Chapter 811: Our Wish Is Slaughter (2)

Qing felt like she’d just taken a brutal punch.

In technical terms, it was voluntary tax payment, testimony that skipped the middle, and a razor-sharp preemptive strike delivered with exquisite tact and a scrupulous sense of duty.

For Qing—who hadn’t even managed to draw her sword yet—it was a truly bone-deep blow. But—

Qing steadied herself by staring at the human trafficker’s deliciously ripe evil karma.

She couldn’t back down here.

Today, for the justice of the martial world—and for the vivid, living feel of slicing through evil—she would walk the merciless path of the demonic outsider.

SHIIING—Moonlit Night slid free with a cold sound.

She’d heard the information she needed, and the evil karma was over one hundred, so she could enjoy herself for now—no, she could clear out this villain first and think after.

“Come, then! You confess your crimes with your own mouth! Repay that great sin with your life!”

“Wait—crimes? What crime have I committed?! This is unfair!”

“What do you mean, unfair? Didn’t you just confess your crimes with that mouth of yours? How can a person buy and sell people? That’s exactly what your kind does—slave brokers! Unforgivable!”

“Slave broker?! You misunderstand! We’re not like those human scum! It’s all a misunderstanding!”

“Hah, now it’s a misunderstanding? You dare toy with me? Add contempt of court—death!”

“Wait! We’re not slave brokers, we—we’re just decent charity businessmen!”

“...Hm?”

Qing—who’d been about to put in a single stab—froze.

“Decent?”

“Yes. That is—what we do is simply run a business that offers people who have already collapsed through major failure in society a chance to get back on their feet. We arrange employment for those who failed, and in that process we take a small service fee. If I had to put it in words, we are labor-placement intermediaries for personal rehabilitation.”

“No, what is this now.”

“Do your best and leave the rest to Heaven—though man may plan his work, success or failure depends on the sky. But is it not too cruel a punishment to fail purely due to such fate and be thrown out into the street? And what if one needs a great sum of money due to a trial one cannot bear? Should the penniless simply give up and die? But! If your body is intact, what is there you cannot accomplish? We support such people.”

“So you lure desperate people in and sell them as slaves.”

“Slaves? It is an exclusive contract.”

It was a learned tongue coming out of a man with greasy, shaggy hair and a huge scar carved at the corner of his eye.

Qing’s brain stopped.

You weren’t supposed to judge people by appearances, but—what? What is this? What in the world?

That was when it happened.

BEEP-BWEEEP!

“Hey! What’s this commotion!”

A whistle shrieked, and a group of martial guards carrying six-foot staves came rushing in from all sides.

Qing watched with her sword drawn, and from among the guards surrounding them, one of them approached.

In an instant, murderous starlight spun through Qing’s eyes again.

Hadn’t she heard that if you caused trouble at the black market, you got attacked by the market’s guards?

If they came at her first—

The true intent of martial arts was self-defense.

Protecting yourself was only natural, wasn’t it?

They’d definitely take a high-handed posture and sling some cocky threats—Where do you get off raising hell, do you want to die?

And if she pretended to be a little cowed and stepped back, they’d get all puffed up and start demanding compensation, or telling her to hand over an arm—spitting humiliating nonsense like that.

Then there’d be no point talking—wasn’t it said a martial artist spoke with the blade?

Qing swallowed hard—

And the Shadow Market guard bowed his head.

“We apologize, customer. Are you having a dispute with one of Shadow Market’s members? If there is an issue, could you tell us what the issue is?”

“What—no! What the hell is this?! Why are you doing this?! Why are you like this to me?!”

Qing shrieked.

Because the Shadow Market guard was polite.

Instead, he leveled a domineering glare at the labor broker and dropped his voice.

“You. Mister Jang. What, exactly, is the situation? Why is the customer so upset?”

“Th-that’s not it. I-I think there may be some misunderstanding. She asked about the whereabouts of our clients, so... I thought perhaps she held a grudge against labor brokers as such...”

“Ah. I see. Customer—Shadow Market strictly prohibits all transactions that use coercive means. May I ask what part caused you discomfort?”

“No, I mean—he’s a slave broker, the kind that lives off human trafficking, so he can’t be doing this, so what the—”

Her aggrieved voice got cut off by a hand that landed on her shoulder.

Qing turned her head and saw Peng Daesan’s bamboo hat swaying side to side.

“Stop. It’s a little... mm. Yeah.”

“No, why?! What did I do wrong? Is it that wrong to say I want to cut down some bad guys?”

“Sis. That’s... kind of...”

Even Jegal Ihyeon shook his head slowly, and Qing swept her gaze over the whole group.

Even Tang Nanna somehow had her face veil subtly pointed in a direction that didn’t quite line up—

Of course, the rest—Seol Iri, Gyeon Pohee, Jayeo—had expressions like they weren’t thinking anything at all.

“Customer. Please calm down for the moment. Have a cup of tea, and Shadow Market will investigate the matter you’ve raised.”

*****

Shadow Market’s reception room—if you called a place meant to receive guests a reception room, then it was the sort of place that deserved the name.

On the tea table, alongside tea, were fairly decent-looking cookies glazed with honey until they shined.

Normally, Qing would’ve performed rage-snack annihilation—chewing the cookies like enemy flesh, packing all her resentment into it—

But.

It was still the black market. Who knew what this stuff was. Why would she eat it......

So Qing sat there, steaming, her unresolved anger making her huff and hiss.

No, seriously, what is wrong with you people?

What did I even want?

I just wanted to hack up a few guys who can die, who deserve to die, who dying would benefit the world.

How can Heaven be this indifferent—how can it do this to me?

How many villains have I sent to hell? Instead of piling them onto me when I finally have the chance, why is it making me into the weird one......?

That was when it happened.

A middle-aged man entered the canopy—his face packed with fleshy folds, and his expression itself so sharp it looked like greed had fattened on him.

A textbook image of a corrupt merchant—so obvious you didn’t need a physiognomist; anyone who saw him would go, Wow, that’s a corrupt merchant.

A spark of liveliness swirled in Qing’s gaze.

Oh. Maybe?

“Ah, my apologies for the discourtesy. Ahem—does the tea not suit you? It may not be top-grade, but it is Yunnan pu’er. I am the master of Shadow Market—Chang Jeong-oh.”

Mm. Pointlessly polite again.

Qing’s shoulders sagged.

“It seems you had an issue with Mister Jang, the labor-placement intermediary, but according to what we have looked into, it does not appear to be a problem.”

At that, Qing’s eyes flashed again.

This bastard—“not a problem”?

When they’d hired a medicine peddler to lure desperate patients’ families into selling their bodies, and it wasn’t the first time, and she couldn’t even imagine where all those countless people were being taken, or what they planned to use them for—

When Qing demanded answers, Shadow Market’s master, Chang Jeong-oh, shook his head.

“Ahem. I understand what you are saying, but—was there any coercion in the process of luring those patients’ families? For example, threats by force.”

Meaning: did they hold a sword to their necks and threaten them to buy the medicine, threaten them to sell their bodies if they didn’t have money?

No. It wasn’t that.

“Of course, the group that provided the medicine is suspicious. However, buying a product and paying the price—does that not lack problem?”

“No, they priced the medicine at ten gold taels. How many sick people can pay that? It’s basically saying, sell your body.”

“And yet, even at that price, did they not try to buy it because they needed it? Perhaps the medicinal ingredients are expensive, or perhaps the compounding process is painful, or perhaps it requires enormous manpower and thus demands such a sum.”

“......”

“And Shadow Market’s labor-placement intermediary is not a slave broker. He merely introduces jobs for a small commission. In the case of Therapist Tae—already, at Jeong Family Manor, it was agreed they would buy up all the labor Therapist Tae recruited and take them to be used. Therefore, I have heard that Mister Jang merely served as an intermediary to deliver the workers Therapist Tae brought.”

“No, then what are those Jeong Family Manor bastards using that many people for? Anyone can see it’s suspicious.”

“I suspect it is labor to establish new tea fields. Tea-field work is notoriously harsh. Have you seen what tea fields look like? Across the whole mountain slope, there isn’t a single patch of shade—only waist-high tea trees spread everywhere. To clear away a jungle-thick mountain and set up tea fields there—ah, that is not a business a person can do alone.”

“Mm.”

Hearing “clear away a mountain,” Qing couldn’t help thinking of a horrific kind of construction she called a scorched zone.

That kind of project really was something you couldn’t force on anyone but slaves.

No—using human trafficking to build a scorched zone? What kind of heaven-defying lunatics are these?

“Even so, why would a merchant concern himself with a customer’s affairs? Does a butcher ask what dish you will cook with the meat, and who you will feed it to, and only then decide whether to sell you the meat?”

His words flowed like a clear river.

But who was Qing?

The intangible poison the Sichuan Tang Clan acknowledged—truly the world’s greatest sweet-talker, a terrifying mouth.

If it came to arguing, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t.

On the way in, she’d seen poison herbs, poppy resin, stolen goods, and plenty of wandering swordsmen there to sell their blades—if you were buying that sort of thing, wasn’t your intent obviously suspect?

Even if he invoked “merchant ethics” and claimed merchants didn’t pry into customers’ affairs, that was just irresponsible sophistry.

If someone bought a mask, a knife, and corpse-melting powder, you could roughly guess their intentions.

Saying, The customer wanted it, so we sold it; we don’t interfere—how was that different, in a broad sense, from being an accomplice?

But Qing simply let out a deep sigh.

If you asked whether that was a sin worth killing for...

It didn’t quite feel like it.

Then if it wasn’t something that required blood, there was no reason to waste strength.

So instead of pressing those points, Qing decided to ask about what had felt unfair.

“That’s that. But I heard the people were sent to Jeong Family Manor in Gaegu County—can you trust that? And can a merchant just blurt customer information like that?”

If that slave broker had wanted to hide it, he could’ve fought for it a bit.

But she hadn’t even asked, and he’d just started spilling everything on his own.

“From what I have felt, commerce has its own path, and if one does not keep it, even a flourishing merchant house can collapse overnight. The black market collapsed exactly like that. The merchants lost the people’s goodwill, so even when the house struggled, none helped—rather, they spat and said, Good, it collapsed; good riddance.”

“Huh. The black market collapsed?”

“It is hardly surprising, is it? There were many who ground their teeth at it. Everything was full of counterfeits, there were forced sales and threats, and it was unclear whether they were merchants or bandits—only vicious criminals gathered there. So even a small merchant like me found opportunity. An underworld market will exist no matter what, and if so, it is easier when it is gathered like this in one place—such is also the thinking of those in high places.”

He said he didn’t want to repeat the black market’s mistakes, so he differentiated with strict quality control and prioritizing customers.

Thus, Shadow Market was born.

“But what does that have to do with blurting customer information? If you prioritize customers, shouldn’t you keep your mouth shut about that kind of information?”

“If you ask such information, it means a great problem has occurred because of a Shadow Market transaction. We cannot bear even the customer’s wrongdoing together. Consider yourself, customer—you drew your sword with such confidence. Are you not surely a master of the martial world in a lofty realm? How could mere underworld killers oppose you?”

“Mm.”

“So is it not better to speak quickly? Once it is known we reveal everything, customers with dirty secrets will not even try to use Shadow Market to begin with—so we can block bad customers from the start.”

It was the survival strategy of the powerless.

Shift responsibility onto someone else as much as possible.

And because confidentiality didn’t exist in the first place, dirty men wouldn’t try to use it either.

Of course, the price of confidentiality was usually high, so the ones with dirty secrets tended to spend lavishly—and those were the biggest spenders.

But he’d given that up, choosing safety instead.

Mm. Was that... clever, in its own way?

Doesn’t look like it, but you really came up with that......

Of course, it wasn’t Shadow Market’s master’s original idea.

Qing didn’t know it, but he’d merely copied the method of a group called Baekjeom, which had been dominating underworld trade recently.

Baekjeom’s root—what you’d call, in Qing’s hometown phrasing, the parent company—didn’t yet have strong influence as far as the Central Plains’ south, so in the provinces these “Baekjeom-like” imitators were in vogue.

But what did Qing know, or care, about the inner workings of this groundbreaking customer-friendly underworld market?

More importantly—

“Haah......”

Qing let out a deep sigh.

What kind of suspicious conspiracy could you even plot while trusting people who spilled everything this easily?

Like the market master said, maybe they really did just need slave labor for tea fields.

Or even if there was some conspiracy, it didn’t seem like they’d use a method that exposed the trail this directly.

My massacre......

Our wish is massacre, our dream is massacre—massacre that saves someone’s life—but if even cutting down a few villains is this hard—

How am I supposed to live, a kind and pretty calamity star like me?

This is seriously too much......

She had to go anyway, because she still needed to obtain the prescription. But—mm. Her fire was completely doused.

Qing’s shoulders couldn’t help but slump.