Night Visitor - 3
Any man, at least once in his life, has imagined a beautiful woman slipping into his bed with him in her sights.
You know the type — a stepsister of the fantasy-species breed, chirping "Good morning, big brother!" as she comes to his bedside every morning to wake him with a smile.
And then there's the childhood friend who lives right next door and hops from window to window to catch the protagonist's morning "physiological phenomenon" in the act — enough to make you wonder just how the building codes of this world are supposed to work. That, too, might be called a similarly mutated desire.
For a moment, I stared blankly at Lim Hayeon and her frozen face. So she had come to steal something precious.
She was dressed in a full-body suit of tights whose provenance I couldn't begin to guess, with proper clothing layered over certain areas — whether to protect them, or to provide stimulation for a certain someone, I couldn't tell. Through the tights, her gazelle-like figure flaunted, without the least restraint, an elasticity that suggested no one could ever run her down in the night, while a single region of her had cornered the market on every ounce of softness.
To think she'd come to steal dressed this boldly.
Of course, I did happen to have something precious I could give the woman kneeling on my bed in the dead of night. I was, after all, the one who earned pitying looks whenever my friends traded stories about their girlfriends — not so much a believer in premarital chastity as a believer in chastity through chronic singleness — and thanks to that, I did have something to offer at a moment like this.
But come to think of it, a question occurred to me. Was that really so precious to a man? If anything, it was something I'd gladly be rid of.
I steeled myself and addressed Lim Hayeon.
"Do I look like a man who'd simply hand it over because you came to steal it? Anyone else would have dropped to their knees in gratitude. I, however, will not."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
It meant her timing was off. Why couldn't she have come a year earlier?
"There is quite a backlog of reservations."
"There are already people reserved? Who?"
Lim Hayeon tilted her head as if this were news to her and asked.
"Even for the Shadowless Divine Thief of the age, there are those who would make you sorely regret stealing it carelessly."
Getting on the wrong side of even one woman was dangerous. Steal it carelessly, and she would not enjoy what followed.
"If I want it, I can steal as much of it as I like."
She certainly looked the part. It wasn't just her words — even the figure my eyes kept drifting back to radiated confidence.
"Confidence is all well and good, but your opponents are every bit as formidable as you are."
"...Don't tell me — the warriors of the Sichuan Tang Clan?"
Where on earth had she heard that?
Thanks to her skin disease, Hwarin could hardly set foot outside, and even at Daseogak she mostly handled work that kept her out of sight — the printing room, the ledgers, that sort of thing. The Tea Book Club regulars upstairs, meanwhile, did little else but tremble in dread whenever rabble-rousers appeared, terrified by the word that Hwarin herself would come to deal with them.
And on top of it all, the Tang Clan itself was entangled with inhumane experiments, the Demonic Cult, and even the affair of Tang Geohu, so I had been waiting for the day Hwarin's cultivation climbed high enough for her to speak of it all with her chin held high.
"The Sichuan Tang Clan has them too."
"If I made an enemy of the Sichuan Tang Clan... yes, that would certainly be rather dangerous."
Lim Hayeon clamped her lips shut, looking thoroughly stumped.
"Miss Hayeon. Coming to find me in such a brazen, do-as-you-please manner is not good. Of course, I understand how action can outrun the heart. But if this is something you truly desire, it is the kind of matter we ought to begin by building trust between us and talking through, is it not?"
"There's no time for that."
"If you cannot invest even that much time, then you cannot steal it."
Though I'll admit, if she came at me clawing those tights off as she advanced... I might have a little trouble holding my ground. Lest my true feelings betray me, I spoke with firm resolve.
Perhaps my firmness got through.
Lim Hayeon stripped off the mask covering her face and dropped her head in disappointment.
"...As I thought. Since Volume 4 of Dangga Pungun is Daseogak's most precious treasure, you can't very well show it to just anyone, can you?"
Volume 4 of Dangga Pungun? The one I'd barely sketched an outline of — why that? Ah. So that was the precious thing.
Not the precious experience currently fermenting like a well-aged jar of soybean paste as it waited for a certain member of the Kang clan?
"Th-that's right."
For an instant I couldn't hide my fluster, and my voice wavered slightly. I hadn't put my foot in it just now, had I? I'd been counting my chickens from an egg the hen had never even thought of laying — and being taken for some kind of eccentric shopkeeper would be a problem.
Though, of course, precious few people in this world are stranger than a woman who breaks into a man's bedroom at midnight in full-body tights.
And there I'd stopped, mid-word. Time to feign composure, and fast.
I straightened my rumpled clothing — which, until now, I had made a show of ignoring — rose from the bed, and walked over to where the teapot sat.
So she was just going to stand there and stare without saying anything.
"...I'll be going, then."
As I poured tea into a cup, Lim Hayeon rose from the bed as though she had made up her mind.
"Go where, exactly?"
"I failed to steal it, so I ought to head back."
Steal what, exactly? I didn't think she'd come to steal anything in the first place.
"I know full well that isn't the real reason you came to see me, so where would you even go? I'll hear whatever it is you have to say, so sit."
Now, where had I put that extra cup? I unhurriedly fished one out and poured a serving of tea for Lim Hayeon as well.
"What do you mean, real reason?"
"You didn't come stealing when Volume 3 came out. You could have sneaked a peek at Volume 4 just as easily, yet you deliberately made noise and woke me. There's a reason for that."
Would the great Shadowless Divine Thief, on an actual heist, wait around for her mark to wake up?
The thieving story must have been a cover for her embarrassment all along. Right. How hard must it be to tell the man you usually trade barbs with that you've come to him with your troubles?
She said nothing.
Silence, as a rule, is affirmation.
Even as I drank down the tea I'd poured, she kept her lips sealed and simply watched me.
She'd come all this way, yet when it came to actually speaking, she was too shy? Very well, then — let me explain the reason she has every right to speak.
"I am the Shadowless Divine Thief's sworn younger brother. And you are my sworn brother's daughter."
I said this to her while wearing the expression of a man greeting an adorable niece who'd come to visit for the holidays.
"What does that have to do with any—"
I cut her off and pressed on.
"You are my precious subordinate and employee, and a fine talent who will one day lead Daseogak. And..."
And a genuine heroine candidate, at that. The words that had sprung to mind were impossible to spit out, so I let the sentence trail.
"And?"
Lim Hayeon asked, fixing me with a look as though trying to confirm something.
"Oh, something like that. In any case, simply unburdening to another soul the thing that presses hollow against your chest is enough to lighten the heart. So don't even think about going back empty-handed."
"...Hmph."
Had my words actually persuaded her?
For whatever reason, Lim Hayeon seemed pleased about something — the corners of her eyes crinkled faintly — and she accepted the tea I offered.
Cradling the teacup in both hands, she fidgeted with her fingers for a while as though picking her way through her words, then at last put on a heavy expression and spoke.
"From the Wuhan branch, which oversees all the Haomun branches in Hubei Province, an official directive has come down: the runaway courtesan Lim Hayeon is to be arrested and escorted there in custody."
It was a calamity so vast I couldn't have predicted it even in my wildest imaginings, and for an instant it pressed down, hollow and heavy, on my chest as well.
Arrest the very person who had reported the Wushan branch's calamity?
Ordering the arrest of the one who reported a branch's disaster — it made no sense. Was that not the same as branding an innocent witness the culprit and dragging her off?
"That's... they say the Wushan branch is perfectly fine."
"Did a calamity not befall the Wushan branch, and did you not flee because of it?"
"On the day the wicked-faction scum attacked. They say the Haomun branch that was attacked mounted a counterattack and beat back the assault."
If what she said was true, the whole affair had become badly tangled. To her, the escape had been an act of reporting her branch's calamity — but in the eyes of others, she was nothing more than a runaway courtesan who had seized her chance amid the chaos.
"Hold on. Something is not right here. That day, in broad daylight, the wicked-faction scum clearly chased you. And if all this is true, it's been well over a month already. Why did we never hear a word of it?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying is strange. The Haomun branch that was attacked was annihilated. Every member in Wushan who could be called an executive is dead, and the branch head who presided over the Gyobang died as well..."
Were they all people I knew? Strength gathered in the fingers holding Lim Hayeon's teacup.
"They're all dead, yet the branch is fine? Does that not strike you as odd?"
"They say the Wushan branch's Domun — the Gambler Division — carried out the vengeance for the attacked Gimun."
"The Domun? You mean the gamblers?"
Most people think of Haomun as a single sect, but the reality is different. Setting aside its executive leadership, Haomun is a lattice of outposts. Whatever a courtesan overhears, she passes up to the Gimun, the collective of courtesans; whatever a gambler learns, he passes up to the Domun, the collective of gamblers. From there, the senior members of each collective pass the information up the line to the executive leadership.
"Yes. But it's all far too convenient. The Domun, whose strength fell short of the Gimun's, counterattacked as though they had been waiting for precisely this moment, succeeded — and absorbed every last one of the Wushan Haomun's operations."
Lim Hayeon added that the previous head of the Wushan branch had belonged to the Gimun.
The Gimun wiped out in a single attack, and the Domun seizing all power in its wake? Suspicious to anyone with eyes.
"Is this connected to their attempt to take you into custody in Wuhan?"
"Because I am the sole survivor of the Wushan branch's Gimun. But even if I went, nothing would change. The vengeance is finished, and all that remains is one runaway courtesan. And even if they put me through their ceremonial interrogation, I could hardly give testimony unfavorable to the Domun."
"Why is that?"
"Because the Domun holds my courtesan registry."
It meant Lim Hayeon's owner was those gambling scoundrels. She spoke with her brow knitted in indignation.
"Was it not originally the Gimun's?"
"Haomun is a wicked sect too, after all. They seized it by force and called it fair, so why would they ever hand it back? The Gimun did raise the issue, but the Domun snarled back that if they wanted to buy the runaway courtesan back, they had better produce the proper price."
Lim Hayeon told me the exact figure.
"What kind of outrageous sum is that?"
The figure she named made the printing press and the mansion look like pocket change.
"Because I'm a runaway courtesan. Having fled once, I would spend the rest of my life repaying a debt I could never repay, working in the giru — the courtesan house — until the day I died."
Lim Hayeon bowed her head as though in agony.
It was a sum that a bowed head alone could never hope to express despair for.
Even if I had been the ace of the Ouran High School Host Club, this was the kind of sum that would have had me screaming that my life was over.
So this was how the original story connected?
The Lim Hayeon I knew was the most sought-after Cheonggi in all of Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei — not of Wushan, and not of Yichang.
Even without me, the attack on the Wushan branch and her flight would have unfolded exactly as they had — which meant her being caught as a runaway courtesan and hauled off to Wuhan was the original history.
Lim Hayeon — the Shadowless Divine Thief. By day, the finest courtesan in Wuhan; by night, a divine thief with a screw or two loose. Either trade alone would have made her a fortune — so the reason she ran both was to pay down her debt as a runaway courtesan?
Wait — thieving? It couldn't be.
"Then those outrageous exploits you've been staging in Yichang lately — is this the reason behind them?"