In my memory before the regression, Geon Pyeong was the owner of a middling talent.
He was born with the Grand Madam's cunning and venom, but had not been born with her acuity, and he had not inherited the looks of a crane among fowl that the trading company's master, Geon Wi-jin, possessed, nor his quick-witted tongue that saw straight through another's insides.
If anything, it was Geon A-seong, who died by my hand, who took after Geon Wi-jin and was exceedingly handsome.
So Geon Pyeong worked to hide what he lacked with the connections around him.
Just as now.
I looked over the three men and two women standing in a ring around me.
Every one of them from a martial house that counted for something within Sichuan Province.
Geon Pyeong seemed to mean to pay me back for the earlier business through them.
Not by touching me, but by tormenting Seol Ha, whom I held dear.
“Don't worry too much. She will come back without trouble. With her master waiting so anxiously.”
Yeon Gyu-baek clapped me on the shoulder.
Each time he clapped, I felt true qi at the edge of his palm.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
A weighted force transmitted through my shoulder.
Anyone could see it was hostility.
A martial artist of a lower level than Yeon Gyu-baek would have swallowed a gasp and sunk down with his knees giving out.
But when I showed no reaction whatsoever, Yeon Gyu-baek's eyebrow twitched.
It was the moment Yeon Gyu-baek clenched his teeth, as though about to add a little more force.
Before he had a chance to pull his hand away, I caught and gripped it.
Seeing Yeon Gyu-baek's expression harden further, a smile came to my lips.
“Thank you for your concern. But what I brought is nearer a paired companion than an escort. Surely finding the companion who came with me is my own role.”
Unlike me, beaming and smiling, Yeon Gyu-baek could not squeak out a word and had gone white.
And no wonder, since the hand of his I held was past spasming and would not even straighten properly.
Even through it, perhaps wanting to keep his pride, Yeon Gyu-baek endured with the one hand and did not use the other.
I broke into a broad grin.
CRACK—
The sound of bone grinding rang out brightly after it, and Yeon Gyu-baek finally screamed.
“AAAAAGH!! You son of a bitch!!!”
His easy smile nowhere to be found, Yeon Gyu-baek loaded inner arts into his other hand.
It was a single fist swung with no mercy at all, enough to inflict a fatal wound on a graze.
WHOOSH—
I dodged the hand with a tilt of my head alone, then twisted the hand I was holding once more. His arm wrenched grotesquely and Yeon Gyu-baek became the center of the commotion.
“GUAAAAH!!!”
Only after seeing Yeon Gyu-baek drop to his knees, unable to bear the pain, did I let go.
Yeon Gyu-baek, streaming tears and snot, and the rest of the group each wore a look of utter blankness.
Not the situation they had expected, so their faces were bewildered.
Only the girl who had said her identity was a secret watched me with an odd expression.
Jeong Hong-seon came to himself and charged in first.
“What is the meaning of this!! Have you ever seen such mannerless trash!!”
In an atmosphere gone savage enough for blades to be drawn at once, Jeong Hong-seon vented his anger on Geon Pyeong.
“Will the younger brother's kin simply stand and watch? A sharp rebuke for your rude brother would hardly be enough!!”
His face reddened as though it would burst, Geon Pyeong glared at me, huffing.
With so many eyes watching, he was rolling his own this way and that over what to do.
He cared about his reputation in his own fashion.
Recalling my days as a demonic practitioner, I ought to give his back a light push.
I sent Geon Pyeong a telepathic message.
-What do you suppose that wench beside you thinks of the sight of you standing there like a fool, unable even to touch me? She will think you a dolt who can do nothing about one younger brother and only stamps his feet. Then again, what could a middling talent like you, good at not one thing, do to me?
“Y… you bastard… dare… to me….”
Geon Pyeong went red and then past red to white in the face, and drew his sword.
“I will kill you right here!!!”
As though he no longer cared about the eyes around him, Geon Pyeong charged.
But no one cut in.
If anything, the mood was one of watching politely, like a fire across a river.
Say what they like about the jianghu being all brothers, you have to hand it to the orthodox bastards for hypocrisy.
But today that hypocrisy.
“Is very much to my liking.”
A feeble sword force proving him second-rate gave off a formless sharp edge of sorts and tore at me.
A wretched result, for something said to come of being supplied with every spiritual medicine and of recruiting outstanding masters to study under.
I slipped aside from Geon Pyeong's killing-intent-laden sword, left and right, caught the hand holding the sword and bent it back.
“AAAAGH!!!”
Taking the unfailing scream as my accompaniment, I dislocated the shoulder of the bent hand as well.
“Guhhk.”
Fear rode in the eyes of Geon Pyeong, writhing in pain.
I smiled brightly and looked away.
This is only the beginning.
Geon Pyeong's eyes went wide at the sight of my knee rising next.
THWACK!
Geon Pyeong's teeth burst out in a shower and scattered through the air.
Spewing blood from mouth and nose, Geon Pyeong toppled backward.
To hasten the unconsciousness of a Geon Pyeong already on its very edge, I pressed down on his face once more.
THUD. THUD.
Geon Pyeong, who had been trembling, lay in a smear of blood, tears and snot, giving off a foul stench.
“Ugh… what is that smell….”
Even Ju Yeo-ran, pledged to marry him, hurriedly covered her nose and stepped back, so he had evidently disgraced himself most powerfully.
Even the musicians stopped playing, and the mood fell into silence.
Jeong Hong-seon, who had egged the fight on, looked at the fallen Yeon Gyu-baek and Geon Pyeong and flinched.
“Care for more?”
Jeong Hong-seon only glared and withdrew a step.
“My apologies for the disturbance. It arose from a light quarrel between brothers, so pay it no mind. Close brothers quarrel this often as a matter of course.”
My powers of persuasion seemed to shine in their own way.
The mood, on the verge of turning grave, loosened, and merry music rang through the hall once more.
In the midst of it Yeon Gyu-baek came to himself, let out a groan and ground his teeth.
“You dare, and you think you will get through this unharmed. I am Yeon Gyu-baek of the Flowing Jade Sword Clan!!!”
“Stop shaking that broken hand and go. I have spared your face in my own way.”
I pointed at Geon Pyeong, stretched out flat.
“Otherwise you would be in that state.”
Yeon Gyu-baek dared not refute me and shouted instead.
“Whatever happens to that bitch of an escort of yours, know that it is all your doing!”
So this was the reality: sons of the orthodox sects aping the filthiest players among the unorthodox sects.
No wonder they get beaten to a pulp by the Heavenly Demon down the line, every last one.
Just then Seol Ha came and stood beside me.
A faint smell of blood drifted from her.
Yeon Gyu-baek's and Jeong Hong-seon's eyes went wide at the sight.
Naturally, since they could never have dreamed the men they sent would be beaten by Seol Ha.
“My apologies for being late.”
Perhaps because of the eyes around us, Seol Ha was stiff with me.
“It's fine. Looks like you had a fairly enjoyable time. I had a rough idea of the situation.”
“Yes.”
“I wasn't worried, of course. If anything I worried for the ones going at my paired companion.”
“…….”
“I was busy myself.”
Seol Ha looked at Geon Pyeong lying on the floor and let out a short sigh.
“Ah….”
“Right?”
“This is… serious.”
“Well, what else could I do. My brother came at me meaning to die. The Grand Madam will understand too.”
Then I offered my farewells to Geon Pyeong's group and left.
“I will take my leave. It seems I have enjoyed as much as there is to enjoy.”
No one halted our steps.
***
“Are you all right?”
“You ask only now?”
“I had faith.”
“I lived up to it.”
“By the way, we never did get to the thing we actually came to do.”
As I smacked my lips in regret, Seol Ha smiled brightly.
“I found him. We arranged to meet outside the banquet hall first.”
“Really? Well done. Sharp as ever.”
“But will the person I found really be the same person you are looking for? You never even told me his name.”
“His name? I don't know it either.”
“What??”
It was true. Even before the regression, I had never known the name he went by in the past.
I had only heard the life story of a self-made man from him and from those around him.
He was a being who in later days, even in a chaotic age when countless great trees of the merchant world came down, even the Heavenly Demon acknowledged as the Mount Tai of commerce.
-The Merchant King, Lone Crag.
That was who.
I had half wondered, and to think he truly was in this place.
***
-Everything arises from profit and loss. Conflict between common men, conflict between murim factions, conflict between the government and murim, all of it has come out of trifling numbers.
-The Heavenly Demon took my hand because those numbers satisfied her as well.
Of course, it was possible because we also shared values beyond profit and loss.
The Lone Crag I had seen was always a man whose insides could not be read.
He was about five years older than me, yet a sage with much to teach, and one of the few beings my Liege the Heavenly Demon did not treat lightly.
The news in later days that he had been ambushed and killed by a band of assassins was a shock even to me, so large was his presence.
I suspect that was when Cheon Yu-wol's standing began in earnest to waver.
“Impressive.”
In a small room of an inn, I lifted my cup and wet my lips.
“Young Master, are you speaking to me?”
“Who can say.”
Facing Lone Crag in his younger days this way stirred something in me.
No one knew Lone Crag's past.
He had never particularly hidden it, but his movements were simply so ghostlike.
Everyone said with one voice.
That he was a being who had dropped straight out of the sky.
But I had once heard it from his own mouth.
-All call me ghostlike, but I was an endless failure.
It is only that I had so little presence that no one remembers anything of me.
Nor is it a past I much enjoy. If it were otherwise, why would I have loitered about places like the Sichuan Dragon and Phoenix Society looking for a prodigy who might invest in me?
He might have been lying.
But since no one knows what if, I had come looking in the spirit of clutching at a straw.
“Baek Mun-gyu, is it….”
His face was of course younger than the one he had before the regression, but he was without question the Lone Crag I had known.
The teardrop mole beneath his eye.
The three unusually thick lines crossing his forehead.
An unremarkable frame, yet shoulders and back always held straight, and even those quiet, deep black eyes that measured the other man's innermost heart.
Setting aside the quality of the cloth, the neatly ordered way he wore his clothes alone let one feel what sort of character he had.
“…….”
The silence continued.
Baek Mun-gyu had not opened his mouth again since the exchange of names.
Growing curious instead, I asked.
“Are you not curious why I called you aside?”
“I am curious.”
“Then why do you not ask?”
“I thought that if I waited, you would tell me yourself.”
Heh—
It made me laugh. People really do not change.
The Lone Crag, or rather Baek Mun-gyu, I had met before the regression was the same.
That words put a man at a disadvantage the more of them he spoke.
That sparing them and listening much was a merchant's basic virtue.
“Do you know who I am?”
“I do. The second son of the Golden Manor.”
“Both right and wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
Without drawing it out, I carefully took the human-skin mask apart.
Baek Mun-gyu's gaze shook violently.
“I am the Golden Manor's discarded son, a man named Geon Gon. I do not know whether you have heard of me. If you know of me as well, the talk will be easier.”
Baek Mun-gyu, who had not spoken for a long while, let out a deep breath and a dry laugh.
“How is it that a man said to be dead sits before me?”
“It will be convenient, not having to add an explanation.”
“What do you want of me?”
Watching him adapt swiftly to the situation despite his bewilderment, I drew the promissory notes from inside my robes.
“I will buy. Half of you.”
However the future changed because of my choices, that was not mine to see to at this moment.
That is a thing to think about after every last thing I want is in my hands.
Just as I felt everything was flowing as I willed it.
An unexpected answer came.
“I am not selling.”
I set down the cup I had been about to bring to my lips again.
The wine had lost all its taste.