Chapter 1002: Journey to Nanjing (2)

Gongsun Cheonil’s letter began in Nanjing, then traveled one-way upstream along the Yangtze until it finally reached Qing and delivered its news...

Qing lay down on the bed right away and set the letter down by her pillow.

Hm. Sounds like Lady Gongsun got her heart hurt—bad.

And honestly, after hearing the situation... no, after reading the situation, how could she not feel hurt? It was exactly the kind of thing that would sting.

Still, according to Gongsun Cheonil’s ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) note, his mother was simply the type to be a bit careless with words on a daily basis. He insisted it was absolutely not something said out of malice.

Qing found herself nodding.

Yeah. Those people exist.

No bad intentions—just the kind of person who speaks without running it through the brain first, tosses words out bluntly, and then—CRASH—causes a disaster.

And once she thought of that, Qing suddenly remembered the first time she’d met Gongsun Yoye and become friends with her.

A pickpocket had stolen a hair ornament Gongsun Yoye treasured, and Qing had gotten it back for her. That was how they’d gotten close.

And she clearly remembered this, too—Gongsun Yoye had said that ornament was something her mother had given her.

Then, when Qing thought back to the strict, rigid atmosphere Gongsun Yoye had described from back then, she could practically hear it in that one shout Gongsun Yoye had once barked out in the middle of the Dragon-Phoenix Assembly.

—You pathetic martial-world bitches. All you do is powder your faces and giggle, so is it any wonder your martial arts are that trash? Have some shame!

She hadn’t actually said it that aggressively, but apparently that was exactly how it sounded to anyone listening.

And thinking about it now, Gongsun Yoye wasn’t exactly in a position to complain about feeling hurt. She’d fired words off without thinking about how the other person would take them—just like her mother.

They said blood didn’t lie...

Anyway, Gongsun Yoye’s childhood had clearly been shaped in an atmosphere where anything “womanly” was treated like a kind of wrongdoing.

In that situation, her mother must have felt sorry for her daughter and quietly slipped her that hair ornament without letting anyone else see.

If you looked at it that way, Gongsun Yoye’s mother probably hadn’t said it with much thought.

The problem was that Gongsun Yoye had taken it straight to the heart—she’d gotten properly scratched raw, as Qing’s hometown would put it in clinical terms...

Well, friends were friends. What else was there to say?

A real friend showed up when things were hard—or even if you ignored that, it had been a long time since Qing had even seen Gongsun Yoye’s face.

And Nanjing, huh. What kind of food would be good there...?

Travel meant eating, and eating meant something Qing could never endure patiently.

Without thinking, saliva pooled in her mouth, and she swallowed hard.

“What is it...?”

On the bed, Jayeo had her head resting snugly on Qing’s chest. She tilted her head way back to look up and ask.

Qing let out a small laugh.

“Jayeo. Want to go on a trip with me?”

This wasn’t like the last trip to Changbai—no dangerous hunt for demonic arts, no purpose-built expedition.

It was just going to a friend’s house to coax a shut-in martial artist out of hiding and hang around for a bit. There was no reason to leave Jayeo behind.

“Oh...!”

Jayeo’s eyes went wide.

Why did little kids light up and lose their minds the instant they heard the word “trip”?

Even quiet, gentle Jayeo couldn’t resist it. Leaving the house meant hardship—then again, what did kids know about hardship? If it got hard, they just flopped, and the grown-up carried them around.

“When do we go? Now? Right now?”

“We can’t go right now. We’ll go after we sleep and wake up, and yeah—we have to get Grandma’s permission too.”

“Mm. Mm.”

Only then did Qing realize she’d messed up a little.

Yeah... I should’ve told her tomorrow morning.

Jayeo’s hollow, sleepy eyes—hollow as always—were sparkling, a faint liveliness blooming inside them.

Like all the sleepiness had vanished in one shot.

*****

Sure enough.

That night, Jayeo kept firing off endless kid-questions with no beginning and no end: where are we going, what’s there, when do we go, how do we get there, and so on.

But Qing didn’t actually know much either, so she mostly kept thinking, What even is in Nanjing? The... massacre—no, that hadn’t happened yet. Anyway.

So Jayeo tossed and squirmed and slept badly, then started nodding off from morning onward. While she dozed, Qing went to her master in order and asked for permission.

“A disciple continuing to broaden her experience can also be part of cultivation. But taking the child... ah, yes. Still, if you leave now, it will be past mid-June. Nanjing at that time is like a furnace, and I worry about the child’s health.”

“Nanjing is that hot?”

“Would they call it one of the Three Great Furnaces of the Central Plains for nothing? And among them, they rank Nanjing as the worst. Wouldn’t that be rather harsh for a child?”

“Furnace” meant a literal furnace—something you filled with charcoal and fuel and lit on fire.

In Qing’s homeland, there was a city called Daegu notorious as a “fire hell,” practically proud of its heat as a local specialty. Likewise, Nanjing had a terrible reputation for the filthiest summer weather in the Central Plains.

Truthfully, the Central Plains were enormous, and if you measured pure temperature, there were plenty of cities hotter than Nanjing.

But Nanjing had something extra.

Humidity.

Not just humid—very, extremely, viciously humid.

And on top of that—

No wind.

Hot weather, high humidity, and dead-still air, all packed into one place?

It was hot under the sun, hot in the shade, hot inside the house—and it wasn’t like Qing’s homeland where every house had fans or air-conditioning.

No matter where you went, the air pressed down on your lungs, suffocating.

A true hellscape.

After listening to Ximen Surin’s explanation, Qing thought:

Mm. Master really is something.

Since I said I’m taking Jayeo, Master feels sulky, and this is how she’s showing it.

But she can’t exactly tell me to leave the kid behind when it’s obvious Jayeo will love it, so she’s trying to scare me by painting Nanjing like some unlivable fire pit.

If it were truly a furnace, how would anyone live there? People lived there because it was livable.

And in fact, Qing’s guess wasn’t wrong.

Ximen Surin didn’t have many disciples who were comfortable enough to come chat warmly with her, so Jayeo—throwing herself into her arms with “Grandma, Grandma” in that cute voice—was basically the only joy she’d found late in life.

Anyway.

Qing had heat immunity to begin with.

With Ice-Jade Divine Art being run in that ridiculously “ice” way, Qing could make cold spill out of her body whenever she wanted. She hadn’t worried about heat in a long time.

If Jayeo got hot, Qing could just cool her down.

Hm. Or should she bring Iri too?

Qing’s Ice-Jade Divine Art had been learned from Seol Iri, and Seol Iri was the original “ice”—a master of that northern Ice Palace survival style who unconsciously radiated cold, even while sleeping.

“Iri. I’m going to Nanjing to see Yoye. Want to come?”

Seol Iri looked like she was thinking for a moment.

“If we go by boat.”

Meaning: if we go on foot, she wasn’t going.

Which made sense. Nanjing was downriver on the Yangtze, and the Priestess Order Temple was midstream—by boat, it was a straight shot.

And Nanjing was one of the Central Plains’ representative major cities, so boats going there weren’t rare. Besides, if Qing said she was going, the Seol Family Trading House would probably conjure up a boat route even if none existed.

So Qing packed simply and left the Priestess Order Temple. Just as she stepped out, Yeonseo and Sarang—who were on gate duty—

Wait, why do these two always seem to be posted at the front gate? Are they getting bullied or something?—

They grabbed Qing’s pant leg and clung.

“Great-Grand Senior Teacher, Great-Grand Senior Teacher, if you leave like this, how are we supposed to live? And you’re even taking Jayeo too—no, you can’t, you can’t do this! Our only joy in life is seeing something pretty or something cute, at least one of the two—how can you steal them away so cruelly? If this is how it was going to be, I should’ve never opened my eyes in the first place...!”

“Right! If you do this, I might go bad, you know? I think about Great-Grand Senior Teacher morning, noon, and night, but now I won’t! Then my thoughts about Great-Grand Senior Teacher will drop from a hundred times a day to... ninety-seven!”

Yeonseo and Sarang’s usual over-the-top routine.

Qing smiled and played along.

“Something cute? I’ll give you cute Jangmyeong instead. How about you endure it with Jangmyeong?”

“...Hm.” “...Hmmm.”

Sarang and Yeonseo immediately went stone-faced—then burst out laughing like kids who’d successfully pulled a prank.

“Then have a safe trip!”

And with their send-off behind her...

At last, the trip to Nanjing—departure!

...Not quite yet.

Whenever Qing went anywhere, she always stopped by the Seol Family Trading House first. It didn’t feel like a real departure otherwise.

She went down past the mountain gate, followed the now neatly maintained mountain path east, and the city that changed every time she saw it—Jagwi—came into view.

*****

Inside a tavern in Jagwi County.

“You hear that? They say the Golden Hawk Unit—the Evil Path Alliance’s elite combat force—is taking care of critical patients at Sasa Medical Academy now.”

“Hah. You’re late on the gossip. That’s because of what happened last time—there was that huge uproar, right? People saying the Heavenly Flower Sword learned seed-extraction demonic arts. And then that bastard who claimed he was the Greenwood bandit boss’s kid came out and started spewing insane nonsense too.”

“Hm? What does that have to do with the Golden Hawk Unit?”

“What does it have to do with them? Isn’t it obvious? Turns out it was all the Evil Path Alliance—those dark-world bastards—pulling strings.”

“Figures. But what does that have to do with the Golden Hawk Unit?”

“Man, you’re thick. Think about it. From the righteous side’s point of view, it’s like they messed with the Heavenly Flower Sword, the sacred figure of the orthodox world, right? Retaliation wouldn’t have been strange at all. But instead, they made a deal—an elite combat force does charity work, and everybody lets it go quietly.”

“That certain?”

“If it weren’t, why would masters from an elite combat force be nursing critical patients? Try caregiving yourself sometime—you’ll see. That’s not something a human being can do. That’s why people say there’s no dutiful son in front of a long illness.”

“...Hm. Is that so?”

“If the Martial Alliance and the Evil Path Alliance fought, the outcome would be obvious without even looking, wouldn’t it?”

“Then why not just fight?”

“Even if the Martial Alliance wins for sure, do you think it comes out unharmed? And while they’re fighting, who gets splashed by the sparks? People like us. So the Martial Alliance handled it like this, didn’t it?”

“So the Evil Path Alliance knows it’ll lose if it fights—so it got scared and obediently listened, and sent out its elite combat force?”

“Yeah. Now you’re finally speaking my language.”

The two men were talking unusually loudly.

Sure, in the Central Plains, talking loudly was as natural as breathing, so someone could argue it wasn’t “unusual” at all.

But it was unusual.

Because if you were going to put words like “Evil Path Alliance” and “Martial Alliance” in your mouth, lowering your voice was basic survival wisdom.

So did these two not value their lives?

In a way, yes.

They were the sort who could gladly offer up their lives for the Priestess Order Temple’s great cause, for the Priestess Order Temple’s Supreme Being—the Wise Goddess.

But more than that, their loud talking was deliberate.

It was a rumor they wanted people to hear.

They’d lost the gold and couldn’t even hang the signboard.

And now the Golden Hawk Detachment was so busy nursing critical patients that it couldn’t even widely publicize that the academy’s operation was an Evil Path Alliance project.

This was the finishing nail.

The Evil Path Alliance framed the Heavenly Flower Sword, got caught red-handed, got scared of the Martial Alliance—and rushed into charity work!

A truly lethal rumor.

Because then, even if it became openly known that the Evil Path Alliance was running a charity clinic, it would be dismissed as nothing more than a face-saving event to cover up their scheming.

But if this reached the Evil Path Alliance’s ears, Golden Hawk Unit Commander Hyung Taejak was about to end up in a very awkward position.

They’d lost eighty strings of gold.

And it wasn’t even to some famous, terrifying master—no, they got robbed by laughable trash and became a public joke.

They’d gotten scammed by a con artist and bought a signboard of truly miserable quality for five strings of gold.

Looking at the signboard’s condition, Hyung Taejak almost felt it was a relief the Priestess Order Temple hadn’t given permission. If that signboard had been hung up, how ridiculous and pathetic would the Evil Path Alliance’s name have looked?

And then, on top of that, they’d scraped together another fifty strings—dragging in every last scrap they had—and sent it.

They couldn’t even manage the easy job of widely promoting the charity work, and now what?

People were saying the Evil Path Alliance started charity work because it was scared of the orthodox hypocrites?

And yes, the Greenwood bandit boss’s “kid” incident was something they planned, but the “Heavenly Flower Sword is a seed-extraction witch” story wasn’t their work!

Sure, the Evil Path Alliance could feel wronged.

Hyung Taejak could feel wronged too, since he was going to be judged as an unbelievably incompetent bastard.

The Golden Hawk Unit members, forced into nursing critical patients because they followed the wrong unit commander, could feel wronged as well.

But what was there to feel wronged about?

That’s what he got for not living like a decent human being in the first place...