Allies of the Bamboo Grove
Gwak Yeon was covered in blood and filth.
Yet Cheon Gang and Gwak Ho-shin paid no heed to any of it as they came running.
“Are you all right?”
“Brother!”
“Did you fight—! Did you win—!”
Not only Cheon Gang, but even Gwak Ho-shin—who was usually so shy he barely spoke at all—seized Gwak Yeon’s hands and made no secret of his joy.
And then there was Yeo Baek-rang, who the moment he spotted Ju Hwa-jeong standing nearby bolted straight into her arms. The people of the Cheonhae Merchant Group, as if they had all agreed beforehand, turned their backs and pretended not to notice.
“Thank heavens—truly, thank heavens! But you must never charge in so recklessly again! Do you understand!?”
Ju Hwa-jeong’s nose was red and tears clung to the corners of her eyes as she poured out her scolding. Only after that final lecture did the joyful reunion begin to settle.
“……By the way, what about the fight earlier?”
“We cleaned it up on our side as well! Completely wiped out those bastards, yes sir! No one on our end was seriously hurt!”
“And those people over there?”
“Hahaha! You’ll be shocked when you hear this!”
Cheon Gang glanced back, then abruptly lowered his voice and spoke almost in a whisper.
“……It’s the Hubei Pang Family.”
“The Hubei Pang Family?”
“Yes. They showed up and helped us just as we were nearly finished smashing those jiangshi and the rest of the scum.”
In truth, Gwak Yeon had known the moment he saw that banner.
Even beneath moonlight and starlight, the flag of the Hubei Pang Family—famed among the Seven Great Families for its unbridled momentum—flaunted its majestic presence.
It snapped in the wind!
Beside that banner, a man stepped forward and offered a bold greeting.
“I am Pang Mu-gwang of the Hubei Pang Family.”
He was a compact man, short but solidly built. Straightening his chest, he raised both hands clasped before him toward Gwak Yeon.
“This Pang dares, on behalf of the vengeful spirits of the Wondan Escort Agency and the common folk of Beijing, to offer Young Hero Gwak his deepest thanks!”
With the formal clasped-fist salute, Pang Mu-gwang laid out the details. Holding a torn fragment of the Wondan Escort Agency’s flag, he explained the situation cleanly and simply.
“At the request of the Wondan Escort Agency, which vanished not long ago, we combed through every corner of Hebei and found our way here. Night had fallen, so we were searching for a campsite behind that ridge, intending to scour this bamboo grove at first light.”
“And that was when you discovered the fighting.”
“Exactly so!”
The exchange was refreshingly direct.
“Today has been a truly precious day! Not only did we happen upon the people of the Cheonhae Merchant Group with whom we are about to trade, but we have met Young Hero Gwak as well!”
“My greetings are late. I am Gwak Yeon of the Seoho Gwak Family of Hangzhou.”
“Hahaha! I’ve already heard the stories!”
Pang Mu-gwang answered Gwak Yeon’s clasped-fist salute by lifting his own joined hands again, laughing heartily.
“As it happens, I heard about Young Hero Gwak from my little brother Jegal here, who was staying in Hebei!”
“A pleasure to see you.”
At those words a man stepped forward—a lean figure holding a folding fan. He inclined his head quietly, then opened his mouth with an utterly expressionless face.
“We meet again.”
“Ah.”
“We met once before. You may not remember.”
“Is this not Young Master Jegal Chan of the Jegal Family?”
“You remember?”
“Of course I do. Did we not exchange brief greetings after the martial contest hosted by the Cheonhae Merchant Group last time?”
Gwak Yeon’s answer flowed without a hitch.
“Your memory is excellent.”
“Even so, it is but a drop of blood from a bird’s foot before Young Master Jegal.”
“Hmm.”
Jegal Chan’s eyebrows, which had remained utterly flat, lifted ever so slightly.
After the contest against Baek Jung-hyeok hosted by the Cheonhae Merchant Group, Moyong Wol-un had introduced them and they had exchanged the briefest of greetings in passing. Jegal Chan had been too busy with family affairs even to attend the banquet afterward. Gwak Yeon had a separate reason for remembering him.
How could I forget? The whole time we were drinking, Moyong Wol-un kept complaining about how rigid and inflexible he was……
Moyong Wol-un had drunk with Gwak Yeon nearly until dawn. Even in that short time, the old man’s drunken muttering about every last shortcoming of the Jegal youth who simply did not suit him had left a lasting impression.
“Now that greetings are out of the way, let us finish the important matters first. From the looks of it, the thatched hut that served as their base has collapsed. Did you go inside and come back out?”
“Little brother Jegal.”
Pang Mu-gwang let out a quiet sigh, about to rein in the man who was diving straight into business—
“We’ve only just met. How about speaking a little more naturally? Over a drink, even. When men of the jianghu have drawn blood with their weapons, fine liquor should accompany the talk that follows.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Eh—eh?”
“Everyone has just been through an intense ordeal and is exhausted. Drinking now risks distorting whatever information we exchange. If we are going to talk, we do so sober—or better yet, rest and speak in the morning.”
“……”
“Is that not so, Young Master Gwak?”
Pang Mu-gwang looked as though he had been robbed of every word, barely swallowing his temper. Watching him, Gwak Yeon immediately took the measure of Jegal Chan’s character.
Ah. So that’s why Moyong Wol-un……
It was not only Moyong Wol-un and Pang Mu-gwang. Hwang Pil, Ju Hwa-jeong, Cheon Gang, Gwak Ho-shin—even that rascal Heoksijo—were all shooting Gwak Yeon looks that screamed, Just agree with him.
They had only met him briefly, yet already looked thoroughly fed up as they nodded. Gwak Yeon turned to Jegal Chan and spoke.
“Very well. We will share the information quickly, without liquor.”
“Good. Someone who can be reasoned with.”
In truth Gwak Yeon had wanted any additional intelligence he could get, so he agreed without fuss. Jegal Chan studied him in silence. Around them, people from every group let out quiet sighs that no one was meant to hear.
With a soft crackle and whoosh, a campfire just lit, they gathered around it and began to share everything each of them knew about the night’s events.
The man who had seemed to be the ringleader of the brigands—the one who had died in the underground chamber of the thatched hut—turned out, surprisingly, to be a figure with a proper moniker of his own.
Black Hegemon Wolf.
Among the black-path outlaws near Beijing he had woven a web of large and small connections. Even while committing one petty crime after another, his knack for never getting caught was famous even among his own kind.
Moreover, the victims believed to have been hit by the brigands under Black Hegemon Wolf’s command were far from few. Not only the Wondan Escort Agency—quite a number of escorts and merchant caravans near Hebei had been killed or wounded in sudden jiangshi attacks.
Beyond that, there was little else of note.
A merchant in Beijing who had been awaiting the Wondan Escort Agency’s cargo had complained of the matter to the Hubei Pang Family, with whom he shared a long friendship. Pang Mu-gwang, forever on the lookout for a chance to display chivalry, had dragged along Jegal Chan—who happened to be visiting the Hubei Pang Family on Seven Great Families business—and the two of them had ended up here.
Of course, listening to the explanation of how they had zeroed in on this particular bamboo grove among the countless stretches of terrain near Beijing proved…… a little tiring.
“So you wish to know how we finally reached the vicinity of this bamboo grove? With only a few clues to work from, the conclusion was easy enough to draw.”
Jegal Chan had suddenly become very talkative.
“Of course, reaching that conclusion also required the assumption that they would be using jiangshi. Curious how I deduced that? First—”
Everyone forced their eyes wide open.
They had already been exhausted, and a full quarter-hour after they had nearly collapsed into sleep, Jegal Chan’s explanation still flowed without a single pause. By the time he reached the part about how he had discovered cart tracks and footprints of a certain form he had hypothesized—
“Thinking of it as a formation was simple. First—”
Several warriors of the Cheonhae Merchant Group and several more from the Hubei Pang Family finally could not hold on; they toppled backward and began to snore.
Still the words poured on. Only when even Cheon Gang, Gwak Ho-shin, Hwang Pil, and Pang Mu-gwang were nodding off did Jegal Chan’s explanation finally grind to a halt.
“……and that is how we arrived.”
“Mmm.”
“Since the others will also need to speak, I will keep my account brief and end it here.”
“Thank you.”
Everyone, Gwak Yeon included, offered their thanks with absolute sincerity.
Jegal Chan’s eyes gleamed as he immediately posed the next question.
“By the way—what of the thatched hut?”
Gwak Yeon considered for a moment.
Of everyone present, only Yeo Baek-rang and Gwak Yeon had entered that hut. The information he alone had experienced while fully conscious, he began to recount with careful honesty.
“In the underground chamber of the thatched hut, this is what happened.”
And so Gwak Yeon’s account continued.
Most of it was the unvarnished truth.
The vicious man and woman who had returned to the underground chamber to plan for later…… the jiangshi laid out below…… the arrangement by which they offered up collected blood and corpses in exchange for new jiangshi…… the figure they dealt with above, a person called “Lord Goechok”…… and even the formation mixed with restraining seals that blanketed the hut.
“Is that so?”
“Haa—truly bizarre. Bizarre!”
Aside from drastically downplaying his own martial prowess in easily defeating the jiangshi, there was only one thing Gwak Yeon left unsaid.
The secret auction house in Hangzhou.
The reason he did not mention the secret auction house in Hangzhou—where Black Hegemon Wolf had been meant to go in order to receive a delivery date from the man he called Lord Goechok—was simple.
I still…… don’t know.
He still had no certainty that the Hubei Pang Family and the Jegal Family were completely unconnected to the Blood Cult.
Of course, throughout the conversation his vampire senses had been stretched razor-sharp, and he had detected nothing suspicious in the physical reactions of either Pang Mu-gwang or Jegal Chan.
But there is always the one-in-a-thousand chance.
Having already obtained intelligence that one of the Seven Great Families was entangled with the Blood Cult, caution cost him nothing.
“Truly a foul and insidious combination of seals and formations!”
“It is not impossible. I once read of such things in an ancient text. The possible combinations of formations that can exist in this world are more numerous than the stars scattered across the heavens. To explain the principle, one must first begin with the Eight Trigrams—”
“By the way, Young Hero Gwak!”
True to his origins in a family renowned for mechanisms and formations, Jegal Chan’s eyes had lit up and he was about to launch into a lengthy discourse when Pang Mu-gwang swiftly cut him off.
Having rescued everyone from the demon of sleep, he thumped his chest and cried out.
“That fellow they called Lord Goechok—if what you say is true, he is a demon among demons.”
“I agree.”
“Looking at his methods, this is no ordinary sorcery. It is the sort of vicious craft that even ordinary unorthodox sect disciples would shudder at—the kind practiced only by demons who treat human lives like insects.”
“You’re right.”
Gwak Yeon agreed as well.
Lord Goechok.
Seeing Black Hegemon Wolf’s head explode the instant he tried to say where the man belonged, the odds were high that “somewhere” was deeply involved.
He may even be connected to the great evil I am hunting.
Once he had determined whether the Hubei Pang Family had any ties to the Blood Cult—and if they proved innocent—the place Gwak Yeon would have to visit was obvious.
The secret auction house in Hangzhou.
There, he would have no choice but to meet this Lord Goechok in person.
“In any case, you have worked hard, Young Hero Gwak!”
“You have worked hard as well. Incidentally, I never finished speaking about formations earlier—does Young Master Gwak happen to have any interest in formations?”
The moment Pang Mu-gwang finished, Jegal Chan opened his mouth as if he had been waiting for exactly this. Another long-winded speech was about to begin.
“If you do have interest—”
“Ah, that reminds me!”
Weariness was closing in; Gwak Yeon deftly shifted the focus of the conversation.
“As for me, well enough—but the one who truly suffered more than I did is Young Master Yeo Baek-rang of the Cheonhae Merchant Group, sitting right here.”
“……Wh-what?!”
Yeo Baek-rang, who had been dozing upright, snapped his eyes open the instant his name was spoken. He straightened his body where it had been leaning against Ju Hwa-jeong’s shoulder, wiped his mouth with his arm, and rose. Gwak Yeon addressed him.
“Your sense of responsibility is truly remarkable.”
“Mmm?!”
“In order to protect a pouch containing part of the sample goods that had to be delivered to the Hubei Pang Family for the trade, you pursued those brigands all the way to their thatched hut alone—and retrieved it in the end.”
“Ohh!”
It was not only Yeo Baek-rang’s eyes that flew open.
Hwang Pil and Ju Hwa-jeong, seated to either side of the boy, could not hide their shock as they stared at Gwak Yeon.
……How?
The sample goods destined for the Hubei Pang Family.
The pouch the brigand had fled with earlier had been one of twenty such pouches packed with those samples.
But they had never once told Gwak Yeon any of that.
Under their astonished gazes, Gwak Yeon continued to praise Yeo Baek-rang.
“Risking your life to recover the trade goods so that the promise with the esteemed family would not be broken—that is truly the bearing of the young master of the Cheonhae Merchant Group, the greatest merchant house of Zhejiang.”
“Haa!”
“What’s more, even after being dragged into the thatched hut, how composed you remained. Although their tricks did rob you of your senses for a time, the moment you woke your first thought was of the goods.”
Thanks to Gwak Yeon beginning to gild Yeo Baek-rang’s face, the conversation had completely left its previous track.
“If I had faced something like this at the young master’s age, the tear tracks would never have dried from my cheeks.”
“Was it truly that serious!”
“I guarantee it.”
The praise, delivered while lowering himself, reached its peak.
“By the time the young master reaches my age, he will have become a man so fine that I would not even dare to compare myself.”
“Ooooh!”
Pang Mu-gwang rose with a great booming laugh, offered Yeo Baek-rang a clasped-fist salute, and conveyed his thanks.
“Indeed! That the Hubei Pang Family encountered the Cheonhae Merchant Group was a fated meeting the likes of which the world will never see again! I thank you! This Pang will never forget the young master’s sincerity—staking even his life on the trade with us!”
“I-I, too, am h-honored, yes.”
Looking dazed, Yeo Baek-rang stood and returned the clasped-fist salute in that same awkward, archaic manner of speech.
Pang Mu-gwang smiled as he faced him, and a warm atmosphere bloomed around them.
Just as things seemed ready to draw to a close, several of those still awake arrived at the same thought at nearly the same moment.
“Well then, let us have a drink! I brought some fine liquor—”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why!”
“We must match our schedule with those who are already asleep.”
“Damn it all.”
At Jegal Chan’s firm voice, sighs rose here and there.
They flopped down wherever they were and sought sleep.
And the next day, they arrived at the outskirts of Beijing, where the Hubei Pang Family was based.