A Feat to Make Ghosts Weep
I had said long ago that the Shadowless Divine Thief pointed to an unfathomable phenomenon, but the situation before me now truly deserved to be called a labyrinth.
"What is going on!"
"Fourth Uncle! The Supreme Clarity Elixir — the Supreme Clarity Elixir is gone...!"
"What? And the rest of it?"
"There was no time to examine everything properly, but it seems only the Supreme Clarity Elixir has vanished."
"Inform the Medical Pavilion Head at once and sound the emergency summons. You — go quickly and see whether anything else is missing."
"Yes, Fourth Uncle."
It was a conversation carried from far away, yet my Earth-Listening Art, honed to mastery, caught every word with perfect clarity.
Just as on the timeline of the Ming-gae era, the Supreme Clarity Elixir had been stolen — even though I, who had known it in advance through my regression, had kept a vigilant watch through the whole night.
Is that even possible?
The thought flickered through me: slipping clean past the watch net cast by me and my two elder brothers to pluck the Supreme Clarity Elixir from Wudang's own Yeongeun-gung — perhaps not even the Heavenly Demon could manage such a thing. Even that Heavenly Demon might seize it by force, surely, but one had to judge that not even he could spirit it away like a ghost, as this had been done.
"...How in the world?"
For the life of me, I could not conceive of a way to extract the Supreme Clarity Elixir from Yeongeun-gung — a place already beyond our watch, ringed by every mechanism, formation, and guard the sect could muster.
"Rather than rack our brains for answers, I think we ought to get out of sight first."
"That would be the right call."
Chun-baek hyung had appeared at my side before I noticed, and he was right. A swift response came first. Lose our grip and go wandering around Yeongeun-gung, and we might well suffer a calamity for it.
"So the Shadowless Divine Thief was real after all..."
Dancheon Hak murmured it as he watched Yeongeun-gung seethe with uproar. In truth, he had been unable to hide his skepticism when I first claimed the Shadowless Divine Thief would visit Yeongeun-gung, yet even now he sent no suspicious glance my way — and with reason. We three, ringing the outskirts of Yeongeun-gung, had been close enough all the while to sense one another's presence. I, Dancheon Hak, Chun-baek hyung. Each of us knew the others had stood faithful to the vigil like watching stones.
"Where should we go?"
asked Chun-baek hyung.
"Do we need to run, even now?"
added my elder brother Dancheon Hak.
The gravity on their faces told the story plainly enough. The situation was bad. We had moved with every confidence, yet the results had proven less than promising — no doubt that was why.
Thanks to movements as untraceable as a ghost's, we might yet conceal that we had lain in wait near Yeongeun-gung. What we could not so easily conceal was that Chun-baek hyung's guest hall and Dancheon Hak's had stood empty all through the night. If Wudang had any competence at all, the two of them could not escape suspicion.
"If we flee, wouldn't that be as good as confessing we are the beasts?"
And so running, as my elder brother suggested, had to be judged the worst of all bad courses.
"We are not truly beasts, so there should be no problem. If we simply say we came down the mountain when our time was up, what could they say to that?"
"The timing is too neat. Suspicion is inevitable, and should it come to that, we shan't escape detention for some time."
"Hmm."
He seemed to concede my point, for Dancheon Hak raised no counterargument.
"Even we, who kept watch, do not know the beast. Which is to say, everyone will come under suspicion. In such a situation, drawing the eye would serve us ill."
We knew our own innocence. The trouble was that our only guarantors were one another.
"That said — I do have a plan."
Long experience had taught me to prepare for the worst, so it was not as though I had no contingency in mind.
"Let us go to the Sword Emperor's residence."
I knew that the Sword Emperor's hermitage at Nogun-dang was one of the few places in all Wudang beyond the reach of the main sect's surveillance net. It was, after all, the retreat where the sect's venerable elder dwelled. That made it more than a simple matter, though.
"And what do we tell the Sword Emperor?"
"Fortunately, I understand he was away from his quarters last night."
As it happened, the Sword Emperor Mugeuk Jinin had been absent from his residence the previous night as well, so claiming we had spent the night there seemed the right course. For an alibi away from the scene, one could hardly ask for better ground.
"But what if he has already returned?"
"...Then we leave it to fortune."
Of course — nothing in this world ever goes perfectly.
We settled swiftly and quietly into Mugeuk Jinin's retreat on the fringe of Nogun-dang, yet even in that brief interval we could not miss the uproar spreading through Wudang. The sect's high masters, with no notion where the thief might be hiding, kept flitting back and forth across the rugged slopes. The mood across the mountain was so frantic and disordered that anyone professing ignorance of the affair at Yeongeun-gung before dawn would have drawn suspicion — so much so that even here at Nogun-dang, far removed from the main sect, we could taste it in full.
"Truly a feat to make ghosts weep."
murmured my elder brother Dancheon Hak, sunk deep in thought. Before long, his gaze swung to me.
"How did you know?"
He had not asked outright, but Chun-baek hyung's interest had clearly been stirred as well, and both their gazes came to rest on me.
"A secret. Don't misunderstand — I have nothing whatsoever to do with the beast."
The easiest expedient would have been to lie and claim I had bought information from the Beggar's Sect or the Hao Gate, but in the present circumstances prudence counseled against that too. Should the case take some strange turn, it might breed the misunderstanding that the Beggar's Sect or the Hao Gate was implicated in the theft of the Supreme Clarity Elixir. It would be wrong from the outset to take any action that might drag my friends into jeopardy. So for now, the best course was to seal my lips and trust that my elders' faith in me would hold.
The original plan had been to catch the thief of the Supreme Clarity Elixir and only then claim I had gleaned intelligence from the Beggar's Sect — but everything had gone sideways. In any case... my elder brother Dancheon Hak had it right. I had stood at the very scene as the Supreme Clarity Elixir vanished, so calling it a feat to make ghosts weep was no exaggeration. Still, I could hardly sit on my hands, and my mind was running furious circles of deduction.
It was said that a capable information broker thought no differently from an investigator. Broker or investigator alike, they were people who took fragments of intelligence for clues and layered inference and imagination atop them to hunt down the substantial truth. I was a capable information broker, so in this situation the soundest course was to trust my keen brain — the equal of any investigator's.
I heaped inference upon inference, but no conclusion came readily, and time slipped away without mercy. The missing link was simply too large to be filled by deduction and imagination alone. And then, at last—
"Myeong of the Dancheon Clan? Are you present?"
The officers of Wudang's Disciplinary Pavilion had found the Sword Emperor's hermitage.
Discipline is a fearsome word.
Do they not say that once born a man, the two things you can never escape are death and taxes? That is why they called discipline the calamity more dreadful than a tiger's ravages — the one disaster from which there is no fleeing. Discipline had first arisen, after all, for the proper collection of taxes.
Word had it that the sects were less ferocious about it than the government or the imperial palace, yet even among the schools of the murim, a Disciplinary Pavilion had to be regarded as an institution wielding prestige to match a tiger's scourge. Most great clans and sects were organizations in their own right, and this was the place that carried the full weight of that fearsome word — an austere authority said to hush a crying child at once.
"You were looking for me?"
"We come from the Disciplinary Pavilion. Would you be Myeong of the Dancheon Clan?"
True to that dreaded name, the very first question across the threshold carried a keen edge. The Disciplinary Pavilion held the power of enforcement, and in a crisis its authority reached beyond mere force of arms; in their presence, one's conduct had best be immaculate at all times.
"I am Myeong of the Dancheon Clan."
Stepping out of the hermitage, I clasped my fist and offered a proper salute. Absolutely, positively not because the word discipline had frightened me.
"A pleasure. This humble Taoist is Cheon-su, head of the Disciplinary Pavilion."
"Ah — so you are Cheon-su-jinin."
Beftting his office, Cheon-su-jinin was a man memorable for the three deep furrows carved between his brows and a mouth set firm as a lock. That stubbornness, without a trace of give, lent the head of the Disciplinary Pavilion an air of trustworthiness.
That he had walked all the way out to Nogun-dang on the fringe less than a single double-hour after the incident let me gauge how exceptional Wudang's Disciplinary Pavilion truly was. That he had deigned to call at the Sword Emperor's residence meant, after all, that the search everywhere else had already concluded.
"What brings you here?"
In truth, the situation was not good. The head of the Disciplinary Pavilion had come in person — not some rank-and-file disciplinary officer — and there had to be a reason for that. Something, say, like pinning down the culprit through a witness. Excessive tension ruins even easy tasks, so I swiftly swept the worst assumptions out of my head.
"I take it you have some notion of what has befallen our sect?"
"I have eyes and ears of my own, so I could hardly fail to know. My sympathies. I will not carelessly broadcast another sect's affairs, so have no fear."
Cheon-su-jinin nodded, and I used the beat to carefully steady my breathing. I had to keep my thinking supple, ready to answer fittingly however he chose to come at me.
"So, here is the thing. The vagabond Yi Chun-baek and Hak of the Dancheon Clan have vanished. Were you not traveling with them?"
"Ah — there seems to be some misunderstanding. They have not vanished. Since yesterday they have been with me at Mugeuk Jinin's hermitage in Nogun-dang."
Fortunately, this was the best of the scenarios I had mapped out. It was an offensive I had anticipated long before, which meant I could turn it aside with ease. As if my words were a signal, Dancheon Hak and Chun-baek hyung emerged from the hermitage. The morning sun had risen only a short while before, and they looked for all the world like men only just roused, throats still clearing — natural enough to the eye.
"You were looking for us?"
"What is this about?"
Lying, after all, was a craft that deserved to be ranked among the conjurer's arts — a craft with room for refinement. Which is to say, it was also a craft whose clumsiness could show through plainly, depending on how diligently one had trained it. I, having honed an information broker's skills back in the Ming-gae era, was adept at the art of the lie, but I could not say how smoothly Chun-baek hyung and Dancheon Hak would manage.
"You were here?"
At the appearance of Dancheon Hak and Chun-baek hyung, Cheon-su-jinin's eyes flashed sharp.
"Circumstances arose, and we've been putting up at the venerable Sword Emperor's hermitage."
"I see."
Perhaps thanks to a vagabond's life, Chun-baek hyung's manner was quite natural, but a strange dissonance hung about Dancheon Hak's.
"And those circumstances being?"
"It concerns martial arts, so I'll keep silent on it."
Like a man who had sat through many an interrogation, Chun-baek hyung's answer left no gap to pry at.
"So that's it."
Even the Disciplinary Pavilion observed the murim's unwritten laws, and at the mention of a matter touching martial arts, Cheon-su-jinin did not press further. He merely switched the target of his attack.
"And Young Master Hak? Why is he here?"
"He was my sparring partner."
"That's right."
Chun-baek hyung swiftly offered the helping hand, and Dancheon Hak hastily swallowed it whole. Measured against Chun-baek hyung, Dancheon Hak managed only the briefest of words, and even so the odd awkwardness was hard to bury entirely. Then again, it would be strange indeed if he — raised the eldest son of a wealthy, storied clan — were any hand at lying.
"Then since when have the two of you been here?"
"Late last night we were sparring, and there was a matter on which we wished to seek counsel, so we stopped by this place."
"The same goes for me."
I did not know how penetrating the eye of Cheon-su-jinin, head of the Disciplinary Pavilion, might be, but Dancheon Hak's amateur stagecraft might not suffice to deceive him. And sure enough, my guess proved sound: at some point Cheon-su-jinin's gaze had fixed on Dancheon Hak alone. To put it crudely, Dancheon Hak looked, right now, like an easy mark caught fast in Cheon-su-jinin's sights.
"Young Master Hak — what did you come here to do last night?"
I could see Dancheon Hak's pupils waver.
This is bad.
Even so, cutting in would not do. It would only sharpen Cheon-su-jinin's suspicion. In truth the boy had committed no actual crime, so I could only pray he would not be made to suffer greatly for it.
"That is..."
Just as Dancheon Hak opened his mouth—
"Cheon-su? Is that you?"
"I pay my respects, Grand-Uncle."
The Sword Emperor Mugeuk Jinin appeared without warning, and Cheon-su-jinin buried his sharp gaze and quickly bowed his head. For Mugeuk Jinin to show himself at this very juncture — now even I could no longer guess which way the affair would turn.