When It Rains, It Pours - 4
Qinggong.
Put simply, it's the travel technique of the wuxia world.
In the murim, qinggong is a martial art for getting from place to place quickly, but in wuxia novels its real purpose is saving time. Heroes are forever crossing in a few short days a distance that would take a month on horseback. After all, even the fastest marathon runner alive takes cars and planes whenever he actually travels.
Movement in this world wasn't fast enough to shrink the earth itself, and between the drain on internal energy and the toll on stamina, even murim folk relied on horses for long journeys—yet qinggong remained, arguably, the single most useful martial art in everyday life.
"If I can learn it, then I'd like to."
With the five years' worth of internal energy I possessed, learning qinggong should be well within reach. I nodded at once at Lim Hayeon's unexpected offer.
"I can teach you, but..."
Lim Hayeon trailed off, wearing a strangely reluctant look. Why offer, then waver?
Could it be...?
"Is this an art of your school passed down to a single disciple alone, never given to the unworthy?"
An art entrusted to one heir of proven character and no one else. If that was the case, she might hesitate even wanting to teach me.
Whether a profession like thieving could ever be practiced by anyone of genuinely proper character was, admittedly, debatable—but I decided not to bring that up.
"Nnngh... n-no, it's not that. It should be fine to teach you. No—it will be fine."
Lim Hayeon clenched both fists and murmured like someone under self-hypnosis.
It doesn't look fine at all. What if I learn it and end up in serious trouble?
"If it troubles you, don't force yourself."
"I said I'd teach you, so I'm teaching you. Come out to the courtyard."
Having apparently settled her feelings, Lim Hayeon led me to the inner courtyard, hidden from view outside.
"The art I'm going to teach you is called the Shadowless Body Art."
"The Shadowless Body Art? Even the name alone sets my heart racing."
A martial art that shares its name with its bearer's epithet is, as a rule, that person's signature art. The qinggong of the setting's greatest thief—surely something extraordinary on reputation alone.
"It's technically a light-body art with a body-technique component as well, but mastering all of it would take far too long, so I'll teach you the qinggong side first."
If qinggong was the art of running fast, the body art was the art of maneuvering one's frame in combat. Martial arts were never perfected in a morning, and since she proposed teaching me selectively, starting with what mattered most, there was no reason to refuse.
"I'm in your hands."
"The essence of the Shadowless Body Art lies, just as the name says, in fleeing without leaving so much as a shadow behind. To manage that, you must first learn to make the body light."
Lim Hayeon took one of the thin branches lying about the inner courtyard, stood it upright, and leapt lightly atop it.
Had it been me, I'd have been shouting my apologies to the tree on impact. Lim Hayeon, however, perched daintily on the very tip of the branch and looked back at me.
"The branch isn't even bending?"
My astonishment must have pleased her. A sly smile crept across Lim Hayeon's face as she spoke.
"Running fast alone just leaves more traces behind. And traces mean you get caught in the end. Even sprinting across a field of grass, you run without bending a single blade. That is the essence of the Shadowless Body Art."
To think the qinggong Lim Hayeon had mastered was of the highest grade, capable of even Grass-skimming Flight.
Which led me to an important realization.
"So that's why you've been eating midnight snacks without a care in the world lately."
She'd been eating away at night as though scales had never been invented in this world—turns out there was a reason.
"Th-that is NOT why! Ah—!"
"Oh dear..."
Snap. The instant Lim Hayeon's inner calm shattered, the branch—like a chair that could no longer bear its owner's weight—broke clean in two.
"...Do I look slower lately?"
Lim Hayeon asked me carefully, the way someone might confess a mortifying secret they'd rather never face.
One wrong answer here and I may never learn the Shadowless Body Art.
"You look the same as the day we met. No—if anything, you've been worrying so much lately that you look a touch thinner."
I said it with a face drained of all mischief, all concern.
"You and your silver tongue... Plenty of qinggong arts simply make you run fast. But the qinggong that outruns everyone and leaves no trace—the Shadowless Body Art is the finest under heaven."
Lim Hayeon's voice swelled with pride.
"An art optimized for escape, then."
"As your mastery deepens, you'll learn to shift your body's weight and balance at will, and do all sorts of things with it. I'll run a lap—throw a stone at me as hard as you can."
With complete confidence, Lim Hayeon pointed at the pebbles beside my feet.
"You've seen what my hidden-weapon throws do. You could get hurt."
I was, after all, a man who had endured hidden-weapon accuracy drills under the Tang Clan's masters.
"Hmph. Stop worrying and throw."
Lim Hayeon gave a derisive snort, looking at me as if I were beneath notice.
She thinks I'm a pushover. Time to serve her a slice of humble pie.
I fixed my eyes on Lim Hayeon and closed my fist around a stone.
A lion brings its full strength to bear even against a rabbit—and a rabbit facing a lion, all the more so.
Like a closer whose only gift is raw speed giving everything he has, like David drawing a bead on Goliath's forehead, I hurled the pebbles one after another with everything in my arm.
"Anti-thief!!! Me! Te! Or!!!"
"Hmph!"
"Wha—!"
She's changing direction mid-air!
Lim Hayeon slipped past every stone I threw, weaving through empty air itself, then twisted her body once more and set down feather-light on the very spot she'd been heading for.
"Well? What do you think?"
Lim Hayeon's voice was every bit as triumphant as her qinggong.
"The Kunlun Sect's Eight Great Cloud Dragon Forms?"
Twisting and turning the body freely in mid-air—was that not precisely the supreme aerial qinggong, the Eight Great Cloud Dragon Forms, the art that moves like a dragon across the sky?
"You're from Joseon, and you know the arts of distant Kunlun? That's right. One of my predecessors once had the chance to steal a look at the Eight Great Cloud Dragon Forms' secret manual, and folded it into the Shadowless Body Art."
The Kunlun Sect. One of the perennial pillars of the Nine Great Sects and One Union, tucked away in the high mountains of far-off Qinghai, beyond even Sichuan.
The sect was famous for exactly two things: the Eight Great Cloud Dragon Forms, a light-body art that could change direction freely in mid-air—and its standing distinction as the first sect wiped out whenever the Demonic Cult invaded the Jianghu.
In other words, the Demonic Cult's tollgate. And the sect renowned as the invasion's early-warning siren had just had its single most famous art picked clean.
It was as if some beloved pig's-trotter joint—worth the arduous trip purely for the food—had had its secret sauce stolen down to the last drop. Not that I was complaining. Truly the qinggong of the setting's finest thief.
"The heart method I've cultivated isn't the same one you trained in. Would it still be safe for me to learn the Shadowless Body Art?"
A heart method was like the operating system of a computer or a phone. No matter how superb a martial art might be, if the underlying method wasn't compatible, it could wreck the body.
"What you learned is an Orthodox heart method, yes? Nothing Unorthodox or Demonic?"
"That's right."
The heart method Sohee had used when refining the Moyong Clan's toxin-absorption art was, I'd been told, a Buddhist method for suppressing the murderous urges of the Heavenly Killing Star—Orthodox to the core.
"Then you'll be fine. What great heart method could thieves possibly have, anyway? It's a qinggong built to be learned on whatever method happened to get stolen at the time."
Apparently the Shadowless Body Art was something like a light-body-arts build of Doom—the kind of thing that could run on a refrigerator display or a karaoke machine.
"In that case, shall I perform the formal disciple's bow now?"
"...You want us to become master and disciple?"
For some reason, I caught a faint note of hurt in Lim Hayeon's voice.
"If that's what you'd like."
These things were never taught for free, after all. Martial arts were hopelessly closed-off—handed down only between master and disciple, or within a family.
"Forget it. I'm teaching you as repayment for everything else."
"Then I'll be in your care."
And so I began learning the Shadowless Body Art from Lim Hayeon.
Just as I had something to learn from Lim Hayeon, so too did Lim Hayeon have something to learn from me.
"So? How is it?"
Lim Hayeon peered up at me wearing the face of a high school girl checking her university acceptance results.
"Let's start over from page one."
Rejected.
"Why!"
Lim Hayeon cried out as if she simply couldn't believe it.
"Why on earth do you burn several whole chapters on explanations of the year and the era before the story even begins?"
"Obviously readers need the foundational knowledge before a novel can start!"
"And the moment that background lecture ends, the characters who appear are figures from centuries past with no connection whatsoever to the protagonist. And you're advancing the actual plot with them? Why?"
"Just listen. Later, at the very end of the story, through the protagonist's karma—"
Not listening.
"—and after all that, it ends with the protagonist as an ordinary young man living his ordinary days. Where else in the world does a protagonist with zero charm show up after a third of a single-volume novel has already gone by?"
"It'd be weird to have an incident right at the opening!"
"Then what's the aphrodisiac doing in there?"
"Because Dangga Pungun is popular... I thought I'd try crafting an incident with an aphrodisiac, that's allllll."
Perhaps something pricked her conscience, because Lim Hayeon's voice shrank smaller and smaller.
"Hmmm."
A total train wreck.
What she'd submitted for the literary society hadn't been nearly this bad. Somehow, her urge to write and her urge to be popular had fused into something that veered off in entirely the wrong direction.
"Haah. I knew it was hopeless."
Lim Hayeon must have read the stench of failure off my face; her shoulders sagged and her voice deflated.
"The story itself could still be fun, though."
Anyone can hurl criticism. But that alone gets you nowhere but surrender.
"What?"
"A thief story. You staked it on your strong suit—well chosen. The opening is riddled with problems, but the skeleton is sound."
"It's—it's good?"
"Everything but the skeleton is a shambles, mind you. Even at full effort from page one, success would be touch-and-go, and with this structure you'd be writing tens of volumes."
"Nngh... it took me half a month."
Lim Hayeon muttered at me, aggrieved, as half a month of labor evaporated in a heartbeat.
"Write it so it can end complete in one volume. If it takes off, you can always spin the story further afterward with little side-settings that come before."
"I'll try."
Granted a small flicker of hope, Lim Hayeon nodded and hugged her precious manuscript to her chest.
With Lim Hayeon's feedback finished, it was now my turn to walk into the courtyard and take my lumps.
"Why are you forcing your internal energy through the Bubbling Spring acupoint when I tell you to run fast?"
"It's the best way to change direction, isn't it?"
I've thrown barbarian punches with this, pulled off two-stage jumps—you name it.
"You'll be caught after a step or two of walking. Go all-out from the very start and you won't last the distance."
"Those words have a barb in them, don't they."
Who turns someone's own manuscript critique around on them like that?
"Hmph! Where did you even learn that footwork? The direction is all wrong, but I can glimpse the hand of a supreme-grade movement art."
"A little sister from back home taught me a trick or two."
Had it really been over a year since I met Sohee? Her face floated up before me—expressionless, yet carrying more feeling than anyone I knew.
I wondered if my letters had reached her. A reply would have been nice, but they'd said even exchanging letters was beyond Salmak, so there was nothing to be done.
And now, suddenly, I miss her face.
"A woman?"
"Hm?"
"A woman?"
Lim Hayeon's voice had gone inexplicably glacial.
"How could you tell?"
"...From today on, the moment you force your energy through the Bubbling Spring acupoint, I'm throwing a stone at you."
Lim Hayeon glared at my legs as though some foul vermin had latched onto them, a pebble clenched in her fist.
"Even so, throwing stones is a bit—"
"You need to learn fast, don't you!"
She has a point.
The stones Lim Hayeon hurled came flying fierce, as though her feelings rode on every one of them.
"Sister Hayeon... are we truly never going to see her face again?"
It had already been ten days since Lim Hayeon last set foot in Daseogak. Ha Soso asked me with worry written across her face.
"She's hard at work at the print shop. Once things settle down, she'll come back."
"Sister Hayeon must be so lonely, cooped up at home all day. You'd better take good care of her, Manager."
"That, you needn't worry about."
"What do you—"
Gugu-goot!
Right on cue, Gugu had arrived. I carefully untied and unfolded the slip of paper bound to the pigeon's leg.
Buy some kimchi mandu on your way back.
I showed Ha Soso the letter Lim Hayeon had sent by carrier pigeon, and the two of us had a good laugh together.
The afternoon had worn past the lunch hour.
I was still racking my brain over Lim Hayeon's problem, for which I could see no way out, no matter how I looked.
"Those fellows from the other day—it seems they set out before my letter even reached them in Wuhan. Those bastards have no patience at all. They might come once more, so keep your eyes open."
The Haomen Yichang branch manager told me with a sigh.
If only I could pin down some firm news of Uncle's whereabouts, a thread might finally present itself. But as of yet, no real solution was coming into view.
"Kyaaaaah!"
Just as I was sinking into my worries, an employee's scream tore down from the first floor.
"What's happened?"
"Manager! You need to come down to the first floor—now!"
When I reached the first floor, more than a dozen warriors had ringed Daseogak's entrance and were shoving the patrons out into the street.
"What is the meaning of this!!!"
Don't tell me they'd sent a dozen-odd this time because five had failed through Haomen.
And these men looked nothing like the neighborhood black-path toughs from before—these ones looked ready to draw steel in earnest.
"Are you Manager Kang Yunho?"
A single man, neatly turned out and looking more scholar than fighter, came toward me at an unhurried pace.
"I am he. Might you have come from Wuhan?"
"Yes. I have come from Wuhan."
Had word of the Sichuan Tang Clan affair simply not reached them through Haomen? Or were they so set on confrontation that they'd flex their muscle regardless?
I stole a glance toward the entrance. Getting a message to the Seocheon Escort Agency would be difficult at this point. Was hoping for a move from the merchants' guild my only card?
First, let's try words.
"Miss Lim Hayeon does not work at Daseogak. To persecute someone who knows nothing of this, in this manner—"
"I have no idea who Miss Lim Hayeon is, and I most certainly did not come because of her."
The man shook his head, flatly denying my every assumption.
"Didn't you say you came from Wuhan?"
"We came out of Mangeum Jeonjang. Have a look at this."
Not Haomen—Mangeum Jeonjang?
Why on earth would Mangeum Jeonjang have Daseogak surrounded?
The man drew a document from inside his coat and held it out to me. What now? I unfolded it carefully and read through it at speed.
All outstanding debt claims against Daseogak are hereby transferred, in their entirety, to Mangeum Jeonjang.
"A contract transferring every last one of Daseogak's debt claims to Mangeum Jeonjang? What does a piece of paper have to do with any of this?"
When it rains, it pours.
Life's troubles never wait politely in line. Even while you sweat and struggle over the problem standing right in front of you, hardship and calamity keep arriving without so much as a knock.
Every one of Daseogak's debts—once split piecemeal among countless creditors—had passed into Mangeum Jeonjang's hands.
And the revelation the man delivered, taking back that document that had seemed so utterly harmless at a glance, was devastating.