A Guest Who Arrived With Spring
Spring had come.
The frozen training ground warmed under the sun, and tender green buds pushed out along the bare branches of the manor. As the weather loosened, the once-hushed cries of hawkers regained their vigor. Crowds thronged the marketplace, and the snow that had spun cart wheels uselessly melted away. A gentle warmth began to settle over the Eunseong Merchant Group and the escort agency that shared the same manor grounds.
Merchants and porters bustled this way and that—another escort run must have been scheduled. Pack horses came and went, loads of cargo crossing the manor threshold in a steady stream, while Ilhong stood still and watched one man with quiet intensity.
He was starting to look less like a youth and more like a proper man. If she had to put it into words, he stood at the crossroads between boy and adult. A year had sharpened his features and darkened his jawline until the presence of a man was impossible to miss.
"Aargh! Why can't I see the line?! What's the problem, Killing Star?!"
Her boss was still shouting the same incomprehensible nonsense at regular intervals. To anyone watching, his sword strokes split the empty air with flawless force—yet he clearly found them unsatisfactory.
"Quit your babbling and roll!"
Hwang Geolgae, who was also her master, stuck to him like a shadow and poured out a relentless barrage of cuts. Dan Mujin kept training, insisting something hovered just out of reach. Their "sparring" was so vicious it could have passed for a real duel; blades flashed from every direction, making it terrifying to approach.
Day after day they ate, slept, fought, and sprayed sweat and blood in equal measure. Ilhong walked over to Dan Mujin, who lay sprawled on the ground like a discarded rag, and asked,
"Are you all right?"
"……."
He only turned his head slightly to look at her. His eyes looked exhausted.
"……I'm dying, Ilhong."
He looked it, too. Ilhong had trained herself to the bone for the sake of revenge and had been proud of that effort—yet she could never throw herself into it as desperately as the man in front of her.
"Even so, Boss, it looks like the training is paying off. You've bulked up a little, and your presence feels different."
"It's just height. Height."
He said it as if eating a lot, moving a lot, and then collapsing into sleep had simply made his body shoot upward. Well, they did say that if you took your eyes off a growing boy for even a moment, he would suddenly be towering over you.
"Speaking of which, why haven't you grown much?"
Dan Mujin muttered, pointing at the top of her head. Why hadn't she grown much? She had still gained a couple of inches over the year. At least she was taller than the fully grown Poison Claw Mountain Blood, and she still had room left to grow.
"And why are you getting prettier instead of handsomer?"
"……Isn't that obvious?"
Ilhong's expression said she could not believe what she was hearing. One of these days she would have to pick a proper moment, drop the disguise, and burn into his mind that she was a woman. At this rate he would start treating her as nothing more than a useful subordinate. That was not the future Ilhong had drawn for herself. She now had one more reason to work harder.
"Ilhong, why do you think my sword work isn't improving?"
Dan Mujin stuck the sword he had picked up from the training ground into the dirt and asked the question with a heavy sigh. Ilhong tilted her head, puzzled.
"Not improving? From where I'm standing, it looks like you're getting better every single day."
The Chamgu Sword Art, he had called it. At first he had simply swung with raw strength, crude and rough; now his cuts were precise and practiced. The exchanges he had just shown against Hwang Geolgae in particular carried a level of refinement that her own Gui-ji Sword Art could not match.
Even so, her encouragement left Dan Mujin's face clouded with worry.
"That's not it. I can't see the line. The line."
"The line?"
"The line that cuts along the grain of things. That same motion from the basement of Jinju Manor, when I cut through the jiangshi."
"……Ah."
She understood what he meant. He had claimed it was the first time he had ever held a sword, yet back then he had sliced through the arm of a jiangshi that even a Transcendental Peak martial artist could not cut—clean as chopping a radish.
"You were different then, Boss."
"……Different how?"
Dan Mujin asked with a serious face. Ilhong searched her memory and tried to explain the moment.
"Well… you were a little scary then. Like if I got any closer I'd be cut just by standing near you?"
"Scary, huh. Killing intent? Survival instinct? Or is drawing a line between the two pointless for me?"
He muttered to himself, then suddenly shot to his feet as if something had clicked. A grim, resolute expression settled over his features as he fixed his gaze on Hwang Geolgae, who had already seized the brief break to start guzzling wine again.
"That old man has gone soft, too. He's not really trying to kill me."
What an absurd thing to say. What master in the world would truly try to kill his own disciple? Ilhong stared at Dan Mujin with a look of pure disbelief.
"Then I'll just have to make him serious. If I want to make that red line my own, I have no choice."
Muttering words that made any listener deeply uneasy, Dan Mujin began stomping toward Hwang Geolgae.
"Hey, beggar geezer! Stop chugging that swill and let's go another round!"
"……."
Ilhong closed her mouth and shook her head. Chaos was about to break loose. Sometimes her boss really did have some strange corners to him.
"Has this bastard completely lost his mind……."
As expected, the drunken haze drained from Hwang Geolgae's eyes, leaving them ice-cold. He set down the bottle he had been about to empty and surged to his feet with a look that said, What the hell did this lunatic eat this time?
Dan Mujin seemed to have forgotten the master-disciple relationship entirely, as if he truly wanted a life-or-death match. A chilling sword force—not mere sword qi—rose from Hwang Geolgae in answer.
"Boss… uh, good luck……."
All Ilhong could do was cheer him on with a thoroughly fed-up expression.
"Come at me! Bluffing Daoist!"
In the front courtyard of the detective agency, Jo Harang's massive greatsaber carved through the air. The violent wind pressure bent the weeds and sent them scattering in a rush.
Ever since Dan Mujin and Ilhong had left to learn swordsmanship, the detective agency had grown strangely empty and quiet. Feeling a touch of loneliness, Jo Harang threw herself into solitary training. A place that was normally so noisy felt oddly still today, and her mood shifted with it.
"I wish I could've gone and trained with them."
They were swinging blades, after all—as a saber user she could have served as a sparring partner. That was how she had wanted to repay the kindness she had received. But Dan Mujin had firmly refused, claiming that if she came along something would be exposed. He said his master would notice something about her and it would become a disaster.
"What on earth is that supposed to mean……."
Was she somehow someone he was ashamed to show his master? As the bearer of the Purple Micro Star who prided herself on living without shame—doing good and cutting down evil—she found the idea hard to accept.
"When he gets back, I'm definitely grilling him about it."
She sheathed the greatsaber, went inside the office, and muttered around a mouthful of snacks. Even if they still had the money from that gambling job last time, they would soon need to start looking for new work. Most of the funds had gone into setting up some kind of relief station, and the agency's coffers were about to run dry.
Just as she was fretting in her capacity as a member of the agency, the front gate creaked open.
"Welcome."
Thinking it was a long-awaited client, Jo Harang greeted the visitor warmly. She was already imagining using this as an excuse to run to the merchant group and drag Dan Mujin back.
"Who are you? Where's our Mujin?"
But the visitor's identity was anything but ordinary. Skin white as paper, sharp eyes, red lips, and pointed nails stained dark green. It was Dang Yeohye—Poison Claw Mountain Blood—who had briefly traveled with them on the road to the Murim Alliance Headquarters.
Everyone feared her fierce temper, but Jo Harang avoided her for an entirely different reason. This woman was the very reason Jo Harang had gone up Mount Song for closed-door training. Right in front of her eyes, this woman had dragged Dan Mujin off, claiming they somehow needed to hold a wedding ceremony.
"I'm sorry, but we're not taking any more clients."
Jo Harang's tone turned firm as she issued an eviction order, completely different from a moment earlier.
"Who said I came as a client? You look like some wet-behind-the-ears junior of the martial world. Just tell me where Mujin is."
The woman was completely unfazed. She plopped into a chair as if the office were her own living room and settled in.
"You seem to know who I am. I don't remember the likes of you, though. Tell me who you are."
"Jo Harang. Mujin's closest friend."
Dang Yeohye searched her memory for a moment and recalled a reasonably pretty girl who had once stood beside Dan Mujin.
"Ah, the kid who was next to our Mujin back then? Sorry. I tend not to remember people who don't matter."
It was not mockery; she simply spoke with the calm certainty of someone whose nature was exactly that. Back then Jo Harang's fame and cultivation had indeed been lacking, so as galling as it was, she coldly swallowed her feelings.
"But 'our Mujin'? You speak as if you're quite close."
She could let the personal slight pass, but this part she could not simply ignore.
"Ha, of course we're close. I'm the big sister who's crossed the line between life and death with him more times than I can count—practically family."
Dang Yeohye snorted at the junior who kept arguing so stubbornly while explaining their bond as something as tight as family.
"Heeh, big sister, is it……."
Jo Harang's eyes traveled slowly up and down the woman's height—far too short to be calling herself a big sister.
"Ha, this little—looking to die……."
Reading the meaning behind the gesture, the woman immediately flared up, eyes blazing. But she quickly remembered this was Dan Mujin's office, shook her head left and right, and forced herself to settle down.
"No. No. I have to endure. Poison Claw Mountain Blood, even your temper has mellowed a lot. It's thanks to him."
Jo Harang watched her in silence. "Thanks to him" clearly meant Dan Mujin. From the rumors she had heard afterward, Dang Yeohye had crushed the young master Dang Ak in Sichuan and solidified her position as successor.
"If you're a guest, I can at least offer tea."
"I'm not a guest, but fine—bring me something."
Jo Harang prepared tea leaves reserved for unwelcome visitors, packing only the bitterest bits, and served it. The woman drank it with a soft slurp and no particular reaction.
"Cute. Compared to poison, this is sweet. Not bad at all."
Jo Harang had no idea what the woman wanted, but she desperately wanted to chase her out and had no method. The woman's standing in the martial world and her martial prowess were no less than Jo Harang's own, and on top of that she was the young lady of the great Sichuan Tang Family Manor.
"……."
"……."
The two of them simply traded gazes in a suffocating silence. Just when the quiet had grown dizzying enough to make heads spin—
Creak.
The door opened and Dan Mujin and Ilhong walked into the office, looking as if they had just finished training. They had been chatting about how they thought Hwang Geolgae was going to kill them, how they had barely survived, until they sensed the strange atmosphere in the office and fell silent. Dan Mujin glanced back and forth between the two women facing each other with ominous auras, then said,
"……Ilhong, shall we go out?"
He looked ready to leave the office again, as if he wanted nothing to do with the headache brewing inside.
"Where do you think you're going!"
"Get back here!"
Lately there were two things on my mind.
The first was the red palm that had not shown its face once since I started asking about the previous Heavenly Killing Star. Whether some emotional shift had hit it or not, it was pure silence. Normally it would pop out to mock me whenever I was being worked to death, but these days even that had stopped. I had no idea what its problem was.
The second thing bothering me was the deep, uncomfortable silence filling the room right now.
"……."
I had just finished a brutal training session that left the red line half-visible, half-not, and come home thinking I could finally rest. Instead I opened the door to an even bigger headache. Jo Harang and Dang Yeohye were giving off a thoroughly ominous vibe.
At the moment, two women and two men sat in the office with their mouths clamped shut, facing each other down. Of course, if you dug into the details the gender ratio would shift again, but still.
"Mujin, have you been well?"
Dang Yeohye was the first to speak. The sharp gaze she had aimed at Jo Harang vanished somewhere; she flashed a smile and asked after me.
"Yeah, more or less. Didn't die, so I lived."
I had, in fact, just come back from something uncomfortably close to death. Hwang Geolgae had been so dumbfounded at first that he got angry, but later he seemed to read my intent and started swinging with plenty of killing intent packed in.
"You're not going to ask if I've been well?"
"……Have you been well too, big sis?"
That "big sis" never sat right on my tongue whenever I looked at her height.
"Hmph. Making me bow while I'm already on the floor."
She snorted and set down her teacup. Still, the corners of her lips twitched slightly, so she must not have hated the greeting that much.
By the way, where was the middle-aged man who usually kept her temper in check and handled communication?
"What about Uncle Neungsam?"
"He didn't come today. And don't worry—I didn't come here to yell at you. I just have something to check."
What could she possibly need to check that was important enough to fly all the way from Sichuan to Beijing? And to create this weird atmosphere with Jo Harang while she was at it?
"Mujin, you……."
Just as her question was about to continue, another guest arrived at the office—as if today had been marked on the calendar for visitors.
Knock, knock.
"Is Young Hero Dan Mujin here?"
This time it was a young man with a solid, well-built frame.