novelraw Chapter 42 : Erasing a Debt (5)
Chapter 42 : Erasing a Debt (5)
Chapter 42: Erasing a Debt (5)
‘I had been lucky, sure, but still.’
My lower abdomen felt cold.
How should I describe this feeling?
If I borrowed an experience everyone had probably gone through at least once, it was like that moment when, while riding an express bus speeding down the highway, I suddenly felt the urgent need to use the bathroom.
That indescribable……well, describable, but the moment I let it slip out of my mouth, it felt like I would lose something fundamentally important as a human being. It was exactly that feeling.
I might have put it lightly in words, but one thing was certain: this was no ordinary sensation.
Had there ever been a rival who made Lee Taebaek this tense? Up until now, excluding the electric chair, there had not been a single time where my knees had trembled like this.
‘Ah, so this was why Tang Ji-hye had gone completely limp.’
I felt my drought-stricken capacity for empathy fill up just a little. But the moment that soft-heartedness seeped in, a wave of discomfort rushed over me.
Lee Taebaek perched his hips against the window frame. As the glow of the sunset soaked over him, a single painting was completed. The sun was already racing toward the night.
As Lee Taebaek stayed like that, Yoo Dahee quietly approached. Damn it, why was she here again? While I was oddly on edge, she spoke up.
“Why are you standing like that? Like a puppy that needs to take a dump.”
“…….”
I knew it had just been something she tossed out casually.
I knew that.
But even if she hadn’t intended it, it was a remark that struck right where it hurt. Of course, I instantly buffed my mental state, so nothing showed on my face.
‘……Just five seconds.’
No.
I needed fifteen seconds of alone time.
I didn’t intend to keep my mouth shut forever. In any case, when it came to internal energy, I needed an expert opinion.
And as luck would have it, there were two martial world experts right here. Go-eun and Tang Ji-hye.
Though the latter had to be excluded from the candidates…….
Lee Taebaek remained silent. With my stomach already unsettled, if I inhaled that harsh smoke too, things would spiral out of control. In our Lake City, the rights of smokers were enthusiastically protected.
When Lee Taebaek said nothing, Go-eun simply sucked on her pipe. Even though the ember had gone out, she still held the pipe firmly between her lips.
Then she looked in the same direction. Their reflections appeared in the window painted with the colors of dusk. A man and a woman thinking entirely opposite thoughts.
On the surface, Go-eun appeared perfectly calm.
However.
‘This is insane.’
Her soul’s eye was filled with nothing but shock. She was chewing over the overwhelming scene she had just witnessed. What the hell was this guy really?
Lee Taebaek had treated a dantian.
And not just any dantian—the notoriously difficult lower dantian. There was no mistake. Hadn’t I been standing right next to him watching?
What was martial arts?
It was a technique developed to destroy the opponent. To more efficiently take life.
Explicitly, martial arts were meant as a means for righteous conduct. But most people of the martial world thought differently, and those who actually practiced that essence were rare. The foundation and touchstone of that killing technique known as martial arts was internal energy.
Martial arts and internal energy were techniques and power sources for destruction, so it was common sense in the martial world that they were fundamentally incompatible with healing.
That phrasing was in the past tense because that long-standing common sense had been utterly shattered. By Lee Taebaek.
‘It’s not impossible.’
If enough time was taken and proper nourishment provided, a dantian could naturally recover. If a sufficiently high-level master assisted, it was possible to restore a dantian to something close to its original state.
‘……There are cases, but…….’
A dantian that was already destroyed, or on the verge of destruction, required surgery. It was a dangerous method that involved cutting open the lower abdomen and directly manipulating the dantian.
‘……Tang Ji-hye took a direct hit to the lower dantian. Ban isn’t overwhelmingly strong, but it must have hurt enough to nearly kill her.’
Ban’s physique was larger than that of an average adult man. A kick from someone like that had landed squarely. Even for Tang Ji-hye, there was no way the lower dantian would have survived unscathed.
And yet.
‘Without any incision at all, he just touched it with his hand.’
Go-eun shifted her gaze and gave Tang Ji-hye a quick look. At the same time, the colors of her pupils and sclera inverted.
Her irises turned white, the edges pitch-black. Around her eyes, bulging blood vessels asserted their presence.
Among mages, an extremely small number could clearly see the meridians of a martial artist. The circulation of internal energy was drawn in fluorescent streams, as if viewed through X-ray goggles.
Magic Eyes. For her, they came with the tremendous restriction of ‘giving up something most important to oneself,’ so even those mages hesitated to acquire them.
“Nuuna……?”
For a moment, Ban froze, Tang Ji-hye furrowed her brow, and Lee Taebaek remained calm.
The attention focused on her didn’t bother Go-eun. The mage was simply absorbed in her research.
‘The dantian is almost completely healed!’
Go-eun’s mouth fell slightly open. That said, for some reason, the total amount of internal energy had decreased just a bit.
‘Even that, considering the lower dantian was on the brink of collapse, is practically a miracle.’
When Go-eun stared so intently, Tang Ji-hye wondered what was going on. It couldn’t be that she wanted to fight now, of all times.
“Wait, this is…….”
Her vermilion pupils widened. As blood finally rushed back to her brain, she began to grasp the situation.
Immediately after, Tang Ji-hye looked at Lee Taebaek.
Any martial artist would know that Lee Taebaek’s ability was not a simple technique.
A skill that had reached the divine realm. A divine art.
‘Reversal magic.’
A Gifted that appeared with a probability of one in 99,999,999,999. Even that number was forced statistical guesswork; in truth, maybe one would appear every two or three centuries.
And an ability like that appearing a second time in this generation alone?
“……Is this for real?”
Muttering, Tang Ji-hye sprang up as if her pelvis bounced. Her hair, which had spread into a triangular shape, gathered into a single line.
Tang Ji-hye strode toward the window. Ban, who had been floundering, suddenly stiffened.
“Hey, you—dumpling!”
The words shot straight out of his spinal cord without passing through his brain. When it came to the cult leader, Ban was a fanatic whose sense of fear was completely paralyzed.
“Don’t act up and stay right there, kid.”
Tang Ji-hye warned him with eyes gone cold.
“I just promised that I wouldn’t touch you or that Lee Taebaek-or-whatever-his-name-is. But that was about the dropkick you took. If you keep acting up beyond that, I won’t just sit still either.”
“…….”
“Hoo…… What am I even doing, dealing with a brat. Anyway, don’t worry and just keep leaning on that crutch you were using. From here on out, this is a conversation between adults.”
“Oh. A conversation between adults.”
“Fuck. Do you really want to get hit?”
Just as Tang Ji-hye clicked her tongue sharply, Lee Taebaek, who had been keeping silent, finally opened his mouth.
“So, um.”
Lee Taebaek continued awkwardly.
“How do you do that thing called regulating qi and meditating?”
“……?”
“……??”
“……???”
Lee Taebaek had ended up collecting a multitude of hooks without realizing it. Tang Ji-hye, having become utterly dumbfounded, spat out the words tangled in her mouth just as they were.
“You…… are you a god?”
Insane-.
For now, they decided to move locations. By all accounts, qi regulation and meditation had to be done in a safe place, in a humble atmosphere.
Up until morning, Eunko Bar also met those conditions.
That was because residents who knew the true nature of Eunko Bar never even came near it, and martial world practitioners avoided it due to the principle of non-aggression between orthodox and unorthodox factions. On top of that, there was a big sign on the front door that plainly read ‘CLOSE.’ By common sense, there was no way any drinking customers would come.
Unless someone had a hole drilled through their head, would anyone violate all three of those conditions just to enter Eunko Bar? There really shouldn’t be such an idiot under normal circumstances.
And yet.
There was one. Such an idiot.
“……So, you’re saying it said CLOSE, and you still went in?”
Ban asked absentmindedly.
“Yeah.”
“Why, exactly?”
“Ask the person involved.”
Ban’s eyes turned toward the back. Steam was puffing up from a pair of dumplings.
On top of that, Go-eun let out a derisive snort. It was a critical hit. Tang Ji-hye ground her teeth in humiliation.
“Just asking, but…….”
Ban drove the nail in.
“You don’t know English?”
“…….”
Tang Ji-hye swallowed her anger as if gulping down a fireball. Then she made an excuse in slurred pronunciation.
“Befowre, it waws fine even if I diwnt knoow thaaat kind of thing?”
“Ah…… I see.”
Ban nodded exaggeratedly and continued walking. It was his own way of trying to stop rubbing salt in the wound.
But still…….
Brrrrrr.
That only further provoked Tang Ji-hye’s sense of humiliation. She huffed and complained. Lee Taebaek thought, why did she follow along just to make a fuss?
‘I told her to go, and she still followed. No matter how little pride she has.’
She had thrown away all dignity and presence. Well, the Resistance’s core stance was opposition to authority. Accordingly, in many battalions, regular members and battalion commanders interacted casually.
Of course, separate from that, it was true that Tang Ji-hye’s conduct lowered the expectations one might have for a ‘Battalion Commander.’
As Lee Taebaek shook his head, his gaze locked squarely with Tang Ji-hye’s. And in that fleeting moment, Tang Ji-hye read Lee Taebaek’s thoughts.
“The guy who mocked me for not knowing English doesn’t even know how to do qi regulation and meditation.”
“Stop snapping already. I told you to go your way—you followed on your own, and you’re being obnoxiously loud.”
Go-eun snapped sharply.
That was refreshing. If my stomach had been okay, it would’ve been exactly what I, Lee Taebaek, would’ve said myself.
“We’re rooted in the martial world, so after we learn to walk, we start learning qi regulation and meditation right away. When would an ordinary person ever learn that? Don’t follow us—go study English or something. You’re single-handedly disgracing the Central Plains, seriously.”
“…….”
The one-sided scuffle only quieted down when their destination finally came into view. The former Stiletto Club. They had arrived at the current Baekbaek Order First Branch.
“Oh.”
Amid the haphazardly overdeveloped surroundings, it stood out as something both otherworldly and majestic, as if cut out with scissors. The Eastern-style pavilion, its angles sharply defined, was particularly striking.
Lee Taebaek’s group approached the place. Then shadows suddenly rose up, as if gnawing upward from the base of the windows.
They were children. The kids were huddled closely together, pressing their foreheads against the glass.
The moment they recognized the four faces, their expressions fell all at once.
Soon after, the children tangled together and poured out toward the entrance.
“Investigatooor-!”
“It’s the Investigator! The Investigator!”
“Baekbaek! Baekbaek! Baekbaek!”
Unable to contain their excitement, the children burst into tears. At that, a troubled look surfaced on Lee Taebaek’s face, who had been maintaining unshakable composure on the way over.
The children gathered close to Lee Taebaek. Yet as if they dared not cross a line, they maintained a proper distance and surrounded the four of them.
“What…… is this……?”
Without a shred of exaggeration, it was a thunderous welcome. Tang Ji-hye wore a stunned expression. What was this scene of madness?
“Are you okay? You were really surprised, right?”
Ban said as he came up beside her. He was wearing a proud smile as he looked at Lee Taebaek, the center of their reverence.
“To us who live in the bottommost district, the Gaepa Investigator is like a benefactor who gave us a goal in life.”
“…A benefactor…….”
Tang Ji-hye seemed to chew over the texture of the word. Its weight was unmistakably heavy. She was a daughter of the Sichuan Tang Clan.
“It might look like we’re overreacting. We might look like fanatics. But.”
A boy bearing the stigma of delinquent, dropout, and prostitute’s child spoke.
“For kids like us, abandoned by society, we need something to be passionate about. And if someone gives us faith, we’ll follow them even if it kills us.”
The boy’s eyes were far too old to belong to a teenager.
“I’m truly sorry for attacking you earlier. I broke the Investigator’s rule about not using violence. I’ll repay my own debt. So please…… don’t push it onto the Investigator or the other kids…….”
“Haa.”
Tang Ji-hye let out a deep sigh.
“You know, if you’re a kid, you should at least sound like one. Have you lived your whole life already by yourself? The way you talk, seriously.”
“You don’t look all that different.”
“Ugh, whatever. Fine. Yeah, what made you like this is this damn city.”
“Hahaha. You’re more sensitive than you look. This must also be the will of Baekbaek.”
“Maake sure to the very end! And you, there’s one thing you’re mistaken about—the debt isn’t yours.”
She scratched the back of her head roughly.
Damn it. If it turned out like this, the meaning of running away from that detestable household would disappear.
But they said you couldn’t deny your blood. Tang Ji-hye didn’t want to put this situation into words, but still.
“The one who has to repay the debt is.”
After a brief moment of dazed silence.
Ban Lionheart bowed his head with a broad smile on his face.
“Please take good care of me.”