The Resourceful Wise Woman, Jegal Yeonji (1)
"Cough!"
I hacked up clots of blood along with the water that had flooded my insides. The martial art Chu Geom had seated in my dantian refused to move, as if he had driven a lump of iron into my lower abdomen, and working my energy around it only snagged the flow of qi again and again. I could barely draw on four-tenths of my usual internal energy.
"Damn it...!"
The mass of inner force he had planted wasn't intricate. It was a blunt, stupid wad of energy jammed into place — pure enough that if I could digest it, I could make it my own.
The trouble was that I couldn't get it out by purifying or expelling something tainted. Medicine and poison differ only by the dose, as the saying goes, and this was internal energy that helped the body. It wouldn't drain the way waste does when you circulate your qi. It clung to my own energy and sat there, the way a heavy meal sits until you digest it slowly.
That damned bastard!
He'd said he wanted me, and then handed me a gift meant to advance my martial arts. But if I had to ride out the Blood Calamity that was coming while I was like this, the gift was a heaven-sent opportunity and a trap perfectly built to kill me — nothing more and nothing less.
Nor could I go hunting for a way to undo the sealed points. Acupoint sealing, past the common tricks of flooding a major point or a numbing point with inner force to paralyze someone, or pressing the sleep point to put them under, was an art intricate enough that everything else about it was kept as each sect's secret ultimate technique.
Ransomware. That's what this is.
A real master at least left himself a way to undo the seal. The vicious ones wandered around using methods even they couldn't release, thrown together at random — and more often than not, catching the man himself still didn't get you the method. By the nature of the blood vessels, which have to flow, any sealing will come undone on its own given time. Right now, time was the problem.
"Haa...... so this is my limit..."
As expected, I was no match for their officer class. I had managed to make Chu Geom feel threatened, and that was all. A person with an allergy can die from a hornet's sting, but for everyone else it only hurts, and then the human kills the hornet. The gap between Chu Geom and me was of that order. If I was lucky, I might be able to kill him. If he felt like it, he could kill me.
I'm lucky to be alive... No. It felt more like he was hunting for an excuse because he wanted to let me live.
In the original, Chu Geom had gnashed his teeth and thrown himself at killing Yeon Cheongha. This time he had walked away from a moment when he could have finished me. How thoroughly I had wrecked the original story — the thought pulled a short laugh out of me.
"Young hero. Are you all right?"
I had only just pulled myself together and was letting out a breath when she showed a worried face — the shadow Jegal Yeonji, disguised in an inn clerk's clothes.
"I'm all right. I swallowed some water, but this much is nothing..."
The Jegal Yeonji who had appeared in the night was her: Jegal Yeonji's twin older sister. She had cobbled together the clothes she kept for disguises into a temporary version of the robes worn by the Jegal Clan's Resourceful Wise Woman, and played the part of Jegal Yeonji having arrived.
The true Jegal Yeonji would reach Sichuan with the sunrise. After that, if things followed their course, she would hear the rumors about Ban Gyuseong and try to use him as bait to draw that organization in......
Now she'll come looking for me.
Once she heard of the woman before my eyes — the one who had already shown herself while wearing her face — Jegal Yeonji would come here without looking left or right.
"Thank you. Because of you... I'm alive."
If she hadn't disguised herself as Jegal Yeonji, Chu Geom would have killed me.
"Please, it was nothing......"
"But from the way those men were mistaken, you really are of the Jegal blood, aren't you. Your face resembles Jegal Yeonji's..."
"I have no name, young hero. So please — call me whatever comes easily."
Of course she didn't. If any record of her name leaked, rumors would spread of a shadow who could impersonate Jegal Yeonji or stand in her place, and one of the strategies Jegal Yeonji kept hidden would be exposed.
"Then......"
She did not call herself a Jegal. Even so, she was another Jegal Yeonji.
"I'll call you Lady Yeonji."
"That name......"
"It's already familiar in my mouth."
The Jegal Clan had barred her from having a name. But she was, without question, one more Jegal Yeonji. If that was so, then she was worthy of the name Yeonji. That was what I thought.
I don't know if I've got any talent for naming people, so I can't say it's a good one.
I'd always assumed novelists tossed names at their characters without much care, watching how they did it... but giving a name to a single young lady standing in front of me was enough to make my head ache. Writers who named dozens, hundreds of people really were something else. Not that I expected to be naming anyone else from here on.
"If that is what you wish to call me, young hero... then call me as you please."
A full month had passed since we met, and only now were we settling on a form of address. It had taken long enough.
"Also, young hero. From this point... the Resourceful Wise Woman, Jegal Yeonji, is expected to come."
"The Resourceful Wise Woman... is she coming because of you, Lady Yeonji?"
"Yes. And it was the Resourceful Wise Woman who sent me to Sichuan and asked me to confirm the information."
The Resourceful Wise Woman, Jegal Yeonji, had caught the scent of a traitor hanging over the Jegal Clan, and of the hidden organization moving in secret through the murim. She still wasn't certain, of course, so she had asked help of the shadow she trusted most — her twin older sister. The story from there was that she lost her sister and gained a lover...
Why is a fate that was supposed to go looking for Ban Gyuseong coming to me......
And I didn't want to meet the Resourceful Wise Woman. She was beautiful, and she was wise, but she looked at human feeling as numbers. Put in modern terms, she was something close to a psychopath. No — judging by the things she did, she was a psychopath, full stop. She had been willing to use Ban Gyuseong, a man she had only just laid eyes on, as bait to get information about her own twin sister. If I hid what I knew about Yeonji this time, there was no telling what she would do to dig it out......
What I need at a time like this...... is to pit one enemy against another, isn't it?
Crush evil with evil. Tangle the irritating one up with an irritating woman, and let the two of them entertain each other. Besides, she was one of that bastard Ban Gyuseong's three wives and four concubines anyway. Ranked properly, she was the second legal wife, right after Han Soso. I might as well start tying them together now.
"Yeonji. Can you bring Ban Gyuseong here?"
"Ban Gyuseong... the one who fought you before, young hero..."
"Yes. That bastard. I heard he's looking for me. Can you have him get here timed with the Resourceful Wise Woman's arrival?"
"The Resourceful Wise Woman is already close at hand, so she will arrive shortly. Even if I summon him as quickly as I can, he will be at least a quarter-hour behind."
"That's fine. I'll buy us that quarter-hour..."
"Then I will go."
"Oh — what's my junior sister doing? From the feel of her presence, she seems to be on the ground floor."
"That is......"
Just as Yeonji was about to explain, I felt a formation unfolding below.
"We'll talk later."
Yeonji, born to the Jegal Clan, flung herself out the window before the formation could finish taking shape. I sat on the bed on purpose, returned to circulating my qi, and waited for the Resourceful Wise Woman to come find me.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
The clamor of people passing time in their rooms, of meals being eaten in the dining hall, cut off. An unpleasant silence wrapped the room, a silence in which not even insects or birds could be heard, and through it rang only a sound like modern high heels striking stone. In truth it was the distinctive footfall of the Resourceful Wise Woman's Mystic Discernment Drunken Ridge Steps, as she walked lightly across the formation the Jegal Clan had laid.
The door rattled.
The moment the page boys attending her opened it, a beauty appeared in robes as airy as a celestial maiden's — lovely enough to make a man's jaw drop. She resembled the Yeonji who had just left the room, but she was far colder: dead eyes, and lips painted a deliberate, glaring red. The woman in those splendid clothes seemed to overwhelm anyone who merely looked at her.
"Pardon the intrusion. Young Hero Yeon Cheongha."
Among the Five Dragons and Seven Phoenixes, the one whose wisdom and beauty were said to pierce the sky — the Piercing Phoenix.
The Resourceful Wise Woman, Jegal Yeonji, had shown herself before me.
Click. Click. Click.
The young pages attending at her side brought an ornate chair, fitted the pieces of wood together one by one, and assembled a throne she could ascend.
Honestly... what a goddamn production.
The whole process struck me as absurd, but the Resourceful Wise Woman, Jegal Yeonji, had always been this sort of character, so I let it pass and went on melting Chu Geom's inner force, trying to draw my internal energy up.
Silence filled the room. All I could feel was the heat pouring off my body, fierce enough to sting.
"You aren't asking any questions."
"Should I?"
"Ordinarily, in a case like this, there are a great many things one wonders. Who I am. Or why I am dressed so splendidly. Why I spread a formation over this inn and isolated you. Or how I came here already knowing your name."
"I don't go around hiding my name. Ask the inn for the guest register and you'll have it. The world is wide, and daughters of rich houses are many. You must be one of them."
"Heh... heheh..."
Interest stirred in those lifeless, dead eyes.
Her internal energy wasn't particularly strong. The Resourceful Wise Woman's martial arts were rated as they were only out of regard for the Jegal Clan's prestige and her wisdom; the depth of her internal energy sat at the very bottom of the Peak Realm, just enough to scrape the lowest seat among the Seven Phoenixes, and her practical combat skill was about the middle of first-rate. If it came to it, even my martial arts as they stood could break this formation and get me clear, and if things turned truly dangerous my junior sister would come running.
Good. So long as I have something to bet on, I've got nothing to shrink from.
"I have already heard the rumor that you clashed with the organization."
"The organization?"
"Yes. We are presently confirming the corpse of the Face-Stealing Ghost, and the corpses of those who were cooperating with them in Sichuan."
A lie. In truth, the Resourceful Wise Woman had failed to take the evidence from this place. That was why she had devised something like a bait operation.
Who knows. With the story changed, she might really have gotten her hands on it......
But on the present timeline, the claim that she had confirmed the evidence made no sense. Most likely she meant to sound me out with it...
"You... know about that organization, don't you."
"Ah. I know them."
At those words, madness flickered through the Resourceful Wise Woman's eyes.
There it is! The crazy bitch's eyes!
Seeing that look, Ban Gyuseong had recalled his master's maxim — that one does not deal with madmen — and ignored the Resourceful Wise Woman for quite some time. Now that I was seeing it myself, it raised the hair on my neck. If I hadn't had the overriding premise that I needed to keep the novel moving, I would have wanted to ignore her and run.
"I see. As I thought... it was true that they had begun to work in secret through the murim of the Central Plains. In that case, you as well, young hero..."
"Ah. Those bastards are from the Demonic Cult."
"Yes, that organization is... what?"
"Peel back the ones doing something sinister in the Central Plains, and eight times out of ten it's the Demonic Cult's work. Isn't that so?"
At that, the Resourceful Wise Woman's expression went blank.
"...Huh?"
The look of sheer bewilderment was identical to her older sister's. Twins, sure enough.