The Untamed Hero
Gang Pae, the Untamed Hero, was far more sociable and talkative than one might have expected. Which is to say, even while serving as Ma Sok's bodyguard, he never let the thread of conversation drop.
"You've likely heard already, but I'm called Gang Pae. Might I have your name?"
"Second son of the Dancheon Clan. Myeong."
"Oho. The famous Dancheon Divine Dragon himself?"
"That's the empty title they call me by."
One must never forget that this man, who seemed nothing but boisterous, sat at the very top of the information network that split the Jianghu in two. The correct assumption was that he had asked knowing full well the answer. By letting on that he already knew my circumstances before any introduction was made, he would have made it impossible for me to receive him graciously — and Gang Pae surely knew that. One would do well to remember that beneath his seemingly carefree conduct lay calculations of his own.
"Young Master Myeong, how old might you be?"
"Three years past twenty this year."
Gang Pae broke into a bright grin and tapped his own chest with an index finger.
"Twenty-seven."
"...So that means..."
"Haha. It means I'm your elder."
At some point, Gang Pae's speech had slipped into casual address. Still, the reason it didn't sit badly with me might well have been the peculiar cheerfulness that radiated from the man.
"Go on, then. Call me Brother Gang Pae."
"......"
"Come now."
Gang Pae pressed his point with a posture that was not the least bit threatening.
"Brother Gang Pae."
It seemed best to simply let it pass.
"Hahaha. A pleasure, Myeong. I'll be counting on you from here on."
So this was the hierarchy of the Walpae. I had gained an older brother I never asked for.
"Likewise, Brother Gang Pae."
"Hahahaha! Now that we're sworn brothers, your safety is my responsibility too. No more worrying about walking the streets at night."
"...Thank you."
In that brief span, Gang Pae and I had become brothers.
'Hmm.' I should correct myself. Perhaps there were no calculations after all. In any case... It seemed that by sheer chance, I had come to know a remarkable man. The master of Anhui's night streets. The head of the Walpae — the Untamed Hero, Gang Pae. He was, truly, a man among men.
"Nothing." "Forgive us, Boss." The Walpae, once they put their minds to it, were astonishingly swift. Reports came pouring in one after another — so many that one could almost smell the trail of the Beggar's Union.
"Boss! Boss!" Another underling came sprinting up, gasping for breath.
"Nothing on your end either?" "Yes, Boss." "Then why come running like you'd found something?"
"Heh."
But no good news arrived. Even after combing through every business establishment under Geom Bigak's name that the Walpae knew of, they had found no trace of the man.
"Hoo—" As Gang Pae lit yet another cigarette, anxiety had begun to creep into his face as well.
"Brother Ma Sok, I'm sorry." "The fault isn't yours."
Ma Sok had completed his breathing cultivation and recovered much of his color, but there was no mistaking that his expression had grown darker still. "I'll search again myself." Night had already swallowed the surroundings, but that fact would not stop Ma Sok's feet.
"Brother Ma Sok, calm yourself. This isn't a problem that haste will solve." "No — there's no time." "Geom Bigak is a low-life, but he doesn't break the law."
There was nothing wrong with Gang Pae's words, yet Ma Sok did not appear able to fully agree.
"You know it as well as I do." Sensing Ma Sok's thoughts, Gang Pae shook his head. "Sister Wol is not a woman to be intimidated. She's the woman even I fell for. The idea that some two-bit thug like Geom Bigak could brainwash her — that's simply impossible."
I understood Ma Sok's worry. Setting aside the handful of practitioners who could subdue minds through insidious demonic arts, loan sharks were, by nature, masters of intimidation and manipulation. Ma Sok feared that Yeo Wol might be suffering some torment. For Haomun, an organization that dealt in information, the weight of words was worth a fortune in gold. If Yeo Wol were brainwashed into declaring, with her own mouth, that she forfeited the competition, it would be a catastrophe.
"I have a way." I cut into their back-and-forth. "Young Master Myeong?" "Hm?" Ma Sok's and Gang Pae's gazes turned to me. It seemed right to use the last resort — the one I had hoped never to employ.
It was long said that information organizations expend the greatest effort on acquiring their rivals' intelligence. The Beggar's Union burns with zeal to obtain Haomun's information, and Haomun goes to war to obtain the Beggar's Union's. Setting the Beggar's Union aside, it might seem rather curious that Haomun — which took interest in nothing beyond profitable information — would actively collect intelligence on them. In truth, there was no other way to explain it. Know yourself, know your enemy, and in a hundred battles you will never be defeated. That, and that alone, was the reason. Every faction knew that acquiring a rival's intelligence was the fastest shortcut to relative superiority. To put it another way: espionage. Where information rests on universality, espionage rests its weight on specificity — on hostile and rival factions in particular. So who were the rivals of the Biyak, where Myeong-gae had once belonged? They were called the Eunyeong.
"Myeong-gae. Did you hear the news?" "Which news?" "They were hit again." "Where this time?" "It seems the Eunyeong leaked the entire strike route of the Changcheon Corps. They took a heavy loss." "How on earth?" "...Apparently an Eunyeong spy had infiltrated the Changcheon Corps itself." "......" "......" At that bitter news, I and the Biyak members could not speak for a while.
"Was everyone safe?" "Thankfully the martial artists got out, but the supplies were lost entirely." "Heo—"
Eunyeong was the collective name for the direct espionage organization under Wi Su, the Demonic Divine Conduit and Chief Strategist of the Heavenly Demon Cult. What made them truly vicious was the very fact of their existence — scattered in disguise as spies throughout every corner of the Orthodox Murim. Martial skill decides the outcome of a duel of life and death, but is it not said that information and supplies decide the outcome of war? With Eunyeong leaking intelligence at every turn, the losses suffered by the Orthodox Murim were beyond measure. The Biyak especially, standing at the very opposite pole of Eunyeong, could not escape the wounds to its pride and the sagging of its morale.
"What are we to do..." "Who handles information better than the Beggar's Union? Have you thought of no way?" At my murmuring, a Biyak member asked me with a meaningful look. My apologies to him, but I had no clever solution either.
"The ways of getting information from the Beggar's Union are field surveys, searches, interviews, direct observation, eavesdropping, rumor-gathering, purchase, and so on. But as you well know, all of those are useless against espionage." "So there really is only one way left?" "That way?" "We give back what we've received." "You mean we plant our own spies?" This was a method long and continually debated within the Biyak.
"I heard Master Singija has been working on it for some time — any progress?" "Word is it's proving difficult." "Figures."
The demonic bastards were truly like fanatics. At a time when even an Orthodox agent posing as an ordinary cultist struggled, infiltrating Eunyeong itself was beyond imagining.
"So — was the spy who infiltrated the Changcheon Corps captured?" "He bit down on poison, but they barely managed to take him alive." "...He won't be going anywhere pleasant." "I imagine not."
The Eunyeong spy would now be interrogated. Of course, by 'interrogation' I mean not only physical methods like bone-splitting and tendon-twisting, but also insidious arts such as illusion sorcery. Was this not wartime? It was an age of barbarism where a few unorthodox methods were quietly tolerated. We could not speak of it cheerfully — for the fate of our Biyak member, ensnared by the demonic cult, was little different.
"They say not one of the spies will open their mouth. It would be easier for them to simply burn everything." "...Truly Eunyeong, then."
The Biyak was said to be Eunyeong's rival organization. But honestly speaking, it was hard to deny that the Biyak was being outmatched.
"Master Singija will find a way." At the time, there was no other way.
"Myeong-gae! Myeong-gae!" The Biyak member with whom I'd shared that bitter conversation just three days prior came searching for me in haste. "You were right." "About what?" "Master Singija has found a way!" "Hm?" At those words, my sharp five senses began to turn at full speed. There are, as a rule, three ways of espionage. The first is planting a spy. The second is interrogating a captured figure of importance to extract intelligence. Both had already failed — which left only one.
"Did Master Singija succeed in decoding the cipher?" "How did you know?" I gave no answer to the Biyak member's question, only flashed a sly smile. "The tide of war is about to turn."
For Eunyeong — a small elite force lurking across every corner of the Central Plains — the cipher was their sole means of communication with one another. A leaked cipher spells ruin, so its system was inevitably complex and its decoding fiendishly difficult. And yet Singija, the self-proclaimed genius Chief Strategist of the Murim Alliance, had at last succeeded in cracking Eunyeong's cipher. Language, it is said, is the very essence of a thing's existence. That the Biyak, having decoded the cipher, could now pick Eunyeong apart to its bones was only natural.
The hour had passed midnight, and everything in the world slept but the chirping of grass insects. "There was a place like this in Anhui?" Brother Gang Pae looked around as if marveling. The surroundings were wrapped in pitch-black darkness, but no concealment art could hide the presence of a rising master.
"Where are we going?" Ma Sok asked, no longer able to hide his anxiety as the precious hours slipped away. That he had trusted my single word and walked all this way on time worth more than gold showed just how greatly Ma Sok trusted me.
"A little further, and we'll find it."
My words proved true; after a short walk, a pavilion revealed itself. We had come upon one of Eunyeong's safehouses — a fact that would only be uncovered in the far future. This was the only Eunyeong safehouse in Anhui, so if Eunyeong was active, traces would remain here. According to what the Biyak had learned, Eunyeong marked its cipher on the base of the fourth pillar of a safehouse — a means of providing guidance to members joining later. Circling the pavilion and arriving at the fourth pillar, my gaze dropped downward. 'There it is, as expected.' Anyone else would have dismissed it as graffiti and moved on, but I could extract a wealth of information from that mark. That's right. Having lived Myeong-gae's life and returned, I can read Eunyeong's cipher. It was essential knowledge for every Biyak member.
At that same hour. Somewhere in Anhui Prefecture. Torches burned bright in the underground chamber, a place where no human footstep ever fell in ordinary times.
"Kill him." A voice utterly devoid of emotion — and therefore all the more unsettling — echoed through the chamber. Within the gaze of its owner, Ma Pyeong-sam, fell an unconscious, bound woman and a smirking man. Ma Pyeong-sam's words were directed at the smirking man: Geom Bigak.
"No illusions. Just kill him." "I'm afraid I can't do that." Geom Bigak answered in that same polite voice so at odds with his true nature. "That's not the agreement we made." "How is it different?" Geom Bigak raised his arms in an exaggerated gesture and went on. "Wasn't Eunyeong's promise to make me Matriarch of Haomun?" "Correct." "If I kill the Mistress of Hwawollu, I can never become Matriarch. The one breaking the agreement is you." "......" This was the problem Ma Pyeong-sam now faced.
"Why didn't you say so from the start?" At the question, Geom Bigak made a show of striking himself on the head in exaggerated fashion. "Oops! Slipped my mind, that's all!"
Grrk. Ma Pyeong-sam, head of Eunyeong, found himself wanting to kill that Geom Bigak on the spot.