Sow Beans, Reap Beans

The Dancheon Clan was in an uproar. Both the eldest and the second sons of the family had earned the epithet of Dragon — a triumph without precedent in all the murim.

The clan's storehouses, piled high with every manner of wealth, were thrown wide open, and not a soul within twenty li of the Dancheon estate went to bed hungry that day. One might say the virtue of a great house is cemented precisely through such generosity.

In the nearly three hundred years since the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly had first been held, no single family or sect had ever produced two Dragons in the same generation. This feast, then, could hardly be called an extravagance.

There was, however, one thing I needed to keep in mind: most events held within the clan were orchestrated, root and branch, under the direction of one woman — Baek Yeo-hae.

It was much the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠same reason my own marriage prospects had been governed entirely by my mother, Baek Yeo-hae. As the saying goes, sow beans and you reap beans — so the gathering where the celebrated maidens of Jianghu had assembled was destined, inevitably, to become an occasion for Dancheon Hak.

"To raise your sons this beautifully — I could almost wish to study the Dancheon Clan's methods of education."

"Hohoho, you flatter me too much."

Leaving the lady Baek Yeo-hae to her enjoyment, I rose quietly from the seat I had been warming like a folding screen. Most of the room's attention was fixed on Baek Yeo-hae and Dancheon Hak anyway, so slipping away posed no difficulty.

A blessing and a sorrow, both at once.

"Hm."

For once I felt no desire to return to my desolate quarters, and so my feet carried me, quite naturally, toward the training grounds. Lately it had been the one place in the whole clan where I felt at peace.

I stood at the center of the training floor, idly toying with the aura of the Dancheon Sword.

"What are you doing out here all alone?"

"Uncle."

I turned at the familiar voice, and there stood Uncle Yeo-baek.

"I hear you swept the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly?"

"Haha. So it would seem."

I gave an awkward laugh. This was a topic that had never once come up at the banquets Baek Yeo-hae presided over.

Bang Yeo-baek studied me in silence for a long moment.

"Well done. You've worked hard."

So he said, and gave my shoulder a couple of hearty pats.

…

I wanted to flash a grin and crack some jest of thanks, but for some reason the words would not come, and I held my silence.

Viewed from the outside, it was nothing — a gesture any elder might make.

And yet I felt, only in that moment, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the certainty that Uncle Yeo-baek was wholly and completely my man.

"Did you come into some fortuitous encounter?"

Uncle Yeo-baek asked.

It was a fair question. As far as he knew, I was hardly lacking in wit or talent — but I was not a man who could claim a seat among the Dragons and Phoenixes in so short a span of time.

In the Jianghu, prying into the inner workings of another's martial arts is a grave taboo unless you are that person's parent or child. It was for precisely that reason Manbakja, who could not contain his curiosity, had withdrawn so obediently.

But Bang Yeo-baek — no, Uncle Yeo-baek — is my teacher.

The ancient sages said that lord, teacher, and father are one body, so he too had the right to ask. No — it would be more correct to say that he alone was granted the right to ask such a thing of me.

"Yes. Fate brushed against me, a little."

I could not tell Uncle Yeo-baek a lie. I simply could not yet speak the whole of the truth.

"A great blessing upon the clan, then."

The Jianghu was, after all, a world teeming with eccentrics and miraculous encounters, and Uncle Yeo-baek did not press further.

With those words, silence settled between us. I liked that — this silence was never an uncomfortable one.

Uncle Yeo-baek's candid, unadorned gaze came to rest on me once more.

"Do you still want to be clan head?"

The same question he had once put to me before.

"Yes."

"I see. So that's how it is."

He did not ask why. Somewhere along the way, we had become people who no longer needed to.

"Your training begins tomorrow."

Welcome news, that.

"Lean on some fortuitous encounter and you'll never keep up with my training. Steel yourself accordingly."

"Yes, Uncle."

At last, I was to enter the latter half of the Dancheon Sword Formula — the portion I had never been permitted to learn in my previous life.

"I'm off. Get some rest."

"Take care on your way, Uncle."

I saw Uncle Yeo-baek off, and soon after, my own steps turned toward my quarters.

In my days as Myeong-gae, I had always been surrounded by beggars — and yet I had always, somehow, been alone.

But now it was all right.

Now, I was no longer lonely.

Perhaps because everyone was too busy minding the lady Baek Yeo-hae's moods, it never became much of a topic within the household — but once the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly ended, a great change swept into my daily life.

"All of these came for me?"

"That they did."

The lady Baek Yeo-hae, who had come to visit my quarters, answered with a distinctly dubious expression.

"Take them."

She handed over several sheets of antique-looking paper, and I unfolded one.

Only after stripping away the ornate flattery that great families traded in like coin could I reach the substance.

With my mother Baek Yeo-hae's leave, I unfolded the others as well. Ten years and more of eating beggars' scraps had given me a knack for pulling the key information out of thick stacks of paper, and it did not take me long.

To summarize: the flowery language differed, but the contents were all the same. It was an absurd piece of news — matchmakers from prestigious families across the Central Plains coveted me. Not the eldest son of the Dancheon Clan. The second son, specifically.

"Are there... more of these?"

"I've culled out everything but the decent ones."

Her words proved no exaggeration. Every family name signed at the foot of those letters boasted a formidable renown: the Seok Family Manor of Shandong and the Yue Family of Shandong, the Jinjueon Family of Hebei, the Mok Family of Sinchang in Shanxi, the Dokgo Family of Jiangxi... It began with great houses that commanded real respect in their own regions, and went up from there.

Still, I suspected this conduct of Baek Yeo-hae's was not for my sake. If she married off a Dragon-titled second son to some obscure little family, her own judgment and competence would be called into question — so I took this, too, as her looking after herself.

As for why so many proposals had come to me in the first place, I could guess at two reasons. The first was that those beggars from the Beggars' Gang had already spread word far and wide of the renown and martial prowess I had displayed at the Assembly. The second was simply that I was the clan's second son.

Every single letter contained some version of that line.

Into our house.

These were not brides coming to me — it was me marrying out. All those great families were using marriage as a pretext to draw me into their own halls. That was the difference between an eldest son and a second.

"What will you do?"

Baek Yeo-hae asked, her voice threaded with quiet expectation. Viewed one way, her interests and theirs aligned perfectly.

"I'll think on it."

"Good. You choose from among them."

She was subtly striking the option of choosing none of them from the table. Perhaps such maneuvering worked on an eighteen-year-old Dancheon Myeong — but against the man I was now, it was hopeless.

"I'll be going, then."

It was just as Baek Yeo-hae, her business concluded, turned to leave.

"You!"

Yang Su-rin came storming in at a shout — and collided headlong with Baek Yeo-hae.

"Oh my. Hello there?"

The instant Yang Su-rin registered Baek Yeo-hae's presence, she corrected her bearing and greeted her with a practiced, smiling bow. A capable merchant indeed — her social footwork was swift and precise.

But the mouth behind that sociable smile was not smiling.

A chill.

"Hmph."

The lady Baek Yeo-hae glared at Yang Su-rin, swept around on her heel, and was gone. The rift between the two women was now unmistakable — which made it, to me, a truly heartwarming sight.

"What is all that?"

Yang Su-rin's attention had fixed on the bundle of papers in my hand.

"Letters from matchmakers."

I told her the truth, plain and simple.

"How can you just accept those?"

Shock washed over her face — for all the world as though she had caught her husband with another woman.

"And why would that be a problem?"

She had been a candidate ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to be my fiancée, not my fiancée. She had no standing to interfere.

"Ugh..."

Realizing as much, the light drained out of Yang Su-rin's expression.

"I don't know what you're thinking, but I have no intention of marrying for the time being."

I could have strung her along a little longer, but I decided to give her the truth. She was, after all, the future Young Mistress of the Yang Family Hall — a woman who would one day be a great help to my endeavors.

Perhaps my words gave her hope, because the light returned to her face in an instant.

"Two years. Wait just two years for me."

"Wait for what, exactly?"

Surely she was not raising the engagement again.

"The money you invested, of course. I'll repay every coin — with interest."

This was the news I had been waiting for. Repaying the money meant she would take control of the Yang Family Hall's finances — and holding its purse strings meant becoming its Young Mistress.

In my previous life, I remembered it taking three years beyond those two. Her plans were moving at a gallop this time — proof that the ten thousand nyang I had invested in her was paying ample dividends.

"I'll look forward to it."

She was a shrewd merchant. She rarely got things wrong.

Speaking of it only in hindsight, but Yakseon was a truly singular and wondrous man.

From birth, he saw the world through eyes utterly unlike anyone else's. And to be clear, that is no metaphor — I mean it literally.

Because the Baihui point at the crown of his head had stood wide open from the moment he was born, Yakseon came into the world with what is called spiritual sense already in bloom. His eyes could see what others could not. They were called the Spiritual Eyes.

Ordinarily he would have received a spirit's descent and lived out his days as a male shaman. Instead, Yakseon set his heart on the martial arts. He had judged that tempering body and mind through martial discipline was the most rational path to a station above the immortals themselves. Rather than receiving divinity as an inheritance, he meant to become a god by his own hand — by that measure, Yakseon was a man of sovereign will.

Spiritual elixirs, as a rule, carry spiritual sense within them. Those dubbed supreme or peerless almost always do. And so, for Yakseon with his Spiritual Eyes, hunting down heaven-endowed elixirs was said to be as easy as turning over his palm.

Hearing this, one might think shamans would make the finest elixir hunters alive — but such was not the case. The first reason was that people born with Spiritual Eyes keen enough to catch the spiritual sense steeped into an elixir were exceedingly rare even among shamans. The second was that anyone born with eyes of that caliber walked the path of spirit descent early in childhood and lost all appetite for worldly things. Yakseon's path, then, was a case without precedent in the whole history of the murim.

In any event, walking the road of the immortals, Yakseon consumed countless spiritual elixirs. But no elixir, however marvelous, achieves anything by being swallowed — so Yakseon, drawing on his brilliant mind, charted the road to godhood itself. That road was the Yakseon Heart Decision.

I would call it his magnum opus — a masterwork built with his entire life.

The Yakseon Heart Decision comprised six stages in all.

The first stage: Body Reformation. One consumes the Empty Blue Stone Milk to transform the body's interior and lay the foundation of an immortal. It is known by another name as the Pure Blue of the Furnace — the shade a kiln's flames take at the moment of perfect refinement.

The second stage: Golden Body. One steeps the flesh in Blue Phosphor Liquid and forges a body as flawless as an immortal's. Immunity to blade and spear, Yakseon said, was merely a byproduct of that flawless flesh. And though it was an immortal's body, to the naked eye it differed not at all from a mortal's — so he gave this stage another name: the Return to Primal Simplicity.

The third stage: Invulnerability. This was the process of purification through the Vermilion Fruit. Through Invulnerability, every wicked thing was driven from the body, and the body was made such that no wicked thing could ever invade it again — the means by which the road to immortality was kept open. Just as with blades, Yakseon said, immunity to all poisons was likewise nothing more than a byproduct. He gave the third stage yet another name: the Road of the Clear Mirror.

Everything up to this point he called the work of governing one's own body — self-refinement, in a word. This was the height I had reached so far.

Up through the stage of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠self-refinement, Yakseon was careful to add, one was literally still laying groundwork; it had little bearing on one's martial arts proper. Speaking as someone who had swept the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly on the strength of the first three stages' effects alone, the truth was that I still could not fathom the man's standards.

The fourth stage of the Yakseon Heart Decision was called Amplification.

It was the stage that required consuming elixirs steeped in, so to speak, ten thousand years of time.