The Gathering - 6
Martial arts training.
It wasn't that I'd been neglecting my martial arts since coming to this world. It was simply that, like an office worker cramming for a certification exam, I pushed it to the back burner whenever other priorities crowded in. Ever since I'd nearly died one more time on the trip to Sichuan, I'd been doing my best to carve out time for it. I rose before dawn to keep up my breathing exercises with the Soyun Mind Image Art, and drilled the techniques I'd already learned in every spare moment so the feel of them wouldn't slip away.
"My fingertips feel sharp today."
Thwack! A throwing dagger buried itself in the wooden board. This was the Tang Clan's concealed-weapon art, drilled into me so relentlessly that even thinking about it left a sour taste in my mouth. These days I could probably hit a close-range target dead asleep, but the touch had to be maintained all the same.
This time, three daggers in quick succession—one flying straight, one curving, one turning at a right angle. The Tang Clan's hidden weapons, the kind that could send not just third-rate martial artists but a fair number of second-rate ones firmly to the afterlife, thudded into the board one after another.
It really was strange how well the Tang Clan's concealed-weapon arts suited me. Could it be I'd been hiding a talent all along—one that might have carried me into the Major Leagues as a two-way player?
I put the idle fantasy aside and moved on to light-body training.
"The Shadowless Body Art seems to be coming along nicely today, too."
Reaching the finish point, I turned back to look at the footprints Lim Hayeon had stamped into the ground as a guide. I was still nowhere near her level, but I could follow those footprints far more smoothly than when I'd first started.
"……"
Was her mind wandering? Lim Hayeon stood staring at the ground, her mouth pressed into a hard line.
"Lady Hayeon?"
"……"
"Lady Hayeon!"
"Wh-what is it!"
Only when I came right up to her did Lim Hayeon finally look at me, startled.
"Is something weighing on you these days? You seem like someone whose head is a thousand miles away."
These past few days she'd been making mistakes at work, of all things.
"Sister-in-law, a message just came in asking if it's really true you placed an order twice the usual size."
"That can't be. Huh? There's no way."
She'd always had the occasional scatterbrained moment, but Lim Hayeon worked so thoroughly you could entrust her with anything—yet lately she was fumbling one task after another. Why did she look so restless these days, as if something were snapping at her heels?
"I don't have any worries or anything……"
Lim Hayeon studied me for a moment, then weakly turned her head away. None, was it? Then what explained the dark circles under her eyes, or her hair looking dry and brittle?
"It would hurt my feelings if you were hiding something from me, you know."
"Some people……"
Lim Hayeon jutted her lips into a pout and looked up at me.
"Hm?"
"Haah. No, it's nothing. I'm not worried about anything. I'm just a little tired, that's all."
With the words, her shoulders sagged.
Lim Hayeon was indispensable to the food delivery business. Her existing duties were heavy enough, and with two branch offices to open at the same time, she'd been driving the Giosugu pigeons through their training at full tilt lately. She was exhausted, yet she was helping with my light-body training without a word of complaint. I felt guilty about that.
Hearing her say she was tired, I couldn't help thinking she looked exactly like an office worker who'd been on full overtime since Monday and still had to drag herself through Thursday—with no day off in sight.
How could I put the spark back in her?
"Lady Hayeon. There's something I'd like to do for you."
A good idea had come to me. First, I stepped right up in front of her.
"Yes?"
"Close your eyes for me."
"Yes??? Wh-why, why, why?"
Why was her voice trembling?
"I'm not going to do anything strange. Just close them."
Lim Hayeon gave me one dubious look, then obediently shut her eyes.
"Eep!"
A shrill cry escaped her the moment I cupped her face in both hands. Her face really was tiny. I tilted her chin upward so I could see better, and felt her trembling against my palms.
The angle was perfect. And now, from here—
"Ack!"
"Bear with it. It's a facial massage. Wonderful for fatigue."
I pressed firmly around Lim Hayeon's eyes and the space between her brows. Kang Yunho's signature facial massage, served fresh. Back in college, I'd dreamed that learning this trick would let me sneak in subtle skinship with the girls I was flirting with and open the door to a rose-tinted campus life.
"Sunbae, what on earth are you talking about?"
It was a pipe dream.
The voice of that junior girl, delivered through eyes gone cold as ice, still echoes in my head. She'd said she was tired at the library—was offering a massage really such a crime? I'd said it with a friendly smile, but when she threw up a wall like that, what was I supposed to say? How was I to know she hadn't been saying it to me, but for my friend sitting beside her to hear? And then, on exam day of all days, there she was walking out of my friend's studio apartment hand in hand... honestly...
"Eep!"
Oops. For an instant I'd misjudged my strength, and Lim Hayeon snatched hold of my wrist.
"Sorry. If it hurts, I'll stop."
When I tried to take my hands from her face, Lim Hayeon gripped my wrist tight.
"N-no, keep going……"
Then let go of my wrist, please.
Apparently the effects were showing already. Somehow, Lim Hayeon's listless voice had gone soft as honey. I'd never given anyone a massage in my life, but facial massages seemed to work better than advertised.
"I have to go out and meet someone later, so rest at the inn today."
I'd been silently kneading her face this whole time, and the mood had turned strangely tingly, so I lowered my hands awkwardly as I spoke.
"Wh-why? Who are you going to meet?"
Lim Hayeon asked with the face of a stunned executive who'd just been blindsided by notice of her own removal from duty.
"The savings club. One of the members still hasn't paid in."
"Ah! Then I'm coming with you."
"Wouldn't resting be better?"
"Your massage worked so well I feel brand new. Let's go together."
With a face that showed no trace of the fatigue from before, Lim Hayeon smiled and tugged at my sleeve.
"Your elixir was stolen?"
The place I arrived at was the home of a Joseon physician who ran an acupuncture clinic out of one corner of his house.
"Yes. My investment is gone, so I'm afraid I'll have to give up my place in the savings club."
The middle-aged Joseon man spoke as though shame itself kept him from lifting his head.
"What exactly happened?"
"I run an acupuncture clinic, but the truth is, needles don't earn much."
"From what I understand, unless a physician is truly gifted, most make their profit from medicine."
Even in my old world, people said the real money in Korean medicine clinics came from selling herbal tonics. In this world too, peddling medicine brought in far more than writing prescriptions or applying needles.
"Yes. You know the trade well. I'd been hoping to sell some medicine to the customers who kept coming back on word of mouth. Elixirs, to be exact—the kind you can charge a steep price for to middle-aged customers or third-rate martial artists."
"I take it they're not elixirs on the level of the Lesser Rejuvenation Pill."
"How could an elixir of my own making compare to the prized essence of the Shaolin Temple? It's nothing more than a pill I made by calling in every favor I had, brewed from a few roots of red ginseng that one of our hometown association members had treasured for years."
"And a thief walked off with that?"
The physician shook his head.
"I have no equipment for preparing pills, so I left the essence I'd brewed from the red ginseng with an apothecary, along with a few other ingredients, and asked them to form the pills. It was stolen."
"Then shouldn't the apothecary be the one held responsible?"
"They insist they bear no blame—that the coachman they hired for the delivery ran off with the goods."
"What kind of nonsense is that?"
When a delivery goes wrong, it's the seller who answers for it.
"It's a flimsy excuse. Since the elixir was made with brewed Joseon red ginseng, they seem reluctant to pay compensation."
Even if the Joseon ginseng was the budget grade, an elixir was still an elixir. Was it simply too costly to compensate for over a delivery mishap?
"You mean to just roll over and give up?"
"What can black-hairs like us do in a place like this? In this neighborhood, if we get on that apothecary's bad side, we could lose our customers entirely."
The physician heaved a great sigh and lamented, as if he'd surrendered to fate.
The apothecary he spoke of was one I'd passed a few times on my way to the inn. An entire building, far larger than our own, given over to the trade—it had stuck in my memory.
If the savings club starts shedding members right out of the gate, we're in trouble.
The money I could cover myself, but if people learned they could slip away that easily from the very start, the whole club could be thrown into crisis. Wasn't there some way?
A coachman, an apothecary, and an elixir. A fine idea flashed through my mind.
"What if I were to find this elixir for you?"
"Truly? If you find my medicine, Boss, I'll rejoin the savings club, of course! And I'll reward you handsomely! No—I'll give you half of the elixir itself!"
Half the elixir, no less? Well, that made it even more worth my while.
"I'd like a few clues about the elixir."
"I don't know where the coachman went. But I can tell you what the medicine looks like."
"That will do nicely."
"It's a vivid crimson pill. The elixir's name is written on the paper that lovingly wraps the box holding it and the pills. If you find it, you'll know it at a glance."
"And the elixir's name is?"
"Red Ginseng Candy."
"Haah... And here I thought I was getting used to this world."
For a moment, I nearly choked up. Wasn't that going too far for an elixir's name? Stepping out of the clinic, I muttered in a flat, deflated voice.
"Don't take it too hard. Shall we write off the clinic and fold the shortfall back into operating funds?"
Mistaking the wry smile on my face for heartbreak, Lim Hayeon offered her condolences.
"Let's start by hunting down the coachman who made off with it."
"Across this entire sprawling city of Wuhan?"
Her incredulous expression was fair enough. It was the equivalent of trying to track down a Seoul taxi driver who'd swallowed a wallet forgotten on the back seat—with not one clue to go on. It would take far too long. Better to write it off and get back to work.
If not for one particular method, that is.
"What do tavern waiters, courtesans, gamblers, and coachmen all have in common?"
"The dregs of society... Oh!"
The dregs know the dregs best.
"If you've caught on, let's go right now."
This was Wuhan—home to the Wuhan Haomen, where all the information gathered by every lowlife in Hubei Province pooled in a single place. I was the acting Yichang branch chief, entitled to demand any information I pleased—and a pillar of the Wuhan Haomen's Simun, the Attendant Division.
Lim Hayeon began reading me the intelligence that had arrived from the Haomen.
"The information the Haomen Simun requested from the Horse Division has come in. On the day the apothecary claimed the Red Ginseng Candy was stolen..."
"Hold on."
"Yes?"
"Let's call it an elixir, not Red Ginseng Candy."
Every time I heard that name, my pride as a lifelong devotee of martial-arts novels, barely dozing, twitched awake.
"Fair enough. Anyway—they say no coachman headed toward the clinic that day."
"Then we have our culprit."
"They say the apothecary stole the medicine itself."
Once Lim Hayeon grasped the whole scheme, she laughed at the absurdity of it.
"Joseon ginseng is anything but cheap. Word is the supply dried up for a while and has only just loosened—and even then, you'd need to be a martial clan on the scale of the Sichuan Tang Clan to get your hands on any. No wonder they couldn't resist."
Even in real history, Joseon ginseng had been treated as an elixir. In a martial world, it was the genuine article—a mass-market elixir that even bolstered inner energy. The Kang family had risen to become one of Joseon's most storied wealthy clans by smuggling and selling the gold and silver treasures that came out of the ground.
"According to the Haomen's report, there was a coachman who hauled that very box to the mansion serving as the apothecary's warehouse that day. Shall we gather some men and demand they hand it over?"
"If they deny everything and wriggle out of it, we'd be out of options. And if we tried to force our way in—with red ginseng at stake, blood could well be spilled. There's no need for us to trouble ourselves that far."
"Then shall I try slipping in myself?"
"A fine idea, but the mansion they use as a medicine warehouse is far too vast. It could take days, and I've no wish to put you through days of toil, Lady Hayeon."
She grumbled to my face, sure, but I could see her carving into her own sleep to finish not just her own work but mine as well. She didn't need to push herself that hard.
"...You know it's a dirty trick when you suddenly come at me playing the humble peasant like that?"
"Hm?"
As if nursing some grievance, Lim Hayeon stuck out her lips in a pout—then quickly smiled as though she'd said nothing at all.
"So what will you do?"
"I have it all planned out. Gaettong!"
I called over one of the young waiters working the first floor.
"Yes, sir!"
"Tell every delivery man to gather in front of me."
"Right away!"
In no time, every delivery man working out of the inn's office had assembled.
"Boss! What's the occasion?"
"Are we having a staff dinner today, by any chance?"
"Really?"
"Quiet, all of you! The Boss is about to speak!"
Without a word, I swept my gaze across the delivery men and waited for them to quiet down on their own before I opened my mouth.
"Anyone here who's set foot inside the mansion the apothecary at the four-way crossing keeps as its warehouse."
"I've been there on deliveries!"
"I was just there yesterday!"
"Don't tell me...?"
I nodded toward Lim Hayeon, whose face had gone slack with astonishment.
There was no need for Lim Hayeon to wear herself out trudging all over the city. If you stood in a position that commanded people, then you simply put them to proper use.
Wearing a triumphant grin, I lifted my ink-blackened brush and spoke.
"Everyone, empty out everything you know about that mansion. First, we draw a map."