A Familiar Face
"What's with that reaction? Do you know her?"
I flinched at the bitterly familiar moniker, and Association Leader Gam Un fixed me with a puzzled look.
"No. Never heard of her."
I shook my head and answered firmly.
The family head who would coldly cast aside even his own son if necessary—and the elder sister who led the charge. I had no desire to get tangled up with them again. At the very least, the Moyong Cheongjin inside me seemed to feel the same way.
"I know her! She's the pride of the Moyong Clan and one of the Murim Alliance's Five Phoenixes!"
Ilhong, on the other hand, was overflowing with interest. Her eyes sparkled; this went beyond mere familiarity—she clearly idolized the woman as a martial artist.
"They say she's cut down over a hundred demon heads, and then there's her Heaven and Earth Wave Flash Sword, swift as a lightning bolt!"
Ilhong gushed about the technique, claiming it traced thunderous arcs with the tip of a blade. I knew that firsthand. Yeah, that sword art was ridiculous. The way she had swung at her own little brother had been vicious as hell.
"Anyway, she's an incredibly famous master. I'm a little surprised the boss has never even heard of her."
"Tell me about it…"
Listening to them left a bitter taste in my mouth. Was this how Hong Gildong felt after he couldn't even call his own father "Father"?
"Boss, if you don't want to die a dog's death out in the jianghu, you should at least memorize the famous names and their monikers."
Ilhong's advice was laced with genuine concern for my ignorance. But I had spent my childhood deliberately isolated from the murim world.
"It's fine. I've got you, right? Just fill me in whenever it comes up."
Besides, these days I worked by day and got beaten half to death under the guise of "training" by night—a classic case of studying while farming. I had no time to memorize the personal files of every Central Plains big shot. Let my guard down for a second and Hwang Geolgae's fists and feet came flying.
"Oh, come on. What are you going to do if I'm not around someday?"
"Then just don't disappear. Stick by my side for life."
Even in the Water Margin the heroes never bothered studying. I handled the muscle; she handled the knowledge. We covered each other's weak spots. In business, putting the right person in the right place was everything.
"Fine, stick by your side for life… Wait a second. What exactly did you mean by that?"
Ilhong stopped mid-sentence, blinking her eyes wide.
"Exactly what I said."
Every great troubleshooter needed an outstanding sidekick. A competent subordinate had to be claimed early, before some other detective agency snagged them.
"H-honestly. I'm not the type to fall for lines like that so easily, you know?"
"What's this kid even talking about?"
She cut herself off, abruptly avoiding my gaze. Whatever misunderstanding she'd cooked up, she occasionally pulled weird stunts like this—but as a former Haomu Gate successor with a monstrous memory, she was useful in all sorts of ways.
"…What are you two doing?"
Association Leader Gam Un cut in with the expression of someone who had just witnessed something deeply unnatural—two guys generating a strange atmosphere between them. I shut it down before any weird rumors could start.
"It's a misunderstanding."
"A misunderstanding of what, you brat?"
"Anyway."
Come to think of it, short of peeling off the human-skin mask, there was no way to explain. I decided to just leave him misunderstanding.
"Weird kids, the lot of you… Anyway, thanks to that Cold Flower Jade Maiden, you can forget about bounty work for a while."
If we wanted bounty hunting, Gam Un said, we'd have to wait until that heroine moved on to another region. Masters really were living natural disasters from ordinary people's point of view.
"Then are there any other jobs?"
"I like that enthusiasm. Of course there are."
The middle-aged man praised me for hunting the next job the moment the last one ended.
"Do you know Elder O of the O Family Estate?"
I didn't. But I had Ilhong, my walking human encyclopedia.
"The O Family Estate is famous for the ginseng trade. They must have plenty of martial artists of their own. Why would they be looking for vagabonds?"
"Apparently the wife is having an affair. He needs a vagabond to stake out the scene and thrash the lover."
Definitely too embarrassing to dump on his own subordinates.
"Ugh, no. I don't take those jobs."
I waved my hands with a look of pure revulsion. That exact kind of work was what got me stabbed to death in my previous life. Unless someone offered a jaw-dropping fee, I was done with crimes of passion forever.
"You little punk, what's wrong with thrashing a lover? Vagabonds love those jobs—I picked it out specially for you."
Gam Un clucked his tongue, wondering where all my earlier fire had gone.
"Still… out of respect for your face, Association Leader, please give us something else."
"Honestly. The same brat who ruthlessly squeezed unpaid fees… Fine. How about this one?"
He slid a job slip across. It was densely written with a request to beat up some guy in the marketplace. Reward: three silver coins.
"Is he a bad guy?"
"Ordinary commoner who sells sundries. Personal grudge, apparently."
So pure hired violence. The same garbage those third-rate escorts had pulled when they came after a kid for money. I had standards. A second-class martial artist beating up a civilian? That wouldn't accumulate merit—it would pile up bad karma.
"Anything else?"
"Tch. This brat's picky… This is the last one, understand?"
Muttering that I seemed to think he had endless jobs lying around, Gam Un tossed the final slip at me.
"Missing person search. Usually the pay is trash, the client is desperate, and it sucks up time and labor—so vagabonds avoid them."
On the flip side, merit and internal energy would pile up like crazy. Exactly the kind of job I'd been looking for.
"We'll take it."
I pocketed the slip.
"You actually prefer that one? What a strange kid."
Gam Un huffed a dry laugh at a reaction so different from ordinary vagabonds.
"The boss is kind of a weird person."
Ilhong, who had been watching me all this time, nodded in agreement.
Weird? With a Heavenly Killing Star jammed in my skull, where else would you find someone as normal as me?
"You're going to suffer. Beating people up or squeezing money out of them just takes effort, but tracker work is pure grind with no guarantee you'll ever find the person."
"It's fine. I'm used to that sort of thing."
Gam Un shot me a look that clearly said, Why would a brat like you be used to it? Roughly twenty percent of the detective agency jobs back home had been missing-person searches—one of our core services. The Central Plains was just… really, really big.
"So who's missing?"
"The client's son. Just turned thirty. He's been gone a few months."
A few months. The golden window for a live recovery had long since closed. Still, I'd once found people who had been gone for years.
"Get the details from the client. He'll be waiting in a nearby village where the boy disappeared."
Even a single thin lead, followed carefully, would produce something. And every little action taken for the client would count as good deeds.
"Well then—I'll trust this one won't take long either."
The Association Leader chuckled as he brought up the bold claim I'd made last time. I was a man who answered faith with results, after all.
"Of course. We'll wrap it up quick and be back."
Even if I had no idea whether it would actually work out.
Walk a hundred li south of Beijing and you reach a village called Baekyang Village. Nestled against a small stream and paddies, it was home to people who made their living off hunting, livestock, and logging—primary industries. It was also the place we had arranged to meet the client.
"Hah… hah… This is ridiculous. He clearly said a nearby village."
A hundred li. In modern terms, nearly a full marathon. The Central Plains were so vast you could never take the word "nearby" lightly. After two days of forced marches, Ilhong was gasping as if she might collapse any second.
"Boss, can't we go a little slower?"
"Hurry up. I once walked more than two weeks straight chewing grass roots and insects."
"…Does that even make sense?"
"It made sense at the time."
Swept far downriver in an instant, then endless walking after that. I had pushed my body to the breaking point to shake the Moyong Clan's pursuit.
"Didn't Old Man Hwang teach you movement arts? Just changing the way you walk would make this a lot easier."
"He taught me, but… how am I supposed to master those movements in a few weeks?"
His footwork was certainly bizarre and marvelous. That said—
"I managed it."
"…"
When I casually mentioned it had taken me less than a week, Ilhong's mouth puckered out like a duck's bill. She was razor-sharp with theory and memorization, but painfully slow when it came to physical mastery.
"What's the secret, then?"
"Get beaten until you're about to die."
Humans unlock superhuman strength when driven into a corner. In my case—as the Heavenly Killing Star—other people's murderous intent became visible, punch trajectories turned predictable, and I could roughly copy any martial art I saw with my own eyes.
"I've watched a few of those training sessions… Usually people die when they get hit that hard."
Ilhong looked faintly nauseated, having apparently witnessed the blood and the crunching of my training method.
"It's fine. I don't die."
Probably. I delivered the number-one ranked last words of men everywhere and kept walking toward Baekyang Village.
Ilhong's whining about her aching legs and demands to be carried continued for roughly a quarter of an hour. Around then I spotted an elderly man approaching from the far side of the road, leaning on a cane.
"Boss, I think that guy's been waiting for us."
His face was heavy with worry and dark circles, as though he had recently endured something terrible. The stooped old man caught sight of us and his eyes flew wide open. He tapped his cane and hurried closer.
"Are you the vagabonds Association Leader Gam Un sent?"
His aged voice asked for our identities. His gaze lingered a long time on my youthful face.
"I'm Dan Mujin. This is Ilhong."
Worried he might not believe us, I held out our vagabond tokens as I introduced us. The old man blinked, examined the wooden plaques, then finally nodded.
"I'm Cheon Yugang. I was fretting about how hard it is for these old bones to move… Thank you for coming all this way."
He had been on the verge of giving up from exhaustion, he said, and now two vagabonds had arrived—how reassuring. He seized our hands tightly. Strange. I had expected more anger. This was about his precious son, after all. You hire professionals and two kids who look like middle-schoolers show up? If it were me, I would have unloaded a colorful stream of curses on the Association Leader. Yet he accepted us so easily.
"Boss. Boss."
Ilhong suddenly tapped my arm. When I turned, she looked at the old man and lightly patted her own face skin. Then, covering her mouth with one hand so only I could see, she mouthed something.
Hu. man. skin. mask.
I jerked in surprise and stared hard at the old man's face. On the surface it was just a wrinkled, age-spotted elderly visage. But the person who actually made human-skin masks had apparently spotted something unnatural up close.
"Why are you staring like that…?"
When I fixed my gaze on him, the old man asked back with feigned innocence. To figure out what game he was playing, I immediately circulated the Seongun Simbeop and checked his energy.
This ability to size people up had grown even sharper after a certain demonic cultist had stabbed me in the gut. Privately I called it my crisis-detection radar—or the Heavenly Killing Eye. Beyond mere murderous intent, it could now sense deeper malice as well. Hwang Geolgae had said the Heavenly Killing Star grew stronger through life-and-death crises; maybe he had been right.
I poured everything this limited-time ability could offer into examining the old man's energy.
"Hmm?"
A strange sensation tickled the back of my mind. Not murderous intent or malice—something oddly familiar. An aura I had felt before. The kind of "strong person" energy that the survival-obsessed Heavenly Killing Star inside me instinctively remembered.
When did I feel this…?
The memory rose hazily. A mulberry field. A man in blue official robes. And a mysterious veiled woman. That oppressive aura that had been deliberately blasted outward to seize the initiative against me as I charged in.
I carefully spoke the name, still half-disbelieving.
"…Eunuch Uncle?"
The kindly old face of the self-proclaimed Cheon Yugang twisted violently.
"…You thunderstruck little brat."
He straightened his bent back with a snap and peeled the face skin off in one smooth motion.
Oh.