The Garden Still Asleep
"I'm sorry."
Old men are invariably stiff-necked, yet Chwipung-gae bowed his head deep and unhesitating before me. I had yet to hear the reason, but I could tell it was a matter grave enough to warrant it.
"What's happened?"
Chwipung-gae was giving bodily form, with his whole being, to the phrase people so often use — I have no face to show you.
"Tell me."
"...We don't have it."
"Don't have what?"
"The Chwigu-hwan."
"..."
"I'm sorry."
Chwipung-gae bowed his head again. It wasn't that he was an old man with a strangely supple neck for his temper — I understood that the loyalty he carried in his heart weighed so heavy it made his head feel light.
"Hmm."
Here was a problem I had never once imagined.
"All Five Great Murim Pills must be partaken of."
Yakseon's words flickered through my mind. It seemed my grand design had been knocked askew from the very start. But it was far too early to despair.
"Tell me the whole of it."
"Aye, that I should."
Chwipung-gae's explanation followed, clear and orderly, point by point. True to his long years as a seasoned informant, his delivery was near perfection. Some of what he told me bordered on secrets, yet his tongue never once stumbled — which meant the debt he felt toward me ran deep, and served as proof that his loyalty still lived.
And if I were to boil down everything Chwipung-gae said...
"The spirit herbs for the ingredients are in short supply?"
That was the sum of it.
"That's the way of it."
"So that was the trouble."
Chwipung-gae gave a heavy nod. I understood his heart. Spirit herbs were not things a man could easily come by, and so he had concluded that he could not grant my request.
"I'll look for a way."
It was a serious problem, and yet it wasn't — for a fine piece of information had surfaced in my mind. Information that did not exist in the present, but which lay neatly stored away in my memory. Once more, the hour had come for Myeong-gae's foresight — the kind that refutes, head-on, the saying that too much is as bad as too little — to shine.
In my Myeong-gae days, I lived in a way that refuted, with my whole body, the world's settled notion that beggars are lazy.
First of all, I did my duty as a gang beggar to the full. A gang beggar's duty meant faithfully carrying out the tasks assigned to him — and fawning dutifully on the senior beggars. For all its scruffy exterior, the Beggars' Gang took the shape of a remarkably systematic organization, one fully capable of smoothly governing a hundred thousand beggars; that much was an undeniable truth. And I knew that in an organization built on a systematic frame, what a man needed for swift promotion was his reputation within it — and that a good reputation, in turn, led naturally to a supply of quality information.
And so, being faithful to a beggar's duty became my first task. In my days as a white-clothed novice, I used the essence of begging I had learned from Chwipung-gae to keep a steady supply of food and fill the senior beggars' bellies. After I tied my first knot, I pounded the pavement diligently to gather information, and shared that with them as well. By the time I had three knots, I could proudly call myself a branch chief who ran his beggars splendidly. A gang's information was as important to share within as to gather without, so smooth personal relations were an essential virtue — and I performed them superbly.
This alone would be enough to say that, contrary to the common image of the lazy beggar, I passed days that were full and busy. If I had to put a name to the me of that time: a model gang beggar, or perhaps simply a model beggar.
But that was not the whole of my work. I chased far more information than what was assigned to me — all to lay the groundwork for the regression I had prepared long in advance. Information past its expiration was, to me, the finest information there was, and so my days became a twofold labor of gathering and sorting it. I memorized the places where spirit herbs grew wild and pored over every market bulletin and trade map there was. And I could boast that the only mad beggar to have memorized the Jianghu Register of a Thousand Threads — the treasure of the Beggars' Gang — from first page to last was me.
Amid all that, I did not neglect my martial training either. At around twenty-three, the age I reached three knots, Myeong-gae attained the Peak Realm wielding only the first half of the Dancheon Sword Formula. Measured against the realm I stood in now, it was as faint as a firefly before the sun — but judged objectively, it was a level that would have earned an invitation to the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly. It was an achievement I had carved out on my own, without the Yakseon Heart Decision or the aid of elixirs, and there was no need to say how great the effort behind it had been.
People are like that. When you're busy, time runs faster. And living inside time that flows too quickly, many memories simply evaporate — much as the scenery taken in on a leisurely stroll differs utterly from the scenery glimpsed while running the lightfoot art.
Yet even amid all that, a few memories remained vivid in my head.
"Myeong-gae, sir! Hwanragwon has been discovered!"
One of them was from the summer of my twenty-third year, just after I had tied my third knot — the day Hwanragwon, the Garden of Delight, was discovered.
It was after Myeong-gae had become a three-knot branch chief, and after Chwipung-gae — who had let Eumhyeol Sinma slip through his fingers — had risen to seventh-knot elder. It happened in the summer when Myeong-gae was twenty-three. In this life, Dancheon Myeong and Chwipung-gae had struck down Eumhyeol Sinma around the first day of winter, when I was twenty-two — so reckoned by the calendar, it was an event from roughly half a year later.
"Myeong-gae, sir! I've got new information!"
A one-knot beggar came pelting into the branch, breathless, calling for me.
"New information? What is it this time?"
I — a three-knot branch chief who might be called the very backbone of the gang — asked with languid indifference, in proper beggar fashion. I could swear I was not slack in my duties. But a collective of beggars gathers more than its share of useless information; that was the honest way to put it. As a seasoned beggar, I knew all too well that reacting to a one-knot's fuss every single time would only make my empty stomach ache the more.
And so I had no particular expectation — but.
"They say Hwanragwon has been discovered."
This time, I was the one who was wrong.
"What?"
At the one-knot's report, I shot up from my languid sprawl. The information he had hauled in was, quite simply, a whopper of a catch.
Hwanragwon. The word for a hidden sanctuary where spirit herbs grew in heaps — the kind of place discovered in the jianghu only once in a blue moon. I did not know of the Yakseon Heart Decision back then, but even so, the mere existence of Hwanragwon was enough to make my ears prick up. All the more so, as it was just the period when I had begun gathering information in earnest for the life after my regression.
Those precious spirit herbs — not one or two of them, but heaps. Scoop up a handful and sell them off, and a man would grow wealthy beyond measure.
At my explosive reaction, the one-knot beggar hastily performed a "voluntary tax payment."
"Of course, the Murim Alliance already swept every last spirit herb out of the place. Heheh."
"Figured as much."
I had guessed that much. Information reaching a one-knot beggar's ears usually meant one thing: every soul in the jianghu already knew it. I had come up through the one-knots myself; there was no way I wouldn't know that. And yet color rose in my face. The one-knot spoke with an embarrassed shuffle — but this was precisely the kind of information I had been wanting.
"Let's go have a look."
I made ready at once. For a beggar, "making ready" is a synonym for "getting to his feet." Hwanragwon, of all things — a matter of this scale called for me to move personally. All for the sake of a happy life after regression.
At the sight of me, the one-knot's face turned sulky.
"Do we really have to go all the way out there? There's nothing left, sir. Isn't that the very place the gang's beggars swept through like a storm cloud, terrified some soul might scavenge so much as a speck?"
Thwack!
"Ow!"
My begging bowl cracked square against the one-knot's forehead. A perfectly natural gesture, you might call it — the very posture of a beggar.
"You rascal — didn't I tell you there's no room for carelessness when handling information?"
Of course, my intent to make the journey myself had nothing to do with any duty as a gang beggar, whatever my mouth claimed. I meant to survey the place with my own eyes and commit its geography to memory.
"Yes, yes. Understood, sir."
"Let's go."
"Right now, sir?"
"Then when?"
When the begging bowl began to rise again, ever so sneakily, the one-knot hurried to take the lead.
"All we have to do is go, isn't it!"
Following the still-sulking one-knot's lead, I took to the long road. Time flowed on, and for a long while the two beggars crossed the Central Plains in the guise of pack peddlers.
"Is this it?"
"I believe so...?"
The place where Hwanragwon had been found was one for which even the phrase deep mountains and secluded valleys fell short. Even to me — then barely at the Peak Realm — it was a space brimming with spiritual energy, an auspicious ground.
"So there's nothing here after all."
"I told you there wouldn't be."
He was right. There truly was nothing there. In that place the beggars of the jianghu — the Murim Alliance at their head — had torn through everything and gone, and all that remained was the lush green of nature.
"Good. Very good."
"Have you lost your mind, sir?"
"Why, you—!"
"Eep!"
I moved to smack the one-knot's head with the begging bowl — and stopped myself. I had committed the road to Hwanragwon to memory and confirmed its scale with my own eyes. That alone was satisfaction enough.
"I'm sorry."
Breaking into my reverie, Chwipung-gae — seventh-knot elder, the man who had seen his vengeance through — apologized to me yet again. Truthfully, it was nothing he needed to apologize for. That Chwipung-gae had not known the gang's stock of Chwigu-hwan was gone — news that even I, a man who had regressed, had never known — was entirely understandable.
"There's something I want to ask."
"Ask, then."
Chwipung-gae, his precious loyalty on the line, had become a doting old beggar who answered every question with the utmost sincerity.
"Given the materials alone, could the Chwigu-hwan still be made?"
"It can."
Chwipung-gae answered as though he had anticipated the question. A relief. The Beggars' Gang had not lost the art of refining the Chwigu-hwan; it simply lacked the materials. The materials being spirit herbs themselves, they were certainly rare — but that an organization holding a seat among the honored Nine Sects and One Gang could not procure them was a lamentable thing. No — in truth, looking on the bright side might be the right way to see it. It meant the gang did not line its coffers with its fame and strength, and still lived for righteousness and chivalry. That, after all, was the gang I had loved.
"Could you tell me what materials the Chwigu-hwan requires?"
At my question, Chwipung-gae broke into a grin.
"I already got permission for that, too."
He must have predicted long before that I would come at it this way. His discerning eye had taken the measure of my disposition and read my temperament — before a wily old beggar, it seemed, one had to be careful in all things.
In truth, the permission likely hadn't been hard to come by. Even the Great Restoration Pill, famed as the finest pill under heaven, was no secret to those who knew what went into it; mighty as Shaolin was, it could hardly supply every one of those materials on its own. And yet no one had ever produced the Great Restoration Pill — or even the Lesser Restoration Pill. Because none knew Shaolin's secret art of refinement.
"Purple Spirit Fruit. Thousand-Year Fleeceflower. Dragon Spirit Reishi. Full-Sun Grass..."
"Mm."
"That's quite a lot, no?"
"No. I've only named the ones we're short of."
Even in this, Chwipung-gae had prepared for every contingency — a textbook specimen of a wily old beggar.
"Impressive."
Every name on that list belonged to a spirit herb that was anything but easy to come by. Falling short of the ones I had taken for the Yakseon Heart Decision, perhaps — but each worthy of a place on the list directly beneath them. Truly, ingredients not unworthy of the name Chwigu-hwan, a seat among the Five Great Murim Pills.
"Do you think you could get hold of them?"
To Chwipung-gae's roundabout question, I did not answer at once.
"...I'll have to try."
I answered at a deliberate crawl, playing a part on purpose. A stone laid for the road ahead.
I knew where Hwanragwon lay, still undisturbed in its sleep. Unlike back in my Myeong-gae days, when I had found it picked clean, the hidden sanctuary would be packed to bursting with spirit herbs.
But I could hardly blurt out, As it happens, I know where Hwanragwon is. Before that, a good deal of groundwork would have to be laid.