Gi-mun — 1
They're claiming to be from the Gi-mun, of all places?
Only two parties could currently assert ownership over Lim Hayeon.
The Gi-mun, her original affiliation — and the Domun, which now holds her courtesan registry.
Since the Domun had reclaimed the Gi-mun's courtesans and gyobang, which had been seized by the Sect forces they themselves had secretly incited, the registry had passed into Domun hands by the Sect's own crooked logic.
Not that it was without complications.
There was clear evidence that the Domun had orchestrated the Sect's attack on the Gi-mun in the first place.
On top of that, Lim Hayeon was the sole survivor of the Usan gyobang raid. The Domun had been scouring the land for her with obsessive desperation, while the Gi-mun — buckling under the Domun's fury — had shown every sign of being ready to abandon her.
And now, out of nowhere, the Gi-mun appears and demands to have her back?
"Is this the scheme you've been cooking up since the dead of night, all to hand Lady Hayeon over to someone else?"
Dawn had slipped past somewhere along the way, and the sky was beginning to lighten. I spoke with a face carved from stone to the woman who had appeared so abruptly from the Gi-mun.
"And this is where it all led? To this?"
"……"
When she gestured for me to take a look around, I swept my gaze across the armed men surrounding us on every side.
Domun fighters glaring at us with open hostility, yet too badly outnumbered to make a reckless move — and Gi-mun fighters who seemed content to watch and wait, but coiled like drawn blades the moment things turned.
In that forest of nearly a hundred blades, there was not one sword raised on our behalf.
"Hayeon. It's been a long time since I taught you the pipa, hasn't it? You were such a clever child."
The woman greeted Lim Hayeon behind me with a face full of warmth, as if welcoming an old friend.
"Yes. I remember you."
Someone she knew, then.
"It grieves me to meet you again in circumstances like these. But a clever girl like you understands full well what she must do now."
"Hey! Where do you whores think you're going, snatching her out from under us? Do you have any idea how much we've suffered to catch this woman?"
The Domun thug, sensing the fruits of a sleepless night's labor about to be stolen away, bellowed at the woman.
"Did that suffering include drawing a blade on honored guests of the Tang Clan?"
The woman regarded him with the look one reserves for a fool who has done something profoundly stupid.
"Ha! Barbarians will be barbarians. As long as nobody actually dies, those spineless righteous sects would never drag themselves all the way from Sichuan to Wuhan over it. We'll handle it ourselves, so get lost!"
"How noisy. And how stupid, on top of it."
"Damn wenches! You already agreed to give up on Lim Hayeon, so why in the world are you sticking your noses in now— ugh!"
The moment the Domun men began to draw their weapons, the Gi-mun fighters — several of them visibly round-bellied — leveled a single, silent look at the Domun thugs.
The Gi-mun woman nodded in satisfaction at the sight, then turned her gaze back to Lim Hayeon.
"Hayeon. Come with me now, and I will do everything in my power to clear your name."
"……Will Young Master Kang make it back safely too?"
I felt Lim Hayeon's gaze settle on me from behind.
"Lady Hayeon!"
What are you saying?
"Yes. I swear no harm will come to the one who saved you."
"Lady Hayeon. Hold my hand and don't let go. Whatever happens."
Don't give up. Where are you trying to go? I squeezed her hand hard, willing my heart to reach her through our clasped fingers.
"……My dear."
Her voice sounded like someone who had already given up.
"Get it through your head and stay behind me!"
The indigo was slowly bleeding out of the sky. In a little while, the sun would rise. After this brutal night, its warm light would caress the earth.
Just a little longer. All we had to do was hold on a little longer.
"Hayeon. If you don't come with me now, the one who saved you will pay the price."
"Don't listen to her. There's a gap in their watch — over there."
Could we actually break through? I knew I couldn't. Was there truly no choice but to let Lim Hayeon run while I stayed behind as the decoy?
"……"
"Lady Hayeon?"
When I turned, Lim Hayeon's face wore the expression of a woman who had agonized and agonized — and finally, at long last, arrived at a terrible resolve.
"I'm sorry. I can't bear to watch you get hurt."
"Wha—!"
Before my body could even react, her hand found my sleep point. A pressure technique that forces unconsciousness.
No.
My vision went dark. The strength drained from my limbs.
I felt her soft body catch me as I crumpled.
"……Thank you. I was happy. I was so happy. And……"
Consciousness drifting away from me.
The last thing I remember is a sorrowful voice at my ear, and her tears falling against my cheek.
————
My mind drifted.
Drained strength, gnawing hunger, and the bone-deep weariness of a hundred small wounds had my senses drowning in sweet, bottomless sleep.
Sleep had never tasted so sweet. I could have slept another half a day, easy.
"Big Brother, the Association Master's smiling in his sleep."
"Leave him be. Must be a pleasant dream."
"Mnnnh."
I don't know why, but somehow I had the feeling I needed to wake up. Right now.
"He's coming to!"
"The needle-boy! He really is a divine physician!"
"See? Told you! I've read the Dongui Bogam cover to cover more times than I can count — a pressure point like that is nothing!"
Amid the bustle of voices, I finally pried my heavy eyelids open.
"Where am I?"
"The office of the Ungi Inn. Before dawn, the courtesan brought you in unconscious with the fighters. She ordered us to protect you no matter what, so we came along too."
The Samgu brothers, the physician, and a crowd of Hometown Association men had gathered in a noisy huddle around my bed.
But the one woman who should have been worried about me most of all was nowhere among them.
"Where's Lady Hayeon?"
"Sister-in-law? You mean you didn't find her yesterday?"
Choi Ilgu answered with a look of utter bewilderment.
So it hadn't been a dream after all.
I shut my eyes and clenched my jaw against the ache.
In the end, I had failed to protect her. Months and months of effort to keep Lim Hayeon safe had evaporated in a single moment.
A crushing sense of defeat pressed down on my body like a stone.
Exhaustion and defeat together — for one instant, the temptation to close my eyes to reality and sink back into dreams swept over me whole.
"This is no time for this."
I fought the temptation down with effort and tried to raise myself from the bed.
"Please remain seated."
"Who's there?"
At the unfamiliar voice, I turned my head — and found a single head of color in a room full of black hair, watching me.
"I was sent by the Simun Branch Master."
—————
"Would you kindly send word that I've come to pay my respects to the Simun Branch Master?"
Not a second could be wasted. I threw on my coat and spoke to the woman from the Simun.
"You may see him if you go now. But his answer will not change."
The Simun woman's tone was cold as well water.
"And what answer might that be?"
So word of everything had already reached him?
I'd hoped for a favorable reply, but from her expression to her voice, everything about her set my nerves on edge.
"Give up on Lim Hayeon."
Well. That was certainly not a good answer.
"Do you have any idea what I've suffered for in Wuhan, and this is what you bring me?"
How could they do this to me?
"The Branch Master says that if you give up on Lim Hayeon, he will help her in return."
"……Go on."
I sat down in the chair, glancing briefly at the empty spot where a woman would normally have been quietly preparing my tea, and listened.
"If Young Master Kang no longer interferes, the Simun will mediate between the Gi-mun and the Domun. That would include the Usan raid and the matter of Lim Hayeon's status as a runaway courtesan."
"Then what's the problem?"
If he meant that I was only rubbing a sore raw by stepping in, and they'd handle it themselves — fine. I had no intention of meddling further anyway.
"With one condition. Lim Hayeon returns to being a courtesan. And her registry goes not to the Gi-mun, her original owner, but to the Domun."
"And you call that mediation?"
That wasn't the resolution I wanted at all. Scowling hard, I glared at the Simun woman.
"It is compromise. The Gi-mun abandons all claim to Lim Hayeon's registry entirely — and in exchange, the Domun treats her as a courtesan under contract rather than a runaway."
"That is not the solution I want."
"But it is a solution Lady Hayeon herself could accept."
"……"
How far had Lim Hayeon seen this coming when she went back?
Somehow, I could feel her tears still wet on my parched cheek.
"The Simun searched and found no proof of the Domun's hand in the Usan raid. Dig any deeper now, and we'd be stirring a hornet's nest none of the three branches — Simun, Domun, or Gi-mun — wants touched."
We fight and feud among ourselves, but in the end we are all Haomen. We must never let things reach the absolute worst. That was something the Simun Branch Master liked to say now and then.
In other words: don't waste time souring faces at each other — stitch the wound roughly, sweep it under the rug, and move on.
It was surely a method that could satisfy all three branches at once. But still.
"So what you're telling me is to be satisfied with Lady Hayeon going back to being a courtesan — never mind whatever schemes the Domun might run with her registry down the road."
There was no version of me that could ever be satisfied with that. Do they have any idea what would become of her?
"She was always a courtesan. What's the trouble with a courtesan returning to being a courtesan? I understand this is a difficult decision. But Young Master Kang, surely even you must give up—"
"What is there to think about? Let's go together. I'm going to see the Simun Branch Master myself."
If I meant to save Lim Hayeon, I needed help — now, this very moment.
The Tang Clan was far away, the Seocheon Escort Agency a single drop in the ocean, and begging the Mangeum Lord for an introduction to Jegal Hyang was beyond absurd.
There was exactly one place left that could help me.
"I beg your pardon? Young Master Kang?"
Ignoring the Simun woman's dumbfounded expression, I rose from my chair and threw open the office door.
"I have no intention of giving her up."
"I knew you'd come."
At the Simun Branch Master's inn, which I had hurried to, he greeted me with a snort of laughter.
"Help me."
Not groveling — standing tall. Pleading for his mercy, yes, but as a matter of my own right.
I lowered my body into a cupped-fist salute and met the Simun Branch Master's eyes.
"Clearing a runaway courtesan's name and taking her registry back from the Domun are two very different beasts. Those madmen are dug in like they'll die before they hand it over."
"If it were easy, I'd never have come here in the first place."
"Helping you means a direct clash with the Domun. Give me one reason the Simun should bleed for you."
The Branch Master looked at me the way a man looks at something small and worthless — something he could flatten at any moment, were he of a mind to.
Fair enough. To him, I was nothing more than a promising rookie in the Simun.
Would any company mobilize itself, top to bottom, for the sake of one new hire?
"You won't regret it."
One wrong move, and this could spill into open bloodshed between branches of the same sect. I had to prove — right here, right now — that I was worth exactly that much.
I met the Branch Master's gaze with every ounce of confidence I had.
"No regrets, is it?"
"Bring in what's outside!"
At my word, the door swung open and a large chest was carried in and set down at my feet.
"What's this?"
"This is intelligence on which official the magistrate's office — famous for his incorruptibility, mind you — has been taking bribes from. This is proof that the new wife of the Gaha Escort Agency's Master has been sharing a bed with his own son. This is the hidden double ledgers the Hajong Trading House has been cooking behind closed doors—"
The chest was stuffed to the brim with information worth cold, hard coin.
"What in the world is all this?"
"Intel my people gathered and set aside. If the Branch Master wants it, he can have as much of it as he likes."
"Hoh. I don't recall ever teaching you to do anything like this."
The Simun Branch Master stared at me, slack-jawed.
"The waiter's trade is all learned by watching over someone's shoulder, isn't it? Picked things up here and there."
I shrugged with studied indifference, as if the intelligence laid out before him were merely the tip of the iceberg.
Back when the Branch Master had first set me my trial, I had turned the problem over for a long while.
Build your own faction within the Simun. That had been the entirety of his instructions — and was that really enough?
Haomen was an information network.
Hadn't "grow your own faction" really meant: gather a weight of intelligence that no one in this organization could afford to ignore again?
It would certainly prove useful once banked — so I'd concluded, and quietly begun collecting everything worth a price.
"Heh heh heh heh. Where in heaven's name did this creature crawl out of……"
The Simun Branch Master smiled at me until the creases of his brow could deepen no further.
"Help me."
"Done! It's a patron's duty to invest in a prospect worth investing in. You'll have my help! Now — two parties are claiming ownership of Lim Hayeon, so first we'll work the registry toward the Gi-mun's side—"
"Not two. Three."
"Hm?"
"I'm bringing her to my side. Not the Gi-mun's."
"That'll be harder still. What could possibly drive you that far?"
"Because I owe her an answer."
On the pavilion overlooking Wuhan's night lights, I had taken her hand and promised I would answer.
"What?"
The last words Lim Hayeon had spoken to me as my consciousness slipped away.
— Thank you. I was happy. I was so happy. And……
The words she'd said to me — me, the one who had promised to answer her.
Words meant for no one else's ears, the confession of feelings she'd hidden away, spilled out in a blush she couldn't take back.
— I love you.
"I intend to answer that confession — in my own way."