Inside the professor's office.
Scritch, scritch, scriiitch!
Kang Hyeon's brush moved without hesitation.
It was the work of taking stock of the manuals held in the Martial Learning Archive and filling in what was missing.
‘Baek Yu-yeon is Baek Yu-yeon, but.’
He had to think of the other disciples he would take later as well.
The Seven Luminaries Formation they had to complete was not a martial art you could master in a snap by having a single manual thrown at you.
Its grain was the same as the Heavenly God Scripture's.
Only once a vast body of general foundational knowledge about martial arts had been filled in could one finally get through the first page.
That was the reason he had surveyed the Archive too.
To fill in what stood empty.
“Wow......”
Watching from beside him, Lee Se-a marvelled.
‘Did he do calligraphy as well?’
Kang Hyeon's hand was aloof and at the same time made the heart of the beholder swell.
The archaic language you only ever saw in genuinely expensive manuals!
Lee Se-a swallowed dryly.
The hottest thing in the Hunter world these days was precisely this ability to decipher the archaic language.
An age in which a guild's fighting strength hinged on how accurately a single manual was translated!
‘But this isn't just knowing it. He's practically a native?’
Scriiitch! Stop.
It was then that Kang Hyeon's smoothly flowing brushwork halted.
“Chick.”
“Yes?”
“Stop staring and get on with your own work. It's distracting.”
“Ah, yes......!”
Pushing her lips out in a pout, she headed for the liquor cabinet.
That was right.
Lee Se-a's work at present was restocking Kang Hyeon's water of life, whiskey.
Clink, clatter.
The sound of new bottles settling into the cabinet filled the quiet office.
At that sound Kang Hyeon stopped his brush and turned his head.
Something had struck him as odd.
“Didn't you say the other day that the state wasn't funding the liquor?”
“Ah, about that.”
Lee Se-a's eyes rolled about, and then she smiled brightly.
“So, Mr. Kang Hyeon. While we're on the subject, couldn't you give the state a little support? Just one, that's all.”
Kang Hyeon frowned.
He stared flatly into her eyes for a moment, and then.
“Don't tell me you're filling that with your own money?”
Flinch!
Lee Se-a's shoulders jumped slightly.
“Haa.”
Kang Hyeon let out a deep sigh.
What did she think she was doing.
On an agent's salary, restocking liquor that expensive?
He had felt it since the last time — he really did have to start earning money soon.
Dealing with Asura required financial power, and raising seven disciples to the level of those old monsters would take a tremendous quantity of elixirs.
On top of that, there was no shortage of men who would throw the world into chaos before Asura even appeared.
It was not as if Asura alone would pop out; the thing had its legions.
To handle that sort, he would need information channels as well.
“That's right, I did use some of my own money. So let me make a bit more of a show of it. Actually, that brush and ink. And the paper too — I bought all of it with my own money. So please, help me out.”
“Help you out with what?”
“Help me get ahead. If you'd just clear one single thing off that tablet, my performance rating would shoot through the roof.”
Of course, she did not mean it.
Simply marking Black already guaranteed her the very top rating.
It was a wheedle she indulged in because she knew that if this absolute being with overwhelming force stepped out just once, this country would be far stronger and safer.
And there was no chance Kang Hyeon did not know that.
“From now on, don't use your own money.”
“Sorry?”
“Bring it here, that tablet.”
Lee Se-a's eyes went as wide as lanterns.
“R-Really?!”
“I'm doing this exactly once.”
“Yes!”
Just as Lee Se-a, cheering, presented the tablet on the desk like lightning.
Knock, knock.
Someone knocked cautiously.
“Come in.”
The door opened and a dignified man stepped in.
“Forgive the intrusion during your work. Would you be Professor Kang Hyeon?”
“Yes, and you are?”
“How do you do. My name is Yoon Tae-jeong, and I serve as chief executive of Taejeong Trading.”
Yoon Tae-jeong bowed courteously at the waist.
‘Taejeong Trading?’
When Kang Hyeon tilted his head.
“I also happen to be Cadet Yoon Hyeon-jong's father.”
“Ah, you're his father.”
Only then did Kang Hyeon rise.
“If my sudden visit has startled you, I apologize. It simply seemed to me that I had to call on you in person to pay my respects, so I have come without shame.”
“If it's about saving your son, I received fine liquor for that the other day.”
“That was merely my son repaying his own debt. I, as his father, nearly lost a child. You spared me that tragedy — how could I hide behind my son's thanks? I was taught that one bows one's own head to a benefactor.”
Having said his piece, Yoon Tae-jeong drew a carefully wrapped paulownia box from his coat and set it on the table.
“It is a set of the Four Friends of the Study, made by Taejeong Trading.”
Slip.
When Kang Hyeon opened the box, a deep scent of ink emerged along with an inkstone that gave off a lustrous glow and a brush made of animal hair finely worked and trimmed.
Even at a glance, it was a masterwork carved and finished by a skilled artisan who had poured himself into it.
Standing behind them, Lee Se-a quietly swallowed her tears.
‘Haaa, there really is something to that household.’
A few days ago Gwak Do-jin had bought whiskey, and Yoon Hyeon-jong had appeared at exactly the right moment and produced an expensive vintage!
And now he had instantly made the brush and ink she had steeled herself to buy out of her own pocket look shabby?
Kang Hyeon lifted the brush without a word and worked the tip between his fingers.
The feel of it against his fingertips and the spring of the hairs were excellent.
Even in Murim this would have passed for top quality.
“I'll put it to good use.”
When Kang Hyeon nodded readily, a faint smile spread at the corner of Yoon Tae-jeong's mouth too.
He seemed pleased by the bold way the man accepted it plainly, without a show of refusal.
Kang Hyeon was equally pleased.
‘A man of proper character.’
In Murim too there had been many who received a kindness and sent valuables.
But there is a world of difference between sending an underling with the goods and the head of an organization coming in person to meet your eyes and observe the courtesies.
Men like this understand faith.
Which is to say they do not treat the weight of a bond once formed as a light thing.
‘And those eyes.’
Kang Hyeon's gaze rested on Yoon Tae-jeong's two eyes.
A discerning eye that saw sharply through the value of a thing and the flow of a situation.
Kang Hyeon had seen eyes like that a few times in Murim.
‘Eyes overflowing with a merchant's gift.’
The great merchants who held and shook the commerce of the world had precisely that look.
‘So that steadiness of Yoon Hyeon-jong's came from his father, did it?’
As Kang Hyeon laughed pleasantly inside, his eye caught something else.
‘Hm?’
The man's qi and blood were somewhat strange.
A dark red energy was congealed around the heart meridian — the symptom of a fairly long exposure to poison.
Stroking the box lightly, Kang Hyeon asked as though tossing it out.
“Lately, do you not wake unrefreshed after sleeping, with a heaviness around the chest?”
“Sorry? Ah, well...... running a business does leave me with a certain chronic fatigue.”
“Give me your wrist a moment.”
“My wrist?”
Yoon Tae-jeong wore a puzzled expression briefly, but then his son's words came back to him.
- Father, our professor is a genuine monster! Setting aside his strength, he even seemed to have knowledge of medicine.
‘Does he mean to point out somewhere I'm unwell?’
Rolling his sleeve back a little, Yoon Tae-jeong held out his wrist.
Kang Hyeon laid three fingers lightly on it.
He could see the movement of the qi with his eyes, but to identify which poison it was he had to put true energy in.
How much time passed.
‘As I thought.’
A sticky foreign matter was blocking the circulation of qi and blood throughout the vessels.
‘Cinnabar musk, with seven-spot viper venom diluted into it in trace amounts.’
A blend used often enough in campaigns of covert murder.
For the first few months it gives the illusion that the body has grown lighter, but it gradually hardens the vessels of the heart, a vicious assassin's poison that can be disguised as sudden death.
‘At this level he'll have been taking it steadily for a good two years.’
Withdrawing his hand, Kang Hyeon tossed out.
“Is there something you take regularly of late?”
“Sorry?”
Yoon Tae-jeong blinked.
“Do you mean supplements, or medicine, something of that sort?”
“Tea, perhaps, or a tonic. Something you take every day without fail.”
“There is a tea that comes up every morning......”
“Hm.”
Kang Hyeon clicked his tongue inwardly.
He did not know what the circumstances were, but the man had given him an expensive-looking gift, so he could at least offer a hint.
“From tomorrow, do not drink that tea.”
“Sorry?”
“Instead, take white lotus root, licorice and smilax in a ratio of three to one to one, boiled down thoroughly, and keep taking it. Ah, and when you boil it, you must boil it yourself, without fail.”
Yoon Tae-jeong's eyes wavered minutely.
He was a man with a discerning eye.
He was not so dull as to miss the bone buried inside the few short words Kang Hyeon had thrown out.
‘Is he telling me there is someone doing my body harm?’
“It is people who are more frightening than beasts, in the end. Whatever someone boils up and brings you saying it's good for your health — however close they may be to you, don't put your faith in it too absolutely. You can go in an instant.”
“......”
“I'll put the fine brush to good use.”
***
Yoon Hyeon-jong, who had come running once his class ended, greeted Yoon Tae-jeong warmly.
“Father, what brings you all the way to the Academy? You should have called ahead if you were coming.”
“I came to have a look at the face of this professor you boast about until your mouth runs dry.”
It was a curt answer, but there was no chance Yoon Hyeon-jong did not know what lay behind it.
His father was a cold man who weighed profit and loss rigorously at all times, but behind that lay a firm philosophy.
‘Trust only sprouts when you go on your own two feet and meet a man's eyes.’
In the end, he had come in person all this distance to bow his own head to the benefactor who had saved his son's life.
“So, what did you make of him?”
Yoon Hyeon-jong asked, unable to hide a certain quiet hope.
“He does not seem to be an ordinary man, just as you said.”
“Right? This is only my impression, but I'd say he's stronger than any of the professors here.”
“It was not only strength that I saw.”
“Then what?”
“It's the presence the man gives off. If I am to put my own impression into words, it was as though...... he were someone who had crossed back and forth over life and death a great many times.”
“......Sorry?”
“Learn well from him. Being able to learn something from a man like that may be an opportunity you could not buy with ten million in gold.”
Yoon Hyeon-jong was startled.
He had hoped for kind words, but he had not expected an assessment that high.
“I'll be going, then. Work is busy.”
“Ah, yes!”
“And make plenty of friends.”
The reason Yoon Tae-jeong had sent his son to the Academy was not that he wanted him to become a strong Hunter.
It was rather for the sake of bonds with strong people.
Because at times that would be a greater strength than being strong alone.
Having pushed his son off by the back and sent him away, Yoon Tae-jeong got into the back seat of his sedan.
As the door closed, his expression hardened frighteningly.
- It is people who are more frightening than beasts, in the end.
Kang Hyeon's warning circled in his ears.
Yoon Tae-jeong gripped hard at the area over his chest.
The symptoms of late — the shortness of breath, the tightening of the heart.
‘I took it for simple overwork, and it was not?’
The moment he reached the company he put a call through to the secretariat.
“Let me ask one thing. That tea that comes up every morning.”
- You mean the aromatic tea?
“Yes, that. Who gave the instruction that it start being served?”
Tack, tacka-tack!
The sound of a keyboard came briefly from the other end of the receiver.
- Looking at the record, it was two years ago. Executive Director Park Dong-cheol gave the instruction.
“......Right. Understood.”
Click.
Yoon Tae-jeong set the receiver down slowly.
‘It was you?’
The man who had rolled alongside him from the days at the bottom, before Taejeong Trading grew, each guarding the other's back.
Now his only friend, a man who held a share of Taejeong Trading.
“Ha, hahaha!”
He laughed out loud.
Of course, he did not conclude it on the spot.
Whether Park Dong-cheol was truly the traitor was a thing to be confirmed from here on.