Kaifeng's Haomu Gate
A martial artist's epithet is a condensed record of their deeds—another face that reveals their standing in the jianghu.
That is why, upon hearing someone's title, the polite custom of the Central Plains is to nod along with something like, "Ah, Young Hero So-and-so!"—unless, of course, the name is notorious.
Even if the epithet is obscure, the unwritten rule is to pretend you've heard it somewhere before.
By that standard, laughing in someone's face with "Cloud-Dog Lone Hero? What a dogshit nickname, heh heh" is the sort of thing that earns you a thrashing with no room to complain.
"You lot think the same, don't you? You human-trafficking bastards."
I asked the question after knocking flat every enemy around me—whose numbers, somewhere in the chaos of the fight, had somehow doubled.
The first pack had come charging after Jo Harang and attacked without a word, so there had been no time for introductions. The second group to join the fray, having seen what we could do, had at least started by asking for our epithets.
"Y-you're absolutely right, sir!"
"We were truly reckless!"
The traffickers yelped like beaten dogs and crawled across the ground under a dazzling staff-beating. I glanced at the little kids who had nearly been seized and sold. Still far too young to have their eyes opened to the world's malice.
They clung tight to Ilhong's sleeve, terrified of their captors.
The sight of them sent my cooling anger surging back up.
"So you knew, and you still did it, huh?"
If they knew and did it anyway, they deserved to get hit harder. Call it aggravated punishment.
I brought the Dog-Beating Staff down again and again. Each blow landed with a dull thud, and the creatures at the edge of humanity howled and whimpered.
"Guh—!"
"S-stop!"
Even in my past life there had been bastards who kidnapped the naive and worked them like slaves. I'd taken a few cases related to that, too.
And this was a barbaric age where a martial artist could kill someone and barely face proper punishment. Things like this would be worse here, not better.
"That's it! Harder! Scum like these need their bones pulverized!"
While I was thrashing the traffickers, Jo Harang stood off to the side clapping and cheering me on. Watching her look so cheerfully satisfied—after dragging a complete stranger into her mess—started to seriously piss me off.
"You're not exactly blameless either. Why drag trouble over here and get us mixed up in it?"
"But I figured if it was you, Mujin, you'd help… And look—you fought with me all the way to the end, didn't you?"
I didn't fight with you to the end. I got dragged in to the end, woman.
Use your words properly.
"So. These guys you brought along—who are they? Some Black Path trash?"
Wherever people gather, there are always parasites who fatten themselves on crime. It had been true even in Beijing, where the Emperor lived. Kaifeng would be no different.
"These garbage are Haomu Gate dogs."
Jo Harang answered while nudging the fallen traffickers with her foot. At that ominous remark, Ilhong—who had been soothing the children—went stiff as a board.
"…Haomu Gate does human trafficking too? Weren't they an information guild?"
"Don't you know the five trades—inn, porter, broker, cart, and boat? This place was always a nest of lowlives. Nothing new about it."
Of the five characters Jo Harang listed, the "broker" character meant human traffickers. Being the weak did not make someone righteous. Haomu Gate had originally been little better than a Black Path outfit, until the man chosen as its first Gate Master remade it into an information network and purged the rest.
"So after that, I thought they just operated in the shadows as an ambiguous intelligence group between the Righteous and the Demonic Paths…"
Jo Harang trailed off, fiddling with the hilt of her greatsword as if to ask how things had come to this. I looked silently toward Ilhong.
Her face had gone hard, and her fingertips were trembling.
"There's no Gate Master left to stop them now. Looks like they're willing to do anything for money again—kidnapping included."
Pride abandoned, reduced to something no better than the Black Path. Ilhong muttered it through tightly bitten lips, seething.
"…Excuse me."
The little kids still clinging to her sleeve spoke up. Both women looked down at them.
"There were more of us…"
"More of what?"
"Kids who got kidnapped."
They said they had heard sobbing from what sounded like a hidden warehouse. Quite a few of them.
"Ah—right. There were more people in there."
"Then why did you only bring these ones out?"
"Sorry. I only have two hands. There was nothing I could do."
The enemy numbers had been larger than expected, she said. And there had been at least one First-class martial artist's presence mixed in.
"Boss. We have to wipe them out completely."
Ilhong spoke with a rare, serious face. If she hadn't seen it, fine—but having witnessed how thoroughly the organization was rotting, she said she could not simply walk away.
"Oh, great idea! Let's charge in and clean the whole place out!"
This one didn't even know the backstory and was just excited about thrashing bad guys. She swung her greatsword with fierce whooshes, insisting she couldn't sit a job like this out.
"I know everything about them. Their hidden base, the passwords to get in, the emergency routes and escape paths—all of it."
Right. We had Honggeum, the legitimate successor of Haomu Gate, who knew nearly everything about the organization. She whispered that with the back doors mapped as well, we could purge them without letting a single one slip away.
"Hey, Jo Harang. Can you take that First-class?"
"Of course. I've never lost a one-on-one at a comparable realm—not once!"
Her only real problem, she claimed, was the risk of getting swarmed when her big movements left openings. In a duel, she was full of confidence.
"What about you, Mujin? Second-class and Third-class combined—looked like more than twenty heads."
"I'm fine. Don't know what kind of bad luck clings to me, but I've always fought one against many."
Realm or numbers—I had never once fought with the luxury of either. That was exactly why my gut twisted every time I heard the epithet Cloud-Dog Lone Hero.
"You sure? Those guys are armed with blades. Clothes get soaked in a drizzle—take a cut here and a cut there and…"
"What, am I gonna die? Don't worry about it."
This body regenerated petty wounds in no time and barely tired. Truly, the more I thought about it, the more this physique was optimized for mass slaugh—
"Ahem. It's a chance to pile up good deeds. Gotta work the body a little."
I quietly circulated the Seongun Simbeop and scrubbed the stray thoughts from my head.
"That's my Cloud-Dog Lone Hero! The chivalrous hero I personally recognized!"
"You got any other epithet that doesn't sound like crap?"
And what exactly had she seen in me to accept so quickly that I was a righteous hero? Most people heard my unfiltered speech and manners and looked puzzled at the word "hero." The more I watched her, the less I understood this woman.
"All right—strike while the iron's hot. Shall we head out right now?"
She gripped her greatsword's hilt and settled into a stance as if she might bolt any second. Looking at it coldly, there wasn't a single coin of profit in this—and yet the moment she heard "injustice," her motivation went through the roof.
"Hold up. Before that, let's swing by the Kaifeng Vagabond Association."
"Why there?"
"We take on kidnapping and missing-person jobs first, then move. Odds are a few of those clients will be in that warehouse. Same work, and we get paid for it."
Commission brokers never paid out on jobs that didn't go through them. A kind of rice-bowl war. If a client and a vagabond solved everything without them, they lost their cut.
"Oh—true. Mujin, you really are practical."
"What can I say. My nose for money is second to none."
Normally the Heavenly Killing Star kept me from going full profit-maximizer, but when I could grab both justification and real gain at once, that was a different story.
"Boss. Let's go."
Our guide, burning with purpose. Once we hit the road again, the boring days and the dry spells of good deeds would probably return—so stacking a solid pile here first wasn't a bad idea at all.
"Let's move."
Since ancient times they said villains should be treated like swine and beasts. I hooked the beast-beating Dog-Beating Staff over my shoulder and started walking.
"Who the hell are you?! How dare you come in through the back—! Guh!"
The Haomu Gate thug who had been startled by uninvited guests popping out of the rear entrance never finished the sentence. My Dog-Beating Staff came down hard and caved his crown in with a wet thud.
"…Who are you people?! How did you find this hideout?!"
Well, we had an outraged internal whistleblower on our side.
"No questions!"
Jo Harang surged forward, swinging her massive greatsword with fearless ferocity. The blade scraped along the corridor walls as she tore into the Haomu Gate dogs, shattering crude weapons and drinking blood and screams alike.
Whoosh! Shrrk!
The sharp wind-pressure of something that heavy sounded almost like a tiger's roar.
Reading the trajectories of killing intent, sliding like a ghost on Whirlwind Steps. The long staff tip, bending this way and that, hammered the Haomu Gate dogs from impossible angles.
"Son of a—!"
"Where the hell did these bastards come from?!"
"Don't care—just kill them all!"
As the numbers poured out, my staff work ignited. And Ilhong sealed the other exits so not a single one could slip away.
A fierce battle for the purge followed, and after about the time it takes to eat a meal, the only people left standing in the hideout were us and the freed kidnapping victims.
"W-wait. There's some kind of misunderstanding. We're not some random Black Path trash. Right now you're messing with the famous Haomu G—"
Thwack!
The tip of my staff cracked across the back of his skull, upgrading a half-assed faint into a proper blackout. I recovered the staff with a flourish. When that one woke up, he would probably be looking at a noose or a chopping block. We were handing every last one of them to the authorities—so the moment he opened his eyes, he would be dew on the execution ground.
"Do we really need to leave them alive? They're bad guys. Why not just kill them all?"
Jo Harang, her martial robes and greatsword painted in blood, asked as if she genuinely did not understand. The villains shredded in clumps before her ferocious bladework; the path behind her was soaked. Sometimes I wondered if she was the Heavenly Killing Star.
"That kind of thinking—that anything goes if someone's 'bad'—is exactly how you end up with older sisters who stab their little brothers."
"…What are you even talking about?"
In the heat of the moment, a piece of my private thoughts had slipped out. Still, as long as my own life wasn't on the line, I intended to pass unnecessary killing karma along to someone else.
Anyway, thanks to us, Kaifeng's yamen would be busy chopping heads for a while.
"My name is Dan Mujin. When you get back to your moms and dads, make sure you tell them a cool big brother saved you, all right?"
I gathered the kidnapped kids and spun my staff with a showy flourish. Sometimes you could do the work well and still get no credit for it if you didn't put on a little display.
"Minor Tiger Blade! You were so cool!"
"Thank you for saving us!"
Unfortunately, the children's eyes had locked onto the famous vagabond who had whirled a giant greatsword like a windmill and cut the villains down—Jo Harang. Fair enough. A martial artist off to the side lightly tapping people with a staff and not even spraying blood lacked a certain impact.
"Hah. Life is something else."
Same as when Moyong Cheonghye stole the spotlight during the fight with the Soul-Stealing Demon Lord. Every time, the spotlight of my life got snatched away.
"Th-thank you…"
But one little kid shyly offered thanks and then vanished into the crowd of children. That single word of gratitude made my chest feel tight—as if good merit were rushing in with a soft roar.
Yeah. We made money and stacked good deeds. What more could I ask for?
"Boss."
Ilhong returned after absorbing every scrap of information from Haomu Gate's Kaifeng branch and burning the important documents, then spoke to me.
"Haomu Gate is rotting worse than I thought."
Her expression was thoroughly bitter, disappointment and rage tangled together. She looked shaken by how thoroughly the organization had twisted into crime while hiding among ordinary people.
"Don't worry. Whether it's Up-Down or Left-Right, we'll find those mysterious experts and take the Gate Master seat back."
"…It's Sangryeong and Haryeong, Boss."
"Ah. Right. Of course."
I scratched my cheek, a little embarrassed. Anyway, as I played troubleshooter and wandered the Central Plains, an answer would turn up eventually. And if it came to it, I now had a backer who could dig up information, too.
"…He is a backer, right?"
Considering Hwang Geolgae was only master-adjacent to begin with, I wasn't entirely sure. But good things were good things, weren't they?
I decided to think positive.
Ilhogae, the Seven-Knot Elder of the Beggar Sect, had been so preoccupied with a certain young man lately that he could barely keep his hands on his work.
"So. What has this youth named Dan Mujin been doing?"
At the elder's question, a Beggar Sect disciple unfolded a crumpled sheet and read the intelligence within.
"It seems he hit the hideout of those Haomu Gate traffickers who have lately become such a headache. Word is he lined them up and marched them straight to the yamen. The whole city is buzzing about it."
Ilhogae slapped his knee and burst into admiration at the extraordinary youth's trail.
"Hoh—just the two of them cleaned out that den?"
"Yes, Elder."
"Martial strength, sense of justice—not a single thing missing. Heh heh."
He had assumed the man had cut all ties with the Beggar Sect. Who would have thought the runaway Dragon Head Sect Leader would, late in life, send them such a fine successor?
"But why did the letter call him a thunderstruck greenhorn?"
That part still did not make sense to Seven-Knot Elder Ilhogae.