Pay‑to‑Win King of Martial Arts (Novel) - Chapter 168 - I, Muk Hui-yeong (5)

Chapter 168 – I, Muk Hui-yeong (5)

My mother died when I was ten, so I do not have very many memories of her.

My mother was warm to me by nature, but she also had a strict side. It was largely thanks to her that I came to read the classics and keep books close. She would take on the cleaning and odd jobs at the village school and bring home battered old books in place of wages, telling me to read them.

Naturally, at that age I preferred going out to play. But if I did not read, Mother would pick up the switch.

“Hui-yeong. Do you know why your name is Hui-yeong? It means I named you so you would shine brightly in this world. Do you not pity your mother? You must succeed quickly and show filial devotion to your mother…”

Amusingly enough, Mother herself was completely illiterate. To put it somewhat coldly, one could say she was a greedy woman who tried to seek her own advancement through me.

But I could never accuse Mother of lacking effort. Mother came from a family of five siblings, and from the eldest to the fourth they were all daughters, with the youngest being the only son. My mother was neither the forceful eldest daughter, nor the ambitious second, nor the sharp-witted fourth, nor the youngest son showered with affection. She was the third.

Mother said she had wanted to study, but could not because she had to mind the mood of the household. In truth, even the forceful eldest aunt and the ambitious second aunt had not been able to study. Only their younger brother had been allowed to learn.

So Mother had been born with the fate of never being able to study, and that frustration spilled over onto me. Mother had not been able to choose her father and mother, and I had not been able to choose my father and mother, so it was one of those universal farces that arise from such things.

“You must succeed. You have to raise this family up.”

Mother said that habitually. When I was young, I truly hated hearing it. And there was another thing she said often.

“Hui-yeong. Do you know what I want?”

“What is it?”

“I want to ride in a flowered sedan chair with you and go to a beautiful hill, eat tasty things, and look at the mountains. Or I want to ride a boat and drift around on a lake, looking at the night scenery. One day we can do that, right?”

When Mother spoke of her dream, she clasped her hands like a young girl, as if the thought alone filled her with rapture.

At the time, even I thought that dream seemed impossibly grand. But thinking of it now, it was a dream so modest it was almost pitiful. Or perhaps that truly was the greatest happiness Mother could imagine. We were that poor.

And the reason we were poor was simple.

Father did not work.

That too was tied to fate. Father’s father, my paternal grandfather, had apparently been beaten by martial artists and died of the damage that lingered in his body. That was around the time Father had just married Mother.

Father said the men who had beaten Grandfather down were not even worth calling martial artists, just a few black-path hooligans. One drunk thug had picked a fight with Grandfather, and when Grandfather tried to resist, the black-path men surrounded him and beat him mercilessly.

The fatal injury came because, while Grandfather had curled up and crouched down, one of the hooligans kicked him in the back of the head. Constables came and broke it up partway through, but the hooligans fled, while Grandfather came home, kept complaining of dizziness where he had been hit, sickened little by little, and died. That too was a common enough thing in the cruel Central Plains.

After that, Father apparently became obsessed with martial arts. But Father’s family were mere tenant farmers with nothing to speak of, so there was no chance that martial arts would simply fall into the hands of such a man.

Just as Mother went around the village schools to obtain books, Father went around the village in search of martial arts to learn. But every time he failed, he fell into despair, and whenever that happened he would drink a bowl of cloudy rice liquor and return home.

Father was frightening. After drinking, he would throw and smash the household things in sorrow over the loss of Grandfather, then shout at Mother and me, asking whether we too despised him for having failed to learn martial arts.

Whenever, late at night, the rough sound of the brushwood gate opening from outside rang out, Mother would immediately cover me with a blanket and tell me to pretend to be asleep even if we had only been speaking warmly together a moment earlier. Every time drunken Father tried to wake me, Mother stood in his way.

Sometimes I told Mother I was afraid of Father, but whenever I did, Mother only told me to stop saying useless things and read one more book instead.

Thinking back on it now, Mother must have believed there was no way to break free of the ring of misfortune and poverty unless I rose to success, which was why she was that desperate about my education.

There was another incident too. Once, the village teacher gave Mother one hundred copper coins for how hard she had worked. Considering how poor the teacher himself was, that alone showed how grateful he must have felt toward her.

Mother came into the house on tiptoe so as not to wake Father, who had come home drunk the previous day and was still asleep, then beckoned me with her hand.

“Hui-yeong, Hui-yeong. Come out here.”

The urgency in Mother’s manner made me tiptoe after her without even meaning to. Once we had stepped outside the brushwood gate, she said to me with a very happy face,

“Be quiet when you go in. We cannot let your father wake up.”

“Yes?”

Mother loosened a worn-out purse and showed me the copper-colored coins inside. At the sight of those gleaming coins, I was startled. Since I had been quick with numbers since I was little, I immediately asked,

“How much is it?”

“One hundred nyang, one hundred nyang. Teacher gave it to me.”

“Why?” “He said he wanted to give it to me because I worked so hard all this time. Was that not kind of him?”

“Then why are you not telling Father? It is a good thing.”

“If that man has money, all he will do is drink. We both know we cannot afford to spend money on things like that.”

Mother handed me the one hundred coins. I had already half expected it, but Mother wanted me to use that money to buy books as well.

“Go to the bookstore and buy the Analects with this.”

I nodded, took the money, and left the house. It was the first time in my life I had ever held that much money, and my hands shook.

But I did not buy the book Mother wanted.

Instead of the Analects, I bought medicinal food, half a geun of pork, a string of mackerel, and jaegang rice cakes made with wine lees.

Because that day was Mother’s birthday.

At that age, I did not know just how great Mother’s dreams and desires were. All I knew was that I wanted to make her happy.

Honestly, the idea of passing the state examination and repaying Mother was too uncertain and too far in the future. So I thought that instead of something like that, spending the money on a birthday meal for Mother would make her happy right now.

A tiny brat not even four cheok tall running around the market buying food for a birthday table. The merchants in the market found it endearing and even added a little extra here and there.

“Your mother will be so happy.”

“She raised her son well.”

Each merchant tossed me a word or two, and that made me feel impossibly good.

I spent the entire hundred nyang and came home with both hands full of food. Mother was anxiously pacing outside the brushwood gate, and the moment she saw what I was carrying, her expression froze.

“…What is all this?”

Mother asked. I had not the slightest doubt she would be pleased. Even to the child I was then, it seemed like something truly admirable to do.

“It is your birthday, Mother!”

I said that and held the bundles out to her with both hands full. Mother looked into the bundles, then struck me across the cheek.

“Who told you to buy this nonsense?”

Of course the food in the bundles I was carrying spilled onto the ground, and I was too shocked to get back up. It was not the pain so much as sheer bewilderment.

Mother looked down at me sprawled on the ground, pounded her own chest, and wept. Mother had always been warm except when it came to matters related to books, and until then she had never struck me once.

I could not even think to gather up the food that had fallen. I just burst into tears. I think it was the first time I had cried like that. I cried loudly enough to shake the whole village.

Not only did Father come out from where he had been sleeping inside, but even the villagers came to watch.

Father, once awake, listened to what had happened and lowered his head. Even Father knew that Mother had poured her heart and soul into my education.

“This happened because your father is inadequate.”

Father was a gentle man so long as he was not drinking. He comforted both Mother and me.

In the end, that evening we ate the food I had bought. Even Father, who normally drank outside in the evenings, stayed home that day. The dinner that night was quieter than any other.

Perhaps we had failed to brush off all the dirt after the food fell to the ground, because whenever we ate, there was a dry grating sound of sand in our mouths. Even now, when I remember the sound of sand grating in the mouths of the three of us, my skin crawls.

And so the mother who had wanted to live a wealthy life through me died when I was ten, while still poor. Since she went out to work every day at the village school and could never properly look after her own meals, perhaps it was only natural that she withered away. For the poor, deaths like that, little different from natural causes, leave no one to whom one may cry injustice.

Right before dying, Mother showed a clear moment of returning light.

At that moment, she suddenly opened her mouth and said,

“Thank you for celebrating my birthday. Mother was sorry.”

It seemed that for a soft-hearted woman like Mother, that incident had remained in her heart like a scar.

I thought about what I could say that might comfort her on her final journey, but there was no reason to expect anything extraordinary from the mind of a ten-year-old child.

“It is alright.”

After thinking long and hard, the only answer I gave was something utterly ordinary. For better or worse, Mother died without hearing my reply. After that day, Father changed completely. He cast aside his obsession with martial arts and took whatever work earned money. Since he had no skills and no decent work history, the only thing he could do was work as a tenant farmer.

Father was not evil by nature either, so he seemed to feel a crushing responsibility for Mother’s death.

With one less mouth to feed and Father now working, our life improved somewhat. We reached the point where we could eat meat once a month.

But Father and I did not have a good relationship. Father had always been a taciturn man unless he was drinking, and I considered Mother’s death to be his fault.

And so we lived for years under the same roof while avoiding one another.

Then, when I reached the age of learning, Father suddenly called for me.

“What is it?”

“You are going to become a lay disciple of the Wudang Sect.”

“What?”

The abruptness of it caught me completely off guard. At the time, I was deeply engaged in learning bookkeeping at a tiny general shop in the village.

Back then, I believed that if I wanted to escape the poverty that clung to us like a curse, I had no choice but to become a merchant. Commerce suited me too well. It also helped that I had no interest in Mother’s dream of scholarship or Father’s dream of becoming a martial artist.

“Not right away. But when you come of age, I have arranged for you to be accepted as a lay disciple of the Wudang Sect. The promise came from a famous Immortal himself, so he will not break his word.”

Only then did I learn that Father had been making donations to the Wudang Sect all this time. I think that was the angriest I had ever been in my life.

Father had not cast aside his obsession with martial arts after all. He had merely passed that obsession on to me. He had killed Mother with that obsession over martial arts, and now he was doing this!

Unaware of the fury burning me from the inside out, Father went on in a low voice.

“Whatever kind of work you choose in the future, a man ought to be able to protect his own body. Besides, connections through the Wudang Sect’s lay disciples…”

Looking back on it now, they were sensible words, and the opportunity itself had been something miraculous wrested from a household with nothing.

But at the time, I had no desire to understand Father at all. All I could think was that he had spent money in a useless place. If only he had used that money to buy land for our family instead.

That day, I rampaged like a madman, throwing and smashing household things just as Father used to do when he got drunk.

When my anger reached the top of my head, my mind went white. I swear I remember nothing from that moment. By the time I barely regained my senses, the house was in complete disarray.

Later, I was told that Father’s family line had long carried a tendency toward violent fits of rage. It had passed on to me, and that day was the first time it manifested. Just like Father, I too had been born with the fate of lashing out in those ugly violent scenes Mother had hated so much.

At the time, I was deeply shocked by my own behavior. I had never once imagined that I would become the same as Father.

I was wracked with guilt, and I gave up the vague dream of wanting to build a good family of my own. If I created a family, I feared another tragic sacrifice like Mother would appear. It became a kind of obsession.

The one good thing about it was that women felt comfortable around me. They said women instinctively sensed when a man harbored lust toward them.

Perhaps because my lust had been psychologically castrated, many women were at ease around me. A few of them even confessed to me, but I politely refused every one.

In any case, what happened after that can be summarized simply.

In the end, I was expelled from the path of becoming the Wudang Sect lay disciple into which Father had poured so much effort. Naturally, my relationship with Father worsened even further.

I was old enough by then, so I left home without ever looking back and set foot in earnest upon the road of commerce.

* * *

Of course, I did not tell all of that to Peng Chae-hyang. Matters like how I gave up my dream of creating a family and that was why women felt comfortable around me, or how madness ran in my bloodline, were far too personal. I did not tell her I had been expelled from the lay disciples either. That belonged to my previous life, not this one.

My story about the past ended just as we reached Iron Origin Hall.

“…I see.”

After hearing my story, Peng Chae-hyang remained silent for quite some time before she spoke in a choked voice.

She looked as if she wanted to say more, but at that moment a maidservant came running out of the Iron Origin Hall building and cut her off.

“Young Lady! Something terrible has happened!”

“W-what? What is it?”

“The Clan Head, the Clan Head has come!”

At the servant’s words, Peng Chae-hyang’s face turned deathly pale. Inside the building standing before me right now was Peng Gyeong-seung, the Clan Head of the Hebei Peng Clan and one of the Three Great Sabers Under Heaven.