Pay‑to‑Win King of Martial Arts (Novel) - Chapter 165 - I, Muk Hui-yeong (2)

Chapter 165 – I, Muk Hui-yeong (2)

Great houses originally had many retainers. Their businesses were so numerous that the blood relatives alone could never handle all the work.

Of course, because the Hebei Peng Clan was a martial house, it did not fill itself with martial retainers the way the Fang Estate I had wrecked did. Most of its retainers tended to come from the literary side, former scholars who had once held office, or learned recluses and the like.

Naturally, a group on the scale of the Hebei Peng Clan had plenty of retainers, and the head of the house was not going to concern himself with the addition of one more man like me among them. That was why Peng Chae-hyang gave me one of the guest lodgings assigned to retainers and even told me to rest in comfort as if it were my own home.

“Are you feeling much better?”

“Somewhat.”

But if it was not actually my home, how was I supposed to make myself at home in it? On top of that, Peng Chae-hyang came by the guest lodge where I was recovering almost every single day to check on how my body was doing. Of course, I was grateful that she had given me a place to stay, but from my point of view, it was a little cumbersome. Even if my ankle was injured, it was not as though there was nothing I could train.

Lately in particular, the technique of becoming one with the energy of nature had begun to feel extremely useful, which made it all the more frustrating that she always seemed to show up just when I had sat down to train.

“Young Lady, I am not going to run away, so there is no need to keep coming to check every time.”

“…Black Elder said something.” “Ah, here we go. What did he say now?”

“Do not sigh like that. Black Elder is someone precious to me.”

Peng Chae-hyang mumbled. But how was I not supposed to sigh? Certainly, he had protected her well and showered her with boundless care, but in my eyes, it was far too much.

“So what did he say?”

“That all men are liars, so I should not believe anything they say.” “Then Black Elder must be a liar too. Do not believe him.”

“He says Black Elder and White Elder are different from other men.”

“That is childish enough to make me die.”

Peng Chae-hyang was old enough that she likely sensed something odd about it herself, but the upbringing one received from childhood was not something easily cast aside. Even if, to an outsider, it looked stifling and irrational beyond belief.

I knew that very well too, so I had no intention of pushing the matter further.

“Anyway, I am not going to run away. Trust me.”

“…That is not the only reason I came. You are injured, so I came to visit the sick.” I had indeed asked her for help first, but honestly, we were not close enough for daily sick visits, were we?

Still, I could hardly say that out loud, so all I did was nod.

“Then thank you.”

“Hmph, whatever. As if you are not just making me out to be some suspicious lunatic.” “That is one thing, and being grateful is another.”

“So you are still thinking of me as some patient suffering from paranoid suspicion?”

“There is a saying, is there not? The mouth is the gate of calamity.”

Peng Chae-hyang stared at me as if I were being absurd, then sharply turned her head away.

“Fine. I am leaving.” “Travel safely.”

Peng Chae-hyang disappeared, shutting the door behind her without even hearing my response.

Had she sulked?

Though Peng Chae-hyang was a woman, she was also from the Hebei Peng Clan, so I had assumed she would be brisk and manly. Yet she seemed to have a gentle and feminine side as well. In any event, I was pleased to have driven away the distraction. I immediately sat down and began widening the space with which I could become one.

It was an expansion of awareness.

From my room to the corridor.

From the corridor to the floor. From the floor to the building.

That was how the expansion of my awareness progressed.

But no matter what I did, it was difficult to extend it easily beyond the guest lodge.

At present, the limit of my expanded awareness was the area around the guest lodge. Exactly the same as when I had extended my awareness to Peng Chae-hyang right before Gwan Seo-ye nearly abducted me.

As far as I could guess, the reason seemed to lie in the form of the building itself. Since a building was a shape I could see, it was easy to perceive.

But the ground and the air were either too vast to grasp three-dimensionally, or invisible.

At the very least, if lines or walls divided the space into sections, it became easier to perceive it. But trying to perceive the space outside a building was far too difficult.

The moment I tried to perceive even a little of the outside, an overwhelming amount of information rushed into my head and caused pain like my brain was being torn apart. Was it perhaps like building muscle, where one had to keep enduring pain for the range of awareness to widen?

No matter how much indomitability I had, that pain was truly hard to endure, and I found myself shrinking from it.

“This is dizzying.”

I finished two si-jin of training to expand my awareness. There had been no achievement worth calling a widening of its range. Even so, I had undeniably overworked my brain, and soon I grew hungry and headed outside.

The Hebei Peng Clan truly treated its retainers well. They had even built a dining hall near the guest quarters where one could eat whenever one wished.

When I entered the dining hall, it was already somewhat past the usual mealtime, yet there were still many people there.

Several of the retainers were eating in groups. It looked like they had spent enough time there to become close, and those were the little circles that had formed. Since I had only arrived a few days ago, there was no way I would have anyone close to me there.

And since I intended to leave as soon as my ankle healed, I had no interest in building any ties.

I piled up enough food for a meal and sat down at an empty spot. As I ate, someone came over holding a bowl and sat down across from me.

“May I sit here?”

That someone was an old man whose hair and beard had both turned pure white. Naturally, I had never seen him before.

I looked at him with my chopsticks in hand, then let my gaze fall back to my bowl.

“Please do.”

I could have said, You are already sitting down, so why bother asking? But there was no reason to pick a fight. Right now, all I wanted was to finish eating quickly and return to training my awareness. “And who might you be?”

The old man asked me abruptly. I raised my head and looked around. There was no one else at our table. Even so, I still asked just in case.

“Me?”

“Who else is here besides you?” “Just a temporary retainer who will soon be leaving.”

“That would be odd, seeing how the young lady here keeps coming to see you.”

Ah, so that had caught his attention.

I shook my head to show it was nothing significant. “Young Lady Peng simply helped me. That is all.”

“Hoh. It is the first time I have seen that young lady take such interest in a man.”

“As if I…”

“You truly have no relationship with her?”

As he kept prying while I was eating, I put down my chopsticks and said, “Yes. But you are asking rather persistently. Do you perhaps harbor feelings for Young Lady Peng?”

There was a faint barb in my words. What I meant was that whether a girl as young as his granddaughter took interest in a man was none of his concern.

But the old man’s answer was unexpected.

“Indeed I do hold feelings for Young Lady Peng. What man would not lose his heart to such a beautiful young lady?” I looked at the old man.

What in the world was the Hebei Peng Clan doing, not kicking out a retainer like this?

To think an old man like him was looking at a young and beautiful woman like Peng Chae-hyang that way.

It was revolting beyond measure. Naturally, the barb in my voice grew sharper. “Sir, you look a little too old to be much of a man anymore.”

“Heh heh. I may look this old, but I am confident I can piss a stronger stream than you.”

“Could you not say filthy things while people are trying to eat? It is bad enough that knowing you look at Young Lady Peng like that already ruins my appetite.”

“Why react so strongly? Does that not simply mean you too hold that young lady in your heart?”

“I said no. Just because you are like that does not mean everyone else will be. If you really want to court Young Lady Peng, why not pluck a flower and confess tonight? She already has trouble dealing with men as it is, so you should be able to drive the final nail in yourself.” Despite my sharp denunciation, the old man did not waver in the slightest and merely chuckled.

Could a man truly smile like that after being condemned so harshly by someone decades younger than himself?

Under normal circumstances, I might have admired and envied that composure.

But after hearing the way he spoke of Peng Chae-hyang, he only looked like a fool to me. “So then, what sort of person were you in the past, Elder?”

“What sort of person, you ask?”

“If you are a retainer staying with the Hebei Peng Clan, you must have once been something significant, must you not?”

“Hahaha. Significant? I was indeed something.” “In what field?”

“If one did not know me in the martial world, one was a spy.”

“Really?”

That was another surprise. The retainers of the Hebei Peng Clan, most of whom were literary men, had a martial artist among them? Yet from what I could tell, the old man showed no sign whatsoever of having cultivated martial arts.

I immediately judged that the odds were high he was simply a mad old man babbling nonsense.

He likely had nothing left to boast of, so he puffed himself up with this kind of talk instead.

A pitiful and pathetic life, perhaps, but I had no duty to set him straight.

After quickly emptying my bowl, I got to my feet. “Enjoy your meal.”

“Tsk. Young people these days are terribly lacking in manners. To rise before an elder has finished his meal.”

“Elders should act like elders too. How am I supposed to treat as an elder some old man who stares at a girl young enough to be his granddaughter and entertains filthy thoughts?”

I shot back and turned away without hesitation to leave. But even after that scolding, the old man merely laughed heartily. “Ho ho, so I cannot even joke. Do you truly think I harbor romantic feelings for that young lady? I simply find her adorable.”

“Jokes like that are revolting in themselves.”

“But surely she is beautiful enough that any man might hold her in his heart, is she not? I thought you would be the same.”

“I am not.” To speak honestly, I was not even sure Peng Chae-hyang ranked that highly. Of course she was beautiful and pretty. It might simply be that my standards had risen after having seen Gwan Seo-ye recently.

On top of that, one of the women I knew, Zhuge Yan, was pretty enough to stand alongside Peng Chae-hyang as well.

“Hoh. Strange. There is no way a man could be otherwise.”

The old man stroked his beard as though he were truly troubled. The sight was so pathetic that I turned away again.

“By the way, just what kind of training are you doing?” “Pardon?”

At the old man’s question, I turned back toward him again. It was far too unexpected.

I had not said a word about training, yet he had seen through the fact that I was training.

“It is very rare for someone that young to be carrying immortal qi, you see.” “…Oh.”

That exclamation slipped out of me. Then I returned, set my bowl on the table, and sat back down. The old man smiled.

“So now you are a bit curious about me, are you?”

“Yes.” That was because even Hyeon-wol had never told me what this qi actually was. This was the first time I had learned it was immortal qi, and the first time I had ever met someone who could recognize it.

“So this was immortal qi.”

“Are you learning it without even knowing what it is? I truly do not understand that. It is not a kind of qi someone your age should be touching.”

“Does this qi discriminate by age?” “Not exactly, but immortal qi can only be sensed by those who have undergone a truly exalted enlightenment. And someone your age should not be old enough to have attained such an enlightenment, should he?”

I flinched.

I looked to be just over twenty now, but in truth I carried the experience of someone nearing fifty, did I not?

It seemed likely that was why I could perceive immortal qi.

“Then how were you able to recognize immortal qi, Elder?” “Heh heh. How else? I can recognize it because I cultivate it too.”

At that moment, the old man sitting before me vanished without a trace. It was the same as when Hyeon-wol disappeared before my eyes.

“Will you try to find me? If you can find me within one si-jin, I will answer what it is you wish to know.”

His voice, carrying laughter, entered my ears through voice transmission. Sorry, but I had already played this game of hide-and-seek with Hyeon-wol before.

“You had better keep your word.”

I immediately limited my awareness to the dining hall and sensed the flow of nature. Then I reached my hand straight toward the empty place where a form was absent even though the natural flow did not pass through.

Ridiculously enough, the old man was sitting on the chair right behind me. “…?”

When I caught hold of the old man’s shoulder, he stared at me blankly. It seemed he had never imagined I would find him this quickly.

“Now, how about you answer a few questions for me?”

I smiled. The old man’s stunned expression was utterly delicious.