An Old Story Over Wine
I was twenty-two.
There was a stretch, back in the day, when I wore myself thin darting about to gather information, all because I meant to make Third Knot and strike out on my own once the year turned. It was the season when Ipdong—the beginning of winter—drew near, and a first chill had begun to drift through the marketplace.
"Myeong-gae, have you heard the story?"
The drunkard who often fed me information—a certain Brother Kwak So-and-so, known in other circles as a raconteur—broke the ice in a sly, half-veiled voice. They all knew perfectly well I was no mind reader, yet this breed always opened the same way.
"Any good news?"
Even so, the people we beggars of the gang loved best were precisely these raconteurs. Get close to one and the benefits were many, all thanks to a temperament every last one of them seemed to carry. A raconteur, you see, was a soul who wandered the world aching for someone to listen, so he gladly lavished food and drink on any beggar who would lend his tales a patient ear. More important still, the stories they collected and spread for the sheer fun of it often proved meat and drink to a beggar's trade.
The raconteur and the beggar: he who longed to talk, and he who longed to listen. A textbook case of mutual aid, you might call it.
But today's Kwak So-and-so was a very different animal from usual.
"Hmm—be a shame to tell you this one for free, no?"
Grinning, Kwak So-and-so looked swollen with more confidence than I'd ever seen on him. And for good measure, the man who should have been champing at the bit to talk had sealed his lips instead.
"Oh ho?"
Wasn't sinking my teeth into anything out of the ordinary a beggar's holiest duty?
"Ahem."
"Oh hooo?"
"Ahhem."
At each of my prompts, Kwak So-and-so preened and cleared his throat, the corners of his mouth twitching with the strain of not blurting it out. In truth, I was a capable beggar and he a veteran raconteur, and we each knew exactly what the ritual meant. When a raconteur of his caliber paused for effect, it meant this was no idle tavern rumor but information of genuine worth. A highly evolved raconteur was all but indistinguishable from an information broker, after all, so the odds were good this tidbit carried real weight.
"Brother Kwak, who do you take me for? Myeong-gae, the finest conscience the Beggars' Gang ever produced, no?"
"That's the spirit. Would I have raised the matter for anyone short of you, Myeong-gae?"
"Wait right there."
With that, I gave his back a few ingratiating pats.
Rummage, rummage.
Being a beggar with a conscience, I meant to pay for my information properly, so out came the rice ball I had stashed inside my trousers. Thanks to the warmth of its hiding place, it still steamed gently—a rice ball of the very finest grade. With flecks of finely minced meat folded in, you could call it top-shelf merchandise and not be lying. With great ceremony, I held it out to him.
"Take it. It's my treasure."
Faced with my magnificent bearing, Kwak So-and-so failed utterly to hide the tremor in his pupils...
"...I'll just tell you."
He had evidently resolved to bestow a little charity on me.
"Much obliged."
Kwak So-and-so the raconteur was, as ever, a good man. He leaned in as if to whisper, muttered, 'Whoof, that smell,' retreated a respectful distance, and opened his mouth.
"There's a rumor a Demon Lord has shown himself in the Central Plains."
"Aw, come on."
My excitement deflated on the spot, because for all his confidence, the information was nutritionally void. Wasn't the Jianghu, from the very start, a place where Demon Lords and murim legends cropped up every other day?
"I say, Myeong-gae. Are you taking me, Kwak So-and-so, for some two-bit tale-spinner?"
"The information just doesn't taste like anything, does it?"
"And what if that Demon Lord were the Divine Demon of the Heavenly Demon Cult?"
"Now that has flavor. Out with the rest of it, quickly. You truly are the best, Brother Kwak."
At my oiled response, thumb raised for good measure, a smile seeped across Kwak So-and-so's whole face.
"Well, you see..."
True to a raconteur's roots, he unwound his bundle of tales with heart and soul, and thanks to him I secured information of the finest quality. The best harvest I had reaped in recent memory. With this much in hand, I could swagger my shoulders a good twice over in front of old man Chwipung-gae—truly, deeply satisfying.
"One can't gulp down information this precious on an empty mouth. Here, take this."
"I'm quite alright."
Kwak So-and-so never did accept the steaming rice ball from my trousers—the very model of a true raconteur, that man.
Anyway... I headed back to Chwipung-gae's hovel, both to report my fine catch and to brag about it.
[I'll be off somewhere for a while.]
But there was no bragging to be done. Chwipung-gae, who in two whole years had never once left his post, had gone off leaving nothing behind but a single note.
"Where in the world did the old man go?"
The Chwipung-gae I'd expected back within days did not return, even after a full month slipped by.
Time galloped on, and one day I looked up to find the seasons had turned and the year had passed.
"Been keeping well, have you?"
Chwipung-gae had returned. With him came a haggard pallor unlike anything Chwipung-gae should ever have worn. His expression was a gambler's who had lost every last stake, and at the same time an enlightened monk's.
"Did something happen out there?"
I strangled the information broker's native hunger to dig out every last detail and asked him as if I hardly cared.
"Nothing happened, you rascal."
There was, all right. It simply did not seem to be the time for telling yet. The years spent at Chwipung-gae's side had taught me to read that on my own. While he was away I had climbed to the Third Knot and become a beggar in full standing, so shedding my callow ways probably helped.
Chwipung-gae stared at the sky in silence for a while...
"I suppose I'd best become an elder," he said, out of nowhere.
Before long, Chwipung-gae tied seven knots at his waist and became an elder. Standing in the position every beggar dreamed of, he did not look happy.
"You'll grant my wish, will you?"
"That's what I said."
Chwipung-gae asked, making no effort to hide his impish expression. Perfectly natural behavior, of course—but I knew that face was something he had manufactured on purpose.
"Right then. What does the young master think my wish is?"
I could guess what he was thinking. Chwipung-gae's secret was not widely known even within the gang, you see, and he was quite certain there was no road by which I could have learned anything so private. Perhaps he had me filed away as some short-sighted young master of a great family who assumed a beggar would move for nothing but money. Sorry to say, this time Chwipung-gae was wrong. Because I truly did know the secret he had buried deep in his chest.
He flinched.
The moment the words left my mouth, that impishly crumpled face froze solid. That even a veteran like Chwipung-gae could not mask his own expression told me just how much the name Eumhyeol Sinma meant to him.
—You rascal, what kind of man makes a trade of handling information and then lays all his cards on the table? Expression control is, above all else, the core of a beggar's craft.
You could say the card I had played hit hard enough that Chwipung-gae—who had drilled that very lesson into me in my past life—could not live by it himself. Negotiation was momentum, so I pressed on without granting him a moment to gather himself.
"I'll bring the man to you."
I watched his head—pupils swimming as though caught in some illusion art—give the faintest nod. It was not reason moving him. His instinct had turned his neck all on its own.
"Would you rather I kill him? Or take him alive?"
At my repeated questions, confusion crept into Chwipung-gae's face.
"I'll do it however you wish."
But he was a beggar among beggars, and he soon gathered his wits enough to ask a question of his own.
"...Is it the truth?"
It was a question like a groan, as though wrung from the depths of his lungs.
"What reason would I have to jest?"
He didn't answer at all; Chwipung-gae simply began to weigh the matter in earnest. I could already guess the answer he would reach, so I kept my silence as well. I had a great debt to repay to the teacher of my past life, after all. Unlike the timeline I left behind, this Eumhyeol Sinma would not be returning safely to Xinjiang. Singija's Special Operations Unit of the Murim Alliance was already on his trail, and the Eumhyeol Sinma would find nowhere to run.
Many a man calls drink the root of all evil. Excessive drinking wrecks the body, and it stands chief culprit behind every incident and accident under the sun.
Look at where trouble breeds in the Jianghu and you will find taverns and inns squatting at the top of the list without fail—and isn't that damned drink the reason? For murim folk especially, alcohol was a dangerous thing. When the common folk of the back streets drank themselves hot-blooded and kicked up a quarrel, it ended in grumbling and a bruise or two. But for murim folk who wore weapons at their hips day and night and had mastered arts that killed, a dispute over the wine cup meant a duel to the death.
Reach the Peak Realm and one could circulate one's inner qi to purge the toxins and blunt the drink's harm—but where on earth were Peak Realm masters ever common?
Anyway. Drink may be the root of all evil, but it was not without its virtues. That wretched thing called alcohol has kept its unbroken history for a reason, has it not?
Slurp—glug.
"Aaah—"
"Tastes good, does it?"
I asked Seventh-Knot Elder Chwipung-gae, who was draining cheap rice wine as though it were a feast of mountain and sea delicacies.
"Where else would a beggar find a pleasure half so fine?"
Chwipung-gae spoke true; for forgetting, even briefly, the bone-weary life of a beggar, nothing on earth beat the bottle. I stole a glance at him. His face had gone red to the ears. He was pointedly not purging the toxins, which told me he wanted to be drunk right now. Which meant this might be the moment.
"Old man, why did you become a beggar?"
"That's been gnawing at you, has it?"
"I suppose it has."
Lending a man the nerve to attempt an honest conversation was another of drink's utilities. However glib the phrase "root of all evil," there were moments when one simply had to borrow the bottle's strength.
"Heh heh. Sly little rascal."
In the eyes of Chwipung-gae, laughing in his cups, there was sorrow.
That day was one of those days. The day Chwipung-gae—still living like a beggar even after rising to Seventh-Knot Elder—did something quite unlike himself: shouldered a jug of wine and came looking for Myeong-gae of the Third Knot, who had already struck out on his own. In one sense it was beggarly enough, nothing but cheap rice wine, but no amount of begging would ever have bought that quantity.
"Shall I tell you an old story?"
Chwipung-gae, chuckling as he worked through the jug, opened his mouth. It would be fair to call the whole thing an opportunity the wine had brewed.
"Makes a fine side dish for the drink."
Chwipung-gae called it merely an old story. I received it as merely an old story, too. We both knew whose story it was, and neither of us said so. Only that way could he speak with even a little ease. It was how scarred beggars shared their wounds without bleeding.
"There was a man."
A story begun with the stalest of openings turned out to be, in truth, a perfectly ordinary one.
There was a man. Gifted in the martial arts, he met the right connection and became a man of the murim. Through brutal training and his share of life-or-death duels, he grew. Fortune favored him, it seemed; he survived the treacherous Jianghu and in the end achieved a success that lacked for nothing. Before it was too late, he met a partner with whom he could share his heart. He put down roots and built a snug, happy household with her. Blessing visited the couple, and a child was born.
It was, in a word, the story of any Tom, Dick, or Harry.
For the record, the ones we beggars envied most were never some county's moneybags or some martial clan's patriarch. It was precisely those Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. Live a beggar's life and you come to understand that ordinariness is itself a prize worth having.
Anyway, the tale of this certain man sounded, the way old tales should, utterly peaceful and full of warmth.
"He finished his work and came home, you see, and hell itself lay spread out before him."
That is, until the story met its great turning point. On an ordinary day, the man finished his work and returned to find the village gone. And a village, of course, means the people living within its fences—so it meant every last soul there had perished. There was no way to describe the sight, he said, except as a painting of hell.
With the face of a man possessed by ghosts, he made for his own house. There, his wife and child—who had always greeted him with laughter—lay cold and still. He wailed as he gathered his wife and child into his arms, but the warmth that had once lived there could be felt no more.
"What other hell could there be? That was hell."
As though lending voice to the man's scream, Chwipung-gae told the old story in a level tone—though the rims of his eyes had gone red.