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◈ Raised by a Ruthless Swordsman ◈

Chapter 26: Guju

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I woke to a sky already pale with morning light.

I jolted awake and sat up. So I had slept like the dead until morning.

I quickly turned to check on Du Gi.

But all that remained across from me was the impression where he had lain. The campfire gave off only a thin thread of smoke from its dying embers, and there was no sign of anyone.

Where had he gone? I subtly pulled my sword closer and looked around.

Leaves rustled in the thicket behind me.

With my hand on my sword hilt, I watched that direction.

Du Gi soon emerged through the brush. Two limp rabbits hung from his hand by their ears.

"You slept well."

He tossed the rabbits toward me.

"You clean them."

I caught them without thinking. When had he risen and gone hunting? More than that, I had promised myself I would at least keep my ears open, yet I had sensed nothing.

Tsk. Without complaint, I went down to the river to dress the rabbits.

I could clean rabbits with my eyes shut. They had been the meat I ate most often during my ten years in the mountains.

After Hyeonam showed me once, he left every rabbit after that to me. He merely hunted and brought back the game. Thanks to that, I was probably no worse than a butcher at skinning and gutting animals.

It suddenly struck me as funny. I was the son of a fisherman, yet I had never gutted a fish in my life. I had only become skilled at cutting open mountain animals.

As I slit one rabbit's hind leg and pulled off its skin in one piece, I spotted a small hole near its neck.

It looked as though something thin and hard had pierced it. I checked the other rabbit and found the same hole in the same spot.

It seemed too small to have been made by a sword tip. Besides, to catch rabbits with a sword, he would have needed to get right up to them. With his injuries, there was no way he had chased down wild rabbits. Did he have some kind of thrown blade?

Then again, what I had seen could not be all there was to this man.

I finished cleaning them. I slit open their bellies, removed the entrails, and scraped away everything clinging to the insides of their ribs with my fingers. Once I rinsed the blood from their empty bellies in the river, only pale flesh remained.

I threw the entrails by the water. Whether beasts or fish, something would take care of them.

I carried the two rabbits back to the fire.

Du Gi sat beside it, examining his side. He had lifted his shirt, peeled away the cloth stuck to the blood that had seeped from his wound overnight, and was tearing a ruined piece of cloth to bind it again.

Beneath his lifted shirt, his side was lean and packed with tight muscle. I knew all too well from the past ten years that a body like that did not come for free.

I had thought he was merely thin. Perhaps his clothes had been too large.

There was no wasted movement in his hands. He looked thoroughly used to tending wounds.

After glancing at him, I broke off two fresh green branches and trimmed them with my knife. Then I skewered the rabbits from mouth to rump.

I placed dead branches over the embers to build up the fire, drove forked branches into the ground on either side, and rested the spits on them.

Soon, fat dripped into the fire and a savory smell rose.

It was plain rabbit without even a trace of salt, but my mouth watered. Since the travel sesame flatbread early yesterday evening, I had had nothing but river water.

Drawn in by the smell, Du Gi came over and squatted beside me. We silently turned the spits together.

Once the outsides had browned, we each took one and tore into it. In the mountains, rabbit had been decent enough, but after spending only a few days in towns below, its bland taste and gamey smell caught sharply in my nose. People really were fickle.

Even so, my hands did not stop. Du Gi silently picked the meat from the bones as well. He had caught rabbits after spending the night injured, so he must have been just as hungry.

Only after we had stripped the bones clean did Du Gi wipe his mouth and speak.

"So, what do you intend to do now?"

"I need to go to Yeongpa. As I said, I have to find my family."

Du Gi nodded as he threw the rabbit bones into the fire.

"What about you, Brother Du?"

At my question, Du Gi watched the flames for a moment. His eyes looked as though he were weighing something.

"I must go as far as Hangzhou."

I asked where Hangzhou was. Du Gi stared at me for a moment, then shook his head and answered.

"It is the largest city in Zhejiang. Do you remember the escort captain saying at the start that we would board a boat in Guju?"

I nodded. I seemed to remember him saying that on the first day while emphasizing Seonharyeong. Du Gi held his grease-stained fingers to the fire and continued.

"We will take a boat from Guju to Hangzhou. From Hangzhou to Yeongpa is four or five days on foot. There is a waterway there as well, so if you change boats, you can arrive in two or three days."

My ears perked up at the mention of boats. Whether river or sea, anywhere on the water seemed better than walking.

I brushed myself off and stood. Unlike the protection convoy, there was nothing much to prepare. I shoveled dirt over the embers, stamped them out, and got to my feet. Du Gi dusted off his outer robe, put it on, and readjusted the sword at his waist.

Since there was no visible road, we simply followed the river downstream.

Water flowed to lower ground, and lower ground had roads and villages. Du Gi seemed to think the same, walking along the riverbank without a word.

We had walked for about half a day when the river left the foot of the mountains and broadened. Before long, a dirt road appeared atop the riverbank embankment. It looked wide enough for carts.

I climbed up and examined the road in both directions. Every trace of traffic had been crushed by wind and rain. There were no fresh tracks.

What had happened to the protection convoy?

Were they still behind us? Or had everyone been wiped out that night? There was no way to know how the battle had unfolded after we escaped.

Still, whoever won, what the attackers wanted was the carriage. Someone would have to bring it down this road.

Yet there were still no tracks.

Then...

"They must be behind us."

Du Gi spoke while scanning the ground. It seemed he had reached the same conclusion.

"They are not people we want to meet. Let us hurry before they catch up."

I nodded, thinking the same, and quickened my pace along the road.

The road sloped gently downward with the river beside it. After we had walked for some time, the sun that had been directly overhead had moved far behind us, and our long shadows stretched out before us.

Around then, a village appeared at the far edge of the fields ahead.

The earthen wall surrounding it caught my eye first. It looked like the wall I had seen around Jang Sam's village. Two figures stood near the entrance, no bigger than beans from this distance, and the long objects in their hands looked familiar.

It seemed people lived this way everywhere.

I was about to approach without a thought when something tattered at the edge of my vision caught my attention.

Only then did I look down at myself. My sleeves were torn and fluttering at the ends, my martial attire was ripped in several places, and blackened bloodstains had dried on it.

When I glanced sideways, Du Gi was no better off. If we appeared before those guards looking like this, they would not let us in. Sickles and clubs would come flying first.

I stopped Du Gi, who had been heading forward without a thought.

"Let's pass by. We can sleep outside."

Du Gi looked puzzled, then followed my gesture and looked down at himself. Without another word, he nodded.

We gave the village a wide berth and walked on until the sun had fully set. That night, we made a fire and slept at the edge of a forest off the road.

The next day was the same. We walked when the sun rose, and whenever we saw a village, we went around it from a distance.

We ate whatever Du Gi caught. Rabbits, pheasants, and once, he even brought back a young roe deer from somewhere. Perhaps he was skilled at hunting, for he never returned empty-handed.

He also knew how to strike a fire with a fire striker, build it up, and choose a place to sleep that kept out the wind and rain. He seemed accustomed to eating and sleeping on the road.

I supposed the Bright Mirror Society did not go easy on its people.

It was the morning of our third day of steady travel.

At some point, the river had grown remarkably wide. Sailboats dotted its surface.

I had not known so many boats traveled on a river that was not even the sea. Some resembled the fishing boats from my hometown harbor, but others were far larger and sturdier. They looked able to carry mountains of cargo without trouble, so they must all have been freight boats.

Gray tiled roofs stood densely along the docks where the boats gathered, and behind them, a tall city wall stretched out. The city looked about as large as Geonnyeong.

But boats lined every dock, while people carrying loads moved between them like ants. It seemed as if half the city had spilled out to the water's edge beneath the walls.

The sight was so strange that I stopped walking without realizing it.

As I followed the boats on the water with my eyes, a faint memory surfaced of sitting at the stern of Father's fishing boat long ago. It had been ten years since I had seen people living their lives on the water.

"Does it remind you of home? If you keep standing there in a daze, the sun will set. Let's go."

Du Gi gave a small laugh beside me, then jerked his chin toward the city wall.

"This is Guju."

There was something proud in his voice. It was not even his hometown, yet he sounded as though he were boasting about his own city.

I followed Du Gi and began walking again. The road sloped gently downward beside the river and led straight into the dock district.

The closer we got, the more all kinds of sounds rushed into my ears. After days in the quiet mountain paths, my ears nearly went numb.

Laborers shouting as they carried loads, boats knocking against one another, people yelling over the price of goods.

The smell of fish, rice-rinsing water, and something frying in oil somewhere mixed together and filled my nose.

As we entered the start of the street, the stream of people began brushing past our shoulders. Walking among them, I became newly aware of my tattered sleeves. I could feel several passing gazes settle on our appearance before moving away.

"We should deal with our clothes first."

I lifted a ragged sleeve as I spoke, and Du Gi nodded.

The clothes we had been wearing, our bundles, everything had been left with the protection convoy. It pained me to think that I had worn the clothes bought in Geonnyeong for only a few days.

A little way into the street, I saw a shop with rows of clothes hanging from a pole beneath its eaves. There was no ready-made garments sign, but it looked almost exactly like the shop where I had bought clothes in Geonnyeong.

The shopkeeper looked us over from head to toe. Ignoring that, Du Gi inspected the hanging clothes as if used to it, chose two outfits, and asked the price.

Then the haggling began.

For such rough stitching, the price was robbery. Buying two at once should earn a better price than that. Du Gi answered so smoothly that the shopkeeper's price gradually came down.

In the end, we settled on one hundred and twenty cash per outfit. I remembered paying one hundred and fifty cash in Geonnyeong. I had thought I had bargained well there.

It was too late to go back and complain, so I decided the cloth must simply be plentiful here. Though now that I thought about it, this cloth did seem a little rougher...

We each opened our money pouches and paid, then borrowed the shop's back courtyard to change. I wore layered clothes in an earthy dark brown, while Du Gi wore indigo cotton clothes.

Once I threw off my martial attire stiff with blood and dirt, I finally looked somewhat human again.

Du Gi also looked entirely different once he wore clothes that fit. His straight back, the clean line of his shoulders. At a glance, he had the bearing of a martial artist.

They said clothes made the person, but it felt less like he had put on wings and more like he had shed the skin that had covered him until now.

After leaving the shop, Du Gi led the way to an inn farther down the street. Perhaps because it stood near the docks, the ground floor was half full of people who looked like sailors or laborers.

We rented two rooms, then sat across from each other at a table downstairs and ordered food.

Two bowls of steaming rice, fish said to have been caught in the river and steamed, and stir-fried greens were set before us. It had been days since we had last eaten a hot meal. We both silently emptied our bowls first.

After we had spent some time with our heads down, eating nothing but rice, Du Gi rose as soon as he set down his spoon.

"I'll go ask about boats. If we're lucky, there may be one leaving tomorrow morning."

I told him to do so, then wondered what I should do. My eyes fell on the sword I had placed on the table.

Ma Jeongsan had recognized it. The black-clad martial artist had recognized it. Even Du Gi had recognized its pattern. As long as I wore it at my waist, I could not casually draw it.

Still, I did not like the thought of throwing it away. Then why not carry another sword instead?

"Brother Du."

I stopped Du Gi just as he was about to leave and asked how much swords usually cost. Du Gi looked from my face to the sword on the table, then nodded as though he understood what I was thinking.

If I wanted to buy a sword, he said, I should go not to a blacksmith's stall in the market but to an ironworks that dealt in weapons. Cheap ones could cost as little as a one-tael silver ingot, but their blades were too soft to be useful. For something decent, I would need to pay over two taels. Having told me that much, Du Gi left the inn.

Two taels of silver.

That had been the advance payment for the protection convoy, so it was not a small sum. Yet Hyeonam's silver ingots still lay untouched in my money pouch.

Judging from the advance payment I had received, the heavy lumps had to be worth at least fifteen taels.

I still had no idea how Hyeonam had possessed that many silver ingots in the mountains, but thanks to them, I did not need to worry about the price of one sword.

After clearing the table, I rose and stopped a passing server. I pressed a few coins into their hand and asked where I could find an ironworks nearby. The server eagerly pointed out the way.

They said there was an ironworks near the entrance to an alley, about one majang from the dock district toward the city gate, where the bellows rang loudly and weapons were sold. I carefully memorized the directions.

When I left the inn, the sun was already high overhead. I stepped into the crowd and followed the way I had been shown.

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