Jianghu, Dungeon
From what Yeonhwa had heard from the customers, there were two kinds of hell in this fusion-murim Jianghu that no ordinary person should ever step into.
One was Hyeol-mun, and the other was Yeon-ok.
To Yeonhwa’s modern sensibilities, both of them were basically murim-style dungeons.
You cleared them, and rewards came spilling out; inside, a martial artist’s growth also accelerated. Maybe it was only because the conditions were so extreme, but still.
Hyeol-mun was a volatile space that vanished like a mirage the instant its core in the center was destroyed.
If you compared it to a game, it was a one-time dungeon, a single-use dungeon with no recycling.
Yeon-ok, on the other hand, spat out its rewards once you broke the core and cleared it, then disappeared and sealed itself for a while.
After some time passed, it would reopen in the same place and rage once more. You could call it a repeat dungeon with a respawn timer.
The problem was that these hells did not simply stay where they were.
While open, Hyeol-mun and Yeon-ok constantly spewed out whatever they contained—curse, miasma, anything at all—polluting the land around them.
No wonder the Justice Headquarters kept their eyes open and moved quickly to deal with these radioactive waste–looking dungeons.
***
Dawn was breaking over Mugung Hyeoptak.
As usual, Yeonhwa had been jolted awake by the skull-splitting sound of the jade pendant, and now she was stoking the furnace.
When the night of Jianghu tried to drag the day’s heat back up again, Yeonhwa personally turned the kitchen’s warmth up first.
A body immune to cold was invulnerable to winter’s bite, and as for heat immunity, well... how did that go again?
In any case, she wasn’t immune to fire, but she’d built up enough tolerance to warm herself by the flames.
Once the fire had settled in on its own, Yeonhwa stood and drew in a deep breath.
Haaah! The crisp, clean, radiant air of this past era that modern life could never, ever give me! The modern air I am absolutely not missing at all! Though, yeah, I do miss the conveniences. A lot.
***
“Yeonhwa, what will you make today?”
At Jangro Suksu’s question, Yeonhwa glanced down at the pasta sheets on the counter and answered.
“I’m going to make lasagna.”
Layers upon layers of pasta, with meat, Nam-man-si, and white Geon-rak tucked between them.
Layer, layer, and layer again. As she boiled the noodles, Yeonhwa thought about how everyone in this murim seemed to wear hard armor on the outside.
Cheol-ya was like that. Baek-yeon was like that. Everyone, really. And yet inside, just like this lasagna, they all seemed to carry soft, complicated stories in layer after layer.
They simply never went prying into one another’s depths without permission.
She crushed the Nam-man-si, sautéed the minced beef, and mixed in celery and onions. Steam rose from the boiling pot.
Clunk.
“Making something new again, are you?”
The door opened, and a familiar regular stepped inside.
A man with a long scar across his face, always the type to sit in the corner and guzzle liquor.
Lately he’d been coming less often, as if he were getting busier and busier. His name was Paeng Jung-chan.
Yeonhwa had been startled when she found out. Paeng? As in the Hebei Paeng Clan? She’d seen the greatsword on his back, but she’d never guessed.
She’d only ever seen him drinking and carousing. He even called himself Mugung Hyeoptak’s regular booze hound. At this point, she was almost tempted to call him the Invincible Drunken Hero of Mugung Hyeoptak or something.
“What is it today?”
“A dish made of layers.”
Paeng Jung-chan tilted his head. Then again, he would probably have reacted the same way even if she’d just said lasagna.
Yeonhwa slid the lasagna into the oven. Soon the oven’s fire would seep evenly through its outer layers and its center alike.
While she waited, Yeonhwa boiled potatoes, mashed them, and mixed in butter and heavy cream to make the creamy mashed potatoes that would sit beside the steak. As she worked, her thoughts drifted.
Honestly, lately she’d been thinking that she should have realized this from the beginning. But because she’d been so overwhelmed by the cultural shock—this absolute, all-in-one, mixed-up, jumbled fusion-murim nonsense—she hadn’t really stopped to think.
This damn fusion murim did titles however it wanted, so if something sounded weird, sometimes it had a decent-sounding Chinese or Central Plains name, and other times it just used English or Western words exactly as they were because, hey, why not?
At some point Yeonhwa had half accepted it. Maybe modernization had just come early here. Even in modern times, didn’t people use Chinese characters, Korean, and English all together?
Sizzle—
Yeonhwa pulled out a thick slab of beef and laid it in the pan.
The sound of meat cooking. It really was a strange sound. If someone heard it somewhere, they’d swallow automatically. Gulp. And sometimes that someone was her.
To create beautiful meat, she controlled the untamed fire and shaped it into a restrained flame, and Yeonhwa thought that was exactly like a martial artist of the Fire Realm. Enlightenment? Something like that. Maybe just: only a fire that’s learned how to endure can make meat beautiful.
When she served the finished lasagna and steak, Paeng Jung-chan tasted them and gave his verdict.
“This is... strange. It isn’t heavy, but it fills you right up. Better than a sword, this is.”
A smile touched Yeonhwa’s lips. If it was better than a sword, then in modern terms it would have been a 5.0-star rave review—So good~ So good~ Mugung Hyeoptak is sooo good~—and somehow it felt even better here because it meant she was being recognized as a proper chef.
By lunchtime, three young wanderers came in and ordered carbonara. It was the authentic version, seasoned with nothing but egg yolks and Geon-rak.
“This is... rich, yet oddly hot. It never touched open flame, but it’s warm somehow.”
Their praise pleased Yeonhwa too. Yes, feel even a little of the warmth I got from getting verbally roasted by the fire in front of me.
But the peaceful time of gourmet bliss didn’t last long.
By afternoon, the wind had turned damp. Even the messengers had shut off their Suguta engines for the day and were huddled in a corner of the tavern, checking over their rides.
Clunk.
The old wooden door opened with a scream. What spilled through the gap was not only the night’s cold.
It brought with it the fishy stench of people who had returned from the threshold of death. The ones who came in were six members of Akmyeonghoe.
You could call them a murim-style hunter party that specialized in clearing Hyeol-mun and Yeon-ok disasters. Only... the mood was not good at all.
“Welcome, then. Even the messengers have halted their paths tonight, and yet you’ve still walked all the way here on foot.”
Jangro Suksu stepped forward with a towel slung over one shoulder.
“Hm... judging by that foul aura, you’ve come after clearing Manhon Yeon-ok? To travel here all the way from the mountains of Hanzhong in Shaanxi—must have been quite the ordeal.”
“No.”
But Akmyeonghoe’s leader, Gang Jeok-u, swallowed a mouthful of blood and laughed low in his throat.
Then he said they had failed to clear the Yeon-ok and used escape talismans.
The escape talismans transported them to wherever they had been made, so because the ones they bought had been produced by the Kunlun Sect near Xining, they had ended up here instead. The Kunlun Sect, apparently, had grown weary of being isolated far away on Mount Kunlun as cannon fodder for the demonic sect and had relocated to the area between Qinghai Lake and Xining.
Akmyeonghoe looked like a band of defeated soldiers, draped in gloom.
One of them murmured, “I... don’t know if I even cut it.”
Another answered in a low voice, “Neither do I.”
Their hands still seemed to remember blood, stiff and unyielding.
The youngest among Akmyeonghoe, Do Ha-jin, stared blankly and made a small sound at the corner of his mouth.
“Now that I’m outside... there are so many colors.”
Inside Manhon Yeon-ok, everything had been gray.
“It was a curse.”
The man with the spear spoke slowly.
“I lost my senses.”
What he felt. Where he looked. What he cut.
An abyss where nothing could be known.
“I swung my sword.”
A woman looked down at her own hands.
She had simply cut at the feeling of being cut. She had cut at the feeling of being cut open.
Manhon Yeon-ok had deceived them. Was it a hallucination? A dream? Was the thing before their eyes an enemy or an ally? They could not even tell whether they were cutting or being cut.
“When we got outside... half of us were missing.”
Their voices cracked.
“We were covered in blood.”
They had not cleared it.
They had fled. Because they fled, they were alive.
Death. The death of this world, unfamiliar to Yeonhwa, stood before her now. Always, this was murim—a place where people went on dying.
Gang Jeok-u went on. “The jade pendants were useless in the Yeon-ok too. We came here because we remembered what people said: if you make it back alive, you have to eat the food from this place.”
The instant he finished speaking, the spirit stone on the kitchen wall trembled violently and let out a chime.
Order received: Akmyeonghoe — Beef Stew, Roast Chicken, Cream Risotto. Payment method: silver coins, on-site payment.
Late though it was, once the signal pierced through the interference of the Yeon-ok and reached Mugung Hyeoptak all the way from distant Shaanxi, the order plaque responded at once.
Was this restaurant’s delivery system really remembering orders received in hellfire and dragging them here no matter what? In a way, it was impressive—a signal that had somehow punched through an EMP.
“Order confirmed! Cooking will begin immediately!”
Yeonhwa went straight to the beef stew. The moment she laid the meat in the cast-iron pan, the aroma of it browning spread through the kitchen.
Sizzle—
She moved the seared meat into the pot and poured in a little wine. Then she added onions, carrots, and celery and let it simmer for a long time. Stew could not be rushed. Time was what gave it flavor.
She poured in red wine generously and let it bubble over a gentle fire.
Meanwhile, Jangro Suksu put bread dough into the oven. A baguette, crusty on the outside and pillowy within.
The members of Akmyeonghoe muttered to themselves.
“There was no fire in the Yeon-ok.”
“No light either. It swallowed sound.”
“There was no smell.”
“No sound.”
“No touch.”
One man stared into the void as though looking at an empty space.
“When I swung my spear, I could feel something, but I couldn’t tell what I’d cut.”
“We came back, but... someone must have been in our hands...”
“....”
Wordlessly, Yeonhwa stirred the stew. The red broth slowly thickened.
She ladled it into bowls. The meat had simmered so thoroughly that it would fall apart with nothing but a spoon. She served it with bread alongside.
Gang Jeok-u, leader of Akmyeonghoe, lifted his spoon with a trembling hand.
He took one bite, then stopped. After a moment, he closed his eyes.
The others took a bite, and then another.
Someone let out a quiet breath.
“Warm...”
“Truly warm.”
Yeonhwa next prepared the roast chicken.
She chopped herbs and stuffed them into the bird. Then she rubbed the skin with mashed garlic and butter before sliding it into the oven. Slowly, the chicken’s skin turned a golden brown.
Yu Yeon-ho, the older half of the twin-sword brothers, murmured, “We heard it inside.”
“Heard what?” Gang Jeok-u asked.
“Someone begging to be saved.”
“Hallucinations.”
“No, I’m sure...”
Yu Yeon-ho’s words snagged halfway out, like a voice that couldn’t quite finish speaking.
“Sang-ho... my younger brother...”
His younger brother did not return.
Originally, the two of them had fought with twin swords, and so they were known as the Twin-Sword Brothers.
But now he carried only one blade.
The other had been left behind in the Yeon-ok.
The roast chicken was finished. The smell of herbs and garlic filled the entire tavern.
Jin Yu-ah, the female swordswoman, quietly drew the point of a knife across the back of her own hand. She was checking whether her senses had returned by cutting herself, testing herself through pain.
They talked about the gray death inside Manhon Yeon-ok, which stripped away every sensation, and the darkness where even the jade pendants had refused to shine.
Twelve had gone in, and only six had come back from that razor’s edge. The jade pendants of the other six were probably already cold forever in the darkness of the Yeon-ok...
At last, Jangro Suksu prepared the cream risotto.
He sautéed the rice in butter and slowly stirred in broth, a little at a time. When the rice had absorbed enough of the stock to turn soft, he grated in Geon-rak without sparing it.
He served the risotto, warm and thick with feeling, in a bowl.
They ate in silence.
The moment the risotto went down, Cheong Maek-su, Cheong No-yun, felt his eyes turn red.
“I’m alive.”
The eyes of Cheong No-yun, who had taken a mouthful of that thick, creamy risotto, finally reddened completely.
“I’m alive. I’m still alive. Everyone else... they’re gone.”
***
After finishing their meal, Akmyeonghoe rose as one and headed outside. Their hunger seemed to have been dealt with, but from their hollow eyes it was clear something else was still tightening its grip inside them.
Murim was merciless. The dungeons within it—Yeon-ok and Hyeol-mun, those calamities—were even more merciless.
Every time this happened, Yeonhwa found herself realizing all the more vividly that this was reality.
The kitchen still held the scent of stew. Yeonhwa scooped up a spoonful of the remaining broth and put it in her mouth. It was warm.
“Yeonhwa. What are you sneaking food for? You hungry? Should I make you a meal too?”
“N-no, I’m not!”
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