New Employee - 1
"You want me to become a Daseogak employee?"
Had she misheard? Lim Hayeon doubted her own ears and asked the branch chief of the Yichang Haomen once more.
"One person needs a job, and one person needs employees. A perfect alignment of interests, no?"
Here was a client who had come asking for staff to be found — and Chief Gwak had threatened the very man who, bearing the Black Money, ought to have been welcomed as a guest of the highest honor.
And now, while smoothing over the prickly standoff born of that misunderstanding, the chief had produced a miraculous solution — one that would solve both their problems by tying them neatly together.
"I refuse."
Of course, that solution was miraculous only from the chief's point of view.
"You need money, but you're a runaway courtesan, so courtesan work is closed to you now — and you won't do the work you might actually be good at. So as of this moment, you're unemployed."
The chief spoke in a coaxing tone to Lim Hayeon, whose face had gone stiff with disbelief.
"I'm an aspiring writer."
"Which is to say, jobless."
"…"
The chief's merciless barb left Lim Hayeon speechless.
"Stop refusing for one second and just listen."
"And what exactly is there to listen to?"
Lim Hayeon pushed out her lips in a sullen pout.
Who does she take after, I wonder. Thinking of the friend he hadn't seen in over ten years, the chief pressed on.
"You're hardly some moneybags of an author who can churn out dozens, hundreds of books, then stroll into a bookstore and declare, 'Stock my works, and if they sell, we'll sign a contract.' Are you?"
"No, I'm not."
"Nor are you a scholar so renowned for your brush that bookstores would court you — the kind of patronized writer who can publish volume after volume and promise, 'My next book goes to your shop.' Isn't that right?"
"That's right."
"So picture it: an unknown author walks in clutching a single manuscript and asks the bookstore to front the printing costs, run the publicity, eat the losses when the stock piles up unsold — and pay an honorarium on top of all that. You think that's going to fly? You'd count yourself lucky if all you got was called a walking jinx from the crack of dawn and had a fistful of salt hurled at your back to ward off the misfortune."
"…That's right."
Lim Hayeon shrank smaller and smaller beneath the chief's unsparing dose of reality.
"Now, it's not as though bookstores that sponsor writers don't exist — but you do know most of them stock nothing but proven bestsellers, don't you?"
"I do."
Becoming a writer was brutally, impossibly hard. Lim Hayeon bowed her head, confronting the reality of it all over again.
"But Daseogak is different."
"Different how?"
"We'll set Hopil aside, since you know his story already. Daseogak is a bookstore that has been sponsoring the literati of Yichang for decades — long before its current manager, Kang Yunho, ever backed Hopil."
For decades, the master of the Baek Family Manor — Tang Hwarin's maternal grandfather — had sponsored countless gifted men of letters.
Some of those he backed did go on to write worthwhile books, but a great many of the arrangements amounted to little more than charity.
Then Manager Kang Yunho had appeared in Yichang out of nowhere and unearthed a promising new author named Hopil.
People hadn't questioned it too closely, for this was a patronage enterprise with a long and venerable pedigree, stretching back decades to the days of the old Baek Family Manor bookstore.
"Daseogak sponsors new writers?"
"It does. Daseogak — famous throughout Yichang for backing new authors. And the man who runs it now is the sworn younger brother of the Shadowless Divine Thief himself, is he not? If that man's sworn brother's daughter asked to have her book published, he could hardly turn her away."
"You're telling me to go to that Manager Kang and beg him to publish my book?"
"That's the idea. Of course, publishing a book costs serious money, and he won't grant every whim just because you're his sworn brother's daughter. So you become a Daseogak employee, work hard, and win him over. Simple, no?"
"…"
Lim Hayeon stared at the chief, whose expression all but shouted: This ends the moment you nod, so get to it.
It was an offer tailored too perfectly to fault. But taking it meant bowing her head to Manager Kang Yunho. Wearing her displeasure openly, Lim Hayeon crossed her arms and withheld her answer.
The chief stole a sidelong glance at the way her folded arms pressed even more emphasis onto curves that hardly needed any — then opened his mouth.
"Work beside him. Flash him one of those eye-smiles now and then. Cross your arms just so when you're standing close, like you are right now. And let a generous line of cleavage slip into view, ever so casually…"
"C-Cleavage?! What nonsense are you spouting?! That's the trade of women who sell their flesh! I was trained as a pure courtesan!"
A pure courtesan sold her dance and her song — never her body. Lim Hayeon cried out, arms dropping, her face a portrait of outrage.
"You were surely taught a charm or two along the way. I'm simply saying you ought to put those courtesan skills to use. Who's to say? It might not stop at cleavage — other things might slip into view. Why, at this rate that Manager Kang fellow will one day be addressing his sworn brother as 'Father-in-law.'"
Facing the girl as she rounded on him, eyes bulging as though she'd just been dealt the vilest of insults, the chief spoke as if it were nothing at all.
"Uncle Gwak!"
"Aigoo, enough noise. Around here I'm the Yichang branch chief. 'Branch Chief,' if you please."
"Fine! Bran. Ch. Chief! Do you have no idea how much I despise that man, that you'd go joking about fathers-in-law?!"
Lim Hayeon demanded, her hostility toward the man who was her own father — the Shadowless Divine Thief — laid bare.
"He must have had his reasons."
"Reasons, my foot. He simply did what every other man does. He threw my mother away, the way all the rest throw away their courtesans."
Her gaze sank — furious and heartbroken at once — as she seethed against that man.
It was the oldest story in the book.
Lim Hayeon's mother, Madam Im, had been a celebrated pure courtesan of Wushan. And the Shadowless Divine Thief was a thief whose name carried weight across the entire Jianghu.
What courtesan ever asks whether money is dirty or clean? All of it is precious money. The Shadowless Divine Thief had fallen head over heels for Madam Im and spent money at her house like water.
Sell your song, if you must sell anything at all.
But never, ever sell your body.
It was a maxim handed down among the pure courtesans who lived by song and dance — though had it ever truly been kept, it would never have needed to become a maxim at all.
Madam Im, pure courtesan though she was, fell in love and gave her answer. And so the Shadowless Divine Thief took Wushan's finest courtesan into his arms.
And in the end, a child was born to the two of them.
"He's always had a terrible case of wanderlust, that friend of mine."
The chief put in a word for the absent man, for all the good it did.
"Of course. Wanderlust so terrible he wasn't even there the day I was born."
Had he been the sort of man to give up his ways the moment a child came into the world, the epithet "Shadowless Divine Thief" would never have been coined in the first place.
Lim Hayeon spoke with the momentum of a woman chewing a man to shreds.
"Like I said, there was a misunderstanding. Besides, he taught you the Shadowless Divine Thief's martial arts because he thought of you as his own child, didn't he?"
"That was because I had talent."
"She may be my own child, but such bones, such sinews! From this very day forward, I shall pass down all my martial arts to her!"
A man whose days of absence far outnumbered the days she had ever seen his face. Lim Hayeon recalled the moment he had declared he would teach her his martial arts.
"His child simply happened to be exceptionally gifted, so he taught her with gusto. That's all."
"His daughter simply trained hard because she wanted to hold onto the face of a father who was always disappearing — even one day longer."
Lim Hayeon remembered her childhood self.
Learning the martial arts was the one time he stayed close. And whenever he was near, her mother would smile with a face that looked, for a little while, like happiness.
Harder. She had to train harder.
To pin him in place. To keep her mother smiling. She threw herself harder and harder into her training.
"I do wonder, though — why on earth did he vanish without a trace?"
Chief Gwak looked at the girl, who would not concede him a single point, sighed, and abandoned his friend's defense.
"I'd say his interest simply ran out. That's how it always goes for men who take up with courtesans — they all run off in the end."
From one day to the next, the Shadowless Divine Thief stopped setting foot in Wushan altogether. Why did he never come back? Just as Lim Hayeon and her mother had begun to wonder, news arrived of the Haomen rebellion.
Misfortune arrives all at once.
Word of the Shadowless Divine Thief dried up, and before long her mother passed away. The child of a lowly courtesan is a lowly child. Had things run their natural course, she would have ended an orphan — begging in the streets, or suffering far worse at the hands of others.
Only by clinging to the last threads her mother had left her did she scrape by on odd jobs within the Haomen, until at last she entered the Gyobang, where a girl could train to become a pure courtesan.
He was alive? Then why — why did he never once come looking for us?
Was he dead? Or had he abandoned her mother and her all along?
The Shadowless Divine Thief had cut his ties to Wushan before the rebellion ever came to light, and so Lim Hayeon could hardly guess. But now, at last, she knew.
He had abandoned them.
Anger came to a boil in her heart like water creeping up to a roll, bubble by bubble. Maybe he's alive. Maybe someday he'll come for me. She wanted to laugh at the young girl she had been, nursing such small hopes.
In the end, you abandoned us.
The world might laud him as the Shadowless Divine Thief, but in Lim Hayeon's eyes he was nothing more than a thieving wretch too spineless to take responsibility for even one woman.
"So? Are you giving up on the Daseogak job, then? I mean Manager Kang Yunho. His merchant wiles are clever enough that some call him a rapacious merchant, but he's no villain."
At the chief's words, Lim Hayeon found herself recalling Manager Kang Yunho.
Owing anything to a man she despised was humiliation enough — and yet, before she had learned who he truly was, she had even mistaken him for a man cut from the same cloth as Dang Jeong of Wind and Cloud of the Tang Clan.
Her benefactor — and a rapacious merchant besides. It left Lim Hayeon with a strange, discordant feeling, as though she were gazing upon a man who was good and wicked at once. A father who was also her enemy.
Perhaps there was no reason under heaven she shouldn't ask Kang Yunho for help. But he was the sworn younger brother of the Shadowless Divine Thief.
To be helped by that man was no different from being helped by her father.
Out of her fury at the father who had abandoned her, Lim Hayeon would not take it.
"I don't want help from anyone connected to that man, either. Besides — I have a way to succeed as a novelist in a single stroke."
She couldn't keep flatly refusing a sincerely meant proposal forever. Lim Hayeon decided to lay out the ambition she had long been nursing.
"And what way would that be, might I ask?"
Lim Hayeon regarded the curious chief in silence for a moment.
Why Yichang? The Haomen had branches in plenty of other cities — why had she pointed her steps here of all places?
Because she loved Wind and Cloud of the Tang Clan? Because she yearned to see Daseogak with her own eyes?
Because the chief of the Yichang Haomen branch happened to be an acquaintance?
No. She had wanted to become a writer. And Yichang held a way for even a penniless nobody of a writer to rise to fame in a single bound.
Lim Hayeon opened her mouth to reveal the true reason she had come to Yichang.
"I'm going to submit to the Yichang Literary Society's new writers' event."
To think a man should have to bet his life just to hire some staff. If you're going to bet your life, bet it on your future. What kind of absurd business was this?
Fiddling with the Black Money in my pocket, I came to a stop before the front doors of Daseogak.
"Anyone within! Is Manager Kang within! Is he out on business?!"
Who in the world…? Two figures stood at Daseogak's doors, knocking.
"Elder Brother! Is it truly him? Has he really returned?!"
"I keep telling you — he has."
"Could it be that, after our most fervent prayers, what stands before us is but a phantasm…?"
"Ha! Have you not heard what the other members of the Tea Book Club have been saying!"
Voices I knew.
"Scholar Hwang?"
Up close, I found Scholar Hwang and Scholar Hwang's younger brother standing there — devoted members of the Tea Book Club, and the two loyal souls who had withstood the fiendish sorcery of these past several months.
"Manager Kang! I see you have returned from your grand sojourn elsewhere!"
"That's right. The reopening has kept my hands full. And Scholar Hwang's younger brother — it has been far too long."
So which is it — Sichuan's Greatest Beauty as the true wife, or Hubei's Finest Courtesan? The very pair whose First Wife War debates at Daseogak were the picture of heartwarming sportsmanship. What on earth were they doing here?
"It has been an honor to see you again. To commemorate your safe return, we have brought walnut pastries."
"Oh, you really shouldn't have. Thank you."
I accepted the small paper packet from Scholar Hwang's younger brother. Still warm, too. I'd have to share these with the Tang Clan folks later.
"What brings you here today? If this is about Daseogak, I'm afraid the reopening will take some more time yet."
"Today we come not in our capacity as members of the Tea Book Club, but as members of the Yichang Literary Society."
The younger scholar addressed me with impeccable formality.
"I beg your pardon?"
Not the Tea Book Club — the Yichang Literary Society?
If it was the Yichang Literary Society, that meant the renowned circle chaired by a scholar out of the Hanlin Academy — the Emperor's own advisory council, once charged with compiling the imperial texts.
An organization of tremendous influence, too — the very one whose ringing endorsement of Wind and Cloud of the Tang Clan had made the novel impossible not to know in Yichang.
What business could they possibly have with me?
When I looked at him in bewilderment, Scholar Hwang bowed his head low and asked of me something I had never once imagined.
"We humbly beseech you — please, serve as a judge for the Yichang Literary Society's new writers' event!"