The Day the Beggars Vanished
Clink— A silver coin slipped neatly into the beggar's alms bowl, ringing out a bright, cheerful note.
In the Central Plains, a single copper coin was enough to keep starvation at bay. By that measure, a silver coin landing in the begging bowl of a street beggar was a rare thing indeed.
"Well, well. Thank you kindly, my lord."
The beggar knew that fact well enough; he bobbed his head with all his practiced patter, yet could not quite hide the strangely stiff set of his body. My guess was that this fellow was less a beggar than a specialist — one trained not in begging but in gathering information and keeping watch on men of consequence.
"Which gang do you hail from?"
"......."
Almost no one drops alms into a man's bowl and then asks after his gang. All the more so when the almsgiver is the son of a famed sword clan, a rising prodigy the jianghu had marked for greatness, and a master who had attained the Peak Realm. If there was a reason behind the question, only one twist could supply it: that this beggar was, in truth, no beggar at all. Perhaps it was through precisely such a chain of reasoning that the silent beggar finally grasped the situation.
What followed recognition was compliance. Sheepish, the Beggars' Gang man asked me:
"So I've been made, have I?"
"Some time ago."
"Heheh."
As ever, the patter of the Beggars' Gang's beggars was second to none — caught red-handed on a tailing detail, he tried to laugh his way clear, and the sheer shamelessness of it was a wonder to behold.
"An honor, Grand Hero Dancheon. They call me Wonpyeong-gae."
"The pleasure's mine."
No matter. The Beggars' Gang's shamelessness was a fact I knew well. A smooth interrogation begins with the subject's cooperation — if anything, this was a fine start.
"Since when?"
A question with half its words swallowed, but Wonpyeong-gae took my meaning whole.
"I picked up the watch back in Eunghyeon."
"Not for long, then."
"Well, you might as well say I was made the very moment I began. Heheh."
As Wonpyeong-gae kept up his patter, I let my eyes drift to his waist — where three knots hung tied in plain sight. To play at being a common beggar with his rank knots still on display: here truly was a beggar without a speck of guile. Anyone ignorant of the Beggars' Gang would see nothing amiss in a three-knot man out begging, but to eyes that had eaten almsfood until I was sick to death of it, it looked passing strange.
Within the Beggars' Gang, three knots carried the rank of branch master — the master of a branch altar. The gang was a place where people lived and worked like any other, and its mid-level men almost never took to the streets themselves. Here, too, there was Chwipung-gae for an exception, so it was no iron rule — but "almost never" was close enough.
In any case... the very fact that he had taken up a beggar's disguise with three knots showing at his waist told me this beggar hadn't a cunning bone in his body. But in the Beggars' Gang, the most trusted men were precisely the guileless ones — which meant this fellow was surely talent the gang had winnowed and winnowed again for the sole task of watching me. And with a beggar who had no guile, metaphor and roundabout words would be wasted breath.
"Who sent you?"
"Aw, now how could I go telling you that?"
"The Dragon Head Sect Leader — was it him?"
"...!"
It was face-work skillful enough to do those three knots credit, but he could not hide the fine flicker in his eyes.
"So that's how it is."
"Oh dear. Elder Brother... might you be a senior, then?"
Mindless of my demotion from "Grand Hero" to "Elder Brother," I gave him an easy smile. It was not that Wonpyeong-gae had failed to govern his own eyes — it was my discernment that had proved superior, catching that flicker at all.
Truthfully, invoking the Dragon Head Sect Leader had been the natural conclusion. Chwipung-gae was a beggar of rare resource and ability, but his heart was not the sort to put a watcher on me. In the Beggars' Gang as it stood, who else cared enough about me to assign a watcher — who but the Dragon Head Sect Leader, Musan-gae?
"Hmm. Sounds like I'll be in a world of trouble when I get back?"
So muttered Wonpyeong-gae, who had come to pluck information and been plucked clean himself.
"The Sect Leader is a merciful man. He wouldn't go so far as to kill you — surely?"
"That much is true."
"Three whacks of the begging bowl ought to cover it."
A prediction from a beggar of long practice; it would not miss.
"You have a point there. I'll try to talk it down to two."
"Might well happen, if you put your back into it."
"Thank you kindly."
Even in my Myeong-gae days I had never crossed paths with the man, yet talking with him felt strangely familiar. Perhaps because Wonpyeong-gae carried the whole face of the Beggars' Gang within him.
I passed along the urgent business — the very errand that had driven me to run this man of stealth to ground.
"It's urgent. Send Elder Chwipung-gae and the Medicine Hall Master to Eunghyeon."
"I'll see the word delivered."
Wonpyeong-gae asked no reason. A stolid, honest character, faithful to the task given him and empty of tricks — one could see from it how superb the Dragon Head Sect Leader's eye was, to pick out such a man and set him to use.
"Take this for your travel expenses."
Clink— One more coin dropped into the alms bowl. When Wonpyeong-gae confirmed its color was a warm, buttery gold, he laughed out loud, clear as a bell.
"A beggar never refuses alms, sir!"
"I know it."
Weighed against the burden of the errand he would carry for me, the gold was no loss. And judging by the man's character besides, that single coin of alms would go not to lining his own purse but to filling the bellies of his branch — or so it plainly seemed.
"Then I'll be on my way."
"I'm counting on you."
Flinging away his beggar's disguise, the Sect Leader's right hand spread his movement art and leapt skyward. It was the sublimity of the Thousand-Li Wind Chasing Movement — named, alongside the Eight Drunken Immortals Steps, as one of the two great movement arts of the Beggars' Gang. True to the ten thousand li in its name, it outdid even the Drunken Steps for devouring distance; it would not take him long to reach Kaifeng.
As I watched him dwindle into the distance, genuine qi gathered even in my Yongcheon points.
Whoosh.
The extreme limit of form-shifting displacement. My form, gone like a bolt of lightning, arrived in an alley with a hidden view of both myself and Wonpyeong-gae — and behind the man who had been secretly watching me from there, my body came to rest.
"You heard all of it?"
"...Yes."
An appearance of utter, deliberate plainness. But I knew who this fellow was — for the man of no small account who had once come to Chwipung-gae's hovel and left word behind, and this thoroughly unremarkable-looking fellow, were one and the same. Disguised as a passerby, this was an agent of the Murim Alliance's Special Operations Unit. He had shed the unit's garb and dressed himself ordinary, but he could not slip past my quick eye.
"You've heard everything, so I'll spare you the long explanation. Summon me the Chief Strategist — or the Alliance Leader. It's urgent."
Lately famed though I had become, it should still have been strange indeed for the second son of a single prestigious clan to summon the very summit of the Murim Alliance — yet the agent raised no question. Presumably, having been detailed to me all this while, he knew my true measure well.
"Will that be all?"
"Ah — I'll have need of the Alliance's Shanxi Branch Chief and the forces under his command as well."
The Shanxi Branch Chief — Reckless Blade Paeng Ga-heon. That he was a hero in his own right admitted no dispute, and he was a martial artist bound to the Alliance Leader by old and deep ties. He would make a far better move than hauling troops all the way from the Murim Alliance in Hunan.
"Might I ask why?"
Unlike Wonpyeong-gae, the Special Operations agent asked after the reason. I did not take it ill — it was simply, I judged, the difference in temperament between the Beggars' Gang and the Special Operations Unit. But one thing was certain:
"I chanced upon the Hwanragwon — the Garden of Delight."
"...!"
...the agents Singija had picked and raised with his own hands could be trusted. I could speak of it because I was certain that what I told this man would pass through no ears but Singija's. Besides, only by letting this much be known could I set a fire under the backsides of those slow-moving gentlemen — unlike the beggars of the Beggars' Gang, their bodies moved slow, after all.
"I'll make haste."
Resolve settled over the agent's face as he grasped the weight of the matter. The discovery of the Hwanragwon was intelligence of immense worth — and a leak, mishandled, could end in blood — so his reaction was, in truth, exactly right.
"I'm counting on you."
Whoosh!
The agent's form vanished. Unlike Wonpyeong-gae's, his was a stealth art close kin to an assassin's — and first-rate at that.
Turning my gaze, I spied a lout idling a fair distance off. Dolled up to look a fool though he was, his bearing and footwork told me plainly that here stood a master of at least the Peak Realm. A Haomun information runner, I judged. I turned my back on him and wheeled my form away.
Hmm—
I owed Yeo Wol and Ma Sok a debt, but leaving the two of them out of this was the right call. The Dancheon Sword Clan, the clan that sheltered me, was itself under the banner of the Murim Alliance — and the moment an unorthodox power stepped into the affair of the Hwanragwon, procedure would grow hopelessly tangled. The grace they had shown me ran deep; I could repay it later, by some other road.
Which organization handled information best in the murim of the Central Plains? Orthodox martial artists would think of the Beggars' Gang; unorthodox ones, of Haomun. The arm bends inward, as the saying goes. Someone with a little knowledge of the jianghu's upper echelons might even mention the Murim Alliance's Special Operations Unit.
I did know that the Sado League's strategist — Heavenly Brain Sama Ui — ran an information network of his own, but as even I knew little of it, I set it aside. In any case, the right answer to the question changed with the asking, for handling information was a matter of many different layers.
At spreading information through the Central Plains, nothing surpassed the Beggars' Gang. With ranks swelling toward one hundred thousand, the gang was said to possess the largest and most numerous mouths under heaven. As the old tale goes — three men swearing to a tiger can conjure one — the Beggars' Gang held the power to make any piece of information false, or true, to suit its taste. Of course, a gang that exalted righteousness and lived by chivalry never abused that power so. It simply stood as the jianghu's foremost wellspring of news, gathering information, ordering it, announcing it, spreading it. In truth, one might say the very reason it hammered so insistently on righteousness and chivalry was that it understood the burden of being a group whose power exceeded any muster of martial forces.
At turning information into profit, no one surpassed Haomun. This perhaps owed to the makeup of its ranks — thugs, courtesans, tavern waiters and their like — and to its faithful devotion to its unorthodox nature. Haomun, too, had a real knack for gathering and spreading information, but its true mastery, I judged, lay in minting profit upon the foundation of what it knew. Across the long history of the Central Plains' murim, every form of pricing information and buying and selling it had, so I knew, sprung from Haomun.
At digging out secrets, none surpassed the Murim Alliance's Special Operations Unit — a fact owed to capability rather than character. The unit ran on the fewest hands, and it was also run with the finest. The very cradle of the hand-picked few Singija had raised with his own hands was the Special Operations Unit itself. Tempered by above-average martial prowess and a spy's schooling, the unit leaned not toward passively collecting information but toward actively extracting it. Each of these organizations handled information well, each in the manner its nature demanded.
And so, last of all — which group controlled information best? The answer, again, was the Beggars' Gang. Extremes touch, as they say, and so the mechanism opposite to spreading information — reining it in — was likewise the gang's specialty. Of course, a gang that regarded information as the common property of all hardly ever restrained it. But when a time came that the murim's order and peace demanded control, one was granted a sight of their true caliber.
The Beggars' Gang had two ways of controlling information. The first was to throw its vast manpower across every path by which information might leak; beggars barring the thoroughfares as densely as the fabled net of heaven and earth could choke off all information at the source, at least for a short span. The other was for the Beggars' Gang to do nothing at all. Only once the beggars who had made the very current of information flow had vanished did the people of the world understand that these lowly beggars had been like the air itself — no one had even known they were there, and yet, once known, they proved indispensable.
The method the Beggars' Gang preferred, as a rule, was the latter.
A single day. That was all the time it took for every beggar planted in Eunghyeon to quietly disappear. Few ever spare the beggars a second glance, so by the time someone happened to sense that something was wrong, not one beggar remained in Eunghyeon. And yet no one knew why they had gone — for with the Beggars' Gang gone silent, every thread of information had frozen where it hung. In an Eunghyeon where the current had stopped, there was no way left whatsoever for word of the Hwanragwon to spread.
And into the town the beggars had abandoned, a few new ones slipped in, cautious as thieves.
"Is the dispersal finished?"
"Yes."
"Good work."
That one among them was the beggars' chief — the Sect Leader of the Beggars' Gang himself, Musan-gae. It was a fact unknown even to Dancheon Myeong.