The Divine Art: Sunflower Manual (2)
Now that I had formed a dantian and laid the foundation to circulate true qi through my meridians, I could read the true qi of anyone whose body I touched. My qi sense as a Peak Realm master was intact besides—there was no chance I had misread it. Before the regression I had possessed no martial arts in this era, so I had never known.
Nanny has internal energy? Then… the rest of the family as well?
Nanny was a martial artist. Somehow I had the unshakable feeling that the Sunflower Manual was about to upend everything I thought I knew about this world.
A short while later, the sight of me seemed to have eased whatever weariness she carried. Nanny had already drifted off. The Grand Matriarch would be the same, and so would the aunts and the sisters—none of them would stir before the late afternoon. For now, the hours belonged to me alone.
I poured tea from a pot that had long gone cold and let my thoughts wander. Looking back on it, a pleasure house that saw every kind of character under the sun had never once erupted into a blood-soaked catastrophe. If anything of the sort had ever been brewing, the Grand Matriarch or Nanny might have packed me out of Yuwol Pavilion before I could see it—so perhaps I simply hadn't known. Even so. It had never happened. Not once. Did that make any sense?
Did the aunts and the sisters put down every disturbance themselves? And if Yuwol Pavilion is a Jianghu faction, how has it stayed invisible to the court?
Of course, this was the imperial capital, home to the palace itself—that much could explain it. The same held for Shuntian Prefecture, where the Forbidden City was still rising. No famous Jianghu power had ever dared nest in the emperor's city. Court and Jianghu had not always been strangers, but theirs was a relationship that could be neither close nor distant. Strange bedfellows, perhaps. An uneasy cohabitation. A symbiotic arrangement in which each side, as a rule, left the other alone. And so, as the saying goes, it is darkest under the lamp: the capital had always been a little slack in its watch over the martial world.
Even so. This was the imperial seat, a place that had to answer the slightest twitch of the army or the ministries. Official surveillance here could hardly be called loose. Evading the court's eye in a city like this meant only one thing. If Yuwol Pavilion was a Jianghu faction, they were no ordinary players. At the extreme, they might be a power capable of slapping a great orthodox sect across the face. To bury their existence that thoroughly, under that kind of secrecy, was proof that whatever they possessed was anything but common.
The thought carried me to another question.
Then why, when I wanted to learn martial arts, did they refuse to teach me?
Nanny had known I wanted to become a martial artist. She had known I was regularly humiliated by worthless thugs. And still she had never taught me a thing. If she had—if the me of that former life had reached even the Second-Rate realm—I would never have become a eunuch.
Yuwol Pavilion…
Not that I resented her for it. Had I never become a eunuch, I would never have obtained the authentic Sunflower Manual. I was simply curious what secret Nanny and this house were keeping.
Nanny.
She slept soundly on the edge of the bed, her hand closed around mine. Her true qi was something I had never encountered before. Second-in-command of the Eastern Depot or not, how was I supposed to recognize a current I had never felt in my life? Even sitting here with her hand in mine, I could not place it.
What is this? The flow doesn't feel like orthodox martial arts.
Then again, if orthodox dogs were running a pleasure house, they would already have ceased to be orthodox. What righteous sect in the world worked its disciples this hard? Those were the same people whose pride scraped the heavens, the ones who periodically launched into some deranged flying side-kick of a performance about being the gentlemen of the age.
I need to see the Grand Matriarch.
Once the aunts and sisters woke, I could greet them properly and find out whether they, like Nanny, had trained in martial arts—and whether they cultivated the same true qi. Yuwol Pavilion's secret would surely rest with the Grand Matriarch, who had been mistress of this house since before I was born. Besides, if I had accumulated even a scrap of internal energy yesterday, Nanny would have felt it the moment she embraced me. Whatever secret she and Yuwol Pavilion were hiding, I needed to settle it before I began practicing the Sunflower Manual in earnest.
Time slipped by. The sun was already leaning toward the horizon when Yuwol Pavilion stirred from its deep sleep, and the family, waking to find me lingering in the halls, promptly raised a commotion.
"Kyaa?! Jang Jinmyeong! When did you get here? Hmm?"
"Sister Shanghua."
Twenty years old, two years my senior. The second of the Thirteen Flowers, Yuwol Pavilion's pride—Sister Shanghua—spotted me coming out of Nanny's room and came flying at me, throwing her arms around my neck. For me it had been thirty-two years. For her it had been two days at most. Why she always made this much of a production, I had never understood. We had grown up together; by all rights we ought to have been at each other's throats. Shanghua had never once changed. Plenty of the other sisters were not so constant. Still.
"I knew it—my future husband! How can anyone be this handsome?"
"Sister, I can't breathe."
The soft, warm weight of her pressed against my chest, and true to a name that meant an ever-blooming flower, a lovely fragrance rose from her. Full of affection and laughter, with that slightly vacant sweetness that was half her charm, Shanghua was a beauty—a small, pale face and eyes as large and clear as lakes. Only the face was small. She was tall enough that the crown of her head reached the chin of a man six cheok in height, nearly six feet, and the sweep of her figure was the most dramatic of anyone among the Thirteen Flowers. They said it was because she was half from the Western Regions. In popularity she stood shoulder to shoulder with Sister Yeong Hwa, the first among them, and to be honest her looks would not have suffered beside the most celebrated consorts and palace maids in the imperial household. Even now the generous swell of her was driving into the pit of my stomach.
What a magnificent situation this is.
In the life before, I had flushed and fled every time. Not now. I put my arms around Shanghua and held her close. I intended to live this life as a man, without a single regret—and if that was the plan, I would have to get used to moments like this.
Unfortunately, an eighteen-year-old body in the full flush of virgin vigor was one beauty's assault away from jumping the rails. I had to summon the Buddha to mind and recite the Heart Sutra. I had to keep that thing from rising—
Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond… let us all gather wisdom and proceed unto nirvana… ngh! The stimulation is too much.
Getting used to this, I suspected, was not going to be easy. Even so, being reunited with my family was a happier moment than any I had known in all my years as a eunuch.
Before long the sun slipped behind the western hills, and night came down over Yuwol Pavilion. The sisters of the Thirteen Flowers and the rest of the family took their places and began to ply their arts. Song and dance, melody, verse and calligraphy, the tea ceremony—all of it wove together into a scene of real refinement. Guests drunk on the atmosphere those arts created kept drawing out silver taels and copper coins, and the wine jars on the tables ran dry almost as soon as they were set down.
I was sitting across from the Grand Matriarch on the highest floor of Yuwol Pavilion. Nanny Zheng Hui was with us.
"Our little Myeong has grown so dashing in just a few days, hasn't he, Zheng Hui?"
Praise, for an opening. I did not know the Grand Matriarch's true name. Neither did the aunts or the older sisters. In her youth she had used the courtesan name Yeongyeon, but now she was simply the Grand Matriarch. Zheng Hui was forty this year; she had first entered Yuwol Pavilion as a child of ten, in the same generation, and the character yeon had been in the Grand Matriarch's generational name even then—which put the Grand Matriarch somewhere around eighty. Whatever her years, she was the spiritual pillar of this house, and from her youth her elegant beauty and refined nature had made her the idol of every artistic courtesan in Yingtianfu.
"He has, hasn't he? That was the first thing I thought when I saw him this morning."
"Heh-heh-heh! Song Yu and Pan An will weep and flee. Zheng Hui, you'd best take care. After what I've seen today, this boy is bound to be swept up in calamities of the fairer sex."
The Grand Matriarch and Nanny Zheng Hui could not stop praising my face. I was, to be fair, easy on the eyes. In my years as a eunuch, every time I crossed paths with the emperor's consorts and the palace maids, the same murmur had followed me: if only he weren't a eunuch. Add to that the Sunflower Manual's work of scouring every impurity from the body, and the skin of a man in his prime now ran with a clear, living sheen.
"I'm worried too, Grand Matriarch. A few of the Thirteen Flowers latch onto Myeong the instant they see him and kick up such a fuss. Honestly."
"After watching drunken men sidle up and try to break them, it does the heart good to see our Myeong go all shy and keep his distance. Our boy grew up and turned every sister's head, did he? Why, you rascal!"
"I haven't done a thing."
Their words actually did make me a little embarrassed. I gave a small, awkward wave of the hand. That I was pleased as well was also true. To think I had left these people and become a eunuch. I had been out of my mind. My wits had deserted me and fled beyond the Great Wall.
"That's just it, you rascal. Doing nothing is the problem! The business between men and women is a mysterious thing. Heh-heh-heh! Be good to your sisters. But you said you had something to tell this old woman?"
"Yes, Grand Matriarch. Nanny as well."
"Your mother too?"
The Grand Matriarch glanced at Zheng Hui as if to ask whether she already knew.
"He dragged me here by the hand. I haven't the faintest."
Zheng Hui shrugged, then looked back at me with the same curiosity in her eyes. Strike while the iron is hot. I decided to come at it head-on.
"Grand Matriarch. Nanny. The aunts and the sisters. Are all of you martial artists?"
"Ah… what?"
Zheng Hui looked thoroughly thrown by the bluntness of it. She flicked a sidelong glance at the Grand Matriarch, who, unlike her, remained perfectly composed.
"Hmmm…! And why would you think that?"
Calm as still water, the Grand Matriarch turned the question back on me. This was the real thing now. Well. Did I lay out the Sunflower Manual here and now, or—
That was when the commotion started outside.
"I'll ask the Grand Matriarch myself today. Just how much do I have to pay to buy a night with you bitches? Out of my way!"
"Sir! You can't! Yuwol Pavilion does not—!"
The man's voice, thick with rage, and the woman's trying to stop him—I knew them both. The woman was Sister Shanghua.
"You bitch! How dare you! A guest wants to see the proprietress and you stand in the way?"
A sharp crack of flesh on flesh.
"Ah!"
Shanghua's cry came with the sound of the blow. I had confirmed it only a little while ago. When I had returned the sisters' embraces, I had felt it—they had trained in martial arts. The same art Nanny Zheng Hui cultivated. And still they endured this, as they always had. I wanted to know why. What possible reason could there be to swallow this much humiliation and shame just to keep their identities buried?
These sons of bitches.
Anyone looking into my eyes just then would have learned what it meant for sparks to fly from a human gaze. The one barging toward the Grand Matriarch's rooms, laying hands on Sister Shanghua without a shred of fear, was Zhong Tianxiang. That Zhong Tianxiang. The good-for-nothing of the Jiangning Zhong Clan, the one who swaggered around on his family's paltry influence. The one who had driven me into becoming a eunuch. More than one set of footsteps—he had brought the pack that always ran with him.
Coming to find your own grave, are you.
My insides were already at a rolling boil when the Grand Matriarch, who had been sitting with her eyes quietly closed, opened her mouth.
The Grand Matriarch's aged voice slipped through the closed door and into the corridor beyond. At that, Zhong Tianxiang and the two with him yanked the door open with all the grace of a kicked stall.
"You heard her. You're coming too. I intend to buy a night with every last one of the Thirteen Flowers."
Zhong Tianxiang locked eyes with the pair of idiots trailing him like retainers, then dragged Shanghua in by the wrist.
The square jaw on the left was Zhao Tie, Young Master of Zhao Sword Gate. The slit-eyed pig on the right was Jin Ping, Young Master of the South Fist Sect. All three were in their early twenties, martial trash who had barely scraped the Second-Rate realm, and all three were infamous for their appetite for women.
To think I'd have to look at your faces again.
Zhong Tianxiang's uncle, Jong Hyeon-su, was the current second-in-command at the Ministry of War—Left Vice Minister, a post of the third rank. Which meant these creatures were throwing their weight around on the strength of a third-rank Left Vice Minister of War. When I had been Chief of the Eastern Depot, a single word from me would have sent the second-rank Minister of War himself sprinting over to knock his head on the floor. And these minnows had the gall to swagger around on a mere third-rank post. Not unless their guts had already crawled out of their bellies.