Every gaze inside the Myriad Books Pavilion gathered on them.
The children's eyes were bright with interest.
As though they were looking forward to how the boy would discipline Jaegal Mun-hyeon.
Their feelings would be much the same.
They too must have been driven to the Myriad Books Pavilion by their parents' nagging, exactly like the boy.
Their body servants, of course, could only stamp their feet.
They could hardly step into a quarrel between masters, yet leaving it alone might let who knew what disaster unfold.
So-hye alone was a little different.
"Young Master, your words go too far. How can you say such a thing......."
"Silence, bitch! Who do you dare flap your mouth at!"
WHAP—!
So-hye, struck in the face by the book the boy flung in his fury, curled in on herself.
The book fell to the floor.
Seeing So-hye in pain, something like fire surged up in his heart.
But Jaegal Mun-hyeon walked over slowly, picked up the book, and asked the boy calmly.
"Hey. I am curious, so tell me. That bit about lowly blood...... was that aimed at me? Or was it about my mother?"
"Hmph! Work it out for yourself."
"Hmm. Work it out, you say?"
At the boy's snort, Jaegal Mun-hyeon nodded.
I see.
What he did to So-hye was already more than enough to leave alone, and he dares speak of my mother.......
At this age, with that reputation, fighting a child was absurd, but the lid came clean off that small seven-year-old head.
I will work it out for you!
The moment he set his mind, his body moved.
The small foot he put forward closed the distance in one stride.
The boy had evidently learned the rudiments of martial learning, since he moved a hand to respond, but he was a child for all that.
Against an adult, perhaps, but against an equal, how could he possibly block it?
The book swung in his hand traced a cunning curve and struck the boy across the nose.
THWACK—!
At the unexpected blow the boy clutched his nose and stumbled backward.
Naturally.
He had struck with the corner.
"Y-Young Master!"
The boy's body servant, who had clearly never imagined he would actually strike, started in alarm and moved to intervene.
But on meeting Jaegal Mun-hyeon's eyes, the servant flinched and halted.
"Don't interfere. Not if you want to keep from croaking......."
At that voice laid down bleak and cold and the fierce glint in those eyes, the servant swallowed without meaning to.
Only seven years old...... and what eyes were those.
Gooseflesh rose and the servant shrank back.
The boy screwed up his face and thrashed out at him.
"You! Do you know who I am! I am......."
THWACK—!
Before the words were out, Jaegal Mun-hyeon dropped the book and his fist smashed into the boy's face.
"Aagh! ......Blood! Blood!"
What was so impressive about the soft, tender fist of a seven-year-old who had not yet begun training in earnest?
But strike the same spot twice and a nose bleeds, naturally.
And the moment the blood burst, the fight between the two was as good as over.
Children are like that.
Blood is another word for fear.
At that age both the one struck and the one striking tend to take fright at the sight of blood. But for Jaegal Mun-hyeon it was only a familiar thing buried a while in memory.
"I don't care who you are. What matters is that you insulted my mother."
THWACK—!
The third fist was more indifferent still.
From the fourth he seized the boy by the hair as well and swung mercilessly.
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!
Blood sprayed.
Not only the boy's face. Jaegal Mun-hyeon's untempered fist did not come through unscathed either.
With matters at that point, the appalled body servants began tearing Jaegal Mun-hyeon away.
"Y-Young Master! You must not do this."
An adult's strength.
Not a level Jaegal Mun-hyeon could withstand.
But.
"I told you clearly to let go."
"Y-Young Master."
At the force of spirit in that chilling voice, the servants lost their grip on the collar they had seized.
Cold and savage.
The pressure was enough to make a body shrink back.
Young he might be, small his body might be, but in that moment he was the Heavenly Demon.
The punching did not stop, and the fallen boy was kicked and trampled.
Howl as he might.
It was then.
"What is going on here!"
The guard, who had come running at the commotion within, hurriedly blocked Jaegal Mun-hyeon's way.
"Move."
"I cannot."
"I said move."
"......."
Even the guard was startled.
Blood dripped from the fist of a child not yet grown. The venom in those eyes chilled his spine enough to make him swallow of his own accord.
Frowning, the guard looked at the fallen boy.
He had already lost consciousness.
"This one is your cousin, your elder brother, Young Master."
"And?"
"Pardon?"
"What has that to do with me? Move."
His eyes had already turned.
There is a difference between persuading and wasting breath.
For the guard, of course, it was nothing but a predicament.
He still did not know how matters had come to this, but leaving it alone looked likely to produce real catastrophe.
"Young Master, forgive my discourtesy."
Obliged to stop by force a Jaegal Mun-hyeon who kept advancing on the fallen boy despite his efforts, the guard reached out.
Since he could not wound a bloodline of the Jaegal Clan, it was a movement called the Pressing Hand, which only sealed off motion.
A simple technique, but he judged it would be more than enough to stop a Jaegal Mun-hyeon too young to have learned martial arts.
And yet.
'Hm?'
He could only be bewildered.
The advancing Jaegal Mun-hyeon dropped his stance and slipped through, as though he knew the weak point of the Pressing Hand.
Simple technique or not, it was hardly something a mere seven-year-old could evade.
'W-wait. In that case......?'
This was no time to stand there amazed.
The guard twisted his body urgently and tried to snatch Jaegal Mun-hyeon's shoulder.
The Grasping Hand, which seizes an exact target.
Even at the cost of an injury.......
But that too came to nothing.
The guard's grip closed on empty air.
'Wh-what is this?'
He had missed.
The movement of a child who had not even begun training in martial arts.
But how could he have known?
That though he had never trained, Jaegal Mun-hyeon, once the Heavenly Demon, had already seen the Jaegal Clan's Seizing Hand through the father who wanted to hold his hand.
And that it had been far more refined than the guard's, so that a hand hesitating to avoid injury could be evaded with ease.
"Ah......."
The guard's face twisted.
Jaegal Mun-hyeon showed no sign of intending to stop.......
"Young Master!"
"......."
In that instant, So-hye threw herself over the fallen boy's body.
"Stop, I beg you. You must not go further. You have to think of your parents."
Only after So-hye pleaded did Jaegal Mun-hyeon's movement halt.
***
The boy was carried straight to the infirmary.
Thanks perhaps to the efforts of the quick-footed body servants, word of the commotion in the Myriad Books Pavilion spread in an instant.
"You wretch! Do you know what you have done!"
A middle-aged woman who had come rushing at the news shrieked with venom in her eyes at Jaegal Mun-hyeon, who knelt in the front yard of the Myriad Books Pavilion.
She was the boy's mother.
Only then did he learn the boy's standing.
Ten years old, Jaegal Mun-gi.
Son of Jaegal Do-myeong, fifth among the Clan Head's brothers, and a cousin three years older than Jaegal Mun-hyeon.
Only that much.
He had asked whether I knew who he was, so I thought he was somebody.
In any case, right or wrong aside, a younger brother had beaten an elder, which was as good as throwing the clan's order of rank into disarray.
But Jaegal Mun-hyeon held his head up stiffly and met the woman's eyes.
"He was struck because he deserved to be struck, and I struck him because he deserved striking."
"What was that?"
When, far from taking fright or shrinking under her thundering, he answered squarely, the woman's rage swelled further.
"This wretch does not even know what he has done wrong...... What are you all doing! Flog him until that damned boy says he was in the wrong!"
The woman shrieked at the top of her voice with her eyes raised, but the body servants only looked about uncertainly.
"You lot! Must you be given a flogging together with him!"
It was just as that venting was spreading to the servants.
"Let me ask one thing."
"What?"
With a composure no one would take for a child's, Jaegal Mun-hyeon spoke to the woman.
"How have you spoken of my mother all this while?"
"What did you say?"
"Mun-gi said she was born of lowly blood. Is that something you have been in the habit of saying?"
"What nonsense......."
"They say a child is the mirror of its parents. Mun-gi would not have said such a thing out of nowhere."
At the words spoken while looking up at her with cold eyes, the woman shut her mouth as if at a loss.
It was plain at once.
That Jaegal Mun-gi's words had been learned from his mother's habits of speech.
Her name was Tang Yeo-jin.
She came from a collateral line of the Tang Clan, which represented Sichuan.
Baek Su-hyeon, by contrast, was a musician's daughter.
Martial artists are like that. They are a breed who think themselves the most superior of all.
They are quick enough to count even those from merchant circles beneath them, so how great a thorn in her eye it must have been to have, as her elder sister-in-law, a mother born of a performer's family dismissed as 'mere.'
'Tang Clan or whatever the hell.'
Had he the strength of his past life, he would have cut her head off on the spot.
Then he would have carried that head to the Tang Clan, called them to account for failing to raise their child properly, and wiped out their line.
But now he was nothing but a seven-year-old boy named Jaegal Mun-hyeon.
He had no strength.
There was nothing he could do.
Even so, with his temperament, how could he endure it?
Saying that a wrong is wrong requires nothing but a mouth.
Like a son of the Jaegal Clan, he fought with words.
He met her with boldness.
"The apology ought to come from you first, Aunt."
"What was that?"
"The Chapter on Examining the Heart in the Precious Mirror of the Bright Mind says that when you see another's fault, before you condemn it you should reflect on whether the same flaw lies within you. Before you scold me, how would it be to teach your son properly first?"
He had known it all along, but having gone over it again lately under his father's pressing, he remembered it clearly.
Thanks to that, when the boy on his knees instead pressed and lectured her, Tang Yeo-jin's face flushed crimson.
"You wretch! You dare slight your aunt now, not content with your elder brother?"
"I did not slight you. You seemed to know it and yet fail to practice it, so I informed you."
"Hold your tongue!"
"Give me the apology and I will hold it whenever you like."
It was for his mother.
For the one who let him feel a mother's love, he held his head higher still.
"Very well, wretch! I shall see how long you stay so stiff-necked!"
At length she snatched a cudgel from the hand of a body servant beside her and came toward Jaegal Mun-hyeon.
It was then.
"What in the world is this commotion!"
When the angry voice bore down on the gathering, body servants and martial artists alike hurriedly threw themselves to the ground.
The Clan Head, and his retainers.
The Grand Hall was not far from the Myriad Books Pavilion, so he had come himself.
But then.
"Clan Head! Hear me, I beg you. Where in the world is there such a law as this?"
"......."
"Mun-gi seems to have misspoken in a child's thoughtlessness. But how can a younger brother strike his elder for that? What is more, Mun-gi is now so badly beaten that he hovers at death's door. When I scolded the boy for it, he glared me straight in the eye and shouted at me instead. I beg you, lay his fault out plain and punish him."
Dropping the cudgel all at once, she sank down and poured out tears in a manner like watching a scene from an opera.
Is she in her right mind?
That was misspeaking?
How on earth does she change her face in an instant like that?
Honestly, it beggars belief.
Listening to it was more than he could bear.
But just as his lips twitched to protest her drivel.
Jaegal Do-yun came walking through the middle of the commotion.
His step was heavy.
"Mun-hyeon."
"Yes."
"You......."
At his father's thoroughly hardened expression, Jaegal Mun-hyeon frowned.
He means to scold me.
Then again, he too is a Jaegal.
However much he loves Mother, there is the matter of the clan's order of rank.......
Fine, let us see you get angry.
I went over my duty to my parents through the Precious Mirror of the Bright Mind, but father or no father, I have no intention of bending.
"Are you all right?"
"Pardon?"
"Your fist is badly hurt."
"Ah, that...... that is......."
It was unexpected.
Father knelt with his face deeply furrowed, tore his own clothing, and bound the injured fist.
"You do not think you were in the wrong, do you?"
"......No."
"And you will not make excuses either?"
"No."
"Understood. I believe you."
"Pardon?"
"If you are not at fault, your father will always be on your side. Even if I cannot fight in your place and must only bow my head and apologize."
Though he had arrived late and could not have known the details, Jaegal Do-yun asked his son nothing at all.
At the word that he had done no wrong he simply said he believed him, patted the boy's shoulder, and called over So-hye, who had been stamping her feet nearby.
"So-hye, take Mun-hyeon to the infirmary. His hand is badly hurt."
"Pardon?"
"What are you waiting for?"
"Yes!"
So-hye ran over and supported him.
"F-Father."
"It is all right. Your father will settle what remains, so do not worry and get yourself treated."
At the sight of him smiling brightly, something rose up in the boy's throat.
"Brother-in-law! What do you mean by that? Mun-hyeon is......."
"Sister-in-law."
"......."
"Would you tell me, one by one, what crimes my son has committed? If they are just, I shall mete out the punishment myself."
At those calm words Tang Yeo-jin shut her mouth like a mute who had eaten honey, and Jaegal Mun-hyeon looked at his father's back as he turned away.
He had always been the one out in front, so he had never sunk into feeling at the sight of another's back.
Because he had never leaned on anyone.
But how had his own back felt to someone in the past? Had it felt as large and as dependable as the father before him now?
There was no knowing.
But he regretted having refused the father who had tried to hold his hand.
From now on, letting him hold it seemed quite all right.