Pay‑to‑Win King of Martial Arts (Novel) - Chapter 74 - All for One, One for All (2)

Chapter 74 – All for One, One for All (2)

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Translated by Heavenly Cat

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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At some point, I recalled the first time I had entered Wudang. The carefree Daoists, the buildings that were simple yet neatly maintained, the lush mountain scenery, and the young disciples overflowing with pride. Back then I had thought, so this is what a martial sect is.

“Hey, hey. Are you sure that mushroom is edible? It doesn’t look like it.”

“We just eat it and purify it with qi regulation afterward.”

“What are we, the Sichuan Tang Clan?”

But what about now. Daoists walking around with their shoulders drooping, buildings with spiderwebs thick beneath the eaves, mountain scenery left messy because branches hadn’t been trimmed in time, and dejected young disciples. Those were what I saw now.

“Ha ha. I win. Hand over one fasting pill.”

“I feel like I’ll die if I don’t even eat that…”

“Hand it over. A wager is a wager.”

“That’s cold.”

Now, as I walked through Wudang, I felt it once more. If one wanted to maintain even the minimum standard of life, then some amount of money was absolutely necessary.

Look. The young disciples couldn’t tell poisonous mushrooms from ordinary ones and were just eating them anyway, and were even gambling over a single fasting pill to the point of hurting their friendship.

If I said this, they’d probably point fingers and call me a vulgar merchant again, but didn’t most forms of love and friendship also rest on a foundation of money? The people of Wudang had thoroughly ignored that fact, and this was the result.

When I entered the Hall of Exhausting the Way, the disciples’ state was truly a sight.

The ones eating poisonous mushrooms or gambling over fasting pills at least still had some energy left.

“No, Senior Brother!”

“…Junior Brother.”

The very first thing I saw upon entering the Hall of Exhausting the Way was Myeong-seong sprawled on the ground. He had no vitality, and his lips were so dried and cracked that he looked like a squid dragged up onto land.

“I wanted to work hard, since I’m one of the Taiji Sword Guardians…”

I supported Myeong-seong’s head and placed it on my lap. Myeong-seong let out rough breaths. He was so skin-and-bones that it seemed obvious he hadn’t been eating proper food. And in the middle of that, he had still trained because he was one of the Taiji Sword Guardians, and that was why he had collapsed like this.

If even Myeong-seong, the eldest among my senior brothers, couldn’t endure it, then what had happened to Myeong-gyeong and Myeong-jin? Carrying Myeong-seong on my back, I hurried inside.

“Senior Brother, Senior Brothers!”

“Oh? Junior Brother.”

Inside the building, Myeong-gyeong was seated at the table. On the tray before him, tree bark and roots were piled up quite neatly.

“When did you get here?”

“Just now. Senior Brother Myeong-seong collapsed outside.”

“Ah. So he did again.”

Unexpectedly, Myeong-gyeong’s reaction was lukewarm.

“A lot of people keep collapsing these days. I don’t really know why, though.”

Myeong-gyeong shoved a root, still covered in dirt, roughly into his mouth. It was astonishing that he could make an expression of savoring the taste while eating something like that.

“Is it good?”

“Yeah.”

I remembered buying Myeong-gyeong something delicious long ago. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe he hadn’t said it was delicious because it truly tasted good, but because he was simply the sort of child who could eat everything deliciously.

“By the way, where is Senior Brother Myeong-jin?”

“Behind you.”

“Pardon?”

The moment I turned around, I was startled. Myeong-jin was drooping there in ragged condition. He had already lacked presence to begin with, and now that he’d lost strength as well, even his presence had become fainter.

“You startled me. At least make some sign when you move around.”

“I don’t even have the strength for that.”

Myeong-jin muttered a rough answer and slumped flat against the table.

It felt as though an epidemic called lethargy was sweeping through Wudang itself. No matter how much I was the Divine Physician of Hubei, I couldn’t cure this. This was the sort of thing that required a fundamental change in constitution.

“Where is Master?”

“He’s been leaving the main mountain a lot these days. He should be back soon.”

Apparently Cheong-hwa wasn’t any better either, because I felt his presence outside. But when I saw the man who came in, I stopped short for a moment.

“…Who are you?”

That slipped out of my mouth before I knew it.

Rather than a Daoist of Wudang, the man looked more suited to being a beggar from the Beggars’ Sect. The grime flowing down his face, his hair sticking out wildly, and the sleeve of his Daoist robe torn and dangling loose.

A knuckle immediately flew straight into my forehead. From the impact alone, I knew who he was.

“Master?”

“To fail to recognize even a master as lofty as heaven. You’re truly out of line.”

Cheong-hwa brushed past me and dumped food onto the table. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, chestnuts, and other things that could at least be called food. Myeong-gyeong and Myeong-jin immediately snatched them up and devoured them greedily.

“Leave some for Myeong-seong too.”

“Weren’t you neat and tidy when you came to Wuhan?”

“Who in the world would give alms to a neatly dressed man in fine robes?”

“Alms? You’ve been begging?”

At my words, Cheong-hwa realized his slip and covered his mouth with a hand.

“It was a secret.”

But Myeong-gyeong and Myeong-jin didn’t react in any special way. It seemed I was the only one shocked that my lofty master had been going around begging.

“Master. It’s all right. I more or less knew.”

“Hm?”

Myeong-gyeong, who had been licking sweet-potato skin from his fingers, said it as though it were no big matter.

“There’s no way food like this would just suddenly appear from nowhere.”

“…”

Apparently Cheong-hwa had never imagined that his disciples would discover his humiliation, because his face turned red. I quietly stepped behind him and patted him on the shoulder.

“It’s all right, Master. It was a noble deed.”

“The thing I spent my life emphasizing was Wudang’s dignity, and now we’ve fallen clear to the bottom.”

“Originally, if you have no money, your dignity falls. They don’t call it dignity upkeep expenses for nothing.”

At my words, Cheong-hwa sighed. It was such an obvious fact that it would have been stranger not to know it until now.

“But how did things suddenly become this bad?”

No matter what, these were still renowned Daoists of Wudang. They took escort jobs from merchant companies from time to time, and there had to be valuables or money they had obtained unavoidably while travelling the jianghu. It was hard to understand how they could have suddenly turned into a group living on bark and roots.

“It seems the Zhuge Clan put very firm pressure on the merchant companies too. They told them that the moment they so much as placed an escort request, they should prepare themselves to sever ties with the Zhuge Clan.”

“Ah. Then all our businesses have been halted?”

“That’s what Cheong-su told me.”

To think Wudang’s lofty position, which usually had no dealings with merchant companies, would return to poison it like this.

By contrast, the Zhuge Clan maintained close exchange with the commercial world, so perhaps this outcome was only natural.

“Do none of the other Immortals have money hidden away anywhere?”

“This is all they had after spending the rest. In any case, it was never much. They’d only set it aside to buy tasty food for the disciples when they traveled the jianghu.”

“Why is everyone such a painfully upright official? Then just threaten the lay disciples at least. Tell them they’ll be expelled if they don’t donate.”

“Senior Brother Sect Leader would certainly never allow that.”

That damned dignity again. Then again, the lay disciples already had to be watching the situation carefully as it was. If Wudang pressured them on top of that, its reputation would fall to the floor as well. The Zhuge Clan’s pressure was proving more effective than I had expected. Was that why they were the sort of people known for using their heads?

“Then I should step in.”

“What could you possibly do?”

“I’m already marked by the Zhuge Clan anyway.”

“Even so…”

Apparently the omitted words were something like, what could you, who only have a newly founded merchant company, possibly accomplish? But Master didn’t know what sort of person I was.

I immediately left the Hall of Exhausting the Way and headed to the Hall of Preserved Wholeness. The people of the Hall of Preserved Wholeness were all on forced shutdown. Since Wudang had no money to circulate, that was only natural.

Naturally, Cheong-su, the Master of the Hall of Preserved Wholeness, was also pasted to a chair with vacant eyes, utterly slack.

“What in the world is all this?”

That was the very first thing I said to Cheong-su the moment I saw him. Naturally, Cheong-su wasn’t the sort of man to just sit there gloomily and take it.

“What do you mean, what is what, you brat? You show up after all this time and immediately pick a fight?”

“Even so, how can things become this impoverished so suddenly? When you’re running an organization, of course you need to build reserve funds in case of emergencies.”

“The Sect Leader said that if we had money to make an emergency fund, we should help people in hardship instead. He said that was what Wudang was.”

“Haa…”

In truth, I knew. It wasn’t Cheong-su’s fault. If anything, Cheong-su, since he handled money, was one of the more awake ones.

The problem was Wudang’s elders and the Sect Leader. In one sense, they were people who kept well to a Daoist’s proper role. But in my view, they were people with outdated ways of thinking.

“Then what about that warehouse rental business?”

“That won’t work either. The merchant companies are all watching the Zhuge Clan’s mood.”

“Then you should at least be thinking up some new business. Are you really going to leave the Hall of Preserved Wholeness people sitting idle like this?”

“What new business? The Hall of Preserved Wholeness isn’t a place that runs businesses. Senior Brother Sect Leader would oppose it too.”

“Ah, you’re suffocating.”

Cheong-su and I sighed at the same time. We exchanged looks.

Now wasn’t the time for the two of us to quarrel. Cheong-su was, in Wudang, the one person whose thinking was at least somewhat closest to my own.

“Even so, Senior Brother Sect Leader does think Wudang can’t keep going on like this.”

“That’s enough.”

If Wudang’s disciples’ livelihood meant less than dignity, then even I would’ve found this difficult. Still, Cheong-ui wasn’t the sort of Daoist who was that completely stubborn.

“For now, there are two things we need to do.”

“Two things? Is that all?”

“Broadly speaking, yes. One is to improve the lives of Wudang’s disciples right away. The other is to resolve the conflict with the Zhuge Clan, which is the root of this whole matter.”

“Easy to say.”

Cheong-su spoke lukewarmly. Well, they were people who knew nothing about how to earn money. What would sword fanatics who had spent their entire lives doing nothing but swing swords know? In that regard, I, the specialist in this field, needed to get a firm grip on myself.

Even so, I still needed the cooperation of the people of Wudang, especially those of the Cheong generation.

Though I didn’t say so to Cheong-su, in truth my goal was threefold. The last of the three was improving Wudang’s constitution itself, which had allowed things to come this far.

Even now, Wudang definitely possessed the strength to escape this crisis. And yet because of dignity, wasn’t a mature master like Cheong-hwa forced to go down into Jun County and beg?

It occurred to me that changing the thinking of Wudang’s elders might be more difficult than crushing the Zhuge Clan itself.

“All right. Say it. When it comes to money, at least, you’re several moves ahead of me.”

“First, let’s fleece the wealthy lay disciples a little.”

“How obvious. Do you think that thought never occurred to me?”

Cheong-su’s eyes narrowed.

“Lay disciples are also people we must protect. If they suffer because of us, then what kind of righteous conduct would that be?”

“That’s because you’re thinking of it as collecting donations.”

“Then what is it?”

“We’re taking investment. From the lay disciples, and from the lay branches too.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A tremendous difference. We make them choose Wudang. All we have to do is show them Wudang’s future.”

Wudang didn’t even regularly collect money from the lay branches because it wanted to preserve its loftiness. In one sense, that could be called part of a Daoist sect’s identity, but in reality, an organization needed money to function. And I wanted to reform that constitution.

“…Is that so?”

“It is.”

“But will they really choose Wudang while accepting that kind of risk?”

“You’re underestimating Wudang too much.”

I smiled.

“Wudang is one, isn’t it?”