The Heavenly Demon Pays Back (3)
The gambling continued without pause. Jijon kept losing round after round, and it was clear he wanted to wrap things up soon. But I had no intention of letting him off the hook. If you make someone else wear a long face, you’d better be ready to wear one yourself. It’s a proverb anyone who’s lived long in the murim would remember.
When I’d won about twenty times in a row, Jijon slammed his fist on the table. His face had turned bright red—he was clearly furious.
{Hey. Is that a challenge?!}
The reason for his anger wasn’t the money he’d lost. Sure, I’d taken quite a bit from his pocket, but to someone like Jijon, that amount was nothing. He was the owner of this gambling den. Compared to the fortune he was squeezing out of outsiders, murim people, and countless gambling addicts, what I’d taken was barely a fingernail’s worth.
So why had he lost his mind? It was mostly because I’d started enjoying myself too openly from the middle of the match. Ever since his initial tricks were exposed, Jijon had been testing me with all sorts of sleight-of-hand moves. It was as if he were asking how far I could see through him.
His technique was certainly impressive. After all, he was the one who had risen to the position of one of the Three Venerables. With that level of martial talent, it was only natural his hand tricks would be exceptional. The unfortunate part for him was that every single one of those techniques was something I had already seen countless times while frequenting gambling houses in the past. Our accumulated experience was simply on different levels—his as someone who had only recently taken up gambling, and mine as someone who had wandered through countless gambling dens across the old murim.
“You should’ve looked the other way there. No matter how good your hand technique is, if someone’s staring right at it, they’ll catch you.”
At first, I gave him advice just to scratch at his pride. I figured that only when he was emotionally shaken and his ego crushed would true revenge be achieved. But after watching him immediately apply my advice in the very next round, my thoughts changed. Martial artists are the type who simply can’t resist when they see real talent. And if that talent absorbs everything you say on the spot, it becomes even harder to ignore.
“Tsk tsk. If you keep messing around like that, what are you going to do? Once you’ve done it once, you should ease off a little and lower the opponent’s guard.”
“Sometimes it’s good to show them you’re playing tricks while leaving the real move untouched. That way they stay suspicious the whole time.”
“Too obvious. If you’re going to divert their attention, you need to make it more convincing.”
And so, every time we played, I gave him advice that would genuinely help his skills while also taking the chance to poke at his nerves. The sight of him trembling with rage yet unable to talk back was quite entertaining.
Eventually, Jijon’s patience snapped. He unleashed a murderous aura so intense it pressed down on the surrounding air and warned me, but it had no effect whatsoever. After all, I wasn’t the kind of person who would flinch at such threats.
Ah, but it wasn’t completely useless. It did succeed in making cold sweat run down the backs of the innocent bystanders. That was truly impressive. When I clapped my hands in genuine praise, Jijon ground his teeth so hard I could hear them creak.
“Alright. What are you doing? Hurry up and start the next round.”
{You’re not the kind of martial artist who’d run away just because you’re scared of losing, are you?}
If he wanted, he could flip the entire gambling table and start throwing punches. But that would be the same as admitting defeat. It would mean he had no confidence in beating me at gambling and was running away from this place. Could he really do that?
When I asked him with my eyes, Jijon took a deep breath and shoved his hand back into the bowl of beads. Then he began moving his inner energy.
Heh heh. He’s properly pissed off now. Bringing martial arts into a simple gambling match? He’s willing to risk exposing his identity just to make me lose?
His hand movements changed completely. What he was using was the palm technique known as Thousand Net Ensnaring Palm. True to its name, the technique was fundamentally about trapping and confining. Having reached the pinnacle of that art, Jijon could lock away not only the beads themselves but even the five senses attached to them within his palm. Sound, texture, weight, presence—everything.
“Odd? Even?”
I looked at the hand Jijon confidently held out. Nothing could be seen inside it. Of course not. If dozens of fiercely flapping bees couldn’t leave a single trace within that palm, there was no way a few mere beads could reveal their presence.
There were many ways to counter this. I could use my own martial arts to shatter his technique, read his psychology and make a guess, or simply stand up and call him pathetic before walking away. There were plenty of options, but the one I chose was something Jijon would neither know nor even be able to imagine.
I painted a picture upon the world. What I desired was Dosul that would dye the canvas of the world pure white for a single instant. The moment the colorful world fell silent, even the principles governing Jijon vanished briefly from existence. In that instant, I saw it—his sneaky little trick.
Not long after, the world regained its original colors. Jijon blinked at me, his eyes filled with clear bewilderment. It wasn’t hard to guess what that look meant. He was one of the Three Venerables, a figure who had become part of legend. There was no way he wouldn’t notice that his martial arts had disappeared for a brief moment.
I didn’t answer his confusion. Instead, I placed the pouch full of money on the table.
“There’s nothing in your hand. What kind of nonsense is this?”
At my rebuke, Jijon’s face twisted horribly. It seemed he hadn’t expected his carefully prepared strike to be dismantled so easily. Trembling, he slowly opened his fist. Just as I had said, there was nothing inside.
“...Enry. Don’t tell me you’ve already gone broke?”
I remembered giving him quite a lot of money. I asked in bewilderment, but no answer came. I’d have to go check on him.
When I stood up after watching Jijon put the money into his pouch, he raised his voice.
{It’s not over yet! The match isn’t finished! Sit back down!}
It seemed he didn’t want this contest to end in his miserable defeat. He grabbed my sleeve, but I lightly shook off his pathetic grip.
“Sorry, but it’s gotten boring now.”
The moment his gambling techniques ran dry, my interest in him had vanished. Even if we continued, he would just come at me with his martial arts. I had already seen more than enough of his techniques in the past. If they hadn’t improved since then—and they probably hadn’t—there was no reason to keep watching.
“If you want a rematch later, come find me at Mount Hua with a reward that can actually catch my interest.”
If you’re the weak one, you should act like it—acknowledge your shortcomings and properly challenge me, shouldn’t you?
At those words, Jijon stared at me with complicated eyes full of many thoughts before finally letting me go.
“Baru-nim. Baru-nim. This time it’s number three. Looking at the flow, it’s definitely—!”
“Shut up. Why would I trust the words of someone who already lost all their money?”
“I’m telling the truth! Just trust me once, bet on it, and if you win, just give me a little—”
When I later arrived at the yabawi gambling stall, Enry was pathetically clinging to Baru. Seeing how fed up Baru looked while staring at him, it was clearly not the first or second time this had happened.
I stepped in and lightly smacked Enry on the head. He reacted in an exaggerated manner.
“Aaaagh! My head! My head! I think my skull’s cracked! I definitely need compensation for—!”
“Enry. Do you know the saying that the dead don’t speak?”
“It was a joke! I’m perfectly fine!”
When I asked the awkwardly smiling fellow if he had gone broke, he nodded. From the side, Baru explained with a look of utter disdain that after losing several times, he had gotten emotional and thrown all his money away. How does he never improve?
When both Baru and I sent him identical looks of contempt, Enry grumbled.
“Hwaryong-nim. When you’re going to scold someone, you have to give them money too. If you just nag without anything, you’re just an old fart. But if you add the phrase ‘here’s some money’ next to it, it becomes the advice of a respected mentor.”
“I have no desire to become the mentor of someone who blows through money in ten minutes.”
“But—!”
Leaving Enry to collapse dramatically like the protagonist of a tragedy, I turned my gaze toward Baru.
“Did you enjoy yourself at least?”
“Of course. Who do you think I am! Something as trivial as this is nothing to me!”
Baru grinned from ear to ear while bragging about how much profit she had made. The expression on her face held not greed, but pure joy. As a divine spirit, she would never be bound by material things. It seemed what amused her wasn’t the money itself, but the fact that she had won multiple times in the contest.
Still, she really had earned quite a lot.
“Did you risk everything on one big bet and win?”
“Do not compare me to a human like Enry. I do not gamble while taking such risks.”
Baru puffed out her chest as she spoke, but I felt a question rise in my mind. In yabawi, the odds of winning are one in three. You might win once or twice with luck, but the longer you play, the more overwhelmingly advantageous it becomes for the house. Even if you read the opponent’s psychology, there are limits. Such techniques can only slightly raise the one-in-three odds; they cannot guarantee continuous victory.
Yet Baru claimed she had steadily kept winning and earning money. Without being able to match the house’s sleight of hand.
“Did you use Dosul?”
I whispered the question into Baru’s ear. In truth, it wasn’t so much a question as a certainty. What she had done was impossible through normal means. As expected, Baru couldn’t answer and averted her eyes. I let out a small laugh and gently stroked her head.
“...You’re not going to scold me?”
“Why would I? You did well.”
Originally, things like this aren’t a problem as long as you don’t get caught. Instead of feeling unnecessary guilt, think about what delicious food you’ll buy with that money. When I said that, Baru lifted her head and gave a bright smile.
“Shut up.”
I don’t know who it is, but they really have no sense. No sense at all.