Pay‑to‑Win King of Martial Arts (Novel) - Chapter 155 - Reunion from Memories (1)

Chapter 155 – Reunion from Memories (1)

I think the first time I met Gwan Seo-ye in my previous life had also been in Beijing.

That time too, she had draped her braided hair over the front of her shoulder just like this. There had once been a time when the emperor gathered all the influential merchants of the Central Plains in one sweep.

At that time, the Radiant Crystal Merchant Company, if not representative of the entire Central Plains, at least represented all of Hubei Province, and so we were invited.

The assembled merchants all stumbled through expressing their opinions before the emperor. I was no different.

No matter what, even for me it had not been easy to stand tall before the supreme ruler of the state.

The merchants, drained of their strength, left the imperial palace and, as if by prior agreement, gathered at a tavern. Part of it was surely because they were all burning to speak about what it had felt like to behold the emperor directly.

At the time, I had still been an immature merchant, and I had been carried away by the thought that I had received the emperor’s recognition in person.

Because of that, under the influence of drink, I made the mistake of revealing my weak point. Wanting to boast about how hard a situation I had risen from, I brought up my father.

Back then, I had been immature enough to wear the conflict with my father and the unhappiness of my home life almost as a badge of pride.

“Don’t you think speaking ill of your own family in front of others is like spitting in your own face?” That was the moment when Gwan Seo-ye and I first became entangled.

Just as Gwan Yeong-sang treasured Gwan Seo-ye, Gwan Seo-ye also respected her father Gwan Yeong-sang.

Naturally, there was no way my ugly words about my own father could have sounded good to someone like her. But I was already drunk, and the rebellious part of me flared up, so I barked back at her.

“If I want to speak ill of my own family, what problem is that of yours?”

“There’s no problem. I’m only telling you that it makes you look ugly.” “And what part of me looks ugly? Ah. Well, I suppose hearing such things might have been uncomfortable for the princess of the Yunchang Merchant Company.”

“How childish. I heard the Radiant Crystal Merchant Company was rising in Hubei, but seeing you now, it feels like it’ll vanish without amounting to much.”

“What? Are you finished?” Gwan Seo-ye had struck every point of my pride.

My troubled conflicts with my father, and the merchant company I had built entirely on my own without any support, were everything to me.

“No. I’m not done yet. Judging by how quickly you dragged my family into it, it seems your inferiority complex about family runs deep. Your parents must be truly pitiable. And you too, hating a father you should have loved, are pitiable and unhappy enough that it hardly needs saying.” “Worry about your own father. From the look of things, there are a lot of dutiful sons and daughters these days who only perform filial piety with their mouths.”

“What did you say?”

Gwan Seo-ye’s face reddened. In truth, that had been a very mild counterattack from me.

No matter how much I represented one of Hubei’s leading merchant companies, making an enemy of a member of the Shanxi Four Families would still have been a burden.

And yet Gwan Seo-ye clenched her fists, trembled, and at last even welled up with tears before abruptly storming out. I was left a little bewildered.

I had not expected her to react that strongly.

And then, once the others explained why, I realized I had made a mistake. “The Yunchang Merchant Company’s Grand Branch Master passed away not long ago. I think it was last winter.”

One of the merchants from Shanxi spoke to me almost as though rebuking me.

Since that gathering was taking place in early summer, it meant Gwan Yeong-sang, Gwan Seo-ye’s father, had died only about half a year earlier.

He also explained that Gwan Seo-ye and Gwan Yeong-sang had been exceptionally close. I cursed inwardly and hurried after Gwan Seo-ye.

It was not that I had no grievance of my own.

How was I supposed to know the details of someone else’s family circumstances? And besides, the fathers of people our age ought to have been around fifty or so, so it was also simply younger than one would expect for a well-kept wealthy man to die.

Still, the mistake had been mine, so I went after her at a quick pace.

By then Gwan Seo-ye had already disappeared into the streets, but after asking people here and there, I finally found her. She was drinking alone in a tavern.

She had turned her back toward the doorway where I stood and was crying bitterly, seemingly thinking of her father.

That alone was enough to hit me with a powerful sense of guilt. I did briefly consider simply leaving.

But in the end, I gathered my courage and sat down across from her.

The instant she saw me, her eyes turned sharp as an axe, then she lowered her face toward her collarbone and hid it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had circumstances like that.”

“…”

“So yes. The things I said about my father could certainly have sounded unpleasant to you too. I admit all of that.” “…I know.”

Gwan Seo-ye answered in a very small voice.

At the time I wasn’t yet a martial artist, so my senses weren’t particularly sharp, and I had to ask again. “Pardon?”

“I said I know. That you didn’t know my circumstances. I just thought of my father and got emotional on my own. In the end you just got made into the bad guy for no reason.”

“Ah. Well. If you put it that way, I’m grateful.” “I was too hasty as well. There are all kinds of parents in the world, and some of them aren’t fit to be parents at all. The kind who come home drunk and beat their children.”

“To be honest, it wasn’t that bad. Things just creaked a little between us. My father worked hard for me. Just as you said, I was the one spitting in my own face.”

The two of us each stepped back one step and apologized. That was how a natural drinking table for just the two of us came to be formed.

It was almost as though the two of us had deliberately slipped away from the others together.

The food at the tavern Gwan Seo-ye had chosen was objectively far worse than the food at the Beijing Restaurant. Of course it was.

The Beijing Restaurant was a base where the great powers of the commercial world gathered.

Naturally the cooks there were all exceptionally skilled. There was no basis for comparison with an ordinary market tavern.

And yet for all that Gwan Seo-ye was the daughter of a great family, she had a surprisingly generous palate.

“It’s delicious.” “Isn’t it only delicious because you spent so much energy crying?”

“Don’t tease me. I’m already embarrassed enough as it is.”

I didn’t say it aloud, but strangely enough, I too found the food subjectively delicious. The seasoning was all over the place. One part of a dish would be salty, another sweet, another spicy. And yet even that felt like a distinctive trick of the cook’s own style.

In any case, after that day, Gwan Seo-ye and I became close.

Whenever I visited Shanxi, I would go to the Yunchang Merchant Company and drink with her, and whenever she came to Hubei, she would visit the Radiant Crystal Merchant Company and spend time with me.

On the most glorious day of all, the day the state formally designated the Radiant Crystal Merchant Company as a great merchant company, everyone else merely sent letters of congratulations, but Gwan Seo-ye set aside her own busy affairs and came in person to congratulate me. That was how close we became.

Friends of the same age were rarer than dawn stars, and when even the work one did was the same, it was perhaps only natural that we became close.

We had the tact never to bring up subjects that would make the other uncomfortable, we recognized one another’s wit, and we resembled one another most of all in the way we placed our responsibility as merchant masters above everything else. One day, when the snow was falling heavily, I had been exhausted by overwork and suddenly found myself wanting to see my friend Gwan Seo-ye.

So I left for Shanxi on impulse with only a single escort.

I ended up meeting Gwan Seo-ye not in Shanxi, but in Henan between Shanxi and Hubei, and astonishingly enough, she said that she too had suddenly wanted to see me and had left her work behind to head toward Hubei. That was the day we confirmed that each of us occupied the same space in the other’s heart, and, trembling from the comfort and thrill of that realization, we shared our cups together.

Was it because we had been that comfortable with one another?

The unfamiliar way Gwan Seo-ye looked at me now felt unbearably sorrowful. Not only was it unfair that all those memories and milestones, which should have been shared between us, rested on my shoulders alone, but the fact that the Gwan Seo-ye of this time held not even the smallest trace of me in her heart.

It was the first moment I tasted not the sweetness of regression, but its bitterness.

“Yes. I was the one who asked to see you.” That was probably why my voice came out caught in my throat.

“Are you crying?”

“No. Why would I be crying?” “No, you are. It looks like you’re crying.”

Gwan Seo-ye smiled softly.

As befitted a woman only a little past her coming-of-age years, it was a smile full of a freshness so great it almost felt unfamiliar. It was different from the intelligent, elegant smile of the Gwan Seo-ye I had known, but it was beautiful in its own right as well.

“Wouldn’t it be better to cry properly, get all that moisture out of your system, and then refill it with tea?”

“I’m telling you, I’m not.” Gwan Seo-ye went on teasing me for my choked-up voice.

It felt as though I were now paying back the debt for how I had once teased her for crying in my previous life.

Once Gwan Seo-ye sat down, tea was brought out. As expected of a tea house selected by Gwan Yeong-sang, it used extremely fine tea leaves.

“All right then. Why did you want to see me?”

Gwan Seo-ye asked. Just as I was about to speak, she suddenly raised a palm.

“Ah, wait. Let me guess first.”

“…” “You wanted to flirt with me, the greatest beauty in Shanxi! Really, what else could it be?”

“Haha.”

I laughed out loud from sheer disbelief. Gwan Seo-ye and I had known each other for decades.

We had shared many nights with drink between us, nights when the nature of a relationship could easily have changed.

And yet not once in all that time had that sort of current ever appeared between us, nor had we even once discussed one another’s ideal type.

“It’s not that. But I admit I can see why you’d think so. We’re at that sort of age.” “For someone who seems so smooth, you’re surprisingly shy.”

“…Then let’s just say that’s what it is.”

“Fine. Then it’s my turn to answer. Right now, I’m working toward inheriting the Yunchang Merchant Company. So I don’t think I can become that sort of thing with you. I’m sorry.” Gwan Seo-ye said that with an apologetic smile.

It was the sort of smile one couldn’t hate, so I found myself laughing too.

“That’s a shame. Then let’s put that matter aside like that and move on to the other agenda.” “The other agenda?”

“Yes.”

“What other agenda? And don’t use that ten-times-and-the-tree-will-fall mentality to repeat the same thing.” “Don’t worry. It’s not that. Your self-consciousness is really something.”

“What?”

Gwan Seo-ye’s eyes widened as if she had never expected to hear that. Naturally, the Gwan Seo-ye of this age would be less mature than the Gwan Seo-ye I had known.

There was something surprisingly enjoyable about seeing the past of an old friend I had never known.

So she’d had a bit of princess syndrome when she was young too, I thought to myself. Well, given that face and that age, it was exactly the sort of affliction one might have.

I nodded inwardly to myself.

“Then what is this other agenda?” “Would it be possible for me to take a look around the Yunchang Merchant Company?”

“A look around? That’s your agenda?”

Gwan Seo-ye’s voice lost some of its force, perhaps because she had expected something more significant. “Yes.”

“Ah, well, I suppose a latecomer would have plenty to see if he toured our merchant company. But why didn’t you simply tell my father? He’s the Company Lord.”

“It would have been a bit awkward to say it to the branch master.” “What’s awkward about it?”

“Because I’m not going there to study your organizational structure.”

At my answer, Gwan Seo-ye’s expression turned puzzled. “Then what for?”

“You must keep this confidential.”

“What? Why so suddenly…” “I think there’s an infiltrator from the Demonic Cult inside the Yunchang Merchant Company.”

At my words, Gwan Seo-ye stared at me with completely vacant eyes.

Some time passed, and once she had recovered her composure, she took a sip of tea and said, “…What kind of nonsense are you talking about?”

Of course, both her hands and her voice were trembling.

It looked like it was going to be a long explanation, so I cleared my throat and began from the very start. From the story of how I became entangled with the unorthodox faction in Hubei, with the Black Dragon Gate now headed by Mun Il-ji.