Scheming
I walked on in silence. I had wiped the blood from my hands roughly against the Chief Steward's clothes, but they were still red.
Rather than thinking about washing, the thought of finding my pulse elixirs came first.
That walk brought me to the main gate, where the plaque of the Yi Clan estate hung large and proud.
Yi Jeong and Yi Won were waiting there alongside the clan's warriors.
Whether they planned to silence the bandits on Myeongwol Mountain by exterminating them or not — honestly, I couldn't have cared less.
The two of them noticed my approach and turned to look at me. My gaze was fixed on only one of them.
On Yi Won.
I walked toward him and stopped at about a zhang's distance.
"Second Brother."
"...Yes, well. What is it? No — more importantly, what is that on your hand?"
I raised my hand and curled it lightly. Dried, crusted blood flaked off and dropped to the ground.
"Oh, this? It's the Chief Steward's blood."
"...The Chief Steward?"
"Yes. I just killed him on my way here."
At those words, Yi Won's eyes went wide. He wasn't the only one. Yi Jeong looked stunned as well, and so did the warriors of the Yi Clan standing guard around them. I ignored all of it.
"Quite the amusing thing to say, isn't it?"
"...What in the world are you talking about? You dared to kill the Chief Steward? Have you forgotten whose man he is?"
"Whose man, you ask? Naturally, he was a man of the *Yi Clan*."
"...What?"
"Second Brother, I believe you're laboring under a misunderstanding. Everything in this family — all of it — belongs neither to you nor to our Eldest Brother. Nor, of course, to me. It all belongs to the Yi Clan. The servants, the stewards, the warriors standing over there — every last one of them."
"..."
"We merely borrow the use of these things. The only things one could genuinely claim ownership of would be what we built ourselves, through our own *efforts*. The pulse elixirs I bought, scraping together every coin I had and didn't have — that would be one such example."
"..."
"I believe I said something similar at the succession duel. How dare a servant's whelp covet his master's possessions with such insolence. I went and asked around, you see, and it turns out that this filth called the Chief Steward — the one I just killed — stole my belongings and handed them over to you, Brother..."
Yi Won swallowed hard.
"But here's the thing, Brother. When a matter grows too large, it only wearies everyone involved. That's how the world works, wouldn't you say?"
Just as Yi Won opened his mouth to respond, I took a single step forward and extended my left hand. He couldn't react in time. My hand closed around his shoulder.
"My pulse elixirs. Where are they?"
"...They are mine now."
"I told you, didn't I — everything in the Yi Clan belongs to the Yi Clan, and I gave you the example of what little one could claim ownership of through one's own efforts."
Strength flowed into my left hand. *Crunch.*
"When someone scorns me, or plays their petty games at my expense — honestly, I'm willing to let such things pass a few times. But there is exactly one thing that I will never forgive. Do you know what it is?"
It wasn't a question asked in expectation of an answer. I pressed on immediately.
"Daring to covet what is *mine*. You're still half my blood, after all. I've never been a patient man to begin with, so understand that I am restraining myself as much as I possibly can right now. I'll ask one last time. My pulse elixirs. Where are they?"
"...They're..."
"Don't tell me you've already swallowed them all? That entire box?"
"No... no... they're in my quarters."
I smiled faintly and eased my grip.
With that bloodstained hand, I brushed the dust from our Second Brother's shoulder. Clumps of half-dried blood smeared onto the fabric, but it didn't matter. If anything, it made him look all the more the rugged warrior. Rather becoming.
"Well, well. Now that I look at you, it seems our Second Brother had a grand design all along."
"A... grand design? Me?"
"Yes. There's no other reason the Chief Steward would dare covet my belongings, is there? Moved by your vast and generous influence, the Chief Steward, entirely on his own initiative, stole what was mine and delivered it to you... You surely understood full well that it was a wrongful thing to do, but you wanted to sound out in advance just how many treacherous underlings like the Chief Steward would dare to cross that line — am I mistaken?"
"That is... yes, I suppose that was it..."
"Or — surely not — did *you* order the Chief Steward to do it? To steal my things for you?"
"...That's... no. Of course not."
"Naturally not. A man who went so far as to set a trap just to weed out treacherous servants would hardly do such a thing."
"..."
"I thank you for *safeguarding* my pulse elixirs, which nearly fell into the Chief Steward's thieving hands. And let me say this just in case — if anything resembling today's events happens even one more time, I will kill you. I will tear you limb from limb, gouge out both your eyes while you still breathe, and rip out that dantian of yours — so faded and formless no one could even tell it exists. Do I make myself clear?"
"...I... um..."
"One more thing. The bandit extermination you're heading out for today — I trust you'll crush them down to the very last seedling. A secret is only worth keeping if as few people as possible know it, wouldn't you agree?"
I watched Yi Won swallow hard, then turned my gaze to the eldest, Yi Jeong.
"I wish you well in today's affairs as well, Eldest Brother. Do come back without a scratch."
Yi Jeong's face was full of astonishment at what he'd just overheard between me and Yi Won. Even my parting greeting drew no reaction from him. The two of them were without a doubt trueborn brothers.
They wore the same blank, stupid expression, after all.
I turned and walked away.
Today, I intended to reach the Zhoutian meridian cycle.
This wretched body could be tempered at my leisure, but meridians too damaged to hold even a proper circulation of qi had to be repaired by any means necessary.
Right now, I was deeply displeased.
Not because of the Chief Steward, or Yi Won, or any of today's affairs.
It was the turbid qi still swirling inside my body.
Every time the qi I raised tried to make its circuit through the meridians, it stalled. The turbid qi had accumulated so thickly that my qi couldn't circulate properly at all.
That feeling was unbearable.
And so I arrived at Yi Won's quarters, and there I found my box of pulse elixirs.
I walked out with it, just as I was.
Such was the second day after my return to the past.
There are many ways for a martial clan to grow.
But two stand above all the rest as the most certain.
The first is producing a powerful martial artist.
If that martial artist hails from one's sect — or better still, if they are the sect's head disciple or its young master — renown rises naturally, and the gates fill with new disciples seeking entry. Among them there are gems, and among them there are raw stones.
Nurture them, and the clan grows with them.
That was the first method. The second was forming a marriage alliance with a stronger sect.
The Yi Clan, which held Jangryeong Commandery in its grip, was by no means a small house.
Their income was substantial, and the warriors sworn to them were numerous.
Their representative martial art, the Cheongnyeong Sword Art, pursued extreme speed — its signature was the clear, ringing chime it sang with every swing. Measured against the whole of the Murim, however, it was, regrettably, a technique that could only be summed up as "respectably mid-tier."
Even so, the clan's power itself was considerable, and there had been no shortage of families lining up to seek a marriage alliance with them.
Yi Se-geuk, patriarch of the Yi Clan, had taken three wives in all.
The first was the eldest daughter of the Sang Cloud Merchant Group, based in Suju Prefecture, the commercial city to the north. The second was the eldest daughter of the Un Clan, based in Songju County within Jangryeong Commandery.
Only the third wife had no backing at all.
She had been a mere clerk working at an inn in Jangryeong Commandery. Yi Se-geuk's eye had fallen on her, and she had entered his household as a concubine.
Had she possessed any backing at all, it would have been stranger.
And she died giving birth to Yi Do.
Which meant, in effect, that the Yi Clan presently held exactly two factions.
One centered on Lady Sang, eldest daughter of the Sang Cloud Merchant Group; the other on Lady Un, eldest daughter of the Un Clan.
Each was pushing her own son — Yi Jeong the eldest and Yi Won the second — toward the position of heir apparent. Such was the current state of affairs.
And then, in the midst of all this —
The third son, the concubine's child, the so-called baseborn Yi Do, was showing himself to be utterly transformed from the boy he had always been.
To simply say he had *changed* would have been an understatement of insulting inadequacy.
The man had simply, become someone else.
Word had just come that he had beaten another steward to death with his bare fists.
The method was so vicious that the entire Yi household was reeling in horror even now.
There ought to be limits to how heavy a hand one's punishments became — but not only had he pounded a man's skull into pulp, witnesses swore he had never once stopped smiling as he did it.
Was this even a human being?
No. That was a mad dog, that one.
He had driven a blade through the throat of a servant who had been with him since childhood. He had torn out a bandit's throat with his fingers before an axe could even fall on him. He had crushed a steward's head into mush.
That made three times already.
At this point, everyone's thinking on how to deal with Yi Do would have to change. That much was certain.
And this — this was the result.
The original plan had been simply to isolate him and let him rot away on his own. That plan was dead now.
They could not afford to handle him so half-heartedly any longer. The way things were going, he would drag the Yi Clan's very honor through the mud.
Lady Sang spoke.
"Look here. It's true that you and I are rivals, each seating her own son on the heir's seat — but from time to time, we must join hands."
"You're right, Elder Sister. I agree completely."
Lady Sang and Lady Un — and let it be said plainly — did not get along well at all.
Both were formal wives, true, but strictly speaking there was an order between them, and first and second were very different things.
Among the famed clans of the martial world, the eldest son was most often named heir by one means or another. In truth, the overwhelming majority believed Yi Jeong would become the heir. And yet Lady Un had not given up.
She would make her son the heir, no matter what.
But before that —
What needed clearing away had to be cleared away.
"That Yi Do, skulking about half-present all these years, quiet as a dead mouse — the boy comes back from one trip to Sanghang and turns into a different person entirely. Even the Patriarch has begun to look at him differently... Don't you think it's time we acted?"
"I understand your concern perfectly, Elder Sister. But do you have some countermeasure in mind?"
A peculiar smile crossed Lady Sang's lips.
"As it happens, I do."
"Might I hear what it is?"
Lady Sang raised her index finger.
"First, understand this much."
"Which is?"
"Whether or not Yi Do covets the heir's seat — that hardly matters. Sister, you and I scheme behind the scenes to seat our own sons as heir, but frankly speaking, there are many kindnesses we could grant one another. Whichever of us prevails."
"..."
"If my Jeong becomes heir, would I really exile Won to some idle post in the hinterlands? Of course not. I would place him in a truly central position — one worthy of the family's backbone. And it would be the same the other way around. You wouldn't dream of casting me or my Jeong aside, would you?"
She couldn't cast her aside even if she wanted to.
The reason was simple: Lady Sang's backing.
And Lady Sang, in turn, could not dismiss Lady Un either. That, too, was because of her rival's backing.
It was thanks to these backings that the two of them could carry on their "friendly competition" at all.
"Naturally. Even if our Won becomes heir, he will not turn you or Jeong into enemies. Of that I give you my word."
"Which is precisely my point. Yi Do has no backing like ours. None whatsoever."
"That's true."
"The Patriarch pays him some small mind these days, but he's a discarded child regardless — a concubine's whelp. And judging by how he's been carrying on with that savage hand of his lately, he is bound to become a threat sooner or later. So what is to be done then? Surely you don't intend to let a mad dog be born inside the Yi Clan."
"...Elder Sister, what you're saying is..."
The intent could not have been clearer.
"We kill him."
"...The third son?"
"Before he grows any larger. Before the Patriarch takes any greater interest in him. We clear him away in advance — that is what I'm saying."
"But the hired bandits failed, didn't they?"
Lady Sang's smile turned ice-cold in an instant.
"That was never meant to be an assassination in the first place. Besides, they were nothing but untrained rabble of bandits — it's no wonder even that failed. This time, I intend to hire a proper killer."
"...A killer, you say...?"
"I intend to place a commission with the Killing Curtain. I'll put up the money myself — you need only prepare the stage."
Lady Sang reached out her right hand and took Lady Un's left.
"We cannot let a concubine's brat muddy the waters. And what — a mere baseborn son, of all things, is to ruin the Yi Clan? Hmm?"
In the end, Lady Un — just as Lady Sang had done — took hold of Lady Sang's hand.
"Sister. Let's raise the Yi Clan together, you and I."
"Yes, Elder Sister."