My First Client
Out of nowhere, she asked if I knew how to raise silkworms.
So I told her I did. That was when Eun Hwaran seized my hand and hauled me after her without another word.
“Who’s the little brat?”
“The merchant group leader brought him here herself.”
“Don’t tell me that’s the kid who passed the account-clerk exam?”
The silkworm house was the merchant group’s most critical enterprise. The sudden appearance of a child left the workers there looking none too pleased.
But could any of them have been more baffled than me, still sporting mulberry juice around my mouth?
“You said you’ve raised silkworms before? And you meant it—not as a joke.”
“Yes, well, that’s true, but—”
I answered while surveying the generally chaotic interior of the facility.
Oddly enough, even though this was a silkworm-rearing house, the soft rustle of mulberry leaves was barely audible.
“Then would you take a look at the silkworms here? I need to figure out what’s wrong with them.”
The head of one of the Ten Great Merchant Groups of the realm was holding a thirteen-year-old boy’s hand and making a request like that. Something desperate clung to her face—the air of someone willing to clutch at any straw.
“Looking them over is no trouble.”
I nodded, thinking it would be easy enough.
I should never have done that.
Ten minutes of inspection was all it took to grasp the absolute disaster unfolding here.
“……This is a complete mess.”
Yeah. A complete mess.
If you gathered people who knew nothing about silkworms and told them to raise the things, this was exactly the situation you’d get.
“Workshop master. How did the hatching of the silkworm eggs go?”
“……I have no face left to show. We only managed to keep half of them alive.”
The workshop master of the silkworm house pointed toward the hatchery. It was the place where silkworms were born in their most fragile state—and not a single condition, from light exposure to airflow to humidity, had been properly prepared.
When I saw direct sunlight pouring straight through the windows, I smacked my forehead.
Silkworms crawl into dark, narrow places to spin their cocoons, then emerge to lay eggs. Why? To keep as many of their offspring alive as possible so they can hatch.
Yet this workshop master had set up the hatchery right under the blazing sun, claiming it was to give them “yang energy.”
That was Absurdity Stack Number One.
“Haaah, look at all this dung……. Time to change out the mulberry leaves.”
One of the workers, intending to provide fresh leaves, forcibly ripped the silkworms off the old ones—silkworms that had reared their heads high. They do that to anchor themselves to the leaves while molting. Yanking them free like that was as good as killing them outright.
Crunch—
That made Stack Number Two.
“Workshop master, what should we do with these dead ones?”
A worker lifted a rearing frame littered with silkworms that had withered and died. Softened skins and black spots. Judging by the symptoms, it was probably grasserie or flacherie.
What was certain was that both the silkworms and the rearing tools had been contaminated by bacteria, so every piece of equipment that had touched them needed to be disinfected or replaced.
“What else? Burn the silkworms and set the frames out in a sunny spot to dry, then reuse them.”
People of this era had no concept of microorganisms, so burning only the obviously ruined specimens was the best they managed. No wonder entire batches of dozens of silkworms kept getting wiped out on a regular basis.
The one silver lining, I supposed, was that by trying to “drive out the yin energy” they had accidentally UV-sterilized the frames.
Anyway, that was Stack Number Three.
Overall assessment: hopeless.
“Mujin, how was it? Do you think you know what’s wrong?”
“…….”
Faced with Merchant Leader Eun Hwaran’s question, I shut my mouth, not knowing where to begin.
Looking at the tools and facilities, the foundation seemed decent enough. So why was the actual technique of raising silkworms this wretched? They might as well have been trying to headbutt bare earth.
Thud-thud.
And there was a worker transferring newly hatched first-instar silkworms using the same basket that had just held the dead ones.
So that was how the residual pathogens were spreading.
In the end I couldn’t hold it in any longer and snapped.
“Ah— for real, that’s not how you do that.”
My voice must have been louder than I thought. The workers’ hands froze mid-task. Every gaze in the place swung toward me.
……Uh-oh.
Hwang Geolgae forced a dried-out dumpling into his mouth. The crumbly, gamey taste reminded him of the days when he’d had nothing as a first-rank beggar.
Chew-chew.
“Heh-heh, dare to steal this old man’s side dish, do you?”
He’d noticed Dan Mujin slipping one into his robes and stolen it right back. The boy had been so busy dodging flying fists that he never even realized his pocket had been cleaned out.
As expected, a dumpling stolen on the sly tasted better than any freshly steamed one under heaven.
“I should’ve beaten him a little harder.”
After gulping the dumpling down, Hwang Geolgae muttered with genuine regret. He had been trying to open the boy’s blocked acupoints and meridians with internal-energy-laden punches, drawing out the latent potential of the body. But the cheeky brat had twisted away from those delicate hands, howling that he was going to die of pain.
“I hit him a bit hard, sure, but it was all for his own good. Tsk tsk.”
Every time the old man smacked the boy’s back with a sharp crack, the kid had flopped around like a freshly caught fish. And when Hwang Geolgae mixed a thread of killing intent into the forms to provoke him, the Heavenly Killing Star inside had gone wild. The same instinctive counter that had once swatted away his own Seize-and-Control Hand in that alley had played out all over again.
No matter how much strength he held back, this was a boy who had known nothing of martial arts only a short while ago. Faced with what he perceived as a life-or-death crisis, the kid had even managed a clumsy display of the light-body technique Hwang Geolgae had crammed into his head as pure theory. The old man couldn’t help a dry chuckle.
It was like watching the legendary Heavenly Martial Physique said to be born solely for the martial path.
“Of course the boy’s body doesn’t hold the harmonious balance of the Three Powers, the Five Elements, and the Taiji—it’s stuffed full of nothing but murderous intent.”
What he had witnessed, then, was the Heavenly Killing Star devouring martial arts for the sake of slaughtering even more people. That terrifyingly rapid growth was also a martial talent bestowed by Heaven—though the intent and purpose behind it were completely different.
“If only that talent could be corrected so it serves the proper path…….”
For reasons unknown, the child was defying the destiny of the star that commanded him to become a killing ghost, and still kept a clear, lucid mind. If, by any chance, he could be guided onto the right road, it might become a tremendous blessing for the orthodox martial world. Fail, and Hwang Geolgae would have personally raised the worst murderous demon the world had ever seen.
Hence the ancient maxim: do not teach one who is not the right person. He had to keep testing, endlessly, whether this was a boy to kill or a boy to save.
“Hnnh? Why do my shoulders suddenly feel so heavy……?”
Too many thoughts made them so. To cut the thinking short, he tipped back the Shaoxing wine he’d pilfered from the storehouse and drank deep. The fierce liquor scorched tongue and throat. Hwang Geolgae set the bottle down with a throaty “Keuh.”
“Heh-heh. Looking back, this too might be inevitable…… just as that man said.”
Back when qi deviation had twisted his vessels and his internal energy had run wild, blood pouring from eyes, nose, and ears—on the very brink of self-destruction—a Daoist had walked down from the night sky as if out for a stroll. White robes white as snow, a long, luxuriant beard, the very picture of an immortal sage. Seeing Hwang Geolgae swollen with ruptured meridians after losing to his inner demons, the man had taken pity and recited the oral formula of a certain heart method.
A supreme art that could hold starlight within the body—clearly the distillation of long enlightenment and hard-won insight. Yet the Daoist had not hesitated for an instant, offering it simply to save the man before him. That air of detachment from all things.
When Hwang Geolgae asked whether it was proper to bestow such a gift on a stranger, the Daoist had answered that there were no coincidences among heaven and earth and the ten thousand things; this, too, was the arrangement of the Primordial Heavenly Lord. After speaking of a heavenly will that would lead somewhere, he had vanished like the wind.
So perhaps it was also Heaven’s will that a child bearing a baleful star had come to the man who governed the power of the stars.
“Keh-keh.”
The Shaoxing wine slid down his throat with a sharp, clean burn. When the boy returned he would finish opening the remaining acupoints. This time he planned to be gentler—no more taking his temper out on the kid. The boy’s durability was solid enough; last time emotion had slipped into the fists without Hwang Geolgae noticing.
“But where has the brat run off to that he still hasn’t come back?”
Today was supposed to be the day for training the Starfall Heart Method. The boy had stormed out yelling that he couldn’t live like this, and by now he should have been crawling home, yet there was still no sign of him.
“He hasn’t gone off somewhere causing trouble, has he?”
After a few weeks of keeping the boy around, Hwang Geolgae had learned one thing: this was a creature that bounced in completely unpredictable directions. On top of that, that peculiar way of talking occasionally flipped a person’s entire wardrobe inside out.
“Well…… nothing major will happen.”
Worrying was useless anyway. The moment the boy got hungry he would sneak back in to swipe something.
So Hwang Geolgae decided to finish the Shaoxing wine he had been drinking.
“Keuh.”
There is a certain type of person who loves telling everyone else what to do. In common parlance they are called “backseat drivers.”
When things are already going spectacularly wrong, having someone stroll up and announce that this was done incorrectly or that was a mistake is a sure way to make blood pressure spike—even if the criticism is accurate and comes from someone who has done the work before.
“What would a little brat like you know……!”
“A green kid lecturing adults—who do you think you are?!”
The silkworms kept dying, they already had no face left to show the merchant leader, and they felt miserable enough to die. Then some random punk they’d never seen before started butting in. The rage of the overseers and workers shot straight through the roof.
All that denunciation and pushback finally converged on a single conclusion.
“You think this looks easy?”
“Have you ever raised silkworms yourself? Huh?!”
“If you’re so frustrated, why don’t you raise them yourself!”
The workers and technicians unleashed the classic counterattack against backseat drivers: “If you think you can do better, you do it!”
And that, as it happened, was not particularly difficult.
In the modern world, a single search pulled up professional literature on sericulture by the armful; I had read it all and even raised the creatures myself based on that knowledge.
So I stepped forward and said:
“Then how about a wager with me?”
Even when the adults tried to intimidate me, I refused to tuck my tail and pushed back hard. The silkworm-house workers flinched. Something in my unflinching attitude must have told them there was more to me than met the eye; suddenly their chatter dwindled.
“Child, do you truly know how to raise silkworms?”
Eun Hwaran, who had been watching the entire standoff in silence, suddenly asked.
“Yes. I know how.”
“This is work that the livelihoods of many people depend on. Even if you are the old master’s disciple, if you said that as a joke, a heavy punishment could fall.”
Because the fate of the merchant group hung in the balance, she put on a stern expression, wanting certainty. I picked up one of the withered silkworms lying among the tools and answered as proof.
“Strangely enough, don’t the silkworms keep dying in droves right around the third instar? While they’re still unable to shed their skins.”
I had seen them ripping molting silkworms free. This was different from a pestilence like flacherie. It was a clear-cut man-made disaster born of pure ignorance.
“How did you…….”
Her eyes wavered slightly; I had hit the mark. The workers, equally flustered, opened their mouths.
“H-he just guessed, didn’t he?”
“Silkworms die in heaps at every stage anyway. It could be coincidence…….”
Dying in heaps at every stage—what a hilarious and tragic statement. Even on a battlefield, forty percent casualties earned a unit the judgment of total annihilation. Here they were killing off more than eighty percent every single cycle. No wonder people who knew nothing couldn’t tell the difference between meddling and actual advice. All they could think was that something this important must never be entrusted to a child.
Fortunately, they were not the ones who decided.
“Big Sis, from what the workers said earlier, an official from the Court is coming soon to inspect the silkworm house, right?”
Fail the gold-seal verification or whatever it was called, and the losses would be enormous; the entire enterprise would be wiped clean off the books.
“……That’s right.”
The thin dark circles under her eyes made the weight on her shoulders easy to guess.
“You know this is a dead end as things stand. So isn’t it worth a shot even if we lose? I’ll grab this thing by the scruff and force it to live. Give me full authority.”
She had already been at a loss. That was why, the moment I said I knew about silkworms, she had grabbed me and dragged me here on the off chance. So now she needed to throw her full weight behind that last straw so it could actually do its job.
“Worth a shot even if we lose…….”
The line seemed to stir something in her. Eun Hwaran tapped her slender chin with her folding fan.
“You mentioned a wager earlier. What are the terms?”
A wager: two parties staking something on a contest. I was fairly confident. Just blocking that insane direct sunlight would double the hatching rate of the eggs. And since her counterpart was an unknown street kid of beggar origins, she would naturally want some plausible collateral. In return I would be able to squeeze something useful out of the head of a great merchant group.
“Merchant Leader, you can’t possibly be thinking of trusting that account-clerk brat?”
“Some punk who just showed up and started picking fights…… over us?”
The workers pushed back. If their sericulture had produced any results so far, she would never have needed to agonize like this.
“I’ll ask Master to stay on as a guest for a while. I’ll tell him I want to train here a few more years.”
“……!”
After the incident with the Wolf-Fang Staff Eccentric had nearly destroyed her escort agency, Eun Hwaran had learned the hard way how crucial a high-level expert could be. Yet Hwang Geolgae gave no indication of how much longer he would remain, and he was the living embodiment of non-possession—a being like the wind that neither gold nor power could hold. In that situation, a boy bound to him by the master-disciple relationship, as close as parent and child, offering to make the request was something that would naturally catch her ear.
“Is it possible?”
“Of course.”
It was completely impossible, of course. Officially that was the story, but the moment the Heavenly Killing Star swallowed me he would cut my head off without a second’s delay. They simply didn’t know that. They believed Old Master Hwang had taken me as a disciple after recognizing my innate martial talent.
But if I solved the silkworm problem, none of it would matter. A perfect win-win.
“You must have something you want as well. Don’t you?”
Whether it was the sericulture or the escort business, she had decided she could at least save one of them depending on the outcome. She asked for my terms.
“If I succeed, give me whatever compensation you yourself think is appropriate, Big Sis.”
In other words, I would take the reward omakase-style. Another negotiation trick I had learned while running the troubleshooter office. Even though she was a master capable of injuring people with sword-qi and received deference wherever she went, she seemed to carry a faint sense of indebtedness toward Hwang Geolgae, who helped without taking a single coin. He claimed he owed the previous merchant leader some debt, but she had no idea what it was. So I, the disciple, would accept that burden of the heart in his place. The principle was a bit like a bribe: when the man himself stubbornly refused, you simply shoved the gift into the hands of his child or wife instead. Of course the old man himself would not care one whit whether I received anything or not.
“…All right. I understand what you mean.”
Fortunately the prospective client grasped the implication. I rubbed my hands together and waited for her next words.
“I’ll give you full authority. Raise the survival rate of the fifth-instar silkworms to seventy percent.”
Finally!
I clenched my fist tight. Climb high by starting low; grind an axe into a needle. It felt like the moment I was reclaiming my true vocation once again—the work of solving other people’s problems and receiving gratitude and money in return. The start of the troubleshooter’s trade.
“You can do it, right?”
“Ah, just leave it to me, Client!”
Customer satisfaction first. Kindness and service that bring them back again. The monumental first client of Dan Mujin’s Troubleshooter Office had just appeared.