The Safety-Anxious Young Clan Head and the Danger-Oblivious Escort
"Young Clan Head! It's time for us to be departing."
"Very well. My apologies for the wait..."
Despite the fact that my appointment as Young Clan Head had been concluded just yesterday by the hasty expedient of pressing an identity plaque into my hand, the servant was already addressing me by the title—and for no particular reason, I answered with an extra helping of pomp and turned around.
"Hoo... now this is..."
There it stood: a carriage finished in a black so deep it might have been carved from a single slab of ebony, its body tricked out with lavish gold-leaf flourishes. Even the horses slated to pull it had been matched to a glossy raven sheen, as if someone had deliberately color-coordinated the whole ensemble, and my lips flapped open in an involuntary gasp of admiration.
"Okay, wow... this is actually kind of impressive."
While I stood there gawking at the carriage like a slack-jawed tourist, someone spoke to me from behind.
"As this is the young master's first official engagement since becoming Young Clan Head, these are fine steeds, hand-picked with the utmost care."
Startled by a woman's voice coming out of nowhere, I flinched and spun around—but she brushed straight past me without so much as a glance, walked up to the horses hitched to the carriage, and did nothing but stroke their necks, over and over.
"Good girl... yes, that's it..."
I watched her coo at the horse with a faint grin. Now, who was she again...? Pretty sure she was one of the Squad Leaders... Rifling frantically through my memory, I racked my brain trying to place her.
Whether she had any idea what I was going through or not, she stroked the white serpent coiled around her neck as she approached me.
"We should depart now. I don't believe we can afford any further delay."
"Ah... right. Can't be late, can we..."
At her urging, I offered an awkward smile and climbed aboard the carriage.
"Aigoo, my poor back... This is going to take forever, so I might as well get some sleep... yeah?"
The moment I was aboard, I had wedged myself into a corner, kicked off my shoes, and started kneading my aching feet—
"What do you think you're doing?"
Watching her climb in after me, I tilted my head and asked,
"Why are you getting on?"
Her face curdled into an expression of pure what kind of nonsense is this now as she fired back,
"Am I not allowed to ride?"
At her sharp-edged reply, I flapped both hands wildly and hurried to explain. "No, no... that's not what I meant..."
"Then what did you mean?"
"Well... you see, it's..."
"Ah. Are you saying you can't share a carriage with a woman who goes around with a snake draped about her neck?"
Like someone had slammed a meltdown button and floored the accelerator, she went from zero to a hundred in a heartbeat. I shouted back, half flustered and half dumbfounded. "No! Just hear me out for a second!"
Only after I'd yelled did the glare quietly ease from her eyes, and she waited for me to continue.
"I'm the one going as our representative to this assembly, aren't I?"
At my follow-up, she answered with the look of a woman who no longer trusted her own ears. "You are going in your capacity as the Dang Clan's representative... are you not?"
"Yes, that's exactly what I'm asking."
"Pardon?"
"Look... if someone of Squad Leader rank is traveling with the party, then naturally the Squad Leader becomes the representative of the party..."
Her face screamed what is this idiot even saying. Her mouth opened, shut, and opened again before she heaved a long sigh and spoke.
"Young master... who is the highest-ranking person in the clan?"
The question came so far out of left field that I answered with a mental shrug of what will she ask next. "My father is the highest in the clan."
"And the second highest?"
I mulled that over for a moment. "Ah-ha... that's me."
She shook her head. "The second is the Head of the Elder Council. You, young master, are the third highest in the clan. So what on earth is this sudden drivel about Squad Leaders and representatives?"
Right up until I'd boarded that carriage, I had been thinking, I'm the Dang Clan's Young Clan Head now, so I should probably start speaking with a bit more gravitas... But my goldfish memory had vaporized my own position in an instant, heat rushed to my face, and I hastily changed the subject.
"Ahem... regardless. So the Squad Leader will be accompanying me in the capacity of my escort, then?"
"Yes. We have been assigned as your escort for this journey. We look forward to your continued guidance."
As she dipped her head in a bow, the pale snake dangling from her neck—whether in imitation of its mistress, who could say—bowed its head to me as well.
At the sight, I extended my hand in turn. "Likewise, I look forward to—"
My sentence dangled unfinished in the air, and after a sigh, she supplied the missing piece herself.
"Haah... Dang Jihyeon. Leader of the White Heaven Squad."
"Right... well, anyway..."
"It's quite all right. You needn't say any more."
"Okay..."
An awkward current hung inside the carriage for a good long while after that.
How much time had slipped by...? Somewhere around the point when the carriage began to jolt more than before, suggesting we had turned onto mountain roads, I casually struck up a conversation with Dang Jihyeon.
"By the way—what exactly is your relationship with the Dark Heaven Squad Leader?"
She had been leaning her head against the carriage wall, absently fiddling with her long-suffering snake, and she answered without so much as a glance in my direction.
"He is my mother's son."
"Ah..."
When I sank into silence without further comment, she opened her mouth once more.
"We share a father as well."
In my head, I had already finished drafting a heart-wrenching saga—one mother, two fathers, half-siblings torn apart by fate—only for her clarification to let all the air out of it at once.
"Hnngh... Then why didn't you just say 'he's my brother' from the start?"
No sooner had the words left my mouth than Dang Jihyeon's eyes snapped open with the cold gleam of a serpent's and bored straight into me, so I promptly turned my head away and took in the scenery outside the carriage.
Mountain peaks drifting slowly nearer in the distance. Trees flashing past in a green blur. The steady clop of hooves echoing from both ahead and behind. Chin propped on my hand, I gazed out at the tedious yet tranquil landscape and thought, You know, this isn't so bad...
But just as I was savoring that peace, feeling the crisp bite of the wind pouring in through the open window—an ominous thought crept over me like a shadow.
Bandits always pop out at exactly this kind of peaceful moment... Given the luck I've had so far, who's to say the King of the Green Forest himself won't come leaping out next?
Unable to shake the crawly feeling, I quietly posed the question to my chief escort, the White Heaven Squad Leader.
"So... all this mountain road we're crossing—there's no chance Green Forest bandits might jump us, right?"
"There is no chance."
Her reply was so flat and so absolute that I felt vaguely foolish, but I pressed on anyway. "I mean... there's always a 'just in case,' isn't there? What if we do run into bandits, huh? What then?"
My persistent questions earned a look of deep fatigue from Dang Jihyeon. "Bandits who are, for the most part, Second-Rate and Third-Rate, with the occasional First-Rate sprinkled in—are you seriously suggesting they would ambush a carriage with the Sichuan Dang Clan's name painted across it in plain letters?"
Talk about being mocked to my face. My voice thickened with irritation. "And what happens when the bandit king himself shows up, then?"
"Does that monster have so much spare time on his hands that he would come all the way to Sichuan to bother with the likes of us? If such a thing ever came to pass, I would stop being Dang Jihyeon and become Pancake Jihyeon."
I was struck dumb by the sight of her, boldly staking her own family name on a guarantee in front of the Young Clan Head no less, before I shook my head and turned back to the window. "So I really am just worrying over nothing..."
Even that solitary muttering did not escape her. "Yes. You are worrying over nothing."
Good ears, apparently. Is the Dang Clan really going to be okay like this? The question flickered through my mind as she needled me yet again, and a curse slipped out under my breath.
"Haah... fuck's sake. I honestly don't know anymore..."
Logically speaking, she was a hundred times in the right... But in less than a single year, I had managed to suffer every injustice the world had to offer, and in one corner of my heart, that nagging little what if? simply refused to die.
"I'm dead tired from getting up at the crack of dawn as it is. Might as well just sleep."
No amount of fidgeting on my part was going to change anything, so I soon resigned myself and drifted off.
And so a day passed... then a week... then three weeks, during which, remarkably, absolutely nothing happened.
"Why in the world has nothing happened...?"
I muttered the words over dinner at the last inn before the Zhuge Clan Estate. "Seriously... was the Central Plains always this peaceful a place?"
Dang Jihyeon, wearing an expression that said she understood absolutely nothing of what she was witnessing, regarded the muttering Dang Muyeong with weary disdain and spoke.
"What did I tell you? Didn't I say you had nothing to worry about?"
"This can't be right..."
Watching Dang Muyeong stare blankly into the middle distance, pupils gone loose, mumbling incoherently to himself, she shook her head as though she could bear it no longer.
"Good grief... This road runs between two of the Five Great Clans—three, counting the Nine Sects and One Union—so what exactly does he imagine will happen? That one of the Ten Hegemons of the Unorthodox Faction will come springing out of the bushes?"
But no matter how many times she looked, Dang Muyeong was still gazing vacantly into thin air with the same dopey expression, and so Dang Jihyeon seized him by the shoulders and shook.
"Young master! Snap out of it! Just how long do you intend to carry on like this!"
"H-huh? I was already snapped out of it..."
Only then did I come back to myself, and I shamelessly insisted that I had been perfectly lucid the entire time as I turned to look at her—and in that very instant,
Creeeak—
At the sound of the inn door swinging open, someone stepped inside.