The Big Score - 4
"You want us to send a calling card announcing the theft before we commit it?"
The Advance Calling Card of the Phantom Thief.
It was the next move in my scheme to install the Shadowless Divine Thief as the Hyangju of the Gamblers' Division.
"That's the idea."
Before Miss Hayeon began her career as a phantom thief in earnest, I nodded at her question.
"What kind of thief sends a letter ahead announcing he's coming to steal?"
"That's exactly why we must do it. Because no one in history ever has."
Even a stale cliché becomes a feat when you're the first to pull it off.
Burgle the Nine Great Sects or a storied martial clan, and even if Miss Hayeon were to attempt it, she would be neither the first to try nor the last. But the phantom thief's calling card was different.
In the modern world, the phantom thief's calling card is a tired trope. In the Central Plains, it was something else entirely—a feat no one had ever dreamed of attempting.
A phantom thief announces the heist, then pulls it off anyway. Who? How? Why? The world would go mad for a thing the likes of which had never been seen.
"I really do have to become a phantom thief, then. One who flings down her calling card, strolls over the wall in broad defiance, and shares the spoils with the poor."
"And that phantom thief's name will ring out beyond Hubei, across the whole of the Central Plains."
Just as a martial artist flings down a challenge letter to prove his strength against a mightier foe, the Shadowless Divine Thief would fling her calling cards at the world to prove herself.
A first in all the history of the Central Plains.
If a single thief succeeded, time and again, at deeds no one had ever imagined—let alone attempted—she would become a legend. The greatest phantom thief the Central Plains had ever known.
The Shadowless Divine Thief herself.
"They say letters from the Shadowless Divine Thief came flying right into the mansions of the rich!"
News of the calling cards was, without question, the hottest topic at Daseogak as well.
"Flying letters from the Shadowless Divine Thief? You mean the sort you wake up to find—black paper cranes waiting for you?"
"That's the truly wondrous part! The letter flew through the sky and into the estate!"
"A letter, flying through the sky? Been hitting the midday drink, have you?"
"It's the truth, I tell you! A sheet of black paper came sailing out of the bright blue sky and planted itself in the inner courtyard! At first folk thought a crow had dropped dead out of the air!"
"So it wasn't a bird, then?"
"It looked like one, but up close it turned out to be strangely folded paper, they say. In all the vast world of Wuhan, who else could work such artistry with a mere sheet of paper?"
"A paper bird flew in and stuck itself in the middle of the courtyard? Heh heh. How uncanny. Utterly uncanny!"
"So the Shadowless Divine Thief even sends her calling cards winging through the sky?"
"She didn't earn the name Phantom Thief for nothing!"
The paper airplane.
It's a paper craft every child folds at least once—yet in truth, the paper airplane's history barely spanned a century. To the people of the Central Plains, the very sight of paper taking wing could only register as an impossible marvel.
After the black paper cranes, people marveled anew at the black paper birds, chattering about the Shadowless Divine Thief's calling cards for days on end.
"There's a passage in the novel where the Shadowless Divine Thief sends a black calling card ahead, remember? So it's true—she really does send notice first, then robs the great houses anyway!"
"Only the Shadowless Divine Thief of Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon could manage it! What madman of a thief would even try such a thing?"
"A few of them have already been robbed, you know."
"What?! That's actually true?!"
It would be easy enough to write a paper airplane off as some prankster's joke.
So to make it unmistakably clear who had sent the calling cards, Miss Hayeon robbed the very houses the paper planes had landed in.
Now, nobody doubted who was behind the black paper airplanes.
"Have you heard? The Shadowless Divine Thief sent her calling card to the Provincial Governor's family estate not long ago!"
"The Provincial Governor?! No! A calling card, to the home of an official that highly placed?"
Think of Hubei Province as a country unto itself, and the Provincial Governor stands roughly where a state governor would. As one of the highest-ranking officials in all Hubei, he was a man the crowd couldn't help but gawk at.
"The Governor with his family seat here in Wuhan—you mean that notorious crook? The one with strings reaching all the way into the court, who's squirmed out of every accusation ever thrown his way?"
"The very man. Word is an Imperial Inspector went after him in person and nearly got himself demoted for the trouble."
"He buried even an Imperial Inspector's report? Well then—the Shadowless Divine Thief certainly picked her mark with care!"
"Now there's news a man can savor. The Shadowless Divine Thief's calling card, delivered straight to the mansion of the province's most infamous graft-artist!"
A phantom thief's calling card, aimed at a corrupt official. It had righteous cause in abundance, and difficulty to match.
With one more crucial symbol added on top, it would be perfect.
"Glad as I am to hear it, though—a man of the Governor's rank would have vaults stuffed to bursting with gold and jewels. Even if the Shadowless Divine Thief made off with a tidy sum, who'd ever notice it was gone?"
"My friend, you know the one thing and miss the second. You didn't know there's a single treasure even the great Governor himself cherishes, kept at his family estate?"
"There's a treasure like that?"
"There's a certain very famous metal, you see."
"A metal? Don't tell me he's sitting on orichalcum or mithril?"
"Why would you bring up metals fit for the imperial household?"
"Then what—Changbai Pure Silver? Ten-Thousand-Year Cold Iron?"
"If the Governor's house had any of that, my dog back home would have to be a dragon."
"Then what is it?!"
"The Darksteel Heavy Ingot. A block of meteoric iron, smelted with the aid of a legendary smith and cast into a single ingot."
"The Darksteel Heavy Ingot? A treasure like that?"
Darksteel. A metal every martial artist lusted after, famous for its impossible durability and staggering weight.
It was said that a swordsman of the heavy-blade or saber arts who managed to get his hands on a sword forged from darksteel could hold his own even against masters a full cut above him—that's the kind of treasure it was.
And a true phantom thief needed the world to hear that she'd stolen a treasure worth shocking it over.
The Darksteel Heavy Ingot happened to be the very prize Miss Hayeon and I had set our sights on.
"They say the Governor has ordered the guard strengthened to an absurd degree. She's no Shadowless Divine Thief out of Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon—how could the Wuhan Shadowless Divine Thief possibly steal it?"
Even the Daseogak regulars, for all their chatter about the Shadowless Divine Thief, looked to be in agreement: robbing the Governor's estate was beyond her.
"Everything has a way."
Seated in the mansion's study, I murmured the words as I paged through the documents spread out before me.
"I never dreamed the information the couriers had gathered could be put to use like this."
Miss Hayeon remarked, sounding genuinely impressed as she looked over the papers laid out in front of me.
Hasn't it been more than once or twice since we came to Wuhan that we've needed information? Figured it might prove useful someday, so I had it prepared."
The red ginseng candy affair. The fake Hopil incident. The Nokcheong Escort Agency mess. I'd needed the Joseon Hometown Association's intelligence far more than once or twice, so I had made information reporting a basic duty of every courier on staff.
"No wonder the Simun Head sings your praises. This isn't Haomen-grade yet, but it's an intelligence outfit in its own right, isn't it?"
"The branches keep multiplying without a hitch. Who's to say—someday, the Joseon Hometown Association might just dig up information even Haomen can't get its hands on."
A network of Joseon people, built by Joseon people. In Wuhan, it might be no dream at all.
"Young Master Kang. I've finished sorting through everything—the information you provided and Haomen's both."
Miss Jegal said, spreading a single sheet of paper out before me.
What the sheet showed was a map of the Provincial Governor's mansion—drawn with such precision that even the Governor's own family couldn't have matched it.
"Thank you. Without you, Miss Jegal, I'd rather not imagine how we'd have managed any of this."
"Hehe. It's nothing, reeeally."
I paused to watch Miss Jegal smile bashfully at my praise. With settling Miss Hayeon's business the most pressing matter at hand, I'd been giving her far less attention than she deserved, and I felt a pang of guilt over it.
Once this affair was over—whatever Miss Jegal wanted, wherever she wished to go—I resolved to grant it, no matter what.
"The warrior guarding the eastern wall suffers from the wasting-thirst sickness and a chronically runny nose, so he visits the privy constantly, even while on duty."
I pointed to the eastern side of the estate, consulting the compiled records.
"The martial artist posted before the vault room has excellent skills, but poor night vision and a fondness for drink. On his days off he drinks himself blind, and every following morning he suffers miserably for it."
Miss Hayeon traced out the shortest route from the eastern wall to the vault.
"For the break-in, we'll compare the two men's duty rosters and go in from the east. As for the escape—let's assume we get spotted and work out fallback plans as well."
"If we're discovered at the vault, from the western side we'd have to loop back around to reach it. There'll be an opening while we circle—so I'll try breaking through over the rooftops."
"I'd rest easier if there were a safer way…"
Unless a man had a dozen spare lives on hand, multiple escape routes were a necessity.
Was there truly no better option? The Governor's security had been reinforced from top to bottom, and finding an escape route wasn't going to be easy.
"W-wouldn't it be fine to hide here?"
As Miss Hayeon and I sat stuck for an answer, Miss Jegal—who had been listening quietly—pointed at one particular room.
"Miss Jegal. Isn't that the servants' quarters?"
"O-one of the servants struck up a friendship with the young lady of the house, you see."
"Let's see… so a servant grew close with the Governor's daughter. I see! And the servants vacate their rooms at night, you say—then we could slip in there and hide."
We could tuck ourselves into a servant's room and wait for the watch to loosen—or failing that, open an escape route out through the servants' wing.
"Hehe. Yes. That's right."
By the time the three of us had mapped out the infiltration route and every escape path besides, only a single obstacle remained.
"The problem is the vault room itself. They say there are traps inside, but that's the full extent of what anyone knows."
So the vault room was the crux after all. We had no notion of how its defenses worked.
"It's true—neither Haomen nor the couriers have a thing on the vault room."
No courier would ever have reason to deliver food to a vault room, and Haomen's knowledge didn't run deep there either.
We'd managed to gather everything down to the last guard, but the room's interior structure remained a complete blank.
It was like an open-world game with the entire map lit up—except the one marker that mattered most, the objective itself, sat shrouded in fog.
"The blueprints of whoever built the vault room would solve everything, but there's no way to get our hands on them."
Miss Hayeon muttered, frustration plain in her voice.
"The one who drew the blueprints?"
"Y-you mean someone like a master carpenter?"
"A master carpenter…? Ah! So that's how it was."
An old memory surfaced in a flash. So that was it.
"What is it?"
"Nothing. Something from way back just came to mind."
"If you're set on making your living as a street storyteller, go try Chilgok County. There's a draper there called Wang-ssi—an old friend of mine."
I'd always wondered why Uncle Wang—the Shadowless Divine Thief—and a master carpenter were old friends, of all things.
I had no way of knowing whether the carpenter ever learned that Wang-ssi was the Shadowless Divine Thief. But it made perfect sense: a man with access to the blueprints of every great estate was exactly the sort of contact a legendary thief would keep close.
A small mystery had resolved itself in the unlikeliest of places.
"Shall we dig for more information?"
"No need."
"There's also the option of sneaking in once, purely for reconnaissance."
I shook my head at Miss Hayeon's offer.
The Joseon Hometown Association and Haomen alike had strained every nerve to gather what they could. No amount of further digging would turn up anything more.
Miss Hayeon could certainly scout the place in person beforehand—but there was no reason to shoulder that risk.
What I needed was a way to get more on the vault room without a scrap of danger.
"There's a far better way than that."
And I had it.
"Governor! I've brought the one man the whole of the Wuhan magistrate's office recommends!"
Wuhan. The Provincial Governor's family estate.
The Chief Steward walked briskly over to the Governor, whose face was clouded with worry.
"Is that so? And you're the man who knows the Shadowless Divine Thief better than anyone in Wuhan? I've heard no small amount about your reputation of late."
The Governor's worry was anything but slight.
Countless wealthy households in Wuhan had already fallen to this Shadowless Divine Thief.
And according to rumor, it made no difference whether they hired martial artists from renowned orthodox sects or from the unorthodox—the result was always the same.
Was there truly no other way? Fortunately for the Governor, he had one option the others didn't.
Unlike the ordinary rich, he was a high official of Hubei Province—and he could put the power of his office to private use.
With a look of deep satisfaction, the Governor watched the man before him bow.
"It is an honor to meet the illustrious Governor. Kang Yunho, bailiff, at your service."