Jo Yeongyeong of the Jo Family
Around midday, another visitor arrived at the detective agency.
It was none other than Yangjo and Yangwi, escorts of the Eunseong Merchant Group.
"Well, well. Setting up your own office right in the middle of Beijing's busiest district."
"Looks like you're doing better than I thought. I'm jealous."
The older escorts tossed out envious remarks the moment they walked in. For salaried men drawing a regular paycheck, owning a private business in Beijing was the kind of dream you barely dared to dream.
"I heard from Ohchil that the job hit a snag. So what exactly happened?"
Ohchil had already called in the second-class escorts who handled the practical work, then gone upstairs to catch up with Ilhong after so long apart.
"This might take a while."
"How about a cup of tea first?"
In the Central Plains, pouring a cup of tea the moment someone sat down—or before any real conversation began—was an ancient tradition and culture all its own. The escorts, settling into the clients' seats, asked if they might be served a cup.
"I'm sorry, but the tea leaves have all gone bad. They're not fit to drink."
The tea caddy on the outside looked perfectly fine. Inside, however, lay the concentrated malice of the agency staff.
"Hah. Really now."
"Still holding a grudge over how we treated you before?"
No—it wasn't a grudge. The leaves truly were undrinkable. Not that the escorts knew that. Feeling snubbed by the cold reception, they helped themselves and steeped their own cups.
"Pffah!"
"Cough!"
They promptly spat out the tea, overwhelmed by a bitterness and astringency that went far beyond the pale. See? I'd told them the leaves were so far gone they were only good for unwanted guests, and still they insisted.
"Why on earth would you keep tea like this in the office?"
Their faces said it all: they'd heard the place was making good money, so why were we brewing something no better than weeds?
I answered the question without a word, simply turning my gaze toward Jo Harang, Ilhong's partner in crime. She quietly averted her eyes.
"Anyway—what kind of trouble has the Jo Family run into?"
I had a track record of cleaning up other troubleshooters' messes. A firefighter for the profession, you could say.
"Do you know Miss Jo Yeongyeong of the Jo Family?"
"Of course I do. Isn't she the most spoiled young lady in the whole estate?"
Rummaging through my memories, I couldn't recall her having a particularly pleasant personality. I'd been openly looked down on, too.
"Is that so? She was nice to me."
Jo Harang, crunching through a sesame cake, shot back with a puzzled look.
"She would have been, to you and Ilhong."
With me specifically, she had been the spoiled heiress of a wealthy house. Back then I was still known as one of the Seven Lucky Wanderers of the Clouds—a nobody who'd supposedly lucked into a reputation. I still remembered her calling me a pack mule.
"Anyway, the young lady has come of marriageable age, so the family started sending matchmakers all over the place. Talks were going back and forth with several households in Beijing, and then…"
Yangjo and Yangwi took turns laying out the long, winding story between sips of the lukewarm water I'd handed them.
"Recently they managed to settle a match with a decent family. Gifts had already been exchanged, and a formal introduction to the fiancé was right around the corner."
"But the young lady… well, she seemed to hate the marriage the family arranged so much that she tried to run away again and again. That's why people like us got hired—to stand guard over the Jo estate."
Ah. So Ohchil's party hadn't been hired to keep outsiders from breaking in. They'd been hired to keep someone on the inside from breaking out.
The head of the Jo Family commanded no small number of businesses and connections even within Beijing, which made him someone of considerable importance to Eun Hwaran herself, the leader of the escorts. In short, he was one of the Eunseong Merchant Group's key trading partners.
"You said you were standing guard, though. The fact that you've come to me means…"
"Ah. Yes… that little wildcat of a young lady finally slipped our watch and vanished."
"Hah."
They'd assigned three martial artists just to keep her from disappearing before the betrothal day—and she'd shaken all of them and gone to ground. For all I knew, the heiress had some secret talent for stealth techniques.
"I still can't figure out how we lost her."
"But if we act now, we might still be able to salvage things. That's why we came to you after hearing Ohchil's recommendation."
If they could recover her before the day of the betrothal and deliver her to the venue, there was still a chance of patching things up. In other words, there was still an opportunity to cover up their failure and keep the escort business afloat.
"It's a pity, isn't it? Being forced into a lifelong vow with someone you never wanted."
A woman's voice, colored with quiet sympathy. Ilhong had come downstairs at some point and added a rueful remark of her own. As far as I knew, she too was destined for a political marriage as a member of Haomu Gate, the largest unorthodox information sect.
"Well, doesn't everyone do it that way? You enjoy the family's wealth, so you take on the obligations that come with it."
Jo Harang, having finally cleaned out the office's sesame cakes, delivered the line with a thoroughly unimpressed look. This was an era where the idea of marrying for love was thin on the ground. Anyone raised on a family's privileges was expected to obey that family's decisions—that mindset was everywhere.
"So, Young Hero Dan—we know it's shameless of us to ask, but will you help us?"
Yangjo and Yangwi set down their empty cups and watched my face carefully. Beside Ilhong, Ohchil was sending me the same pleading look.
"I'm not doing this because I like you gentlemen. I'm helping for Ohchil's sake—and Sister Eun Hwaran's."
The moment I agreed, Yangjo, Yangwi, and Ohchil all let out long sighs of relief. But it was far too early to relax. Affairs of the heart and marriage troubles were never the sort of thing a single troubleshooter could fix with a snap of the fingers.
"Let's head to the Jo estate first."
I needed a more detailed account from the head of the Jo Family himself. Rising from my seat, I said we should go to the last place Jo Yeongyeong had been seen. The others at the agency made ready to follow.
I stepped into a grand mansion planted squarely in the heart of Beijing. Tall gates rose overhead, flanked by intricately carved stone guardian beasts. In a broad garden of carefully laid ponds and pavilions, the head of the Jo Family stood with his hands clasped behind his back, waiting for us. Word of my arrival had clearly gone ahead.
"My, my—who do we have here? Isn't this Young Hero Dog-Beating Dragon, whose renown is shaking the entire Central Plains these days!"
Lord Jo turned the same polished social smile he always wore for famous figures of the Murim full upon me. He played the generous, open-handed host, making a point of being warm toward a martial artist. Watching that peculiar reaction, I felt it sink in all over again: I had climbed from a worthless third-class wanderer into the ranks of true Murim masters.
"It's been a while. Have you been well, Lord Jo?"
He laughed heartily, as if of course he had, and clapped me on the shoulder.
"By the way—are those stories true…?"
"Which stories do you mean?"
Right. This man had always been the type to hang on every tale and rumor from the martial world, like any avid enthusiast.
"That you befriended the Alliance Leader, that you rebuked the great Thunder Sword Moyong Cheon… I've also heard you cut down a jiangshi from the Jinju Eon Family, and that you slew an elder of the Blood Sect. Which of it is true, and which is false?"
We had once been tied together by a job, so he had apparently been collecting every scrap of news about an acquaintance's string of exploits.
"All of it is true, for what it's worth."
"…Good heavens. You—who used to be a second-class wanderer?"
Lord Jo still seemed to harbor a romantic longing for the Murim. Curiosity and awe mixed in his eyes.
"Remarkable. To grow so quickly… I must have been blind not to recognize the next greatest under heaven standing right beside me. Hah!"
The next greatest under heaven. Hadn't people used to say that about Young Hero Namgung Jin, the Blue Cloud Sword?
In any case, idle greetings and Murim gossip were not why I had come. I cut straight to the point.
"First, we need to establish Miss Jo Yeongyeong's whereabouts."
"Ah, of course… Knowing that you yourself have come to help, I couldn't feel more reassured! Hahaha!"
With trouble in the family and a master of my caliber riding to the rescue, Lord Jo looked thoroughly pleased and deeply relieved.
Jo Yeongyeong had vanished from the household that morning, so not even a full day had passed. In cases of disappearance—or "escape"—the golden window mattered. The longer you waited, the more the search area ballooned out of control.
And yet neither Lord Jo nor his children seemed especially worried about Yeongyeong. They grumbled as if they had half expected this all along.
"It's obvious, isn't it? She didn't want the wedding, so she went and hid at a friend's house."
"Honestly. We brothers all married whoever the family chose for us."
The Jo brothers seemed to regard it as little more than a theatrical runaway fit. They were already talking about using the chance to teach the tomboy a proper lesson.
"Hmm."
There was a real chance of that, so I would need to ask around among them for places she might take refuge.
"By the way, young masters—why has Miss Jo Yeongyeong been so dead set against this marriage?"
I put the question to Lord Jo's grumbling sons. Had the intended groom been that terrible? They said no.
"He's a fine fiancé. Looks, background, temperament—nothing particularly off about him. Ordinary, I suppose you'd say."
Of course Lord Jo doted on his daughter; he had used a matchmaker to arrange a decent match.
"Then why refuse it so fiercely? Because she wanted her freedom?"
Apparently not that either. If anything, she had always dreamed of meeting someone she truly wanted and building a happy home with him. The more I heard, the less sense it made—so I pressed for the reason she had fled.
"That would be… because of the man she's been pining after."
A man problem. So we were tangled up in a matter of the heart after all.
"Our little sister has had her heart set on someone for a long time."
Even after all this time, she still carried a torch for him. Being forced into a match with another man on top of that had only made her resistance worse.
"Who is this man?"
If we followed him, we might find Jo Yeongyeong's trail easily enough. I asked the question with the sudden hope that the case might resolve itself without much trouble.
"Well, you see… it was a handsome young man she met long ago on the road to the Dragon-Phoenix Gathering. At the time he was just some nobody of a wanderer, as I recall… Wait—!"
Mid-explanation, Lord Jo's eldest son spotted Ilhong standing beside me and flinched. Then he thrust out a finger, pointing straight at Ilhong—who was currently disguised as a strikingly handsome, androgynous young man.
"I-it's that young hero right there! The handsome one Jo Yeongyeong never stopped talking about!"
The certainty in that shout drew every eye in the vicinity onto Ilhong at my side.
"…Huh."
Come to think of it—long ago, when Ilhong had still hovered on the line between pretty boy and beautiful youth, a certain heiress had fallen head over heels and kept dragging him into her carriage without rest. Meanwhile I had trudged along on foot like a pack animal.
"Ilhong, you sinner of a man."
"…"
I glanced over and muttered as much. Ilhong's face settled into an expression of pure, speechless disbelief.