WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 140: The Rear Waves of the Yangtze Push the Front Waves (14)
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The moment Yeon Sowol signaled with his eyes,
Flutterrrrr!
His friends scattered in every direction at once, each tossing a bundle of papers into the air.
“Huh?”
“What?”
The papers soared high overhead, then burst apart like fireworks.
They drifted down in a flurry, light as snowflakes.
The venue, which Yang Hoeam had kept completely under control, fell into disorder in an instant.
Flap!
Flap!
People reflexively snatched up the sheets as they fluttered down and began to read.
“Good heavens.”
“Is this true?”
They were packed with accounts of the Dongting Lake water raiders’ atrocities.
- On a certain day of a certain month, Eunrak Village burned to the ground. Water raiders are suspected.
- Missing persons within Yuezhou City, including Mr. Wang, Miss Jeong, and Elder Shin... all are believed to have been kidnapped, murdered, or robbed by people working with the Dongting Lake water raiders.
- Pyeongseong Village supplies the water raiders with enormous amounts of food each month, as well as people.
- To avoid giving up their own people, the residents of Baek Village have been targeting passing travelers under cover of night...
They were incidents most people living inside Yuezhou City knew nothing about.
Yet in the remote fishing villages beyond the city walls, such violence had become routine. There were even crimes quietly committed within Yuezhou itself.
“It was this bad...?”
“Good grief...”
Even those who had believed Yang Hoeam had the water raiders under control were shocked by the scale of their atrocities.
Every reader’s face reddened with rising anger as they looked around at one another.
Then, in the middle of that uproar,
Flap!
Yeon Sowol appeared.
He wore a yellow martial robe beneath a white outer robe, and the red silk sword cord tied at his waist swayed like sunlight.
Delight filled the spectators’ eyes at the sight of him.
Right. Something had felt missing!
Hero Yeon!
It was Hero Yeon!
Yet once they saw his face, their expressions turned strange.
Dusk had already fallen, darkening the sky. The blazing braziers cast red shadows over the martial arts platform, and the firelight made the shadows of Yeon Sowol’s white robe ripple in every direction.
The white figure standing at their center was somehow chilling.
He looked strangely different from the young gentleman they usually saw. Paler, perhaps. His gaze seemed sharper too.
With shadows billowing around him, Yeon Sowol approached Yang Hoeam. He looked like a ghost risen from the underworld.
The generals moved to stop him, but froze at a gesture from Yang Hoeam.
“Right. You were here.”
Yang Hoeam looked Yeon Sowol up and down before asking, “Have all your internal injuries healed? You look pale. Perhaps you haven’t fully recovered.”
His voice was deliberately gentle.
Yeon Sowol slowly bowed at the waist, offering a long salute.
“I have one request.”
“Speak.”
“Moyong Ha was my friend. I wish to avenge her.”
“Absolutely not! Did you not hear what I just said? Suppressing the water raiders is my duty. Yeon Sowol, a commoner from Shinheung County in Guangdong, do not overstep your bounds.”
The refusal was firm.
The spectators swallowed.
Yang Hoeam had the righteous cause on his side. They looked worried that trouble might arise if Yeon Sowol defied him.
Yet Yeon Sowol suddenly found the whole situation ridiculous.
Wasn’t that hypocrite, Yang Hoeam, the one behind Moyong Ha’s death?
Even putting that aside.
It was ridiculous.
‘Yang Hoeam has the righteous cause?’
Was a person of the Jianghu like Yeon Sowol using force considered private revenge and vigilante justice?
While Yang Hoeam’s military authority was legitimate public power?
A bitter smile touched his lips.
‘Is this the twenty-first century?’
Had this land’s ruler somehow been elected by vote and granted legitimacy? Who had made its laws? Had a national assembly representing the people done so?
Did law enforcement reach every corner of the territory and every person living in it?
What about its administration?
No. More fundamentally...
Did human rights even exist here?
Did this country guarantee every person even the bare minimum needed to live, along with basic rights?
No.
It did not.
None of it did.
This barbaric world possessed not one of those things. Bandits and water raiders ran rampant in plain sight, yet it could not even wipe them out properly.
‘And yet vigilante justice is forbidden? Why is only that treated like it’s the twenty-first century?’
Ridiculous. It was absurd.
Since falling into this world, Yeon Sowol had never wanted anything grand.
He only wanted to live an ordinary, peaceful life.
But could common sense exist in a world where a martial official’s jiangshi emerged on a deserted island, and the friend who went to investigate came floating back with the waves as a corpse?
‘You want me to stay quiet?’
Then do your job properly.
If the world were truly in order, why would people of the Jianghu even exist?
The anger boiling inside Yeon Sowol seeped into his voice.
“Why are you stopping me?”
“Let ruler be ruler, minister be minister, father be father, child be child!”
A ruler should act like a ruler.
A minister should act like a minister.
A father should act like a father.
A child should act like a child.
For the world to remain stable, everyone had to fulfill their own assigned role and moral duty.
It was like a company starting to fall apart when management began meddling in design. Management should do management’s work. Designers should do designers’ work.
Yang Hoeam rebuked him on exactly those grounds.
“What are you? What makes you think you can suppress the water raiders?”
Yeon Sowol answered.
“I am simply a person who wishes to live.”
“What did you say?”
“Every life born into this world seeks to protect itself and survive. Is that not also the law of heaven?”
Yeon Sowol looked Yang Hoeam straight in the eye.
“My friend has died. If I leave this alone, what guarantee is there that another friend, then yet another friend, will not die next? And when bandits like those water raiders finally come for me, who will protect me then? Will the provincial governor protect me? Then why could you not protect Moyong Ha?”
Moyong Ha.
Whenever Yeon Sowol spoke her name, the scene from that day rose vividly before his eyes.
For some reason, her body had not decayed at all. Pale as ever, tangled in water plants, she had floated to the surface.
The weight of her body when they pulled her from the water.
He had been too numb to put it into words...
“Why... Why did... Moyong Ha...?”
His voice caught.
His eyes reddened.
His fingertips burned.
He trembled.
The vulnerability displayed by a master listed among Hunan’s Three Greats shook everyone gathered there.
They all remembered.
The corpse that had surfaced by Dongting Lake that day.
The grief of Yeon Sowol and his friends as they stood around it.
The crowd held its breath.
Yeon Sowol’s words struck home. It was something that moved their hearts before logic even entered the matter.
There stood Yeon Sowol in the evening gloom, his usual composure slightly broken, looking like a ghost. There was something painfully sad about him.
Who could block the path of that grieving young man?
Would that not be unnatural?
Would it not be wrong?
Would it not be nothing but stubborn cruelty?
“So yes, this is revenge, but it is not simple personal rage. On a small scale, I seek to save myself. On a greater scale, I seek to save more people. It is not merely a matter of my assigned role. It is my duty as a human being. At the same time, I wish to wipe out a band of thieves no different from rebels. Is that not the loyalty of a subject seeking to put His Majesty the Emperor’s heart at ease?”
When Yeon Sowol finished, Yang Hoeam realized something.
‘This sophistry will work.’
Especially on people of the Jianghu.
Those ignorant fools who drew their swords whenever their hearts stirred would be swayed by those words.
By Yeon Sowol’s eyes.
His voice.
Their memories of Moyong Ha.
They would fall under his spell.
In this atmosphere, there was a good chance they would ignore even Yang Hoeam’s solemn command. Foolish, disrespectful wretches.
Suppressing the urge to grind his teeth, Yang Hoeam calmly countered, “Do you dare claim you can suppress the Dongting Lake water raiders? They are connected to the Yangtze River Waterway Stronghold. Even the Nine Great Sects and One Gang, whom you people of the Jianghu revere like immortals, must watch their step around those bandits. Even the elite troops of the Eight Army Clusters have failed to destroy the Yangtze River Waterway Stronghold.”
The Yangtze River Waterway Stronghold was powerful.
It was strong enough to contend with two or three ordinary sects of the Nine Great Sects and One Gang attacking at once.
They were bandits who traveled freely along the Yangtze, which stretched for thousands of miles, using swift ships and Water Arts that allowed them to move in and out of the water with ease.
Even the Lingbo Cluster, the central army unit that included naval forces, had repeatedly suffered defeat.
The Yangtze was endlessly long, and its tributaries were countless. How could they find every water raider who appeared without warning and disappeared just as suddenly? At most, they could pluck a few feathers from them.
On top of that, the Yangtze River Waterway Stronghold’s formidable masters would appear out of nowhere to launch ambushes, forcing even the Lingbo Cluster’s elite troops to suffer losses.
Water raiders were that difficult to deal with.
The Dongting Lake water raiders were even more troublesome because they were directly connected to the Yangtze River Waterway Stronghold.
So Yang Hoeam said, “I acknowledge that you are a fairly capable martial artist. But child, this is not a martial contest. This is war. What do you know about war?”
The crowd swallowed.
Some nodded heavily.
The mood shifted again. They sympathized with Yeon Sowol’s feelings, but on reflection, was Yang Hoeam not being reasonable?
Martial artists were not soldiers.
War was fought by soldiers.
That was common sense.
Yeon Sowol fell silent.
Yang Hoeam closed his lips as well.
“...”
“...”
Their gazes collided.
One looked down from the four-man palanquin.
The other looked up at it.
Then Yeon Sowol spoke.
“Three days.”
“Hmm?”
“Within three days, I will cut off the heads of every Dongting Lake water raider.”
Yang Hoeam’s eyebrow twitched.
“What nonsense...”
But Yeon Sowol had not truly been speaking to Yang Hoeam.
His words sounded as though they were directed at Yang Hoeam, but they were meant for everyone to hear. He turned and took in the countless spectators.
“Three days. If I fail to return after cutting off the water raiders’ heads within three days, I will gladly accept my punishment.”
“What are you...?”
Yang Hoeam was left speechless.
Three days?
How could that possibly be done?
Yet...
“Three days? Is that possible?”
“The leader of the White-Robed League isn’t the sort to make empty claims.”
“Good grief. That’s true.”
“Then can he really do it in three days? Kill those vicious water raiders?”
The people were captivated by his words.
Not because they had thought through the facts. They were blindly drawn in because they knew everything Yeon Sowol had accomplished until now.
The heroic deeds he had shown since arriving in Yuezhou.
And above all, the martial arts tournament they could never forget for the rest of their lives.
Amazement and reverence that someone still only twenty years of age had accomplished all of it.
“He’s the leader of the White-Robed League! He must have some brilliant plan!”
“That’s right. There must be something we can’t even begin to understand.”
Yang Hoeam’s face twisted.
‘Idiots...’
It made no sense.
But he realized that the scales of righteousness had already tipped.
The common people were tiresomely foolish creatures.
‘I would like to arrest him immediately...’
Yeon Sowol could become an obstacle to the operation planned for Mid-Autumn Festival.
Yet Yang Hoeam could not seize him here. His eyes flicked toward the people, who still held the papers in their hands. The water raiders’ atrocities were recorded on every sheet in painstaking detail.
‘How did he learn all of this...?’
Everyone had read it. Everyone was enraged.
How could he harm a young hero who had declared that he would behead the culprits in only three days?
There was no guarantee he could even capture Yeon Sowol. If public sentiment turned against him because of such an act, Yuezhou would fall into turmoil.
That would create an even greater obstacle for the Mid-Autumn Festival operation. He would be avoiding a wolf only to walk into a tiger’s den.
Yang Hoeam frowned.
‘Then I must wait and see what happens in three days...’
In Yang Hoeam’s eyes, suppressing the water raiders within three days was absolutely impossible.
Even if he personally led the army with all his strength, there was no guarantee he could wipe out the water raiders in three months, let alone three days.
That was what it meant to face bandits who had learned martial arts and could scatter, hide, and flee in every direction along the waterways.
Therefore...
‘If three days pass and Yeon Sowol is exposed for failing to keep his word...’
Then he could attempt an arrest.
Yang Hoeam’s white beard trembled.
He remained silent, glaring at Yeon Sowol.
“I will see you in three days.”
Yeon Sowol declared it.
After giving one long salute, he turned sharply and left. He even used his lightness skill, covering ground in huge strides.
Then,
Flap!
Flutter!
A group suddenly followed behind him.
They imitated Yeon Sowol, each offering Yang Hoeam a long salute. Then they turned their clothes inside out until they were white and leaped after Yeon Sowol.
It was the White-Robed League.
The previous White-Robed League had consisted only of Yuezhou’s young rising talents. This time, many prominent figures from the Jianghu who had made their names during the martial arts tournament had joined them.
Yeon Sowol’s words had moved their hearts.
“Hah.”
Watching their backs, Yang Hoeam gave a hollow laugh.
He wanted to arrest them all, but doing so would only make the planned operation harder. He could not act.
As he tried to calm the anger boiling inside him, his eyes met Jin Hyeogo’s.
The large man with flecks of gray in his beard lowered his head deeply, fidgeting like an eldest brother apologizing for the trouble his younger siblings had caused.
That was generally how it went.
Those who followed Yeon Sowol included martial artists who were thirty years of age, or had only recently reached forty.
The elder masters who had spent decades active in Hunan and were acquainted with Yang Hoeam in one way or another all remained behind, watching his reaction.
Of course, they also held Yeon Sowol in high regard.
Still, the more experienced martial artists judged that it was right to preserve the government’s dignity and restrain themselves for now.
They also could not believe he would suppress the water raiders within three days.
‘At least that is fortunate. I still have cards left to use if the need arises.’
Even as he thought so, Yang Hoeam clicked his tongue.
“Tsk.”
The evening gloom had already faded, and darkness settled over the land.
The waves of Dongting Lake blended into the night.
Footnotes:
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