Ivan Novikov? From Today On, He's Novi (1)
Ivan, a martial artist of the North Sea Ice Palace, bid farewell to Hwang Jinsa—a man who could rightly be called his benefactor—and left the Hwang estate without delay.
After walking for some time, it suddenly struck him that he still did not know the assassin's true identity, and that he would have done well to ask before leaving the Hwang household. But turning back now would look undignified.
A true man of the snowfields never retreated.
So he resolved to uncover the assassin's identity himself. All he knew was that the man was an official from the imperial court in Beijing and the scion of a renowned martial clan—but that ought to be enough.
Ivan headed straight for the village tavern. Ordering a bowl of cloudy rice wine, he asked,
"Mistress, has an official from Beijing been traveling through these parts of late?"
"An official from Beijing?"
"Yes. I hear he's the son of some martial family."
"If it's a recent outsider who came through… ah, you mean the Sichuan Crouching Dragon?"
"The Sichuan Crouching Dragon?"
"That's right. The Young Master of the Sichuan Dang Family—the Sichuan Crouching Dragon, Young Hero Dang Hui-yeom."
"Could it be… the Tang… Semya of Sichuan?"
Three years in the Central Plains, and his language still had rough edges. The Tang Semya—he had heard of them even back in the North Sea.
Novikov, if ever you go to the Central Plains, be especially wary of poison. The martial arts of the North Sea are in no way inferior to those of the Central Plains—but when it comes to poison, the variety and potency of what they brew there is of an entirely different order.
No base tool of intrigue could ever fell a warrior of our Ice Palace, who carries the soul of the glacier.
Young warrior, take my counsel to heart. Countless martial artists of the North Sea have lost their lives to the underhanded poisons of the Central Plains. The toxins of the Tang family are especially dangerous. Vladimir Lenin, the sixth Palace Lord of our Ice Palace—who once succeeded in seizing even Beijing—drank black tea laced with the venom of the Radiant Serpent prepared by the Tang family, vomited a full horse-load of blood, and breathed his last.
Th-that cannot be… the Red Superman…!
Remember this well. Beware those who favor green garments. They are venomous schemers, as wicked and cowardly as snakes.
I shall carve it into my memory.
Recalling his master's teaching, Ivan's eyes blazed a fierce blue.
"Damn those cowards of the Dang family!"
His goodwill toward Hui-yeom, a man whose face he had never even seen, plummeted on the spot. As he erupted in fury, the tavern mistress's brow furrowed. The farmers at the next table, startled by the sudden outburst, turned to look at him with hard faces.
"What the hell? Which lunatic is badmouthing the Dang—"
Their gazes shifted—and found a towering foreigner who looked like a polar bear, grinding his teeth with a face full of rage. The farmers' eyes rolled as they hastily redirected the conversation.
"—has every right to, yeah. Ahem!"
Hearing that, Ivan's conviction only hardened.
If even the farmers curse them this freely, the Dang family must truly be villains!
Ivan was not so much a fool as a very naive young man, a little slow on the uptake. He already carried the prejudice his master had instilled against the Dang family; add Hwang Jinsa's story on top of that, and he was now rock-solid in the belief that the Dang household was a den of evil and Hui-yeom a wicked man.
Villain who torments the good—the fist of the North Sea shall shatter you.
To locate the cowardly Hui-yeom, Ivan asked the tavern mistress,
"Where must I go to find this man?"
"W-well, I couldn't say…"
Afraid of drawing trouble if she spoke carelessly, she let her words trail off. Ivan fixed her with a hard stare.
"…You know something, don't you?"
"N-no, I don't."
"A lie."
"I'm telling you, I don't!"
"What are you so afraid of? Confide in me, Ivan. I never abandon the weak!"
"I said I know nothing!"
In the end, she never told him that Hui-yeom was staying at an inn near the Provincial Administration Office. Ivan sighed.
That she knows something yet keeps her mouth shut to the last only shows how deeply the fear of that villain has sunk into her bones.
His fighting spirit flared at the thought of so wicked a scoundrel, one who must be punished.
Villain! No matter how you hide, you will not escape Novikov's iron fist of justice.
The man had neither hidden nor fled. But Ivan, content in his own delusion, began combing diligently through Guizhou Province.
He spent half a day searching, and every encounter with strangely uncooperative locals only deepened the certainty in his heart.
The people of Guizhou fear the Dang family! That is why they will not speak!
In truth, the people of Guizhou refused to sell out Hui-yeom because they regarded him as their benefactor. From their point of view, he was the man who had given them a fertilizer like magic—allowing them to reclaim and farm land that even the provincial authorities and local gentry had abandoned—who had brought them a wondrous crop called sugar cane, taught them to grow it, and then bought their harvests at high prices. On top of that, rumor held that a Mongol host of three hundred thousand cavalry, marching to trample the Central Plains, had been stopped in Yunnan by none other than Hui-yeom's army.
So when a white man the size of a bear went around asking after the Dang family with a menacing look, of course no one gave him a straight answer.
Even so, Ivan's wandering did not last long.
"You there. I hear you're looking for the Dang family?"
A woman's voice from behind made him turn—and for an instant his breath stopped. His blue eyes flew wide as if they might burst as he stared at the person who had spoken to him.
The one who had called him to a halt was Dang Su-jeong.
The people of Guizhou had reported to the Sichuan Dang Family that a suspicious foreigner was inquiring after the whereabouts of their Young Master. As the most formidable fighter among them, Dang Su-jeong had come herself—to guide him to Hui-yeom if his intentions were good, and to break him if they were not.
When Ivan froze like stone, Dang Su-jeong tilted her head.
"You were looking for the Dang family, weren't you? Or can't you understand our language? Maybe I should have brought Yeom along…"
"How can anyone be so beautiful!"
"What?!"
Ivan's sudden bellow made Dang Su-jeong jump.
"Jesus—you scared me. Why are you yelling all of a sudden…"
"You are nearly as beautiful as our Young Palace Lord!!"
He made no attempt to hide his feelings, shouting them at full volume. Then he flinched, crossed his arms, and began stroking his chin.
"Hmm… or not? The Young Palace Lord is still more beautiful… at that level, maybe… zero-point-six, no, zero-point-seven of a Young Palace Lord?"
"Is this guy insane?"
Being told she was pretty out of nowhere was one thing; being subjected to a finely graded beauty appraisal on top of it sent heat rising to her head. Just as she began to toy with the pistol hidden in her robes, Ivan spoke again.
"Ah—forgive me. I was so astonished by your beauty that I committed a discourtesy!"
"So you know it was a discourtesy? Who are you, and why are you looking for our family?"
"Your family?"
Only then did he notice the deep green of her garments. His blue eyes blazed.
"Green clothes! So you are of the Dang family! Then you must be the Young Master of the Dang!"
"No. I'm the Young Master's bodyguard and chief researcher of the Innovation Division. Dang Su-jeong. In the jianghu they call me the Poison Phoenix."
"Person of the Dang! Even if you are not the Young Master, you are still of the Semya! I put this question to you. Why do you oppress and intimidate honest commoners? If you have any pride as a martial artist, know shame for your deeds and withdraw!"
"Oppress and intimidate commoners? What kind of nonsense is that?"
Dang Su-jeong's eyes sharpened to blades.
"Do you have any idea how grateful the people here are to our family? We helped them reclaim wasteland they had given up on, gave them medicine so crops could grow even in this barren soil, and provided them with crops suited to the land. Walk these roads and you hear their praise nonstop—so where did you hear such garbage to come spouting it at me?"
"Few have the courage to speak the truth before a person with a blade! They fear the Dang family, and so they hide what is real! A man of a household that once showed me kindness trembled with loathing at the Dang family's tyranny, yet wept for the reality that he had no choice but to submit!"
"And which household was that?"
"If I name them, do you think I don't know you'd go find them and take revenge?"
Dang Su-jeong stared at him in disbelief, then spoke with the strained patience of someone trying to reason with a child.
"Look, you there—Novi, was it?"
"Ivan Novikov!"
"Right, Ivan. From the way you talk about owing a family, you were probably a guest retainer of some local gentry… You think if you stonewall us we won't figure it out? How many gentry families are there in Guizhou Province? And we've only visited a handful of houses recently. You came from the Wang, the Jin, or the Hwang family, didn't you?"
"?!??!"
Ivan staggered back as if struck, then shook his head hard.
"N-no!"
"…Are you a little slow?"
"Ivan is not a fool! Master said Ivan is only upright and steadfast!"
"…"
For all his apparently dim behavior, her eyes never stopped scanning every inch of him. He might act a little dense, but that solid body was a weapon in its own right, no less than the warriors of the Southern Barbarian Beast Palace—and the aura seething from him was as sharp as a blade of wind off the frozen plains.
The jianghu occasionally produced masters who had fallen into heart demons, or whose martial arts had left them simple-minded, regressed to childhood, or simply a touch slower. Such people were notoriously difficult to deal with. Dang Su-jeong raised her guard on the assumption that Ivan might be one of them.
He spoke.
"I will not waste more words! Leave Guizhou at once, and never return. Then my fists will not have to shatter that beautiful body of yours!"
"I appreciate the compliments, but I'm a martial artist before I'm a woman. And do you really think you can beat me?"
"You have no intention of withdrawing peaceably?"
"You're the one who needs to drop the prejudice and wake up to reality. Why take one side's word and paint the other as absolute evil?"
"Hwang Jinsa is absolutely not a wicked man!"
"So you came from the Hwang family."
"Ah—"
His face flushed crimson as he shouted in flustered outrage.
"You vile witch! You tricked me…!"
"…Fine, fine. We'll say I tricked you. I'm sorry. My bad."
The sheer stupidity of the situation had snuffed out her anger.
"I won't take it out on the Hwang family separately. Watching you, I can more or less picture what happened. You were living as their guest retainer, some gentleman of the Hwang house got an earful from Hui-yeom, and you decided you wanted revenge for him. The Hwangs put on the airs of virtuous scholars while dodging state taxes and exploiting the farmers nearby—classic predatory gentry. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black…"
"Did you use mind-reading?! You witch!"
"Oh, for fuck's sake—!"
As if declaring he would listen no longer, Ivan charged with fists swinging.
"No more talk! First I'll make you yield, then we can speak. Do not curse my fists for being merciless!"
As he drew up his inner power, the air temperature around them plummeted and a blizzard like a knife-edged wind rose howling. Dang Su-jeong's eyes went round.
"Bingbaek-singong… the North Sea Ice Palace?!"
As Ivan's fist shot forward, a pure-white blizzard howled forth like a storm, hurtling toward Dang Su-jeong as if fired from a cannon.