Pay‑to‑Win King of Martial Arts (Novel) - Chapter 2 - Wudang Sect (2)

Chapter 2 – Wudang Sect (2)

===================

Translated by Heavenly Cat

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

===================

The Wudang Sect.

What more is there to say. The very Wudang Sect of the saying, “In the north, Shaolin is revered; in the south, Wudang is honored.”

Ever since the founder Zhang Sanfeng took root on Wudang Mountain in Jun County, Hubei, the Wudang Sect had never once drifted outside the center of the martial world in the Central Plains.

So it was only natural that these bastards were drunk on their own importance.

“Take this! Taiji Fist!”

“Kuh, strong…!”

Even though I was an outsider to martial arts, I could tell that was not Taiji Fist.

After Cheong-hyeon, who had thrown the bamboo sword at me, vanished without a trace, I was now absentmindedly making grass flutes. If you use the stems of dandelions that grow all over Wudang Mountain, they are easy to make.

Dandelion stems are hollow inside, so they make a flute sound even if you simply blow into them, but I added a little craftsmanship of my own.

I cut the end diagonally, then made a slit across it. After that, I inserted a broad leaf into the slit and trimmed the whole thing short enough to hold in the mouth comfortably. That completed a single grass flute.

Pheee.

I gave one a soft test blow. The pitch was a bit too high.

“I should use one that is thinner and longer.”

Dandelion stems vary wildly in thickness and length, and the sound changes accordingly. I made my grass flutes using stems that were as similar in thickness and length as possible.

Uniformity matters when selling goods. That is what trust is. Buyers have expectations of an item, and I meet them. That trust is the foundation of commerce.

Thinking it over while making the flutes, there was no way the Nine Heavens could be this vivid and full of life.

I had already stayed here for several days. I had even slapped my own cheeks a few times. Only today did I finally decide to admit that I had returned to the past.

“Is it because of that Divine Demon Pill?”

At the time I swallowed it, the situation had been too urgent for me to notice, but thinking back, perhaps some strange power really had been swirling within it. I was not sure.

“What is this?”

At that moment someone reached out from behind me. I slapped the back of that hand before it could touch the grass flute.

“Hey now.”

When I turned around, a boy was clutching the back of his hand. Judging by his face, he did not seem especially embarrassed. Since we were in the same cohort, speaking informally was allowed. No, it was practically required. That suited me fine too, since even I found it awkward to use honorifics with children much younger than I was in my previous life.

“Why’d you hit me?”

“Because you touched merchandise.”

“Merchandise?”

“That’s right. Merchandise.”

I put the grass flutes into a small travel bag. I laid broad leaves between each layer so they would not break as much as possible.

“Aren’t you training martial arts?”

“Does that look like martial training to you?”

To my eyes, it looked like child’s play. If that business of disguising some market-street Three Calamities Fist as Taiji Fist was not a game, then what was?

“There’s the lay disciple evaluation tonight.”

“The lay disciple evaluation?”

Ah. There had been something like that. A sparring event for the newly admitted lay disciples, supposedly to assess their talent.

But who would really care about mere lay disciples? The Wudang Sect would surely send only some low-ranking disciple in name alone just to fill a seat. As I remembered, that was exactly what happened.

“They say if you catch someone’s eye there, they’ll let you enter the mountain as a main-sect disciple.”

“I know. But that will not happen to us.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you think? How old are we?”

The Wudang Sect’s main-sect disciples are the sort who begin practicing horse stance from the moment they can barely walk. And if they show talent, they go through hair-purging and marrow-cleansing to reshape their bones and meridians for martial arts.

“We’ve already eaten too much cooked food. Too much turbid qi has built up in our bodies. Even if we train martial arts from now until we shit blood, first-rate will probably be the limit.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

I answered roughly and was about to move away, but his next words stopped me.

“You’re smart. To tell the truth, I didn’t want to hang around with those idiots anyway.”

“Hm?”

The sudden sharpness of his tone caught me off guard. Then again, at twenty, he was old enough to know a thing or two.

“They still don’t seem to understand. The real meaning of entering the Wudang Sect as lay disciples.”

“What meaning?”

“Why are you pretending not to know? You know too. This place is just for building connections. If your family can donate enough to get you into Wudang, then your family has some money. Which means you’re the kind of friend worth knowing.”

So the brat was black-hearted. But nothing he said was wrong. If anything, it was exactly right.

The reason we entered as lay disciples was not to learn the Wudang Sect’s martial arts, but because we needed the label of having once been a Wudang lay disciple.

That sort of label helps a great deal later when you want to open a merchant association.

“You’re an awfully precocious little bastard.”

“Not nearly as bad as you, trying to sell things already.”

The boy laughed. The way he did it still looked innocent enough to be amusing.

“I’m Jeon Oh-su. What’s your name?”

“Muk Hui-yeong.”

“Cool name. Sounds like some unrivaled master under heaven.”

Unrivaled master, my ass. It is the name of a man who grovels before martial artists and dies a screaming death.

Still, Jeon Oh-su. I rolled the name around in my head.

“Could your father’s name perhaps be Jeon Ho-rak?”

“Oh, you know him? That’s right.”

“So you’re the son of the Wuhan Money House.”

As expected of Wudang lay disciples, many of them seemed to be children of local influential families. I had been expelled after only a month, so I never got to know them very well.

“What about you?”

Jeon Oh-su’s eyes shone brightly. I only shrugged.

“My father is just a farmer. I got in because he kept making donations to Wudang. They weren’t large donations either. We aren’t well-off enough for that.”

“Ah. Really?”

The interest in Jeon Oh-su’s eyes cooled at once. He must have thought I had some tremendous backing.

“Disappointed?”

“A little. But it’s fine. My father told me to get to know as many people as possible. And if someone looked especially valuable, to build an even closer relationship. Of course, it’s a little disappointing that you don’t have a background, but you look smart, so it’s all right. If I put you in charge of accounting at the money house later, you seem like you’d do well.”

“I’m not the sort to stay under someone else. I’d rather run my own business.”

“See, you’re smart after all. If you want to succeed, you have to run your own business. If you stay under someone else, you’ll live as a slave forever.”

Jeon Oh-su chuckled. As I remembered it, he eventually became the owner of the Wuhan Money House without much trouble and lived very well. Getting close to someone like him could not hurt.

“Anyway, why are you selling grass flutes?”

“Because I need money.”

“Who would buy these? Honestly, if it were me, I wouldn’t. I could make one too.”

“The main-sect disciples. They don’t have anything to enjoy. They don’t even know how to make a little trinket like this.”

Usually a lay disciple would receive plenty of pocket money from home, but my family circumstances were not very good.

Still, my father had been surprisingly farsighted. To think he had conceived of sending me to become a Wudang lay disciple despite our difficult situation. Of course, I failed to last even a month, so I was not even recognized as a proper lay disciple in the end.

“Then maybe I’ll be your first customer.”

“Welcome, honored customer. Sorry about smacking your hand earlier.”

Jeon Oh-su picked up the grass flutes from the bag one by one and blew into them.

“They all sound the same. You’ve got nimble hands.”

“You flatter me, honored customer.”

“How much?”

“Three copper coins.”

“Cheap.”

“My labor is only worth about that much for now. It didn’t take that much work either.”

Jeon Oh-su counted out three copper coins from his pocket and handed them to me. I passed him the best-made grass flute.

“I’ll use it well. I was bored anyway, so this worked out. If it breaks, will you fix it?”

“Customer, would you like to get hit?”

Jeon Oh-su snickered as if he had expected that response. Blowing his grass flute, he went into the inner hall.

The first time I ever bought goods wholesale and sold them on, I was around twenty-eight. Until then I had done every kind of work imaginable just to build up capital. I was young then. If you have no capital, you sell what you can without it, but instead I had run myself ragged trying to build capital first.

Anyway, I had now sold my first item at the age of twenty. I had advanced things by a full eight years.

“A pine caterpillar really does belong on pine needles.”

Selling even one item set my heart at ease. A merchant’s constitution really never goes anywhere.

The subtle truth of commerce is that money calls to money. With the money you earn from selling one good, you buy a better one and sell it for more. You keep growing and growing like that until you become a Great Merchant.

But I had no intention of reinvesting in goods right now. I intended to invest in something else.

Those words I had named the Martial Talent Shop. The moment I focused on them, they floated before my eyes again like a mirage.

[ Nimble Movement – Ninth Grade ]

[ Price: three copper coins (beginner discount!) ]

I looked over the other things too, but that beginner discount only applied to this one. Tightfisted bastard. It really seemed to be a one-time offer.

This shop window thing had some mercantile talent of its own. Drawing in a customer once is hard, but drawing them in twice is easy. That is why merchants hold opening events and the like, as a strategy for hooking people the first time.

But how do I buy this? I want it.

The moment that thought crossed my mind, the three copper coins in my hand disappeared in an instant.

The rough sensation of the coins was still lingering in my palm, so the whole thing was downright ghostly.

‘Did I buy it?’

I did not know. For the moment, I could not feel any difference.

Maybe I would know if I tried using martial arts. I remembered that Immortal Cheong-hyeon had taught us the basics of the Three Calamities Heart Method and Three Calamities Fist.

‘If you were going to send me back, you could at least have sent me back to when I was five.’

When someone saves a drowning man, the rescued man asks for his bundle back too. I should have been grateful enough just to be given a new life, but greed still rose up in me. If I had come back that far, I could have trained martial arts without having to borrow money from others like this.

But as I had told Jeon Oh-su, I was already too old. Until the age of twenty, I had never learned so much as a trace of martial arts.

Just as I was about to try martial arts on my own, a small pebble whizzed past beside me.

“Ack!”

That small stone struck the back of the hand of a lay disciple in the yard with perfect accuracy while he was playing at Taiji Fist.

When I whipped my head around, I saw children wearing blue Daoist robes unlike ours. They did not even try to hide the fact that they were the ones who had thrown it.

“Who are you brats?”

“Main-sect disciples.”

The boy who looked to be the one who had thrown the stone stepped forward, puffing out his chest arrogantly.

The lay disciples were around the ages from fifteen to twenty, but those main-sect disciple children looked to be barely ten years old.

“Why did you throw that?”

“Because you insulted our Wudang!”

The main-sect disciple child shouted furiously.

“How can you call a fist technique like that Taiji Fist? Lay disciples like you are not even taught Taiji Fist.”

I see. The way their faces were flushed red, it seemed they truly felt they had been insulted.

Then again, children from the Nine Great Sects really did have a terrifying sense of belonging.

“And that means you get to throw stones?”

“Be grateful we did not break his arm.”

The child spoke haughtily. The friend who had been hit looked fit to burst with anger too. He was probably furious that a brat a full head shorter than him was acting that way.

“Fine then. Go ahead and break it.”

The lay disciple who had been hit rolled up his sleeves and strode toward the child.

The atmosphere turned ugly. The lay disciple rushed in first. At a glance, he looked like someone who had never thrown a punch in his life.

The main-sect disciple child, by contrast, already had the angles of a proper stance. I felt as though I already knew how this fight would end.

“Aaagh!”

In the blink of an eye, the lay disciple’s arm was twisted behind his back and he was subdued. I had not even properly seen how he had done it. The other lay disciples looked openly shaken, as if they too had not expected their friend to be handled so easily by a little kid. That was the difference between martial artists and non-martial folk.

“How dare a mere lay disciple challenge a main-sect disciple!”

“Aaaaagh!”

Come to think of it, the main-sect disciples had picked fights with the lay disciples often.

From the point of view of the main-sect disciples, being grouped together with lay disciples under the name of Wudang seemed humiliating. At that age, when they lacked judgment, it would be even worse.

“What do we do…”

“At this rate, isn’t his arm really going to break?”

The lay disciples looked around in confusion. They were searching for an adult to stop this.

But the adults of the Wudang Sect only visited the lay disciples’ quarters twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. They had no reason to care any more than that.

“Hey, customers.”

At that moment Jeon Oh-su tapped my shoulder from behind. He seemed to have come out from the inner quarters after hearing the commotion.

“I know.”

I brushed his hand off my shoulder and stepped toward the main-sect disciples.

The main-sect disciple children looked at me warily as I approached.

“What, do you have a complaint against us too?”

“How could a lay disciple possibly hold a complaint against a main-sect disciple? This unworthy one has never even dared think such a thing.”

I clasped one fist into the other before my chest and raised them in a martial salute.

“I am the lay disciple Muk Hui-yeong.”

Because I came out so politely, the main-sect disciple children looked at one another for cues. They clearly did not know how to respond.

“First, please let that friend go so we can talk. He has surely learned his lesson by now.”

“Are you ordering us?”

“No. I am making an earnest request.”

“You came out just to say that?”

Prickly little things. Still, from a merchant’s point of view, customers are always prickly.

I cleared my throat and said,

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“I happen to have an excellent item.”

“Huh?”

My abrupt words made the main-sect disciple children wear baffled expressions.

Now the selling would begin.