WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: BerageeBomb
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◈ I Obtained the Martial God’s Book ◈
Chapter 14: Jujube
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Beyond the pass lay a small village cradled in the valley.
Rough stone walls surrounded it, with low thatched roofs perched atop cracked earthen walls.
Here and there, frost-bitten cabbages remained in fields left half-harvested.
A mossy waterwheel turned slowly beside a frozen stream.
When an unfamiliar man entered, wariness first appeared in the villagers’ eyes.
But when Elder Bae, who was leading the way, raised a hand in greeting, their suspicion melted like snow.
“Well now, the herb old man’s here.”
“And who’s the young gentleman with you?”
“He’s a traveler I happened to become companions with on the rough mountain road. I’m only asking you to let him avoid the cold frost and stay the night.”
I was generously fed supper in the inner room of Dallae’s home, which served as the village head’s house.
There was millet rice, steaming cabbage soup, and wild greens dressed in perilla oil.
After wolfing down every last bite, I reached into my robes and held out ten copper coins.
Dallae’s father, his beard thick and shaggy, recoiled and immediately waved his hands.
“Oh, no. If we charge a traveler who came through the cold dew for a meal, the goodwill of this poor mountain village will weep. Please put that away.”
“Then please accept it not as payment for dinner, but for letting me sleep somewhere warm tonight.”
“We’re only offering an old pile of straw in a drafty barn. What lodging fee could we possibly take?”
“That pile of straw is worth a hundred times more to me right now than silk bedding in a palace.”
After some back-and-forth, we agreed to leave the coins on the kitchen shelf.
“My name is Insu. And the one tending the fire over there is my wife, Jeomnye.”
Dallae’s father, Insu, finally introduced himself with an amiable smile.
The child hanging from the threshold and watching our exchange was Dallae.
She was a girl of six or seven who looked like a boy.
One of her front teeth was missing, and her cheeks were red and chapped like apples from the cold wind.
She was clearly dying of curiosity about the coarse mat I had propped behind me.
“Mister, what’s that thing rolled up over there?”
“My tool for making a living.”
“What kind of tool?”
“A tool for cutting tough grass clean through.”
“Come on. Is it a sickle? What kind of sickle is that ridiculously huge?”
“I never said it was a sickle.”
Dallae wrinkled her nose and pouted as if she didn’t believe me.
Smiling, I took three dried jujubes from my robes.
They were part of the handful I had taken from that Qingcheng bastard’s pack five days ago.
“Want these?”
The sweet scent made the child’s eyes grow as wide as lanterns.
“Wow! Jujubes!”
Dallae carefully accepted the three jujubes in her plump little hands.
Yet instead of putting one in her mouth, she merely swallowed and stared at them for a long while.
“Why aren’t you eating them instead of just looking?”
“They’re too precious. I’ll give the biggest one to Father, the middle one to Mother, and the smallest one is Dallae’s.”
“Your name is Dallae, right?”
“Yes. Like the spicy wild chives that grow deep in the mountains!”
The child laughed brightly, revealing her missing front tooth.
Then she tilted her head and stared up at my face.
“But mister, why are half of both your eyebrows burned away?”
“I got burned pretty badly in a fire.”
“Oh! You must never play with fire! Mother always says that if you play with fire at night, you’ll wet the bed in your sleep.”
“That’s right. Fire is frightening. This is what it led to.”
Dallae held her stomach and giggled to herself.
Then she rummaged through the pocket of her old padded trousers and placed something in my palm.
It was a warm whole chestnut.
“This is for you, mister. If I only take things for free, Mother will smack my back and scold me.”
“Well now. You already know the basics of business.”
“Our Dallae is the quickest with numbers in the whole village!”
One boiled chestnut for three dried jujubes was a fair exchange in this village.
As evening deepened, neighbors came and went through the courtyard carrying bowls of soup and side dishes.
When Dallae’s family made soup, the woman next door brought seasoned greens, and the widower behind them added millet and cooked rice.
The children played by throwing stones at the waterwheel by the stream.
Then, one by one, their mothers’ scolding dragged them indoors.
Once the supper table had been cleared, the adults gathered around the brazier.
The mountain village’s concern was, as expected, the man-eating tiger of Black Fang Mountain.
“Goodness. The Kim family in the village below had their entire cattle shed torn open the night before last.”
“They say it carried off a bull by the nape of its neck. It leaped right over that tall wooden wall.”
“Our village is still safe, but that word, still, is the frightening part.”
“Once the sun sets, keep a close eye on your children. Never let them outside the door.”
Jeomnye came out of the kitchen and pulled Dallae into her arms.
“Dallae, you heard them, didn’t you? Once first watch passes, bolt the door and don’t move a step. Understand?”
The child nodded with frightened eyes.
Elder Bae explained to the adults the grim situation he had told me about earlier that day.
I lay my aching body down on the straw pile in the chilly barn.
With warm food in my stomach and the tension gone, my eyelids grew heavy.
Somewhere in this mad world, warmth like this still remained.
Lost in that thought, I fell into a deep sleep for the first time in a while.
* * *
Craack!
My eyes snapped open at the sound that shook heaven and earth.
A woman’s scream tore through the nighttime village.
“Ahhh! Dallae! No! Dallae!”
I sprang from the straw pile, snatched up the sword beside my head, and kicked open the barn door.
The sound had come from Dallae’s main house.
The rear wall had been breached.
Not the wooden door, but the thick earthen wall had been smashed apart, leaving a hole the size of a cartwheel.
Dallae’s father, Insu, lay facedown before it, drenched in blood.
His flesh had been gouged open by claws from shoulder to chest, and blood gushed out in torrents.
Insu coughed up bloody foam and clutched at my trouser leg.
“D-Dallae... That Mountain Lord bastard took our Dallae in its mouth and headed for the mountain...”
Jeomnye clung to the broken earthen wall, half out of her mind as she wailed.
“My child! You monster! Give me back my child right now! Dallae! Dallae!”
The peaceful village was turned upside down in an instant.
Torches lit up everywhere.
Men in thin undershirts poured into the courtyard holding clubs, pitchforks, and sickles.
“It’s the tiger! The Black Fang Mountain tiger actually took a child from our village!”
I crouched before the broken wall.
Suppressing my rage, I examined the traces first.
The footprints were as large as two of a man’s palms put together.
They were stamped deeply into the soft courtyard earth, before a thin crust of ice had formed.
The beast was much heavier than a bull.
Its front paw prints were deep, while its rear prints were shallow.
It had not fled.
It had strolled away after finishing its work.
I examined the rear wall again.
It had avoided the pillars and rafters supporting the roof, breaking through only the earthen wall.
And there was something even stranger.
Other than a few drops that had splashed when it tore through Insu’s chest, there was not a single drop of blood on the path where Dallae had been taken.
If it had bitten through a person’s throat, blood should have sprayed everywhere.
It had only seized the nape of her thick padded coat and carried her away alive.
Yet the footprints beyond the wall were unnaturally clear.
It had deliberately avoided the frozen ground where prints would not show clearly.
It had stepped only on soft mud, where its tracks would sink deepest.
The beast had hidden all sound and traces when it came in, but when it left, it had openly left a trail telling us to follow.
A chill ran down the back of my neck.
This was not a predator’s hunt.
It was calculated fishing.
If it fought several people in the middle of a populated village, even a fierce beast could be stabbed by a spear.
So it had taken living bait, someone the villagers would desperately want to save.
Then it would lure the prey who came charging after it in rage into the dark mountain and chew them apart one by one in its nest.
The two tiger hunters had likely met the same end.
That must be where the story had come from, that even ten grown men armed with spears would be wiped out.
Dallae, the bait, was probably still alive somewhere in the forest.
Bait was only useful if it stayed alive and screamed.
If so, then things were different.
* * *
The courtyard boiled with rage and confusion.
“We need to grab torches and chase into the mountain right now! Bring every pickaxe and club you can find!”
“Oh dear. Mountain Lord must be truly angry! We need to prepare an offering table and hold a ritual at once...”
“You idiot. What Mountain Lord? It’s just a mad man-eating beast that took a child!”
“Our Dallae might still be alive! If we run now, we can save her!”
“Have you lost your mind? You want to enter the mountain on a night this black? That isn’t hunting. That’s walking into the beast’s mouth on your own!”
Elder Bae stood in the middle of it all, leaning on his A-frame pack pole.
“Quiet, all of you.”
His low voice weighed down the courtyard.
“Do you know what will happen if you rush in together holding nothing but these little clubs? By tomorrow morning, there will be ten more funerals in this village.”
“Th-then are we supposed to just give up on the child while we watch?”
“I’m not saying we abandon the child. I’m saying that if we’re going to kill it, we prepare properly and make certain we catch it.”
The elder coldly swept his gaze over the excited men.
“Open the village storehouse immediately and bring out every long spear used for hunting boar. Anyone who knows how to draw a bow, bring a quiver of arrows. Against a tiger that large, those little clubs and sickles are nothing but a pleasant scratch. Only long, pointed spears can stop a tiger’s charge, even for a moment.”
“How does the herb old man know so much about hunting tigers?”
Instead of answering, the elder rolled up the tattered sleeve on his left arm.
Three scars ran from his forearm to his shoulder, as though a plow had torn furrows through a field.
“In my younger days, I was a tiger hunter employed by the magistrate’s office. These old arms have caught nine tigers.”
The boiling courtyard fell silent as if cold water had been poured over it.
“And I ended up like this fighting the tenth one, so I took up a sickle and became an herbalist.”
Pulling down his sleeve, the elder issued a firm command.
“So follow my orders. Eight spearmen. Two archers to support the rear. And two torchbearers to light our way. We will choose exactly twelve men. Any more than that, and the formation will only become tangled in the mountains, making us a burden.”
The men ran to the storehouse and began bringing out weapons.
I stepped in front of the elder.
“Elder, I will join the hunting party as well.”
The elder’s experienced eyes swept over me from my bamboo hat to my feet.
“This is our village’s affair. It is no place for a guest traveler to casually risk his life.”
“I have not yet repaid the price of this evening’s meal.”
“You intend to pay back that paltry meal with your life?”
“I know how to use a sword reasonably well. I am no great master, but I can at least look after myself.”
The elder snorted and tapped the coarse mat on my back with the end of his pack pole.
“You intend to cut down a tiger with the weed-cutting tool wrapped in that cloth?”
He seemed to have seen through my disguise from the beginning.
It had fooled even the warriors at the ferry.
“Keep that unsightly sword safely on your back. Didn’t I just warn you? Against a tiger, a short sword like that will not even bite.”
The elder shouted toward the storehouse, where everyone was hurriedly gathering weapons.
“If there is a long, sturdy spear left, give one to this young traveler!”
I caught the spear that came flying with one hand.
A broad, heavy iron spearhead was fitted to the end of a thick ash-wood shaft.
It was a boar spear, made to withstand a charge.
The moment I gripped the shaft, my palms found their proper positions on their own.
I remembered the spears of the Orthodox Faction warriors that had clashed amid the blood of Blue Stone Valley, the bamboo spear Mal-su had brandished at me, and the countless spears planted like gravestones at the valley entrance.
The principles of every spear I had seen awakened and pulsed in my palms through the power of the Book of the Martial God.
Then Insu crawled out over the threshold.
Jeomnye, tears streaming down her face, had bound his torn shoulder with cloth.
He slammed his forehead against the cold dirt of the courtyard with Thud! Thud!
“Please... Please save our Dallae from that Mountain Lord bastard’s jaws. Please...”
No one could bring themselves to help him up.
The enemy was too overwhelming for anyone to promise they would certainly bring her back alive.
The hunting party was assembled quickly.
Pitchforks and clubs were replaced with boar spears.
Resinous pine torches were lit.
Including Elder Bae and me, there were fourteen of us in total.
Spearpoints gleamed sharply in the torchlight.
Quite a few of them trembled.
Even so, not one spear withdrew from the formation with an excuse.
That young life had been taken into the mountain.
As I tightened my grip on the spear, a thought suddenly came to me.
Had this night, too, existed in the scenario I had once played through a screen, where a child was taken by a man-eating tiger and the village men formed a desperate hunting party?
Even if it had, the ending was obvious.
Every one of these spears would have broken, and this village would soon have become ruins.
An incident where around ten mountain homes were devoured by a beast would not earn even one line in the game’s chronology.
But now, I was not outside the screen.
I stood in this courtyard.
I had no intention of letting things proceed toward that obvious ending.
Dallae probably had not yet taken a single bite of the three jujubes I had given her.
No matter what happened, I had to make sure she could chew those jujubes herself.
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