Those Who Suffer
Chu Ildo was an ordinary commoner of Anhui Province.
He had been born in Sichuan. His ancestors, a collateral branch of the Sichuan Dang Family, had run a small general store as merchants; when the Demonic Cult swept over Sichuan they took to the refugee roads, and by now they had been settled in Anhui for a full thirty-five years.
The child born on that flight had become the head of a household, so in every practical sense the Chu family were Anhui people.
Of course the early years had been hard. The dialects of the Central Plains varied so sharply by region that at first they could barely understand their neighbors, and the rejection of outsiders was fierce. Historically the people of the heartland carried a strong sense of privilege; anyone from a remote place like Sichuan was casually looked down upon.
Still they endured. For the sake of living in Anhui they waited, year after year, until the village finally accepted them as neighbors.
That patience had borne fruit. They had become true Anhui folk.
Or so they believed—until the day they watched their own shop burn.
“No—!!!”
His son, a vigorous man in his mid-thirties, was hauling well water in a futile attempt to quench the flames, the effort as useless as pissing into a frozen boot. His daughter-in-law clung to the neighbors, screaming for help to put out the fire, yet people only averted their eyes with uneasy expressions; no one moved to assist.
Old legs gave way. Chu Ildo sank to the ground and muttered,
“It’s no use…”
The young couple, lost to panic, had not noticed what he already knew. If a fire broke out in the village, the first people to come running should have been the men of the Namgung Family—and he had been searching for them. Now he saw them: figures in blue martial uniforms and headscarves watching with bitter eyes while they held the Anhui villagers back.
They were from the Blue Dragon Martial Hall, a collateral line of the Namgung Family.
The Blue Dragon Martial Hall that looked after every village affair, that sometimes protected people more reliably than the local yamen itself.
If they stood by and refused to help extinguish the fire, it could mean only one thing: the Chu family had been marked by the Namgung Family.
And that meant they could no longer live in Anhui.
“….”
Forcing strength into legs that refused to hold him, Chu Ildo planted his cane and rose. He walked toward the master of the Blue Dragon Martial Hall.
Hall Master Jang was gazing with a bitter expression at the burning house and the screaming young couple. When the old man approached, the disciples moved to block him, but the hall master stopped them with a gesture.
“Old Chu. I regret what has happened.”
“…Regret, is it.”
Teeth ground together. More than anything he wanted to spit every filthy curse he knew into that brazen face, yet Chu Ildo held himself in check. Risking his family’s lives for a single outburst of rage would be pure folly.
Instead he collapsed to his knees before the hall master as if he had simply fallen.
“Hall Master Jang… we have looked one another in the face for more than thirty years, have we not…?”
“….”
“If you have not treated me with empty hypocrisy all this time… if the upright, fair-minded Hall Master Jang I remember was the true man… then I beg you, I beg you for mercy.”
“Mercy…? It is already too late to put out that fire…”
“We will leave Anhui. Only let us go alive. Or at least spare the young ones.”
From the wrinkled corners of Chu Ildo’s eyes tears poured—futility, rage, and self-loathing for all the years that had come before, twisted together.
“End it with this old man’s life… I was the one who said we should settle in Anhui. The children have done nothing wrong, have they…?”
“I think there has been some misunderstanding…”
“Please… I will bow like this…”
“….”
For a moment he even struck his head against the earth, hot tears still falling. Then a soft clink sounded and a small coin pouch dropped in front of his eyes.
When he looked up, the master of the Blue Dragon Martial Hall had already turned and vanished.
“You will be able to leave Anhui safely, Uncle.”
Speaking in his master’s place, the senior disciple Jang Pyeong said bitterly. He and Chu Ildo’s son had been close friends since childhood.
“That things have come to this… I am truly sorry.”
A single sentence.
A few syllables that left no trace in the world erased thirty-five years of one family’s life in Anhui and stripped them of every foundation they possessed.
The words of those who hold power are truly terrifying things.
“…So that is how you arrived in Sichuan.”
The odds that a family whose home and shop had burned to the ground, who set out with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a single coin pouch, would reach a distant destination alive were vanishingly small.
The sole reason they had arrived was the bandits of the Green Forest.
Unlike the Green Forest men of Sichuan and Yunnan, who had already been fully remade into employees of Noksan, the Seventy-Two Strongholds of the Green Forest still operated more or less normally on the mountains of the wider realm. On the road to Sichuan the Chu family encountered a band of them on some nameless peak…
“Hand over everything you have and we’ll spare your lives!!”
The bandits had swaggered out full of menace, only to click their tongues as they listened to the Chu family’s story and their wailing pleas to simply be killed instead.
“What a motherless mess! Damn it, this doesn’t feel like someone else’s business. My own hometown got burned out whole by some damned unorthodox sect and that’s why I’m doing this shit… tch.”
“So where were you headed, you say? Sichuan? How do you plan to walk that far with nothing but your bare bodies…?”
“And once you get there, how are you going to eat?”
“What? …A distant collateral branch of the Sichuan Dang Family? You think someone will still remember you if you go back?”
“Are you insane? You should have said that from the start!”
From that moment the suddenly, suspiciously kind Green Forest bandits appointed themselves escorts for the terrified rabbit-like Chu family and saw them safely on their way.
By now every Green Forest bandit under heaven knew of the unofficial relationship between the Sichuan Dang Family and the Seventy-Two Strongholds; they understood that, given time, they would eventually become one family of sorts. There was no reason not to help a collateral bloodline of the Sichuan Dang Family on its first homeward road in thirty-five years.
Doing so placed the Dang Family in their debt. It also scratched an old grudge against the Namgung Family, who liked to play the righteous knights of justice and would periodically storm into the mountains to slaughter Green Forest men by the dozens and hundreds. And finally, there was the Chu family’s story itself, a tale that could not be heard dry-eyed.
A great many of the bandits shared the experience of having lost their own homes for one unavoidable reason or another… which made the Chu family feel even less like strangers.
Thus the Chu family arrived in Sichuan under the pleasant delusion that the world was still a warm place after all—and only then did their story pass through the Minjeongwon and reach Hwiyeom.
“This is merely one case. Upon investigation we found that shops throughout Anhui Province operated by collateral branches of the Sichuan Dang Family, or that trade with our house, have been suffering a continuous stream of incidents.”
“Incidents of what sort?”
“It begins with the cutting of trade, the aggressive collection of loans, the refusal to extend credit, the isolation of long-time customers until they stop coming. From there it escalates to threats, plunder, and ultimately assault, murder, and arson…”
“Assault, murder, and arson by an orthodox power inside the capital region?”
“Of course there is no evidence that the Namgung Family itself committed any of it. It is simply the work of local thugs. Yet the fact that such things are occurring inside Namgung territory at all would be impossible without the family’s tacit consent.”
“Hmmm…”
Hwiyeom tapped the table with one finger, lost for a moment in thought.
“The Namgung Family… a prestigious sword house of kingly dignity, a clan that holds open-hearted righteousness as its creed, that always stands at the front to fight evil, the pride of Central Plains swordsmanship…”
Tap.
His finger stopped. Hwiyeom’s characteristic smile deepened.
“Complete bullshit.”
Well, murim people are like that.
Hwiyeom tried to understand it inwardly. No matter how finely they dressed it up, a murim man was ultimately nothing more than a private soldier swinging force for his own profit. Individual righteous martial artists or righteous sects might exist, but the physiology of the murim itself being righteous and romantic was the sort of story that belonged only inside wuxia novels.
And—
Whatever survives has a reason for surviving.
No matter how much a house pretended to righteousness and tried to act righteously, the mere fact that it had long dominated and survived in this filthy, blood-soaked murim proved that it had done dirty and dishonorable things whenever the family’s interest required it.
The Sichuan Dang Family is hardly in a position to lecture anyone… true enough… but this isn’t picking a fight with the main house, and it isn’t striking a major trading caravan of real size… scrubbing out tiny affiliates whose existence the main house itself barely even knew about… isn’t that just cheap?
Had he overestimated the Namgung Family because of their reputation? This wasn’t even dealing with a neighborhood gang—what kind of filthy behavior was this? The thought left Hwiyeom thoroughly foul-tempered.
Lee Jinmyeong, who had watched Hwiyeom for a long time, recognized that his lord was truly furious and tensed.
“…For the moment we have been providing the refugees with temporary lodging and food, but what shall we do?”
“What else? Protect them in the name of the Dang Family. Shelter every one who arrives, and among those whose bodies are still sound, arrange work and whatever else they need to stand on their own feet. Of course, a few spies—sorry, agents—may try to slip in among them, so do not be careless with surveillance.”
“Yes!”
“Still, I’m disappointed. The Namgung… is that all the house amounts to?”
“It probably wasn’t the Namgung Family that stepped forward.”
“Hm?”
Sama Yun, who had been dandling little Uju, spoke up.
“The Namgung Family are people who would rather die than lose face. Their obsession with ‘we are justice itself’ is beyond imagination. The first line of their creed is ‘The Namgung sword is the sword of Heaven, and therefore it is utterly upright and fair under Heaven.’ It’s a famous story; Namgung people go around boasting about it constantly.”
“Mmm. People can say anything with their mouths.”
“If they were the sort who would stoop to this kind of petty harassment just because the Dang Family’s activities irritated them, they could never have gone through the long history of the murim without being caught even once.”
“So you’re saying this situation was not ordered by the Namgung Family?”
“Well, that is what they will claim. And in fact they probably did not act themselves. They simply stayed silent. This is closer to the collateral branches and underlings reading the Namgung Family’s mood and getting overexcited.”
Sama Yun sighed.
“But the very fact that they are allowing it already reveals the Namgung Family’s displeasure. At least as I know them, direct contact should come soon.”
And as if Sama Yun’s words had been prophecy, it was not long before a messenger from the Namgung Family arrived.
“I am Namgung Jin, young master of the Namgung Family, known as the Thunder River Sword Blade.”
A man in his mid-forties, of an age with Dang Un-sang, Namgung Jin was a handsome middle-aged gentleman who looked as though he had stepped out of a painting. His features were clean, his frame—tempered by martial arts—was solid and tall, his eyes clear and deep, his complexion gentle, and his voice soft yet brimming with heroic spirit.
He was the very image of a “righteous hero,” the kind of presence that could make wariness melt away of its own accord.
Hwiyeom received the greeting and answered with proper courtesy.
“It is a great honor to meet so distinguished a senior of the murim. I am Hwiyeom, young master of the Dang Family, who holds a trifling reputation in Sichuan.”
The self-introduction was markedly humble; Namgung Jin’s expression brightened.
“Hahaha! It weighed on me that I could not attend the wedding in person and had to send my son instead. At last we exchange greetings. Glad to meet you, junior.”
“I am likewise delighted to meet you, senior.”
“Haha, yes, yes. But tell me—”
In an instant a chill pressure rode the laughing voice of Namgung Jin.
“Where has the Family Head gone, that you appear in this seat yourself?”