Yeo Hong-ran's eyes, following Tang Yu-hyeon's fingertip, shook wildly.
He was telling her to press her thumbprint onto a blank sheet with no way of knowing what would be written on it.
And he was deliberately reminding her that with it she could die, or live a life worse than death.
When Yeo Hong-ran only bit her lips inward, Tang Yu-hyeon spoke again with a cold face.
"You had better press it quickly. If you do not cooperate willingly, I will turn over everyone connected to you. Including the place where your sworn sister is."
"N-not where my sister is!"
Yeo Hong-ran reached out desperately and caught Tang Yu-hyeon's sleeve.
"Strike the Red Tiger Keep instead. That is the place I was backing!"
"Why? Is there something at the Moon-Crossing Pavilion your sworn sister runs that I must not know about?"
"......!"
"So there is."
Tang Yu-hyeon coldly shook her hand off and set the paper before her eyes again.
"I will not say it twice. Press it."
Yeo Hong-ran chewed her lips and trembled all over.
But realizing there was no other way, she smeared her blood on the hand that was still whole and pressed her thumbprint.
"Hrrk."
Whether Yeo Hong-ran wept or not, Tang Yu-hyeon checked with an indifferent face that the print had come out cleanly.
'Bastard without blood or tears.......'
Yeo Hong-ran cursed inwardly, but on the outside she wheezed pitifully and collapsed to the floor.
Her pride stung, but she had to plan for later if she was ever to have her revenge.
"Now, you will spare me, will you not?"
"You keep saying strange things."
FWIP—.
A poison needle lodged in Yeo Hong-ran's head.
"I never said I would spare you. Do not go assuming things on your own."
"You...... khh!"
Yeo Hong-ran glared at Tang Yu-hyeon with bloodshot eyes.
Black marks spread from her head down through her body like a blooming demon flower.
A fast-acting poison overran her body in an instant.
"Kh...... uh......."
Her body, convulsing from the poison, stopped moving like a puppet with its strings cut.
Tang Yu-hyeon looked down at the corpse, now hard to recognize, then turned his head toward the window.
"I know you are watching. Put the Pavilion Mistress in a cell and clean up the rest. Prop up a figurehead for the pleasure house and keep it running. As for the people, I will follow Mother's decision."
At that, a voice came out of the darkness beyond the window.
"By your command."
They were the shadows the Tang Clan had assigned to him.
They had likely watched his every move from the moment he left the Tang Clan compound.
If so, all the better.
He had shown them exactly what the Tang Clan wanted to see.
'This is what people mean when they say blood cannot be hidden.'
A faint smile, whether self-mockery or self-affection, surfaced and faded.
"Return as soon as the work is done. I have somewhere to stop by."
"Go safely."
He said that, but several of them would follow at his heels.
That was their duty to begin with.
'It makes no difference.'
He was not going off to learn a lost manual; robbing a mountain keep in league with the Hundred Flower Pavilion was nothing special.
"In all my years I never thought I would see a pleasure house and a mountain keep join hands."
Tang Yu-hyeon smirked and ran off into the darkness.
***
"Haaaaaaw."
At the entrance to the Red Tiger Keep, Wang Chil, standing watch, yawned wide enough to split his mouth.
'Nobody is going to come at this hour anyway, and they still shove it on me. I should have picked my side better. Tsk.'
He had originally belonged to another mountain keep near the Red Tiger Keep.
But the Red Tiger Keep had appeared out of nowhere, grown its power, and swallowed them whole in a single raid.
That he now stood watch alone was because the original Red Tiger men had dumped the work on him.
'Joining hands with a bunch of pavilion women. Have they no shame?'
To a man who believed martial attainment was the only means of proving one's worth, it was a considerable blow to his pride.
Since when did counting and talking get to meddle in the business of fists?
Just as he was clicking his tongue over grievances he could not speak aloud, a man appeared before him.
"Excuse me, let me ask something."
"What?"
"Is this the Red Tiger Keep?"
Wang Chil did not answer at once and looked the man up and down.
The night was dark and he could not see well, but the upturned eyes and the distinct features told him this was a handsome youth.
'By his looks he could be the young master of a famous house.......'
If so, all the better.
He would fleece him before some other bastard got a spoon in.
Frightening naive young masters and sucking them dry to the marrow was his specialty.
Wang Chil chuckled and nodded.
"That it is."
"Then I have come to the right place."
"Huh?"
The youth smiled.
At the same time Wang Chil's field of vision tilted.
Whump.
Only when he could no longer see the youth's face did Wang Chil realize he had fallen to the ground.
'Why am I......?'
Pain flared in his throat.
But his arms would not move, as though frozen.
'When was I hit?'
Wang Chil choked and forced his eyes up.
Only then did he see what the darkness had hidden.
An ornate pine tree embroidered on a green outer robe. That was unmistakably the Tang Clan's.
"Caught on now?"
"......!"
With the youth's, with Tang Yu-hyeon's mocking smile as the last thing he saw, Wang Chil's vision washed black.
***
'Only one man on watch. Excessively sloppy. Or else they have grown fat.'
Tang Yu-hyeon thought this as he retrieved the poison needle lodged in Wang Chil's throat.
Could the funding from the Hundred Flower Pavilion dull people this much?
There was no way.
Something more was certainly going on.
"Wang Chil, you bastard. Let us switch. The ones coming from the Hundred Flower Pavilion have not even sent word...... Huh? What the!"
Jang Bok, crawling sluggishly out from inside the Red Tiger Keep, spotted Tang Yu-hyeon and started violently.
"Hey! We are under attack!"
Had he wished it, sealing the mouth that called for his fellows or loosing poison to turn the whole keep into a wasteland would have been nothing at all.
But Tang Yu-hyeon did not.
The more people gathered, the easier it was to test his own strength.
Sweep.
By the time he braced a hand on his knee and rose, about ten more had arrived than when he first looked.
They were gripping swords or spears, one apiece, as if ready to charge at any moment.
"Kekeke. What is this? A little young master?"
"Did you take a wrong turn somewhere? But what to do? You laid hands on a man of the Red Tiger Keep, so you will hardly pass through unharmed. Heh."
Tang Yu-hyeon did not react to the cheap provocation.
He merely looked the bandits over as one looks at small children, then crooked a finger.
"What are you waiting for? Come at me."
"Why you——!"
The bandit at the front thrust his spear with force enough to run Tang Yu-hyeon through.
But Tang Yu-hyeon did not so much as blink; he looked straight at the man charging him and loosed a throwing blade.
SQUELCH!
The blade, flying fast, pierced through his forehead.
"Khhh......."
A frame the size of a house pitched over in an instant.
"Tsk. Slow."
Every time his body or his reflexes lagged behind what his mind grasped, he felt it anew.
That he had truly entered a different body.
'Is it because I am still only first-rate? It will be trouble if I do not finish this quickly.'
Tang Yu-hyeon turned the huge body over with his foot as he thought.
He might as well use the chance to get used to moving in it.
"You! Hyung-nim's murderer!"
Tang Yu-hyeon saw the bandit newly charging in and loosed another blade.
Slice. Slice.
Not the sound of something being stabbed, but of something being cut. A sound he would have thought a throwing blade could not make.
"Kuh-hurk!"
In only two strokes the outstretched spear snapped and the corded throat fell to the ground.
Movements clean and free of waste, handling the throwing blade as if it were a sword.
'What in the world is that man?'
Come to think of it, arriving alone at a mountain keep in the dead of night had been strange from the start.
But they had been fooled by his looks and let it pass without much thought.
Just a dull-witted young master who did not know how frightening bandits were, who had overlooked the standing of the rising Red Tiger Keep and the Hundred Flower Pavilion that backed it.
But the martial artist before them overturned that expectation for all to see.
By his comparatively small frame and thin voice he was certainly a child not yet twenty, yet the cruel hand that went straight for the throat did not match that age.
Unless he had been rolling in the streets since birth, a boy that green could not be so accustomed to killing.
Gulp.
An uneasy instinct sent up a warning.
They had picked the wrong man.
None of them said it aloud, but their faces said it for them.
'This cannot be.'
While every one of them stood frozen, one bandit, certain the situation was against them, quietly brought a signal whistle to his lips.
However outstanding the martial artist, he could not overcome being outnumbered, or so he judged.
'I have to blow it quickly——!'
SQUELCH.
But before he could blow air into the whistle, Tang Yu-hyeon gripped a throwing blade like a sword and ran it through his chest.
He had crossed a distance of three feet in a single burst and appeared before him in an instant.
"Shh."
The motion that followed, twisting slightly to kick the falling whistle away, was just as natural, without a hair of hesitation.
"You must be quiet."
At the low, hard voice, shed of any trace of a boy's, the bandits' eyes quivered.
"A m-monster!"
At the word someone let slip, Tang Yu-hyeon turned his head.
Every one of them expected merciless attacks and deaths to follow.
But Tang Yu-hyeon, as though laughing lightly at their expectations, broke into a chuckle.
"That is a phrase I have not heard in a long time."
"......."
"Everyone who has called me a monster is buried in the ground and will not come out to say it again."
At words they could not begin to understand, only confusion and terror deepened.
Tang Yu-hyeon swung the retrieved blade lightly and flicked the blood onto the ground.
"Well, never mind that. This is a mountain keep, so you must have all sorts of valuables hidden away. You have surely fleeced plenty of people, commoners and sons of great clans alike."
Crrrack.
When Tang Yu-hyeon loosened his hands, his knuckles answered.
"And you dared do it in a place the Sichuan Tang Clan plainly watches over."
A ghostly aura like frost poured out of him.
"Every one of you deserves to die, but I will treat it as the folly of my own young days and tell you the one way to die in relative comfort."
Tang Yu-hyeon jerked his chin toward what lay behind them, the Red Tiger Keep.
"The valuables your Boss has hidden. Do you know where they are?"
"......."
"Right. Of course you do not."
"B-but they must be somewhere in the Red Tiger Keep!"
"Would they not be? Who are you trying to fool?"
"Eek! Spare me! From now on I will live an honest life!"
"Listen. Is this an academy? You act as though anyone may say whatever he pleases and asking forgiveness undoes what was done."
Tang Yu-hyeon slid poison needles between his fingers.
"I do not believe a word of yours."
FWISSSSSH!
His sleeves flapped and dozens of poison needles sprayed out.
"Aaargh!"
"Aaaaaaah!"
Screams burst out on every side.
Those who judged they were no match threw away their pride and fled.
Tang Yu-hyeon gave them not the smallest opening; he sought out those who had run and pressed deeper inside.
Because the place a cornered man seeks is the comfortable heart of his own den.
Thump. Thump.
Corpses piled along the path he walked, yet not a scratch appeared on his body.
His leisurely stride, as though he were out for a stroll, halted only when it reached the heart of the Red Tiger Keep.
"......and that is how this body has been fleecing the Tang Clan's fortune! Hahaha!"
"As expected of the Boss!"
"Nowhere in the Central Plains is there a man with a heart as bold as yours!"
Enjoying yourselves, are you.
Without withdrawing his cold gaze, Tang Yu-hyeon kicked in the door that hid their revelry.
CRAAASH!
With a roar the door panel flew off.
Tang Yu-hyeon looked over their startled faces and pulled one corner of his mouth up.
"Why has the mood gone so cold? Were you speaking ill of me?"