Temporary Mom
Honghwaru was the finest courtesan house in Beijing.
An elegant, luxurious façade where graceful, gifted beauties always waited to receive their guests. Countless powerful clans, high officials, and great dignitaries came in endless procession; the music and laughter never stopped.
That was Honghwaru, raking in money by the cartload and posting enormous profits. But money was not the only thing they scraped together.
Honghwaru’s true face was an information-gathering window for Haoman.
Men, as a species, lost their reason in front of beauties. Add wine, and they spilled secrets they should never have spoken. Imperial intelligence from careless officials, transaction records the powerful let slip as boasts, even the intimate secrets of the imperial clan itself—Haoman sucked it all in through the glittering shell of a high-class pleasure house.
Yet even this smooth operation began to gather dark storm clouds one day.
“That insolent bitch, Pavilion Mistress Okryeong.”
A new courtesan house had risen to challenge Honghwaru’s supremacy and was siphoning away the big spenders. People were saying they simply had to go see that woman—Ju Wolay or whatever her name was—who had ridden the gossips’ tongues straight into the ranks of Beijing’s Five Flowers. Not one or two patrons had drifted away. Even key figures Haoman had been cultivating for information were being peeled off one by one by Cheonhwaru. Among them were men they had been preparing to “entertain” in the basement; the damage was anything but small.
“But well… that ends today.”
They had spent a fortune and pulled every string to hire an entire notorious unorthodox sect. True, Cheonhwaru had some rising expert called the Dog-Beating Dragon attached to it, but word was he was still only First-class Realm, unable even to project sword qi. With numbers like this, they would sweep the place clean in no time.
So she waited in the damp basement for the glad news that Cheonhwaru had been finished off.
“Heh heh. You agree, don’t you, guest? A place like Cheonhwaru is better off gone.”
“……Mmph!”
A man bound hand and foot thrashed and moaned at the question. He lay on a long wooden table, staring in terror at Il-hye-hyang—leader of the Sinbigak and mistress of this very pavilion.
“When you move, you must move decisively. That’s how I joined the ‘great undertaking’ and claimed this golden pavilion-mistress seat for myself.”
It was a business that brought in colossal revenue—the price of betrayal. She rattled on about things no one had asked, as if talking to herself, and drew a certain bottle from her robes.
“Which is why I have a gift for you, guest.”
Where the old courtesan-house method had been to sit still and wait for information to flow in, the Sinbigak’s approach was proactive: go out and dig it up. That was why work sometimes continued in secret places like this.
“Do you see them? These cute little children?”
A pair of long, slender worms swam hazily inside the opaque bottle. When she thrust them toward him, the man seemed to sense something ominous; he flopped and strained against his bonds like a moth that had flown into a spider’s web, lured by the scent of flowers.
“Guest, this is called Yin-Yang Gu Poison. A precious pair of worms I paid a very high price for at the Black Market.”
Once he understood what they were, the man’s eyes bulged even wider and he thrashed harder.
People said Haoman’s information network touched every corner of the Central Plains, yet there was one place even they had never managed to penetrate: the Imperial Palace of the capital, Beijing. Stiff-necked, impossible to buy with ordinary money, high-handed and oppressive—making obedient collaborators there was no easy task. But plant one of these gu worms inside a body, and the man would become a spy inside the Third Princess’s palace just to stay alive, whispering internal secrets whether he wanted to or not.
“Guest, power is a line. And you, I’m afraid, chose the wrong one. Princess Dohwa? In this day and age, who clings to a rotten line like that?”
Haoman’s new leader, Heuk Jin-jo, was cut from a very different cloth than the previous one. He had shattered the founding master’s iron rule that the court and the Murim must never mix, and had thrown himself straight into the great current for wealth and power.
“Still, you lived because you were so stubborn about finding the courtesan you wanted. If you’d switched to that bitch Ju Wolay, everything would have gotten tangled.”
Il-hye-hyang gave a thin, mocking smile and fished one of the hideous worms out of the bottle.
“Now, guest. Say ‘ah.’ Ah.”
“Mmph! Mmmph!”
She yanked the gag free and forced his jaws wide open with both hands. Just as the venomous worm was about to drop into his mouth—
Crash-crash-crash—!
A thunderous roar exploded from the entrance of the pavilion. Il-hye-hyang’s hands jerked to a stop.
A fight among guests upstairs, perhaps? The house guards would handle it. She was about to resume her work when—
“Fuck! What the hell are you?!”
“You crazy bastard—!”
Boom—!
An impact shook the entire building as if the front gate itself had been blown in. And instead of being subdued by the guards, the uproar only grew louder.
“Th-that madman!”
“Stop them! There are only two of them!”
Dozens of men drew blades and thundered across the floor above; the noise came straight through the ceiling. Clang! Thud! Rat-tat-tat! The clash of steel against blunt weapons, frantic footsteps, and the heavy thumps of bodies hitting the ground followed one after another.
“Keheok!”
“What the hell is that guy…! Gyaaah!”
Cries of pure terror. Unable to stand it any longer, she rushed upstairs—only to find the once-beautiful Honghwaru transformed into a five-minute-old slaughterhouse.
“You mess with someone else’s business, you’d better be ready for yours to get wrecked! Close up shop, you sons of bitches—!”
One lunatic was charging straight into the ranks of the house guards, swinging pure primitive violence. Beside him a small-statured youth kept popping something that went bang! and dropped guards in clusters.
“I don’t care if you’re a guest or staff! Get in my way and I’ll smash everything! Don’t want to die? Get the hell out!”
A deranged kid who would pulverize anything that annoyed him—and his martial arts were ridiculously strong.
“Haaah, look at that savage little bastard…!”
“Let’s go! Damn it, we can’t even put down one rabid dog!”
After the brutal declaration that followed the fall of a dozen guards, the pavilion’s guests clicked their tongues and streamed out like an ebbing tide.
“N-nooo! Do you know how hard it was to gather those customers…!”
Il-hye-hyang screamed, face ashen. But there was no way to hold guests whose hearts had already turned.
“Damn it! Don’t fall back! We’ve got way more numbers, you bastards!”
“Why can’t you stop one guy like that?! Snap out of it!”
The lead guards, unable to watch any longer, berated their men and stepped forward. Two against twenty. Thick killing intent and fighting spirit rose over the battlefield—
Tzzzzzz—
The youth poured razor-sharp energy along the length of his fully extended staff. A hazy, enormous inner force wrapped the entire weapon, so dense even outsiders could see it clearly.
“Behold. This is what you call an Armed Staff Uprising.”
“…….”
The guards, who had been forming ranks ready to charge, froze at the display of power and swallowed hard. They had no idea what the wordplay meant; they only muttered in tense faces.
“P-Peak Realm…?”
“Good heavens, a brat that young…!”
Dan Mujin tapped the Dog-Beating Staff against his shoulder and opened his mouth.
“I am the Dog-Beating Dragon, Dan Mujin! Remember the name well. It’s the name of the man who’s going to pulverize you bastards today.”
The moment he revealed himself, a stir ran through the guards.
“Dog-Beating Dragon? The one who sided with Cheonhwaru?”
“Damn it! Nobody said he was Peak Realm!”
“And if he’s here, that means the hundred men from the Iron Dragon Gate who went after them are all…”
One guard swallowed the rest of the sentence, unable to finish. Dan Mujin grinned and finished it for him.
“That’s right! Every last one of them got smashed at the end of this staff!”
A vast tide of inner force surged from his dantian through every meridian. Dan Mujin unfolded the Whirlwind Steps and shot forward like an arrow loosed at the enemy line.
“And now it’s your turn!”
His form crashed in like a gale. The Dog-Beating Staff raised enormous shockwaves and began to sweep the enemy away.
Thud-thud-thud!
Swords and sabers thrust out, only to shatter and burst the instant they met the staff.
“Kyaaaah!”
“Keuk!”
The solid tip of the staff bent at impossible angles, as if it had already read the opponent’s path, and slammed home. Dull, heavy impacts rang out from every direction.
“Shoulder! Thigh! Groin! Groin! Groin!”
Dan Mujin helpfully shouted each target at the top of his lungs. The long staff whirled through bizarre trajectories, beating the enemy like dogs. The small youth beside him watched the scene with horrified eyes.
Thwack!
“Keuph!”
The wet sound of skin splitting. Another enemy clutched his groin, foamed at the mouth, and collapsed. The guards who had just witnessed a man receive a career-ending injury as a man staggered back, trembling.
“……Boss, why do you keep hitting them only there?”
Ilhong finally asked mid-swing, unable to take it any longer.
“If I hit the head or chest wrong, they might die.”
He was, in his own way, trying to hold back. He had only recently reached Peak Realm and gained the power of staff qi; controlling the force was not easy. If he went all-out the way he had against Hwang Geolgae, these guys’ skulls would simply explode. This fight was not the kind that piled up good karma, so there was no reason to rack up killing karma and do the Heavenly Killing Star any favors.
“I think they’d rather just die.”
Ilhong muttered, pointing at the men groaning and whimpering like dogs.
“Then they shouldn’t have picked the fight in the first place. And hey, I’m letting them live.”
They had sent a hundred armed men to wreck someone else’s business just because it hurt theirs. There was not a scrap of reason to show mercy.
“This Dog-Beating Dragon is going to grind this whole pleasure house into powder!”
Once the guards’ fighting spirit broke, Dan Mujin turned his attention to demolishing the pavilion itself. After bellowing “Close up shop!” he smashed the wooden walls with the Dog-Beating Staff packed full of inner force.
Crrrack!
Wood splinters flew in every direction. With the monstrous strength of the Heavenly Killing Star amplified by staff qi, the walls burst like they had been hit by cannon fire. When he next slammed a support pillar, a vertical crack split with a sharp crack! and the entire building shuddered as if it were about to collapse.
The structure began to groan like a living thing. The second-floor railing crumbled; expensive ornaments rained down.
“Nooo! You madman! Stop right now—!”
Pavilion Mistress Il-hye-hyang came running, screaming like a woman who had lost her mind.
“M-Mistress! You mustn’t go near that rabid dog!”
The guards tried to stop her, but she would not listen. She had sacrificed far too much to reach this position; the moment the pavilion began to break, she was already beyond reason.
“You the boss of this place?”
Dan Mujin had been about to shout “Owner, get out here!” anyway, so he looked pleased as he pulled the Dog-Beating Staff back. Then he saw Il-hye-hyang’s face, flinched in surprise, and narrowed his eyes. Something about her face was not unfamiliar. A hazy memory from his beggar days rose to the surface.
“Mom…?”
The shocking, completely unfiltered words froze every person in the pavilion in place.
A chilly silence settled over Honghwaru as if time itself had stopped at my remark.
The first to recover and open her mouth was Ilhong beside me.
“Boss, you don’t have a mom.”
“Geez, kids these days really say whatever comes into their heads.”
‘You don’t have a mom’? Hearing it out loud, it almost sounded like a dead-parent insult. I shook my head.
“From the beggar days. The temporary mom who used to give us pocket money.”
Back when we had nothing left to lose and the whole world was parents and family. We’d surrounded her on the street once to shake her down for cash—partly as revenge for the usual mockery we took.
“Ahh, that kind of…”
Come to think of it, Ilhong hadn’t been with us then. She had probably still been a runaway ninja. No wonder she misunderstood.
“……Wait a second, Boss.”
But after studying Il-hye-hyang’s face carefully from the front, Ilhong’s expression turned grave, as if she had just realized something, and she looked straight at me.
“That person… isn’t just a pavilion mistress. That’s a fake identity.”
“Fake identity?”
I asked back at her whisper of recognition, not understanding. Not just a pavilion mistress?
“Her real identity is the leader of the Sinbigak… a high-ranking officer of Haoman.”
“……Oho.”
Ilhong’s eyes burned as if she were staring at a traitor. It seemed this pleasure house still had more secrets buried inside.