Side Story: The Miserable Life of Jang Eun-jo of Kunlun
Jang Eun-jo was a mixed-blood child born to a Han merchant father and a woman from the Western Regions. Her father already had a family in the Central Plains before she was born, so he bought a house in her mother's hometown at the start of the trade route. He would visit every few years, stay for several months, then set off again on his merchant caravans. Her father must have run a fairly large operation, because Jang Eun-jo enjoyed a wealthy childhood with maidservants attending her. Naturally, she grew up treating gold and silver as trivial things.
When she was about thirteen, news arrived that her father had died of a tropical disease far away on the trade route. From that moment, her life changed completely. The maidservants fled in the night with the family's wealth. Her mother sold even the glass beads Jang Eun-jo had played with as a child to buy food. Former subordinates of her father sometimes slipped into the house at night to sleep with her mother, and the next morning the dining table would be laden with food. Already old enough to understand such things, Jang Eun-jo knew exactly what her mother was doing to survive. One night, while her mother was still panting heavily in the inner room, she slipped out of the house.
She went straight to the small Kunlun branch. Large sects like Kunlun generally accepted young orphans first and later decided whether to take them as direct disciples based on talent. Those who failed to become direct disciples became outer disciples and, if they could not pay the enormous tuition, were cast out to wander the streets by the age of twenty. Clever Jang Eun-jo was already past the age of fifteen when she arrived; her bones were beginning to harden. Still, she looked younger than her years, and her feminine features had barely developed. She lied about her age, claiming to be three years younger, and barely managed to enter as a direct disciple.
Her luck ended there. Her master, who had initially believed she possessed talent for martial arts, grew tired of her dull progress as months and years passed. He began neglecting her training, and she soon fell behind even disciples several years younger than her nominal age. She had never put much effort into cultivation anyway. From the moment she entered Kunlun, her only goal had been to live comfortably without getting expelled. Naturally, her martial skills ranked at the very bottom among the second-generation disciples. Her master, martial uncles, and senior sisters often approached her in secret and urged her to leave Kunlun. But she knew that if she went outside, the best she could hope for was to end up like her mother after her father died. She refused to leave.
In her fifth year at Kunlun, while pretending to train so the others would not stare, she saw a young master from the Namgung family who had come to visit. It was the first time she had ever laid eyes on a man with such finely chiseled features, well-proportioned muscles, thick hair, and a faint, refreshing scent that drifted from afar. She lost her heart to him without ever exchanging a single word. The flame of infatuation that had caught in the girl's chest began, slowly but surely, to gnaw away at her life.
Truly smitten, the girl never even considered the shrewd plan of making the heir of the greatest family in the world her man and changing her fate. Instead, she moved as swiftly as she had when she left home. She took on chores like cleaning and laundry that she normally shoved onto her junior sisters, and for the first time she went to the training ground at night to pretend to practice external arts. Through these contrived coincidences she gradually closed the distance between them. Eventually she managed to create an opportunity to drink tea alone with the young master.
“…Meet me at the hour of the Dog. Young lady.”
By the time she came to her senses, she had already promised a secret rendezvous. Dazzled by the young master's voice, sweet as though candied dates had been stuffed into her ears, she gave him both her body and her heart that very night.
“P-please… come in…”
“Then I shall enter, young lady.”
—Squelch, squelch…
“Ah… g-gently, please… Young Master…”
“Does it hurt?”
Seeing the faint disappointment on his face when he first saw her bare chest, she swallowed the pain of being deflowered and forced a weak smile.
“Haaah… I-it’s fine… P-please, do as you like, Young Master…”
The moment those words left her lips, the young master began pounding into her without mercy. Having tasted a man for the first time, she felt only brutal pain from the violent coupling and no pleasure whatsoever.
—Spurt! Spurt!
She even felt a twinge of resentment when the Namgung scion released deep inside her without asking permission. Several days after they began sleeping together, the young master vanished from Kunlun without a word of farewell, let alone a greeting, leaving a period at the end of Jang Eun-jo’s fleeting first love.
“W-why…?”
Yet the real disaster came later. About a month after he disappeared, a messenger hawk arrived from the Martial Alliance. The letter contained something she had never imagined and never wanted to hear. It stated that half a year earlier, a young master of the Namgung family had been murdered while traveling the jianghu, and an impostor had been using his identity plaque and belongings to seduce female experts from various sects. All sects were advised to be on guard.
The man who had taken both her body and heart had never been the real Namgung heir, nor had he ever felt any affection for her.
“Ugh!”
“Uurk!”
“Uuuuugh!”
“Uweeeeh!”
Upon hearing the news, Jang Eun-jo and her junior sisters, along with their senior sisters—more than ten Kunlun female experts in total—spent the day retching in disgust at the vile impostor. After an emergency meeting of the elders and sect leader, all the women were sent to the secluded training caves deep in the Kunlun mountains under the pretext of closed-door cultivation.
Months later, Jang Eun-jo and the others gave birth in the caves, helping one another. Some crippled their own dantians and left Kunlun to raise their children. Others begged the sect leader in tears and were allowed to stay on the condition that their children would later be accepted as disciples. Their one common point was that none of them abandoned the child carrying the impostor’s blood.
Jang Eun-jo, however, abandoned her still-bloodied infant at a small temple and fled. She had no interest in what would become of the child or where it would grow up.
“The world looks down on me only because I have no money and no strength.”
Having gained a clear answer during the false closed-door training, childbirth, and postpartum period, she began offering her services to the wealthy martial uncles whose pockets were always heavy. “Sex brings no pleasure at all, and all I have to do is spread my legs for men to happily hand over money. Why wouldn’t I do it?”
Most first-generation disciples of Kunlun carried thick purses. The added thrill of violating a junior sister without repercussions allowed her to demand as much as one tael of gold per night—twice the rate of a high-class courtesan in a major city. Yet the martial uncles’ purses never closed to her. Intoxicated by the taste of money and, occasionally, expensive elixirs, she began offering additional paid services using her mouth and rear as well. Word spread through the inner and outer disciples until even the senior uncles heard of her. Her pockets grew even thicker.
Sometimes she became pregnant and her business faced crisis, but her martial uncle Hyeonjo would appear without fail whenever her belly began to show. He would hand over a large sum and demand a special act.
“Uhyoooo!”
Afterward, her qi and blood would be so disturbed that she lay bedridden for a month, but the fetus inside her would always be gone. Several more years passed. Even after Kunlun relocated its base from a remote mountainside to the outskirts of Heungkyungbu, the capital of Western Xia, her business remained as prosperous as ever.
A few days later, the sect leader Hyeongeom, his neck wrapped in bandages, entered her room reeking of blood right after finishing a session. Her business finally came to an end.
“Ahaha, so you’ve finally found out.”
“No. I’ve known all along.”
“Th-then, does the Grandmaster also wish to have me?”
“Indeed.”
“Th-then please give me one gold coin first.”
“Do you wish to be expelled?”
“Ah, I understand. I was just asking, just in case.”
“Then spread your legs.”
“…Yes.”
When Jang Eun-jo sat on the bed and parted her thighs, the thick, discolored semen of the martial uncle who had just left bubbled out from her well-used entrance, which no longer suited her age.
“I’m putting it in.”
“…Yes.”
—Thrust!
Hyeongeom, who had maintained an extremely stiff posture and tone since entering the room, continued to pound into her with the same rigid demeanor even as he drove his thick member between her legs. Having spent years doing nothing but spreading her legs until men finished inside her, she felt no pleasure beyond the sensation of being stretched. Only pain remained.
After some time, her expression was one of agony while Hyeongeom continued thrusting with the same unchanging posture and face. Her dried-up junction offered only sharp pain instead of pleasure, and heavy bleeding clouded her mind.
“Aaaagh! P-please stop, Grandmaster!”
“I still haven’t finished once.”
There was a lie in those words. Hyeongeom’s member, turned into a durahan, had been altered to forgo ejaculation and instead wound the depths of a woman’s passage, absorbing demonic energy through the blood. For some reason, no one was near her quarters that night, so she received no rescue.
The next day, Jang Eun-jo was discovered as nothing more than skin and bones—a mummy. And the gold she had saved over the years was never found.