships laden with the dreams and desires of countless people were gliding in toward the piers.
Hmm. So — where is Eun Ae-hyang?
I had expected a fair crowd. I'd accounted for people when I chose the meeting spot, certainly; I just hadn't counted on this many. Don't any of them sleep?
Nothing for it, then. I bounced lightly on my toes a few times and hurled myself upward with everything I had.
By the time I'd risen high enough to make out the city walls spread out below, I could see one spot where the crowd had gathered unusually thick. Ah. There she is.
I covered the rest on steps tacked into empty air, and sure enough, there stood Eun Ae-hyang.
With more eyes fixed on her than I could count.
The men around her, young and old alike, kept sneaking glances her way even in the middle of conversations with their friends, their sweethearts, whoever they'd come with.
Not that I could blame a single one of them.
Raven-dark hair swept back without a single strand out of place, set against skin like polished white jade.
She wore the near-unadorned black robes of the Kongtong Sect, and somehow the austerity only threw her refinement into sharper relief.
Whoa, hold on. What am I doing, standing here admiring her like every other fool on this pier? I have no intention of ending up one of those wretches wasting away over lost love.
I shook my head briskly and started toward her.
Hm? Wait. Someone had beaten me to it.
The man standing before Eun Ae-hyang was a Westerner — golden-haired, sharp-nosed, built with an imposing frame that would have held its own against any warrior of the jianghu.
He had struck up a conversation with a warm, friendly smile, but Eun Ae-hyang stared straight ahead as though he did not exist.
Snubbed, the man flushed a blotchy red across his pale skin, then reached out without ceremony to seize her wrist.
Ah. That one is finished.
Eun Ae-hyang's expression did not change by a hair. She drew the sword at her hip and laid the tip of the blade beneath his jaw.
The Westerner flinched and stumbled backward — and something dropped to the ground at his feet with a soft thud.
It was the Westerner's hand.
He stared down at the severed thing wearing the blank face of a man who could not begin to process what had just happened to him. Then the color drained out of him entirely. All right. My turn.
The instant he drew breath to scream, I was in front of him, sealing his acupoints before a single drop could spill from the stump.
And while he stood there bewildered by my sudden entrance, I slipped around behind him and struck the back of his neck, laying him out cold.
Eun Ae-hyang slid her sword back into its sheath. "Quite the outpouring of mercy, for such a lowlife."
"It isn't mercy. A Westerner means complications."
A low murmur ran through the crowd at the sudden bloodshed, thickening into unease and fear. Before long, government soldiers shouldered through the press of bodies and ringed us in.
Fortunately, I had a stratagem of my own — worthy of those legendary silk pouches.
As the old story goes, the genius Kongming of the Zhuge clan once handed Zhao Zilong a set of brocade pouches, with instructions to open them the moment he found himself in dire straits.
I did not panic. I simply reached into my breast and produced the imperial pardon the Emperor had granted me.
One look at the jade seal stamped into the pardon, and the soldier gave a stiff nod, gathered up the unconscious Westerner, and melted away. Hard at work day and night, as ever. My sympathies.
That man is probably going to die.
If he made it home alive, he might blab about the jianghu, or hand someone a ready-made diplomatic incident.
Afterward, a bribe would no doubt find its way to the captain of the ship he'd sailed in on, and the whole affair would be quietly smoothed over.
So I don't have a Kongming of my own. But I do have an Emperor.
Yet no sooner had the Emperor crossed my mind than a different worry began to sprout.
"Haaah—."
"The Grand General will have words for us later."
Eun Ae-hyang had read my sigh down to its bones.
Grand General Cheonram handled official government business on top of a healthy share of the Wulin Alliance's administration. If this story reached him, he would nag us half to death. No doubt it would go something like this:
Lady Eun Ae-hyang, hear Our decree: Our subject Seong Hyun has passed his examination. As his reward, he shall sit at Our right hand — this seat, newly made Wulin Alliance Leader — and is granted leave to live on as Our wedded match.
Except the whole mess was your fault to begin with, wasn't it?
When I turned an expression of supreme incredulity on her, Eun Ae-hyang let out a couple of loud, pointed coughs.
Perhaps the sight of the Emperor's pardon had settled everyone — the murmur of the crowd no longer carried a trace of confusion. Yes. Behold the power of an Emperor.
"So. What's on the docket for today's match?"
In answer, I tipped my head down the boulevard in a come-along gesture.
We shook off the crowd, followed the great thoroughfare, and at last came to a stop before a certain establishment.
— after Daedalus, the genius craftsman of Greek legend, his name set down in the Chinese fashion —
"And this place is?"
Eun Ae-hyang's eyes demanded an explanation.
"A game that's become all the rage among the young people of the Central Plains of late."
At the word game I watched her sidelong, half braced for her to turn up her nose. Eun Ae-hyang only lifted her chin a fraction — go on.
"Long ago, in the western kingdom of Sira, there lived a craftsman named Daedalus. The king wanted a beast that was half man and half beast locked away where it could never escape, so Daedalus raised an enormous labyrinth for him. Taking inspiration from that tale, someone devised a game of escaping from inside a building."
"I see… And if one ever found oneself trapped in such a place, could one not simply destroy the building?"
Of course that would be her solution. The jianghu way of solving problems has never once met an obstacle it couldn't smash through.
But have no fear. Eun Ae-hyang would play. Because I would lead her there, every step of the way.
I opened my eyes very wide.
"Surely not……"
I let the words hang. Eun Ae-hyang sent me a look that ordered me to finish the sentence.
"The genius of the Kongtong Sect, the peerless Chunpung Seomchim — surely she isn't the sort of blockhead who'd fail to escape one little building and smash it to pieces out of sheer frustration?"
"Hmph. You think I can't see straight through a provocation that obvious?"
Eun Ae-hyang smiled — a thin, cold thing at the corner of her mouth.
Except her eyes weren't in on the joke. What is with that slitted glare?
Just as I was beginning to fear the gambit had failed, a man emerged from inside the building.
"Welcome, welcome!"
He greeted us and looked the two of us over in turn.
"From your attire, you'd be jianghu folk. Might you two be husband and wife?"
I shook my head to say no and raised a hand to elaborate. For one instant, the back of my skull gave a faint sting.
……Must be my imagination.
The man introduced himself as the owner of the establishment and asked whether we would be coming inside.
I turned to Eun Ae-hyang and asked with a glance: well? What will it be?
Eun Ae-hyang sighed, then stepped forward to face the owner.
"Tell me — do you have anything by which two people might settle a contest?"
The owner said of course they did, and she asked him to explain.
"Inside, you'll find a chamber with two doors. Enter through either one and you'll face a series of contrivances installed to bar your way. Dismantle them as you go and press onward — the first to reach the goal is the winner."
There, you see? A contest is a contest, whatever the arena.
I beamed at Eun Ae-hyang, brimming with triumph. She spared me a single sideways glance and opened her mouth.
"Why, you——"
"Well, if it isn't Cheongun Dojang and Chunpung Seomchim themselves!"
That voice.
I turned toward it and found a face I knew.
A gaunt face beneath hair tied back any which way.
A long scar down one cheek, a nose knocked slightly crooked, a scruffy, unkempt beard.
A tiger-skin vest slung loose and half-open, baring a chest patterned with lipstick marks.
It was Mu Yeong — the Green Forest King himself, gallant hero of the wilds.
He was chuckling to himself, a courtesan who was clearly his woman hanging on his arm. So those lipstick marks were hers, then.
I raised a hand. "What business brings you all the way out here, Brother?"
"Forget that the Nanling Mountains just past the city walls are where I make my home, did you?"
Oh. Right.
This was a world with as many mountains as the vast continent could hold — and a bandit gang camped on every last one of them.
The Green Forest was the fellowship all those bandits had formed, bound together under a single banner of chivalry. Outcasts by birth, they were men even an Emperor could not treat lightly.
And there was exactly one man whose chivalry held the power to command them all.
A man who bore the title of king not because any Emperor had granted it — but precisely because none ever had.
That was the Green Forest King.
Mu Yeong stole a glance at Eun Ae-hyang over my shoulder, then sidled up close and murmured into my ear.
"You two were stuck to each other like glue the whole time at Toemagwangmyeong — so did you finally become an item?"
That much was true.
Toemagwangmyeong — the elite academy the Wulin Alliance had established to forge rising prodigies for the Great Demon War.
No one could yet gauge the full strength of the Demonic Cult, and so the Alliance had gathered its young talents without distinction, Orthodox and Unorthodox alike.
The Green Forest was Unorthodox, and so it answered the Alliance's public call to raise its rising prodigies — and Mu Yeong had been among those who joined.
Before ever setting foot in Toemagwangmyeong, he had already climbed to the very summit of the Green Forest on the strength of his Samjeongchang spear alone, so he was on the older side among his classmates.
And yet, thanks to that easy charm of his, there wasn't a single one of them who disliked him.
The jianghu calls him a true hero in every sense of the word — and for once, the rumor mill has it exactly right.
"Hold on. You mean you're still not lovers?"
When I answered with a small shake of my head, Mu Yeong went quiet with surprise in his own way, his gaze darting back and forth between our faces.
He mulled something over for a moment — then grinned, wide, like a man who had just struck upon a brilliant idea, and made straight for the building's owner.
"I say, friend. Do you happen to run contests in there where folk pair up two by two?"
The owner, his face still cradling its smile, answered with perfect courtesy.
"But of course. Our one-on-one chambers can be run as team matches."
Mu Yeong flashed his grin and turned to Eun Ae-hyang.
"Eun Ae-hyang! What say you team up with Seong Hyun here and face me and my woman?"
What kind of nonsense is that? Then it wouldn't be our match at all.
Remembering the business with Jeok Seong, I fully expected Eun Ae-hyang to decline with a sigh.
But her reaction was nothing I had foreseen.
"……Very well. A match against you, Brother Mu Yeong? I gladly accept."
What. Wasn't it supposed to be just the two of us?
And what about Jeok Seong, the poor man whose face you've planted in the dirt twice already?
When I fixed her with an axe-blade glare, Eun Ae-hyang turned her head away, eyes closed.
Poor Jeok Seong.
Though — the smell. Pitiable, and pitiable because he reeks. Poor Jeok Seong.
……Keep this up and I might actually grow fond of the man. Best to think no more about it.
Mu Yeong, for his part, pumped his fist the moment her answer landed.
"Splendid! For this is my chivalry — to reach out a hand to the great masters who hesitate!"
Chivalry? What chivalry? Where, oh where, has the way of the jianghu gone?
His words made me want to grab him by the collar and ask what, exactly, he believed chivalry to mean.
But this man, who carried the Green Forest's unstoppable momentum in every inch of his body from crown to heel, had already hooked an arm around my neck and begun hauling me toward the building.
Inside and up the stairs, we found — just as advertised — a chamber with two doors.
Just as I was thinking what an enormous building this was—
"Well then, little brother, little sister — we'll be heading in first. Welcome to Guangdong!"
With that parting word, Mu Yeong opened the door that he and the courtesan seemed to have already chosen, and the two of them slipped inside.