The Evil Woman - 1
Some live today with all their strength so they may see tomorrow. Others live today with all their strength so they may die tomorrow.
Liaodong Province.
The Moyong Clan.
A private training ground.
Here stood a woman who lived each day with fierce diligence for the sake of dying tomorrow.
In the martial world of the present age she was called a viper who had murdered her husband. A female praying mantis who had devoured the man she wed. An evil woman.
“Report.”
Moyong Sang-ah.
Months had passed since the incident in which she was said to have slain her husband. She halted her private training and addressed the captain of the Changbong Guard, who had come to deliver his report.
“Several of the Kang Clan businesses still refuse to accept the takeover.”
“Even after you showed them the documents bearing my husband’s seal?”
“They claimed the papers were forgeries and tried to tear them up right in front of me. We barely stopped them.”
“They tried to tear my husband’s documents?”
A flash of fury slipped past the careful composure she always maintained.
Those papers were the last thing her husband had left for her—authority to claim every Kang Clan enterprise scattered across the Central Plains. With them she possessed overwhelming right and legitimacy to take control.
“We did deliver a stern warning that the businesses must be surrendered. But the Joseon people are stubborn. They show no intention of handing anything over quietly.”
“Then I will go myself. Ready the Changbong Guard.”
The Changbong Guard—her personal escort unit that had been scheduled for disbandment the moment she married—had been rebuilding its strength ever since that day.
“Young Mistress, allow us to handle this.”
“They ignored my husband’s dying will. I must see them with my own eyes.”
What little her husband had left behind for her alone. Someone had tried to erase even those traces. She would never let it pass.
Moyong Sang-ah set out with the Changbong Guard toward one of the Kang Clan businesses.
“I’ll never hand it over!”
The man Moyong Sang-ah confronted was the innkeeper who had run a Kang Clan guesthouse in Heungseong of Liaodong Province. When the Kang Clan fell, he had swallowed every business under his management whole.
“These are the enterprises my husband left behind. If you surrender them, I will allow you to continue operating them as before.”
She spoke calmly, offering a solution both sides might accept.
“Operate them? Who the hell are you to swallow everything and then treat me like a servant? Do you even know who I am?”
“I do not. I only know that you illegally seized Kang Clan property.”
A thief who had dared to snatch what belonged to her husband. Moyong Sang-ah swallowed the thought and answered evenly.
“I’m the adopted son of the eighth cousin of the Kang Clan head’s cousin’s in-law! Illegal? I barely escaped the disaster and preserved the family’s wealth, and now you want me to hand it all over?”
A paper-thin claim of kinship. Through that tenuous connection and every illegal, violent means at his disposal, the man had seized the businesses of Heungseong. Moyong Sang-ah’s claim, by contrast, rested on the ironclad authority of Kang Yunho’s own name.
“I will not waste words. Surrender them quietly.”
Any member of the Changbong Guard standing beside her would have sensed the cold anger threading her voice. The innkeeper in front of her did not.
“Not wasting words? You mean you can’t! Everyone under heaven knows you were the one who destroyed the Kang Clan! And now you dare demand their fortune—using the name of the very Kang Yunho you murdered? I’m shameless, sure, but aren’t you even embarrassed before the heavens?”
Mistaking her restraint for weakness, he raised his voice until every worker in the establishment could hear, veins bulging in his neck.
“How dare you speak to the Young Mistress like—!”
“Stop.”
One of the guards reached for his sword, but Moyong Sang-ah lifted a hand and halted him.
In the early days seizing the Kang businesses across the Central Plains had been easy. Months later, many still remained outside her grasp for one simple reason: word had spread that the accusation of treason against the Kang Clan had come from Moyong Sang-ah herself. Countless enterprises had turned their backs on her.
She looked at the man before her.
Should I simply let this one go?
I am an eternal sinner to the Kang Clan. I have already taken so many of their businesses. Would it not be enough to leave this one as an act of atonement?
She had come to wield the rights Kang Yunho had given her, yet standing before his name she felt herself shrinking to nothing.
Seeing her face darken in thought, the man scented opportunity and poured out more venom.
“That idiot Kang Yunho—ugh. I always knew that wastrel would meet a spectacular end. What was he thinking, leaving anything to the family’s enemy? Did her pretty face fool him? Demanding the entire family fortune in Kang Yunho’s name? If he was going to die he should have died cleanly instead of taking a giant shit all over everyth—”
“Guh!”
The blade sank into his belly in an instant.
“You… a creature like you… dare insult him so freely…”
Moyong Sang-ah’s sword, trembling with cold rage, twisted slowly inside the man’s gut, drawing out every ounce of agony.
“Kraaah!”
“He was never that kind of man.”
For a single breath she scorned herself for having hesitated over something so small.
Because I am a sinner, I would abandon his dying will for the sake of atonement?
The one I must atone to is not some piece of garbage who cannot tell heaven from earth because he is busy lusting after another man’s property.
The one I must atone to is—
—I am sorry. Sorry again. Sorry I did not meet you sooner. Sorry I did not run to your side sooner. Sorry I cannot stay with the wife who will be pointed at and scorned for the rest of her days.
Her own husband, who had laid down even his life for a selfish woman like her.
Moyong Sang-ah recalled the unforgettable memory of that day—his face.
Yes. He had fretted more for the future of the wife who would be cursed by the world than for his own precious life.
How could she waver over a matter like this?
How could she betray the will of the man who had given her his life?
When everything was finished she would go and beg his forgiveness. In hell, her body torn to shreds, she would beg.
And for that reason she had chosen to become the evil woman.
What on earth was I hesitating for?
“Kuh… kuhk!”
Strength flooded into her blade.
“You bitch! How dare you draw a sword on the master?!”
One of the innkeeper’s men shouted at her.
“I am… his remaining will. His legacy. His everything.”
She carved the resolve into her heart once more and cleaved the man cleanly from crown to groin.
“Young Mistress!”
The Changbong guards reeled in shock at her sudden violence. Moyong Sang-ah ignored them. Face expressionless, she turned to the people still standing inside the establishment.
“From this moment, anyone who agrees to the Moyong Clan’s acquisition of this business will kneel.”
“Kneel, now!”
“Are you insane? The master was just murdered! And you want us to hand the place over?”
“I… I’ll kneel.”
Perhaps they understood that resistance meant death. At her single cold command the quicker among them dropped to their knees where they stood.
“Every right belonging to the Kang Clan businesses rests with me—Moyong Sang-ah. I will not repeat myself. Kneel.”
Most sank to their knees. Yet those who could not bear to release what they had already grasped, and the martial artists guarding them, remained stubbornly upright.
“Changbong Guard.”
She looked at the ones still standing and called her unit.
“Yes, Young Mistress.”
“Kill everyone who is still on their feet.”
“What?”
One of the guards behind her gaped, certain he must have misheard.
“Kill them all.”
She repeated the order so there could be no mistake.
“By your command!”
The guards moved like lightning.
“S-spare me!”
“I’ll give you everything! Please!”
In moments the men of the Changbong Guard severed every neck that had refused to bow. When the brief slaughter ended, only trembling figures on their knees and headless corpses remained on the blood-soaked floor.
“Vice-captain, clean this up and bring me the official seal declaring that the Moyong Clan has taken possession of this business.”
Moyong Sang-ah cast one indifferent glance over the crimson-drenched hall, then turned and walked out.
“Young Mistress.”
On the road back to the Moyong Clan, the captain of the Changbong Guard quietly sought her out alone in her guest room.
“Yes. Speak.”
“Slaughter of this kind is not something a righteous clan like the Moyong should commit.”
He had obeyed because it was her command, yet killing powerless commoners left a bitter taste.
“The justification was mine. They illegally seized my property.”
“True enough. But some among them were not even martial artists.”
“Does the Demonic Cult carefully select only martial artists before it kills?”
“We are not the Demonic Cult.”
“We are people of the Moyong Clan—already under the Cult’s shadow.”
“……That is precisely why we must walk the proper path all the more. Just because their hands are black does not mean ours must become black as well. Should we not punish them according to the righteous way?”
“If it means I can erase them, I do not care if my entire body turns black, not merely my hands.”
“Young Mistress!”
“From now on, give the remaining Kang businesses that resist one final warning. If they still refuse after that, there will be no mercy. Kill them all. We have a long road ahead.”
“Young Mistress… why have you changed so much? You no longer seem like the woman I once served.”
His voice was thick with sorrow as he remembered that day—the day she returned after killing a wastrel. He had hoped the man’s death would restore everything to the way it had been. Yet on the day one man died, the woman he had served his entire life also vanished, never again to return to the face he remembered.
“……If you wish to leave, then leave.”
“I will pretend I never heard that.”
The captain bowed and quietly withdrew from the room.
When every presence around her had faded, Moyong Sang-ah sat by the window and gazed up at the sky.
“The road ahead is long. ……Far too long.”
She repeated the words she had spoken to the captain only moments earlier while the chill night wind brushed her face.
The path that would one day lead her to him stretched as distant and unreachable as the stars themselves.
She could not afford to linger any longer.
This was a road that could not be walked while seeking anyone’s understanding.
“Husband……”
The cold night wind stroked her shoulder.
A trembling heart. She longed to rest this head heavy with care against a solid, reliable chest.
If she had, he would have quietly gathered her shivering form into his arms and held her.
But the man who would embrace her no longer existed.
She had killed him with her own hands.
The only one left who could steady the evil woman’s shaking heart was herself.
Cold night wind.
Moyong Sang-ah quietly wrapped her own arms around her shoulders and held herself.