Daytime Words Are Heard by Mice
Even in a martial world thick with strange masters like grains of sand, those who can draw out solid Sword Force remain vanishingly rare.
And if word spreads that a master of that caliber will run through fire and water for a client?
Potential clients nursing thorny problems will come running with their money packed in fat bundles. Of course they will.
My customer-first philosophy — that service spirit that will even dive into the Imperial Palace if it means solving a problem — had clearly moved the deep-pocketed tycoons of Beijing.
Of course, the Beggar Sect disciples now scattered all over the capital had done their part spreading the gossip as well.
"Anyway, I've reached the point where I can pick and choose my commissions."
I muttered the words while looking down at the request forms heaped high on my desk.
Until now I had been racing all over creation just to find clients. In a lot of ways, it felt like a whole new world.
"At this rate, even Guildmaster Gamun is going to get jealous."
Jo Harang — former vagabond herself — said it with a faintly startled look at the blinding speed of the business boom.
The power to pull in demand from that many people was the power of a boss. For a guildmaster, it was influence and speaking rights among the vagabonds.
"With more options, work should get a lot easier, right, Boss?"
Ilhong scratched her cheek and tossed the question out of nowhere.
"Well… not necessarily."
I don't only take the easy jobs. I pick the ones that look profitable and seem likely to pile up good karma.
"It gets even harder from here? Is that… even possible?"
Ilhong, who had weathered everything with me from the very beginning except the Imperial Palace, asked with a pale face.
"With him, it might be…"
That came from Jo Harang, who had been tangled up with me for a shorter stretch but through thicker, heavier scrapes.
"Just what kind of things have all of you been through?"
One of the Beggar Sect disciples who had been watching our exchange opened his mouth with a look of pure shock.
Back when I had been disguised as Majungcheon, the worst I had dealt with was shuttling between Shaanxi and getting mixed up with the Blood Cult.
"It would take a while to explain, Park Chil."
He was my secret connection inside the Beggar Sect — the man who had early on marked me as Dragon Head Branch Leader material and quietly greased a lot of wheels for me. The one I called my little xiongdi.
With a Beggar Sect branch going up not far away, he dropped by the office whenever he got bored.
From what I heard, my good reputation in the Beggar Sect owed a lot to the steady stream of favorable stories this man had been telling about me. Thanks to that, the other disciples treated him as someone with an eye for the future — and as my personal hotline.
Though for some reason, ever since he started showing up, Ilhong's face had been looking a little dark.
"Park Chil. Among these commissions, anything I should filter out?"
What was the Beggar Sect, after all? The orthodox faction's greatest information network, built on the countless beggars it had scattered across the Central Plains.
The man in front of me was only a mid-level Four Knots disciple, but behind him stood the intelligence of a hundred thousand Beggar Sect members.
"Skip this one from the Oh household."
Park Chil scanned the piled requests, plucked one out, and flicked it far away.
"Why? The work looks straightforward and the fee is substantial."
"Master Oh is currently drowning in financial trouble. He doesn't have that kind of money. He just threw out a big number first so he could hire you."
Unbelievable. The gall of trying to hire a Transcendental Peak Realm master like me without even having the cash?
If there had been some unavoidable hardship, I might still have stepped up for the good karma. But this was calculated deception from the start.
"Ilhong. From now on, if anyone from the Oh household shows up, sprinkle salt at the door."
"Yes… I'll do that."
Truly worthy of the orthodox faction's greatest intelligence outfit. I nudged the rest of the requests toward him with a look that said, Keep talking.
"This client is posing as a victim, but they're actually the aggressor. Getting involved would be dangerous. And the contents of this request could entangle you with the imperial family — the risk is considerable…"
Park Chil analyzed the forms one by one, efficiently pulling out and organizing exactly what I needed to know.
A useful man, no question. And because he knew how to sketch out a future, the eager way he made himself useful to me was something I liked as well.
"This commission also looks like it would end with you harming an innocent party. Later, when Young Hero rises to a high position, someone might use it to find fault with you. For the sake of the sect's honor, you should avoid it."
And there it was again — that constant fretting over the Beggar Sect's future, and that particular attitude.
"Whoa, now what's this all of a sudden? Telling a plain troubleshooter to watch his step in case he rises high someday?"
"Hahaha. You're right. Look at me, getting ahead of myself… Still, you never know, do you?"
Apparently Park Chil was treating my formal recognition as the next Beggar Sect successor as all but settled.
Just like before, he was worming his way into my good graces with an eagerness that somehow never felt grating.
In every way, the man had both character and ability going for him.
"Honestly, that old man's temper is so foul that who knows how things will turn out later."
"Even so, I believe in you. If not the man who petitioned the Son of Heaven for the Beggar Sect's sake, who else could take that seat?"
"Ahem. Well, if you put it like that…"
The two of us swapped teacups and shared a warm, easy laugh.
And the warmer our mood grew, the darker Ilhong's expression became, bit by bit.
She was pretending not to care while shooting Park Chil faintly displeased looks — a little like jealousy?
Surely she wasn't getting jealous because someone with a fat information network and what looked like an upgraded version of her own skills had shown up, and now she thought her own usefulness was dropping?
The common hired hand's anxiety: I might be replaced.
Funny, since I have zero intention of doing anything of the sort.
I had made it this far thanks to her. A single word from this kid had helped me break through the wall into the Transcendental Peak Realm.
She had absolutely no reason to feel insecure, yet here she was fretting all by herself.
Was it because she had once been abandoned or betrayed? But her head was too sharp for that to be the whole story — she should know better.
Well. Later I could sit her down over a proper cup of tea and talk it through.
For now, work and commissions were flooding in from every direction, so I would take Park Chil's help first.
With that thought, I slurped the steeped tea like a successful businessman.
Two blades of light — sword and saber — shattered under the moonlight.
Normally, a rival's rise in realm would leave a person restless and on edge.
But Jo Harang was thoroughly delighted with the current situation.
Because it meant she could finally fight that man she considered her equal at full strength again.
"Mujin! Take my full power!"
"Uh — hey! Stop!"
KRA-KA-KRAK!
A clash between Transcendental Peak Realm masters. They had deliberately chosen an empty lot far from the office, but her distinctive saber arts and that tyrannical Saber Force quickly turned the entire area into a wreck.
"Hey, tone it down! Tone it down! I'm still at the baby-steps stage of Transcendental Peak!"
"No! I've been waiting for this day!"
Roaring like an excited tiger, Jo Harang charged Dan Mujin without a moment's pause.
A long sword and a massive saber met again and again in harsh metallic crashes, throwing off brilliant sparks as they parted.
Fierce qi waves surged out in every direction from the collisions of Sword Force and Saber Force.
And not far away, enduring that raging sword wind with her whole body, was a woman whose mood was sinking straight into the basement.
"Ahaha! Yes — this is it, Mujin!"
"What do you mean 'this is it'! Ease up already!"
Two Transcendental Peak martial artists trading techniques with pure joy on their faces.
Somehow they looked even better matched than usual.
Perhaps for masters of such a distant realm, crashing their martial arts together was simply more comfortable than a hundred spoken words.
"Haa…"
Ilhong sat on the ground with both knees drawn up and buried her face between them.
"Somehow it feels like… I'm the only one falling behind."
She had already given up on the idea of supporting the Boss with martial arts from the moment his strength had pulled so far ahead — and especially once Jo Harang joined them.
But now she was starting to lag in information power as well?
Ilhong thought of Park Chil, the Beggar Sect disciple who, for no payment at all, simply to get into the Boss's good graces, kept cheerfully handing over the latest intelligence and even confidential secrets.
Because of that, it felt like her place inside the office was slowly disappearing.
Was this what it felt like to be pushed to the back?
Clang! Cha-cha-chang!
The office was enjoying a boom, yet Ilhong's heart felt emptier than ever.
In the old days, the agency's rise had felt like her own joy.
"They used to say daytime words are heard by the Beggar Sect, and nighttime words by Haoman, didn't they?"
If the Beggar Sect was the orthodox faction's greatest information network, then Haoman was the greatest intelligence organization of the unorthodox and the underworld.
But lately she had heard that Haoman was acting less like an information guild and more like a pure profit syndicate.
And then there was the man before her eyes — the one who, with outstanding martial talent, had already reached the Transcendental Peak Realm at his age, and who looked ready to seize the considerable position of Beggar Sect successor.
They had once been fellow beggars drifting through the alleys together. And somehow, while she blinked, a gap this wide had opened.
"Ugh…"
On top of everything, even the imperial clan seemed to have their eyes on him lately.
That beggar boy she had been close to as a child had turned out to be a man whose ceiling no one could even begin to guess.
"Would a man like that… even have a reason to keep helping me…?"
At first she had thought he was helping because she was Haoman's heir.
But to someone already being treated as the de facto Beggar Sect successor, did that even mean anything?
In any case, Ilhong was churning through a thoroughly unsettled heart alone, never saying a word, just suffering in silence.
"I said I'd use him at first… and in the end, I'm the one being used…?"
She had tried to harden her heart, but the walls she had built against him kept thinning until they finally collapsed, and now she was the one being thoroughly led around.
"What am I supposed to do…"
Anxiety written plain on her face. A teenage girl in the thick of a storm of feelings.
And so, late at night, there was a girl fretting over something she had no need to fret over at all — simply because they had never sat down and talked.
The imperial decree permitting Beggar Sect disciples to enter the capital was announced.
Because of it, countless Beggar Sect members flooded into Beijing like a tidal wave.
And once they began thrashing anyone who had scorned beggars and brazenly establishing a branch right under everyone's noses, one power in Beijing found itself in utter chaos.
Their identity: the sole information organization that had monopolized the imperial capital until now.
Or rather — the organization now forced to split the capital and compete. Haoman.
"I knew that bastard was trouble. So this is how it ends up."
And inside Haoman, there was a woman who had known things would turn out this way.
She was Il-hye-hyang, Leader of the Sinbigak, currently disguised as the proprietress of Honghwaru.
"I hear the Beggar Sect disciples are already applying pressure on Haoman in every form, tangible and intangible."
According to the intelligence flowing into the Sinbigak, the Beggar Sect's movements were anything but ordinary.
They seemed to believe Haoman had been behind the earlier expulsion of Beggar Sect disciples, and were now making a play of their own.
From the moment they swarmed in like a hive the instant a single decree dropped, she had expected them to cause trouble.
"And on top of that, our Haoman's state of division is at its absolute worst…"
It had always been a cell-based organization with only a thin sense of collective identity.
Even so, under the cause of Haoman — the lowly banding together to protect one another — at least they had never wavered.
But recently the Haoman Leader had been overthrown in a rebellion, and the new Leader was a man who cared only for his own profit and advantage. The hearts of Haoman's members were nothing like before.
A house built on sand. Each Haoman member was only a weak foundation stone — but if they shook, even the peak of the building would eventually shake with them.
Perhaps that was simply the nature of an organization on the verge of collapse.
"So that's why you've sought me out in secret at this late hour, Sinbigak Leader?"
At a man's question, Il-hye-hyang nodded without a word.
"Yes, Muyeonggak Leader. In this merciless martial world, you are the only person I can still somewhat trust."
This was the man she had once suspected of sharing a secret affair with the new Haoman Leader, Heuk Jin-jo.
The same man about whom a rumor had once spread — thanks to certain little beggar brats — that he had a child.
That man was the Muyeonggak Leader standing before her now.
"I'm grateful for the trust, but so what? What do you propose we do?"
At his question, Il-hye-hyang smiled faintly and spoke.
"Just as we did once before — switch ships."