I Was Waiting
"Long live!"
In every house, windows flew open and doors swung wide as people scattered flower petals into the streets. Children swarmed about, plucking wildflowers and flinging them into the air.
Poor scholars from the neighborhood academy climbed the high towers and tore paper into scraps to cast down, drawing a great roar of cheers from below. To the swelling crowds, the paper merchants gladly sold their stock at rock-bottom prices.
"Long live the First Young Master!"
The people of Luoyang had no idea where the cries of "Long live!" had begun. They did not even know the First Young Master's face. Many had no connection to the House of Compassion, no faith in the Fairy Goddess. Because the First Young Master had no direct bearing on their lives, plenty of them had no reason at all to step forward and shout his praises.
"Long live!"
Yet for those who had spent the previous night wide awake, hearts clenched with dread beneath the thunder of bombardment, something more was needed. They needed a signal that the terror had ended—that ordinary days had returned. They needed celebration.
"Long live!"
Amid the throng, as scraps of paper and petals rained down from rooftops, the young shop clerk who had first cried out for the First Young Master looked around with a face full of emotion.
He was a child of the slums. Only with the aid of the House of Compassion had he survived to adulthood. That he could now stand on his own two feet and do a man's work—he owed it all to that First Young Master whose face he had never even seen.
He felt the heat gather at the corners of his eyes and the wetness on his cheeks before he realized he was crying. Swelling with feeling, he shouted louder than anyone else in the street.
"Long live... the First Young Master!"
Until only recently, the news that the First Young Master of the Luoyang Sword Family had ended his seclusion and returned had been a matter of high political importance to those above. To ordinary folk who were neither paupers nor the elite, it had been a distant tale—little more than idle gossip for amusement.
But now—
"Long live!"
At least in this moment, all of Luoyang felt the return of First Young Master Yeon So-hyeon in their bones.
"Out of the way, you bastards!"
"What the hell are you cheering for?!"
Huge men shoved aside those shouting "Long live!" and an old man hurrying between them snapped at his companions.
"I told you not to do anything that draws the eye...!"
Even so, he never stopped moving through the crowd, nor did he stop glancing back over his shoulder every few steps. The reason was simple. He was one of the leaders of the Six Men Society, the underworld syndicate that had once ruled the dark corners of Luoyang with the Second Young Master's faction as their backer.
"We move quietly, without drawing attention...!"
"Yes, Elder."
The big men nodded and silently used their bodies to shove a path through the throng. When they finally reached the alley they had aimed for and left the crowds behind, the old man and his party let out a breath.
"Any pursuers?"
His bodyguard and closest confidant—a black-path martial artist—shook his head.
"Nothing of note has registered on my senses."
The man, who had built a considerable reputation as a man-hunter up in Hebei, added,
"I've been watching every face nearby the whole way. No one followed us this far."
"Is that so...?"
A flicker of relief crossed the old man's face, but he checked once more.
"...Any chance someone is trailing us in stealth?"
"None."
The black-path martial artist shook his head with absolute certainty.
"Unless the other party has turned into a ghost, they cannot slip past my eyes."
"...Good."
In the flood of people still pouring into the streets in a frenzy, secretly tracking anyone would have been fiendishly difficult. The old man would have liked nothing more than to tear every last one of those "Long live the First Young Master" shouters apart with his bare hands—but for the moment, they were actually useful.
"Let's move."
He and his subordinates pushed deeper into the tangled back alleys. Today the narrow, filthy lanes seemed especially grating; the old man's face twisted with distaste.
"What about the others...?"
He meant the remaining leaders of the Six Men Society.
"...Given the situation, there's no information we can fully trust, but—"
The only other surviving officer answered.
"It looks as though we are the only ones who made it out."
"...I see."
This was why thorough preparation for every contingency mattered. The moment the warriors of the Luoyang Sword Family's War Department had appeared, the old man had immediately fled into a nearby underground space he had prepared in advance and hidden there. He had held his breath like a dead rat until the "Long live!" uproar erupted across every street in Luoyang—then used the chaos to make his escape.
"We've arrived."
A dead-end alley. The big subordinates cleared away the junk piled in a careless heap, revealing a concealed iron door. The man-hunter black-path martial artist examined it with painstaking care.
"No sign it has been opened."
This place was the old man's safe house and fallout shelter, hidden for just such a worst-case scenario.
"Check it."
True to his meticulous nature, he sent his men in first.
"All clear."
Only after they had finished sweeping the surroundings did he step inside the safe house himself. A reek of mold and rot stabbed into his skull, yet the old man found the stench almost welcome. It meant no one had opened the door since he himself had last checked the place.
"...What do we do from here?"
Until now they had been too busy risking their lives to think of anything else. But the moment they reached the safety of the house, none of them could hide the hollow look on their faces. Most of the organization was dead or captured. With the Second Young Master's faction that had backed them brought low, their entire foundation in Luoyang had been smashed to pieces. The name of the Six Men Society itself would soon be forgotten and erased from the city.
"What do we do?"
The old man smiled. Smiling in a situation like this? Under the baffled stares of the others, he walked to a corner, grabbed a chain lying on the floor, and pulled.
A low rumble answered. A hidden vault slid into view.
"That's...?!"
He opened the vault. Heaps of gold, silver, jewels, and promissory notes glittered inside.
"This is the secret fund of the Great Immortal Merchant Group that I was holding."
It was a portion of Grand Madam Guyang's hidden fortune. Under normal circumstances the old man would have been nothing more than a faithful vault-keeper, never daring to lay a finger on the money. But in this moment, it was possible.
"With a sum like this, starting a new organization in some other city would be no trouble at all."
The officer, mentally tallying the value of the treasure, nodded so hard his head might have come off.
"More than enough! No—this is overflowing!"
"Oh my. It really is an enormous sum, isn't it?"
The reply came in a woman's coquettish, sing-song voice.
"...?!"
Everyone froze. Of course they did. There had never been a woman among their party.
"I was bored half to death, but it was worth the patience of following you all the way here."
They had been tailed. On the old man's face, once he grasped the situation, anger rose faster than shock.
"Didn't you say no one could follow us unless they were a ghost?!"
He rounded on the man-hunter black-path martial artist—only for the man to answer not with words but with bubbling froth of blood.
"Krrk—khek—khek—"
A sickening crack of bone. The man's eyes rolled white; he died on the spot and collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
"...?!"
As the black-path martial artist crumpled, the woman standing behind him was revealed in the lantern light. Her impossibly expensive palace-style robes and dazzling, elaborate cosmetics made it almost unbelievable that no one had noticed her presence.
"Oh my. Don't tell me..."
She put on a look of mild surprise, then shrugged as if she found the whole thing absurd.
"Did you really think you had succeeded in escaping the First Young Master's grasp?"
The provocation in her tone was blatant, yet no one paid the slightest attention to how she spoke. Every eye was fixed on the thick, pale knuckles she was rolling between her fingers with soft, clicking sounds.
"...W-waist bones?"
She smiled, both seductive and radiant.
"That's right. Vertebrae. Aren't they pretty?"
She was one of the Twin Sala Trees—Seo Rim-cheong. The First Young Master's assassin. The same woman who had assisted Se-a of Hyeonwol Pavilion not long ago had revealed herself once more.
"U-uaaaah...?!"
The officer was the first to scream and bolt. But what greeted him as he burst through the half-basement entrance was not the morning sunlight.
Crunch!
An unnaturally long hand shot out from a crack between buildings, seized his skull, and slammed it into the ground. The sound of bone shattering into fragments filled the air as crushed matter oozed between those terrible fingers.
"Insects, with those tiny heads of theirs, always believe the little scrap of world they can see is the whole of existence, and that their own judgment is absolute truth."
With a soft rasp, a spider-like figure emerged from a gap between buildings so narrow no ordinary person could have passed through.
"That is also why insects breed so well wherever they go."
The creature possessed a reed-thin torso and grotesquely elongated limbs.
"And that is precisely why the world needs someone like this seat—someone who specializes in pest control."
He was the worst assassin ever produced by the Sichuan Tang Family, and one of Fourth Young Master Yeon Bi's closest confidants. Gigigoegoe—Sichuan's Silencer.
"Long live!"
"Long live the First Young Master!"
The faint, distant screams rising from the back alleys of back alleys were swallowed without a trace by the roaring cheers of the streets.
A certain corner of Luoyang. A safe house of Hyeonwol Pavilion.
"Report from Seo Rim-cheong and Gigigoegoe: the hunt is finished."
Se-a, Master of Hyeonwol Pavilion, delivered the news while standing in the faint sunlight that filtered through the window screens.
"Word has also arrived from the Sichuan Tang Family. Vice Head Tang Gwi-ho is personally transferring the Grand Abbess of Emei."
From the seat of honor in the darkness, where a figure sat cross-legged, a question returned.
"...And the situation within the main family?"
Even the chill that came from the sticky demonic energy thick in that voice did not slow Se-a's reply.
"The elders of the Second Young Master's faction have been taken into custody. Grand Madam Guyang is under house arrest. The Second Young Master himself is returning to the main house under escort by warriors dispatched from the Sword Family."
She lowered the documents she had been reviewing and forced a faint smile.
"Everything is proceeding exactly as My Lord desired—nothing more, nothing less."
In the darkness, her lord—First Young Master Yeon So-hyeon—gave a single nod.
"...Continue monitoring the situation and report."
Even someone less sharp than Se-a would have heard the pain threaded through that voice.
"My Lord. Then at least circulate your energy and rest a little..."
Even while locked in a desperate struggle against demonic energy on the brink of rampage, Yeon So-hyeon had been overseeing every detail of the operation until this very moment, fine-tuning the final stages with a precision that bordered on madness.
"No."
He shook his head with a firmness utterly at odds with the strain in his body. The white mask that would no longer come off seemed to sway in the empty air.
"Rest can wait until every last matter has been concluded. That will be more than enough."
"But—"
"Thank you for your concern."
At her lord's gentle words, Se-a could say no more. She bowed deeply and left the room.
"Long live—!"
As she walked down the corridor, distant cheers reached her ears. Did those people know? That the true architect of this victory—her lord, First Young Master Yeon So-hyeon—was enduring agony beyond imagining even now?
She bit her lip and kept walking.
Only moments earlier, sunlight had been seeping through the screens. Now the interior was steeped in pitch-black darkness. The demonic energy Yeon So-hyeon had been suppressing for Se-a's sake had finally burst free, warping reality itself.
The voices tore through every mental defense and clawed through his mind—the voices of the Yeonja who had long ago knelt and submitted to the Jeam Jincheon Scripture.
Yet even as cold sweat poured from him like rain, even as his cross-legged body trembled with fine spasms, the curve of Yeon So-hyeon's lips beneath the white mask was unmistakably a smile.
And that smile seemed to say:
I was waiting.
It was not the expression of a man who had suppressed the rampage until he reached his limit. It was the expression of a hunter who had succeeded in drawing his prey in until the very last possible moment.