The fire burned all night, and was only fully put out after dawn. Officials, with cloths soaked in water covering their noses and mouths, thoroughly searched the pile of ashes from which smoke still rose. They didn't even glance at the burnt corpses.
Everyone picked up the silver taels that had been on the gambling table first. They also diligently collected the swords and other valuable items used by the swordsmen. Anxiously, I stared intently at the spot where my room had been.
The 30 coins hidden in the wall by the bed. I planned to run over and find them as soon as the Officials left. Silver taels and coins, even if melted by fire and their shape ruined, could still be used without any problem.
The Officials knew this well. That's why they were so persistently digging through the scene of the fire. In the end, the 30 coins also fell into the hands of some Official.
It was hard to recognize his face, but it was certainly one of the bastards who usually took bribes from the owner. As if that wasn't enough, the Officials stripped clean even the hinges and small metal fittings on the lodging's door. My entire fortune was plundered right before my eyes.
I was furious and gnashed my teeth, but I couldn't go and demand they return my money. Far from getting my money back, it was obvious I'd be framed as the arsonist. It was better to be alive and penniless than to have my head hung before the city gates.
Unexpectedly, I was a free man again, but I wasn't the least bit happy. The place where I ate and slept was gone. I had no idea where I would eat my next meal or sleep for the night.
It was the dead of winter. A truly terrible time to become a beggar. Here and there in the back alleys of the entertainment district, I saw a few frozen corpses.
One of them was naked. Beggars had stripped it of all its clothes and even its shoes. They might have even killed him before stripping him.
As I walked aimlessly, clutching the kitchen knife—my only possession, which I had taken from the kitchen—thoughts of my hometown suddenly came to mind. I was no longer the little kid who had gritted his teeth and fled the gambling den two years ago.
Whether by begging or stealing, I was confident I could somehow survive and find my way back home by asking around. The problem was what came after. If I returned looking like a beggar, my prospects for survival were bleak.
I had no inherited land, nor the money to buy livestock. Sister Soso's family wasn't very well-off either. It would be shameless to show up in such a shabby state and freeload off them.
Since I had come to the city, I wanted to earn proper money and return home in glory. All I had was a single kitchen knife for self-defense. All I knew how to do was a still clumsy tile cheating technique and the ability to read people's expressions.
With skills like these, I couldn't find a job anywhere. If I loitered around another gambling den, my wrist would be chopped off before I could even win a single round.
It might be a different story for a young master from a rich family, dressed in silk and with bodyguards, but kids in shabby clothes couldn't even get near a gambling den in the first place. Even to work as a waiter in a small inn, they wouldn't hire you without connections.
But I couldn't just take up a knife and start robbing people either. To make a living as a roadside bandit, you need to overwhelm your opponent with a large build or a menacing face. Only then will they not even think of fighting, trembling as they hand over their money.
At that time, I was just thirteen years old. I wasn't small for my age, but even I could see my face was plain. If I blocked a passerby's path with a kitchen knife, it was obvious I'd either be laughed at or beaten to a pulp and handed over to the Officials.
The son of a bitch who sold me was a weakling, even among adults. I was able to kill him because of my blood-soaked grudge. I didn't have that kind of grudge against strangers I'd never seen before.
I survived by sneaking into the kitchens of brothels and inns like a rat to steal food, until an unexpected opportunity came my way. I happened to fall in with a group of wandering swordsmen. It was a small and shabby organization, the kind that would take in kids like me.
They said I would get a day's wage just by making up the numbers, but while on the job, the atmosphere turned hostile and a sword fight broke out. In the fight I was unwittingly dragged into, my experience with killing and my ability to read expressions were a great help.
I somehow survived, earning a reputation for being 'quite vicious for a young one,' along with 10 grimy coins. Since then, I've survived by eating by the sword. For lowly lives with nothing and no education, the martial world was about the only place where they could make a living without being looked down on.
In other words, ninety percent of martial artists were bastards with nothing and no education. Fools who draw their swords at the slightest provocation. Despicable bastards who don't hesitate to ambush one person from behind with many.
Swordsmen who live as they please, drinking and gambling, and don't hesitate to commit robbery when they run out of money. Scoundrels, whose balls are a waste, who boast about raping women as if they were heroic tales. Idiots who repay kindness with enmity and act all proud of it.
Among these irredeemable beings that even the Buddha would despise, I sometimes find it miraculous that my head is still attached to my neck. Could it be because of my talent for knife work, which was recognized even when I was trimming vegetables and meat in the gambling den's kitchen? That's not it.
This world isn't so easy that a vicious, undisciplined sword style swung without any lineage could keep working. There's a skill to killing people. And I was lucky enough to learn a little of that skill.
An unnamed sword art I learned in the back alleys of Hangzhou from a one-armed, middle-aged man, in exchange for buying him food and drinks for two months. Without it, I would have become crow food long ago. Eighteen forms without an inner cultivation method.
It was a supremely practical sword art. At first, I thought it was something the middle-aged man had created through real combat during his heyday. The more I practiced it, the more I felt this was no ordinary sword art.
The connections and system between the forms were solid, and even to my eyes, which had never properly learned martial arts, I could feel something that could be called martial principle. It was like being able to guess the existence of a huge mountain range just by seeing the foot of Mount Tai.
No matter how I looked at it, it seemed like the martial art of a martial family or orthodox sect that was once a big deal. The middle-aged man only passed down the forms; he never revealed his name or his school to the very end. He didn't even tell me the name of the sword art.
Since that encounter, which you could call a fortuitous one, my lifeline has become as tough as a whale's sinew. Even so, I'm no match for the martial artists from places like the famous righteous sects, great clans, or the Five Great Families, who have been systematically trained to kill people like assassins since childhood.
Setting aside such deadly folks, I made good use of the unnamed sword technique against most ordinary swordsmen. Except for a short time working as a guest guard for a small escort agency, I have lived as a swordsman, wandering the Central Plains.
The desire to return home came to me right after the end of the last battle where I was hired as a swordsman. It was a dirty war between two factions fighting over interests. As the swordsmen mobilized by both sides flooded the streets, passersby fled and merchants hastily shut their doors.
A moment later, with the clang of swords clashing, severed limbs and corpses were rolling on the dirt ground. Heart-wrenching screams, shouts, and curses rose with the dust clouds for a long time before subsiding. From the perspective of ordinary people living their lives diligently, it was a fight where nothing would change no matter who won.
Even if they all wiped each other out, some other bastards would just flow in from somewhere and extort protection money. This time, too, I didn't die. There are many martial artists in the world, but masters who live the life of a swordsman were extremely rare.
Those skilled enough to be called masters had shrewdly taken up positions in various factions or merchant guilds, and were sitting around getting fat bellies. So, despite my young age, someone at my level was considered quite a master. Covered in blood, I surveyed my surroundings.
The survivors were collecting the weapons and silver taels of the dead. A dying wandering swordsman, gasping for breath, came into view. I pointed my sword at him, intending to kill him and then search his belongings.
The man looked up at the sky with unfocused, vacant eyes and muttered desperately. It wasn't a plea to be saved. He said he wanted to go home.
He faintly repeated trivial memories of bathing in the river with his friends and catching and grilling fish to eat, as if they were a scene from a paradise seen in a dream. Listening to him, many thoughts crossed my mind.
The realization that if I kept eating by the sword, I would end up just like him, jolted me to my senses.
If I was going to live a desperate life only to be struck down by a sword one day, longing for my hometown as I became food for wild animals, wouldn't it be better to just go see it once while my body was still whole? I turned right then and there and headed for my hometown.
The decision to return home was made that impulsively. The steps toward my hometown were not light. I was no longer an innocent eleven-year-old kid.
Sister Soso must have changed a lot, too. In my childhood, when I boasted that I would propose to Sister Soso when I grew up, I didn't even know what marriage was. It was enough just to become Sister Soso's closest family and be with her forever.
It was similar to how a little girl says she'll marry her dad when she grows up. By now, Sister Soso would probably be married to someone. She's likely living well with sons and daughters.
There would be no place for me beside her. No. That didn't matter. The decisive reason I had hesitated to return home until now was that I was a martial artist who had killed many people.
I saw a murderer when I was young. It was an accidental killing that occurred when two farmers got into a fight over irrigating their rice paddies. The entire village watched with fearful eyes as the farmer was taken away by the Officials.
When they passed in front of our house, Sister Soso covered my eyes with her hand. Her hand was trembling terribly. Her body, pressed against my back, was trembling too.
That was the first time in my life I had ever seen Sister Soso tremble like that. I have killed dozens of people. The reasons for the killings were the same as any other martial artist.
Personal grudges. Accidental clashes. Self-defense.
I've also been hired for money several times. Swordsmen, rapists, killer-robbers, thieves, wastrels, drifters, gamblers, scoundrels, loafers, swindlers, fools, wanderers... Most of the bastards who died by my hand were martial artists and villains.
They were the kind of people whose absence would be a help to the world, but the fact that I killed people doesn't change. I've been hurt in many places while fighting countless bloody battles. Still, I was lucky not to die and managed to survive.
The wounds on my body healed and became scars. An indelible scar was left on my heart as well. From some point on, whenever I thought of my hometown, blood would seep even into my dreams.
When I push open the gate I long for, Sister Soso comes out to greet me happily. I reach out my hands to run and embrace her, but then I flinch. Bright red drops of blood dripping from my blood-soaked hands.
No matter how much I wipe them, they never dry. Hiding my hands behind my back is useless. At the sickening smell of blood clinging to my body, Sister Soso steps back, terrified.
Seeing as I always wake up around that point, that must be the climax of the nightmare. A nightmare like that surrounded my hometown like a barrier. That was why, while I roamed aimlessly through the Central Plains from Sichuan to Zhejiang, I could never bring myself to even go near my hometown.
This time was different. I diligently made my way toward my hometown. I traveled along the main road, and when I had to take mountain paths, I crossed the mountains by accompanying other travelers or an escort agency.
Avoiding bandits, poisonous snakes, and tigers, I arrived safely in my homeland after three months.
Jeong Dae-cheon.
Twenty-one years old. I had returned ten years after leaving my hometown.