The Request - 10
The Mangeum Lord's estate.
To some, it was a place to sit in the garden and agonize over the life one had lived and the question of succession; to others, it was a place kept far too busy by the succession crisis that had come crashing down on their heads.
"The young master was kidnapped in the middle of a debt collection?"
The Chief Steward frowned at the news that had come flying in.
"The young master mobilized warriors to press a debt, and got taken captive himself instead!"
"Good heavens... how does one even manage that..."
The Mangeum Lord's examination of heirs was in full swing, and his grandsons were living up to expectations—in an entirely different sense.
"They say they will kill him unless the debt is settled. Wh-what are we to do? They say the matter is quite beyond resolving among themselves."
"Un-yeop. I must ask you to step in."
Letting out a deep sigh, the Chief Steward turned to his son, who had been following the situation at his side.
"I will attempt negotiation first, and should a show of force also prove unlikely to succeed, I will have the debt transferred to the young master's account."
Jeon Un-yeop settled on a course of action with a handful of warriors and set out at once for the scene of the kidnapping.
Watching him go, the Chief Steward could not have been more grateful that the youngest son he had raised with such pains took after none of those hooligans.
But the affair did not end there. Creditor and debtor, the strong and the weak—for once hooligans their own parents had half given up on had transformed into debt collectors, there was nothing they would not dare.
"He told the debtor he would sell his daughter and wife to a brothel if the money didn't come?! What?! His wife is the daughter of a prestigious family!"
"A formal protest has arrived from the family."
"Did I not warn you all to take care that nothing of this sort happened!"
"I did caution them beforehand, but they say that since the husband's family paid the debt in the end, all's well that ends well."
"Haa..."
"The young master has disappeared? And why would you ask Mangeum Bank about that? He failed the second trial, so he has no doubt gone off somewhere to clear his head! What do you take this place for, a lost-and-found for children?!"
"What? He went over a wall in the dead of night? Tried to steal a famous painting in place of the money? Has he lost his mind?!"
"He wrecked every last stick of furniture in the inn because they wouldn't pay him?"
"The young master is asking whether the compensation he owes might be deducted from the debt."
"Hoo..."
The Chief Steward found himself sorely missing the tobacco he had given up long ago.
"My lord."
The ordeal was not yet over. Chief Steward Jeon, faced with reporting the troublemakers' antics to his master, felt as though his wrinkles were multiplying by the minute.
"So you've come."
Without lifting his eyes from his documents, the Mangeum Lord greeted his steward with one corner of his mouth curled upward.
"You seem in uncommonly good spirits today."
Curious at so rare a sight, the Chief Steward asked after it.
"Kang Yunho. That boy has sent in his second repayment."
Setting down the papers he had been reading, the Mangeum Lord answered, the smile never leaving his face.
"I beg your pardon? Money from someone other than the Three-Eyed Sword Jo Cheol? It has scarcely been days since he settled the Three-Eyed Sword affair!"
It was the first time that day the Chief Steward had doubted his own ears—and for an entirely different reason. The Impossible Ledger Kang Yunho had taken was a ledger drawn up under the Chief Steward's own direction, with the Mangeum Lord's approval.
Granted, it was not a ledger from which collection was truly impossible—but neither was it a list of names from whom money could be recovered one after another.
"He brought back the money Jeong Munwon borrowed."
"Jeong Munwon... you mean the—the Imperial Inspector?!"
"I had abandoned all thought of ever seeing that money again—counted myself lucky if it might one day at least serve as rat poison. And he brought it back."
"Did you not assume the Imperial Inspector had no money to his name and could never repay? How on earth..."
Each revelation outdid the last. This was no minor clerk—it was an Imperial Inspector.
Had the Mangeum Lord not held out before his eyes the document bearing Jeong Munwon's seal, the Chief Steward could never have closed his mouth over news he would not have believed in a lifetime.
Finding his steward's barely contained astonishment quite amusing, the Mangeum Lord chuckled and went on.
"Heh heh heh. That boy is impossible to predict."
"The Three-Eyed Sword Jo Cheol, and now Imperial Inspector Jeong Munwon. It was a list that no amount of hounding and threatening the debtors—the way the other young masters carry on—could ever have cracked. I simply cannot fathom how this has come to pass."
The Chief Steward called to mind the conduct of the other heir candidates. Strong-arming debtors to cough up money, hauling in warriors to intimidate them, seizing whatever valuables caught their eye—reports he could scarcely bear to hear, and the sighs that trailed after them, had kept pouring into his ears all day.
Had the Mangeum Lord not mentioned that he was keeping a close watch on matters, it was a situation in which any one of them turning up dead would have surprised no one.
Even those hooligan young masters had not chosen the Impossible Ledger.
Seeing Kang Yunho's choice, they had taken him for just another rival. What an idiot. A barbarian who knows nothing of his place, as expected. Not one of them had managed to hide their sneers.
And yet, from the very ledger that even those hooligans—who stopped at nothing—had abandoned, he had already collected from two names.
To the speechless Chief Steward, the Mangeum Lord imparted one more piece of good news.
"As it happens, the guard from that residence—the one who brought the Inspector's money—was present when the Three-Eyed Sword's debt was recovered. Let us hear it together."
"He tricked the Three-Eyed Sword Jo Cheol out of his money?"
"Yes. He handed over the promissory note quite willingly."
The guard of the residence where Kang Yunho and Jegal Hyang lived bowed his head, utterly at a loss in this hastily convened session of questions and answers.
"A man like the Three-Eyed Sword should not have been fooled so easily."
"I could not make sense of it either, so I looked into the matter closely—and frankly, had I been the Three-Eyed Sword, I believe I would have been fooled all the same."
The guard began laying out before the Mangeum Lord everything he had seen and heard while protecting Kang Yunho, together with the facts he had gone on to investigate himself.
"Heh heh. How amusing. Amusing indeed."
The Mangeum Lord, for his part, knew all too well just how hard it was to get money back once a murim master decided to make off with it. Ask pleasantly, and they threatened you right back, eyes glinting with killing intent. Raise your voice demanding repayment, and they vanished on the swiftest of legs. Come at them with a blade, and—fair enough, they laughed, as a blade came sailing back at you.
For a man of the Mangeum Lord's stature, ways existed. But they were not ways available to a young man who had only just crossed his twentieth year.
And yet, to think.
To think he would extract the money by talking a man into investing in a promising venture.
Picturing the Three-Eyed Sword—a man no threat under heaven could have moved—handing over the promissory note of his own accord, the Mangeum Lord could not suppress his delighted laughter.
"To use his own position and the Joseon folk to deceive him... it makes my hair stand on end."
The Chief Steward, too, was startled by the sheer unexpectedness of the method.
"True. But surely, once the Three-Eyed Sword learned he had been deceived, he would never have let the matter rest?"
The Mangeum Lord could follow the tale up to the taking of the promissory note. But the man in question was a murim master. Deceiving him to the very end would have been one thing. Learning that the money he had put up had gone to settle his own debt? He would never have stood for it.
With a troubled look, the Mangeum Lord turned to the residence's guard for an answer.
"Well... at the very end, he confessed the truth, called upon his connections, and moved the Three-Eyed Sword with nothing but his words. Even telling it now, I can scarcely believe it myself. Haah... I would have thought any man who didn't return the money in that situation no man at all."
Kang Yunho's sudden confession, the appearance of the Joseon folk, and an eloquence that sealed every lip in the room. As if astonished all over again at his own memory, the guard did his utmost to untangle a scene that defied any explanation.
"Heh heh. He might have carried the deception to the very end, yet at the last he laid the truth bare and left the choice to the man... A master of the con, yet he doesn't hesitate to stake the grand wager, either. The more I learn of him, the more remarkable a boy he is. Wouldn't you say so, Chief Steward?"
"A merchant skilled at trickery rarely reaps great profit, and one who stakes the grand wager all too easily lets the small gains slip through his fingers. It is hard to believe this the work of a youth barely past his twentieth year."
"He is like an orchid blooming out of bare earth..."
Countless were the orchids raised with every care whose roots rotted through until they could not bloom at all—children who squandered their lives, never grasping how blessed the soil they grew in was, how precious their station.
The Mangeum Lord closed his eyes and pictured a single orchid blooming in proud solitude.
The ground was parched, wanting for nourishment. And still the flower's roots drove down through the earth by whatever means they could find, and survived.
Even amid all of it, the orchid does not fear to lift its face to the sky. It is not merely fighting to live. It is reaching to bloom.
To have chanced upon so rare a flower—that alone was the good fortune of his twilight years.
"It puts me in mind of your younger days, my lord. That affair of long ago, when you and Clan Head Baek bought out a ship's owner and seized an escort agency's cargo. I knew the agency would not repay its debts no matter what you tried—but never did I dream you would go to such lengths."
"Heh heh. If we hadn't gotten that money back, we'd have been sleeping in the streets, so the two of us put our heads together. Those were the days."
Whether they walked away with the money or with a blade between their ribs, staying as they were meant death all the same. Hand over the money if you ever want to see your ship again. Refuse, and we'll turn her bow around and sell off every last piece of her cargo.
It had been a thing possible only with a youth that burned brighter than anyone's—and a friend he could trust. The Mangeum Lord smiled at the memory of those days.
"Young Master Kang seems to share a great deal in common with you, my lord."
"Heh heh."
The Mangeum Lord did not trouble himself to deny it.
"My lord. Even granting that Young Master Kang recovered the money, I worry the Three-Eyed Sword may nurse a grievance over it in time."
The Mangeum Lord nodded at his steward's concern.
"A fair point. Might that boy Kang Yunho have need of more guards, then?"
"Well, the thing is..."
The guard averted his gaze at the Mangeum Lord's question.
"Don't tell me something has happened?!"
The temper of a supreme master was beyond prediction—who could say he might not one day, without warning, set a blade to Kang Yunho's throat and demand his money back. Nor was such a thing outside the Mangeum Lord's own experience, and he asked in sudden alarm.
"Young Master Kang persuaded the Three-Eyed Sword Jo Cheol—and won Jo Cheol over as his own man."
For an instant, the guard's words struck the Mangeum Lord dumb.
A boy who carried on the will of that old Baek rascal—a boy he had believed not unlike his younger self. And into Lord Jang's mind drifted the words Kang Yunho had once spoken.
"...Chief Steward."
"Yes?"
"I begin to think that boy may surpass even me."
A smile he made no effort to hide spread across the Mangeum Lord's lips.