Neither Fly Nor Cry (1)
The fall of the Donghwa Merchant Group sent shockwaves through the martial world. Until then, the line between the Orthodox and Unorthodox factions had never been especially sharp.
War had no spectators. The terms "Orthodox" and "Unorthodox" merely distinguished the sects that had fought in the wars from those that had not — and even the Orthodox sects understood that the Unorthodox had fought simply to survive.
When the Hwangbo Clan swallowed the Donghwa Merchant Group whole, the Murim Alliance — the gathering of the Orthodox factions — protested fiercely. But the Donghwa Merchant Group's influence had been enough to dominate Shandong Province, and now the Hwangbo Clan had inherited it.
The Moyong Clan of Liaoning Province marched into Shandong under the banner of repaying a debt of gratitude, only to find no meaningful supply lines within the province and be forced into retreat. After that, the other sects grew reluctant to commit their forces.
In the end, hegemony over Shandong fell to the Hwangbo Clan. The Murim Alliance could offer no real resistance.
There were two reasons for this. First, Go Jihyeon — the sole surviving heir of the Donghwa Merchant Group — was in the Hwangbo Clan's hands. The Hwangbo Clan seized control of Shandong under the pretext of protecting Jihyeon, who had lost her entire family in a tragic accident. But after appearing in public only once, Jihyeon was never seen again.
Second, as the boundary between Orthodox and Unorthodox hardened, long-simmering conflicts with neighboring Unorthodox sects flared into the open. With those disputes surfacing all around them, few sects were willing to march into Shandong in defiance of the Hwangbo Clan's claimed justification.
People expected the Imperial Palace to intervene. The palace remained silent — as if the Donghwa Merchant Group had never existed at all.
In the end, the Donghwa branches across the land either declared independence with the cooperation of nearby sects or were absorbed under the banners of more powerful merchant houses. Only the Golden Pagodas of the Nine Great Sects kept the memory of the Donghwa Merchant Group alive.
Two years later, a carriage was making a precarious crossing of the plank roads of Sichuan Province. Every time the wooden walkway shifted even slightly, the carriage groaned and creaked in protest.
It was not only the sound that spoke of age. The outer walls of the carriage were worn and shabby, and at one corner the painted characters had been rubbed nearly away.
Only a single character remained legible — and it was utterly at odds with the battered vehicle that bore it: a bright, clear Hwa, for splendor.
Once across the plank roads, the carriage arrived in Chengdu. The coachman exchanged practiced greetings with the gatekeepers and drove on through the streets.
They passed through a market lined with stalls and turned into the last alley. Beyond it, a narrow warren of lanes stretched out, nothing like the bustling market behind them.
After winding through the alleys for some time, the carriage finally stopped — in the heart of a slum district.
It stood before an inn so dilapidated that no one seemed likely to ever set foot inside. The coachman climbed down and knocked on the carriage door. With a creak, the door swung open, and a woman climbed out, staggering under an armful of luggage.
"Jun, take some of these for me."
The coachman divided the load with her and stepped into the inn. The interior was dark, as if no one were there at all.
He carried the bags inside and set them down on a table hard enough to make a thud.
"If you were already in here, you could have come out and helped."
"…"
The coachman surveyed the wreck of a kitchen as he spoke. From within it, someone waved a hand in reply.
The woman entered the inn, took one look at that hand, and said,
"I was worried — but it looks like you haven't been starving."
"Instead, look at the state of this kitchen."
"It's fine. I'll make him pay for it later. It's a hundred times better than finding him dried up and withered like a plant that never got watered."
"I watered him well enough. He pulled through."
With the voice from the kitchen, Jinmyung rose to his feet. At the sight of his face, Ak Jun and Myohong both broke into smiles of relief.
For the past two years, Jinmyung had been little better than a broken man. With Ak Sun's help he had escaped the exploding Tamduseon, but the deaths of his family had remade him entirely.
He would stare blankly into empty air, then scream himself awake from nightmares the moment he managed to sleep. Ak Sun and Ak Jun had no choice but to take him and flee Shandong.
They believed that only by leaving the province could they keep him alive. Beom Myohong, who had followed Ak Jun, helped them. Hiding among the Beom family's silk caravan, the party slipped out of Shandong.
With Jinmyung unable to give any real direction, the others wrestled with the question of where to go. To the Murim Alliance — or somewhere else entirely…
Ak Jun, watching the Imperial Palace's response, decided they needed to go to ground first. If the Hwangbo Clan had acted alone, the Murim Alliance might have been able to settle the matter. But if the palace stood behind them, that changed everything.
The Beom family's silk caravan was bound for Sichuan to acquire Shu brocade. Ak Jun judged that Sichuan's rugged terrain would make an ideal place to hide.
He rented a shabby inn in the province and settled in. Situated in the middle of a slum, it was a place ordinary people rarely sought out.
As the Donghwa affair sparked clashes with Unorthodox factions across various regions, wandering martial artists began to gather even at Ak Jun's inn. But that, too, was brief.
The overlord of Sichuan was the Sichuan Tang Clan — an Orthodox house that would not hesitate to drink poison that ate away at its own body if it meant killing an enemy.
No Unorthodox faction could stand against the Tang Clan. Or rather — some had tried, and vanished without a whisper, as if neither rat nor bird had ever known of them.
And so the party settled in Sichuan. More precisely, Jinmyung had still not returned from the sea he had been cast into — but the others had.
Once Ak Jun and Beom Myohong established themselves in Chengdu, Ak Sun announced that he would return to Shandong. Ak Jun tried to stop him, but Ak Sun cited his superior martial skill and left to take the measure of the situation there.
It was the news Ak Sun sent back that gradually restored Jinmyung's mind: his sister, Go Jihyeon — who had not been on the ship — was in the hands of the Hwangbo Clan.
When Jinmyung opened his mouth and spoke again, Beom Myohong dropped a bolt of the finest Shu brocade to the floor in shock. Jinmyung was weeping, searching for his sister.
In her place, Myohong held him and soothed him. Jinmyung had left his family's embrace at the age of eight; he had never known his sister as an adult.
Through Myohong's care, Jinmyung slowly came back to himself. Ak Jun was a little jealous, of course.
Once he had recovered enough, Jinmyung could no longer bring himself to lift his face in front of Beom Myohong — but she waved it off with a single remark: when she married Ak Jun, he was not to forget what she had done. Ak Sun and his son both believed that if it had been left to them alone, Jinmyung would never have found his way back.
The first thing Jinmyung did upon recovering his senses was to survey the lay of Sichuan and search for the Golden Pagodas. To that end, he asked the others for their help.
Besides the Sichuan Tang Clan, the province was home to two of the Nine Great Sects: the Emei Sect and the Qingcheng Sect. If the Nine Great Sects each held a Golden Pagoda, then Sichuan contained two of them.
Jinmyung remembered Dan Jun's final words. Live as a merchant. If you cannot — then better to neither fly nor cry.
Neither fly nor cry meant exactly that: do not take wing, and do not raise your voice. But the phrase was bound up with the old tale of King Zhuang of Chu.
After ascending the throne, King Zhuang of Chu abandoned the affairs of state for three full years, drowning himself in wine, women, and idle pleasure. At last, one minister who could bear it no longer asked him a question.
There is a bird on the hill that for three years has neither cried nor flown — what manner of bird is this? King Zhuang smiled and answered: having not flown for three years, when it does fly it will pierce the heavens; when it cries, it will startle the world.
The next day, King Zhuang purged the sycophants who had encouraged his dissipation and took up the governance of the state. In time, he claimed hegemony over the Spring and Autumn period.
Jinmyung wrestled with the question of whether Dan Jun had meant simply to survive without flying or crying — or to prepare, carefully and thoroughly, for a return from the dust. The struggle did not last long.
Jinmyung had recovered his mind, but the nightmares still came every night. Or rather — they were not nightmares. No ghosts appeared. Not a single word of reproach was spoken.
He simply saw his cousins talking with him on the deck of the ship, his father cuffing him across the head at the Bongrae Pavilion, and his grandfather telling him the old stories.
When he woke, knowing full well it had been a dream — even though he had thought every last tear had already dried — he would find himself weeping without a sound.
Jinmyung decided that Dan Jun must have meant for him to rise again from the dust. Otherwise, he would never have left instructions to seek out the Golden Pagodas.
He asked Ak Jun and Beom Myohong to confirm the Golden Pagodas of the Qingcheng and Emei Sects. Both of them looked troubled by the request.
With Ak Sun away at the Beom family in Shandong, Jinmyung would have to hold the inn alone. The two of them hesitated over whether they could leave him by himself.
But Jinmyung's resolve was absolute, and in the end they left him at the inn and departed. They had only just returned.
The three of them sorted the luggage they had brought and cleaned up the wreck of the kitchen. By the time they finished, the sun was setting.
Beom Myohong boiled a pot of plain noodles and carried it out. The three of them gathered around a table in the inn. There was nothing but noodles loosened in boiling water — but after the life they had been living, it was a familiar enough supper.
Jinmyung wolfed the noodles down.
"Have you been starving all this time?"
"I wasn't starving. I just cooked for myself, so it tasted terrible."
At Jinmyung's answer, all three of them laughed and ate. The thought that the Jinmyung who had spent ten years with him in Chang'an had finally come back put a smile on Ak Jun's face.