I Am This Murim’s Crazy Bitch
Chapter 800: I Don’t Like This Trend (4)
The place they’d herded the sick into was Banyong Street at the northern end of Kunming—terrain perfect for isolation, with three sides blocked by mountains like a horn jutting out.
Qing had expected them to head straight for Banyong Street, but the place Lord Physician dragged Qing’s party to was Kunming’s market instead.
“Welcome—hm. The old sir has come, has he?”
A grain merchant who’d been laying out and selling sacks of various grains hurried out to greet a customer, then, upon seeing Lord Physician, took on an attitude that wasn’t particularly welcoming.
So it wasn’t that his customer service was just terrible.
“Th-then, old sir, you still haven’t paid the tab from last time either, and, sure, feeding the sick is of course a good thing, but I’ve got to live too, don’t I?”
“Tsk. What a heart. A bastard selling grain trying to starve to death—when grain’s lying all over the place. How big could that tab even be?”
“It’s already ten taels of silver. And that’s without interest. I charged you at the exact price I bought it for because you said it was for a good cause...”
“Did I take good grain? It was all old anyway—what interest, tsk. What are you doing? I said give me the money?”
Lord Physician looked at Qing’s party as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Even though he’d already received Qing’s entire coin pouch, he was still pressing them.
Maybe he was trying to save a bit for relief funds even after they left, but his attitude was so brazen that Qing glanced at her friends with an embarrassed expression.
This time, Zhuge I-hyeon opened the coin pouch and paid off the tab on the spot.
There was no saying less trustworthy than “a merchant sells without profit,” but judging by the grain merchant’s relieved face once he got the money, it didn’t seem like he’d been lying.
“Fine. So how much old grain do you have left?”
“Ahem... how much do you need?”
“All of it.”
“Rice, oats, beans, millet—altogether it’ll be seven seom. You mean all of that?”
“Are you deaf? I said all of it. Don’t worry about tabs—this big guy from the Zhuge Clan is paying.”
“Ah... so you’re a young master of the Zhuge Clan.”
At that, Zhuge I-hyeon scratched his head.
It sounded like Lord Physician was singling him out to pay on purpose, but in truth, it was also a way of hammering it in: this grain support was “charity from the Zhuge Clan.”
He’d said he’d squeeze money out of rich people to save the sick—if he did it like this, even the rich people being squeezed probably didn’t find the amount all that painful.
They stopped by the grain merchant and bought old, cheap grain—not the fresh stuff—rice, wheat, oats, and so on.
“Is it really okay to get old grain instead of fresh? Um, at a time like this we could buy something better.”
“Tsk. Do you even know what a lockdown is? They gather the sick, lock them up—and once you’ve locked up the ones who are sick, where do you think money comes from? One month, and you’re the poorest of the poor. If it’s not a weirdo like me, what Therapist would even poke their head into a beggar den like that?”
Lord Physician shook his head side to side.
“So what can you do? I’m not swimming in money either, so I’ve got to save where I can. It just tastes a little worse—once it’s in your mouth, it’s the same thing. Everyone’s starving; if they can eat, they’ll shovel it down and say it’s delicious. Filling bellies comes first, doesn’t it?”
They went around the market like that, clearing out old grain from the grain stalls, and with carts hitched behind them, they bought meat too—the cheapest scraps—and loaded it up.
Lord Physician kept buying nothing but the cheap stuff.
Except for medicinal ingredients.
“Now, look here. When you’re checking medicinal ingredients, you’ve got to lift this bottom part. Cruel bastards always hide the watered-down stuff underneath. H-here, look. With poria, don’t look anywhere else—just check the last row. If the last row’s alive, it’s fine even if it looks wilted. But if it looks fresh like this and the last row’s dried out, they sprayed it with water and played tricks. You watch out when you buy medicinal ingredients too.”
“Ah, old sir. Tricks, you say. I just gave it a bit of water so it would keep its freshness...”
“Listen to the way this bastard talks. Medicinal-ingredient sellers are all like this.”
Lord Physician clicked his tongue—tsk tsk tsk tsk—while roughly rummaging through the sacks of medicinal ingredients, and his mouth never stopped either, rattling off how to tell good from bad.
It really was hands-on training.
Except—
“Uh, old sir. But is it okay to rummage around like that?”
“Of course it’s not.”
Lord Physician grinned a wicked smile.
“Normally, if you rummage around like this, you get thrown out. But once you’re famous, you can do whatever. Same for you, heavenly maiden—you’re a master, right? If they say anything, you just draw out your sword aura or whatever and ask if they want to die. Then they’ll shut up.”
“Oh...”
The medicinal-ingredient seller looked dumbfounded.
And what was that “oh” supposed to be? A cranky old man teaching her something “good,” my ass.
“And while we’re at it—yeah, you Tang Clan woman, listen up too. Isn’t looking at herbs the basics of medicine?”
“Hey, I can tell herbs apart too, you know?”
“Hmph. If you’re Tang Clan, you probably don’t even handle cheap junk in the first place. You have to be able to look at wilted stuff like this too. Can you even read this kind of thing?”
“Hmph. Why would I look at something this pathetic?”
“Because not all the sick under heaven are rich. Who doesn’t know good medicinal ingredients are better? But if you’re not treating one or two and that’s it, you save where you can save. Now—this one’s water dropwort. The leaves have to be bigger than two nodes for the medicinal effect to come out...”
“Seriously, so pathetic...”
Tang Nanna grumbled the whole time, but she listened closely.
After they swept the whole market, the carts trailing behind them had reached seven in number.
Everything was cheap, but even those cheap things—he hadn’t been able to pay for them, so everywhere he went, he’d been running tabs.
And seeing that made Lord Physician’s virtuous merit stand out all the more.
Even if he said he squeezed rich people—were rich people the type to get squeezed obediently?
To begin with, to be rich, you either had to be extremely greedy—or have parents or ancestors like that.
If an old man went around throwing his name weight and pitching a fit, they might toss him some alms for the sake of face.
But it wasn’t enough.
That was why tabs followed him everywhere.
No matter how rough and stubborn his way of speaking was, an old sir who’d lived long enough going around making humiliating pleas to others had to be an ordeal—something that cost him face every single time.
...Yeah.
His virtuous merit wasn’t high for nothing.
She’d heard “lockdown,” so she’d expected soldiers posted and guarding it, but it looked like they’d gone as far as cutting down trees and physically sealing it off.
At the temporary gate left open between the palisade logs, the soldiers standing watch looked troubled.
“Old sir, only Therapists are allowed to go in and out. Everyone else—”
“They’re all Therapists too. Therapists.”
“Old sir, they’re obviously martial artists.”
“So martial artists can’t be Therapists?”
“No, but there’s even a child—”
“An apprentice. An apprentice. Medicine’s something you learn from when you’re young.”
“Ahem... you can’t do this, sir...”
But what could a low-ranking soldier do?
In the end, he couldn’t beat the pressure and opened the gate.
The moment he did, the people who’d been waiting beyond it came running over in a little swarm and welcomed Lord Physician.
“Old sir, you’ve come!”
“Tell everyone to come get food. Today we’ve even got meat—won’t be plenty, but for once they can have broth and chew on some solids.”
“Ooh! It’s been a while since we’ve tasted meat! Thank you, old sir!”
“I didn’t buy it. Where would I get money? These young ones are paying—so take it and be thankful to them.”
“Thank you!” “Ooh, thank you!”
As thanks poured in, the party’s expressions loosened a bit.
Even that lingering suspicion—Is this guy a con artist using Lord Physician’s name?—melted away.
People did volunteer work for this kind of feeling, didn’t they?
Then they rushed in and started unloading.
Once they unhitched the carts and left them half-straddling the gate, the quarantined people of Banyong Street carried the supplies down and stacked them off to one side, heave-ho, heave-ho.
After the cart owners turned back, the blockade gate shut tight.
Ziiiik—even the sound of the bar sliding into place.
After that, a few people naturally grabbed bowls and opened the grain sacks.
Everyone lined up and took their allotments—grain, vegetables, even rings of something—like they’d done it a hundred times.
Qing thought there’d be the usual squabbling—Give me more, He got more than me—but there was none.
It was orderly.
A rare sight in the Central Plains.
And then—
“Hey. Look. Sneak a look. Those bastards.”
“Huh? Who?”
“Those bastards over there. You can tell just by looking—dirty faces.”
Qing followed Lord Physician’s gaze.
There were a few people that really did stand out.
She couldn’t say their faces were especially “dirty,” but the reason they stood out was simple: while everyone else was grimy and filthy, those few looked fairly neat.
And they weren’t in line, either.
They just stood over there, watching the distribution like observers.
“Those sons of bitches I want to deep-fry in shitwater.”
“What are they doing?”
“They’re thugs from Jangyun Sect. They can’t quit their old habits—collecting ‘protection fees.’ Protection my ass, at a time like this. They look like the kind of bastards who’d even pluck out a chick’s eyeballs and eat them.”
Jangyun Sect was a common kind of unorthodox sect.
Banyong Street jutted north, with three sides surrounded by the steep slopes of Gongwang Mountain.
And “steep slopes” meant something else too: if you knew how to climb, it was a shortcut up the mountain.
It was a spot mountain folk used.
So originally, Banyong Street had a not-small market where mountain folk sold what they gathered.
And in the Central Plains, where there was a market, there were martial artists who collected protection fees—Jangyun Sect was the sect that claimed this area as its turf.
But then the region got sealed off, and Jangyun Sect got quarantined right along with it.
“No, does that even make sense? It’s not like they blocked it off with an ambush. They would’ve warned people—told them what was happening and to come out, right?”
“Hmph. That’s martial artists for you. If it were your sect, and someone told you they were going to seal off your neighborhood and to come out—would you obediently walk out?”
“...Mm.”
“Besides, aren’t martial artists all the type who think they’re something special? They probably thought they could ignore the lockdown.”
Maybe they’d thought they could ignore it under the banner of “noninterference between officials and the martial world.”
Or maybe, since city sects rarely didn’t pay off city officials, they’d assumed they’d be treated as an exception by the usual “custom,” lockdown or not.
“Ridiculous. If they were something like the Diancang Sect, maybe, but even under national law, sealing off a plague is a major matter where they mobilize even soldiers. What’s a tiny little unorthodox sect going to do about it?”
“Elder Sister, in truth, they probably didn’t have a way out either. For an unorthodox sect to lose its territory is practically the same as its destruction, isn’t it? With the nature of unorthodox sects, once the money source is cut off and they even lose their home base, the disciples will start abandoning them immediately. Rather than that, wouldn’t they have decided it was better to forcibly hold on inside the sealed zone?”
That was Zhuge I-hyeon’s annotation.
No one had asked, but still.
“No, so what? You’re saying those guys are squeezing protection fees out of the sick right now?”
“Yeah. That’s why I went to call them on it, didn’t I.”
Qing was startled.
Those were unorthodox trash with neither decency nor future—why was an old sir who didn’t even know martial arts going to confront them?
What if they hurt him?
But Lord Physician just snorted.
“Guys like that only growl—they’re cowards. If word got out they harmed Lord Physician, every sect in town would come running to stab them, happy they’d finally gotten an excuse. What are those little shits going to do?”
“Still. It’s dangerous.”
“Anyway, I went and saw that sect leader bastard’s face and called him on it, and what do you know? He apologized, said he wouldn’t do it again.”
“Huh? He said he wouldn’t?”
“That’s what I thought too. But the nasty bastards—only with words. We measure and split the food by the day, but look at them—they’re all half-starved. When I ask if those bastards took it again under the name of ‘protection fees,’ everyone says no. Of course they say no. Who knows what armed men might do to them.”
She’d told them not to, and they were probably taking it in secret.
In a place already perfectly sealed, there wasn’t anyone more terrifying than men with blades at their waists.
So even if Lord Physician scraped together food and distributed it, people still couldn’t eat, and their faces kept turning sallow and yellow.
And when he asked whether Jangyun Sect took it, everyone was terrified and insisted it wasn’t them—so there was no proof.
Right when he’d been racking his brain over it, wasn’t it said that some rich young people had come into the city and were spending money like water?
A headache was a headache—but he couldn’t exactly let people starve.
So he went to receive a bit of alms...
And then, like this.
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