novelraw Chapter 62 : Chapter 62
Chapter 62 : Chapter 62
Chapter 62 - The Truly Pathetic Person
Twenty-two. A blossoming age.
At this time, when a woman’s beauty reached its peak, the gisaeng Jinhwa began to be called the First Beauty of Yiliang.
Even within the Drunken Fragrance Pavilion, which was famous for its many beauties, her beauty was second to none.
To the point where people came from other regions, including Luoyang, just to see her face.
However.
Despite receiving the highest praise a gisaeng could get, Jinhwa made a huge mistake.
A taboo that all women working in a gisaeng house must remember and remember again.
She had broken the taboo of ‘not giving one’s heart to a man’.
“Jinhwa. I think you’ll have to help me.”
Even before Jinhwa became famous, there was a handsome man who visited her every few days.
He was a man with such striking features that one would wonder if he even needed to visit a gisaeng house.
Unlike other guests, he did not treat her carelessly, and above all, his gentle and warm smile, like the moonlight in the first month, seemed to soothe her heart, frozen by the secular world.
The fact that his martial arts skills were not particularly outstanding, or that he was a member of a declining sect, did not seem like major flaws.
Because this man possessed a ‘sincerity’ that could not be felt from anyone else.
However, on the night she met him, his characteristic smile was nowhere to be found on his lips.
“It seems the sect’s fortune has run out. I plan to abandon my sword and move to a new place to settle down.”
The man explained the whole story with a sincere face.
The sight of the two handsome people exchanging a secret promise under the dim moonlight was both dangerous and sweet.
“Yi Chan. Are you saying you will abandon both the sect and the sword?”
“What’s so precious about a collapsing sect? I don’t want to cling to a sword I have no talent for, and I don’t want you to keep working at the gisaeng house. All I need is you.”
“……Yi Chan.”
“Although we might not be wealthy, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you follow me?”
The swordsman of the Diancang Sect, Yi Chan, spoke words akin to a promise of eternal love to Jinhwa.
Jinhwa, who loved the man, firmly believed his promise and gave him all the money she had saved without holding back.
And not long after that.
The Diancang Sect was attacked by unorthodox factions and met its demise.
***
“Until then, I was just admiring Yi Chan’s insight. It was as if he had anticipated something like this would happen and prepared for it.”
Jinhwa.
The tongue of the woman who had now become Lady Mihwa began to slur slightly.
With her monologue that began with a long sigh, the sweet scent of liquor was slowly accumulating.
“But for some reason, I never heard from Yi Chan. With the money I gave him, he could have opened several cloth stores in another region.”
Biyoung listened to her words in silence.
It was a development he could not have imagined.
To think that there was a fellow disciple who had turned his back on the sect and fled before its destruction.
‘He was really handsome.’
The World's Fastest Sword had always thought that when he saw Yi Chan.
He thought that if Yi Chan's sword skills were even a quarter as good as his face, he would have become a more famous swordsman than himself.
He remembered dismissing the rumors that Yi Chan frequented gisaeng houses, thinking he was just living up to his handsome face.
He never imagined that his loyalty to the sect would be so lacking.
“So you never found that man named Chan… no, Yi Chan?”
At that, Lady Mihwa gave a bewitching smile.
“How could that be? The reason I painstakingly built up the Loyal Heart Pavilion and created the Syndicate of Ten Thousand Eyes was all to find Yi Chan.”
“Then……”
So.
She had walked that rough and thorny path just to find Yi Chan?
“It wasn’t a particularly difficult task. In fact, sitting still and waiting for contact that would never come was hundreds of times more painful. Could something have happened to him? Could there be another reason he wasn’t contacting me? Such thoughts never left my head all day. I thought I would go crazy if I continued like this. So I made a decision.”
“You decided to find him yourself?”
“Yes. At the time, I was quite well-known in Yiliang County, so I received a lot of help in various ways.”
The expression ‘quite well-known’ was an excessive display of modesty.
She was still so fine and beautiful now; it was as clear as looking at the palm of one's hand what Lady Mihwa must have been like in her twenties.
Just as Jinhwa had harbored feelings for Yi Chan, those who harbored feelings for her would have helped Lady Mihwa in every way possible.
“After those years filled with obsession passed, was it a year ago? I was finally able to find out where Yi Chan was living.”
“Heo……”
It was a process that had taken well over ten years.
The feelings of Lady Mihwa, who had obtained the news she had longed for at the end of that long time, were difficult for Biyoung to guess.
“What do you think was the first thing I saw when I went to Yi Chan’s house?”
Now, the tables had completely turned, and bottles of liquor were piled up like a mountain in front of her.
The liquor she gulped down roughly flowed over her lips and dripped down from her chin.
The clear liquid looked just like the clear something that comes from the eyes.
“It was a heavily pregnant woman.”
“…………!”
“She was a shabby and plain-looking woman. Just an ordinary person you could commonly see on the street. At first, I suspected the information was wrong. Even though I knew that the information confirmed by the Syndicate of Ten Thousand Eyes could not be wrong.”
She must have wanted to deny reality.
Biyoung silently nodded his head.
“As I stood there, half out of my mind, she called for Yi Chan, and the look on his face when I saw him then was truly……”
Lady Mihwa’s face began to change from moment to moment.
It was filled with burning anger, then became so tearful it was hard to look at, and later, a bitterness that made one smack one's lips washed over it.
“When I thought that I had endured all those years for a man like this, all sorts of thoughts came to my mind.”
As if mocking herself, Lady Mihwa emptied all the remaining liquor bottles with a face full of scorn.
Biyoung listened to her story in silence and then asked.
“Did you kill him?”
“He wasn’t even worth killing. He got on his knees and begged me to spare his life. In return, he said he would give me information that would make me money.”
Information that would make money, revealed by someone who was once part of the Diancang Sect.
Only then did Biyoung understand why Lady Mihwa had revealed her past.
She had heard the information that there were secret manuals and treasures in the Diancang Sect at that very moment.
“Hohoho. Do you know what? Actually, the truly pathetic person isn’t Yi Chan.”
“……?”
“A gisaeng who broke the taboo of not giving her heart to a man, a foolish gisaeng who wasted her entire life deceived by a false promise, is the most pathetic in the world……”
Thud!
With the sound of her forehead hitting the table, Lady Mihwa’s words ended there.
Having completely lost consciousness, Lady Mihwa had buried her head and fallen asleep.
“Good grief…… there are still two more questions left.”
Left alone, Biyoung could only scratch his head and smack his lips.
***
“So, you just came back?”
“What else could I do? She was passed out drunk.”
“Heh, look at this frustrating fellow.”
The scary-looking man’s face contorted fiercely.
His expression was so ferocious that a waiter who was peeking at him dropped his tray.
Crash!
“Hic! I’m sorry! Please spare my life!”
“……Why are you apologizing only to me? There are more than one or two customers here.”
“Th-that was also my fault! It’s all my fault!”
At that sight, the young man sitting opposite him shook his shoulders and giggled.
The man with the grim expression, Uma, waved one arm as if he didn’t even want to speak.
“Forget it and just bring the liquor quickly.”
“Yes, sir!”
The waiter picked up the tray and moved away in a hurry, and Uma’s gaze turned back to the young man.
“You should have slapped her cheek or splashed water on her to force her awake. Does it make sense to just come back like this?”
“I passed the message to the guy who was hiding. That I’ll come back tomorrow to hear the rest of the story.”
“The guy who was hiding? There was a guy hiding in that place?”
“Yeah. He seemed like a patient fellow. And skilled too.”
Biyoung spoke nonchalantly, but Uma felt a chill in his chest.
The Loyal Heart Pavilion was the best gisaeng house in Yiliang County and also served as the headquarters of the Syndicate of Ten Thousand Eyes.
From Biyoung’s perspective, it was no exaggeration to say that he had thrown himself into the tiger’s mouth.
The one directly protecting the head of the Syndicate of Ten Thousand Eyes would surely be a master of swordsmanship.
To think he went drinking heavily in a place where such a person was hiding, Biyoung’s audacity felt truly remarkable.
“He would be a good match for you, Senior Brother. I should have brought you along if I had known.”
“Hmph. As if some back-alley information syndicate could be that skilled.”
“Where are those two now?”
Uma’s beady eyes subtly pointed towards the ceiling.
“I’ve tied them up so they can’t escape. It won’t be a problem to keep them tied up for another day.”
“Is there a chance they could untie themselves and escape?”
“Don’t worry. This is my specialty.”
Uma bared his teeth, expressing his confidence.
A member of the Diancang Sect who had a knack for confining and tying people up.
If the previous sect leader had heard this conversation, he might have coughed up blood.
But Biyoung’s eyes looking at Uma were filled with satisfaction.
“Good. Then shall we step out for a bit?”
“Where to?”
“There’s something I need to be careful about discussing here.”
Uma’s eyebrows, gathered in the middle, twitched once.
He gulped down a bottle of liquor in one go and stood up from his seat.
The two men who left the inn walked in silence for a while.
Then Biyoung suddenly asked.
“Senior Brother. What did you think when I was beating up Han Ryeong before?”
At that question, Uma scratched his chin once.
“Hmm…… I thought if a demon were resurrected from hell, it would be you. Even loan sharks more vicious than me don’t beat people up like you do. Practically a human butcher……”
“No. Not that.”
“Hmm?”
“The swordsmanship. The swordsmanship. How was it?”
“The swordsmanship……”
His face flushed slightly red.
Because every time he recalled the memory of that day, a special emotion welled up.
“I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“Yeah. To be honest, I was thinking that there were limits to the Diancang Sect’s swordsmanship. I thought that even if we reclaimed Diancang Mountain like this, we wouldn’t be competitive compared to other sects. But……”
Uma recalled the swordsmanship Biyoung had shown that day.
Concise yet strong, fast yet tyrannical.
It was a swordsmanship very familiar to Uma, yet at the same time, it felt completely alien.
The Eagle Talon Twelve Swords.
When that basic and simple swordsmanship was unfolded at Biyoung’s fingertips, it transformed into an unparalleled martial art, second to none in the world.
“I didn’t know that the Eagle Talon Twelve Swords, which I thought was nothing special, had such power. It wasn’t the Eagle Talon Twelve Swords that was wrong, it was my eyes.”
“You don’t need to blame yourself like that. In the first place, you never even learned the proper Eagle Talon Twelve Swords, Senior Brother.”
As the conversation continued, the road turned into a mountain path, and Biyoung and Uma reached a deserted area overgrown with weeds.
“How about it? Do you think you can try using what you learned that day?”
“Now?”
Uma’s eyebrows twitched once again.
No matter how much he had practiced the swordsmanship his whole life, he had not yet properly practiced the ‘standard form’ that Biyoung had shown him.
“Of course, I can try to follow it a little…… but did you bring me all the way here with the intention of making me try it?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not trying to beat me up under the pretext of a sparring match, are you?”
“Hey. Others might misunderstand if they hear that. I’m not that much of a personality-flawed person, am I?”
…….
But you are……?
That’s exactly right……?
As Uma stared blankly, Biyoung grinned and gestured with his chin.
“The ones you have to face aren’t me, but them over there.”
“!”
Sparks flew in the eyes of Uma, who had been looking at Biyoung with a suspicious face.
Because he had finally felt the murderous aura approaching the two men.
‘Since when……?’
Was it when we left the inn?
Or was it already from the time we met in front of the inn?
A cold wind brushed past Uma’s back.
Uma was seasoned in dealing with ordinary levels of tailing.
There had been more than one or two debt collectors who had secretly followed and attacked him.
The fact that he hadn’t noticed at all meant that the enemy was at least his equal or a greater master.
“Come out now.”
As if in response to Biyoung’s voice, masked men began to walk out from the forest one by one.