A Name I Know All Too Well
Crash, bang, clatter.
The sound of someone tumbling down the stairs and bursting outside.
Old Man Jang came barreling out the door with a face flushed red, then spotted me and Ilhong and wore an expression of pure disbelief.
“You… you’re that little beggar brat from back then!”
The street performer who had come last year hadn’t died after all—he was back again.
The moment he recognized me, his face crumpled into a scowl.
“Old Man Jang, if you borrow money you pay it back. Why the hell are you playing dumb?”
I flapped the promissory note right in front of his nose as I spoke.
His beard quivered as he jabbed a finger at me.
“You insolent little—! Where the devil did you get that note this time?!”
At the word that a beggar had shown up, two servants came charging out of the shop the way they always did, clubs already in hand.
“This? I got it from Guildmaster Gam Un.”
“……What? Don’t tell me you’ve gone and joined the ronin?”
The old man flinched and shot the question back the instant the Guildmaster of the Ronin Guild rolled off the tongue of a kid he’d written off as a beggar.
I just shrugged one shoulder instead of answering. Ilhong leaned in and whispered in my ear.
“You’re not an official ronin yet, you know.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that.”
If I finished this job, I’d be official anyway. Might as well start spending the future rank a little early.
“Anyway, the client’s demand is simple: pay back at least the principal, Old Man Jang.”
“……You cocky little shit. This is between me and Brother Wang alone. Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong and get lost.”
Telling a ronin who made his living sticking his nose into other people’s business not to interfere… that was like telling a sparrow to walk past a mill without stopping.
“Funny how a man who claims it’s private still dragged in his constable relative.”
He hadn’t paid a single coin of interest, and he’d kept blocking the client every time the man tried to petition the authorities. On top of that he’d used his connections to thrash and drive off every ronin who came calling.
“…….”
With no comeback ready, Old Man Jang just clamped his mouth shut and glared. Quietly he traded looks with the two servants standing behind him.
Bad sign. People get violent when they run out of words.
“Only two of them today, huh? Perfect. Those annoying brats—break one arm and one leg each.”
See? Didn’t deviate from the script by so much as an inch.
Murim types, I swear. The second talking fails, it’s straight to violence.
“Resist and we’ll break the other arm for free.”
“Just take the beating quietly!”
The two servants charged in swinging their clubs and spouting nonsense.
Whoosh!
I folded at the waist and slipped the first strike. Then I drove a palm strike loaded with internal energy straight into the man’s gut.
“Ghk!”
With a sound like leather tearing, one servant went flying nearly a full zhang and hit the ground.
The second attack I cut off with ghost-like footwork, stepping half a pace inside his range, then planted my fist in his jaw.
Thud!
The yell he’d been winding up for snapped shut with a click of teeth.
The two sturdy servants crumpled one after the other, completely limp. The whole thing was over in the blink of an eye.
Old Man Jang’s eyes flew wide at the fluid, disciplined movements that were anything but ordinary.
“You… where the hell did you learn martial arts like that…?”
I wasn’t the same kid who’d brawled with neighborhood beggars anymore. This body now held seven years of internal energy—a proper martial artist of the Murim.
“Same old nasty habits, Grandpa. How does a man even think of breaking kids’ arms and legs?”
“That’s right, that’s right.”
Ilhong nodded along beside me, chiming in.
I rolled both shoulders with a crack and started walking toward him. Old Man Jang flinched and scrambled backward.
“D-don’t come any closer.”
“Don’t wanna.”
I’d learned that from Hwang Geolgae. Commands are a privilege reserved for the strong.
One step, two steps. Given the mountain of bad karma he’d piled up, the closer I got the paler his face became.
“A martial artist bullying commoners… have you no shame?!”
Thick-skinned bastard, that one.
“You’re not ashamed of defaulting on a loan and playing dumb? A person ought to have some sense of shame.”
“Exactly. You used that money to expand this whole building and still won’t pay a single coin of interest. That’s just petty.”
Ilhong and I took turns laying into him. Old Man Jang ground his yellow teeth with a grating sound.
“Shut your mouths! Sometimes payments slip when you’re running a business! And for that you humiliate me and hire ronin…? Now I’m too pissed off to pay you anything!”
Veins stood out on his neck as he dug in his heels. That right there was the real thuggery.
“What a piece of work—sweet when it suits him, bitter the second it doesn’t. Cut the crap and pay up.”
The classic type who swallows the sweet and spits out the bitter.
“I don’t have a single coin for trash like you!”
“Guess some old men only learn after a beating.”
Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Break one of his limbs the way he’d planned to break ours and he’d probably start seeing sense.
“Hmph. Lay a finger on me and my constable relative will thrash the lot of you, then make sure you never set foot in Beijing again!”
The second I moved to squeeze him like a dried squid, he started waving the constable’s authority around as a threat—the exact same leverage that had crushed every ronin who lacked connections or backing. I didn’t even bat an eye.
“So you’ll report this to the yamen constables too, then?”
“Report what?”
“Milyangjam.”
The secret no one was supposed to know slipped from my mouth, and Old Man Jang jerked as if he’d been stabbed with a needle.
“W-what nonsense is that?”
I could hear the brazen confidence cracking in his voice.
“I hear you’ve been selling silk fabric dirt cheap. A man like you doesn’t just give up profit for no reason. Right?”
“……Hah. So that’s what this is. You’re trying to frame an innocent man without a scrap of proof. I should never have wasted words on mongrels like you.”
He tried to storm off, declaring he was done entertaining us.
Then a few words from Ilhong froze his busy feet in place.
“Il-hye-hyang, proprietress of Honghwaru.”
The old man turned back toward us with a grinding, awkward motion, like a broken puppet.
Ilhong grinned beside me.
“She’s your contact for the silk supply, isn’t she? We already know everything.”
The two kids standing here weren’t ordinary civilians. We were the kind of hard-bitten operators who’d seen every dirty trick in the book.
“H-how the hell do you two know…?”
The exact identity of the Haoman contact left Old Man Jang stammering in terror.
Not content with merely seeking knowledge, he’d actively joined in silk tax evasion and raked in huge profits on top of it—his guts must have been hanging outside his belly.
“None of your business how. Make a choice. Face capital punishment together with your fancy relative, or pay my client back and maybe keep your head.”
If I reported this through Eun Hwaran, performance-hungry high officials would come dancing down here with their blades out. That was how you did a proper threat.
“……I-I’ll pay! But I don’t have the cash on hand right this second, so if you could just give me more ti—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. You think I care? You completely ignored my client’s situation too.”
This was a man who’d already betrayed someone’s trust once. Not a single word out of that mouth was worth believing.
“Quit the bullshit and scrape the money together if you don’t want to die. Sell the silk you’ve stockpiled, put this fancy building up as collateral—I don’t care how!”
The core of debt collection is volume and presence. You have to hammer shameless bastards so hard they can’t even think of wriggling free.
“Whoa, Boss, you’re good at this. You sound like a real nasty loan shark.”
Ilhong piled on the praise, calling my blistering threats vicious. In context she probably meant I was doing a great job. I’d filter it myself.
“So what’s it gonna be? Pay up, or die?”
A disaster of his own making.
“H-huhh…”
The face that had stayed brazen from start to finish went rapidly pale. His pupils darted around in panic; upper and lower teeth clacked together.
“I… I…”
At last his mouth forced out a decision.
The sun had begun to sink toward the horizon when the two boys who had gone to collect a bad debt came barging back through the doors of the Ronin Guild.
Ronin who had been sipping liquor looked up with curious eyes.
“They look way too clean for a debt-collection job.”
“Normally you have to roll around screaming and thrashing just to maybe get paid…”
It was the kind of brutal commission that usually sent people home either covered in filth or sporting fresh blue bruises all over their bodies.
“Maybe they just gave up halfway?”
“Figures. How are a couple of kids supposed to finish a job even we couldn’t handle?”
Murmurs of disappointment mixed with relief. Even Guildmaster Gam Un, who had sent them out thinking a little hardship would be good for them, quietly started to lower his expectations when the kids walked back in looking completely unscathed.
Thud.
The boy named Dan Mujin set a heavy money pouch down on the table.
He loosened the drawstring and a cascade of bright yellow gold and silver coins spilled out with a bright clatter.
Every ronin’s eyes went round of their own accord.
“……What? They actually collected it?”
“No way.”
People stood with their mouths hanging open for a long moment, too stunned to close them.
“Twenty-five gold coins, plus twenty silver coins collected as interest.”
“Pretty impressive, right? That’s our boss for you.”
The handsome boy tossed the pouch up and down as if to say “Look at this,” while the pretty one beside him beamed.
Gam Un stopped what he was doing and walked over with heavy steps.
“How did you pull it off?”
He’d planned to hand them ronin badges if they managed to scrape together even a few silver coins, just to acknowledge their persistence. But they’d brought back the entire principal—and every last coin of interest on top of it.
“We leaned on him.”
“There’s not a single person here who hasn’t tried leaning. Still got chased off every time.”
You couldn’t afford to make an enemy of the yamen in the imperial capital of Beijing. Getting expelled or thrown in a cell was a headache that hit your livelihood right away.
“This time the yamen was on my side.”
“……?”
Dan Mujin tossed out a cryptic line as if he’d overheard Gam Un’s muttering.
“Ilhong helped a lot. The rest is a trade secret.”
The boy made it clear that success was what mattered and refused to leak his methods for free.
Merchant Leader Eun Hwaran had said their skill was trustworthy, and Gam Un had half-doubted it… but now.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
Looks like an interesting pair had wandered in. The scarred man scratched at an old wound, eyes already glittering with interest.
Word that I’d recovered the money brought the client sprinting over from a nearby bookstore.
“A child this young… you really took the money back from that vicious bastard?”
At first he’d been skeptical that I’d succeeded where even the rough-looking ronin had failed. But the surrounding ronin’s reactions and Guildmaster Gam Un’s repeated confirmation soon convinced him it was no joke.
“……I thought I’d never see that money again. Thanks to you I can finally breathe easy.”
“In the future, don’t do money deals with friends. You just end up losing both the cash and the friendship.”
A clean refusal is actually the secret to keeping a relationship longer. Saying no might sting for a moment, but lending and then getting stiffed turns the other person into a mortal enemy.
“You’re absolutely right. Only after getting burned do you understand… You’re still a kid, yet you sound like you’ve lived longer than I have.”
The bookstore owner muttered as if something had clicked, then said:
“I only asked for the principal. You keep the interest.”
He pressed the pouch holding twenty silver coins into my arms and left.
“Thank you, kid. You were a huge help.”
He even left a warm word of gratitude on the way out.
Old Man Jang… fleecing a good man like this.
“Feels like we did something good for once, Boss.”
Yeah. It did.
Maybe because it had been a while since anyone thanked me, something near my dantian gave a strange little itch. And now I knew exactly what that feeling was—the Starfall Heart Method reacting to a meritorious deed.
The client’s joy was my joy. How many years of internal energy would this particular good deed turn into?
“A minute ago when we were shaking the guy down I felt like a villain, though.”
“Hey now, that was perfectly legal debt collection.”
We’d taken down a bad man and saved a client. By my standards there was no “good deed” cleaner than that. Add a decent payday on top, and for a first ronin commission the opening gambit had gone pretty well.
“Dan Mujin. Catch.”
Guildmaster Gam Un flicked a wooden plaque with something carved into it. It was a ronin badge engraved with the lowest rank of all—Jeong, the last of the four ranks Gap, Eul, Byeong, and Jeong.
But ranks like that climb on their own if you just keep taking jobs.
“You take one too. He said you helped a lot.”
Remembering my earlier words, Gam Un tossed a badge to Ilhong as well.
“Whoa, for real? Thank you!”
She clutched the plaque tight and broke into a full-bloom smile, so bright that even with her male disguise my eyes were pulled in for a second.
“I’m grateful, but is this okay?”
We’d already been treated like parachute hires; handing out badges as a two-for-one might stir up a little resentment.
“I said I’d give a badge for even a single silver coin. You two brought back the entire principal on top of that… so you easily count as two full ronin.”
Gam Un mentioned the three or four who had failed earlier and waved any concern aside.
“Hey, what were we supposed to do when a constable shows up?”
“You can’t make an enemy of the authorities in the imperial capital where the Son of Heaven lives.”
A few ronin who’d been drinking muttered excuses that sounded a little guilty.
“Enough. Ronin speak with results. If you don’t even know that, what business do you have in this line of work?”
Gam Un shut the grumbling down in an instant, muttering that the useless ones always had the longest tongues. Since he was the one who controlled the commissions at this Beijing branch, the others could only grumble quietly among themselves.
“Anyway, now that Elder Gam has recognized us, we’ll be getting solid jobs from here on, right?”
“Of course. Good commissions should go to skilled ronin.”
Looks like the effort had paid off. Between the connections and the proven skill, he seemed to be looking at the two of us quite favorably.
“So… are there any jobs taking down crooks or bandit chiefs around the level of the All-Sky Sound Thief?”
Based on Ilhong’s advice, I planned to absorb their notoriety and build my own reputation. I’d keep running until a moniker stuck and work started walking in on its own two feet—for the sake of extending my lifespan.
“Hmm. That might be a bit difficult right now.”
“Wait, that doesn’t match what you just said.”
I stared at the guildmaster in front of me with pure bafflement. Hadn’t he just claimed skilled ronin deserved the good jobs?
“It’s not that. Lately every bandit chief and crook has either fled Hebei or gone into hiding.”
At the exact moment I needed to make a name for myself as fast as possible, Gam Un dropped this bizarre piece of bad news.
“Why?”
Most of them vanishing without a trace was hard to believe. In an age with such poor public order, those kinds of bastards usually respawned after a single day.
“There’s a certain heroine who flings sword qi like a storm and is carving through bandit chiefs at a terrifying pace. The whole crop has dried up.”
What now?
Nothing in this damn Murim ever went smoothly.
“Who the hell is this heroine?”
I demanded the identity of the woman who was forcing me onto the long way around, voice full of resentment.
“Have you ever heard the moniker Cold Flower Jade Maiden?”
“…….”
Apparently that had been the wrong question to ask.