The Woman from Sichuan
The Beijing branch of the Vagabond Association.
Every vagabond with actual work had already gone out, leaving only the layabouts behind to guzzle cheap rice wine.
A middle-aged man with a long, striking scar turned a gleaming silver coin over and over between his fingers.
"Strange. I'm sure the scar was throbbing."
The coin was the mediation fee left by a pair of newly registered vagabonds.
Against every ominous instinct he had felt, the two of them had wrapped up their second job without a hitch and come back alive.
When he had carefully asked whether anything unusual had happened during the job, the boy named Dan Mujin had frozen for a beat, then blurted out, "Nothing happened at all...!"
"That can't be right. Is it really true...?"
Gam Un kept rubbing the scar that stretched across his face.
Like old men's joints aching before the rain, that thick scar of his would start to throb whenever something truly ill-omened was approaching.
Its accuracy rate had always been high enough that, through all the blood and mud of a vagabond's life, he had managed to survive this long.
"Tch. Getting old must have dulled my instincts. Lucky for those kids, I suppose?"
Just like last time, the scar had only begun to pulse after he had already sent them out on the job.
But they had returned from that previous commission in one piece, so this worry was probably nothing more than fretting over shadows.
In other words, even the man once known as Unlucky Gam Un—the one misfortune itself was said to avoid—had finally gone past his prime.
"Heh. Good thing I retired before my luck completely dried up."
So this ominous throbbing pain had to be a false alarm.
They would come back from this job without incident as well.
Reassuring himself, Gam Un tipped back his wine the same way the other idle vagabonds were doing.
"Ahh. That hits the spot."
Standing right in front of us was a girl whose presence far outstripped her small stature.
Skin white as blank paper, sharp eyes, a high bridge of a nose, and lips red as pomegranate seeds.
She pointed at us with pointed fingernails dyed a dark green.
"Neungsam. I told you to call for vagabonds. When the hell did I say to bring me a bunch of brats?"
Her tone dripped with thick disappointment as she scolded someone unseen.
A man wearing a gathering basket over one shoulder stepped out from the underbrush and answered.
"Judging by the vagabond plaques at their waists, they appear to be the genuine article."
"...Huh? For real? These little kids?"
The girl cocked one eyebrow and looked us up and down.
What a cold world. She couldn't even cut some kids a break for scraping by to put food on the table?
"You're basically a brat yourself."
She must have heard my muttering, because both her eyes flared with twin flames of fury.
"Ha? What did you just say to an eighteen-year-old woman in the full bloom of her youth?"
A hard story to swallow. No matter how many eccentric hermits and freaks filled the Murim, claiming to be an adult with that face and height was pushing it.
"Ahem. Young Lady Dang Yeohye only ended up like this because she accidentally consumed poison as a child. She is, in truth, a young woman of eighteen summers."
As I stood there half-doubting, the man called Neungsam stepped forward to clear up the misunderstanding.
What kind of family feeds their kid poison instead of tonic, anyway?
Then Ilhong, who had been listening beside me, suddenly let out a high-pitched shriek.
"Dang Yeohye... Don't tell me it's Poison Claw Mountain Blood Dang Yeohye?!"
So she even had an epithet. Ilhong's eyes went round as saucers.
"Hmph. At least one of you has decent eyes."
Having been recognized, Dang Yeohye looked thoroughly smug. The face that had crumpled at being called a brat smoothed out just a little.
"Ilhong, who is she?"
"Come on, please memorize epithets already. She's the second daughter of the Sichuan Tang Family—a master of claw techniques and poison arts who turned dozens of Green Forest bandits from the Muhoche bandit stronghold into a single palmful of bloody water."
There were so many masters in the Murim it was impossible to keep them all in your head.
Still, I had at least heard of the Sichuan Tang Family.
They showed up a few times in those wuxia novels. Specialists in poison arts, obsessed with blood ties and grudges, and as I recalled, almost every character from that clan had a rotten attitude.
"I see. So she's a full-grown adult."
Call it the mysteries of the Murim—or the mysteries of the human body.
In this world, you couldn't always trust what your eyes told you.
"Which is why, honored vagabonds, remarks like the earlier one are... problematic. The young lady pretends not to care, but she is extremely sensitive about her childlike appearance."
Neungsam cautioned us that this was the topic that scratched her the worst.
"...You son of a bitch! You didn't need to say all that!"
Sometimes excessive consideration only made things more awkward for the person involved.
Her true feelings completely aired, Dang Yeohye flushed crimson to the tips of her ears and started kicking Neungsam's back with solid thumps.
"Urgh—that hurts, Young Lady."
"Shut up! A useless servant like you can stand a little pain!"
It was a full-blown scene of middle-aged-man abuse.
Then again, watching a master with her own epithet carefully control her strength, they were probably just that close.
"In the old days she would never have spoken so harshly. Ever since the poison, she's grown so prickly that she says things she doesn't even mean... This Neungsam worries greatly for you, Young Lady."
"Bullshit! I mean every word, so shut your damn mouth!"
Was it really the poison that made her so foul-tempered, or was she just naturally rotten?
Getting treated like a kid and teased nonstop would twist anyone.
"Ahem. In any case, I am Neungsam, the personal servant who has attended the young lady since the day she was born. I look forward to working with you."
"Ah. Dan Mujin."
"Please call me Ilhong."
We exchanged formal fist-and-palm salutes. Somehow this guy felt much easier to talk to.
"So why did you call for us?"
The branch master had said something about looking for medicinal herbs, but hunting down an extreme poison out of nowhere was another matter.
"You already heard earlier. We came looking for poisons. Are your ears plugged?"
She had poison soaking into her bone marrow. What a mouth.
If she wanted extreme poison, she should be combing the jungles of Yunnan. Why come all the way out here and make a scene?
"There's a peculiar variety of mushroom growing in these mountains."
For some reason her tone carried absolute certainty.
She tossed a gathering basket toward us and continued.
"The mushroom's name is Black Pine Abscess. It juts up like a horn, jet-black, with pus oozing from the surface."
Aside from the color, the description sounded exactly like the red staghorn mushrooms that could kill you if you so much as brushed them.
While fleeing possible family pursuit, I had been so starving I stuffed anything I could find into my mouth—but I had never once touched a mushroom that looked that suspicious.
That was a shortcut straight to the Yellow Springs.
"Are you sure? I've never seen a mushroom like that anywhere near Beijing."
"Yeah, pretty sure. A few months back I heard a Blood Boar showed up in this area."
According to her, a Blood Boar was a monstrous, bright-red wild pig that grew by devouring poisonous herbs, insects, and mushrooms.
Cut one open and there was a high chance of finding a Poison Core inside—practically a spirit beast in its own right.
"That thing goes crazy for Black Pine Abscess. So if you know where it stayed, you can roughly pin down where the mushrooms grow."
Like releasing trained pigs to sniff out expensive truffles.
"But what if we run into that Blood Boar while we're picking poison mushrooms?"
Wrestling a spirit beast was not a job for brand-new vagabonds.
Didn't seem like it would rack up much good karma either.
"Won't happen. The thing never stays in one place long. By now it's long gone."
Apparently it gorged itself on everything in sight, then coolly wandered off to the next hunting ground.
And while it was huge, it was slow—so you could just use lightness skill and run.
A remark that showed zero consideration for either Ilhong or her own servant.
"Worry more about running into wild animals or mountain bandits while you're picking. You're self-proclaimed vagabonds, so you can handle that much, right?"
"Yes, yes."
I had already beaten dozens of bandits and brigands senseless on the last job.
"Then grab a basket, stick close to Neungsam, and make yourselves useful. We've got a lot to do today."
And just like that, an unseasonable mushroom-hunting commission began.
As a side note, Dang Yeohye also described various poisonous herbs and insects, telling us to collect any we could find.
She promised decent pay per plant or per creature.
"Oh, and for the record—even if you find Black Pine Abscess, don't touch it. It sprays poison if you mess with it."
A commission that made me want to just go home.
If I made it back this time, I was definitely going to call out the branch master's rotten instincts.
In my previous life as a troubleshooter, I had truly seen every kind of job imaginable.
All-night stakeouts, diving into lakes looking for corpses, undercover work at manufacturing companies, scaring punks straight by pretending to be their terrifying uncle with temporary tattoos.
Sometimes it felt like detective work; other times I wondered what kind of dogshit labor this even was.
Ironically, working as a vagabond here in the Central Plains, I was tasting that exact same feeling all over again.
"Unseasonable mountain-herb gathering. We really do every weird job under the sun."
And this from someone who was a proper ranked vagabond with real martial force of his own.
In front of people from the great clans, we apparently ranked somewhere around convenient disposable labor you didn't have to think twice about using.
When I first entered this line of work, I had expected a life constantly reeking of blood.
Aside from the dull ache in my lower back from all the gathering, everything felt almost peaceful.
"Not that bamboo-shoot-looking thing—the one next to it is the poison herb. Idiot."
Everything except for that foul-mouthed Tang Family woman, that is.
While the rest of us were crouched like mountain diggers, probing every corner and focused on gathering, our client strolled behind us with her hands clasped behind her back, doing nothing but criticize.
I plucked a handful of the poison herb, stuffed it into the basket, and nudged Ilhong's shoulder.
"Ilhong. Is that person strong?"
"Yes, extremely. She's reached the stage where she can project internal energy outward. See those dark-green nails? That's Seven-Finger Poison. Just a graze and you cough up blood and die."
Ha. Shit.
Better not mouth off.
I swallowed my temper and quietly kept pulling up herbs and mushrooms, dumping them into the basket.
Working diligently, the basket filled up before I knew it.
"Hey, Boss. Isn't this a shiitake?"
People who had grown up as beggars had a reflex—they reacted the moment they spotted anything edible.
A habit born of pure survival.
"That? Not a shiitake, but you can eat it. Used to be my main food source for a while."
A pale-brown mushroom that vaguely resembled an oyster mushroom.
On the starving road to Beijing, it had been a precious source of nutrition, a single ray of light.
I had kept walking by eating these, unknown berries, and gulps of river water.
"There's surprisingly a lot to eat out here."
Ilhong—daughter of the Haomu Gate master and every bit a city girl—said it with genuine surprise.
"Right?"
Unlike a city that was basically a desert if you had no money, the mountains offered plenty of natural forage.
The problem was that those same mountains also held tigers, bears, and the human kind of predator—bandits and brigands who hunted people just as eagerly.
Anyway, since we had found them, maybe we should pick a few to eat later?
"Hey, are you insane? That's a poison mushroom. Put it down."
Dang Yeohye suddenly shouted as I casually snapped off a few ordinary-looking mushrooms.
"...These are edible mushrooms, though?"
"What the hell are you talking about? That's a Fire Mirror mushroom. It goes into death-penalty poisons."
She knocked the mushrooms from my hand, explaining that large doses would paralyze the limbs and internal organs.
What? So the mushrooms I had been stuffing down my throat thinking they were food had actually been poison all along?
No wonder a reddish haze had shimmered in front of my eyes every time I swallowed them.
Back then I hadn't even known what that energy was, and since my stomach never hurt, I had just cheered jackpot and kept shoveling them in.
"I overheard you earlier. How much of this mushroom did you eat?"
"Uh, at the time it was die-this-way or die-that-way, so I tore up and ate every single one I saw?"
Whatever my eyes found, whatever my hands could grab. I hadn't been in any position to be picky—I had shoved everything from tree bark onward into my mouth.
"...You're crazy. How are you even still alive?"
My thoughts exactly.
Gorging on an ingredient of imperial death poison and walking away fine. I might actually be kind of amazing.
"That's our Boss for you. There's definitely a hungry ghost living in his stomach."
"Ilhong, that was a compliment, right?"
Most likely the Heavenly Killing Star parasitizing my head had kept me alive.
If I died, it would have to sit on its hands for hundreds of years waiting for the next host.
Which was why it desperately tried to prevent this body's death—while simultaneously scheming to seize my consciousness the moment it could.
"Whoa. You're really something... Completely fine after that."
Then a searing gaze suddenly burned into the side of my head.
Eyes tinged green—maybe from her poison arts—were fixed on me with unblinking intensity.
"Hey. Want to take a different kind of job? It's simple. Every so often you just eat a poison I made and tell me how it feels."
"No thank you."
Dang Yeohye smiled sweetly as she made that deeply alarming proposal.
Her eyes looked like she had just discovered something fun and fascinating.
"I'll pay you well. Generously."
"I don't need it."
"A minute ago you were so broke you were eating poison mushrooms?"
"I've decided to just live in poverty from now on."
Clinical trials? In this barbaric Central Plains?
And personal poison trials for a Tang Family female master who turned people into palmfuls of bloody water without batting an eye?
Even the Heavenly Killing Star needed to stay far away from that category of work.
"Don't worry. I've got the name Poison Claw Mountain Blood to uphold—I won't kill you. Just trust this big sister, okay?"
"I'm not interested."
As long as you don't die, anything goes? For all I knew I could end up with side effects just like her.
"Playing hard to get. It's not like it wears anything out."
She scratched her cheek and grumbled.
It absolutely wears things out, you maniac.
I wrapped both arms around myself and took careful steps backward, away from the girl who stood a full head shorter than me.
"...Young Lady! Young Lady Dang Yeohye!"
Just then a voice burst through the undergrowth, followed by solid, purposeful footsteps.
"What? What's going on?"
"Huff... huff... I've found a place where Black Pine Abscess is growing wild. We should go at once!"
The speaker was none other than Neungsam—Dang Yeohye's loyal servant and, for the moment, my personal savior.
"Tch. Fine."