Crisis at Daseogak - 5
Part of the reason things had come to this was my own fault.
The contingency plan I had prepared for the moment the Sichuan Dang Clan decided to take issue with Dangga Pungun—that plan had blown up in my face.
Hwarin had generously told me that if the clan came after the book, I should use her as a shield. I never wanted it to reach that point.
To keep from having to put her in front of me, I had reached for the other scheme I had been holding in reserve.
One approach had been to paint the protagonist Dang Jeong as a righteous chivalrous warrior forced into those passionate nights, the classic righteous-hero-with-a-harem setup. The other had been this:
Use the Bulmanghwan.
On the road to the Seong Family Manor, tailing Cheon Sohee’s assassination mission, we had come across a man already dead at the hands of bandits. On his person he had carefully carried a Bulmanghwan.
In the original story that ring belonged to Dang Hwarin, so at first I assumed I had simply stumbled onto hers by chance.
—A Bulmanghwan? Why do you have that?
—I heard everyone from the Sichuan Dang Clan carries one. You don’t. I was just curious.
While we were traveling together I had casually asked Hwarin why she never wore one.
—No. Only direct bloodline descendants carry those. Well… that bastard Dang Geoho used to say that once my martial arts improved enough he’d take me into the family properly and give me a Bulmanghwan as proof. Probably another one of his lies.
So that was how she obtained it in the original.
—Guess I had it wrong.
—Then how do you have one? Ah… right.
She asked the question and answered it herself in the same breath, bowing her head in apology. Perfect—she’d already filled in the misunderstanding for me. Fine. Go ahead and believe my Dokin friend gave it to me.
In the end, the anonymous Bulmanghwan was never meant to end up in Hwarin’s hands.
So whose was it?
The answer lay in the book the dying man had begged us to carry all the way to Sichuan. The volume was so soaked in blood it was unreadable—under normal circumstances no one could have restored it.
—Assassin Number Five said he didn’t have time to restore the book himself and called in a specialist, but you’ve already left. If you still have it, I’ll restore it for you free of charge.
Even when she left, Sohee kept every little promise. This big brother was moved. Thanks to her I got to read the restored contents in one of the Assassin Pavilion’s safe houses.
It was a diary. The diary of a Joseon courtesan named Hyang-a.
The author was Hyang-a, a rising star destined to become Hubei’s foremost courtesan. She had not yet spent her first night, and every man in the province was watching her.
The raising of the hair. Who would buy that first night and pin up her hair?
Even a moderately pretty courtesan’s first night cost the price of a tiled-roof house. How much, then, for the woman who would be Hubei’s greatest beauty?
Gossipers tossed prices around, yet contrary to every prediction the price of raising Hyang-a’s hair was not money. It was love.
—Thank you for saving me. May this humble woman know the young hero’s name?
—I am… Dang Chu.
They met dramatically and fell for each other at first sight. The name he gave was false, but love does not care about such things.
They burned for each other and shared their first night. The brothel flew into a rage, yet the man neither paid the hair-raising fee nor bowed his head.
—How can a man buy his woman’s first night with money? Better that I free her destiny entirely.
Instead he paid a far greater sum and bought her out of the trade completely. Purchasing a first night already cost a fortune; buying a courtesan free of her indenture must have been astronomical.
A prince who rescued her from crisis, the man who took her virginity, the one who even saved her from a cursed fate—there was no reason for the woman not to fall for him.
They loved like wildfire, and eventually she conceived.
—I must leave for a mission now, but when I return I will take you with me and make you a proper member of the family.
Dang Chu was an alias for the mission. He pressed an unmarked Bulmanghwan into Hyang-a’s hand and departed. That was the last she ever saw of him.
“She got dumped, plain and simple.”
Hyang-a was never acknowledged by the Sichuan Dang Clan. Months later she heard that her lover’s party had returned, went to find him, and was turned away at the gate without ever seeing his face.
Nowhere to go, belly swelling day by day. In despair she chose the road home to Joseon.
“In this world that kind of story is more common than you’d think.”
A courtesan bearing an illegitimate child was nothing rare. An official posted to the provinces taking a fancy to a local girl and leaving her with child; a scholar on a pleasure trip dallying with a courtesan until she falls pregnant; a martial artist rescuing a woman and then planting a seed—those things happened all the time.
Sometimes the woman was lucky enough to become a concubine. Far more often she was simply abandoned.
The diary I had read was just one more ordinary tragedy of that sort.
“The dead man we found… he was Hyang-a’s son.”
Hyang-a remarried in Joseon, but she caught an epidemic and died young.
At the end of the diary, in a failing hand, she wrote to her son: survive, grow strong, and when you are a man take the Bulmanghwan and go to the Sichuan Dang Clan.
The young man obeyed his mother’s dying wish, grew up, and journeyed into the Central Plains—only to die before he ever reached Sichuan. A bitter pair of lives. Yet those two lives handed me a perfect opportunity.
“An illegitimate child of a direct Dang bloodline. I’ll say I was that bastard’s friend.”
I muttered the words to myself while writing Dangga Pungun. The Dokin friend I had mentioned to Hwarin would become that friend.
Even among the direct line, if you counted the previous generation’s children and grandchildren the numbers added up. Somewhere among the distant cousins who gather at grandfather’s house for the holidays, someone had fathered a child with a woman named Hyang-a.
“I’ll claim I wrote Dangga Pungun in order to deliver my dead friend’s memento.”
It was common knowledge in the Murim that returning a Sichuan Dang Clan Bulmanghwan earned a generous reward.
When the clan came to Daseogak to take issue with the book, I would load a tear into the chamber first.
“Hic… The truth is I wrote Dangga Pungun so my friend could find his father. The image of Dang Jeong is exactly the chivalrous warrior my closest brother always imagined his father to be. Here! The Bulmanghwan. I was told that returning one brings a great debt of gratitude, but I need no such reward. Please just take this to my friend’s father at once.”
And while you’re at it, maybe look the other way about the book I wrote. A quiet appeal, a quick pardon, done.
There was nothing truly damning about the portrayal of Dang Jeong, and if I simply delivered the ring with a reasonable story they would drop the whole matter of Dangga Pungun.
That was the plan.
I never expected Dang Chu to have been the Clan Leader himself.
They called it a secret history, so I had suspicions, but it still didn’t make sense.
In this era if a direct descendant sired a bastard, the worst he got was a thrashing from his wife. It was not the sort of scandal that required crushing the necks of random barbarians like hydraulic presses.
Only when the words “secret history” left Uigakju’s mouth did I finally understand how the situation was flowing.
Of all people, I had based Dang Jeong on the actual Clan Leader who had once chased after a beauty. Unfair as it was, from the Sichuan Dang Clan’s point of view someone had just published their private scandal.
If I just hand over the ring and say it belonged to my dead friend, will they forgive me?
The original plan had been possible only because Dangga Pungun contained nothing truly unforgivable. A clan secret history changed everything.
—My late friend was in fact the Clan Leader’s illegitimate son. Here’s the Bulmanghwan—please spare my wrists.
—You’re not the Clan Leader’s bastard. Whether you were even friends is unproven. And you still published the Dang Clan’s secrets as a novel?
I was not the original owner of the ring. Could a mere Bulmanghwan really smooth this over?
If my wrists were rocket-punch replacements or regenerative hands or some kind of parasitic organism, maybe I could have tried it. As things stood, I could not risk those words.
In the end there was only one way left to keep my hands attached.
I become the Clan Leader’s illegitimate son.
“What?”
“Whaaat?”
“What do you mean!”
My bastard announcement sent every person in the attic reeling. Hwarin, why are you surprised? You nodded earlier when I said I finally understood whose ring it was.
I locked eyes with Uigakju so he would not notice Hwarin’s stunned face.
“Y-you claim to be the Clan Leader’s illegitimate son?”
Surprising, right? I only rewrote the setting thirty seconds ago to stay alive, so I’m surprised too. I kept my face perfectly composed and answered with complete confidence.
“Does it not strike you as strange already? How else would Hwarin know the story of Hyang-a and the Clan Leader?”
The blame for this entire mess was split three ways: one-third to the developers for never writing that Dokins could be womanizers, one-third to Hopil for using Hyang-a’s story as insurance in Dangga Pungun, and one-third to all the previous righteous-hero novelists who made those steamy tropes so delicious. Kang Yunho was completely innocent. Truly unfair.
“You said you were a Maedamja. You must have heard somewhere, from someone, about a courtesan who once shared a bed with the Clan Leader.”
Uigakju stared at me with open suspicion. If even evidence would not convince him, I would give him the parts only Hyang-a could know.
“It was a day when the cold had finally broken and the first spring buds were forming. Late at night, when no one else walked the streets, my mother—belly just beginning to swell—knocked on that gate because she had heard her lover had returned. She only wanted to see him. What she received instead was a shove into the freezing dirt and the words, ‘How dare some barbarian bitch show up pregnant with another man’s child?’ The man who said it was a Dang Clan warrior she had seen many times before.”
That night Hyang-a had staggered home covered in dust, fallen ill, and the moment she learned the Dang party had left she set out for Joseon.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Ha! Who else could I have heard it from? I would rather ask how you know it. Were you by any chance the warrior who stood in her way that night?”
“…….”
Was I right?
For a fraction of a second Uigakju’s eyes slid away from mine. I was not about to waste that opening.
“You—what you did to my mother!”
I twisted my face into pure rage, clenched my fist, and swung a wide, theatrical blow toward Uigakju’s head.
“Young master, restrain yourself!”
Bugakju shot forward and seized my arm and shoulder.
“Let go! Because of this bastard my mother—!”
I poured every ounce of fury into the shout aimed at Uigakju, who stood frozen, staring at me in shock.
Thank you, Bugakju. I made the swing deliberately big, knowing you would stop it. Perfect catch.
“……I cannot believe it. You have black hair.”
Uigakju smoothed his startled expression and fixed me with suspicion once more.
I had expected the black-hair challenge.
“Since coming to the Central Plains I’ve heard an amusing saying: a woman who goes to a black-haired man never returns.”
“A warning to beware of lowly barbarians who covet other men’s wives, I take it.”
Classic barbarian-discrimination interpretation.
“There was another amusing one: black-haired men may steal wives easily, but they find it hard to steal seed. Do you know why that saying exists?”
“Because children born between black-haired barbarians almost always come out with black hair.”
“And black eyes as well.”
The probability was a little lower for eyes, but yes—Hyang-a’s son had both black hair and black eyes.
“……The Bulmanghwan and that story. I accept that you are Hyang-a’s son. Yet that is no proof you are the Clan Leader’s child. To my eyes it looks far more like a man desperate to keep his wrists inventing a convenient lie.”
Middle-aged detective Uigakju was sharp as ever.
Yes, that was the more rational conclusion. Suddenly claiming, in a moment of crisis, “I’m the Clan Leader’s bastard” was exactly the sort of desperate gambit that deserved a “and I’m your mother” retort followed by severed hands.
He had every right not to believe me. Frankly it was ridiculous.
But the Clan Leader’s illegitimate child had existed. Hyang-a and her son were dead. And every scrap of information about them now lived only inside my head.
“You need not believe me. Yet if you are truly loyal to the Clan Leader, you must take me with you.”
I carefully freed my arm from Bugakju’s grip and straightened my clothes as I spoke.
“Why would I take a liar anywhere?”
“Because I am the purpose of your journey.”
This was no longer about making one tiger into my big brother. Once the words left my mouth I would have far too many tigers to deceive.
“What nonsense is that?”
“You came to the Zhuge Clan seeking medicine, did you not? The Sichuan Dang Clan Leader’s only legitimate son is hovering at death’s door, and your own healers have exhausted every method.”
I tossed out the ultra-secret information a Daseogak Society member had whispered to me as though it were idle gossip.
“How do you know that?”
I would have to walk straight into the tiger’s den. Deceiving a single tiger would never keep me alive.
To enter the den I had no choice but to become a tiger myself. And what kind of tiger should I become?
I smiled the smile of a cub that has waited a very long time for the prey to weaken, and opened my mouth.
“The Clan Leader’s son is dying and there is no medicine. In that case… does that not make me the Clan Leader’s only remaining son?”
The cub before whom every other tiger must bow.
A being so sacred that even doubting him was blasphemy.
Yes. I would become the one tiger no one could touch.