Lost in thought, I set my fingertips on the table and tapped, tap, tap.
“Why? I am the Clan Head's only daughter, with no brothers. If you marry me, a great deal of the Jaegal Clan's full authority will be conferred on you.”
Then I stopped tapping my fingers and answered while sweeping back my hair.
“And become nothing but Miss Jaegal's scarecrow. My life would be decided this way and that, as Miss Jaegal's breath blew. For me that is an obvious future. Rather than that, would it not be easier to devour the Golden Manor by my own effort?”
“Hohoho, you are no ordinary man after all.”
“You flatter me. Besides, are you truly certain this marriage comes with the Clan Head's permission?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I think it does not. People as careful as the Jaegal Clan would never consider a man they have not even met face to face as a son-in-law out of hand.”
This came from my own experience; it was the real thing.
The people of the Jaegal Clan are, at bottom, filthy with suspicion and worry.
That becomes one of their strengths.
It also works as a weakness that limits the expansion of their influence.
In other words, behavior like Jaegal Rin's is close to impossible, judging by the mood inside the Jaegal Clan.
“Go home. Whether you took the Golden Manor lightly or took me lightly I do not know, but treating a matter like this so lightly makes a mockery of the Jaegal Clan's own house law.”
Jaegal Rin's eyes turned sharp.
“Groundless guesswork is laughable.”
“If you insist on it, I have nothing more to say. I am certain, you see.”
“So in the end you invoke my house's law in order to make an excuse for your own insufficient aptitude. It seems I have misjudged you badly indeed. Your vessel is too small to hold me.”
“Well thought. I shall not see you far out. My time is not idle enough to deal with a hotheaded, reckless girl.”
I stretched out a hand and pointed at the door.
“Go well.”
It was then.
Jaegal Rin, biting her lip hard, drew two lustrous beads from a treasure pouch made of silk and rolled them in her palm.
“Young Master, focus on this sound.”
To my ear, as I focused on the beads without meaning to, Jaegal Rin's voice came unusually clear.
CLICK, CLICK—
The sound of the beads meshing melted into it as though playing in concert.
Within that dreamlike spread of sound, Jaegal Rin blew true qi into the beads, and their light took on a more lustrous glow.
As the light grew fiercer still, Jaegal Rin intoned something.
Peculiar syllables caught hold of my consciousness and made it languid.
The light blinded the eyes more and more, and the sound bound the heart fast.
The resonance in the room coiled around me with her at its center.
“From now on, answer my questions.”
“No. You answer.”
At the same moment the beads Jaegal Rin had been holding rolled across the table, roll, roll, and came into my hand.
“Yes.”
Jaegal Rin's eyes, their focus already gone, were exactly the eyes of one caught by the Soul-Seizing Art.
“You are out of your mind. Working a Soul-Seizing Art in the open. Your nature has been filthy from childhood. Then again, that is why the men who marry you in days to come will meet one suspicious death after another. All of them cleared away for crossing your will, no doubt.”
I do not know Jaegal Rin's childhood, but I know well what sort of worst being she becomes in the future.
As a female mantis devours the male, Jaegal Rin's future rather resembles the Golden Manor's Grand Madam.
“She would not have got on well as a daughter-in-law either. Too alike.”
In any case, what mattered was that Jaegal Rin had dared to lay a hand on me.
“You dared to unfold the Vermilion Radiance Soul-Seizing Art before me?”
“Yes, I did.”
The Vermilion Radiance Soul-Seizing Art is the Jaegal Clan's Soul-Seizing Art.
Before the regression, a fair number in the Heavenly Demon Cult fell to it as well.
Unfolding it required several conditions.
A medium in place of a formation, such as the spirit pearls steeped in spiritual qi now held in my hand.
Added to that, a space closed on all four sides where the beads' light and sound would concentrate, like my room now.
And the last condition.
That from the Soul-Seizing Art's beginning to its end, the practitioner never stop the resonance in the room through the spirit pearls.
“It seems you never once thought I would see through it.”
“Yes. I judged it would be fine, since once the Soul-Seizing Art was finished the memory I wanted would be planted in you. Your escort is keeping watch far outside, and there is no one in the room but you and me.”
She had built the Soul-Seizing Art's environmental conditions naturally, and had brought about circumstances enough to put me off my guard.
She had grounds to be arrogantly certain.
It is only that she happened to choose the wrong opponent.
Having prepared in advance for the Vermilion Radiance Soul-Seizing Art, I swept back my hair and stimulated several acupoints on my body.
After that I blocked the light and sound coming from the beads and put a crack in her Soul-Seizing Art.
Tapping the table was not because I was lost in thought.
It is the process of reverse oscillation, severing her resonance joint by joint with my own true qi.
Once the waves are cancelled and their flow comes wholly into my grasp, the initiative turns its edge like a blade and takes command of her soul-seizing instead.
That is the greatest weakness of the Vermilion Radiance Soul-Seizing Art.
Now the Soul-Seizing Art, turned back on her, will not come undone for some time.
Of course, I had no intention of spending such an opportunity idly either.
She had walked into my grasp on her own feet; how convenient.
“Between a forced attempt at a Soul-Seizing Art and contriving a marriage on your own authority without your house's permission, it is hard to see that you valued me that highly. What is your real intent?”
“I….”
“…….”
“I meant to seduce you and make use of the power of gold you hold. If the talk went well I was going to borrow funds from you, and if not I was going to take your secret funds with the Soul-Seizing Art.”
“What does a noble daughter of the Jaegal Clan lack? The Jaegal Clan is hardly about to collapse tomorrow.”
“There is one matter I carried out in secret from the house. And that matter went wrong.”
Well now?
It gets better and better.
“Go on.”
“I failed at an investment in Lanzhou. It was an investment into which went all the secret funds I had and even exchange-house bills siphoned from the house.”
“How large a sum went in?”
“Funds of about one chest of gold were put in. I have to make that much good without the house finding out.”
About one chest of gold.
That was double the scale of funds I had lately dealt in.
However much she was the Clan Head's daughter, if this matter came out it was certain she would face confinement at the very least, and likely worse.
“What sort of investment?”
“Through a business partner I set up a nameless phantom trading company and meant to corner the market in Lanzhou. My partner's funds were included as well.”
Cornering a market is unexpectedly difficult.
Timely circumstances and luck must follow, and in failure all the funds put in are lost.
“Lanzhou, is it. White Spirit Wood, perhaps?”
“Yes, that is right.”
White Spirit Wood was a tree that grew only in Lanzhou's bedrock belt.
Tough and sturdy, it was used for various purposes, but in Gansu Province it served as a bark medicine that prevented the Earth Bone Poison, an endemic sickness said to spread in cycles every year.
Nor was there any suitable herb in other regions to replace it.
“But buying up White Spirit Wood for yourself, when even in Lanzhou it grows only in a fixed bedrock belt, cannot have been easy. There is already a faction holding those rights.”
“Yes, the Dragon Iron League holds ownership of the White Spirit Wood. It is one of their main sources of income.”
“Then how? You did not move the Jaegal Clan directly, and handling the Dragon Iron League by your own strength alone would hardly be easy.”
“When the White Spirit Wood's output was stacked high, I spread a rumor that an herb with effects similar to White Spirit Wood existed in another land. I drove the price of White Spirit Wood down on purpose, and bought up the White Spirit Wood that came quickly onto the market through the phantom trading company.”
“All of the stock?”
“Yes. Since White Spirit Wood stock normally accumulates every half year, I meant to secure every bit of the stock in time for the season when the Earth Bone Poison is most rife.”
“So you used that fellow, the business partner.”
“Yes, but that fellow had been had by the Dragon Iron League as well. He lost all his property and collapsed. After that I threw him away, his value as a tool having fallen.”
“So there really was another herb capable of replacing White Spirit Wood.”
“Yes. They released an herb prepared in advance onto the market and ruined the price of the White Spirit Wood I had bought past any recovery. So at present he and I are keeping the White Spirit Wood in a warehouse, unable even to dispose of it.”
“Since you were the one who was led into cornering the market, there are no grounds to suppress them in the house's name, and being taken in by a rumor and buying up White Spirit Wood would be a disgrace to the Jaegal Clan. You must be afraid the reputation you have built up until now will be shaken.”
“That is so. I would sooner die.”
I grinned.
I had thought the situation merely tiresome, and here was a usable opportunity that had rolled in vine and all.
Just then Jaegal Rin's lips trembled.
What consciousness remained was resisting the Soul-Seizing Art.
There was little time left, but I had obtained everything I needed for the moment.
“Now, from here you will remember the situation as I tell it. First, you made a deal with me. And on terms favorable to you, at that.”
Jaegal Rin's trembling lips stopped.
However caught by the Soul-Seizing Art one may be, residual consciousness remains.
Loss and gain, it feels precisely.
As this seemed to be a gain, the consciousness's resistance lessened.
“Yes.”
“You concealed your truth, and because of the conflict with me just now you threatened to put a real marriage proposal to one of my brothers and obstruct my path.”
“Understood.”
“To prevent that, I fell into the trap of the rights to acquire the White Spirit Wood, and after haggling back and forth over the price the sum was finally set at about three tenths of what you invested. How is that.”
“Good. New business funds mean the capacity to make other investments, which is good for me as well. Only then can I make good the house's funds.”
“Good. I will write the formal deed of contract, and the moment this meeting breaks up you will hand over the location of your warehouse and all authority over it. Then I will see to the rest.”
“Yes, the location of the place is….”
Watching Jaegal Rin pour out everything freely just as I wanted, I leaned back quietly into my chair.
A sudden journey to Lanzhou, then.
“It should make for quite an enjoyable trip.”
It seemed an opportunity had come to give Baek Mun-gyu the transfusion of funds he needed faster than expected.
Of course, there was one more person I had to meet before leaving.
***
“Did you hear? They say the second young master's conduct is no ordinary thing.”
“I was astonished. I hear he beat the first young master to a pulp. And at the Sichuan Dragon and Phoenix Society, where all sorts of noble sons and daughters gather.”
A small inn near the Golden Manor's estate.
Clerks of the Golden Blossom Division who had finished lunch were gathered close together, sharing the tea served afterward.
Especially of late, the incidents arising from the second son Geon A-seong's startling conduct had risen to such a burning topic that anyone working in the Golden Manor made mention of Geon A-seong.
“And that is not all. From what I hear, the daughter of the Jaegal Clan's own Clan Head is pressing a marriage proposal on him!”
“From the Five Great Clans? Wow… can a man's life change like this?”
“Hush, someone will hear.”
Just then the clerks' eyes turned toward Ju Cho-saeng, who was quietly absorbed in his meal alone. The chief clerk who had led the conversation laughed shortly.
“Our Ju has no interest in things like this, does he?”
“Yes. So long as I eat well and draw my monthly wage, what more is there? I intend simply to devote myself to a clerk's life with a warm back and a full belly. Heheh.”
“You fool. That will not do. From of old, standing in the right line and showing your face in advance is what opens the road to advancement, is what I am saying. Will you die rummaging through ledgers your whole life?”
Unlike the chief clerk, who had begun to lay out his lecture, the clerks who had been talking so eagerly began to gape their mouths open and shut like carp.
“Er… er… Chief Clerk.”
“What. Looking at you lot with no ambition is what makes my chest burst. Just wait. Before long I shall go see the second young master myself, show my face once and have a meal with him besides.”
Just then a voice beside the chief clerk asked back.
“How?”
“Well, there are threads for that. Do you think this body has been spending drink money here and there for nothing?”
“Then you saved on the meal money.”
“Hm?”
Feeling the mood go cold in an instant, the chief clerk finally grasped the state of things and rolled his eyes toward the shadow taking the seat beside him.
“What need is there to go to the trouble of using connections. We can talk right here. But which connection is it that will arrange a meal with me?”
“…….”
Geon Gon, disguised as Geon A-seong, grinned.
“I don't have anyone I'm close to.”