Chapter 39
Daylight was short. But today, the day had felt longer than expected, because Namgung Cheon had asked me to wait until the Alliance’s internal meeting was over.
This is a request? It’s an order.
Ever since I got tangled up with that old man, trouble had started coming in one after another. Still, I’d gotten plenty out of it too.
Thanks to the old man, it’ll be a lot easier to weed those bastards out of the righteous sects.
Honestly, I’d expected it would take ages to find the ones hiding among the righteous factions. Until then, I had no intention of trusting them either.
But now things were different.
The righteous sects were usable now.
That was welcome enough for someone like me, who didn’t really belong to any faction and didn’t have a power base of my own.
I do know it’d be better to have my own faction, but...
I wasn’t the sort of person who could build one. In the first place, my past life had never needed such things. So in the end, what Namgung Cheon was doing was turning out to be a net gain for me.
“Are you talking about me, old man?”
“As if.”
Right. He meant you, Namgung Cheon.
I shrugged at the old man, who was wearing a sour expression.
I’d said it so he could hear.
It was payback for making me stay cooped up here without even letting me rest after the battle.
“Suspicious, I tell you.”
“How could I possibly speak such nonsense to someone as lofty as the Alliance Leader? Hahaha.”
Namgung Cheon looked at me with those fox-like eyes of his, clearly unconvinced, then sat down in the guest room chair.
“A guest comes, and you don’t even bring tea?”
“Alliance Leader? This is a guest room inside the Murim Alliance. Am I not the guest here?”
“Was that not funny? A joke, then.”
“Yes. It wasn’t funny.”
“Now that’s embarrassing. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that in my life.”
Well, of course. He was the Murim Alliance Leader. What subordinate could keep a straight face at a superior’s joke?
As I swallowed a sigh, Namgung Cheon’s mood shifted.
“The internal meeting is over.”
“So?”
“So? Aren’t you curious what was discussed?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I hear it, it feels like some incredibly annoying work is going to land on me.”
“Hmm... you...”
Namgung Cheon studied me intently, then slowly lifted the corners of his mouth.
“You’re quick on the uptake.”
“Naturally. I won’t hear it.”
“An idea came up to hold an internal meeting among the righteous factions as well, with the leaders of the Nine Great Sects and the Five Great Clans, along with me, the Alliance Leader. As you’d expect, the main topic would be those men.”
I stroked my chin and thought for a moment. I couldn’t tell whether the stubborn old leaders of the righteous side would actually agree to such a meeting.
Seeing through my thoughts, Namgung Cheon continued.
“They’ll attend. That’s why we made today’s events happen.”
“So you knew those bastards were within the Alliance after all, Alliance Leader.”
“I only made an educated guess. Even I didn’t realize there’d be that many of them until I got to the Alliance Leader’s residence.”
Unlike before, Namgung Cheon’s face darkened. Then he let out a sigh.
“The righteous factions are still moved by the greater good in the end. Once everyone saw the assassin attack with their own eyes, this meeting became inevitable.”
“By the way, why did you make me wait? I’m a busy man too.”
“I’d like you to escort someone.”
“Escort? Who? No, where to?”
“Sichuan.”
“Sichuan, then...”
The instant I heard Sichuan, there was only one thing that came to mind.
“The Dang Family?”
“That’s right. The Dang Family.”
Namgung Cheon took a letter from his robes and handed it to me.
“Deliver that to the Dang Family head.”
“Is this about whether they’ll attend the meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Then just send it by carrier pigeon.”
“You’re the one who’ll escort her to the Dang Family anyway, so you may as well deliver it yourself.”
“Her? Who am I escorting?”
“You’ll hear that when you meet her yourself. That will be all for me.”
Namgung Cheon had barely finished speaking before his figure vanished in an instant.
“Damn it! That miserable old man!”
“Ah! We leave from the entrance of the Murim Alliance at noon tomorrow. Don’t be late.”
I couldn’t see Namgung Cheon anymore, but his voice still reached me.
“Haa... better dead than sick.”
As I walked out of the guest room, I organized my thoughts. Since I was headed to Sichuan anyway, I had to take whatever I could get from Henan and Sichuan while I was at it.
There’s a lot I could bring back, but since I’m on escort duty, I can’t take anything too troublesome.
The moment I left the Murim Alliance, I broke into light-footed movement and ran.
For now, I’ll deal with what’s right in front of me.
Before long, darkness had fallen over the world and began to conceal my figure completely.
* * *
It had been a long, exhausting day. From the events at the Alliance Leader’s residence to the Murim Alliance’s internal meeting, I felt like I’d been running out of breath the whole time.
Yeom Pa, one of the Murim Alliance’s eight elders, slipped out of Henan secretly after the meeting ended.
He moved with his body concealed as much as possible, and that cost him a great deal of time.
Once the world had gone dark and there were few people around, Yeom Pa began moving quickly with light-footed movement. He stopped in front of a cave.
“Namgung Cheon. So you’d been quiet all this time, and now you somehow found out...”
Yeom Pa looked around once more before stepping into the cave. Then he checked the cave’s interior.
The wall was covered in countless secret codes. The final ones written there were:
Three Bindings.
Ten Defeats.
“Am I the first one here?”
Yeom Pa drew his sword. Then he released sword energy into the wall marked with the secret code.
Rumble.
The sound of the wall collapsing echoed through the entire cave. After that, he carved new characters onto the opposite wall.
Ten Great Defeats.
“That finishes my assignment, then.”
This was the last task given to Yeom Pa. All that remained was to erase the identity of Yeom Pa and disappear completely.
Yeom Pa turned and tried to leave the cave quickly. But someone was standing at the entrance.
I didn’t sense a thing?
Because of the cave’s darkness, he couldn’t make out the person standing there. Carefully, he spoke.
“Who are you?”
“...”
But no answer came back.
Step.
Yeom Pa raised his sword, ready to strike. He was slowly gathering his momentum.
Step.
The figure drew close enough that he could see it with his own eyes.
“Which rank are you?”
What appeared before him was a man wearing a black rooster mask.
“...”
“Thirteenth Branch?”
Yeom Pa confirmed the number carved into the mask. It was undoubtedly the Thirteenth Branch, the one who had left the last secret code.
“What happened? Thirteenth Branch. How did the Three Prison operation fail? And how did Namgung Cheon learn about the human-skin mask?”
“...”
“This is no time for this. Move quickly. Now that Namgung Cheon knows about our existence, we need to go into hiding...”
Yeom Pa couldn’t say another word. A strange sensation suddenly tickled the back of his neck.
“You’re not Thirteenth Branch, are you?”
“Yep.”
“Who are you? Who would do something this damned disgusting?”
“Aren’t you the ones doing the damned disgusting thing?”
“Take off the mask if you don’t want to die.”
Yeom Pa released all the momentum he could muster. Yet the rooster mask didn’t move at all.
“And if I take it off, you won’t kill me?”
“Cut the wordplay.”
“Fine. Let’s stop playing. My day’s been stupidly long too. Thanks to you lot.”
Yeom Pa’s gaze darted rapidly around the cave. But in this cramped space, there was no way to slip past the rooster mask and escape.
Can I beat him?
He studied the rooster mask carefully, but he couldn’t gauge its level, and he couldn’t find a single opening either.
He’s a master.
One thought filled Yeom Pa’s head: he could not run. If that was true, then what could he do now?
Only perish together.
He drew out every bit of inner power in his body. Then he turned and tried to unleash sword energy in every direction of the cave.
But Yeom Pa’s wish never came true.
The moment he turned, the sword had already been drawn from the rooster mask’s scabbard, and like flowing water it sliced through his throat.
“You show your back to an enemy?”
The rooster mask touched Yeom Pa’s face. As expected, it was a real face, not a human-skin mask after all.
“If it were a human-skin mask, Namgung Cheon would never have failed to notice.”
The rooster mask began searching Yeom Pa’s robes with familiar ease. All he found were a few sheets of paper money and the Murim Alliance token that proved he was an elder.
“So these bastards really are a cell structure. They don’t even know each other’s true identities.”
The rooster mask slowly removed the mask. Beneath it was Baek Mugeuk.
“Old man. Even so, you should’ve picked your elders properly.”
Yeom Pa was the lowest-ranking of the Murim Alliance’s elders. At the same time, he was a spy who wasn’t wearing a human-skin mask.
The reason Baek Mugeuk had suspected this man was a spy was simple: the twitch he’d shown just before the battle at the Alliance Leader’s residence, and that hesitant look in his eyes.
It was probably a reflexive reaction to the possibility that their identities had been exposed.
That insignificant behavior had aroused suspicion. In truth, suspicion was enough. If Yeom Pa was one of them, then the instant trouble arose he would have to move.
This is a pain. There’s no way to tell exactly how many spies there are.
Baek Mugeuk felt a tightness in the back of his neck. But what could he do? There was no way to solve it right now.
Baek Mugeuk went deeper into the cave and inspected the wall. The wall where the secret codes had been written was smashed to pieces.
“Good thing I made a rubbing of it first. At this point, though, I doubt this cave will ever see another secret code written in it.”
This cave for writing secret codes was clearly a place where the rooster mask and its organization exchanged information. Since they were organized in cells, the codes were probably being sent to higher-ups.
And the final secret code written on the opposite wall:
Ten Great Defeats.
“Ten Great Defeats. What the hell does that mean?”
Baek Mugeuk recalled the code left by the Thirteenth Branch.
Three Bindings.
Ten Defeats.
“That Yeom Pa said something earlier, didn’t he? Something about how the Three Prison plan had somehow failed?”
The moment Yeom Pa’s words and the characters for Three Bindings came together, the code began to unravel little by little.
Three as in the number three, binding as in tying. Three bindings. Three Prison. Then what about Ten Defeats?
No matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t decode what Ten Defeats meant. For a moment, I regretted not asking about the code before killing Yeom Pa.
But would he have told me even if I had asked?
“For now, I should head back to the Murim Alliance.”
The moment Baek Mugeuk picked up the rooster mask from the floor, another thought flashed through his mind.
Rooster. The twelve earthly branches.
He wrote the characters on the floor again.
Rat. Ox. Tiger. Rabbit. Dragon. Snake. Horse. Goat. Monkey. Rooster. Dog. Pig.
“The defeat of ten. The rooster’s defeat.”
The meaning of the code became clear before his eyes.
Each number lined up perfectly with the order of the twelve earthly branches.
Then... “Ten Great Defeats” must also mean the rooster was defeated.
Baek Mugeuk’s eyes gleamed sharply. Then another intuition followed.
The one who left this code was Yeom Pa at the Alliance Leader’s residence.
As the clues connected, a complete conclusion formed in an instant.
So the ones handling the Murim Alliance were the roosters.
A smile spread across Baek Mugeuk’s face as the corners of his mouth lifted.
At the same time, he collapsed the cave entrance and sent his form flying back to his lodging with light-footed movement.
If I can decipher the rest of the codes, there may be some useful information in there after all.