Chapter 327: Grace Is Easy to Forget, but Grudges Are Hard to Let Go (3)

The Murim Alliance wasn’t a superior organization ruling over the other sects of the Murim, so just because a mission letter had arrived didn’t mean one had to accept the order and obey.

However, it wasn’t easy to start resisting from the very first mission after the Murim Tournament.

In the Central Plains, face was equivalent to life.

Of course, if one had to choose between life and face, a hundred out of a hundred would choose life—but that was just to say how serious it was.

So if you said, “I’m not doing this mission. I don’t wanna,” right after the Murim Tournament ended, it would be like smearing shit on the face of the Murim Alliance.

What’s more, Qing was the winner of the Dormant Dragon Martial Contest.

As the most prominent of the post-generation disciples of the righteous sects of the era, if Qing ignored the mission, who else in the world would bother to follow it?

Besides, it wasn’t even a mission that required risking one’s life in a deadly battle.

It was simply asking her to go somewhere a bit far off, and just stay there until the end of this winter.

And even then, there would be no hardship awaiting her there—just lavish hospitality.

So, what could she do? She had to go.

Especially since there were a few people who absolutely couldn’t avoid the mission.

Among them was Seol Iri, who had been dispatched to the Murim Alliance as a representative of the Ice Palace and hadn’t done a single damn thing except eat and slack off until now.

The Murim Alliance had no means to track Seol Iri’s whereabouts.

But her deputy strategist, Sima Chunbong, was a weirdo of a man, though disturbingly efficient when it came to getting things done. Every mission letter came with an attached document saying something like, “If someone on this list is nearby, please deliver this mission to them.”

And so, our puberty-stricken or possibly rebellious training-obsessed freak Seol Iri ended up clutching Qing’s hand with unshakable determination.

“Lady Ximen. I swear I’ll come back.”

Her eyes were dead serious.

Just from her expression, it looked like someone heading off to a battlefield where survival wasn’t guaranteed, swearing they’d return no matter what.

“Didn’t you say ‘Soju’? Soju, huh. Now I’m craving it. A cold shot with some flatfish sashimi—damn.”

This won’t do. This really won’t do.

Qing summoned her inner energy and groped around wildly somewhere deep inside her gut.

The life she carried inside her stirred from the stimulation, flailing in protest, and a nice, warm wave of venom surged up and heated her core.

As expected, it was the liquor gourd. Damn reliable.

What a pitiful end for that liquor bottle, a parasitic salamander blood gourd, who just got whacked around by true energy while happily sucking up the poison.

Well, it was technically an internal pet parasite designed to detoxify accumulated venom in the body.

“Ahhh, that’s the stuff. But hey, if it’s Soju, isn’t that a pretty nice place? I heard the food there’s amazing. Ah. Do you need some pocket money?”

“...Yes. I mean, no. I mean... uhh. And... I don’t like being called Gunyaeng.”

Soju, huh? Yes.

Going somewhere good, right? No.

Need pocket money? Uhh.

Come to think of it, even if Seol Iri was dirt poor and practically a beggar, there’s no way she’d eagerly go, “Yes, please give me some allowance.”

She might accept it if offered, but only if Qing brought it up first. Seol Iri always looked a little guilty whenever that happened.

“Ah. I’m so thoughtless. Wait just a second. I’ll get something for you.”

And what Qing hastily brought out was a silk pouch filled with coins.

“Don’t go spending it all at once just because you’ve got money. Be frugal—it’s how you survive. But don’t act like a miser either. Still, when your pouch is full, you can walk proud wherever you go.”

Seol Iri bowed her head as she took the pouch, then looked up at Qing again and said,

“I’ll get strong. Strong enough to protect you.”

“Right, right. This daddy is just so touched by our little Gunyaeng saying such wonderful things.”

Seol Iri looked like she was about to protest at the “Gunyaeng” part but then tilted her head.

“...Why are you ‘daddy’?”

“Eh? Then should I be mommy?”

“...?”

“...?”

They exchanged confused stares.

After a moment, Seol Iri just tilted her head again and seemed to chalk it up to the usual nonsense and moved on to say goodbye.

“I’ll come back. For sure.”

“Didn’t you say that already? Also, why are you coming to the Sect of Divine Maidens? Isn’t your mission with the Murim Alliance?”

“Yes. But I said I’d protect you. So yes.”

“Yeah, yeah. Alright. Better catch your boat. Go on.”

“I’ll definitely, definitely come back.”

At Seol Iri’s solemn gaze, Qing burst out laughing.

The journey from the Sect of Divine Maidens to Soju wasn’t difficult or dangerous—in fact, it was practically a free ride.

Just hop on a boat at Zaguixian and drift along until the sea water shows up. Soju was right there.

That was, in fact, Sima Chunbong’s consideration—placing Seol Iri somewhere she could never possibly get lost, assuming she wasn’t familiar with the Central Plains.

And now, Qing had to go inform the Empress Dowager that she would be heading down the mountain for a task.

...Ugh, this is going to be hard.

What if she tries to stop me?

The ancestral rites will be over in just half a month and she’s bound to say, “Why not just stay a bit longer before leaving?”

I don’t think I’ll be able to refuse coldly.

But the Empress Dowager, surprisingly, was calm.

“All right. It’s only natural for the mother to see off the child, not the other way around. Be careful. Don’t eat anything you pick up, don’t sleep just anywhere when you feel sleepy, don’t skip proper bathing just because there’s no bathhouse, don’t follow strangers, and don’t go chasing after some cute animal you see.”

“...Am I a child or what.”

“If a twenty-year-old girl isn’t a child, then what is she? Most importantly, stay safe. If you ever feel like you’re in danger, think of your mother. If I hear something’s happened to you... I’ll take my own life too.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“The reason I didn’t end my life when I lost you... is because I couldn’t bring myself to die without first seeing your corpse. Just in case—just in case you were still alive. You say you want to live as a warrior. And perhaps that means you’ll die as one too. But even if that happens, don’t be too afraid. If our darling piglet has to go to the afterlife, her mother will go with her. If you think of your life as having one more life tied to it, you’ll treasure it more, won’t you?”

She was saying she’d die if Qing died.

And she wasn’t joking, no matter how you looked at it.

That’s way too heavy! Seriously!

Still, the Empress Dowager let Qing go surprisingly easily.

Ximen Surin, as always, was blunt and to the point.

“Go and come back safely. It’s a coastal land, so eat plenty of seafood while you’re there. You were dying to get your hands on raw fish—now’s your chance to satisfy that craving for good.”

“Hehe. Ah, right. Now that I’ve reached the Peak Realm, can’t I put off learning the Taeguk Grace Sword and Four Directions Sword for now? Is there another martial art worth learning?”

“Hmm.”

She’d wondered where Qing kept managing to swipe rare, high-level martial techniques from, and upon learning she was technically a princess, Ximen Surin had decided to accept it, more or less.

They said the imperial archives were a collection of all the martial arts in the Murim, so clearly someone had been fetching them whenever Qing needed them.

That said, considering Qing still hadn’t mastered even one or two of the techniques she’d been told to learn ages ago, it was clear she wasn’t picking them up that quickly.

Whether the process of smuggling them out was tricky, or just time-consuming.

“Now that you’ve reached the Peak Realm, it’s time to refine your own martial path. So why covet someone else’s techniques? But if you’re still insistent, inner energy techniques are never too many. Something hard and focused on internal energy—like Force Art—wouldn’t be bad for you.”

“Force Art. Got it.”

Ximen Surin chuckled.

What kind of master tells her disciple to go out stealing other people’s martial arts?

Still, her disciple was now a Divine Combatant. Maybe, thinking about it that way, it wasn’t so strange after all.

And with that thought of the Divine Combatant, Ximen Surin said,

“Send a letter to the Hanlin Scholar. Explain your situation and let him know you probably won’t be able to visit this winter. He’s your second master, isn’t he?”

“Oh—right. I totally forgot.”

“If you’re staying in Naknyeong until winter, then you’ll be back in spring. Ask him in the letter if it’s alright to visit then instead. You mentioned you still had some training to continue, didn’t you?”

“Ah, yes. Master, if he does give me permission, would it be alright to bring Jangmyeong along? We promised after the Murim Tournament that we’d take a tour around the jianghu together, but... things ended up like this.”

“If it’s to Taiyuan, there’s no problem.”

After being pushed out of direct politics, the Hanlin Academy had moved far away from Beijing—to Taiyuan.

So Taiyuan was practically the headquarters of Confucian academia, and there’d surely be something to learn from going there.

And while a Divine Combatant might just be a thieving bastard, a Teaching Scholar of the Hanlin Academy was a giant of Confucian education.

That was the reason Ximen Surin had agreed to this second master: for all her straightforward martial arts, she still believed in the moral teachings of the Three Doctrines—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.

She’d read Buddhist and Daoist scriptures, but Confucianism remained unfamiliar and distant.

That damn Confucianism was an especially cruel and nasty doctrine toward women—she’d found it repulsive and ended up burning every last Confucian classic she had.

And so, the disciple offered her farewell to her master.

Jin Jangmyeong, when she first heard Qing was leaving, sulked with a scowl like the little brat she used to be, clearly displeased.

But as soon as she heard they’d be spending a season together in Taiyuan afterward, her expression instantly lit up.

“It’s a promise. You can’t be late.”

“How far could it possibly be that I’d be late?”

“Isn’t it really far?”

“Isn’t it just a little shorter than a round trip to Luoyang?”

“...?”

Sure, if you were measuring by straight-line distance.

There weren’t any major obstacles between the Sect of Divine Maidens and Luoyang, so you could pretty much gallop straight across a line on the map.

You’d be trampling through rice fields and farmland like a complete nuisance, but it wasn’t exactly impossible.

But the road to Guangxi was a different story.

In the geography of the Central Plains, the west is high, the east is low. The north is also high, and the south is high too.

When “high” overlaps with “high,” it doesn’t cancel out—it stacks, becoming even higher.

So to get to Guangxi, you had to go east first, all the way to Dongting Lake, then swing down along the eastern edge of Hunan, and finally descend to Guangdong Province.

Only once you reached Guangdong could you properly turn west.

Which meant the route was twice as long.

“Well yeah, that’s if you’re dragging a wagon or something.”

Of course, Qing had no plans to take the long route.

She could just take the mountain paths and get there quickly, couldn’t she?

Why insist on smooth roads and circle around?

She could just keep heading south. Even if she got a little lost, as long as she kept her eyes on the south, she’d get there eventually.

After all, she had peerless lightness skills, an absurd digestion that let her eat literally anything, and the ability to sleep anywhere like a wild animal.

And she’d heard there was a trail, technically, so... whatever.

****

The shape of the Central Plains’ administrative provinces was jagged and erratic—some stretched long to the left, others to the right—and among them, Gansu Province had the strangest shape of all, like the long, stretched body of a snake.

Why did its borders look like that?

Simple. Because there were obstacles there.

Long ago, shockingly, there was a time when people were even more primitive and savage than they are in this already primitive and savage present-day Central Plains.

Those ancient primitives had not yet conquered the high mountains, dense forests, or wetlands.

So any terrain they couldn’t survive in became an impassable barrier—places humans dared not enter.

In other words, the boundaries of the Central Plains’ provinces were mostly made up of ridgelines connecting mountaintops ten bu apart, dense forests, swamps, or jungle.

Of those, the swamps had since been conquered.

The southern part of the Central Plains had originally been swampy and uninhabitable, but now it was prime land, rich and fertile enough for the capital to have moved east to Beijing.

But the straight path Qing was aiming for? That wasn’t through today’s Central Plains—it was through one of the most undeveloped wildernesses, even in the future.

Still, there was exactly one point along that straight path that would eventually be developed.

It was the sacred land of Qing’s ancestral people, the emotional homeland of the Korean race, the start and end of all dutiful family vacations, the supreme sacred mountain of the people—

Zhangjiajie!

Of course, Zhangjiajie becoming a Korean tourist hot spot was still far in the future.

At present, it was occupied by a completely different power.

To be precise, the name “Zhangjiajie” wasn’t even well known yet—it was just a tiny nearby town.

In the current Central Plains, the area was known by its lofty name: Tianzishan.

And Tianzishan was home to a massive bandit faction.

The Green Forest.

A workers’ union of forest bandits, professional murderers, kidnappers, and looters.