The Zone Forbidden to Men
The sparring grounds of Shaolin Temple were blanketed in soft earth.
Under the watchful eyes of their superiors, the lay disciples took turns proving themselves, kicking up dust as they traded blows in the dirt.
The order of matches cycled quickly, and it was not long before my turn came—a spar against Jo Gon.
The young man appeared before me with that same irksome air about him.
"I took you for a true friend…!"
I shouted, trembling with a surge of betrayal.
Jo Gon, who had only just parted from me with a laugh, gave me a look that said, Has this guy lost his mind?
"Friend, have you gone mad? What's gotten into you all of a sudden?"
The way he had casually steered my attention toward Beopgwang, then slipped away to move on his own… He must have anticipated the pursuit, and likely worked out our identities long ago.
For all I knew, that ambush itself had been a trap laid to confirm who we really were.
"Friend? Don't you dare call me that, you traitor!"
I had been hungry, he had fed me, and I had simply thought him a decent person.
I thrust a foot forward and sent a spray of dirt exploding ahead of me as I roared.
"No, seriously—what is this about? I even saved you my favorite steamed bun."
Genuine bewilderment clouded Jo Gon's eyes. If this was acting, it was acting of the highest caliber.
"You're that martial artist from the Emei Sect—the one who eloped with a man, aren't you?"
"…"
My blunt throw caught him square. The indignation on Jo Gon's face faltered; I caught the faint tremor that ran through his cheek.
For the briefest of instants, the mask nearly slipped.
"…I have no idea what you're talking about, friend. You've been spouting nonsense since the moment you opened your mouth."
"That look just now already gave you away."
Even under my relentless bluffing and provocation, Jo Gon clung desperately to the performance, trying to smother every reaction.
"So what in the world are you going on about? I honestly can't make sense of a word—"
Talking was getting me nowhere.
Killing Star—lend me a hand.
I gathered the murderous intent that burned crimson within me into a tight knot and fired it at the person standing before me like a single, concentrated shot.
She flinched hard, her body reacting violently to the sudden killing intent on pure instinct.
Whoosh—!
When I moved again, Jo Gon—who moments earlier had not so much as twitched—responded with superhuman speed, driven by the raw will to live.
To any onlooker, both of us had simply jerked once. But the two of us already had a fair measure of each other's speed and martial prowess.
In particular, the footwork she had nearly unveiled just now was that distinctive Emei style—the very movement she had once demonstrated for me, claiming it would help Ki-hyo and Jeong-yo track someone down.
"See? I was right after all."
"…"
Jo Gon's face went rigid. This time, he could not even manage a denial.
So it really was Hye-yul Sinni, the female master of the Emei Sect.
I should have been suspicious from the start of anyone who got overly friendly for no good reason.
"Lusting after a man, betraying your sect, stealing a sacred treasure, and then sneaking into a sanctuary forbidden to women…"
The words You ought to be ashamed of yourself tumbled out of my mouth on their own.
"…It wasn't like that! There were other circumstances—hidden ones."
"Then what? What circumstances?"
I asked without letting the ugly pressure of my aura drop.
Hye-yul Sinni, conscious of the eyes gathering around us, whispered urgently.
"I can't talk here… Let's finish the spar and speak somewhere quiet."
"Don't want to. I'm going all out right here—if only to expose your identity to the entire world."
Her expression darkened further at that.
"…Calm down. If you do this, we're both finished."
She threatened that not only her identity but mine as well would be laid bare for everyone to see.
"I'm not finished, though. At worst, I only faked being a lay disciple. But you? A woman who walked straight into a sanctuary forbidden to women—and a famous martial artist of the Emei Sect, no less. Your name will be all over the Central Plains."
In a threat like this, the one with more to lose always folds first.
She should have looked before she leaped.
"D-Don't do this. Please, just calm down and hear me out."
Her voice shook, as if she truly believed I might go through with it.
"Don't feel like calming down. I'm about to charge you as is."
They say a friend turned enemy is the most terrifying kind.
I kept needling her in the most infuriating tone I could muster, and she bit down hard on her lip, her face twisting with frustration.
"Wow, Boss. You're a really terrible person."
"Quiet."
Ilhong, watching from the side, spoke in something like admiration.
I shut her mouth before I could decide whether that counted as a compliment.
"Before we do anything else, let me ask you one thing. How did you know I was an outsider who'd come hunting you?"
My cover had been prepared by the Beggar Sect itself—there should have been nothing to give me away. The disguise ought to have been flawless.
"Well… when people come to Shaolin's main temple, even those from powerful families tend to shrink a little. But you were far too full of swagger…"
In short, my unshakable, go-my-own-way aura—the kind that wouldn't flinch no matter what hit it—had been the problem.
I had lacked that peculiar air ordinary people gave off, the instinctive intimidation before a great orthodox sect.
"The Boss really isn't much good at disguises. No matter what you do, it shows."
Ilhong, a master of male disguise and a virtuoso with human-skin masks, nodded in emphatic agreement.
A proper disguise, she lectured, required changing everything—build, speech, voice, mannerisms. She proceeded to pick apart my entire approach to going undercover.
"Fine, you're amazing. A real man among men."
"…Tch."
Years of living as a man must have left her with a peculiar sense of pride.
At my sarcasm, Ilhong pulled a long face and started thumping my back with her fists.
"All right then. Shall we pick up where we left off? Let's have a match."
I had heard she was a master of the Transcendental Peak Realm.
I spoke while directing a monstrous wave of fighting spirit and killing intent that only she could fully feel.
Sensing that I was about to charge in without so much as a word, the female master of Emei took up a defensive stance with a look of pure despair.
This was a woman who had already lied to my face once, calling me a friend. Whatever her reasons, I could hear them after I had thoroughly subdued her.
"What a fool…"
That was her muttered judgment.
A fool, was I? Not words I cared to hear from the woman who had turned the entire Emei Sect upside down.
I circulated the Sacred Cloud Mind Method and forced internal energy through every meridian in my body.
At the very moment I was about to unleash a vast surge of power through the Yongcheon acupoint and crash down on her—
"Amitabha. Young benefactor, would you kindly stop for a moment?"
A low, deep voice seeped in from right beside me like a breath of wind.
I had not sensed so much as a whisper of approach. Startled, I hastily retreated several steps.
"And who might the elder be…?"
White brows stirred in the breeze; a long, silver-streaked beard hung from his chin. From his entire being flowed an otherworldly refinement—an immortal-like high monk of the purest presence.
"…Th-The Abbot?!"
I learned who he was thanks to the Shaolin monks around us, who had frozen in shock.
"Why would he appear at a mere lay disciples' spar…"
"He barely shows his face even for the temple's great affairs…"
Apparently he was not a man who appeared often, preferring seclusion. His sudden arrival left everyone staring our way in disbelief.
The Abbot of Shaolin, Beopseong.
A high monk of Shaolin, known more by rumor than sight—he had not even shown himself at the Dragon-Phoenix Gathering.
Clear light flashed in both his eyes, and an ineffable, profound mystery flowed through him. He was on an entirely different plane from a certain old man who tended to swing his fists first and ask questions later.
"B-Boss. Why is the Abbot of Shaolin standing in front of us?"
Ilhong helpfully voiced the exact question on my mind.
Unlike the murmuring, restless crowd, the monk before us addressed us with a calm and kindly face.
"Benefactor Muhong, would you not hear out the unfinished story of this one who carries many burdens?"
His voice was not loud, yet it carried a dignity that silenced every other sound.
If even the Abbot of Shaolin had stepped forward to settle the matter, then this truly was no simple case of a woman who had run off after falling for a man.
There seemed to be some hidden layer to this commission that I still knew nothing about.
"But listening to someone who's already lied once…"
As I hesitated, the Abbot's clear gaze pierced straight through me.
"Is that not true of you as well, Benefactor?"
"…"
My mouth closed. I had been concealing my identity too. Fair enough—I had nothing to say to that.
"Well. All right, then."
Only then did Hye-yul Sinni let out a long breath of relief.
Fine. We would move somewhere quiet and hear her out.
When I nodded, the Abbot answered with a benevolent smile.
The deepest reaches of Shaolin Temple.
Beyond the windows stretched the distant ridgelines of Mount Song, and the very air of the chamber seemed steeped in the breath of generations of Shaolin Abbots.
There, in the quarters where Beopseong resided, we finally heard the true story Hye-yul Sinni had been suffering alone to keep hidden.
"So what you're saying is, you didn't actually elope after falling for a Shaolin monk?"
In the troubleshooter business, you run into that sort of romantic melodrama often enough that I had simply assumed this was another one.
Hye-yul Sinni's explanation stood in complete contrast to what the female masters of Emei had commissioned us to do.
I tilted my head and asked again whether it was true. She thumped her chest in pure indignation as she poured out her defense.
"Of course not. How could it be? Because from the start, I…"
"From the start, you…?"
At my prompt, Hye-yul Sinni hesitated a beat, drew a deep breath, and spoke.
"I prefer women to men…"
She dropped that bombshell of a confession without warning.
Her face carried the look of someone finally free after carrying a long-held secret.
"…"
Without a word, I quietly pulled Ilhong over to my side.
Good heavens. A woman that dangerous had been living in a sanctuary of women, a zone forbidden to men.
"D-Does this mean you believe me now?"
"I'll believe you."
The Central Plains was extremely conservative on such matters. A confession like that, staked on a master's honor, could be taken as truth.
"You don't seem to mind men sticking close to each other either, so I found the courage to say it."
She said it shyly, looking at the way I had drawn Ilhong into my arms.
"Mmm."
Where was I even supposed to begin explaining this one? I scratched at my temple in mild distress.
Untangling every complicated misunderstanding sounded exhausting, so I decided to simply let it slide without a word.
"So what's the real reason you ran, then? Did you get caught revealing your… preferences?"
Hye-yul Sinni kept circling without saying the actual reason, dawdling around the point.
I pressed her on why she had fled all the way out here.
She gazed out the window at the mountain ridges and answered heavily.
"Because I sensed something strange about Hyein Satae, the sect leader of Emei…"
Her voice was nearly a whisper.
As if confessing, she laid out the trouble festering inside the Emei Sect.
"Strange how? In what way?"
Come to think of it, it was the sect leader of Emei herself who had sent people after this woman and commissioned the hunt.
It felt as though the commission had come first and the perspective had been deliberately inverted. Something large was clearly tangled up in all of this.
"Recently… you must have heard the rumor that the sect leader's realm rose another level?"
"Yes. After long years of cultivation, she finally ascended to the Flame Realm."
I had not known that myself—Ilhong answered from beside me.
"It was from then on. How should I put it… as if the person herself had changed a little?"
Her realm rose, and the person seemed replaced. Judging by the context, it had not been a change for the better.
"Could it have been a disguise of some kind?"
Faint as the chance was, a genuine substitution was possible. I seized on it.
"No, it wasn't that. I even brushed her skin under the pretense of chance, so I know. What felt wrong was… an unsettling aura that no one walking the path of the Dao should ever carry…"
Not a disguise either, then. She murmured about the secret change that had come over her master of late.
And once she began digging into that part, the sect leader noticed—and turned on her, threatening her safety and her life.
In a blind panic she had fled all the way to Shaolin and taken shelter with the Abbot, with whom she already had some prior connection.
"That does sound strange."
I frowned as I spoke.
"Right? It's truly unlike her. I've always admired the sect leader, so I know these things well."
Hye-yul Sinni dropped yet another staggering confession as casually as breathing.
Without a word, I pulled Ilhong even more firmly into my arms.