Monopolizing Fortunes (194)
Monopolizing Fortunes (194)
One of the merchants wrung his hands and begged.
"Please spare me. I have a wife and two children waiting at home."
"I don't have a wife or kids. Why would I bother making any?"
It wasn't even funny, but the dozens of bandits around them burst into raucous laughter.
Jang Gu-mok, who had been sitting in a chair, planted his Daegam Blade on the ground like a walking stick.
"You know the difference between splitting a pig's head with this sword and splitting a man's head?"
The merchants couldn't answer the question.
"There isn't one. Pigs and people are the same. They look the same to me. You're all just pigs to me. No, worse than pigs. Can't even eat you. Hmm... now I'm suddenly curious what human flesh tastes like. Should I kill these bastards and have a taste?"
Go Eung-sik spoke.
"If it's your first taste, wouldn't tender young women be better?"
"Now that you mention it, you're right. You really are smart. Heh heh heh..."
Jang Gu-mok's Daegam Blade suddenly moved. Tracing an arc, the blade split the head of a merchant in the middle in two.
"Gurk!"
The merchants doused in blood mixed with brain matter screamed, but the screams quickly died away.
Jang Gu-mok split the heads of five merchants like he was chopping firewood. It was already a familiar sight, so the faces of the bandits watching the five deaths were indifferent.
Their hands were already steeped in blood as well. Without any order being given, a few bandits began gathering up the corpses.
Trillll—! Chirp—!
The Howang Stronghold was fairly well organized, as befitted its numbers. Though they were ignorant bandits, they had even posted lookouts down below the stronghold, showing enough preparedness to guard against an attack by government troops.
The whistle disguised as a birdcall was a signal warning of a stranger's approach. Judging by the signal, fewer than three people were coming up.
"What? If someone's approaching, just kill them."
Go Eung-sik muttered, and was about to give an order to the bandit who had sent the signal when Jang Gu-mok spoke.
"Leave them. I was a little short on the feel of it, so this works out."
Before long, the four bandits on watch came first, and a stranger appeared.
"What? Just one guy?"
The foppish-looking young man walked into the stronghold and slowly looked around.
"There sure are a lot of you. But..."
The young man wrinkled his nose.
"I smell blood from somewhere."
A bad premonition began creeping up from Jang Gu-mok's instincts. For one thing, he didn't like the sword hilt jutting out over the man's shoulder.
The fact that he could remain so composed among a hundred bandits while carrying a weapon meant there was a chance he was a martial artist.
But why would a martial artist come all the way here? Those people yap about chivalry and righteousness all day, every day, but that's just talk—they're the kind who stake their lives fighting over their own rice bowls.
The true chivalrous heroes, rare as beans sprouting in a drought, don't give bandits like them a second thought. So the only ones to be wary of were government troops. That was the reason bandits like them had survived unscathed so far.
The young man, having spotted the corpses the bandits had been in the middle of clearing away, frowned.
"From the look of it, they seem to be merchants... why did you kill them?"
Before Jang Gu-mok could say anything, Go Eung-sik's mouth opened first.
"Does a bandit need a reason to kill people? You're about to die too, but for once you've got plenty of reason. If you crawl into a bandit den alone, you die. Right?"
'That clueless bastard. I need to size him up first!'
Jang Gu-mok spoke.
"What's your reason for coming here?"
Still, he had the dignity of a chieftain, so he didn't use polite speech with the young man.
"I was debating whether to beat you all up and chase you off, or just kill you comfortably. But now that I've come and seen, there's no need to debate."
The young man, Do Tong-dal, drew his sword. He had never once considered himself a chivalrous hero, but seeing people who treated human lives like the lives of flies made fury surge up on its own.
This wasn't because he was a chivalrous hero—it was simply human nature. If you saw this and didn't get angry, that would be abnormal. Therefore, he was an extremely sensible person, absolutely not a chivalrous hero like Won Dae-yeon.
"Before we fight, we should talk first. There's nothing in this world that can't be resolved through conversation..."
Jang Gu-mok tried to stall for as much time as possible to figure out what kind of person his opponent was. But there was no need to take the time to find out.
Do Tong-dal moved first. Neither his movement nor his sword swings could be seen.
It simply looked as though the heads of the bandits around Do Tong-dal were rising into the air on their own.
'Fuck! He's a master!'
As expected, bad premonitions were never wrong. The premonition he'd had when raping and killing his sixth woman had been like that.
He'd thought, 'Somehow I don't feel good about this,' and in the end it had come to light, and he'd become a bandit after being chased.
Of course, it had been a blessing in disguise. He had become a butcher of people, a perfect fit for him. If it weren't for shitty work like this, he would have kept thinking that way for the rest of his life.
"Kill that bastard!"
By the time Jang Gu-mok shouted, eight bandits' heads had already flown. The bandits, belatedly coming to their senses, rushed in, but masters of the martial world were beyond what bandits like them could handle.
Like rice stalks cut by a farmer's sickle at harvest time, his subordinates' necks were cut down just like that.
Among them was the deputy chief, Go Eung-sik. The death of his old friend made his fury greater than his fear.
"You son of a bitch!"
Well, in the end, that was probably how he was fated to go. A bandit hoping to live to sixty or seventy was truly the mindset of a thief.
Jang Gu-mok being the chieftain didn't mean he fought better than the grunt bandits. He was merely skilled at using a blade thanks to having been a butcher, and even that was six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Do Tong-dal's sword easily cut through the neck of Jang Gu-mok, whose neck was twice as thick as an ordinary man's.
It was revolting. The spraying blood was, the screams boring into his ears were, and the rank smell of blood was.
But Do Tong-dal did not stop killing the bandits. When he had killed about forty, some bandits fled, but to Do Tong-dal they were no different from grubs crawling away as fast as they could.
The bandits who fled would go somewhere else and become bandits again, and would kill innocent people just as they had before.
Perhaps the slash-and-burn farming village where he had been indebted for a meal could suffer harm.
So he could not let even a single one go alive. Do Tong-dal himself was surprised that he could kill this many people.
A thug doesn't normally kill people. Resolving things through talk and extorting money is the best option, and making threats is the second best. Killing is truly the last resort.
So murder was not familiar to Do Tong-dal. But after today, he could no longer say that murder was unfamiliar.
He had killed a full hundred people. It might even have been three or four more than that. Blood with the feel of glue dripped from his hair and ran down his cheek to his chin.
Nausea surged up, but he forced himself to hold back from vomiting. He had only killed those who needed killing. He had promised the villagers that he would make sure the bandits could no longer torment them, and he had kept that promise.
That was all.
Do Tong-dal threw the corpses into the largest hut, then broke the building apart and piled more wood around it.
He had killed them, but at the very least he didn't want to leave them to become food for wild beasts.
Since a hundred people lived there, the storehouse naturally had oil. The wood soaked in oil burned well. The smell of burning people was strangely nauseating.
Do Tong-dal, who had been staring at the fiercely blazing flames, grabbed a set of clothes hanging on a laundry line and left the stronghold.
If he searched around, there would probably be things worth money, but just this once he decided to take the fall and get back up.
After washing the blood off in a nearby stream, he put on the clothes made of animal hide.
"This bastard could've washed his clothes a little cleaner."
Do Tong-dal's steps back to the slash-and-burn village were slow. Even though he had washed thoroughly, he still seemed to smell of blood.
He didn't want to bring that blood smell into that kind-hearted village. So Do Tong-dal could only reach the village by dusk.
No one had thought that Do Tong-dal, who had left, would come back. The man who had told him the location of the Howang Stronghold was the same.
"Mister!"
Only Hanmu greeted Do Tong-dal with a glad voice.
"Mister, your clothes..."
"Those bastards even gave me bribes like this and promised they wouldn't come anywhere near here. Heh heh heh..."
"Really?"
"Of course! When have you ever seen me lie?"
"We haven't even known each other for a day."
"Right, so of course you haven't seen it."
An old man appeared among the people who had gathered, murmuring.
"You disappeared all of a sudden—what happened?"
"I have to earn my meals. I don't like being in debt."
The old man, who had been staring at Do Tong-dal, spoke.
"From the look of it, you seem to have been to the Howang Stronghold, but I won't ask for details. There's only one thing I want to know. Is it true that the bandits won't come anymore?"
"You can sleep with your legs stretched out now."
"Thank you."
"If you're grateful, how about telling me about that Ascension Cave?"
"Huh?"
There was a good deal of back-and-forth, but in the end Do Tong-dal was guided to the Ascension Cave the next day. The guide was the same man who had told Do Tong-dal about the Howang Stronghold.
The attitude of the man, who gave his name as Cheon Du-bong, had completely changed.
"Great hero, watch out for that tree root there. On mountain paths like this, it's common to trip over roots sticking up out of the ground. And watch out for that rock too. There's moss on it, so it's slippery."
He simply didn't say, 'I'm still a martial arts master in my own way.' The cave in Yeolusan took a little over one shichen from the village. Considering it was a mountain, it wasn't that far.
"It's somewhere around here..."
It took two ke to find, but they found it anyway. It had been covered by vines, so it wasn't Cheon Du-bong's fault.
As befitted a naturally formed cave, it was rough from the entrance. It was so narrow that one had to bend over considerably to enter, and sharp stalactites jutted from the ceiling here and there.
There were some places wide enough to straighten his back, but most of it was narrow, and there were sections where he had to crawl on his belly.
Even holding a torch, he couldn't push back much of the darkness.
'In a cave like this, closed-door training would be difficult, wouldn't it?'
There wasn't even space to practice martial arts, so he couldn't understand how a place like this had come to be named Ascension Cave.
If he had come alone, he would already have turned back, but out of respect for the sincerity of Cheon Du-bong, who had guided him this far, he decided to go in a little further.
As Do Tong-dal crawled through the narrow cave, he was about to tell Cheon Du-bong to turn back, thinking, 'Haven't I shown enough sincerity by now?'
But then a chill energy pressed in from ahead. Caves are naturally cool, except in special cases.
But the energy pressing in now was close to the cold of stepping into a space full of ice.
So Do Tong-dal decided to go in a little further. After advancing five jang, a space a full jang high appeared.
At the edge of a fairly wide circular clearing sat a pool of water two jang across.
"That's the place. I'd only ever heard about it in stories, but it really exists. We call that the Ascension Gate."
Cheon Du-bong said this with a satisfied expression.
"A pool of water is a gate?"
"Yes. They say if you enter through the Ascension Gate and follow the underground waterway, you reach Ascension Cave."
Everything Cheon Du-bong said was far removed from any sense of reality.
"No one's ever gone there, so how do you know that?"
"It's a story passed down."
Do Tong-dal stared blankly at the calm surface of the water. There might be a space inside where closed-door training was possible. Since several people in the village seemed to believe it, there must be some reason for it.
The problem wasn't ascending to immortality—it was that he could starve to death. The only things to eat inside the cave would be moss or bugs.
"But are you really planning to ascend to immortality?"
"Huh? Ah! No. I'm just looking for a quiet place to be alone for a while, but this place seems difficult. I'm not the kind of person who can live on nothing but moss and bugs."
"If that's your worry, you don't need to be concerned. Let's go outside first."
They exited the cave. Cheon Du-bong had been following behind, so Do Tong-dal hadn't noticed, but his clothes were torn here and there, and faint wounds were visible.
After leaving the cave, Do Tong-dal asked Cheon Du-bong, who was climbing the mountain again.
"Why are you helping me like this?"
* * *