The Old Beggar's Eye
"Get a move on, then." Chwipung-gae urged me along.
"And where would we be going, may I ask?"
At my question, Chwipung-gae shot me a look of pure exasperation.
"To settle things with Eumhyeol Sinma, of course. There's not an hour to lose."
I understood only too well why his heart could not help but race ahead……
"Do you know where Eumhyeol Sinma is?"
"You're the one who ought to know, aren't you?"
"I don't know either."
There, precisely, lay the problem: I did not know, at this moment, where Eumhyeol Sinma was.
At my answer, Chwipung-gae's expression hitched, then hardened.
"You're telling me you don't know?"
"I don't. Not yet."
I have said it before and I will say it again: Chwipung-gae is my benefactor, a man who has showered me with more kindness than I could ever repay. But none of that made him some kindly old soul. He was, at the root of him, a hot-blooded old beggar with a vicious temper and a hide like boiled leather — and I had gone and made my old mistake all over again. I had forgotten, if only for a moment, that the man speaking with Chwipung-gae just now was not Myeong-gae, but Dancheon Myeong.
Only when I saw his face shift like changing weather did it land. 'Ah—.' There was my blunder, plain as day.
"You've been toying with me, haven't you?"
With his eyes gone wide and wild, internal energy came pooling into the center of Chwipung-gae's palm.
"No, that is—"
"Talk is useless!"
This was no ordinary strength. It had to be the Jade-Crushing Divine Palm — the signature art of the Beggars' Gang, the very technique that had carried Chwipung-gae to his elder's seat. A palm art as ferocious as the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, permitted to none but the Gang Chief and the beggar anointed as his heir — not something to be taken lightly.
"Chwipung-gae, calm yourself."
"Shut it, you whelp!"
My words did nothing. The power gathering in his palm did not thin by so much as a hair. It was as if the fury meant for Eumhyeol Sinma had swung around and fixed itself on me.
"Hoo—"
I decided, simply, to understand him. A man who had gnawed his way through twenty years of a beggar's life for the sake of vengeance might well lose his patience now, with the finish line finally under his nose.
It is the oldest truth there is: when you have held yourself in for an eternity and at last catch sight of the privy, the most dangerous moment is the one just before your trousers come down. Chwipung-gae had let his sphincter slacken with his trousers barely at his knees — his heart was simply in too great a hurry. Call it a lapse, and there was nothing in it worth reproaching. But neither could I stand by and let him make it.
"Old beggar. Lower that hand."
I could say it so squarely because Brother Chun-baek stood at my side, his own hand already drifting toward his hilt to face down Chwipung-gae's murderous aura.
"Pardon my rudeness, then."
With that, the force Chwipung-gae had been gathering into his palm scattered into nothing.
"…!"
In the same breath, disbelief spread across Chwipung-gae's face. To have startled the man with nothing but martial skill — the idiom for it would be the pupil outshining his master. True, I had flatly refused, to the very end, to learn his martial arts; all the same, there it was.
Chwipung-gae had never built himself a faction inside the Gang. What that meant was this: free of the politics that trails any crowd of men, he was a master who could have risen to a seven-knot elder's seat on nothing but his own ability. Put another way, he was a warrior who had opened his spirit and attained the Harmony Realm — a rank held by fewer than ten men in a Gang of a hundred thousand. And having reached that realm himself, Chwipung-gae could not fail to grasp how exalted a feat the thing I had just done, easy as drawing breath, truly was. As ever, one sees only as much as one knows.
"Remarkable."
Chwipung-gae said it with what sounded like genuine admiration.
And yet.
Whether he marveled at how far my achievements towered above what the world knew of them, or merely at my skill itself — I could not read the heart of it. The reason was that at some point Chwipung-gae had slipped back into his shrewd old beggar's face. Just as everything I had read in him until now had proved false, I could pull nothing at all from his eyes — so little that I could not even guess which of the two meanings those words carried.
"Well then. A man of your caliber will serve amply well for my revenge."
So saying, Chwipung-gae grinned. His face was serene, as though the rage of moments ago had been smoke and mirrors.
'Ah…….'
Understanding arrived.
"It was an act?"
"Well, I had to take your measure too, didn't I?"
Chwipung-gae answered with a shrug. Chuckling away, he looked exactly like the old beggar of any ordinary day.
"He got you. And he got me too."
Brother Chun-baek's hollow laugh had it about right.
"So it seems."
Whatever the old idiom claimed, I had not yet surpassed Chwipung-gae. And yet — the feeling sat remarkably well with me.
Before I could so much as finish sorting that impression—
"How long will it take?"
Chwipung-gae asked. I knew exactly what the question meant. He had understood me perfectly from the start: that though I did not know Eumhyeol Sinma's whereabouts now, I soon would.
"It won't take long."
I gave my answer with perfect certainty. When Myeong-gae had first received word of the divine demon's emergence, and Chwipung-gae had slipped away from his side, it had been around the beginning of winter of a twenty-second year. And today is precisely that day — the coming of winter that Dancheon Myeong greets for the twenty-second time. The bitter winter of my past life would melt away now, together with Chwipung-gae's grudge.
"Waiting's dull work. Care to join me for a drink?"
"Gladly. It's on me."
Chwipung-gae led us off at a swaggering stride. Grief and fury still lingered in the line of his back.
Chwipung-gae was one of the few souls permitted to tie six knots at his waist. In the Gang's order, a sixth-knot beggar is titled a Dharma Beggar — and a Dharma Beggar is exactly what he was. He had long possessed the strength and the standing to claim a seven-knot elder's seat, yet he stubbornly kept to his six; so, a Dharma Beggar he remained.
What deserves special note is that even a sixth-knot Dharma Beggar holds a very high place in a Gang that spans a hundred thousand beggars. Of all the vagrants under its banner, fewer than twenty have ever been granted the seven knots and risen to eldership. Sixth-knot Dharma Beggars usually number three times that — meaning fewer than sixty men alive may tie six knots at their waists. Fewer than a hundred in a hundred thousand: do the arithmetic, and the odds of reaching six knots come out to less than one in a thousand. They say only one warrior in ten thousand ever climbs to the Peak Realm, so one in a thousand might sound like generous odds. It is not. For this is a world where merely setting foot in the First-Rate Realm — a threshold crossed by one in a hundred — is already enough to let a man walk the streets with his shoulders squared.
In any case…… Chwipung-gae occupied a fairly senior post within the Gang. Which meant, whether he liked it or not, a great share of the Jianghu's news passed through his ears. The Gang's intelligence flowed upward from the bottom of the ranks before being shared among all; so by the time a beggar wore six knots, news big enough to shake the Jianghu forced itself upon him whether he wanted it or not.
Gulp. "Aaah—"
Chwipung-gae had taken into his own two eyes the rising star who had made the loudest name in the Jianghu of late. The prodigy who had claimed a seat at the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly — Dancheon Clan's second son, Myeong. A young master who, treading over the stigma of bastard birth, had won the epithet Lone Dragon by nothing but his own strength. His age at the time: a bare eighteen. To enter the Peak Realm before even twenty was astonishing enough — and he had taken a seat among the dragons and phoenixes who filled that gathering. The tales arrived trailing embellishments: that he had sheared through a blade of hundred-refined steel without releasing so much as a wisp of sword qi; that he had shattered Manbakja's Internal Energy Measuring Sphere. Had dozens of branches not lined up to testify as one, the Gang itself would have filed it under gossip-mongers' fantasy and moved on.
A man like that was worth carving into memory on those facts alone — but Dancheon Myeong's footprints did not stop there. Together with the vagabond swordsman Yi Chun-baek, just the two of them, he was said to have annihilated Black Water Gate, a small-to-midsize school in Shanxi. Shanxi Branch Chief Paeng Ga-heon had attested to it, and so had Jao-gae, the Gang's own man in Shanxi; there could be no mistake. Dancheon Myeong's age then: nineteen. His estimated realm: already beyond the Peak. The Lone Dragon had become the Dancheon Divine Dragon.
That much was common knowledge. Chwipung-gae, as one of the Gang's seniors, knew a good deal more. There was word that the Dancheon Divine Dragon had rescued the Ice Palace delegation that had stolen into the Central Plains in secret — and, by some tellings, an almost unbelievable rider: that he had crossed blades with the Invincible Might Emperor. That last tale remained impossible to verify, but his bond with the Ice Palace was confirmed fact. So was the intelligence that the Dancheon Divine Dragon was presumed to have reached the Harmony Realm. Every time news of the man arrived, he had opened up some new height. Chwipung-gae also remembered receiving word that he basked in the favor of Alliance Leader Yeom Gi-ha, the Tyrant Emperor, and of Chief Strategist Singija — and, by some accounts, the rumor that Alliance Leader Yeom meant to name Dancheon Myeong his own successor. None of it was bandied about openly, so even the Gang could not say how much was true. Lately there had come word, too, that a band of demonic cult spies had raided the Dancheon Sword Clan — but the affair had been kept so quiet, and everyone connected so tight-lipped, that its truth remained unconfirmed as well. For all the talk of assault, the Dancheon Sword Clan went about its days as though nothing had happened; further checking would be required.
In truth, the subject of all this news — impossible to gauge whether it was idlers' fantasy or intelligence of sound objectivity and coherence — was Dancheon Clan's second son, Myeong. And what was certain was this: even sifting out only the rumors whose truth had been verified, the man was worth every syllable of the phrase the finest rising star in the Jianghu.
Truthfully, none of the rest was needed. That one sublime stroke — the one that had turned Chwipung-gae's Jade-Crushing Divine Palm into nothing. That was proof complete. Chwipung-gae had judged the second son of the Dancheon Clan to be no mere Harmony Realm master.
And a man like that had walked straight into the Gang's headquarters and picked him out of the crowd. What was more, the reason for his visit, he said, was business concerning Chwipung-gae himself. Racking his memory turned up no thread of connection between them whatsoever — so of course the old beggar's interest was seized.
But Dancheon Myeong knew his secret, too. Eumhyeol Sinma. He had spoken aloud the name of the enemy Chwipung-gae could have chewed to the bone and never once been sated. He had even said he would deliver the fiend to him. Thanks to the Gang's reach, the demon's identity had long since been pinned down — yet twenty years of searching had never found him, buried as he was in the bowels of the Tianshan range. And this man said he would hand him over.
Looking back on it, none of it made sense. How the man knew the things he knew, why he wished to help — Chwipung-gae could fathom neither. Best to call it conduct with cause and effect scissored clean out. It could just as easily have been the patter of a man not to be trusted.
But Chwipung-gae had decided not to wonder. He had simply decided to trust Dancheon Myeong. Because the grudge of a father who carried his wife and child buried in his chest outweighed any informant's instinct, outweighed any question of whether the intelligence hung together. If Dancheon Myeong undid that grudge, Chwipung-gae's honest heart said, then he could give the man everything he owned and count it no loss.
Today could fairly be called a special day. The day he bound himself to Dancheon Myeong was, in the middle of Chwipung-gae's withering life, a truly wondrous day. Nothing should have been able to surprise him for a while after that. Surely that was how it should have gone.
Gulp. "Aaah—"
That very Dancheon Myeong was sitting in Chwipung-gae's own hovel, knocking back sour, gutter-grade swill.
"Not had this in an age. It's rather good, isn't it."
Looking for all the world like a beggar born and bred, he had ferreted out the wine Chwipung-gae had stashed in the corner of the shack and was laying into it. Chwipung-gae felt less anger than wonder — at the sight of a great house's young master sipping beggars' swill with the practiced hand of a veteran.
"Ugh."
The vagabond Yi Chun-baek, who had trailed in after Dancheon Myeong, touched his lips to the swill, could not bear it, and set the bowl down.
"Hm."
Chwipung-gae felt no insult. If anything, Chun-baek's reaction was the closer to normal.
"Oh, come on, Brother Chun-baek. Drink it down properly. That's a guest's courtesy, isn't it?"
"A-all right, I'm drinking."
Urged on by Dancheon Myeong, Chun-baek swallowed a mouthful.
"Ugh."
Chun-baek's face described the taste of the sour wine better than any words could.
Gulp.
Chwipung-gae took a pull at the wine himself. Good. Good, yes — and yet. He was a man who prized an objective eye, and he knew: this was a flavor only a beggar could enjoy. A seasoned beggar, at that.
So Chwipung-gae studied the man again. Dancheon Myeong had sprawled out across the beggar's hovel as though it were his own front room. Man and hovel had achieved perfect union; the ease of it was remarkable. Which is to say, the beggar-craft on display was worth at least a properly seasoned street beggar's. Smudge a little charcoal on that insufferably handsome face, tangle the hair, dress him in rags — and even Chwipung-gae would not have wagered he could tell whether the fellow was a young lord or a beggar.
"Oho, and such a fine spread of things to nibble. Begging must have gone well today. That's our Chwipung-gae for you."
So saying, Dancheon Myeong scooped a fistful of food out of the begging bowl and crammed it into his mouth.
'The man's a beggar, through and through.' It was no curse — a plain statement of fact. That bearing was, beyond any shadow of doubt, a beggar's.
"……"
Chun-baek, who tried to follow suit and could not bring his hand within a foot of the begging bowl, proved the point better than any argument.
'What in the world is this man?' Chwipung-gae could not analyze the figure before his eyes. In more than twenty years of a practiced beggar's life, it had never once happened. And yet the sight was so warm, so thoroughly endearing, that he could hardly stand it.
Even Chwipung-gae did not know why.