Why did he need to open a tavern?
The reason was simple.
Information gathered wherever people came and went.
Yuha, Machil, Deoksam, Chunsik, Manwoo, Dongseok, and Gaeo.
Jo Won's goal was to complete biographies of those seven people.
He believed it was his sole duty, as the only one left alive, to search for traces of them in the Joseon they had lived in before meeting him and record everything about them.
That was why, among the ten thousand volumes he had brought from the Central Plains, the books he treasured most were the ones he had spent three years writing about his partner and retainers.
But Jo Won lacked the most important thing needed to open a tavern.
“Pffft!”
“Blech!”
The broth Kim Oheung and Jang Obok had just swallowed sprayed from their mouths. Seeing this, Jo Won put on a dejected expression.
“Th-that is...”
Kim Oheung and Jang Obok wanted to say something as they watched Jo Won's dejected face, but they simply couldn't make their mouths move.
'It's poison.'
'It's not fit for human consumption.'
The dried-radish soup Jo Won had made according to the tavern keeper's instructions was truly the worst. He had definitely added the soybean paste and dried radish greens just as instructed, but the soup he made tasted like ingredients he hadn't put in at all.
Sour, bitter, and sweet.
It wasn't the savory, spicy, refreshing dried-radish soup it was supposed to be. Even putting it kindly, no one could call that strange-tasting soup delicious.
Even beggars starving in Hanyang probably wouldn't eat it if he gave it to them. No—even a dog might get angry and lunge to bite him if he fed it that.
“Is it not good?”
Slurp.
With a dejected look, Jo Won scooped up a spoonful of the dried-radish soup he had made and tasted it. But he genuinely couldn't tell whether it was bad.
He had no standard for taste.
The standard itself simply didn't exist for Jo Won.
To Jo Won, eating was merely a way to supply his body with strength. Flavor wasn't worth considering. So long as a poison wasn't strong enough to kill him, he ate it without complaint. He even ate spoiled food.
Jo Won had once lived as a slave, then, after his master's household fell into ruin, spent his childhood wandering the back alleys like a sewer rat.
Even when he received the helping hand of an eccentric who saved him from that life and learned the single-lineage martial art known as Qi Heaven, nothing changed.
Grain-avoidance pills.
Jo Won lived primarily on those pills, which contained nothing but the nutrients necessary to fill a person's stomach and keep them alive, compressed together. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the taste buds on his tongue had practically disappeared.
He could tell that something was delicious when he ate it, but even when other people said something tasted bad, Jo Won couldn't understand what they meant by bad.
“Brother Jo, you asked me to be completely honest, so...”
Kim Oheung gathered his courage and spoke to Jo Won. Jo Won was strangely difficult to deal with despite doing nothing particularly unusual, but he had asked Kim Oheung to speak honestly.
“It really is terrible.”
“I see. So it is.”
Jo Won's face grew twice as dejected. His expression became so gloomy that Kim Oheung actually felt sorry for him. Jang Obok cleared his throat and spoke to Jo Won.
“If you can help it, Brother Jo, you really shouldn't be the one cooking.”
“Even you, Brother Jang...”
Jo Won took another spoonful and tasted it. But he still couldn't find anything strange about it. Only now did he understand why his partner and retainers had always prepared food and brought it to him.
It must have started after they ate the food Jo Won had made during one of his nights sleeping rough.
In other words, even back then, Jo Won's cooking had been worse than awful—practically a disaster.
“Couldn't I learn?”
“I don't think that would work.”
Kim Oheung seemed to have decided to be completely honest. In his eyes, Jo Won's skill wasn't something that would improve simply because he learned.
Besides, what difference would learning make for someone who could create the taste of ingredients he hadn't even put in?
Slurp. Slurp. Slurp.
Even now, the man was eating that broth—the disaster he had made himself—without noticing anything strange about it at all.
“Is it truly impossible?”
Jo Won set down his spoon and put on a dejected expression. Kim Oheung asked him,
“Why do you want to run a tavern, Brother Jo?”
“There is something I need to find. To do that, I thought it would be best to have a place where people from all over the country pass through.”
“Hmm. If that's the reason, there aren't many places more reliable than a tavern.”
He might have joined a traveling merchant caravan that wandered the country, but even at a glance, Jo Won was clearly not suited to be a peddler.
“Do either of you know how to cook?”
Jo Won asked Kim Oheung and Jang Obok. Both men looked troubled.
“I’m a boatman...”
“I’m no good at that sort of thing either.”
Kim Oheung and Jang Obok both groaned. Jo Won grew dejected again. If he was going to run a tavern, the food had to taste good, but he clearly had no knack for cooking.
Then Kim Oheung scratched the back of his head and said,
“I’m not completely hopeless. But I can't match the tavern keeper...”
Jang Obok stared at Kim Oheung in surprise. From his appearance alone, Kim Oheung looked like a man with absolutely no talent for cooking.
His dark, sun-baked skin, bristly beard, and thick muscles bulging all over him made him look even less suited to it.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Big Brother?”
“No, I just find it surprising, little brother.”
They say men grow close by fighting with each other. After marveling at each other's abilities during the day, the two had spent the night drinking and become close enough to call each other Brother and little brother.
Jang Obok was three years older, so Kim Oheung called him Brother.
“Then could you make it for us once?”
Jo Won asked Kim Oheung, his eyes filled with eager expectation. Kim Oheung scratched his head, then nodded with an expression that said he would just have to give it a shot.
“All right. I'll give it a try for you, Brother Jo!”
“Buuuuuurp!”
Jang Obok felt the knot in his stomach loosen all at once after all the grass he'd eaten through the night. When he came to his senses, he realized he had already polished off an entire bowl of rice soup.
“Little brother!”
“Well? Is it all right?”
Kim Oheung looked at Jang Obok sheepishly. Beside him, Jo Won, who had been scraping the bottom of his rice-soup bowl, lifted his head with a bright expression.
“It's delicious!”
“This is the best rice soup this Brother Jang has had in a long while, little brother!”
“Ha-ha-ha! I only watched my mother make it from the side!”
Kim Oheung put his hands on his hips and burst into hearty laughter. Passersby outside looked at the three men strangely.
Instead of thinking about opening the tavern, the men inside were busy cooking food for themselves and sharing it. Besides, it was unusual to see men cooking rather than a tavern keeper.
“Brother Kim.”
Jo Won set down his empty bowl, climbed off the platform, and grabbed Kim Oheung's hand. He moved so swiftly that Kim Oheung had no chance to avoid it before Jo Won seized his hand.
“Please teach me how to cook, or cook for me. I will pay you for it.”
To Jo Won, who had been dropped into Hanyang without knowing a single person, Kim Oheung was no different from a lifeline lowered from heaven.
If Jang Obok had eaten that frantically, then the food's quality was practically guaranteed.
“Huh? You want me to cook here?”
“Yes.”
“But... I'm only a simple boatman...”
Kim Oheung looked troubled, as though this had never crossed his mind. Jo Won took a large silver piece from his waistband.
“I'll give you one nyang of silver a month.”
“O-one nyang of silver?”
One nyang of silver was enough to buy two bolts of cotton cloth, making it a fortune worth five nyang in cash coins. That was roughly a tenth of what Kim Oheung earned in a year.
But Kim Oheung composed his raised eyebrows. He stared at the silver shimmering before his eyes, squeezed them shut, and turned away.
“If you tell me something else you want, I’ll think about it.”
“Something else? What would you like?”
Jo Won felt as if he wanted to grab Kim Oheung by the hem of his trousers. Jang Obok looked at Kim Oheung with admiration for resisting the temptation of the silver.
“I want to learn Brother Jo's skills.”
“My skills?”
Jo Won tilted his head, looking as though he was trying to think of what skills he possessed. But Kim Oheung looked at him knowingly.
“I once saw one of the Man merchants' musicians who came to Hanyang. They got into a dispute in the street, and even when twenty street toughs rushed him, they couldn't handle a single musician.”
The Man merchants were traders who traveled back and forth across the border with Qing. They generally didn't come as far as Hanyang, but it seemed Kim Oheung had seen one of the few who did.
“Didn't you learn the same skills as them, Brother Jo?”
Instead of silver, Jo Won realized what Kim Oheung wanted. Kim Oheung didn't even know that it was called martial arts, but that was what he wanted to learn.
“The skill I learned is called martial arts.”
“Right! That's what I meant! Someone who has learned martial arts is called a martial artist!”
“A martial artist?”
When Kim Oheung said martial artist, Jang Obok understood the word this time. Jo Won hadn't expected either of them to know about martial artists, so he looked at Jang Obok.
“I overheard this at the magistrate's office. I heard that during a banquet at Mohwagwan, a Qing envoy was saying something about Qing being a great nation in front of His Majesty, and the military state councilor took offense and clashed with a martial artist.”
“How dare that barbarian say such a thing!”
Kim Oheung shouted angrily. He was only a boatman, but he was furious that an envoy had dared to act that way in front of the king of Joseon.
“So who won?”
Jo Won, however, asked Jang Obok who had won. Jang Obok puffed out his chest and said,
“Of course the military state councilor won.”
“...He won?”
“He is a man named Seodaeyu, with a magnificent build and extraordinary strength! When he went to Japan as an envoy, the Japanese trembled, thinking Lord Chungmu himself had returned!”
Jo Won nodded as he listened to Jang Obok. He hadn't found any traces of martial arts in Joseon during his journey to Hanyang, but he had realized that it wasn't completely absent.
“But did Brother Jo learn those martial arts as well?”
Jang Obok asked as he looked at Jo Won. Jo Won smiled faintly and said to Kim Oheung and Jang Obok,
“Do I look like a Joseon man?”
“Then...”
“I came from the Central Plains. The place where those who learn martial arts gather is called the martial world.”
“Then!”
Kim Oheung looked at Jo Won with excitement. Jang Obok, however, simply looked astonished. Jo Won's command of the Joseon language was nearly perfect.
But then Jo Won looked at Kim Oheung and said,
“Before that, I need to know why you want to learn martial arts, Brother Kim.”
At the same time, the force radiating from Jo Won's entire body began to surge forth, making Kim Oheung and Jang Obok instinctively watch their words and movements.