The Gearwheel of the Martial World
The morning at Mugung Hyeoptak began with a brutally unsentimental reality.
That was, if it wasn’t Mugung Hyeoptak. For Yeonhwa, at least, it always was.
She woke before dawn to the jarring chime of her jade pendant, dragged herself out of bed, opened the doors, sorted the flood of order slips, adjusted the flames in the hearth, scrubbed grease-blackened plates clean...
In other words, it meant the suffering was about to begin.
Yeonhwa learned what kind of world the jianghu was not by laughing and clinking cups with other people while they crossed blades in life-or-death duels, but by feeling it in the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet.
She learned which roads people came down, which towns had been torn open and which were still screaming by the color of the dirt stuck to their boots—yellow earth or black soil—and she learned what dishes needed to go out next by the same method.
Or rather, she couldn’t learn it any other way, so she worked with her hands and ran with her feet. That kind of thing was only possible once you’d become a master yourself.
The jianghu was not, as people liked to say, a single unified nation. No, the imperial court beneath the Son of Heaven did hold the Central Plains together.
But because no army or bureaucracy could reach every corner, the overlapping worlds of the martial world had fractured into many different factions and powers.
Although a massive organization known as the Jeongsa Headquarters Bureau had taken the place of the vanished Martial Alliance and held the center together, the jianghu was still divided into the Demonic Cult, the Orthodox and Unorthodox factions, the Blood Cult—the simple rabble of outright villains—along with border sects and smaller groups that chased only practical gain. Unlike the notion of one unified Central Plains, they each carved up their own piece of land and split the martial world among themselves.
Across the southern seas, maritime merchant caravans crossed the waves to bring in Western spices and pungent geon-rak, while through the western desert trade routes came sun-dried meat and strong wine.
In the north, with the snowy plains, the remnants of icy blood pits were traded as rare medicinal ingredients, and from the poisonous swamps of Yunnan in the south came strange herbs even the Jeongsa Headquarters Bureau couldn’t touch.
All of it flowed in its own way, passing through its own power structures on the way to the Son of Heaven—though sometimes it passed through so many hands that the treasonous thugs who were supposed to deliver a share to the emperor ended up with too little, or nothing at all. That was how imperial territory inviolate was maintained.
Hyeol-mun and Yeon-ok were not the property of any sect or the territory of any clan.
Unlike Yeon-ok, which occupied a fixed place, Hyeol-mun opened without warning, like a cleaving strike from a wandering immortal split through empty air.
It might appear at the edge of a sheer cliff, or in the basement beneath a warehouse in the middle of a market street. When a Hyeol-mun or a Yeon-ok opened, the Jeongsa Headquarters Bureau scattered official orders like leaves in the wind.
“Conquer it. And claim your reward.”
Those who threw themselves into that hellfire were sects like the Cheongryu Sect, chasing honor, or groups like the Jeokmyeong Society, chasing silver.
Or lone swordsmen like Cheol-ya, who belonged to no one and walked only his own path.
And Mugung Hyeoptak stood right there in the middle, in that borderland where all those interests tangled together.
When Hyeol-mun and Yeon-ok opened, things beyond the common sense of the Central Plains poured out from within them.
Curses did, and monsters too, but especially the things that burst free when they were finally conquered.
Ore that rang with a metallic hum. Cold that would never melt. Bones and hides from nameless beasts. Merchants quickly turned those things into medicine, weapons, or luxurious ornaments for the wealthy.
Those disasters called Hyeol-mun and Yeon-ok became trade routes, and fear became industry. In other words, conquest was no longer destruction so much as facility management. Learning how to live alongside disaster—that was the jianghu’s way of surviving now.
“Yeonhwa, don’t just stand there staring off into space. Knead more dough. I heard the merchant caravans made a group reservation for today.”
Her master’s voice shook the kitchen. He was the core that kept Mugung Hyeoptak neutral. Without him, the place would be dragged into a brawl and destroyed within days.
The secret to staying out of the crosshairs of both the sects and the Jeongsa Headquarters Bureau was simple.
Just be outrageously strong. No one knew exactly how high Master Jangro’s cultivation truly was, because no one had ever said. All Yeonhwa had seen was him kicking out someone who’d tried to throw a fit in Hwa-gyeong. He’d flicked away a ganghwan with a fan.
In this world where warriors and calamities ran rampant, one certainty kept settling deeper and deeper inside Yeonhwa.
This was the safest place in the world.
From midday on, strange customers kept pouring in. Magnates from the East Sea merchant caravans, Paeng Jung-chan—the regular who seemed somehow more familiar than he had been in ages—and Do Hajin, the youngest of the Jeokmyeong Society. And Baek-yeon, who couldn’t eat spicy food.
Do Hajin had come alone today. The boy’s face, usually tucked in among his martial brothers, looked strangely gaunt. Or maybe it always had.
“I just... was really, really hungry today.”
At his words, Yeonhwa silently filled a bowl with a generous serving of seafood risotto and set it before him. The aroma of seafood, stir-fried by his master with a touch of inner energy, rose in fragrant steam. Hajin took one spoonful and froze.
“Inside the Yeon-ok... I couldn’t smell anything. There was no pain, but I didn’t feel alive either.”
“And now?”
Hajin carefully chewed and swallowed the piping hot risotto.
“...I’m not sure. But it’s so hot it feels like my tongue’s burning.”
That was enough. Even if the senses didn’t come back exactly the way they had before, one fierce, burning proof that you were alive could make a person walk again.
“Miss Yeonhwa. Is it supposed to be this spicy?”
Only, some people did get burned by that heat.
“I made it less spicy than usual.”
“Hiss... Fire is hard to control. It always overflows, after all. Mastering the fire within oneself is also part of a Daoist’s practice, you know.”
“Would you like some milk, then?”
“Bring it quickly.”
“Yeonhwa! Go take care of the customers!”
By evening, as the inn’s doors opened yet again, Yu Cheong-ran of the Cheongryu Sect and Kang Jeok-u of the Jeokmyeong Society stepped inside at the same time.
If it had been before, Yeonhwa would have been unable to breathe under the taut tension between those two factions. But not anymore. They had conquered the same Hyeol-mun, crossed the same line of death, and now sat at the same table in Mugung Hyeoptak, waiting for their food.
Yu Cheong-ran cast a sidelong glance at the ledger Yeonhwa was wiping clean.
“You’ve been busier than usual lately. The order slips never stop.”
“There have been more Hyeol-mun openings. When disasters increase, an inn like ours enjoys a boom.”
Of course, not that she wanted that bloody kind of boom...
At Yeonhwa’s words, Kang Jeok-u drained his cup and said, “When Hyeol-mun multiply, the inner power of people in the jianghu grows as well. If you struggle to survive, your realm rises all on its own.”
But Seohan-muk, seated beside him, shook his head.
“No. They aren’t getting stronger. They’re just getting more exhausted. What meaning is there in growing stronger only because you can’t die?”
Both were right. Calamity tempered human beings, but at the same time it shaved away at the soul, layer by layer.
And yet the martial world needed that very calamity to survive. What kind of place was that? If it endured by sacrificing souls, how was it any different from the filthy scum of the Blood Cult?
Were the things it gained from the places spared by disaster truly worth a soul?
“Yeonhwa! Come handle the fire!”
“I’m coming!”
Another official notice arrived from the Jeongsa Headquarters Bureau.
The aftermath of Hyeonum Cheollyeon had begun to subside, but reports had come in that the sky over the northwestern border had been warping every night.
They said light split apart as though sliced by a blade, and unknown shadows spilled through the gap.
Faced with this bizarre phenomenon, whose status as a conquest target was still unclear, the Cheongryu Sect weighed questions of justification while the Jeokmyeong Society tried to estimate how high the reward would be. Cheol-ya, meanwhile, simply sat in a corner, emptying a cup of cooled rice wine in silence.
“Kheh, geon-rak, geom...”
Whoosh! Crash!
“Gah!”
Cheol-ya hurled his cup at Kang Jeok-u, who had been muttering something under his breath.
Half-asleep, Yeonhwa suddenly thought to herself:
Again. And again. And again, a new Hyeol-mun appears, and Yeon-ok opens its eyes once more.
This world, completely unlike the martial novels she had known in modern times, still turned on human power. It answered to those who were called, calculated those calls, and met them head-on.
This vast world was a gearwheel, turning on the interlocking teeth of the Jeongsa Headquarters Bureau, the great sects, the merchant caravans, the inns, and countless lesser sects whose names no one remembered.
Everyone hated Hyeol-mun and Yeon-ok, and yet at the same time they lived by depending on the relics and power those disasters produced.
Even Mugung Hyeoptak was no exception. If Hyeol-mun disappeared, the footsteps of those martial artists who came to Mugung Hyeoptak would also thin out, at least to some extent.
That didn’t mean she wanted to become the shameless kind of person who hoped for more disasters. She didn’t want to survive by feeding only on calamity like some grave robber for the dead, either.
Her heart wanted only one thing. To fill those people’s bellies before they crawled into those hellish cracks, and to let them feel warmth waiting for them when they came back.
Maybe even now, at this very moment, a new fissure was opening somewhere deep in the woods, or inside a crack in the rock of the northern snow mountains.
But Mugung Hyeoptak had no direct hand in any of that. Its duty was not to divine tomorrow’s fate, but to prepare the dough that would be needed tomorrow. Someone had to be there waiting.
No matter how much wider the world became, no matter what name the calamities took next, none of that mattered.
In the end, people had to come back.
Whether they had gone to the very threshold of death or spent their whole lives chasing money, they needed a place to return to, sit down, chew their food, and catch their breath for a moment.
On the vast map of the jianghu, Mugung Hyeoptak would amount to nothing more than a tiny dot. But when such dots gathered, they became a line, and when those lines connected, they became the road by which someone could come back alive.
Mugung Hyeoptak was the lantern guarding that road, and the central gearwheel that set them all in motion.