It was a sensation he had not felt in a long time.
His head throbbed, and the sounds around him hummed and echoed as though he had fallen into water.
An endless sense of floating ruled his body, like being drunk on a terrible sleep.
In a darkness where even the flow of time could not be felt, a small light suddenly sprouted.
It was so dazzling that he turned his head, but a light was sprouting on that side as well.
The two wavering lights slowly took shape.
DONG—
A vast temple bell shining amber.
CLICK, CLICK—
Two Thunder Rings, slow but unceasing, meshed and turning.
The instant those two forms surfaced.
“......Ah.”
Jeong I-shin opened his eyes.
The scenery that filled his eyes was different from before.
Blue sky, snow-white clouds, a shining sun.
Beneath it, all manner of trees and grasses standing in rows.
None of it was a color that had existed in the Bottomless Abyss.
“......So bright.”
There was no thick mist overhead choking off the light, and no turbid fog lying across the floor of the Bottomless Abyss to shake his qi sense and rob him of true qi.
Even the ground Jeong I-shin was sprawled on...... was a dirt road warmed pleasantly by the sun.
Breathing, too, was effortless.
However he looked at it, wherever he looked, this place...... was not the Bottomless Abyss.
The moment he realized it, Jeong I-shin thrust a hand into his robes.
SQUEAK—
The flying squirrel, hanging limp and strengthless, cracked open an eye in his grip.
He had already known the creature was inside his robes. It had been squirming nonstop.
What he could not understand was the way it patted his hand as if to ask what it had done wrong.
“You......!”
He had a great deal to say.
That they should not have parted like this.
That of course he would have left the Bottomless Abyss someday, but that day was not today.
That he had left far too much behind in that place.
And, and......
He had so much to say, and yet none of it came out of his mouth.
Because the real reason he could not accept the sudden parting lay elsewhere.
“......”
Jeong I-shin lay there for a long while, staring blankly at the sky.
Nowhere in the sky above was there any torn space.
There was no way back, and he knew he must not even think such a thing.
When the sun that had been overhead had tilted a little.
“......I should have called him Grandpa.”
The true reason he could not accept the parting rang out into empty air.
Though he had raised the burial mounds of four men with his own hands, it was a word he had never managed to speak.
Because he had sensed their deaths from the moment they met, and because he did not want to lose family again.
Because of that thin-hearted caution, the word Jeong I-shin had never called them remained in his chest.
He should have left it behind.
SQUEEEAK!
“Ah.”
The flying squirrel smacked his hand with its two little feet.
The scolding was so blatant that it drew a laugh out of him.
“Right, I came after you to punish you, didn't I.”
When he loosened his grip, the flying squirrel scurried off and burrowed into his robes.
Jeong I-shin got up and dusted off his martial arts uniform.
“I decided to move the graves somewhere with good sunlight later. Then, then......”
It was a resolve he had made while burying Namgung Baek.
That someday he would bring the four old men out of the Bottomless Abyss.
So it was nothing more than one more thing added to his original resolve. That was how he chose to see it.
“......It was a Bottomless Abyss I was going to leave soon anyway. This is better, if anything. Right, it's a little early, but let's have a go——”
―So you want to have a go at it!!
“......Huh?”
An unexpected answer burst out from beyond the thicket.
CLANG!
After the irritable shout came the sound of steel.
Jeong I-shin immediately started walking in that direction.
He still could not understand how he had escaped the Bottomless Abyss.
But this was also a settled future Jeong I-shin would have reached eventually.
Which meant he had long ago established how he would act after leaving the Bottomless Abyss.
Under the name of the ‘Jianghu Code of Conduct.’
‘If a disturbance breaks out in a place with few people, avoid getting involved if at all possible.’
Tang Mu-jeong's Jianghu Code of Conduct was built largely on conservative responses.
It was a direction he had set out of a wish that Jeong I-shin would not be dragged into troublesome affairs.
Of course, every article of the code had its own exceptions.
‘......However, in the following situations, active intervention is recommended.’
When urgent funds are needed.
When information is needed.
When people to order about are needed.
‘Found it.’
Jeong I-shin, who fit all three cases, soon arrived at the site of the disturbance.
“To dare take this body for a fool who cannot even count!”
“It's a misunderstanding!”
CLANG—!
It was an ugly scene, two groups facing off with swords drawn.
Among them, the two men at the head of each group had their blades crossed.
“We are the Azure Cloud Escort Agency! We have already paid your keep the toll for this month and for next month as well!”
A middle-aged man in a blue martial arts uniform swung his sword wide as he shouted.
His momentum was fierce enough that the man whose saber met his fell back a step.
He stroked his bushy beard once and then burst out laughing.
“Pfah! I told you it went up.”
“What!”
“I said the toll has gone up! I'll give you a special chance. Leave the cargo you carried in and go. I'll count that as the toll paid.”
The middle-aged man's sword hand trembled, and he glared at the man across from him as though to kill him.
“An escort agency runs on trust. An escort agency that loses trust is finished.”
“Even though your life ends today when my blade takes your head?”
“You bastard......!”
Rough voices burst out from the Azure Cloud Escort Agency's side as well as from the middle-aged man.
Jeong I-shin, too, was greatly impressed by the words of the man who appeared to be a bandit.
‘He talks about killing like it's nothing at all.’
It struck him suddenly.
That this ground he stood on with both feet was not the modern world.
The caliber of the first ‘human being’ he had met was truly something.
As if answering Jeong I-shin's admiration, the bandit raised his saber grandly and leveled it at the middle-aged man.
“Your decision was slow, and too much time has passed. Leaving only the cargo won't satisfy me now.”
“......The Azure Cloud Escort Agency supplies goods to the Heavenly Martial Academy. Am I to take your actions as the will of the Ink Tiger Keep, as the will of the Green Forest Bandits?”
The middle-aged man said it with his teeth clenched hard.
His voice was full of rage and humiliation.
He seemed to be selling the name of his backing, and yet the situation did not flow the way he wanted.
The bandit's eyes went wide for an instant, and then he began to laugh, nostrils flaring.
“Gwahaha! Have you ever seen such a stupid fellow! Then, you bastard, I'm Green Forest — do I look like the Beggar's Gang to you?”
“......!”
“A man who can't read the times, saying he'll run an escort agency. Cut them down!”
The bandit kicked off the ground at the same moment he gave the order.
At the same time, Jeong I-shin finished his judgment.
‘First, help the escort agency.’
Ever since demonic practitioners began running rampant across the Central Plains, it was said the orthodox and unorthodox had long refrained from carving into each other's flesh.
They had joined hands to resist the great evil called the demonic path.
Even so, putting one's own safety first was an unavoidable part of human nature, and so there had been plenty who lived selfishly.
Most of them were the unorthodox sects, and among those, the worst sort of crowd.
‘So this is who he meant.’
Those bandits were exactly the ‘unorthodox and heretical whose skulls must be cracked’ that Gongheon had urged upon him until the moment he closed his eyes.
And so Jeong I-shin took his first step into the murim of the Central Plains.
***
The bandit had closed the distance in an instant, and his saber was a hair from splitting the middle-aged man's neck.
―......I am an inner arts...... ahem, beggar.
It was a very small whisper.
A muttering small enough to be buried entirely under the shouts bursting out from both sides.
Yet why did it sound in his ears like a thunderclap?
Heo Ung, Third Squad Leader of the Ink Tiger Keep, shuddered.
Because of it the tip of his blade wavered, and he failed to take the head escort's head.
“Kuk......!”
While the head escort, cut on the shoulder, fell back, Heo Ung turned his head to resolve the foreboding rising in him.
And what was there was.
“......A beggar?”
A battlefield turned to chaos with the Azure Cloud Escort Agency's escorts and the Ink Tiger Keep's bandits tangled together.
Through the middle of it, a single beggar walked leisurely.
Blind blades swung toward the beggar again and again, but not one of them landed.
The beggar ambled along, lightly tapping the bodies of the bandits he passed.
And...... each time, his subordinates rolled their eyes back and dropped where they stood.
Their number was already past five.
“......”
Heo Ung did not take his eyes off the sight.
And the moment the beggar finally stood before him, he pulled up the corners of his mouth.
“Hah! The Beggar's Gang after all.”
“......?”
Standing before the bandit, Jeong I-shin blinked.
He was still reeling from having recited the inner arts beggar declaration without meaning to, and the words of the bandit facing him were even more bewildering.
“The Beggar's Gang?”
“Don't play innocent. I never imagined you had eyes even on a place like this. Still...... seeing that they sent one fool like you, I can guess the state of the Beggar's Gang.”
“......What is he talking about?”
Whatever Jeong I-shin said, the bandit paid it no mind.
He went on speaking, visibly having recovered his composure.
“Tsk. Do you think you're the Myriad Sword Emperor? What are you doing wandering around with three swords dangling off you? You'll break your back, boy.”
“Swords? What are you...... shi—, what is this!”
Jeong I-shin, lowering his head to follow the bandit's jerk of the chin, jumped. A curse he had long forgotten burst out of him on its own.
Just as the man said, three swords hung at his waist.
“......So he was a madman.”
He did not even hear the bandit clicking his tongue. That was how dumbfounded he was.
‘The wooden sword, Vast Plain, and...... why is this here?’
The pitch-black wooden sword made from the wood of the Thunder Tree Forest.
Vast Plain, the half-sword Namgung Baek had left behind.
And an utterly ordinary iron sword.
Why was the sword he had seen just before leaving the Bottomless Abyss hanging at his own waist?
“Just die quietly!”
“Look out!”
Jeong I-shin, who had been staring at the iron sword with a grave face, tilted his body slightly.
Even as the blue-white saber swept past his eyes, his gaze stayed fixed on the sword.
“This is maddening. Why is it here?”
“You bastard......!”
With a bellow the saber came driving in again. But this time as well Jeong I-shin merely twisted his body a little.
SWISH!
The sound of the saber cutting empty air was faintly pitiful.
The next attack, and the one after that, were the same.
SWISH! SWICK!
“I definitely left it behind. No, I never even touched it in the first place.”
“Just! Get hit! Please!”
At that farcical sight, the ringing of steel across the battlefield gradually died away.
In the middle of the two parted groups.
Jeong I-shin, dodging the saber this way and that, finally nodded.
“......I have no idea!”
“Yooou bastaaard!”
“But you I've got figured out.”
The saber that had been raised high toward the sky came plunging straight down.
Standing at its end, Jeong I-shin finally took the bandit into his eyes.
Then he hooked a single strand of true qi from his qi center and kicked off the ground.
Unhindered Step, Silent Thunder Body, Thunder-Severing Myriad Transformation Hand.
He unfolded none of those martial arts.
‘Heavenly Thunder Qi is out. They said it's the most conspicuous power under a demonic dominion. And the internal injury...... hasn't fully healed yet either.’
That was the conclusion he arrived at.
A single strand of the Sinew-Transforming Marrow-Cleansing Scripture.
And that was enough.
No, in truth, it was too much.
WHOOSH!
With no more than a light roll of his shoulder, the saber split empty air.
“......!”
The bandit's eyes flew wide and he tried desperately to pull the saber back, but Jeong I-shin's hand had already reached his flank.
THUD—!
“Guhk......!”
Clutching his waist, the bandit collapsed like a sandcastle struck by a wave.
“W-Wait, just now......?”
“The squad leader in one blow?”
“The Beggar's Gang! Is he really a Beggar's Gang beggar?! He does look like a beggar......!”
Leaving the commotion of the few remaining bandits behind him, Jeong I-shin looked toward the Azure Cloud Escort Agency's side.
That same middle-aged man's jaw was trembling.
“F-Form-Shifting Displacement? N-No, surely......”
Jeong I-shin kept his mouth shut in accordance with the Jianghu Code of Conduct.
And only watched with an indifferent gaze.
‘Raising Funds, Chapter Two: Escort Agencies.’
When encountering an escort agency, let a little of your energy slip and they will often ask for help.
Anyone running an escort agency in a world overflowing with the unorthodox and heretical is beyond ordinary madness for money, so their spirit is worth acknowledging.
After confirming their character, if they seem decent, lend them your strength.
‘They look like ordinary people. The escort agency...... shall I just take a taste?’
Because for fleecing, bandits alone were enough.