The Flag Bearer - 6
"Second-rate? There should be no shortage of work for men of your level—and yet you want to be deliverymen?"
If third-rate meant an ordinary person who had picked up a smattering of martial arts, second-rate was the realm of those who could actually put internal energy to use.
Ah yes, a man of the murim—here's my card. It was fair to say that only from second-rate upward could a fighter introduce himself as such, which made volunteering to be a deliveryman a drastic step down, steady employment or not.
"You speak from ignorance, sir. That may hold true for the natives of the Central Plains, but it doesn't apply to us Black Hairs."
At my question, one of the young men—a second-rate martial artist—bowed his head as he answered.
"I heard the escort agencies rarely take you on. And guards, and the like—surely there are plenty of places that need fighting men."
"It's the same everywhere, sir. The moment they hear 'Black Hair,' they post you at the deadliest spot, or worse, use you as a shield to catch blades. And if not that, the pay is a pittance."
Migrant laborers with the same abilities ending up in the harder factories and the more dangerous jobs—apparently the murim was no different after all.
"It's true the deliverymen's wages are generous, but only measured against an ordinary shop assistant's. Not generous enough to justify hiring second-rate fighters."
My plan had been to take third-rate martial artists and raise them into deliverymen.
By the time they reached second-rate they would want to quit, so I would dangle the escort's post as bait to hold them as long as possible, then send them off with a hearty Go forth, deliveryman, and make your way boldly in the murim!
Instead, second-rate fighters were the ones standing before me.
"Every one of us trained desperately, tooth and nail, and somehow clawed our way to second-rate. But to be treated with any respect, we would have to run with the unorthodox sects—the Black Path, no less."
"I take it that's a line you'd rather not cross."
In practice, an armed band of brigands. Even while wandering the Central Plains, they had been the crowd I least wanted to be tangled with.
"We chose the blade, yes, but our fathers taught us at least the Three Bonds and Five Virtues. We would sooner beg than take what belongs to another."
In the Central Plains, picking up a sword means deciding every purse in sight is yours. Honest young men—true Joseon stock, through and through.
"So what you're telling me is that you want to start as deliverymen and be recommended into an escort agency afterward."
That is—if their ambition weren't hanging out for all the world to see.
"If the Association Leader would truly do that for us, the gratitude would be carved into our bones. We will never forget this grace."
The fighters did not deny my words.
"Go home."
"Leader!"
The bowing men snapped upright, staring at me in shock.
"No heart in the chanting, but all heart in the funeral rice, is it? I am choosing diligent flag bearers for my delivery service—not escorts."
The escort's post had to exist, above all else, as a prize for the deliverymen.
If it were the goal from day one, they would spend every working hour grumbling about when it was coming—and that was precisely what I did not want.
"We heard we must labor years to earn it. We have no thought of taking the post lightly!"
"I did not call that position the flag bearer of the delivery service for nothing. The first deliverymen to become escorts must set the example—only then can the Joseon men recommended after them rise in turn. And my own name as Association Leader is staked on it."
Could the likes of you bear so weighty a post? I regarded the fighters as though delivering a rebuke.
"Then judge us over years of work!"
"We will labor always to your satisfaction, Leader. And if we catch your eye and earn the escort's post, we will become men the Joseon people of Wuhan need never be ashamed of!"
"Leader! You need not promise us the recommendation. Only give us the chance! We will throw ourselves into the work body and soul!"
The Joseon fighters pleaded with desperate faces, sinking to their knees.
They certainly looked desperate.
I shifted my gaze from the bowed men to the Sam-gu brothers, and the brothers nodded back—a signal that these were men who could be trusted.
Second-rate martial artists, hm.
Unlike the third-raters, who needed drilling just to scrape past the minimum threshold of internal energy, these men could be deployed as deliverymen the moment I taught them the lightfoot arts.
And if they worked diligently for years without a word of complaint, the advantage was mine, if anything.
"If nothing goes amiss, I'll take you on."
After a long moment's weighing, the words left my mouth.
"Truly?!"
The fighters looked up at me, faces blooming.
"The first screening will not be mine—it belongs to the Hometown Association members. Clear it without incident, and I will take you on then."
"We pledge you our loyalty!"
The Joseon second-rate fighters proved to be of better repute than I had expected.
They passed the Hometown Association's screening without a hitch, and it was settled that they would begin their martial training first, alongside the other Joseon men bound for work at the franchise shops.
Association Leader Kang Yunho is hiring deliverymen. He will teach them martial arts, and the exceptional among them will even receive elixirs. Work well, achieve much, and in a few years he will even see you placed in an escort agency.
The rumor kept rippling outward through the Joseon Hometown Association.
"This lad here is the second son of Jung the leatherworker—he runs the tannery workshop."
"Greetings, Leader! I have trained steadily in the Three Calamities Heart Method since I was a boy!"
"And this one is the youngest of the Ju household—dockworkers down at the wharf. Word is Choi I-gu taught him a move or two."
"Leader! Just give me a place, and I will work until my bones turn to dust!"
Having cleared the Association's screening, the applicants had gathered in the courtyard of Chef An's house.
"That's... rather a lot, isn't it?"
Roomy as Chef An's courtyard was, it churned with people like the grounds of a school sports day.
"Leader Kang! There you are."
Escort Choi, who had agreed to serve as our martial arts instructor, came toward me with a glad expression.
"Escort Choi. I had no idea there were this many talented children."
Lim Hayeon would be making the final selections, but even so, the scene felt like an enrollment ceremony at an overcrowded village school.
"Well, you see... it seems the rumor spread rather further than intended."
Escort Choi smiled at me with a troubled air.
"Further than intended?"
"We were recruiting quick learners—boys, mostly—and it seems word found its way to every household with a child in it."
"Leader! Is it really true you will teach the children martial arts?"
"My grandfather sat the military examination back on Joseon soil! I'm nothing to write home about myself, but our youngest is his grandfather all over again!"
Escort Choi held back those pressing in like parents gone mad with zeal.
"This is a hiring selection. Are you telling me the Association couldn't sift them?"
Too many—far too many.
"We didn't take just anyone. We screened for the children who showed visible promise."
He added that every child under the Hometown Association's banner had applied without exception, which had left him in quite a bind.
"You should have culled harder. You're only taking a handful, and the rest will all trudge home disappointed."
A deep pool of applicants was a good thing—it meant I could choose the gifted. Still, this was overzealous.
It being the first attempt, allowances could be made—but I chided Escort Choi all the same, so the mistake would not be repeated.
"Well, you see..."
Just as Escort Choi moved to answer with a troubled face, the master of the house, Chef An, appeared.
"Don't come down too hard on the man. The Association stepped up for your sake, Leader Kang."
"Chef An? Whatever do you mean, my sake?"
"Leader Kang bares his sleeves to teach our children martial arts, hands out elixirs, even promises escort posts. Could the Hometown Association simply stand by? We mean to school the talented children together and recommend the very finest of them as your flag bearers of delivery."
It felt like a village decades ago, the whole neighborhood gathered to choose which child would be sent to the capital to study.
"I haven't enough establishments to pay wages to this many children. And teaching this many would demand no small amount of space besides."
"Did I not buy this house with the coin from selling my inn to you, Leader? We shall open it up for any child with the will to learn."
I cast a glance around the courtyard of the house Chef An lived in. Few rooms within the walls, but a yard as broad as any country homestead.
"But the wages..."
Before I could draw the sentence out, the parents listening behind me burst forward in alarm.
"Leader! How can you say such a thing? What academy anywhere charges its students for a teacher?"
"Quite right! If anything, we will pool our own coin, each giving what he can, to support the children!"
"This is a place to learn martial arts, not letters."
"And is martial arts not learning all the same? What a person studies finds its use somewhere, does it not?"
"That is not all, Leader."
"Escort Choi?"
"We mean to gather the children who've had some schooling and establish a kind of academy. Martial arts and letters both. And from among them, we will recommend the finest as your deliveryman."
"That's right. Life here is bitter, and educating their children in Wuhan was a dream our people never dared. Your leadership has given the Joseon folk a chance to band together. Say yes, and we will manage the rest ourselves."
I gazed, slightly bemused, at the parents who waited only for my word.
Joseon folk living out their days mostly at the bottom of Wuhan's ladder. The years and the hardship were stamped plain on their faces, but their eyes brimmed with a single fierce resolve: my child will not live as I have.
"Then by all means, proceed."
If none of my coin was at stake, there was nothing to lose.
Quite the opposite—a steady supply of promising talent would prove a mighty boon to any future expansion of the business.
"Oh, Leader! Bless you!"
"Well decided!"
At my consent, smiles spread across every parent's face.
"Mm-hm. Mm-hmm."
On the road back to the inn, Lim Hayeon's sweet-voiced humming drifted through the air.
"You seem in uncommonly good spirits."
"Seeing the Joseon folk put me in mind of when I was young."
"Young? You mean your days at the Gyobang?"
Had some sports-day-sweet memory of childhood surfaced?
"Before that. After my mother passed, before I entered the Gyobang."
"I'd heard those were hardly happy times."
"True enough. Belly empty, no soul to lean on. And the door I finally walked through was the Gyobang—the road to becoming a courtesan."
"..."
Somehow I felt I had stepped on a landmine.
Lim Hayeon caught my expression, gave a soft laugh, and went on.
"Don't look so grave. The older and younger sisters there were all good people. ...Still, once my head hardened a little, the Gyobang began to look like a pit to me."
"A pit?"
"A pit you can never climb out of. One where you scramble for the feed tossed down from above, and to earn even that, you must make yourself pretty by any means you can."
A rather serious story.
The mercy was that it didn't run too deep—her eyes were earnest, but her lips still curved.
"I suppose that's how you grew so well—monopolizing the feed."
A gourd, top and bottom—a proper gourd, that one. I answered with a light snort, as though it were all in jest.
"Hmph. And what is that supposed to mean?"
Lim Hayeon dug an elbow playfully into my ribs, then drew a step ahead on light feet.
"But what does any of that have to do with the Joseon folk?"
"They simply looked familiar, that's all. Good people, with no way to slip their circumstances. Everyone wears themselves thin living day to day, and tomorrow never comes any kinder."
"We are only outsiders, ten thousand li from home."
For scorned barbarians to put down roots in the Central Plains was a distant hope at best.
"It would have been—if not for you."
Lim Hayeon, walking a step ahead, turned to look back at me as she said it.
"Me?"
"You may not care for it, but spend any time among the Joseon folk and your ears will sting with praise of you. 'Thanks to the Leader, we have a living.' 'With the Leader here, we feel secure.' 'The Leader gave us hope.'"
"My ears are itching already. I couldn't stomach another word."
At my look of distaste, Lim Hayeon raised a hand to her mouth, unable to contain the laughter spilling out of her.
"Everyone was struggling just to survive. The cooking, the shop work, the deliveries, the dock work, keeping the inn. And now you have secured escort and guard posts besides. It was a pit. You built stairs leading out of it."
Lim Hayeon finished in a bright voice, then sprang abruptly atop the wall beside us.
"That's dangerous."
"And who do you take me for?"
A prodigy of the lightfoot arts. The woman destined to bear an epithet that would make every great house in the world tremble. The Shadowless Divine Thief.
That wasn't quite the danger I meant, though.
"Haha..."
The wall was high enough that the view beneath her skirt hovered right at the border of visible.
I would have to open some distance between us and spare us both the awkwardness.
An empty alley. Lim Hayeon and I walked in step, each at our own height.
Even from a distance it was a little much. I had thought myself somewhat inured to certain regions of her upper half, but the devastating line of her from behind carried a destructive power all its own.
Oblivious to the way I stared, as though being pulled in, she picked up where she had left off.
"Watching them brought the old days back. It isn't the same as mine, but similar enough that it cheered me, somehow."
A voice light with pleasure and yet somehow heavy.
"Miss Hayeon."
I stopped walking and called out to her.
"..."
As she turned, a quiet bitterness lay written across Lim Hayeon's face.
What was she thinking of?
Envy of the Joseon folk? Her past self? Or the place she stood in now?
It didn't matter which.
"The one I most want to pull out of the pit right now is not the Joseon people."
What I want most to save in Wuhan is you, Lim Hayeon.
I held her gaze, my face grave.
"...Ugh. You really are... let's go."
Dusk had stolen upon us without my noticing. In the crimson light of the setting sun, her face looked flushed red.
"What are you staring at, anyway?!"
"Your shoes. The shoes. All that hard work—they've worn down quite a bit."
Busted, in the end.