Phantom Thief - 1
"The Shadowless Divine Thief has appeared? What is this you're saying?"
The members of the Tea Book Club seated the man who had burst in with the sudden news in the seat of honor before pressing him to explain. Before saying a word, the messenger took a long drink from the glass on the table — and even patrons who weren't members began drifting over, drawn by the promise of a juicy story.
"I'd just finished a meal at my usual inn and was sipping the yogurt drink they threw in for free, when one of the Hao Sect servers shared a fascinating tale."
"A fascinating tale?"
"You know Merchant Yeom, the one who lives down by the harbor?"
"Merchant Yeom? The infamous leech who pockets obscene brokerage fees off traveling merchants, all under the pretense of finding them buyers?"
"The very man. Word is his house was robbed a few days ago."
"Hah. Weren't his guards supposed to be tight as a drum? The thief has some nerve. But what does any of that have to do with the Shadowless Divine Thief?"
The Tea Book Club members asked this with visibly deflated enthusiasm. Why else would a rich household hire guards, after all? Because thieves with an eye for wealthy homes numbered beyond what ten fingers and ten toes could count.
All this hullabaloo because some fat cat got robbed — and they claimed the Shadowless Divine Thief had returned? A rich man's house being emptied might be gossip for an afternoon, but chaining it to the Shadowless Divine Thief of the novels was a stretch.
If not for one single fact.
"There was a mark left behind, they say. The chest was packed full of treasures — and when it was opened, every last piece had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a black paper crane!"
"A black paper crane?"
Just like in the novel. Several members' eyes went wide with shock.
"The thief left it there purely to mock him, apparently. Merchant Yeom flew into an absolute frenzy. But the strangest part hadn't come yet!"
"What else could there possibly be?"
Sensing the story taking a delicious turn, the members urged him on.
"There's an orphanage east of Wuhan, isn't there? The one run by a monk."
"Ah! I know it. The good man who takes in children with nowhere else to go, though he can barely feed himself. But what does that have to do with—?"
"Steady yourselves now. A black paper crane appeared at that orphanage too!"
"What?! The thieving cur has somewhere else to rob?! An orphanage, of all places!"
While the Tea Book Club members' eyes went wide and their chatter died in their throats, a few patrons slower on the uptake began shouting themselves hoarse in outrage.
"No. Nothing was taken. Quite the opposite — money was left behind. When the abbot woke, he found a pouch he'd never seen before, heavy with coin, and a black paper crane resting on top."
"Huh?"
"Hold on a moment. Haven't we heard this exact story somewhere before?"
Only then did the slowest of the patrons seem to catch on, murmuring among themselves.
"So you've noticed too. That's right — it's the Shadowless Divine Thief. Look here, at the end of volume two of Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon."
The messenger spread open volume two of Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon on the table.
"The Shadowless Divine Thief would leave behind a black paper, folded with uncanny artistry, as proof that he had come and gone."
The black paper crane left behind by the thief who had surfaced in Wuhan only days ago. At the notorious rich man's house: stolen treasures and a black paper crane. At the charity of a poor monk: coins and a black paper crane.
Identical.
Exactly the same as the Shadowless Divine Thief of Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon.
"..."
All around Daseogak — there on a second floor packed so tight there wasn't an inch of floor left to stand on — silence settled between the wide-eyed crowd for a long moment.
"...The Shadowless Divine Thief truly exists?"
When that voice, speaking for every soul present, shattered the strange stillness, the second floor of Daseogak began to boil over.
"Eek! Sis, the Shadowless Divine Thief has appeared!"
"Did Author Hopil deliver a prophecy?"
"What?! Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon is a book of prophecy?!"
"A thief who steals for the poor!"
"Good heavens! The Shadowless Divine Thief, here in Wuhan! The phantom thief walks the earth!"
"Unhyeon? Then does Unhyeon exist too?!"
"The parts with the Shadowless Divine Thief! Let's read them again!"
"We have to spread this news to everyone else!"
People were spilling out of Daseogak bearing the momentous tidings — to let their friends know that Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon had become reality. To spread word that the phantom thief, the Shadowless Divine Thief, had appeared in Wuhan.
"The Shadowless Divine Thief truly exists...? Then Author Hopil was not spinning falsehoods after all?"
Amid the uproar shaking Daseogak, the Tea Book Club member who had earlier thrown the room into discord by nitpicking Author Hopil's supposed exaggerations could not calm the storm in his own heart.
"How have reactions been lately?"
"Sales of Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon climb higher with every passing day." Glancing over the sales report Jegal Hyang had just finished tallying, I gave Lim Hayeon an account of the absolute pandemonium gripping Daseogak.
"A black paper crane — how did you even come up with that? At first you were going to leave notes reading 'The Shadowless Divine Thief was here,' weren't you?"
"A phantom thief must, above all else, exude mystery. That is why it's better to leave behind a symbol no one can easily imitate."
Writing out 'The Shadowless Divine Thief was here' would look like a prankster's graffiti — it would cheapen the whole image.
The Shadowless Divine Thief is a righteous thief. A phantom who punishes the wicked through theft and shields the weak.
Better to forge a symbol — a joker card, a chess piece — and let it conjure the mystery for you. So I had racked my brain over it. What kind of emblem could carry the full mystique of a phantom thief? The conclusion I reached, after all that agonizing, was the black paper crane.
"I never dreamed people would leap straight from the black paper the Shadowless Divine Thief leaves in Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon to the black paper cranes you leave behind."
"Ordinarily it would have taken ages for anyone to catch on. The black paper gives them a thread to follow, but stitching together a thief from a novel and a thief in the flesh is no small feat."
"That's where the Hao Sect members come in — they weave the rumors for us."
I nodded at Lim Hayeon's words. Normally, word of her exploits would have taken time to spread, and linking the thief who had appeared in Wuhan to Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon would have taken an age on its own. Then more time still before people gossiped openly about the connection between the two thieves. In the end, the world would have concluded by itself that the new thief of Wuhan deserved the name Shadowless Divine Thief — but the whole procession would have taken a very long time indeed.
Of course, we had compressed that entire procession into the blink of an eye, courtesy of a few hundred Hao Sect mouths.
"The rumors racing ahead of us gave us one great gift. The Shadowless Divine Thief's work has only just begun, and already the whole city is burning to know — has the Shadowless Divine Thief truly appeared? Is he truly a phantom who robs the corrupt rich to feed the poor? The people simply cannot stand not knowing."
Expectation must be repaid in kind. It was my duty as an author — and as the phantom thief's accomplice. I began folding the black paper cranes Lim Hayeon would scatter across the city tonight.
Lim Hayeon watched me fold for a while in silence before opening her mouth.
"I suppose I'll have to keep myself busy, then. By the way — where on earth did you learn a skill like that?"
Elementary school art class.
After school, with the change left over from buying supplies, I used to deliberately buy single-sided colored paper instead of the double-sided kind — it left more money for fried snacks dipped in spicy rice-cake sauce at the corner stand — along with the five-hundred-won glue stick that would one day become famous for entirely different purposes.
Naturally, I could not tell her any of that.
"Why do you look like that?"
When my face turned a touch awkward, Lim Hayeon tilted her head and asked. Paper folding was something even grade-schoolers learned back in the modern world, but here it was another matter entirely. Using costly paper — not to write upon, but to fold into useless shapes — was an elevated art reserved for certain rites and funerals.
How was I going to explain this? Fob her off with something vague? Then a splendid idea struck me.
Might as well collect some points with Lim Hayeon while I'm at it.
I rose from my seat with deliberate slowness, leaned against the window with eyes steeped in longing, and began.
"Once, I swore I would never fold another paper crane as long as I lived."
Open with a vow to myself. Speak of the paper crane as though it carried a past too heavy to utter, and let curiosity do the rest.
"A craft you swore never to use again?"
Don't answer right away. Pretend to wrench a painful memory loose, let it hang, then speak.
"That's right. Because it was a craft I learned for my ailing mother."
"For your... mother?"
Caught off guard, was she? Lim Hayeon's voice trembled, just slightly.
"One day, my mother contracted a wasting plague. Fearing the illness might pass to a child, they kept me from her side — I couldn't so much as see my beloved mother's face, and I wore the floor thin pacing. It was then that I happened to meet a man from Japan at the harbor."
"A Japanese man?"
"A famed mystic, or so he claimed. Abe no Seimei, or was it Asakura You? In any case, this man — renowned throughout all Japan for his occult arts — told me something."
"What did he say?"
"He said that if I folded a thousand cranes — the crane being one of the Ten Symbols of Longevity — and offered them to my mother, a miracle might yet come to pass. With a child's whole heart I begged to be taught, and he relented, telling me to pour my soul into every single crane I folded."
"And so... did you fold them?"
Lim Hayeon already knew how this story ended. She had heard from the Gi-mun what became of my mother. But even a tragedy whose ending you know — a dramatic retelling only seasons the tale.
"I folded. These hands were small as bracken shoots, and at first I couldn't manage a single one. But with every crane — every last one — I prayed for my mother to be spared, and somehow I came to believe that she truly would be."
I forced up one corner of my mouth, and one corner only. A sad smile — the sort a man wears when he laughs at the helplessness of the child he used to be.
Now the reaction comes.
"There's so little a child can do when his mother lies sick."
There it was. Lim Hayeon had lived through something very like it herself.
"How many did I manage in the end? I don't remember. No — there was no need to remember. There was no reason left to fold another."
"..."
His mother's death. The boy lost, in a single stroke, the only reason he had ever had to use the craft.
"Had my hands been quicker — had I finished all one thousand — would my mother have lived? Or is a miracle only ever a miracle, and that is why it never came? To this day, I still don't know."
"It wasn't your..."
Perfect. This is the moment.
As Lim Hayeon came toward me, her face frozen, I turned to her and smiled — as though shaking loose a sorrow I had carried for years.
"And yet here I am, folding the very cranes I swore never to fold again. The cranes I believed I had put down forever — I fold them now for you, Lady Hayeon."
The cranes he had vowed, absolutely, never to fold again. The cranes folded for his beloved mother, and no one else.
I am breaking that vow to fold them for you. For you, who are to me as precious as she was.
"Nn..."
Had she grasped the meaning? Lim Hayeon looked away, faint color rising in her cheeks.
The black paper crane — now the very emblem of the Shadowless Divine Thief. Folded into it was my heart, and my heart was pointed at you.
I had said enough. That alone should have earned me points — but if I was collecting points, I might as well drive it home for a perfect score.
"The first miracle I prayed for never came. But this time, I will see one through."
I stepped toward Lim Hayeon and took her hand, my face set hard with resolve.
I won't let go. This promise I will keep, no matter what. And I let every ounce of that honest devotion to her show through.
"You..."
Lim Hayeon stared back at me, her face flushed red to the ears.
Well? A hundred out of a hundred, no?
Lim Hayeon took a step toward me. Her quickened breath was close enough to feel.
Huh?
Hold on.
Did I land it a little too perfectly?
Is this... allowed to escalate? No, wait — the Gi-mun Hyangju warned me, strictly, to keep my distance as long as she's still a runaway courtesan.
Hold on. Lim Hayeon, you of all people must have been warned even more sternly. Why are you easing your face closer to mine?
What do I do?
Just as I stood there, flustered—
"Hnnnghhh..."
A voice of pure anguish rose from behind us.
"Eep!"
"Huh?!"
"You're both being far, far too meeeeean!"
Behind us stood Jegal Hyang, wilted like a cut stem, her face crumpled and on the verge of tears.
"Ahaha. Lady Jegal..."
Right. She had been in the office with us all along. Her desk was buried under a mountain of paperwork that kept her out of my line of sight — and for one shining moment, I had forgotten she existed.
Jegal Hyang hung her head deep and spoke, her complexion gone gray.
"So it's true, I really am that easy to overloooook. Yes. Even at family dinners, somehow there's never anyone left beside me by the end. And still. And stiiiill. I was working so hard this whole tiiiiime, you knowuuu. Hayeon unnie was busy, so I was even doing her work toooo. And then you just went and took Hayeon unnie's hand. If I'd cut in at a moment like that, would I have been in the wayyy? You talk about looking after me too, and then you slyly try to get ahead of meeeeee. What am I supposed to doooooooo?"
Did I just poke a trauma?
"Ah... um. Lady Jegal?"
Lim Hayeon crossed to Jegal Hyang with an apology written across her face — a rare sight indeed.
"Lady Jegal. It's a misunderstanding. That isn't what this was."
"Sob... sob..."
It took us a long while to talk the despondent Lady Jegal down from her depths.
Meanwhile, back where it had all begun — at the Tea Book Club's regular off-site gathering.
"Do you finally see it? The grand design of Author Hopil."
Another member said this as he seized the shoulders of the troublemaker — the man who had insisted that Author Hopil had overreached.
"What in the world... and what is that carrier for?"
The rabble-rouser stared, bewildered, at the carrying frame — easily large enough for a grown man to ride — and asked.
"Climb on."
"What?"
"Everyone, time to ready yourselves."
"Gladly."
At his word, the other Tea Book Club members snapped into eerily flawless motion.
"There's really no need for aaaall this!"
"To dare doubt Author Hopil!"
"He truly was a rabble-rouser, just as we thought."
"Strap him in, quickly!"
"For as everyone knows, to lose one's faith is to court death!"
"Lord Andidi— no, Lord Hopil! We send another one up to you!"
And so, with the rabble-rouser duly processed, the news that the Shadowless Divine Thief had appeared in Wuhan began to spread across the whole of the city.