Swish.
Jo Won lowered his eyes as far as they would go and thrust his arm forward. As he turned his hand, his palm came to rest against the forehead of the thug charging at the very front.
“Gah!!!”
When his forehead suddenly slammed into a palm and stopped dead, the thug’s body was sent flying. He crashed to the ground with a bang, then writhed like a worm, his mouth hanging wide open.
He had landed flat on his back without warning, and the shock to his breathing had left him unable to draw breath.
Tap!
Jo Won lightly stepped on the thug’s back as though dancing, then gave him a sharp kick with the tip of his foot. The thug’s airway suddenly cleared, and he sucked in a ragged breath.
“Yaaaargh!!!”
One of their comrades had been knocked flat with the very first strike, but the thugs were not such novices that they would panic over something like that. Another thug swung his fist at Jo Won’s face.
Thud!
But Jo Won spun around, bent his knee, and shoved his shoulder into the thug’s chest with a solid smack. The thug shot two feet into the air and toppled backward.
Sway, sway.
In that stance, Jo Won rocked his body back and forth. For the first time, the thugs hesitated. Two of the comrades who had charged him had already been knocked down by that bizarre body technique of his.
“It’s hundreds of nyang! Hundreds! You’re going to back down now?”
When the chief barked at them from behind, the thugs’ eyes changed. Hundreds of nyang was enough money to change their lives. Jo Won clicked his tongue.
“Money isn’t everything.”
Jo Won once again said something that sounded like it came from an immortal, but if they had listened to him, they would never have become thugs in the first place.
They had all come up from the countryside to find a way to make a living. In Hanyang, they had banded together as a street gang, desperate to escape the poverty of their hovels.
There were more than enough people in Hanyang looking for men like them, so even knowing that their bodies would be worn down and their lives put at risk, they never hesitated to commit injustice.
Making a living mattered more to them than justice did.
“Yaaagh!”
“Kill him!!”
The thugs knew Jo Won had learned martial arts. So they changed tactics. Since they outnumbered him, they decided to overwhelm him with sheer numbers and bring him down.
In a melee like this, being the first to fall to the ground meant losing. The moment someone lost his balance and fell, his movements became restricted and he was placed at an absolute disadvantage.
Slip, slide.
But Jo Won slipped through the thugs trying to grab him and drag him down as easily as if he were walking across ice. As he moved, he extended his fingers and poked the thugs’ bodies again and again.
“Gah!”
“Uhhh!”
“Huh?”
The thugs’ bodies stiffened as though they had turned into logs. The sudden inability to move a body that had obeyed their will all their lives filled them with immense terror.
In the blink of an eye, more than half of them had gone rigid as logs. Sensing that something had gone terribly wrong, the thugs began to retreat, stumbling backward.
Determination rose in the chief’s eyes as he watched. If they were driven back here, they would lose no matter how many of them there were. He had to turn the momentum around.
“Move!”
The chief of the thugs was the biggest, fastest, and strongest man in the Hangang Gang. He was still inferior to the truly famous street fighters, but within the Hangang Gang, he was the strongest.
To avoid losing the battle of wills, the chief drew a dagger from his waist with one hand and launched himself at Jo Won.
Jo Won’s gaze changed when he saw him.
“Gah!”
The instant their eyes met, the chief stopped dead as if he had run into an invisible wall.
More precisely, the instant he met Jo Won’s eyes, the chief’s legs stopped obeying him. He trembled like a deer facing a predator.
Jo Won’s eyes.
Those were not a man’s eyes.
‘A tiger...’
They were exactly like the eyes of the tiger he had encountered once in the mountains as a child. Back then, the chief had stood frozen for three hours until the tiger disappeared from before him, and the moment it did, he had fainted on the spot.
“You really did intend to kill me.”
Jo Won looked at the dagger in the chief’s hand. A strong scent of blood clung to it. That meant he had not killed just one or two people with it.
That heavy scent of blood awakened memories Jo Won had not drawn upon even once in the past several years.
One Freak Jo Won.
It brought back the martial artist Jo Won—not the man who had headed for Joseon to honor his departed partner and retainers, longing for them and determined to preserve them forever in his memory.
“A man who intends to harm another.”
Even in the turbulent, complicated martial world—a den of vipers—Jo Won had never killed a single person. That was why he had been given the name undefeated one, but it had also earned him the resentment of countless people.
Pride and honor.
The resentment of the martial artists whose pride and honor he had crushed was far deeper and darker than Jo Won had imagined. In the end, it had returned to him as disaster.
Of course, in exchange, Jo Won carved into the bones of those who had lost to him yet survived the very truth they had so fervently acknowledged.
The Three Heavens.
Jo Won had gone alone to the heavens of the orthodox faction, demonic faction, and unorthodox faction—hailed as the absolute rulers of the martial world—and defeated every one of them.
And by sparing them, Jo Won showed until the very end that he was different from them. But that did not bring the dead back to life.
Yet Jo Won’s actions plunged the martial world into a period of extreme chaos.
The power that had accumulated over the years exploded all at once with the defeat of the Three Heavens, causing the martial world to fracture without mercy and enter a brutal dark age.
The selfishness that had built up during those years of peace—selfishness for the sake of themselves, their families, and the organizations they belonged to—had slowly sickened the martial world, causing it to collapse from within.
Just as Jo Won had said after defeating Namgung Muyeong.
“I was prepared to suffer the same fate. That is what I was taught.”
Jo Won slowly walked toward the trembling chief. But the chief and the thugs alike could not move even a single step.
The moment the martial artist Jo Won emerged, a tension that made it impossible to twitch even a finger filled the place.
Not one person there had the nerve to move recklessly in the face of the sense that they might die.
“So.”
Jo Won took the dagger from the chief’s hand. Every time Jo Won showed mercy, his retainers had urged him the same way.
You have to become ruthless. You have to eliminate future threats.
If he had listened to his retainers back then, would things have turned out differently?
“From now on, don’t expect this kind of mercy.”
Crimp!
Right before the chief’s eyes, Jo Won folded the dagger between two fingers.
“This much mercy is enough for one time.”
Crimp.
Then Jo Won folded the bent dagger once more. The chief stared blankly as the dagger he always carried folded like a sheet of paper.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes. Yes, of course I do. Yes, yes.”
The chief nodded up and down, trembling all over. Jo Won gave him a sidelong glance, then flicked the dagger, now reduced to a small ball, with one finger.
Crack!!!
A tree tilted in the direction the dagger flew, then crashed to the ground. The chief’s jaw dropped.
“Consider yourself reborn today. Live humbly and do good.”
“Yes... sir...”
The chief trembled. It seemed he had picked a fight with an immortal today. Still shaking, he gestured to the others.
“L-let’s go.”
“Yes, Chief!”
The thugs gathered up their fallen comrades and hurried back the way they had come. Watching them disappear in haste, Jo Won tied the iron sword back around his waist.
“You didn’t need to kill innocent people, you know.”
He could almost hear Gaeo, one of his retainers, nagging him from beside him again. But there was no one at his side. Jo Won smiled bitterly and began pulling the two carts again.
“What?”
Near Seoho, on the banks of the Yongsan River, stood Byeolyeong Granary, which paid the soldiers of the Training Command their wages. Since the soldiers were paid in grain, the granary was always full. Beside it stood a pavilion called Eupcheongnu Pavilion.
Because the pavilion had been built atop a cliff, anyone standing there could see Yongsan and Mapo, as well as Haengjusanseong Fortress in the distance.
But the reason the place was famous had nothing to do with its scenery. It was famous because of a sailor who was always doing sit-ups with his feet hooked over the tiled ridge atop the cliff, as though the place belonged to him.
Kim Oheung.
He was the finest street fighter ruling Seoho and the area around Mapo, by everyone’s admission—including his own.
“A bandit?”
“Yes, Big Brother Oheung. I saw it clearly with my own two eyes.”
“Well, I did hear an unusual rumor today. A lot of people remember him because he’s such a strange fellow.”
“See? Where else could someone like that have gotten all those books?”
Kim Oheung nodded as though the man had a point. The chief of the Hangang Gang, who had been soundly beaten by Jo Won, was complaining in front of him.
“I only went over because the man seemed suspicious and wanted to see what he had inside. But then the bastard suddenly attacked us.”
“So that made him even more suspicious?”
“If he had nothing to hide, why would he react that way?”
“Books, you say.”
“There looked to be at least a thousand.”
Kim Oheung’s eyes widened. If there were more than a thousand books, they would be worth at least several hundred nyang. Kim Oheung piloted boats on the Gyeonggang River for a living, and he earned no more than two jeon and five pun a day. If he ate nothing but breathed, it would still take him four days to scrape together one nyang.
And yet, several hundred nyang.
“And Big Brother, his fists were incredible.”
“His fists?”
But the chief knew very well that Kim Oheung did not act so easily. Kim Oheung was skilled with his fists, but people did not call him a thug. They called him a chivalrous hero instead.
Whenever a dispute broke out, he would step in and always take the side of the weaker party.
That was why, throughout the vast Mapo area, whenever Kim Oheung appeared, the thugs could do nothing but run.
“He was almost as good as you, Big Brother.”
“Almost as good as me?”
Kim Oheung had never once encountered an equal in the streets. It was always the same, whether his opponent numbered five or six.
That was why Kim Oheung had complete confidence in his own abilities. Sometimes he even indulged in the pleasant fantasy that, if he had been born middle-status rather than lowborn, he might have held a position in the military.
After all, whenever he saw the soldiers who came to Mapo, they did not look nearly as skilled as he had expected.
“You’re not saying this because you covet those books, are you?”
Kim Oheung glared at the chief with tiger-like eyes. The chief swallowed hard. After once provoking Kim Oheung and being thoroughly beaten for it, he had called him Big Brother ever since just to stay alive.
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Hmm... If he really is a bandit, as you say, then this is serious. We should catch him before he sells them.”
With a sudden movement—tap!
Kim Oheung pulled his foot free from the tiled ridge and planted it on the pavilion’s railing. The railing was high enough to make an ordinary man’s legs shake, but Kim Oheung stepped onto it boldly.
“Let’s go. Where did you meet him?”
“I’ll show you the way, Big Brother.”
The chief thought that, if it was Kim Oheung, he could teach that bastard a lesson. Of course, whenever he thought of Jo Won, his legs trembled on their own, but revenge came first.
‘Just you wait!’
The chief’s desire for revenge burned fiercely.