Mt. Hua Sword Debate (3)
When Go Jinmyung returned to the front of the pavilion, Ak Jun and a man and woman were waiting for him. The man stepped forward to face Jinmyung before the Mt. Hua disciples who had been standing guard.
"I present myself before the First Plum Blossom Tree of Mt. Hua. I am Go Jinmyung of the Donghwa Merchant Group."
"I am merely a worthless branch among Mt. Hua's many plum blossoms. Call me Taeshin."
Taeshin and Jinmyung exchanged cupped-fist salutes. Once the greetings were done, Taeshin stepped aside with natural ease. Ak Jun and the woman then faced Jinmyung.
She wore a face veil, yet even her eyes alone were enough to mark her as a beauty. Before Ak Jun could introduce her, she brushed past Jinmyung and walked out of the pavilion.
"She said she was looking for you, my lord… and she's just leaving?"
Ak Jun sounded bewildered. Only then did Jinmyung realize that the woman's voice he had heard a moment earlier had been a sound transmission.
"Standing here to talk is hardly proper. Allow me to escort you to my quarters. This way."
Taeshin led Ak Jun and Jinmyung away.
The audience with the First Plum Blossom Sword was brief. Taeshin's own match was scheduled for the next day, and their request to visit the library rather than the sword debate grounds was granted without difficulty.
Ak Jun and Jinmyung returned to the lodging Mt. Hua had provided and settled in for the night.
The next day, the Mt. Hua Sword Debate opened. Crowds streamed toward the debate grounds. Jinmyung and Ak Jun passed them by and made for the library instead.
Mt. Hua's library was a modest pavilion. While Ak Jun went to brew tea, Jinmyung managed to look through every book on the shelves.
"Is this all of it?"
"I asked the caretaker briefly… He said these are all the texts they can show outsiders. The rest are for sect members only."
Ak Jun poured tea into a cup and held it out to Jinmyung. Both of them drank with the same dissatisfied look.
"Shall we pack up, then?"
"I don't know…"
Jinmyung set down his cup and sank into thought. He drew a coin from his pocket and began rolling it between his fingers.
Ak Jun knew the habit well — Jinmyung did it whenever he was turning something over carefully in his mind. Not wanting to interrupt, Ak Jun set down his own cup and stepped outside the library.
The Donghwa Merchant Group had originally been a trading house of the Shandong region. Its beginnings lay in a coalition of Shandong merchants who had banded together to trade with Goryeo.
Jinmyung's grandfather had grown the group through bold investments during the founding war of the new dynasty. Once he secured an audience with the Emperor and contracted to supply military provisions, the merchant house expanded several times over.
After the new nation was established, the group naturally drew close to the imperial palace. Jinmyung still remembered the grandmother he had met there as a child.
She possessed the most beautiful garden in the palace — the finest place to run and play. Jinmyung had treated it as his playground and clung to her with all the shameless affection of a small boy.
Then one day she could no longer run with him. She began to walk slowly, and later still she simply had a chair brought to one corner of the garden and watched him from there.
Jinmyung had not understood that she was dying. He thought it was simply how adults were. So he brought her the sweets he loved. She smiled and refused them.
Then one day she accepted the sweets he offered. And she asked him what he wanted to become when he grew up.
"It changes all the time. Right now I want to be a sailor. Father went to Goryeo by ship, you know."
"Heh… You don't want to be a merchant?"
"Sometimes. But whenever the whole family gets together, everyone says they'll be merchants, so I thought maybe I should try something different."
"Oh dear. That is a problem. I have something to sell you, but if you won't be a merchant… I suppose I'll have to sell it to someone else."
"I just decided I want to be a merchant!"
Jinmyung had assumed she meant to give him a gift. The talk of selling something, he thought, was only a manner of speaking.
"Take this."
She handed him a pancake. It was a little thicker than the ones sold in the market.
"This is a famous pancake from my hometown. To impatient children it is only a snack… but to a child like you, it will bring good fortune."
"I'll eat it with pleasure."
"Oh my. So impatient already. Shouldn't you at least finish the transaction first?"
"Yes. What can I do for you in return?"
"In my chambers, on the bookshelf, there is a book called Amcheonmyeongjo… Would you bring it to me?"
"Yes!"
Jinmyung tucked the pancake into his pocket and followed the palace maids. He searched every book in her chambers and found nothing.
The head maid, combing through her memory, told him the book had been given to people from the Murim Alliance when they visited. Both Jinmyung and the head maid were a little surprised — as far as either of them knew, Grandmother was not the sort of person to confuse such things.
Jinmyung returned to the garden, but he never had the chance to ask what had gone wrong. By the time he arrived, everyone in the garden was already weeping.
She had passed away. Jinmyung attended her funeral. And there he learned that his grandmother had been the Empress.
He had tucked the pancake she gave him into a corner of a wardrobe. For years it was forgotten — until the Emperor's purges began.
When the Emperor's purge turned toward the merchant group, Jinmyung lay sleepless among the anxious adults.
And in a dream he met his grandmother. She opened the wardrobe door. Jinmyung woke and searched for the pancake inside.
It was no longer edible. Thinking it had been a meaningless dream, he flung it against the wall. The pancake shattered, and a single slip of paper fell out.
On that note, his grandmother had written of her transaction with the Emperor — and of the goods involved.
That was how Jinmyung became a merchant. Because she had wanted it. Among his relatives he was neither the sharpest mind nor the quickest with figures.
Yet after meeting the whole family, the Empress had favored Jinmyung alone. And she had wanted him to become a merchant.
Through her grace, Jinmyung had been able to save his family's lives. To repay that grace, he had set out to find the book.
But ten years had passed. He could no longer even remember the sea of his hometown in Shandong. There had been a time when he said he would simply go home and be done with it.
His grandfather had sent him a letter of only four characters: Credit and Trust. The Empress had placed boundless faith in Jinmyung. And he…
Tap. Tap!
Someone knocked on the table while Jinmyung was lost in thought.
He lifted his head. A woman was seated across from him.
"I heard you would be leaving soon, so I came — knowing it was improper."
It was the veiled woman from the day before. Jinmyung already had a fair idea of who she was.
"Whether I leave soon remains to be seen. But I did not expect you to come looking for me, Miss Moyong."
"You haven't even seen my face. How did you know it was me, Young Master Go?"
"Our merchant group has no particular ties to the martial world. So when a guest seeks me out, and that guest is a woman who carries no weapon, the number of sects I might guess at grows rather small."
It was a lie. Moyong Ran and Jinmyung had been bound by a prenatal betrothal, and once a year each family had sent the other a portrait.
Moyong Ran might not have known it, but Jinmyung had fallen for her at first sight from that portrait. That was why, even behind a face veil, he had recognized his fiancée by her eyes alone.
Moyong Ran, on the other hand, had been deeply disappointed the evening before. She was a martial artist who roamed the wilds of Liaoning Province.
She had tempered her martial arts across those wastelands, and the portraits sent to her had been shoved somewhere on a desk and forgotten. To her, Jinmyung was nothing more than a soft, ordinary man.
"I heard you spent a great deal of time among the books in Chang'an's libraries. Do you intend to sit for the provincial examinations?"
Moyong Ran studied him as she asked.
"The books I've read have little to do with the examinations."
"Then is there some craft in which your book-learning has made you a master?"
"If reading books alone made one a master, every martial artist in the world would be living in a library."
"Then, as a merchant by trade, have you at least made a great deal of money?"
"To make a great deal of money, one needs capital. I have none."
"Ten years of reading, and all you've learned is what cannot be done and what will not work. I have no wish to bind myself to a man like that."
"…"
Jinmyung reached for his teacup, then set it down again when he felt how cold the tea had gone. He had come to Mt. Hua to meet her.
He had never imagined she would refuse the prenatal betrothal.
"My grandfather has already consented. I had meant to stop in Chang'an after the sword debate, but when I heard you were climbing Mt. Hua, I came to tell you myself."
"You've sent a letter to the merchant group as well, I take it."
Their betrothal had stipulated marriage once both came of age.
"Yes. Liaoning is a land of barren wilderness. I want a strong man. At the very least… someone strong enough to defeat me."
"Do you mean to hold a martial contest to choose a husband?"
"That would do nicely."
Moyong Ran rose as if the conversation were finished. Jinmyung had no idea what words might hold her.
She left the library, and Jinmyung was alone.
"Ah… what a pity. I had so wanted Grandfather to be the first to see it…"
Jinmyung lifted the teacup. The tea inside was boiling furiously.