Pay‑to‑Win King of Martial Arts (Novel) - Chapter 15 - Light and Salt (1)
Chapter 15 – Light and Salt (1)
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Translated by Heavenly Cat
Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net
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Two nyang of silver. Measured in copper coins, that was two thousand nyang. At this point, Cheong-hwa trying to threaten me with one hundred copper coins looked almost cute.
Just then, Cheong-hwa approached with a dry cough.
“Ahem, Huiyeong.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll hold on to those two nyang of silver for you.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Cheong-hwa knew it too.
He knew that the hundred nyang he was holding could no longer bind me now.
But the situation now was different from back then.
Exchanging the bank draft for actual money had involved Cheong-hwa’s help, but this was money I’d extracted entirely with my own power.
“What kind of bullshit are you spouting?”
“Ahem. You truly do say anything to someone who is to be your master.”
“As far as I know, you’re still not my master.”
Cheong-hwa seemed at a loss for words.
Well, it must have been embarrassing even for him. Wasn’t it too obvious what he was trying to do?
Still, thankfully, Cheong-hwa didn’t cling shamelessly to the matter any further.
“That aside, your acting was truly first-rate.”
“Pardon?”
“Watching someone roll through the air by himself and slam into the ground was a sight I had never seen in my life.”
“Ahem.”
This time, I was the one who coughed dryly.
“Since when have you been watching?”
“Since Myeong-seong and Myeong-han started fighting.”
“So you were watching from the beginning. Then you should’ve stopped it.”
“Didn’t I give off my presence?”
More accurately, he’d probably been watching me dodge everything and only then revealed his presence.
“A martial artist cannot seize victory through evasion alone. You must have felt that this time as well.”
“I did try to attack. It just didn’t work.”
“You say that proudly. That is the shameful part. To fail to land even a single proper blow on someone far younger than you.”
“I don’t find it that shameful.”
I hadn’t learned martial arts, so it was only natural. That was what I thought.
Cheong-hwa’s expression turned displeased. It seemed he had wanted the fight with Myeong-han to stir some spirit of rivalry in me.
But that was the sort of thinking martial artists indulged in.
As far as I was concerned, if you hadn’t learned something, then of course you couldn’t win with it.
“In any case, from today onward you are not to think so lightly of things. You will have to train harder than anyone else.”
“What are you talking about? If a person doesn’t sleep, efficiency drops.”
“Your way of thinking is still far too non-murim.”
“What do you mean, non-murim? It’s you murim people who are non-ordinary.”
Martial artists really did think they were the center of the world.
That was one of the things about them I found especially irritating.
“Even if I’m not your master yet, I am still your elder. It seems I must teach you the proper respect due to that.”
“I’m already a very polite person.”
“There is etiquette among martial artists that non-murim people do not know.”
“I see. So there is etiquette for non-ordinary people that ordinary people don’t know.”
“Indeed. Relax your body. Or you’ll get hurt.”
“Pardon?”
At the same moment, Cheong-hwa’s fist loomed huge before my eyes. Since it was right in front of me, of course it did.
In an instant, lightning flashed through my vision. A tremendous pain made my nose ring sharply. At the same time, a merciless beating began, so violent I couldn’t even scream.
It was a familiar sensation.
The places he was striking were exactly the same as Cheong-su’s.
An acupoint-opening beating.
Even though I was being hit like this, not a drop of blood flowed.
But the pain felt at least twice as great as Cheong-su’s.
Only then did I realize that Cheong-su had been controlling his strength when he beat me.
Only after the flowers fall does one know it was spring.
‘You lunatic!’
I screamed that inwardly.
It hurt too much for any sound to come out of my mouth.
There were close to four hundred blows.
He beat me without pause for one gak.
Thud.
When the beating ended, I collapsed, trembling on the ground from the pain like a worm on the verge of death.
Cheong-hwa’s education began from that day.
***
On the first day Cheong-hwa gave me an acupoint-opening beating, I bought the talent Robust Body, but it didn’t do me much good.
Huh? Why did your body suddenly get this robust? I can hit you harder now.
Saying something utterly insane like that, Cheong-hwa simply beat me more fiercely.
Unlike Cheong-su, who beat me while keeping a straight face, Cheong-hwa beat me with a kindly smile.
Cheong-su’s acupoint-opening beatings erased all aftereffects within half a shijin, but Cheong-hwa’s acupoint-opening beatings left aftereffects that did not disappear even after half a day.
My daily life split into two parts.
The time when I learned martial arts while being beaten by Cheong-hwa, and the time when I ran around the Hall of Preserved Wholeness doing courier work.
Training in martial arts together with the children of the Myeong generation made one thing very clear to me.
My basic physical strength was markedly inferior to theirs.
Just as I’d felt the difference in external arts during my fight with Myeong-han, that meant that even if I could run around all day and climb up and down cliffs, I was still only at the level of an ordinary person.
“Junior Brother. Are you alright?”
The door opened, and only Myeong-gyeong’s head poked through.
Strictly speaking, I still wasn’t a main-sect disciple yet, so I wasn’t really his junior brother, but Myeong-gyeong called me that anyway.
Or perhaps he simply wanted a junior brother.
“Yes. I’m alright.”
“If it hurts too much, you know, you should try screaming a bit. Sometimes Master goes easier on you if you do.”
“He doesn’t with me.”
“…Really?”
Groaning, I forced my body upright.
“Are you going to the Hall of Preserved Wholeness again?”
“Yes.”
Honestly, I preferred going to the Hall of Preserved Wholeness.
Time spent with Cheong-hwa was hell itself.
“Come back safely.”
Myeong-gyeong’s head vanished back through the door.
It seemed he was trying in his own awkward way to look after me now that he had a direct junior brother, but he was clumsy about it.
Dragging along legs that refused to move, I headed to the Hall of Preserved Wholeness.
By now, the route between the Hall of Exhausting the Way and the Hall of Preserved Wholeness was so familiar that I could walk it with my eyes closed.
“You’re here. There are no messages today.”
“Pardon?”
The moment I arrived, Cheong-su disappointed me.
If there was no work at the Hall of Preserved Wholeness, that meant I’d have to return to the Hall of Exhausting the Way again.
I immediately grabbed at Cheong-su’s trouser leg.
“Hall Master. Please give me work.”
“Get off me, you miserable bastard.”
“I can’t go back like this. Just kill me instead.”
Cheong-su tried to shake me loose by flicking his leg, but I wasn’t easy to throw off either.
I’d recently bought Sturdy Body, and my body had become somewhat tougher.
“You little shit, why won’t you let go?”
“Please. I can do anything you ask.”
“There is no work for you to do.”
While we were struggling, the Hall Master’s office opened.
The man from the Hall of Preserved Wholeness stared for a moment, speechless, at me dangling from Cheong-su’s leg, but soon recovered his composure.
“A market is to be held in Yichang this time, and Shanxi Prefecture has asked us to send some escorts.”
“Really? About how large a market is it?”
“They say around fifty different trades will be setting up there.”
Murim sects were called like this whenever force was needed in various parts of the Central Plains.
A market with fifty trades setting up would be fairly large. It was understandable that they would request Wudang Mountain.
And the Shanxi merchants of Shanxi Prefecture were famous for their wealth, so they had no hesitation about employing one of the Nine Great Sects.
“Sending around ten men should do. How much are they paying?”
“Ten nyang of silver per head, they say.”
“Good grief, they really are rich, those bastards.”
I was thinking the exact opposite.
‘Cheap bastards. Considering how much they have.’
Then again, martial artists probably had no exact idea just how much money the Shanxi merchants possessed.
And even if they did know, there was a high chance it would only be a reduced figure.
Because of the Two-Tax Law, which levied taxes according to one’s assets, they hid a great deal of their wealth.
“Then we can buy this year’s salt from there.”
“Ah, yes. Understood.”
The sects of the Central Plains also needed money, so they did business.
It seemed the Wudang Sect too was buying salt and reselling it for profit.
Well, there were few products as profitable as salt.
“What is salt going for these days?”
“About thirty seok for ten nyang of silver. But they say that if we buy more than five hundred seok this time, they’ll cut us a discount.”
“Oh. If that’s really…”
“Bullshit!”
A curse burst out before I knew it, cutting Cheong-su off.
Cheong-su and the Hall of Preserved Wholeness man both stared at me blankly.
And that blank look soon turned to anger.
“What’s with the cursing all of a sudden?”
“Ah, I’m sorry.”
Sorry was sorry, but I had a more than sufficient reason to react that way.
That reason was the price of salt.
“Thirty seok for ten nyang of silver? What is this, several decades ago? Does that even make sense? Then by the time it reaches the common people, that means they won’t even be getting twenty seok for ten nyang of silver.”
“Several decades ago? You little brat, you weren’t even born then.”
I blinked.
For a moment, my brain stalled slightly.
Then it hit me.
I had regressed.
That meant the current prices were not the prices I knew from lived experience.
I had momentarily mixed up something that should have been obvious.
“You said thirty seok for ten nyang of silver?”
“That’s right.”
I ran the calculation.
The price of salt I knew was around sixty seok for ten nyang of silver.
It had literally become half as expensive.
What had happened in the meantime?
The law governing salt had changed.
Originally, salt certificates that gave one the right to sell salt could only be obtained in the northern frontier.
Since it was difficult to transport military supplies to the frontier, merchants who carried goods north were given special privileges.
That system was called the frontier supply system.
But in time, the frontier supply system was changed into the commuted-payment system.
Merchants no longer needed to bring military supplies to the frontier and exchange them for salt certificates. Instead, they could exchange them at the inland Salt Transport Offices.
That change led to a result in which salt that had once circulated cheaply only in the northern regions began to be released cheaply even south of North China as well.
Judging by the price, the commuted-payment system hadn’t been implemented yet.
When was it implemented again?
If I remembered right, it was around the time I was twenty.
Which meant the price of salt south of North China would soon collapse.
“Absolutely not.”
My calculations were complete.
I objected at once, without room for argument.
As a merchant, I could not let this pass.
When a loss was plainly visible before my eyes, remaining silent was not the merchant’s code.
Right now, Wudang was buying up salt and making profits by reselling it.
But if the price of salt collapsed, Wudang would have to bear the full loss.
“What do you mean, absolutely not?”
“I mean buying the salt. It would be better to buy it later.”
“What do you know that makes you say that?”
Cheong-su said that as though he found it absurd.
“I’ve never heard of Shanxi merchants lowering prices. What a chance this is.”
Neither had I.
Ah, then perhaps.
My mind began turning rapidly again.
Among the Shanxi merchants, there would be many wealthy patrons who financially supported Confucian scholars and officials.
Since they were also close to Beijing, they might well have picked up word somewhere that the policy was about to change.
“Does it not occur to you that if they’re lowering the price, there must be a reason?”
“That is excessive speculation.”
“There is no merchant who is not crafty, and merchants are creatures who chase profit alone. When they say they will lower a price, there is always a reason behind it.”
I felt awkward insulting my own profession, but that was how people of the age saw things.
When I put it that strongly, even Cheong-su’s expression wavered slightly.
Well, since merchants lowering prices was something he’d never seen before, he seemed to be growing suspicious too.
“Can you take responsibility for what you’ve said?”
“Of course!”
I answered confidently.
In any case, once the result appeared, they would have no choice but to see me differently.
Would they perhaps start calling me Brilliant Huiyeong?
Since Huiyeong already meant radiant brilliance, perhaps I should tell them to call me Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant instead.
If I could make Wudang owe me a favor, it would be a tremendous help later when I started doing business.
Of course, for that I’d first have to quit this main-sect disciple business…
“Then prove your words before the sect leader.”
“Pardon?”
“Didn’t you say you could take responsibility for your words? Salt business occupies a fairly large share within Wudang as well. If the plan is to be changed, the sect leader’s permission is required.”
“…No.”
That was something I hadn’t known.
Regardless, Cheong-su had already decided that I would be meeting the sect leader.
…I’m screwed.