The Fathers
It may sound like stating the obvious, but Dang Su-jeong was a proud heroine of the martial world.
Her confidence bordered on arrogance, and with martial arts that were anything but light, she had never once failed to carry herself with perfect poise and dignity wherever she went—even if she was not quite peerless under heaven.
The only person in the world who could make her weak was Lee Jinmyeong.
Yet even when facing him, she had never felt this crushing tightness in her chest, this dizzying sensation as if the ground were falling away beneath her feet.
“Congratulations. It is the qi of pregnancy.”
“…What?”
Dang Su-jeong blinked slowly, dazed.
Her brain felt as though it had turned into a soggy bundle of noodles. She had heard the words, she even knew what they meant, yet she could not grasp their significance.
Like accident victims who could no longer connect the sound of a word to its meaning, she simply sat there blinking blankly for a long while, unable to comprehend what she had just been told.
So the first cheer erupted from the seat beside her.
“Kyaaaaah!! Auntie!! Congratulations!!”
Sama Yun let out a cry of pure joy and threw her arms around Dang Su-jeong’s shoulders.
Ah, right. Pregnancy qi… pregnancy. That’s right, she was pregnant.
Dang Su-jeong nodded in a daze.
“Uh, ah, right. Yun… Yun is pregnant, yes…”
“And you too, Auntie! How in the world—pregnant at the same time! Double joy is coming to the Dang Family!”
“Ah.”
Her mind snapped back into focus.
She had not misheard. It was not a dream.
Dang Su-jeong looked down at her own lower belly with the eyes of someone staring at something utterly alien.
There was only the same smooth, firm abdomen as yesterday, wrapped in her deep-green robes, not a hint of spare flesh to be seen.
Yet inside it, they said, a new life was taking root.
“A child? My child? Mine and Myeong-myeong’s?”
To her vacant murmur, Sama Yun answered,
“Yes, that’s right! Auntie’s and Secretary Lee’s… no, Uncle’s child!”
Then she hesitated a moment, carefully reading the room before adding,
“Um, you’re… not unhappy about it, are you…?”
“Ah…”
The emotions that had frozen solid from shock finally began to move.
The instant she felt a dizzying rush of joy, sheer terror seized her.
“Uh, but I drank a ton of wine right up until yesterday…”
She had heard that drinking while pregnant was terribly harmful to the fetus.
Was it all right? What if something happened to their baby…
As Dang Su-jeong began to tremble, the physician smiled warmly.
“You need not worry. When a woman drinks without knowing she has conceived, it is almost always in the very earliest stage of pregnancy—before morning sickness sets in. I have never heard of a child coming to harm simply from drinking at that time.”
“Ah.”
Only then could Dang Su-jeong breathe again.
It had all started when Sama Yun mentioned that her monthly courses had stopped and asked her personal physician to take her pulse.
Dang Su-jeong, who had come over simply to see Woo-ju, was playing with the five-year-old when she idly remarked, “Come to think of it, I haven’t had my courses for a month or two either.”
For women with irregular cycles it was not unheard of, and it was hardly the first time for Su-jeong herself.
Extreme training often threw a woman’s cycle into chaos.
Hearing that, Sama Yun said, “Then you should have your pulse taken too, Auntie,” and though Su-jeong had grumbled that it was a bother, the physician’s easygoing manner—“It’ll only take a moment”—had made her offer her wrist without further protest.
And just like that, she learned that a new life was growing in her lower abdomen.
News of Sama Yun’s and Dang Su-jeong’s pregnancies swallowed the entire Dang Family in an instant.
The phrase is no exaggeration: every single topic of conversation throughout the household was replaced by those two pieces of news.
Eun Seol-ran, who had been shrieking with delight while hugging Sama Yun and bouncing around before dragging the still-dazed Su-jeong into some unidentifiable flailing that might have been a circle dance or the can-can, suddenly shouted,
“Quickly, quickly—we must tell them! Write a letter to Yeom! And to Brother Jinmyeong as well!”
“Yes, ma’am!”
The personal steward raced off toward the secretaries’ office.
Eun Seol-ran, eyes blazing as if she had just ignited her true qi, seized Dang Su-jeong’s hands tightly.
“?! Hic?”
Startled, Su-jeong froze; Eun Seol-ran said,
“Young lady, from this moment on you will do absolutely nothing. You will devote yourself solely to rest and prenatal care. Understood?”
“Uh…”
“Understood?”
Overwhelmed by that force, Su-jeong nodded on reflex. Eun Seol-ran smiled and turned to Sama Yun, who answered with an adorably coquettish smile,
“Yes, Mother. I shall look only at good things, hear only good things, and think only good thoughts~.”
“Aigoo, Yun, from one to ten there isn’t a single thing about you I don’t love~.”
“That’s because Mother spoils me so much~ Hehe.”
“Yun-ah!”
“Mother!”
While Eun Seol-ran and Sama Yun shared a fervent embrace, a slightly unmoored Dang Su-jeong watched blankly, then gently stroked her lower belly.
My child is in here…?
She still could not quite believe it.
Then someone tugged insistently at her skirt hem.
She looked down to find a fairy-like little girl holding a doll and tilting her head.
It was Dang Woo-ju, who had just turned five this year.
Her father Hwi-yeom was already extraordinarily handsome, and her mother was a beauty who could easily claim first or second place among the renowned flowers of the martial world; the child who had inherited both bloodlines was as lovely as a living doll and monopolized the affection of every adult in the family.
Woo-ju stopped tugging and asked,
“Auntie, baby come?”
At five, Dang Woo-ju could already express herself quite well.
“Uh, yeah… that’s what they say.”
“Mommy too?”
“Mm-hmm… Lucky you, Woo-ju. You’ll get to be a big sister.”
Su-jeong answered half-distractedly; Woo-ju scrunched her little brows in a serious frown.
“I like ‘big sister’ better.”
The expression was so cute that Su-jeong forgot her own fluster and let out a soft laugh.
“Then you’ll be big sister.”
“Really? Yay!”
Her bright, beaming smile was so utterly adorable.
Watching it, Su-jeong found herself unconsciously caressing her belly and thinking,
I’d like to have one of those and raise her pretty…
Myeong-myeong would be happy, wouldn’t he?
From the Sichuan Dang Family, two express riders set out—one toward Chagatai, the other toward Henan.
Naturally the Henan dispatch arrived first, and Hwi-yeom immediately launched a blitzkrieg of such terrifying speed that Franz Halder himself would have wept.
In plain language: he said “screw everything in the way” and charged straight for the Dang estate like a madman.
Thanks to that, Hwi-yeom’s party covered the land distance that normally took a month and a half to two months from Henan to the Sichuan Dang Family in a mere three weeks—an astonishing feat.
As for Lee Jinmyeong…
Lee Jinmyeong was currently shuttling back and forth to Chagatai, coordinating grain shipments and the purchase of Mongolian horses. He had arrived from Sichuan about two weeks earlier and unpacked.
He planned to stay another fortnight or so; once the grain was unloaded he would take the horses and return, then stay well clear of Chagatai for at least a couple of quarters. That had been his firm resolve.
Honestly, this trade is in the stabilization phase now. I don’t even need to come in person anymore, right?
At the beginning the matter had been so special, carrying an imperial order and drawing heavy outside attention, that he had no choice but to go himself. But he was now a vice-president of one of the Sichuan Dang Family’s subsidiaries.
Ordinarily a man of his position did not leave his workplace and travel about so lightly.
Well, once I’m here there is always more work that can be done…
Lee Jinmyeong had a gut feeling that Hwi-yeom’s business expansion would one day push westward beyond the Central Plains.
So while he lingered in Chagatai he was already conducting the ground surveys needed for a transcontinental railway that would cut across Central Asia and Western Asia—an Asian continental trunk line.
In truth he had come to sell rice and had nothing particular to do; he could have simply loafed and no one would have said a word.
But the Mongolian steppe truly held nothing, and it was boring, so the naturally diligent workaholic had simply invented work for himself.
Then the news arrived.
“Vice-President, a letter from the main house. It’s red.”
“Mm.”
Red intelligence meant something extremely serious.
Before breaking the wax seal, Lee Jinmyeong ran through a dozen possibilities in his head.
He examined and discarded countless scenarios.
But this particular possibility had never once entered even his wildest dreams.
“Uh.”
As he read the letter, Lee Jinmyeong froze solid as if he had swallowed paralysis powder.
“Uhhh.”
His eyes had clearly read the characters on the paper—white was paper, black was ink—so he was going to be a father, which meant… uh?
Uhhh?
It took roughly the time of one incense stick for the petrified Lee Jinmyeong to finally start moving again with a strangled cry.
“Great Khan! Great Khan! Great Khan!”
He flew to Adiya Khan’s office.
For reference, Lee Jinmyeong had built a fairly close relationship with Adiya Khan of late, because he had solved Chagatai’s food shortage and thereby greatly helped the Great Khan recover political influence.
Thus even when he burst into the Great Khan’s office at an ungodly hour and demanded an audience out of nowhere, he enjoyed the special privilege of not being rolled up in a carpet and trampled by horses.
In private, when the mood was good, Adiya Khan even allowed them to call each other brothers—he liked Jinmyeong that much.
He had offered recruitment terms several times.
Right now, however, the look on his face said he very much wanted to roll Jinmyeong up in a carpet.
“…So, let me get this straight.”
He spoke with the expression of a man who had just been told that a stable bull had given birth to a deer.
“Your wife is pregnant, so you must rush home at once. Give you the finest horse. Is that it?”
“Yes, Great Khan!”
“Right! You come find me at the Hour of the Rat—midnight—and that’s what you say. Haha!”
Grinning with all his teeth, Adiya Khan hurled a water bowl.
“Go wash your feet and sleep, you little bastard!”
“Brother! Brother! This is no time for that, Brother! Su-jeong—Su-jeong is waiting for me!!”
Perhaps because they had grown close enough to call each other brothers in private?
What kind of words did one dare fling at the emperor of a nation at this hour?
“It could have waited until tomorrow, you bastard! I thought Sungui had gone mad and declared war!”
“Who cares about war right now! Su-jeong is pregnant! I’m going to be a father!”
“That’s wonderful! So you have no more regrets and can die happy—is that it?! Are you begging me to kill you, you plague-ridden fool!”
After a great deal of crashing, roaring, and thrashing, the two men finally calmed down—only after enough time had passed for hot tea to grow cold.
More precisely, Jinmyeong calmed down; Adiya Khan was simply exhausted.
“…I have committed a grave diplomatic discourtesy, Great Khan. I will surely repay this crime someday.”
Adiya Khan stared at the dejected Jinmyeong, shook his head, and sighed.
“…We’ll pretend it never happened. Go wash your feet and sleep.”
“…Yes.”
Just as the crestfallen Jinmyeong bowed and began to withdraw, Adiya Khan’s voice came from behind him.
“Tomorrow.”
“?”
“Tomorrow, stop by my stables and take Red Wind. I’ll assign you one kheshig guard and ten Huchtey Salhi.”
Fire lit in Lee Jinmyeong’s eyes.
“Brother! Please accept your little brother’s kowtow!”
“You lunatic! Don’t smash the floorboards with your forehead—go sleep, damn it! Those are imports and they’re expensive!”
Well.
In the end, even Chagatai was a place where people lived.
Thus, borrowing Adiya Khan’s prized steed and part of his swiftest escort, Lee Jinmyeong set an absurd record by arriving in Sichuan at almost the same time as Hwi-yeom.
The speed was so terrifying that Dang Un-sang could only laugh hollowly and remark,
“Clearly the reason Chagatai lost to our house was that their generals were lazy. Lee Jinmyeong can get here this fast, yet the Chagatai commanders dawdled and threw away their chance at victory.”
Thanks to that, a new proverb was born in Sichuan: “Like a newlywed husband whipping his horse.”