Shaolin Temple
The Emei Sect had one particularly famous combat unit.
An elite force drawn from the most skilled women of the sect for dangerous missions and work beyond the mountain gates—the Crouching Tiger Temple.
True to a name that meant taming tigers, every last one of them was worth a hundred ordinary fighters, and their martial prowess rivaled even the Arhat warrior-monks of Shaolin Temple.
And now, a portion of that Crouching Tiger Temple had taken on a critical assignment and, using lightness techniques without pause, raced all the way to Beijing.
"A yellow dragon filling the entire field of view… so this is Beijing."
On Beijing's city gate, a painted yellow dragon surged skyward with fierce energy. A woman visiting the imperial capital for the first time muttered under her breath, catching herself as if overwhelmed by the scale and majesty of it.
"Nine days. Running lightness techniques day and night was worth it after all, Gi Hyo."
Jeong Yo, standing beside her, answered with a smile.
Two women of the Emei Sect, sent by their Sect Leader's command to find a troubleshooter in Beijing named Dan Mujin. They had shed their white robes for plain martial attire and melted into the crowded streets of the capital.
After asking around, they learned that the troubleshooter's office was out on the outskirts.
"Is this Dan Mujin fellow really worth going to all this trouble for?"
Jeong Yo murmured low, suspicion plain in her voice. In her experience, "troubleshooters" were usually half-baked unorthodox martial artists who would do anything for coin—a low breed of hireling.
"Beggar Sect people don't put certainty into uncertain information. Let's trust them for now and go in."
Gi Hyo answered calmly.
They made their presence known and knocked, but the office inside felt empty. Just as the two Emei women, who had come so far, began to feel hollow with disappointment—thinking he must have stepped out for some business—a beggar passing by stopped and spoke to them.
"What brings you to this office?"
His clothes were shabby and rough, but he wore a pouch of alms at his waist, so Gi Hyo and Jeong Yo answered carefully.
"We are people of a certain family here in Beijing…"
"…and we wish to entrust a commission to Young Hero Dan Mujin."
The Beggar Sect man listened with a blank face, then looked the women up and down, snorted a short laugh, and spoke.
"That breathing, that stance—and the swords. Emei Sect."
"…"
Their identities cut open in a single stroke, the two women clamped their mouths shut and held their silence.
"If you're looking for the man called Dan Mujin, try over that way. He'll be somewhere around the mouth of the alley."
Beggar Sect people always knew too much; it made conversation awkward.
So the Emei women entered a rear-alley clearing that looked straight out onto the main road. Unlike the thoroughfare, it went unmaintained—dust hanging in sparse clouds, nameless weeds grown thick.
When the troubleshooter the beggar had mentioned was nowhere to be seen, Gi Hyo and Jeong Yo scanned the area, baffled.
"He said the one named Dan Mujin would be here…"
"Even Beggar Sect information isn't always accurate, it seems."
Could the Beggar Sect really get something as simple as a location wrong? At this rate, even the reason they'd recommended him in the first place was starting to look dubious.
The moment the name Dan Mujin was spoken, something rustled in the weeds—and a bizarre figure shot upright.
"Looking for me?"
"…Mother!"
The Emei women startled so hard they made an odd little sound.
First shock: the grotesque sight of a man who had stuck weeds, leaves, and twigs all over himself until he seemed fused with nature itself. Second shock: that they had completely failed to sense his presence.
"What on earth is that outfit…?"
Jeong Yo asked, as if demanding an explanation for the strange camouflage.
"It's a custom-made ghillie suit… Anyway, you were looking for me, right?"
The young man introduced himself as Dan Mujin. Half dazed, the two women nodded that yes, they had been.
"But what were you even doing out here?"
Gi Hyo asked, still smoothing a hand over her startled chest.
"Adultery investigation. And you?"
Dan Mujin explained that almost no one ever came this way, and that from here he had a clear view of the secret entrance of the tile-roofed house across the way—so he had been lying in wait.
"A Beggar Sect man told us that if we wanted to find you, we should come here…"
"What—he went as far as giving away my position? Ah… right. I did ask them to steer commissions my way if any came up."
Apparently some arrangement had already been made with the beggars. Jeong Yo, who had been watching and listening to this entire farce with an increasingly incredulous face, finally couldn't hold it in.
"A master of the orthodox path who made a name for himself at the Dragon-Phoenix Gathering… skulking around digging into commoners' private lives like this. Are you serious?"
An Emei master, branding what Dan Mujin was doing as base and shameful. An adultery investigation. For women who had spent their whole lives refining body and mind on a mountain, it was a way of earning a living that simply defied comprehension.
"You don't understand at all. An adultery investigation is the process of restoring justice."
Dan Mujin explained it as a means of recovering a client's trust and, beyond that, of bringing peace back into a household.
"Does that even make sense? Marriage is founded on mutual trust. The very act of suspecting your partner already goes against the Dao."
Jeong Yo preached the Daoist teachings she had learned in the Emei Sect: that even suspicion was not permitted.
"What about it doesn't make sense? Once a seed of doubt sprouts, it only grows until you can't control it. In that case, isn't it better to hire someone like me from the start and cut the sprout clean out?"
Dan Mujin answered every line without yielding an inch, and Jeong Yo's face went flat with displeasure.
"Even so… to use the martial power of the Transcendental Peak Realm on something as trivial as the affairs of men and women… how utterly base."
Talking with her, Dan Mujin was starting to feel that she was truly, stubbornly dense—and that words were barely getting through.
"So then—what commission have you pure and upright ladies of the Emei Sect come to entrust to a base man like me?"
Since they had said they came for a job, Dan Mujin asked for the point.
"Ah."
"…"
With the look of people who had dug their own graves, the Emei women fumbled and could not quite spit out the contents of the commission.
Well, well.
A little later, at the troubleshooter's office on the outskirts of Beijing.
The warm fragrance of guest tea filled the room. Having spilled the entire contents of their commission, the two Emei women called Gi Hyo and Jeong Yo kept sneaking glances away from my eyes.
"So in short…"
Crunching roasted peanuts between my teeth, I swung one leg idly and went on.
"The Emei Sect's greatest prodigy and candidate for Sect Leader fell for a man and ran off to Shaolin Temple?"
That was a full-blown disaster. They had lost the sect's foundation of martial arts and their next Sect Leader in one stroke.
"A-and… the Heaven-Interceptive Sword, Emei's sacred treasure, has disappeared as well…"
Jeong Yo added one more fact in a voice that barely crawled out of her throat.
A total catastrophe, then.
"And the people who come to me with a commission like this are the ones who just casually lecture me about how I earn my rice? Is that right?"
"Ahem."
At my remark, both women hung their heads with nothing left to say. Their napes flushed red with rising shame.
"We spoke without thinking. Please… let it pass."
When a paying client goes that far, you let it pass. I snorted a short laugh and stuffed another handful of peanuts into my mouth.
"Boss, then what about the previous job?"
A bitter commission to identify the lover of a cheating spouse. Ilhong asked as if failure was not an option—if only to keep the words written on the sign out front of the office.
"Almost done. I just have to go tell them who the other party is."
Then the client would boil over with rage and go storming after the adulterer. That was the real highlight of this kind of job, the fun part—but with the next client already here, it looked like I would have to leave in a hurry without getting to watch this time.
They said the matter was urgent, so even lightness techniques at full speed, no less.
"Mujin, so we're going to be flush for a while again?"
"Yeah. Call it rain after a drought."
When people get their heads flipped by love, they stop caring even about the terrifying eyes of the imperial court. A famous trading house's chief had pressed a huge sum into my hands and begged me to find her at once.
The commissions I take are either for accumulating good karma or for earning a living. This one was firmly the latter.
"Anyway—Shaolin Temple. I've heard plenty of stories and seen it a few times. Ilhong, you know it well?"
"Of course I know it well. It's that Shaolin Temple."
Even Ilhong, who knew everything except what she didn't know, said she knew it well. Right—the head of the Nine Great Sects, the pillar of the orthodox path with its long and shining tradition: Shaolin Temple.
And we would have to sneak into a place like that with impure intentions and root someone out.
"Harang and Ilhong will have to stay behind for now."
At my mutter, the office's two employees immediately rebelled.
"What? Why?"
"I want to go too. Why are you trying to do it alone?"
Why am I going alone?
"It's a forbidden zone for women. No women allowed in at all, remember?"
I answered while stuffing the necessary gear into a bundle before setting out on the long journey. Ilhong immediately stuck close and whispered into my ear, as if that was not acceptable.
"This time I'm definitely going with you."
"Didn't you hear what I just said? It's far, and it's a place only men can go."
"You've always treated me like a boy. And now you're saying this?"
…Yeah, I didn't really have an answer for that. Ilhong pressed her case hard with a line that was difficult to refute. And as she started packing her things beside me, Jo Harang smacked her knee as if she had just had a revelation.
"Right, Ilhong. You made that human-skin mask last time, and you're good at disguises—so just dress me up as a man."
Jo Harang suggested she go with us to Henan Province in male disguise. The instant she said it, both of our gazes dropped to her chest.
"That might be hard to hide."
"…Yeah. Probably."
Making something that isn't there is easy. Making something that is there disappear is a little harder. That's just how disguises work.
"Stop staring, Boss."
"Ahem. I was only checking whether it was possible."
Pure intentions, I swear.
"So I'm stuck house-sitting again? That is so boring… Ilhong's lucky."
At that remark, Ilhong snuck a look down at her own chest. She bit her lip lightly, then lifted her chin again.
"Th-that, well. You're still growing, Ilhong. Don't worry about it too much."
"Please be quiet, Boss."
"Shall I?"
I nodded and hurried out of the office.
One of the greatest landmarks of the Central Plains across both past and present—the famous Shaolin Temple.
It sat in the center of Henan Province. Climb higher than the mountainside we had visited before, and when you reached Shaoshi Peak you would find the most famous great sect even in the martial novels: the full vista of Shaolin Temple would open before your eyes.
"Oh. So this is Shaolin Temple."
Once we crossed the rugged mountain terrain, the form of Shaolin—said to stand at the peak of the Murim—was revealed. The vast monastic complex, carrying a thousand years of history, nestled into the ridgeline so naturally it seemed to have become one with the mountain itself.
"And that Emei woman is supposed to be hiding in here?"
This was a place where the spirit of the orthodox path still ran deep—but our purpose in coming today was thoroughly impure.
"The monk who seduced her will be hiding here too, Boss."
I nodded at Ilhong's point.
Today, we were no ordinary visitors.