The Impostor
The bandits' will to fight collapsed in an instant.
From the moment the young man strode forward, a sword at his hip, they had felt something was wrong. His footwork—something they could never imitate—only confirmed it.
And his calm face was worse still. As though he knew with absolute certainty that no matter how many blades swung his way, not a single one would reach him. Who, in their right mind, would keep fighting in such a situation? Only fools who never lived long.
Until now, the bandits had drawn confidence from the name of the famed master Goiyi. But that very man now lay facedown in the dirt, nose smashed, dragged there by the scruff of his neck—unable to even rise.
No youth could have felled such a master so easily. Which meant only one thing: this Goiyi was a fraud.
One bandit spat.
"See? Told you something was off about that bastard. He looked way too soft…"
Loyalty had no place among them. They shuffled back, then, the moment they thought there was distance enough, bolted.
Tang Mujin made no move to stop them. His attention was on the impostor. He crouched beside him, where the man's nose dripped blood into the dirt.
"Tell me," Mujin said coldly. "Why do you think I'm doing this?"
The impostor gave a crooked smile. "Heh. Don't need to ask, do I? But who are you?"
"The disciple of the man whose name you stole."
"Disciple? I didn't know Goiyi had a disciple."
That shamelessness sickened Mujin. He pressed his heel down on the man's left hand. The bones cracked underfoot, the vibration of breaking fingers traveling up through his leg.
The impostor clenched his teeth, hissed sharply, but never screamed. Whether through endurance or familiarity with pain, he endured. Mujin cared little which.
The man should have howled and begged—only then would his death mean anything.
"Let's see how long you last."
Mujin shifted his foot again, ready to grind down on the other fingers—when he remembered who was watching. Dan seol-yeong.
She knew Mujin was no saint, but that was different from seeing him unhinged with cruelty. He didn't want her to see that side.
Mujin exhaled a short sigh, straightened, and called back:
"I'll be gone a while. Rest without me!"
Namgung Myeong waved lazily without standing, and Dan seol-yeong, seeming to understand, did not follow.
Mujin dragged the impostor Goiyi by the collar into the village ahead. Just as he had with Baek Choo-seo and Ban Yonggweol, he meant to lock this man away in some house and fill it with poison. Patience or not, pain would make him talk in the end.
As he hauled the impostor down the street, he felt the villagers' eyes on him.
Though plague swept the region, not everyone had fled. Some obeyed the officials who forbade leaving. Some clung to their hometowns. Some could not abandon sick family, or were too ill themselves to travel.
But the result was always the same. All would be stricken; only a rare few would survive.
Mujin saw it in their faces—no healthy one among them. Too late to cure, they were only waiting for death. Even if he intervened, few could be saved.
So he kept walking, ignoring their suffering.
He searched for a tightly sealed house, walls sturdy enough to hold poison without it seeping out. As he did, the stares multiplied. Some villagers even crept after them.
The impostor tried a discreet hand gesture, urging them back. He thought it subtle. Mujin caught it easily.
Most obeyed and slipped away, but two figures remained. A boy and girl, so small they barely reached Mujin's waist. Together they might have been ten years old.
Mujin fished in his robe and tossed them each a strip of jerky.
They took the food, but did not leave—still trailing after him and the impostor.
Mujin frowned. "I gave you food. Go home."
"But… it's our turn," one whispered.
"Your turn? What do you mean?"
They faltered, unable to answer. The impostor spoke instead.
"I know I've no right to ask, but could you give me a little time? I made a promise to them. Won't take long."
"Planning to escape? Don't try me."
He laughed bitterly. "With this leg? Even whole, I couldn't outrun you."
Mujin hesitated, then sighed again. It wasn't the impostor that stayed his hand, but the children.
He gave the man a warning glare, but turned his head. The children's faces brightened faintly.
So Mujin and the impostor followed them. The little ones led them to a small house, rank with stench.
When the door opened, the reek multiplied. Inside lay a corpse, long dead.
The impostor limped to the shed, fetched a straw mat and sack. With practiced ease, he wrapped the body tight and slid it into the sack. His broken hand slowed him, but the familiarity of the motions betrayed long habit.
Hoisting the bundle on his back, he began to chant as he walked.
"Great Radiance transforms into a canopy… within its light appear all the Buddhas' deeds throughout the Three Thousand Worlds…"
Scripture. Buddhist, no doubt. Mujin let it wash over him, half-listening.
But the sight was grotesque. The body was too long for the sack, two legs dangling free. With each step, they knocked gently against the impostor's head, as though keeping time with his chanting.
"…The light shone dazzling, beyond compare, brighter than five hundred suns… countless Buddha-bodies stretched forth their hands in praise…"
They reached a clearing behind the village, dotted with small mounds of earth. Dozens of graves.
The impostor, lame and one-handed, dug swiftly, still chanting. The soil was soft, farmland once.
When the grave was ready, he lowered the sack in, covered it, and tamped the earth flat with the shovel. The sutra ended. He straightened, back cracking, breath ragged.
In that moment, he looked less like a fraud and more like a bone-burying monk—one of those wanderers who roamed the land to lay the dead to rest.
The two children pressed their hands together in clumsy imitation of a bow, then shyly held out the jerky Mujin had given them, offering it to the impostor. For them, it was the greatest thanks they could give.
The impostor did not refuse. He accepted the jerky the children had offered, then held it out again—this time to Tang Mujin.
"This is my thanks to you," he said.
Almost against his will, Mujin found himself taking it back.
The children trotted away on quick little steps. Soon after, several villagers—faces pale, bodies trembling, their sickness plain—approached hesitantly. They looked not at Mujin, but at the impostor and the strange partnership between them.
The impostor avoided their eyes and urged Mujin forward.
"Let's go."
Mujin glanced down at the jerky in his hand, now returned to him after two turns. Something about it left him unsettled—hard to name, harder still to shake off.
As they walked, Mujin locked eyes with a hunched old woman. Her body was frail, her face drawn, her illness so far advanced it seemed death itself had already shadowed her features. Mujin stopped without thinking.
A faint smile touched the crone's lips, as if pushing back the pall of death for just a moment. Mujin felt a sudden wave of dizziness.
The impostor watched him quietly, then moved to follow the old woman as she shuffled ahead. Mujin followed behind them both.
She led them to a house. Inside, laid upon a straw mat, was the corpse of an old man, nearly her age. Mujin didn't need to ask the relation—husband and wife was plain enough.
The body was not yet rotted, unlike the children's parents. The impostor set to work, wrapping it neatly in the mat, his lips murmuring scripture.
"When this contemplation is performed, the body will be shed, and at rebirth in the next world, one will stand before all Buddhas and attain the mark of no-birth. Therefore the wise must fix their mind in one place…"
Once more, he shouldered the corpse, shouldered the shovel, and limped to the back of the village.
Mujin held back a short distance, watching as the impostor dug, then lowered the body, then raised the mound above it. His movements were slower now, the strain plain on him.
When the second grave was finished, more villagers were watching. Mujin pointed toward a woman standing nearby.
The impostor nodded and started toward her, limping—but stopped when he realized Mujin was not following. He turned back.
Mujin was standing with the shovel the impostor had set down.
"What are you waiting for? Get on with it," Mujin snapped.
The impostor dipped his head and went with the woman.
Mujin drove the shovel into the soil. His body, tempered by martial arts, cut through the dirt with speed. He had no need to dig deep; the work was quick.
Soon the impostor returned, chanting softly, carrying another body. Together they buried it. Mujin's help made the task far swifter.
They repeated this, again and again. In the end, no villagers remained watching. It seemed the few they had buried were all that was left of the living.
"At last. It feels lighter now," the impostor said.
He smiled, and the scar-ridden mess of his face twisted with the expression. Mujin, trained as a physician, recognized the marks. These were not mere wounds of battle but the scars of disease. Signs of a man who had survived plague after plague by sheer misfortune and will.
The impostor stood with effort, speaking once more.
"Even waiting for me was kindness enough. Helping with the graves… I can't thank you enough. Now, let's finish what remains."
He limped forward, but Mujin did not follow. From behind, he asked:
"Who are you?"
The impostor gave a bitter chuckle.
"Who else? A fraud who tried to steal another man's name."
"Then why play doctor, or herbalist, or grave-monk? If that's the path you'd take, why bother with a stolen name at all?"
When Mujin had first heard rumors of a man calling himself Goiyi, he had imagined a con artist profiting off the name. But nothing about this man's behavior fit that image.
"Why? Because people only believe if you give them a name they trust."
He raised his left hand, as though by habit, to scratch his chin—then winced from the pain and lowered it again.
"My martial arts are third-rate. My medicine is worse. Not even third-rate, truth be told. Half of what I know I picked up from wandering herbalists, scraps of folk cures. If I call myself a physician under my own name, no one comes. People would rather rot than entrust themselves to a quack."
"So you stole Goiyi's name."
"That's right. But tell me—does a physician have to grasp a wrist and name every illness on the spot? Does he have to cure everything in a single night to count? People sneer at hacks, but even a hack can be of use."
He muttered on, voice low, almost as if to himself.
"When someone's too weak to rise and hasn't eaten in three days, a bowl of gruel can mean everything. When a fever leaves a body drenched in sweat, someone must wipe it down. When death comes, someone must play the part of a bone-burying monk. If I can do even that much, does it make me greedy to want such a place in the world?"
Mujin almost said yes, almost called it greed—but the word caught in his throat.
The villagers clearly needed him.
And back in Cheongwon, too, none had claimed his treatments made them worse. They had said they did no good—but not that they did harm.
Yet none of that changed the truth: this impostor had defiled his master's name.
By the way of the martial world, Mujin ought to draw his sword and take the man's head.
But he was a physician, and a physician's hand could not draw steel.
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