Forbidden Garden - 3
To a dweller of the murim, travel and homecoming were nothing out of the ordinary.
The world crawled with dangers and bandits; for common folk, a long journey was something they might manage once or twice in a lifetime. Warriors with weapons at their belts were the exception.
And so, unless the occasion was truly extraordinary, even the Sichuan Tang Clan rarely saw crowds pour out to welcome a returning party.
Unless it was a special occasion, that is.
"Dangga Pungun Volume Thrrreeee!"
"Give us Dangga Pungun Volume 3!!!"
"Show us those swordswomen — the ones like sisters! Show them to us too!"
"Show us! Show us!"
Tang Pae's party, bound for Daseogak, had returned — carrying Dangga Pungun Volume 3 itself. At this news everyone had been aching for, a vast crowd turned out to greet them.
"We are to report to the Clan Head first."
"Boooooooo."
"Boo all you like. It won't help."
"Can't you release Volume 3 first?!"
"No early spoilers, those are the rules! Coming through, make way!"
The Tang Clan warriors looked ready to strip the carriage bare on the spot, but there was not a soul in the clan who would defy an order of the Clan Head.
Weaving through a crowd one flush of frustration away from turning bandit, Tang Pae's party barely managed to slip free.
"Tang Pae!"
As the crowd thinned and the Patriarch Hall drew near, a beauty with dazzling eyes appeared before the party without warning.
"Young Miss Hwarin! I trust you have been keeping well."
Tang Hwarin was a Rising Prodigy of the Tang Clan and the clan's own Forbidden Garden — the Poison Human. She was accorded treatment on par with the direct bloodline, and though Tang Pae did not yet know it, as the disciple of the Poison Martial Empress her name now carried real weight across the murim.
When Tang Pae's party halted to pay their respects, Hwarin returned the greeting to the familiar faces.
"Is there... something you brought me, by any chance?"
Like a child feeling out her parents on her birthday, Hwarin averted her eyes and dragged the toe of her shoe through the dirt for no reason at all as she asked. There probably wasn't — but one never knew, did one? And if there was, the sooner the better.
At the sight, Tang Pae smiled faintly and drew a small box from his robes.
"Young Master Kang instructed that this be delivered to Young Miss Hwarin's— oof!"
"Thank you!"
Hwarin snatched the box away at a speed that made a man wonder whether she was truly a Poison Human at all, or perhaps a Brain Human.
"Let's hurry on."
Tang Pae and his men smiled once toward the happily vanishing Hwarin, then made straight for the Patriarch Hall.
"I'm home!"
Hwarin entered wearing a smile in fuller bloom than any flower of the Forbidden Garden, the very picture of worldly bliss.
"Why, your grin has stretched ear to ear. Come — training must begin. Get ready."
The Poison Martial Empress spoke in a mischievous tone to her disciple, who was carrying a box she had never seen before.
"Aww..."
"I jest. Go in and read it at your leisure."
When her disciple's face, already clouded with heartbreak, threatened to twist into the most despairing expression in the world, the Empress let her lips curl into an arc.
"Thank you!"
"Heh heh. Is it that wonderful, then?"
Sometimes there was more delight in watching youth bloom than in strolling the loveliest of gardens. The Poison Martial Empress smiled as her disciple vanished into her room.
"Hm-hm-hmm~."
Humming a tune without quite realizing it, Hwarin opened the box. Inside lay a letter — too plump to be a letter, too thin to be a book — and a single volume.
The book was the new Dangga Pungun, a volume that would send anyone of the Sichuan Tang Clan into raptures. But right now, the new release was not what mattered to Hwarin.
With hands more careful than she would have used on any priceless treasure, Hwarin unfolded the letter.
To my beloved Hwarin,
"Straight out of the gate? How is anyone supposed to show their face. What if somebody sees?"
Yet the grumbling in Hwarin's voice was already thick with butterflies. So this was what they meant by your heart trembling at a single first line.
Shooting a needless glance around in case someone might actually be watching, she returned to her fiancé's letter.
Tang Pae begged so shamelessly for the errand, hiding behind his martial training as an excuse. He insisted it was no matter that he had failed to cut in line, but I could tell self-interest was mixed in plain as day.
"Pfft."
Hwarin pictured Kang Yunho training his way through the entire journey. He would have worn a look of pure agony the whole while — and still drilled every form with perfect diligence. Because that was the sort of man he was.
The letter ran from everything Kang Yunho had endured on the road to Yichang to everything that befell him after he arrived, written in painstaking detail so that not one thing would slip past her.
Of course, some of it didn't quite survive the trip through a letter.
"He gave the staff work uniforms, and the customers multiplied?"
Hwarin tilted her head. Dressing people in respectable clothes brought in more customers?
It was hard to grasp — surely because she hadn't been there to see it for herself. Feeling a small pang of regret, she smiled anyway at her fiancé's kindness in tailoring clothes for his poor staff, and turned the page.
How the old staff had all retired and work-study students been taken on in their place. How the chairman of the Literati Council had covered the wages. How, once he introduced lunch breaks and free lunches, word spread through Yichang that he was a fine employer.
Story after story she would have savored at his side — at each one, Hwarin wore a curious, tender smile.
"Huh?"
Reading on, her eyes caught on a strange passage and stopped dead.
The child of a sworn brother I once owed a debt to was left with nowhere to turn, so I took them in as staff. I suppose fate truly does exist.
"The child of a sworn brother?"
Since when did Yunho have a sworn brother? She seemed to remember hearing he'd owed someone a debt once, but...
"Something about this is off. Is it just me...?"
Like a fishbone lodged in her throat, the line left Hwarin frowning faintly. Something felt wrong. She couldn't say what.
The wrongness was this: a guilty-footed Kang Yunho had not written a woman but had dodged into a child, vague on purpose — and a woman's instincts quietly sounded the alarm.
For a while Hwarin's gaze hovered over the words the child of a sworn brother, then she shook her head. This was her first letter from Kang Yunho; of course her nerves would snag on the strangest trifles.
She read on.
The release of Dangga Pungun and the bidding war over the printing press, how he had given some good-for-nothing his comeuppance — every last thing Kang Yunho had lived through, right up to the moment the people of the Sichuan Tang Clan left Yichang, lay written in the letter.
Starved as she had been for news of him, she swallowed it all far too fast. Her eyes had already reached the final line.
And last of all, I send you what my heart holds for you — the fruit of all our hardship. Dangga Pungun Volume 3, the very first ever printed on the finest press.
"Pfft. Bullshit."
Look at him, taking credit for everything.
With affection welling in her eyes, Hwarin gazed at Dangga Pungun Volume 3. The first copy ever made, on the finest paper and the finest press Kang Yunho possessed.
The moment she opened to its first page, her breath seized in her chest.
I'll be waiting for you at Daseogak. With all my love. — Kang Yunho
"This is... cheating..."
Heart pounding, Hwarin hugged Volume 3 tenderly to her chest.
"So it says he's doing well, does it?"
The Poison Martial Empress entered the room carrying a medicinal tea good for Hwarin's constitution — after her heart had settled somewhat.
"Yes..."
"Has something happened with your fiancé?"
She had certainly received a letter from her fiancé, yet Hwarin's face was not entirely bright.
"He says he's been doing well. That should put me at ease, but somehow I feel a little let down."
With a lonely sort of expression, Hwarin let her heart show.
"Let down, you say?"
"He wrote that working alone was hardship past all telling, so I feel sorry for him — if I'd been beside him, it wouldn't have been so bad. Then I'm proud of him for holding up without me, and then again, he solved every crisis without me, so it feels like he doesn't need me at all. No! That's not what I mean! Anyway. My feelings are just... all mixed up."
Neither purely happy nor purely sad, Hwarin called Kang Yunho's face to mind.
She could not get a grip on her own feelings. One thought of Yunho and her head and her heart both swayed. She had no idea how she was supposed to put this feeling into words.
"...That is love, child."
As if gazing upon her younger self, the Poison Martial Empress smiled down at her young disciple.
"There's nothing strange about it, is there?"
"When half your heart is far away, how could the rest ever be at ease? I often felt the same, back when my husband and I were parted."
"Heh. I suppose that's what it is."
So this feeling, too, was love. Only then did Hwarin smile, as though a weight had lifted. And she looked upon her teacher with reverence.
An elder who had walked a road not unlike her own. Perhaps she too had been chosen by the most trustworthy teacher in all the world — she couldn't rightly say.
"And the book you are holding?"
"A book my fiancé wrote. May I finish reading it before we train?"
She had glimpsed only the words on the inside cover before her heart fluttered so hard she couldn't read a single character more. Hwarin pleaded carefully with her teacher.
"Every hour spent reading is an hour stolen from your reunion."
"Let's go! To training!"
At the sight of her disciple striding off to the training grounds without a shred of hesitation, the Poison Martial Empress smiled with her eyes — and before long, followed after her.
"Your mind keeps floating away."
"I'm sorry."
Without a thought of excuse, Hwarin dropped her head heavily. Focus would not come. Every time she unleashed a form, one man's face kept rising up to scatter it.
"Never mind. News from a long-awaited fiancé can do that. I have business at the Medical Pavilion besides — we'll end here for today."
The Poison Martial Empress nodded with an expression of perfect understanding. It was, after all, the very day her long-awaited word from her fiancé had arrived. There was no need to press her too hard.
The girl trained so diligently one might have suspected she drove herself harder than any master would have dared.
Having no wish to be a cruel teacher, the Empress left the tidying to her disciple and set off for the Medical Pavilion.
"Ugh... seriously. Kang Yunho. This is all your fault."
Tidying the training grounds, Hwarin aimed a gripe-that-wasn't-quite-a-gripe at her faraway fiancé.
The tidying was done in no time. Losing focus had been her failing, but thanks to it she had won herself a generous stretch of hours.
What to do? How to fill a day that had come unmoored? Read Dangga Pungun? Read the letter one more time?
"Yes! That's the answer!"
After long deliberation, a truly staggering idea had struck Hwarin.
"What did the Clan Head say? He said to hand out Volume 3 right away, didn't he?!"
As Tang Pae's party emerged from the Patriarch Hall, several Tang Clan warriors wearing faces of desperate want fell in step behind them.
"He was away on leave. He'll be back this evening, I'm told."
"Then at least give us Volume 3 first!!!"
"The Clan Head holds the deciding say. It's beyond us."
Dangga Pungun was a novel entangled with the Saekma affair. Not even the clan's own people could lay hands on it carelessly. It made a most convenient excuse.
He had, after all, promised that Volume 3 would resolve every lingering doubt — though in truth it was nothing more than the Clan Head's scheme to be first in the whole household to read his son's novel.
"Mm. Right. Well, then. How was Daseogak?"
"Don't get me started. The moment folks heard we were from the Sichuan Tang Clan, their eyes fairly gleamed."
"What?! That's really true?"
The warriors recoiled as one and pressed Tang Pae for more.
Grinning at the reaction, Tang Pae's party carried the tale onward.
"Say you're of the Tang Clan and out it comes — 'What?! You sneaky poison-wielding devils?' — and everyone keeps their distance. But Daseogak is nothing of the sort, I tell you!"
"Mention Dangga Pungun and people swarm like bees to hear us — and they hang on every single word we say. That feeling, ahh..."
One of the escorts, recalling how the gazes of respect at Daseogak had bathed him from head to toe, shivered all over again just remembering it.
"T-tell us more!"
They say a warrior lives on fame and respect. Just how extraordinary must an experience have been to put that look on a man's face?
The warriors swallowed hard and egged the story on.
"Even the beautiful women of the staff, in their work uniforms, send us looks of respect. I know full well it isn't that sort of look, and still my heart won't stop racing."
"That's right. It raced something fierce."
"Work uniforms? And what might those be?"
"Heh heh heh. A creation of Young Master Kang's. It's the dress the women of the north wear — silk clinging tight to every line of the body, ahh!"
Like adolescents rhapsodizing over a grown woman, Tang Pae's party pressed on with shameless grins.
"Think it over again and it's still good. So good."
Wasn't one of the great pleasures of travel, after all, telling the tale to those who had never seen it for themselves?
Fame and respect alone made a heart flutter — and now the gazes of beautiful women besides. Daseogak was nothing less than paradise for the Tang Clan's warriors. Their mouths already hung agape.
Drunk on the smugness of having witnessed Daseogak firsthand, Tang Pae's party lectured breathlessly on the advanced wonders they had seen, hands and feet gesticulating all the while.
"I daresay the rumor about northern women bearing many children didn't spring from nowhere. The line runs down from the waist, sweeps into that dizzying curve of hip, and watching it sway from behind, you— hm?"
He had yet to notice that a very large problem had arrived directly behind Tang Pae.
"Tang Pae. Keep talking."
"Young Miss Hwarin?! What brings you here?!"
Why was Young Miss Hwarin — who should have been in the Forbidden Garden reading Young Master Kang's letter — here of all places?
"Is that the important question right now?"
To Hwarin, the fact that she had come to hear witnesses describe what Kang Yunho had been doing at Daseogak no longer mattered in the slightest.
"It's nothing, truly! L-let me tell you a different story!"
"Talk. Quickly. I'm about to lose my composure."
She smiled, and yet she was not smiling at all. The smile blooming across Hwarin's entire face was cold as a flower of ice.
"I can't! It's a secret!"
I'm dead. Young Master Kang told me to keep it secret. Tang Pae stumbled backward without meaning to.
"Speak."
"..."
"In detail."
That day, Tang Pae learned something.
He learned what manner of warrior Tang Hwarin became when she arrived at a road she must never walk. An overwhelming presence — scarcely believable in one so newly past her twentieth year — was bearing down on him.
Tang Pae squeezed his eyes shut.
They said the mouth was the gate through which ruin entered. Had he just flung open the very gates of hell?
To speak, or not to speak. After long agony, a single thought came to him.
'Come to think of it, I'm not the one walking into hell here, am I?'
"Well, you see..."
When it came down to it, the man had it coming. He himself had opened the gates of hell over one badly cut line — so what was a little venting from a fiancée, when all was said and done?
Tang Pae's mouth — which had never once in its life been shut tight — opened.
Only then did Hwarin learn the true face of the "work uniform" Kang Yunho had written of. The work uniform was a qipao, crowned with a piece called the maidaifu that kindled a most insidious extra stimulation on top.
Fine barbarian culture. This must be embraced. Once opened, the mouth knew no stopping; the explanations rolled on and on — and Hwarin's ice-flower smile creaked, and split, and splintered apart piece by piece.
And at last—
Hwarin's fury-laden roar rang out across the Sichuan Tang Clan.
It was a peaceful spring day, with a warm wind on the breeze.