Episode 36. On My First Night as Leader
The meeting wrapped up as peacefully as I wanted.
I’m surprisingly good at running meetings, you know. After dismissing the executives and sending Shao Junpyeong out with Gold Dragon Pavilion to lock things down, I welcomed a quiet, solemn night.
The power of the Heavenly Jade was full inside me that day, too.
I sat alone in the main hall, wearing the mask, doing nothing but breathing, when a servant approached and asked,
“Gang Leader, will you eat? Or shall I prepare your bath first?”
I wondered if this servant knew we’d changed leaders. Maybe, maybe not. If he’d stayed out of sight doing chores all day, it was natural he wouldn’t know yet. I answered, partly to let him hear my voice.
“Forget the bath. I already ate pork bone earlier. I just feel like there’s some blood on my face, so bring a wash basin here.”
“Yes, Gang Leader.”
Without suspecting anything, the servant scurried off. I sat there thinking for a moment.
Does my voice sound like the Rabbit’s?
We’re both low-pitched, but the nuance is different.
Soon the servant came back, carefully carrying a basin of water. I took off the mask as he walked up.
He looked up without thinking, saw my face, and practically jumped out of his skin, dropping the basin and splashing water everywhere.
His eyes were as wide as they could go.
I looked down at the water he’d spilled and muttered in a flat tone,
“Bring more. And wipe the floor while you’re at it. That was a hell of a throw.”
“Y-yes, I’m sorry…”
“Don’t panic. This time, try not to spill it.”
“Understood. My apologies.”
A little later, he came back, hands trembling, set the basin on the table, and bowed deeply.
“Stop shaking. No harm will come to you. I’m the new Black Cat leader.”
“Yes, Gang Leader. It’s an honor to meet you for the first time.”
I wiped the blood from my face, then carefully scrubbed the bloodstains from the mask, and asked,
“Does my voice sound like the former leader’s?”
“Not right now, no.”
“Not right now?”
“Yes. When you wear the mask, your voice changes a little—like it’s always slightly distorted—so I never noticed the difference.”
“So with the mask on, it sounds similar.”
“Yes, Gang Leader.”
I inspected the inside of the mask. It was made of a solid material with tiny ventilation holes where the mouth was, but overall it was enclosed enough to warp the voice. With this, I wouldn’t have to worry about being exposed from my voice alone. And if I practiced a bit, I could mimic the Rabbit’s tone well enough, too.
I noticed the servant peeking at me a few more times.
“What? Am I that handsome? Can’t take your eyes off me?”
“My apologies.”
“Hmm.”
No idea what that apology meant. Sorry that I’m not handsome? Sorry for daring to look at the leader’s face? Hard to say.
“As you know, today’s my first day as gang leader. You’ll be my guide. Show me my quarters, my private cultivation room, and where you keep the pills. Lead the way.”
“Yes, Gang Leader.”
I followed the servant through the places the old leader had used. For what it was, the compound was quite luxurious. There was a separate changing room, two bedrooms, a private bath, and even a room with nothing but a strange wooden bed.
“What’s this place? Just a bed tossed down in the middle.”
“Whenever the former leader trained external arts, he came here to have his muscles loosened.”
“Who loosened them?”
“The servants all gathered to do it.”
“Didn’t bother training and spent his time on useless crap…”
Next, I was led to the combined private cultivation room and pill storage.
I gave an order.
“Gather the servants and have them wait spread out a bit farther away. If anyone comes near, don’t try to stop them by force. Just ask what business they have here. I’ll handle the rest. Understand?”
“Yes, Gang Leader.”
I waved him out and shut the door.
Pills, Beasts, and Bad Memories
There are some pills you might never see in your entire life, even if you rot in the Jianghu. And there are mass-market pills.
The truly rare ones are taken by only a tiny number of people:
heirs of great clans, successors of major sects, heads at the peak of their prime, or the few who stumble into enormous fortune.
Even if you add them all up, there aren’t many.
So most Jianghu folk just take the mass-market stuff their whole lives and die.
The mass-market ones are basically high-grade medicines made by physicians. That’s why, in the Jianghu, “divine doctor” often means someone who can make really good mass-market pills.
I know one such guy.
Very problematic person. His end was miserable. Along with Bright-Seated One, he’s someone I absolutely have to find first.
I don’t intend to let him die miserably again. He’s tangled up with the Great Rakshasa too, but it’s not time for that yet. What’s clear is, the sooner I kill the Great Rakshasa, the less likely this guy is to live a hellish life. Going by my previous life’s timeline, I’m still just a tavern boy in Ilyang Prefecture, so I have plenty of time.
I opened each little drawer and checked the mass-market pills.
Even among the common stuff, there’s variety.
Pills for internal injuries, antidotes, wound medicine—all mixed together. You can’t just gulp them down at random. Broadly you can group them like that, but the finer classifications are even more numerous. Among them, the best known category is beast medicine.
Beast medicine is for birds and beasts.
Some are fed to carrier pigeons. Others are for horses—made to permanently boost endurance or explosive power. The Black Cat Gang must have handled pigeons, too, because I found some of those.
The Martial Alliance’s strength comes from this kind of mass production.
With deep pockets, they breed more and more horses powered up on pills, then unofficially operate elite cavalry made up of Jianghu fighters.
The Demon Sect is worse.
They never considered people human to begin with. They ran all kinds of experiments on animals. All to counter the Alliance’s elite cavalry. Tons of innocent beasts died because of it.
As I rifled through the drawers, I finally found three mass-market pills at the top tier: Heart-Burning Pellets.
There’s a simple reason they were still here.
Even one pellet lives up to the “product grade” name: it makes you feverish and wipes you out like a bad flu. I’ve suffered enough fevers and qi-deviation while practicing fire arts to know Heart-Burning Pellets all too well.
You only take them when your body is already stacked with strong yang internal energy.
And right now, that’s exactly my condition.
I listened for a bit to make sure it was quiet, then chewed and swallowed all three at once.
Soon, heat flooded my entire body.
Face flushed, I sat cross-legged and prepared to run Golden Turtle Roaming Art. Since I’d already reached the realm of Flame, the pellet’s heat was steadily suppressed.
Before I even formally started circulating my qi, my twisted imagination kicked in: I vividly pictured the heat of the pill being devoured by the masters trapped inside the Heavenly Jade.
They pounced like beasts, each one scrambling to swallow the pill’s heat first.
My stomach dropped.
“Whoa. That’s… unsettling.”
Before I even started a full circulation, I could feel the Heavenly Jade’s qi grow slightly stronger. The energy of the pill had been sucked in and merged with it in an instant.
The feeling was so strange I stretched out my hand and drew up the true qi of Golden Turtle Roaming Art into my palm.
I gathered the qi of the Wooden Fowl in my hand, then converted it to a flame attribute. Heat condensed in my palm, turning the center of my hand bright red.
“Something’s off tonight.”
I couldn’t quite grasp what was wrong.
The Heavenly Jade is probably something that absorbs and stores a living warrior’s qi, life force, and essence.
I wondered:
Did I—or the Heavenly Jade inside me—end up with some strange power… to absorb another person’s qi?
I murmured, dazed,
“No way… right?”
I just want to live as a madman.
I have no desire to become something beyond mad—a monster like the Cult Leader.
I closed my eyes, took deep breaths, and calmed my mind like a wooden chicken, letting it cool.
I silently wished nothing strange was happening to my body.
I still have way too many monkeys to beat to death.
Still, just in case…
If I really did gain some weird power, I kind of wanted to give it a name.
Absorbing Art, Absorbing Qi Art, Star-Sucking Divine Skill, Heavenly Jade Absorption Art…
Heavenly Jade Absorbing Divine Skill, Heavenly Jade Demon Absorption Art, Mad Demon Heavenly Jade Star-Sucking Divine Art…
“Absorb”… we’ll drop that for now.
Naming really is the hardest part in any field.
Somehow I felt like it needed the character “absorb (吸)”, but nothing sounded right. I decided to postpone it. I hadn’t even confirmed this weird power properly yet.
In the private cultivation room, I kept raising flame qi into my palm, repeating experiments to check the ability. When I felt that this approach wouldn’t yield much more, I sat cross-legged and slipped into quiet meditation.
I mixed Bright-Seated One’s words with my own speculation.
I added guesses and imagination about the nature of the Heavenly Jade.
And calmly observed the state of my body.
Then I tried thinking from the Cult Leader’s perspective.
What would he have done the moment he took in the Heavenly Jade? This was probably a matter that decided whether he could become the Number One Under Heaven. The Demon Sect would’ve been more guarded than ever. The protectors would’ve held their breath at his side.
Would he really just have sat and circulated his qi?
No. He would’ve performed some great ritual to become a Demon God at the same time. The Demon Path deviates hugely from normal sects in the way it approaches martial arts.
My free-roaming imagination reconstructed the Cult Leader’s actions. He probably combined the Heavenly Jade with some grand law. If it had worked, he’d have become an untouchable monster beyond all measure.
That’s why I got this impossible chance to return.
When I finished meditating, I crossed my arms and thought for a while, then extended my hand toward the drawers that held the pills, using the auxiliary suction technique sometimes used in long-range force contests.
For a while, nothing happened.
Even so, I held my arm out like an idiot statue, adjusted my approach, loosened up my thinking, and kept testing different insights.
Creating a martial art that’s never existed is something reserved for lunatics anyway.
If you stay inside the lines of other people’s thinking, you’ll never make anything new.
Even though my current level of qi and martial realm shouldn’t allow me to perform a real “grasp-from-empty-air” technique, I stood there like a statue and re-examined the entire world of martial theory I’d built over my whole life.
Then I threw it away in an instant.
Starting from a blank page, I took the power of the Heavenly Jade and the essence of suction, wrote them together as a mental formula, and, using that, drew out the Heavenly Jade’s fundamental strength and dyed my palm red again.
Then—with a clatter—one of the tiny drawers of pills flew through the air and slammed into my palm.
Thock!
I quickly grabbed the drawer, steadied my racing heart, and exhaled.
“Phew…”
The realization hit me like a tidal wave. And with it, a name for this ability came to me in an instant:
Heavenly Jade Star-Sucking Grand Law.
Of course, Heavenly Jade is my own secret, something I can never tell anyone, so those first two characters will be omitted in public.
On the historic first night of my tenure as Black Cat Gang leader, I thought only of martial arts.