Chapter 914: Tripitaka Master and the Thief of Benevolence and Righteousness (7)

The raised pavilion fell into silence.

But only for a moment.

“[Who’s the real monster here? Those wretched people over there—fathers who went out to feed their families even if they look ridiculous wearing monster masks—or you, who wrap yourselves in human skin and suck the blood of others?]”

Beyond the face veil, a faintly visible shade.

Red like a flower, yellow like a beast’s eyeball, yet shining with the most precious color—purple—and also blue like the sky on a clear day, and yet not resembling any of those colors at all: a color that had never existed in this world.

“[I came down here to beat down the monsters that are throwing my world into chaos, so what are you doing? We have to beat down the monsters wearing human masks.]”

Qing snapped her finger straight out.

And it was the very moment the county magistrate opened his mouth to protest—

“[U—UAAAGH!]” “[Y-you dog-like—these filthy sons of bitches!]”

The horde of monsters packed onto the pavilion stair landing surged forward all at once, clubs raised.

Now the courtyard filled with nothing but sound—WHACKWHACKWHACK, the sound of beating a dog, and KEEEUUUGHH, KEEEGH, the sound of a dog wailing.

The anger of the weak is, by nature, something that comes too late once it finally explodes.

Because people call them weak precisely because, even when they have every reason to be furious, they cannot be furious in front of the wall of reality.

But when that anger that has piled up and piled up—anger compressed down, packed tight—smashes its lid and bursts out by sheer accident, recoil follows in proportion to the density that had been crushing it.

And so the rage of the monster horde—the Masquerade Troupe—erupted in a magnificent current, like a volcano spewing, like a colossal wave surging in.

After beating the officials and local clerks who had been lolling around on the raised pavilion into a pulp, the Masquerade Troupe rode that momentum, seized the County Hall, and knocked down the soldiers.

Then they threw the County Hall’s grain storehouse wide open—

“[My God, it’s all rice—rice!]”

“[When we borrowed grain, they gave us half millet, and in the other half of the ‘half’ they mixed in rice bran and sand—while they piled rice up in a warehouse like this...!]”

“[Is this rice flour? These sons of bitches—people are starving to death and they were gonna steam rice cakes, these bastards!]”

A grain storehouse filled to bursting only fanned the fury of starving commoners.

Even if the statement made to Qing had been exaggerated, they hadn’t invented what wasn’t there.

The claim that every house had at least one person who had starved to death was bluster mixed with exaggeration, but if you said one person out of three or four houses had starved, it wouldn’t be wrong either.

And if you added in the ones who died of sickness brought on by hunger, you could even say there had been no exaggeration at all.

So what would the Masquerade Troupe be feeling, staring at sack after sack stuffed into a warehouse?

“[Th-this is all...]”

“[If we’d had even this much, we could’ve stayed full all the way to next year’s harvest...]”

“[After they ripped it away from us like that...!]”

The commoners, eyes flipped white, grabbed their clubs again and poured out into the dark night with torches in their free hands.

And so, for every fine tiled-roof house owned by officials and local clerks, wailing and death screams stormed through like a tempest.

In truth, when it came to temper, Joseon people never fell behind anyone—weren’t they the famed nation of stone battles?

In the Central Plain, a cockfight is a village-versus-village war: win and you become the master, lose and you become a slave.

It is war for survival and prosperity.

But what about Joseon’s stone battle?

A stone battle is a game where you throw fist-sized rocks at each other.

Not war but play—a folk game drenched in blood that only true men can play!

So by nature, the Eastern Tribespeople do not fear seeing blood.

Facing the joyful rebellion of commoners with their eyes flipped white, the gentry, the middle people, and their slave-boys struggled back—

And that was all.

A gentry man got dragged out by the hair, his face split open.

A young master famous for being scum, a vicious madam who made slave girls cry every day, a landowner who strutted around calling himself a landlord—high-status gentry, and middle people who weren’t even gentry yet still lived by ripping others off—all of them got dragged out, pissing blood and sliding along the ground.

And so, at the end of the long, long night—

In the deep night with the moon risen high overhead—

A village festival was held out of nowhere.

People’s faces were bright, and the scent of cooking rice overflowed.

Everyone laughing together, faces uniformly radiant.

But behind them, a gigantic tree with people hanging from it.

On the great tree in the center of the county, instead of love, people had been hung—truly, “On the jujube tree, a person has been hung,” or else, “On the jujube tree, blood-cakes have grown.”

Even in this uncontrollable rage, Qing’s advice—don’t let them die comfortably; hang them and let them live a long, long time, regrettably, in sickness and longevity—must have left quite an impression.

With a festival being held in front of such a grotesque installation, to any passerby it would have looked like a wicked banquet thrown by heretics who bewitch and mislead the people.

But Qing didn’t particularly care.

She’d always been the type who didn’t count anything below human as human, so—well. Cause and effect.

The Plunderer Demon didn’t care either.

Would the great demonic master of the Blood Cult care about something like this?

Gongryang Sayoon didn’t care either.

Human business for something that wasn’t human—what did it matter?

Lu Bu didn’t care either.

Was an animal an animal for nothing?

And so, with no one raising a question, a midnight festival took place.

“[Come, come—Master, you should take a full table too!]”

“Oh. Mm....”

Naturally, even the spearhead of this historic people’s liberation—the liberation fighter Tripitaka Master who had come from the Central Plain—was sent a properly laid-out table.

Tofu. Soy sauce. Kimchi. A meat soup with a little of everything thrown in. A heaping slab of boiled pork, chopped rough.

And an absolutely enormous amount of white rice.

White rice piled into a great bowl big enough to serve as a soup bowl—stacked into a high mound—mm, in hometown terms, that was four bowls of rice... no, five...

In truth, even before she’d gone out into the martial world, Qing had been the classic side-dish butcher who ate little rice and shoveled down lots of dishes—so, mm. Still, rice was nice.

But the kimchi—the kimchi—this color was, like, completely... this was a bit... My kimchi isn’t like this! AAAAGH!

The original Joseon kimchi she’d been searching for was something that used to be cabbage, blackish and smeared with a thick layer of yeast.

And the boiled pork—mm. The stink was... intense.

Qing didn’t know it, but it couldn’t be helped: it was a problem with the Joseon pig breed.

It was why Joseon people ate so much beef the state had to ban it (they ignored it and kept grilling anyway), and why pork dishes had to be boiled hard or simmered down.

Even so, the folk food of Joseon—her Joseon wasn’t this Joseon, but still, Joseon—was the moment her not-small expectations betrayed her.

Mm. Hometown cooking and Joseon cooking really were totally different things. I mean, of course they would be, but...

It was the moment Qing grew a little gloomy.

If Qing’s friends had seen it, they wouldn’t have been able to hide their shock that Qing was getting gloomy at the dinner table.

Are you sick? No, you look incredibly sick—why is your expression like that with food in front of you? If you’re sick, don’t endure it, say something—more or less that kind of reaction.

Anyway, in the middle of that—

“[Say, Tripitaka Master. Didn’t you say you were Seomun Cheong from the Central Plain?]”

Qing lifted her head.

A scholar wearing a horsehair hat.

Even among the gentry, it wasn’t as if every last one of them was a complete bastard—there had been someone among them who, at least, hadn’t drawn hatred.

They said he was a scholar who lived comfortably receiving plenty of grain despite having no work, simply because his genealogy was gentry—yet he’d been the kind of person who shared that grain with the commoners next door.

Maybe that was why he hadn’t entered government service and had stayed home reading books.

Because—sure. The country was really running great, wasn’t it.

“[I’m asking because I wondered whether you have the discernment to see what should be done going forward.]”

“[Going forward?]”

“[What’s happening now is clearly a popular uprising. And what dynasty—ours, or any dynasty—would just watch a popular uprising? Surely troops will come pouring in to suppress it. How do you intend to respond?]”

And wasn’t this, at its root, an incident where commoners and slaves—lumped together as “commoners”—had hung gentry and middle people and plundered their wealth?

On top of that, Joseon’s caste system was especially strict.

If a commoner killed a gentry man, the district head was immediately dismissed, the county’s status was downgraded, and they even changed the county’s name.

Was that all?

They even blocked the people of that county from taking the civil service exam, branding it the homeland of traitors—a traitor county.

Of course, burying a gentry man was fairly common—if you didn’t get caught, you’d be fine, and secretly getting rid of someone was the true terror of the Eastern Tribespeople.

And if you had a realistic, convincing excuse, you could just say a tiger carried them off and it was over.

But you couldn’t blame every last one of these officials and local clerks on a tiger.

“[Mm. In my view, wouldn’t it be enough to agree on a story that Seomun Cheong of the Central Plain brought a bandit horde dressed up as monsters and swept them away?]”

“[Would that work?]”

“[Then you must match your words well.]”

“[I cannot understand it. In the end, that’s nothing but wordplay. And people’s lives are on the line with such shallow wordplay. You may have helped them out of goodwill, Master, but aren’t you, in the end, driving them into greater trouble?]”

“Hmph. If you see someone drowning, you save them, right? But after you save them, do you have to keep them for life and take responsibility for them?”

“[What do you mean?]”

“[If I’d left them alone? To avoid starving to death, they would’ve kept stealing anyway. How long do you think that would’ve lasted? If they provoked the wrong expert, they’d get wiped out, and looking at them, even if it wasn’t a real expert like me, even a lesser one could’ve wiped them out easily.]”

Qing answered as if it were nothing, stirring the meat soup in slow circles.

Then she fished up the offal—mm, is this offal soup with rice...? No, it’s not rice. Offal soup? But why do all these organs stink like this... is it the cook’s fault?

“[And what guarantee is there that the Central Plain or the Jurchens would keep tolerating a monster horde that keeps getting in their way? If soldiers pour in, they could wipe out an entire county in a sweep. How is a sight like this—flailing around without knowing their own future—any different from a man drowning?]”

“......”

“[In the first place, how ‘good’ were they? Even if it was for survival, they’re still bandits, aren’t they? You can take circumstances into account when it’s killing others to live, but the Masquerade Troupe’s evil reputation is already widespread—what kind of viciousness it was, tsk tsk.]”

The scholar lowered his head, ashamed.

Even if it had been an unavoidable choice under the oppression of those above them, robbery was still robbery.

“[But the ones really filling their bellies were someone else. If you’re going to cut bellies open, you should cut open the bellies of the people who used them, not cut open people who are struggling just as badly and live off that.]”

Wasn’t there a saying back home, too?

Get slapped in Jongno and—uh, mm, where was it—spit in Yongsan? Was it Yongsan? Samgakji? Itaewon? Ilsan? No, was it somewhere far away? Then Pyongyang? But was it “spit” in the first place? And was it even “get slapped in Jongno”? Damn, even the sayings back home are getting hazy now.

And there was no way to find out anymore, so—damn it—why’d I even bring it up, now I have to end feeling gross about not knowing. Huh? No, wait. The sayings back home are Joseon sayings.

“Hey. What was that proverb again—get slapped in Jongno, and then what?”

“‘Get slapped in Jongno and throw side-eyes at the Han River’ is what it is.”

Curiosity resolved!

Qing nodded.

“Right. Anyway, if you get slapped in Jongno, you should give it back in Jongno. What good does it do to hurt some random Han River? It’s Joseon officials who failed to look after their own people. Even if blood must be seen, it’s those officials who must see it.”

So regardless of the outcome, this was right.

If Joseon officials abused them and drove them into it, then they had to point their blades at those Joseon officials—how could they live by robbing Manchu slash-and-burn settlers from the Central Plain who were suffering just the same?

The monster horde was pitiful—but being pitiful, being weak, didn’t make them good.