“Mister, me?”

Na Rin pointed at the masked man dressed all in black, brandishing a gleaming knife, and asked for confirmation.

In response, the robber simply nodded his head instead of answering.

“You don’t know who I am?”

“I know.”

“Wow!”

Na Rin couldn’t help but stick out her tongue.

Isn’t this truly an impressive robber’s spirit?

The day hasn’t even turned completely dark yet, and this is the garden of the royal palace. Knowing who Na Rin is, he still attempts to rob her?

“I’ll give you just one chance.”

Na Rin said.

“It seems like you might have an ill family member or a story that can’t be heard without tears. If you change your mind and turn back now, I’ll pretend this never happened.”

“You think I’ll back down because of that?”

“No.”

“……?”

“If you were that kind of person, you wouldn’t have attempted this in the first place. I know that too. But giving you a chance like this puts my mind at ease.”

Na Rin untied the bundle on her back, placed it on the ground, and lightly stretched her body.

Only then did the robber seem to sense something strange and glance around.

‘He probably thinks I’m calling for help.’

What a foolish robber.

As if I would increase the number of witnesses.

“Mister.”

Whoosh!

A crimson flame ignited around Na Rin’s fist.

The so-called Fire Fist technique, combining Three Fires True Flame with punches.

Inspired by the Fengma Cave incident, she had tried creating it.

“I’ll hit you gently, so don’t die.”

It’s my first time putting it into practice.

Whoosh!

It seemed like the wind was blowing, but in an instant, Na Rin’s face arrived right in front of the robber’s. Judging by the lingering crimson glow, it appeared Na Rin was lowering her stance to deliver a strike.

“Urk!”

Despite the robber instinctively blocking his lower body with both hands, the following technique was a spinning back kick like a whirlwind.

Bam!

“Ugh!”

The robber’s body flew like a sheet of paper and tumbled from Na Rin’s kick that struck the side of his head from a blind spot.

The flames around Na Rin’s fist fizzled out.

“Haha! It was a trick!”

If I showed the Fire Fist, I predicted he would only focus on that!

‘This could be sufficiently used in real combat, right?’

With overflowing internal energy, she could pull off such tricks. It’s really amazing.

As Na Rin was giggling, feeling elated, the robber’s shaky gaze turned towards her from the ground.

‘I didn’t know that little girl was this strong.’

The thought of running away now seemed like the wise choice, but he didn’t have the will to carry it out. After all, he had nowhere to run to anyway.

‘There’s only one chance.’

The robber’s eyes shone with a blue light as he gripped the dagger with his dirt and dust-covered hand.

“Hyaaah!”

Swish!

His charging steps followed a well-trained footwork, and the bulging veins on his forearm knew well how to use his strength.

‘I know I’m doing something I shouldn’t.’

But just once.

If he could close his eyes just this once, his life would change…!

“Hand over ten thousand nyang!”

Watching the robber charge with a terrifying momentum, Na Rin clicked her tongue.

Weaklings are always like this.

“Not knowing they can’t win.”

Thud!

The mountain birds all flew up at once.

“Hands up.”

“……”

“Higher!”

“Ugh……”

Seeing the robber standing with his arms raised as high as possible, Na Rin shook her head in annoyance. Because of this damn robber, she had completely missed dinnertime.

‘My plan to sneak in through the back door without Father noticing is ruined too.’

What should she make him pay for this?

“It doesn’t seem like a particularly valuable life anyway.”

The robber simultaneously shrank back and avoided her gaze as if feeling humiliated. A guy with a sense of shame did something like this? Na Rin snorted, ‘Hmph!’

“Let’s take a look at your face first.”

“……!”

Swish.

As she stripped off the mask, Na Rin’s eyes slightly widened upon seeing the face inside.

“Wow, it’s really…… a mess!”

“That’s because some little girl gleefully beat me up!”

“How dare a robber talk back?”

When Na Rin lightly slapped him, the robber’s face swung to the side.

“I thought you were a senile old man and went easy on you. Your appearance is fine, yet you try to rob someone? Do you want to go to prison!?”

At Na Rin’s threat, the robber made a wronged expression.

Even if his mouth was crooked, his words should be straight. Where exactly did she go easy on him? Aside from the bruising and swelling, it felt like bones were broken here and there.

“Name.”

“……”

“Name! Want me to hit you harder?”

“I-, I’m Jeong Do Geom!”

“Short on words, aren’t you?”

“It’s Jeong Do Geom.”

“Age.”

“Twenty-nine……”

After saying it, he let out a deep sigh.

At this age, coveting a child’s… well, it’s a huge sum to call it a child’s money, but in any case, the fact that he committed a crime out of greed for someone else’s money made him feel ashamed.

“Are you coming to your senses now, Mr. Jeong Do Geom?”

Do Geom bowed his head as if he had no face to show, hearing Na Rin pronounce his name with emphasis.

“Why did you do it? Did you think since a child was carrying a large sum alone, you could deceive her and try to change your fate?”

Faced with such an accurate diagnosis, Do Geom could only reply, “Yes.”

“You said you knew who I was, right?”

“Yes……”

“Then did you not consider that you could die?”

He did.

But it didn’t matter.

“Sob…… Waaah…!”

Suddenly, Do Geom began to shed tears.

“I-, I was about to die. I had even hung a rope from the beam, but I was too scared to die and was sitting there in a daze when I overheard the young lady boasting about having a lot of money as she passed by, and I was possessed……”

“Huh? Uh?”

Whether Na Rin was flustered by the sudden outpouring of his story or not, Do Geom continued with a choked voice.

“If I don’t have money, I will die! But even if the young lady doesn’t have ten thousand nyang, it won’t inconvenience you at all. So I thought if I found an opportunity and scared you, you would leave the money and run away. I’m truly sorry!”

Na Rin held her forehead, looking at Do Geom who was prostrating before her, begging for forgiveness.

‘Right. Somehow, I had a feeling it would turn out like this.’

That’s why she had intended to just let him go.

But he insistently started to unravel his story, making it a headache. Na Rin hurriedly tried to wrap up the conversation to cut ties with the robber.

“Okay. That can happen. Everyone makes mistakes once in a while. I’ll forgive you, so just go back……”

“It all started with that cursed mahjong.”

Too late.

The story Do Geom unfolded about himself afterwards was in some ways tragic, in some ways ordinary, but in any case, it was a squalid tale of failure.

“So in other words, you’re saying you followed a friend to a gambling den, temporarily sat at the mahjong table in place of your friend who went to the restroom, and won a huge sum?”

“That’s right! But until then, it was still okay. It was fun, but it didn’t seem like it would become an addiction to that extent. It didn’t interfere with my daily life either.”

Right. They all start out that way.

Secretly wondering what would happen if he played one more time, another opportunity came along. His friends egged him on to prove the rumor that he had achieved a big victory in his first mahjong game.

“But heavens, I won again! I even won more than the first time!”

Thus, Do Geom fell into the delusion that he was a mahjong genius.

From then on, even without his friends coaxing him, he was the one to suggest going to play mahjong first, and sometimes he would lose a month’s salary in a single night.

“You’re a typical sucker.”

“…… I realized that when I was already drowning in debt.”

Thinking about gambling all day, he was fired from his job, his gambling luck turned sour, and his debts only grew, leaving him without hope.

It was at that very moment a major turning point in Do Geom’s life arrived.

“They said if I cooperated with match-fixing at the gambling den, they would write off a portion of my debt.”

‘It’s rock bottom.’

The thought crossed his mind that perhaps his own gambling debt was created through such match-fixing, but Do Geom no longer had the energy to even get angry.

“So you participated in match-fixing?”

Do Geom nodded.

“A merchant from the North Sea Ice Palace held a big gambling event. All the gamblers of Shimandaesan probably went there.”

The North Sea Ice Palace.

Na Rin nodded as if it made sense.

Merchants from the North Sea Ice Palace were welcomed wherever they went. Although they had an abundance of rare resources, due to the characteristic of the North Sea Ice Palace lacking in food supplies, one could always trade with them at good prices.

“Success? Failure?”

“Half and half.”

The gamblers’ malicious plot to fleece the merchant from the North Sea Ice Palace succeeded.

It turned into a situation where the merchants would leave the money they had painstakingly earned over several months of difficult trading in Shimandaesan. The problem was that the merchant from the North Sea Ice Palace didn’t stop there.

“Isn’t it the way of this business that when you run out of money and can’t raise the stakes, you put up real assets next?”

Thus, a treasure of immense value was put up in the gambling den. And that was!

“Ma-, ma-, ma……”

Na Rin’s mouth fell open.

As if this shocking news was the very reason she had to listen to Do Geom’s commonplace story in detail.

“Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron, you say?!”

Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron.

As the name suggests, it refers to cold iron that has aged for ten thousand years.

Iron above iron, steel above steel, white lotus pure steel above white lotus pure steel, and hyeon iron above that.

And above that is cold iron. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that if it’s cold iron, it’s essentially a top-tier weapon material.

But to think it was actually ‘Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron’!

Are you saying that mystical metal passed down like a legend truly exists?

“You saw it?”

“I saw it!”

A real treasure worth its price.

The moment they saw the Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron, the gamblers’ eyes turned upside down.

“It was utter chaos.”

The gamblers who had united their hearts to make one person a fool transformed into demons tearing each other apart over a piece of Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron the size of a maehwajeon coin.

Grabbing ankles, stabbing backs, and snitching.

“So how could the secret be kept? The merchant from the North Sea Ice Palace also realized he had been tricked.”

“All hell must have broken loose.”

“Indeed.”

Do Geom let out a deep sigh.

“In the end, the Black Tortoise Guards were dispatched and everyone was arrested. It wasn’t just gambling, but fraud gambling that I got involved in, so my life was over. My only hope was to be released on bail……”

Do Geom glanced at Na Rin.

It was with the thought that perhaps she would feel sympathetic to his pitiful story and offer help.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

Na Rin couldn’t be that easy.

Besides, if you think about it, wasn’t it a disaster Do Geom brought upon himself? Of course, it was wrong for him to fall for the scheme of the gambling den scoundrels, but still.

‘Anyway, the important thing is that the Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron has appeared.’

Na Rin clenched and unclenched her empty fist, feeling the lack of a sword, and licked her lips.

This is destiny.

Of all times, for the merchant from the North Sea Ice Palace to show up with the Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron when she had ten thousand nyang on hand.

“Where is it?”

“Pardon? What?”

“Not the Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron. I mean, that merchant from the North Sea Ice Palace.”

Na Rin smiled confidently and continued.

“I need to tell him I’ll compensate for all the losses he suffered at the gambling den.”