The Hangzhou Ghost
And so it went.
One day, two days, three…
The Cheonhae Merchant Group continued its preparations for the trade caravan, while day after day the escort force from the Seoho Gwak Family drew closer to the hour of departure for the Hubei Pang Family.
“Did you hear?”
A fresh rumor was catching fire through Hangzhou’s pleasure districts.
Inns, wine houses, brothels—wherever people gathered, they passed the same story around. Its content was simple.
“That inn behind the three-way fork? Turns out it was a den of kidnappers.”
“You’re kidding!”
“How in the world—wait. Don’t tell me it’s the same as last time?!”
“Exactly! Just like those bandit bastards before—nothing left but torn clothes!”
The talk was always the same: entire packs of underworld thugs who had been bleeding the common folk dry somewhere in Hangzhou were vanishing overnight.
“Tch.”
“What? You don’t look like you believe it.”
“That alone’s not enough to say for sure, is it?”
“If you don’t trust me, go ask the waiter at that shop. Survivors said the same thing this time too.”
The rumor had begun on the lips of people who had nearly been dragged off and ruined by those black-path gangs, and every account was stranger than the last.
One survivor claimed to have seen red eyes flashing in the dark. Another spoke of a crimson rain pouring down under the moon. A third swore they had only seen a shadow.
No wonder some refused to believe a word of it.
Believers and skeptics alike, though, agreed on one conclusion.
“What does it matter either way.”
“Right. Whoever it is, they’re doing things even Hangzhou’s constables can’t manage.”
Compared to a few months earlier, the city’s night streets somehow felt safer. The black-path types who used to demand protection money in broad daylight, the ones who brandished blades under the moon and threatened ordinary people—both had begun to vanish.
It had to be the work of that “someone” tied to the rumor.
From the descriptions alone the figure sounded closer to a monster than a man, yet so long as he left the innocent alone, the common folk’s opinion of him was far from poor.
“A ghost has appeared in Hangzhou.”
A strange ghost that the black-path gangs nesting in the city’s dark corners had begun to fear.
“The kind Heaven sent to drag the wicked away.”
And so the legend of Gwak Yeon, still hidden behind a mask, kept putting on flesh right up until the day before he left for the Hubei Pang Family—
Under the moon.
Inside high walls, yellow flames wavered in the stone lanterns that rose from the ground of a manor.
A cutting wind swept the dusty earth hard enough to set every light trembling, and on that ground a middle-aged man knelt, blindfolded and bound hand and foot, shaking as he shouted.
“S-spare me! What in the world is the meaning of this?!”
“Just spare my life! If this was some mistake I’ll forget the whole thing cleanly! If it’s money you need I can give you a fair amount right now! I don’t even know who you people are! So if you’ll just let me live, I won’t make any trouble about it!”
“Then I suppose it’s time you found out.”
The voice came from the black-clad man seated on the raised platform beneath the eaves.
“A pleasure. I am the Master of Black Moon Gate.”
“Black… Moon Gate?”
The middle-aged man gaped in pure shock.
Black Moon Gate.
The name of an assassin group that had only recently begun to make itself known in Hangzhou. The moment it left the black-clad man’s mouth, the bound merchant began to wail and tremble.
“I-I’m no martial artist! I swear I haven’t made an enemy bitter enough to want my head! There must be some misunderstanding—”
“I know.”
“W-well then… what?”
“I said I know. You haven’t done anything worth dying over. You’re no jianghu man with a blood feud either.”
“Th-then…?”
The middle-aged man stared with his mouth hanging open. The black-clad man who called himself Master of Black Moon Gate watched him for a moment, then gave a soft, amused chuckle.
“You’ve been expanding your business too far in Hangzhou. Do you have any idea how many people stand to profit if you simply disappear?”
“Y-you rotten bastards!!!”
At the casual implication that a rival firm had hired killers, the merchant’s neck veins stood out as he roared. Then his voice cracked into pure desperation.
“Somebody help me! Please! Anybody!!!”
“You don’t even know where you are. Stop screaming for help no one can hear.”
“W-wait! You’re going to kill a man who did nothing wrong—just for a little money?! Please spare me! I’ve done nothing wrong!”
“Is that the end of your last words?”
“You animals—! Have you no shame as men of the jianghu?! Aren’t you afraid of Heaven?!”
“Come now. Your death has to look like suicide. There’s a reason we’ve kept you alive this long. So if you don’t want your family to die with you, you’ll take this knife here and—”
“Please!!! Somebody save me!!! An innocent man is being murdered by black-path scum!!! Please!!! Even a ghost will do—just help me!!! Where in the world is Hangzhou’s Ghost when I need him—!!!”
“…Ghost?”
Watching the middle-aged man thrash on the ground, spit flying with every shriek, the Master of Black Moon Gate curled his lip.
Heh.
He thought of the rumor that had been spreading through Hangzhou for some time now—the bizarre tale that began when black-path gangs famous for squeezing the common folk started vanishing one after another.
Hangzhou’s Ghost.
Remembering the story circulating among the city’s ordinary people, the Master of Black Moon Gate looked down on the merchant with pure contempt.
“To still be that naïve at your age. It’s almost pitiful.”
He did not believe a word of it.
A ghost that punished the wicked?
What a joke.
A champion of justice who only killed the bad ones. The sort of nonsense that belonged in children’s legends, not in the real world.
“O Ghost of Hangzhou!!! There’s a vicious black-path man right here!!!”
“Well… maybe I should be grateful there are still so many naïve fools like you in this city.”
The Master of Black Moon Gate murmured as he watched the man continue to howl.
It was true enough. That ridiculous rumor had driven more than a few black-path outfits to pull out of Hangzhou. For Black Moon Gate, relative newcomers to the city, the suddenly thinned underworld had been an opportunity.
And right now the Master was eyeing an even larger one.
“There’s no one—!!! Please—!!!”
“I could let you live.”
“My… r-really?! What do you want?! Just say it!! If it’s money I’ll give you as much as—”
“Not money. Information.”
“Information? What kind—”
The Master rose, walked over to the man sprawled on the ground, and asked quietly,
“Do you know anything about the secret auction house?”
“A-auction house?”
“The secret auction where Hangzhou’s real heavyweights gather.”
The secret auction house.
Rumor said rare treasures, spiritual medicines, divine weapons, and even grotesque items no one had ever heard of—talismans, jiangshi—changed hands there. It was also said to be where the city’s top-tier black-path figures met.
In other words, the genuine powers who scoffed at tales of Hangzhou’s Ghost. A place Black Moon Gate had to pass through if they wanted to buy medicines and gear with the money they had gathered and climb into bigger games by making those connections.
“They meet only four times a year. Once every three months—that’s all I know.”
That was the sum of his information so far.
Which was why, even while taking commissions and carrying them out, the Master of Black Moon Gate had been digging for more scraps just like this.
“You look like you don’t know a thing.”
“…”
“They say there’s not a high-class wine house in Hangzhou that doesn’t take silk from your workshops. Over drinks someone must have let something slip. Anything at all.”
“I-I’ve never even—”
“I figured as much.”
The Master sighed and stepped back. From the shadows around the manor several assassins emerged and closed in on the middle-aged man.
“I-I’m telling the truth! I really don’t know! If I did I’d have said so at once!!! I-I’ll give you money instead!!!”
“Don’t kill him right away.”
“Yes.”
“W-what are you going to do?! S-stay back!!! Help me!!! Please, anybody!!!”
The Master of Black Moon Gate gave his men a small nod.
Just as he always did—extract whatever extra information he could, then begin the careful, traceless torture that would make the death look like suicide—
Thud.
One assassin collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“Who’s there?!”
The Master spun around in shock.
He was not the only one startled. The remaining assassins who had been advancing on the merchant froze and snapped into combat stances.
“Me?”
From the roof of the building where the Master of Black Moon Gate had been sitting, a cold voice floated down. Under the moonlight a masked figure’s red eyes flashed once.
“Hangzhou’s Ghost.”
!!!
Not mere black-path thugs—Black Moon Gate.
In an instant the heretical assassins, trained in arts specialized for murder, scattered across the manor grounds and unleashed a storm of hidden weapons.
Flash—!
Moonlight glittered on every blade and dart. As those points of light converged on a single spot, the masked figure on the roof launched skyward.
Rumble.
He kicked off hard enough to shatter roof tiles, spinning his whole body like a whirlwind as he rose, as if trying to slip past the storm of projectiles pouring in from every direction.
Spurt—
Blood beads welled from several places on his body. A few of the raining weapons had grazed him after all. Catching the scent of blood, several assassins hurled themselves after the rising figure, shouting as they went.
“Kill him!”
The lead assassin drew a sword instead of another dart. Sensing the raw killing intent riding that blade, the masked man—still trailing drops of blood in midair—split his mouth into a long, savage grin.
Thump!
Almost time.
As he began his descent toward the ones leaping up from the ground, Gwak Yeon reversed the spin of his torso. The blood droplets streaming from his body thickened one by one into thin crimson streams.
“Don’t kill him—just take him alive!”
“That’s supposed to be Hangzhou’s Ghost?”
“Let’s get a good look at the Ghost’s face!”
“Ghost, my ass! We’ll cripple him first!”
“Hahaha! I’ve got him!”
“You’ll be begging us to kill you clean!”
Facing the flood of malice head-on, Gwak Yeon’ s eyes burned with manic light.
He was about to feel it again—the taste of throwing open the bolt that held his violence in check. The taste of righteous slaughter.
The pleasure he could never quite reach in a public duel like the one against Baek Jung-hyeok: the pleasure of unleashing every hidden power he possessed and cutting evil men down.
KRA-KRA-KRA-KRA-KRA—!
Gwak Yeon plummeted in a spinning vortex, blood streams coiling around him like living whips.
The first to sense something wrong was the assassin who met him at the front of the charge.
“Die—… ghk!”
Mid-leap the man suddenly dropped his sword, clutched his throat with both hands, and crashed to the ground.
The second assassin following him crumpled clutching his chest; then every other killer who had been racing in from all sides flung themselves backward in the same instant.
“S-sorcery!”
“Already? You’ve got decent eyes, at least.”
Tadak— Gwak Yeon landed lightly atop the manor roof.
At the same moment the thin blood streams whirling around him unfurled in every direction like a spider’s web.
Slash! Slash! Slash!
Crimson threads shot toward each assassin.
What… is that?!
Shocked faces twisted as they raised their blades to cut the bizarre attacks down—exactly then the Master of Black Moon Gate roared,
“Stop panicking! Look below!”
He had spotted the hidden weapons gliding half a beat behind the blood streams like second shadows.
The assassins reacted at once.
Unlike the first two who had died, they adapted to Gwak Yeon’s feint—
“Ghk!”
Thud.
Another assassin fell.
While dodging the late-arriving darts beneath the blood threads, he left his blind side open; Gwak Yeon’s sword had already carved open his chest.
Gwak Yeon flicked the blood from his blade beside the corpse and slowly turned his head.
When the Master of Black Moon Gate saw the red eyes glowing behind the mask, his own eyes went wide.
A gosu!
A thousand thoughts raced through his mind and settled on one conclusion.
To live, there was only one way.
“Kill every light!”
“What?!”
“You idiots! Put out every lantern!”
The assassins understood at once and scattered across the garden. One by one the yellow flames of the stone lanterns died.
The manor plunged into darkness. As if on cue a cloud slid across the moon, sealing the grounds in perfect black.
Soft footfalls.
The Master of Black Moon Gate moved with the barest minimum of sound, every sense stretched to its limit.
He had changed the game from open combat to assassination.
Papapak!
The other assassins likewise erased their presence. Within moments they had located the masked man in the pitch dark.
An assassin’s senses.
Men who lived by ambush and hunting prey in the dark—this was their native element.
“Take him.”
The moment those words reached ears that had just restored the fight to familiar ground,
“If you can, take an arm and a leg first.”
Quiet screams began to fill the silent, lightless manor—dozens of exchanges of steel whispering through the black.
.
.
.
Since entering Hangzhou they had never once failed a contract.
That was why he had believed.
By next year Black Moon Gate would stand as Hangzhou’s foremost assassin group.
He had even thought: Hangzhou’s Ghost? Maybe the idiots panicking over that rumor would only help him reach the goal faster.
But—
When the moonlight finally slipped free of the clouds again,
“Move and you die.”
“Hup.”
With a blade already at his throat, the Master of Black Moon Gate understood just how absurd that belief had been.
A single drop of blood ran from where the tip touched his neck.
It did not matter.
All that mattered now was the scene laid out before his eyes.
Corpses littered every corner of the manor.
Every last assassin he had commanded less than a shichen earlier lay dead.
And they had died in the dark.
To a man who had spent his entire life as an assassin, the meaning was unmistakable.
The masked figure holding a sword to his throat was a gosu.
“Then now—”
“I’ll forget it.”
“Hm?”
“Everything that happened here tonight, everything I just experienced, every question about who you are—none of it exists in my head anymore. I’ll wipe tonight clean for the rest of my life.”
The Master of Black Moon Gate spoke in a rush.
“Just spare my life. Do that and I’ll leave Hangzhou this very night and never return as long as I live.”
“That’s a problem.”
“D-did someone put a contract on me?”
“Not exactly.”
The masked man jerked his chin toward the far side of the grounds.
There, trembling against the wall, stood the middle-aged merchant—still alive through all the chaos, the same man Black Moon Gate had been about to kill minutes earlier.
“If I let you go you’ll just keep murdering innocent people like him.”
“No! That man is a killer! He has blood on his hands—”
“Liar!”
The merchant’s voice cracked as he forced his way into the conversation.
“In my entire life I have never committed such a crime! Business makes enemies, of course, but I swear before Heaven I have never deliberately harmed another soul! You yourself said earlier that I hadn’t done anything worth dying for!”
“I know.”
In that instant the killing intent pressing against the Master’s throat vanished.
The masked man had sheathed his sword.
Turning his back on the Master of Black Moon Gate, he walked across the blood-soaked ground to the middle-aged man. He knelt on one knee, cut the ropes and removed the blindfold, then murmured,
“You may go.”
“R-really?”
“Yes. You need not fear any retaliation.”
At that moment—
“That man will die to—”
“You stupid—!”
A flying dagger shot from behind.
The Master of Black Moon Gate had struck the instant the masked man’s back was exposed, aiming cleanly for the nape of the neck.
Sssshnk!
“Arrogant bastard, turning your back on—?!”
He was already sneering at the masked man’s arrogance when his expression froze.
The dagger that should have buried itself in the man’s neck fell to the ground instead—and in a shape he had never seen before.
A red cloth.
Something like a crimson veil had shimmered into existence in the empty air behind the masked man’s neck, caught the dagger, and vanished.
Body Protecting Strong Blood — a barrier of blood and inner force.
“W-what was that?!”
“As expected.”
“Y-you—what are you?! Are you really a ghost?!”
“Works perfectly.”
The masked man muttered to himself, then helped the middle-aged merchant to his feet by the shoulder and asked,
“Can you walk on your own?”
“I-I can, but—”
“I’ll kill that one shortly, so don’t worry. Unless you’d prefer to watch him die with your own eyes—”
“No! Thank you! Truly, thank you!”
The merchant scrambled up, bowed again and again in gratitude, and hurried out of the manor.
“I will never forget this debt as long as I live! Thank you!”
By then the masked man’s face was already turned toward the Master of Black Moon Gate.
Thud.
The Master’s legs gave out and he sat hard on the ground.
He could see them now—the red eyes beginning to blaze behind the mask.
“G-ghost…!”
“That’s right.”
Watching the man scrabble backward on trembling arms, Gwak Yeon smiled thinly and murmured,
“The Ghost of Hangzhou—who only hunts vermin like you.”
“S-stay back!”
“Oh, I won’t kill you right away.”
“U-uaaah!”
“Just like you were going to do.”
Beyond the blood-reeking manor of Black Moon Gate, the Master’s raw, cutting screams tore through the night.
“Uaaaaaah!”
Step.
Step.
Gwak Yeon walked the streets of dawn.
“Whew.”
He ran a hand through sweat-damp hair and muttered,
“That feels better.”
Over the past ten-plus days he had smashed quite a few black-path gangs.
It had been more than simple extermination of evil. It had been time to train the powers he could never freely display in a public duel like the one against Baek Jung-hyeok.
Hosinganghyeol is roughly under control now…
The ability to instantly fuse blood and inner force into a barrier that blocked attacks. He still could not stretch it into long blood threads, but he was certain that range would grow as his inner force and the volume of blood he absorbed increased.
And I’ve stocked a fair amount of blood…
He had absorbed a good deal from the wicked as well.
Everything he needed to wield a vampire’s powers—including a surplus of blood that might prove useful during the coming caravan journey.
Step.
Step.
Having soothed the frustration left by the public duel in Hangzhou’s back alleys, his footsteps were almost light.
Of course, among the things he had learned while flashing those red eyes at black-path thugs, one piece of information still nagged at him.
A secret auction house, huh…
Gwak Yeon shook his head and pushed the thought aside.
Today a far more important schedule began.
Under a pale blue dawn sky, as the morning sun rose, he stripped off the mask and headed home to the family compound. A smile had already begun to tug at the corner of his mouth.
Thump!
Today the caravan set out.
Toward the Hubei Pang Family—one of the Seven Great Families, among which, rumor said, was a house entangled with the Blood Cult.