Bloodshed in Maeseok Village
At the foot of the mountain lay a village that, to anyone who didn’t know better, would have seemed like an ordinary place where ordinary people lived.
It was far too large to be called a mere village. Without a city wall, it might as well have been a city in everything but name.
"Here?"
"Indeed."
"It’s not a bandit stronghold."
Voicing the confusion everyone else was feeling, I asked the question outright, and Geok Gyeong-jin only smiled as if he had expected it all along before replying.
"Isn’t this proof that the Green Forest isn’t filled only with fools? It also proves that we aren’t so easy to root out."
I looked toward the place called Maeseok Village with a faint sense of disbelief.
But no matter how I looked at it, it was just a big village. A plain, unremarkable big village.
There were rice paddies and fields. Children were running around, with a dog chasing after them. A woman was pulling weeds, a man was carrying a water jar on his shoulder, and a young fellow was hauling firewood.
Watching them, I felt my mind go a little blank.
This was the nest of bandits? This was Maeseok Village, one of the seventy-two Green Forest strongholds?
"Then… are you saying all of them are bandits? That woman pulling weeds, and even that man who looks like he’s never once held a weapon?"
"Strictly speaking, they’re not bandits. If it’s easier to understand, think of it as a clan settlement where families live together. Only in this case, it’s many clans sharing one place instead of just one. Maeseok Village is an old settlement, you see. So it’s a little different from an ordinary stronghold that takes in every ragtag drifter. You might say it’s been professionalized."
"I don’t want to make the comparison, but… it’s like Danggata."
Dang Yeong-young spoke with an unhappy look, and Geok Gyeong-jin answered with a hearty laugh.
"I was considering saying the same, but thought you might take offense, so I held my tongue. But Lady Dang said it first. Hah-hah. Yes, it’s quite similar to Danggata."
Danggata was the place where the members of the Sichuan Dang Clan lived together.
That said, there were a great many of them. The scale was enormous, too.
Not everyone in the Dang Clan learned martial arts. Of course, that was true of any noble house.
Not every family descended from a martial lineage cultivated martial arts.
Martial skill depended enormously on talent. The seeds of it were decided early on.
Besides, in most cases, inheritance went to the eldest legitimate son; the collateral branches weren’t all taken care of equally.
So a family couldn’t possibly absorb every single additional member that kept multiplying over time.
If one wasn’t the eldest son and didn’t have talent either, one either had to live like an ordinary person or leave the martial family altogether.
Danggata was the place where people like that gathered instead of wandering too far away.
A massive clan settlement in the provincial capital of Sichuan—such a huge cluster of households that it practically formed part of the city itself.
So when Geok Gyeong-jin and Dang Yeong-young looked at Maeseok Village, they said it resembled Danggata.
Because this place was basically the same sort of thing.
"Then… are we supposed to wipe out all those people? The children and women too?"
I asked with a troubled expression, and Baek Jin-ah, Dang Yeong-young, and Hong Si-yeon didn’t look much different.
We had come to wipe out bandits, not to start slaughtering civilians.
"I know very well that it won’t be easy," Geok Gyeong-jin said. "Make no mistake, those people are guilty by origin. The child of a bandit is a bandit. Even if it’s not a crime deserving punishment down to the third generation and extermination of the entire clan, I can’t say they’re innocent."
Collective punishment. A method that was always sensitive in any age, in any country.
Especially in a medieval world like this one, where human rights were about as rare as a good conscience; such things would be carried out without a second thought.
Geok Gyeong-jin had said it himself—punish three generations, or wipe out the whole clan.
"Still, if we were going to do that, we wouldn’t have come with this few people. And what would be the point of spilling needless blood? So we won’t be laying a hand on people like that recklessly. Besides, carelessly striking at the seventy-two strongholds isn’t exactly the brightest idea, either. Why go out of our way to smash a wasp nest deep in the mountains?"
"Then…"
"What we need to find is why they’ve suddenly been multiplying their strongholds like this. We don’t need to cut off every single head there."
"Ah."
"The first thing is to get an answer from the chief of Maeseok Village."
"I understand."
My mission in the Dabie Mountains had already been completed once I finished clearing the bandit strongholds.
This was only an extra assignment. I was simply doing a bit more work than necessary in order to find the cause and eliminate it.
So there was no need to make a scene. If it ended this easily, all the better.
"It’d be better to go once it’s a little darker. Those people are extremely wary of outsiders entering their village. They know exactly what their roots are, so that’s only natural."
And so we waited until sunset, while I kept watch on Maeseok Village.
Even now, I still found it amazing that becoming a martial artist and gaining inner power had sharpened my eyesight this much.
Being able to see people moving around so clearly from such a distance would have been impossible before.
Anyway, Maeseok Village seemed peaceful.
It was hard to even call it a bandit stronghold. It was simply a tranquil mountain village tucked among the hills.
In fact, because it was more disciplined than most villages, that only made it seem more so.
The place made it very clear who held real power. And it made equally clear what happened if you broke the rules.
Watching it, I felt glad that we didn’t have to wipe them all out.
I had no hesitation when it came to killing bandits.
I might have had a visceral aversion to it, but I had almost no guilt.
I knew what those bandits had done. If I thought of it as them paying back the karma they’d piled up, I didn’t feel particularly uneasy.
But these people were different. Even if it was a village of bandits and their descendants, they might not be directly guilty.
Above all, there were children and women here.
No matter how heartless a person might be, it isn’t easy to condemn defenseless children and women as criminals and kill them.
No. Even in the worst possible scenario, it would be hard to do. I came from the modern world of the twenty-first century, after all.
Thinking that way, we waited until nightfall and then followed Geok Gyeong-jin into the village under cover of darkness.
There was no difficulty.
The curtain of night hid us from sight, and martial arts erased the sound of our footsteps.
Moving lightly, we headed straight for a large two-story pavilion in the middle of the village and slipped inside.
A man spotted us.
But Hong Si-yeon was faster. She darted forward at once, pressed a point on the man’s body, and then looked to Geok Gyeong-jin.
Geok Gyeong-jin shook his head. Meaning this one wasn’t the chief.
Come to think of it, he did seem a little too ordinary to be the chief.
Going deeper inside, we found a man who looked more like the chief.
He appeared to be around forty, with a bristling beard and a sturdy, imposing frame.
The man was drinking with his subordinates while a woman sat among them.
It was the sort of scene that screamed bandit leadership. Exactly the picture I’d imagined.
"Huh!?"
When he saw us, the man lurched to his feet in such a panic that the table, wine bottles, and cups all toppled over with a crash.
Even so, he didn’t look all that impressive. On top of that, he was clearly drunk.
We subdued them quickly. In fact, it was easier than dealing with the mountain strongholds up in the hills.
The men collapsed at once, their points sealed. The women shrieked and trembled.
So what we did was intimidate the women into silence and subdue anyone who came rushing over after hearing the commotion.
While we were handling the people coming in from outside, Geok Gyeong-jin seized the one who seemed to be the chief and interrogated him thoroughly.
A simple task. Nothing complicated about it.
Honestly, this was better. At least no one had died so far.
There was no need to spill pointless blood. There was no need to kill all of them.
"That’ll do! Let’s go back!"
Geok Gyeong-jin’s bright expression made it obvious he’d gotten something useful out of the man.
Even his steps looked lighter. The way he handled the Maeseok Village chief almost seemed to carry a certain understanding, too.
The man who had called himself the chief looked bewildered as he watched us leave without taking his life.
Well, from the way he’d panicked when we first appeared, he probably thought he was already dead.
So having his life spared must have felt like winning one back.
Thus we left Maeseok Village.
Not a single person dead in Maeseok Village. And we had gotten what we came for.
It was still a little frustrating that we’d left the bandits in the mountain strongholds dead while leaving these people alone.
But in any case, dealing with them wasn’t our job.
There’s more than one way to settle everything in the world. Murder and wiping people out isn’t the only method. That would be too cruel.
With that, we headed for the point where we were supposed to regroup.
When we arrived, Gyeok-seon and Geumran were already waiting for us there.
"Nothing happened, did it?"
Gyeok-seon looked unusually bright when he saw me. I’d never seen him like that before.
He looked remarkably human. None of that cold expression he usually wore showed on his face.
"No, senior. As you can see, I’m fine."
Gyeok-seon came up to me and stared intently, his gaze blazing as if he were scanning my entire body.
It made me feel strangely stripped bare. Good grief. Those aren’t eyes; those are lasers.
"If you’re fine, then that’s enough."
With that, Gyeok-seon turned away. Seeing that, Geumran covered her mouth and laughed softly.
Maybe she found it strange too. She looked just as if she was seeing this side of Gyeok-seon for the first time.
In any case, with the job finished safely, we all gathered together and headed back to Yeoksong.
* * *
After Harin’s group left, Maeseok Village was thrown into chaos for a while.
The points sealed on those who had been subdued were released by the next morning.
Only then was the chief able to speak, and only then did he hurriedly send a carrier pigeon to his superiors.
He told them that suspicious people had come and oppressed them.
And then, a day later, someone arrived from above.
The man asked the chief all sorts of questions, and the chief, having no choice, confessed everything he had said in full.
It was better to speak honestly than to lie.
The Green Forest’s laws were strict in their own way. So there was no reason to get hit once for nothing and then use your brain only to get hit twice.
The man from the headquarters listened to the chief’s story and left without causing any trouble.
The chief clutched at his chest in relief, and the nighttime raid was made to seem as though it had never happened at all.
And then, three days later, three people appeared in Maeseok Village.
And those three people killed every human being in Maeseok Village. Brutally. Horrifically.