It was noon by the time they returned to the Court. Gyuvin made for the Celestial Hall so he could submit his scroll to be marked ‘completed’ and hand over the twenty silver pieces. As he passed by the display board again, he was heartened to see that most of the scrolls color-coded black and brown for high and moderate urgency had all been taken.
“Oh, Gyuvin you’re back!” Hanbin called from the other side of the hall, where he had his hands full sorting through a stack of books almost as tall as he was. “How was it?”
“Fine!” Gyuvin called back. “I need to go to the Orbital to look for Minwoo-sunbae. Have you eaten lunch yet?”
“No I haven’t!”
“Okay! Let’s meet back here when you’re done with whatever you’re doing!”
Gyuvin headed off in search of Minwoo. He thought it would be best to tell him the wards were breaking down, just as a precaution, even though they’d already fixed it. As far as he remembered, Minwoo was usually always at the Orbital during the day, either at his quarters doing his work, or at the sect leader’s quarters handling some other business.
The Orbital was the collective name for the area of the Court reserved for the highest-ranking seniors; Minwoo, as the sect leader’s second in command, stayed in the Mercury Pavilion, and the next in line stayed in the Venus Pavilion, and so on. As Gyuvin left the central area of the Court and turned the corner to the Orbital, he caught a glimpse of Sect Leader Baek in the distance.
“Sect Leader Baek!” he called, hurrying over to greet him.
“Kim Gyuvin, I haven’t seen you since you came back,” he said, smiling. “You rascal, you could have at least come and said hi…”
Gyuvin smiled back, sheepish. “Heh, sorry. I was trying to be helpful around the sect, so I was busy.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sect Leader Baek answered. He’d never been one to be too strict about formalities like that, besides, he’d practically raised Gyuvin. Gyuvin might as well be his son, for all it mattered. “What brings you to the Orbital, anyway?”
“I’m looking for Minwoo-sunbae,” he explained. “I took a request earlier, and something happened with the wards. It seems like they’re breaking down in some areas, even though the sect just finished the reinforcement works. I think it might be necessary for the barriers to be rebuilt entirely, because it’s been up for so long…”
The Sect Leader’s expression darkened momentarily, but the expression passed in a blink. “Oh, that’s not good. You’re looking for Minwoo to report that?”
“Mhm.”
“Okay, he was at the Mercury Pavilion earlier when I went to talk to him. He should still be there.”
“Got it, thanks!”
Gyuvin knocked on the door of the Mercury Pavilion. “Sunbae? Are you in?”
“Come in!” Minwoo called from inside, and Gyuvin slid the doors open. “What is it?”
“I hate to be the bringer of bad news,” he started, smiling ruefully. “But I think there might be something wrong with the wards. I just completed a request from someone living right at the border of the city, his house was full of dark energy because the barrier was broken right where he lived.”
Minwoo sighed, putting his face into his hands. “This is what happens when I let someone else handle the work for once…”
“Sunbae, what are you going to do about it?”
He looked back up, smoothing out his hair. “I’ll issue a temporary movement order for everyone living close to the edge of the wards to relocate for the time being. We don’t have the manpower right now to spare to patch the entire city’s borders all over again, and I sure as hell don’t have the time to handle it on my own.”
“Have you ever considered rebuilding the wards from scratch?” Gyuvin asked. “Maybe the reason they’re breaking down is because they’re old and they’ve been patched too many times.”
“Do you know who the person who built the wards in the first place was?” Minwoo returned.
“The person who built them? No.”
“It was your father, Gyuvin-ah. He built the wards around the city more than ten years ago. Since his exile, has there been any other cultivator in this Court even half as talented as your father?”
“Oh,” Gyuvin trailed off. “No, I guess not. My father built those wards?”
“Yes, he did. Jaeyoung-sunbae found a way to secure the entire boundary of the city to a natural source of energy so it could be self-supporting. It’s fortunate he did, because no one else even came close to figuring out how to do anything like that after he left. He was arguably one of the smartest cultivators of his generation. We were lucky to have him.”
Gyuvin nodded slowly, still processing this new information. He knew his father had been the sect leader’s right hand man and one of the most esteemed cultivators before his exile, but he didn’t know he’d made such significant contributions to the sect.
“Anyway, if you’d like to research a way to rebuild the wards, feel free,” Minwoo said, looking back down at his work. “Otherwise, we’re out of options at the moment. We might even have to call in Moonrise Palace to build new wards for us…do we even have enough money for that? I’ll need to check the sect reserves…”
Gyuvin took Minwoo’s self-absorbed mumbling as a sign to leave. Hanbin was waiting for him in front of the display board when he got there, along with Ricky, Taerae, Zhanghao and Yujin.
“Hey, we need to make Ricky wear a mask to hide his face or something,” Hanbin remarked, continuing from an earlier conversation. “Look, there are girls lining up to submit help requests just so they can see him…”
“Look at this,” Yujin said, plucking a scroll marked pink for ‘low urgency, low difficulty’. “Ten silvers for the young master with blonde hair to come to her house and stand at her window.”
“What does she want me at her window for?” Ricky asked, puzzled.
“Is this the betrothal Zhanghao-hyung was talking about?” Gyuvin piped up. “Actually, would your sect even allow you to marry someone who not only isn’t from your sect but isn’t a cultivator?”
Ricky frowned. “Probably not.”
Gunwook walked past just then, holding a bench with one broken leg, looking like he was trying not to laugh. “Is it really necessary for you guys to be doing this stuff? Like, aren’t there any repairmen in Sunshower City? Have they all decided not to do their jobs?”
“If it’s a non-urgent issue like broken furniture, waiting till summer for the Court to open its doors might be a cheaper option for them,” Hanbin explained. “The carpenters and woodworkers work all year, and their fees are a little more expensive.”
“Actually, it’s a form of price control too,” Taerae added. “It ensures the merchants don’t charge too much for their services, because some of the poorer commonfolk won’t be able to afford them if they do.”
The eight of them turned to fix him with a curious look. “Why would you know that?” Gyuvin asked.
“I picked up a book from the library yesterday detailing the Meteor Court sect’s traditions and cultures,” Taerae answered casually. “It says it all in there somewhere.”
“Ah Seven Star…” Gunwook said, sighing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire of Seven Star Manor was just a giant library.”
“There are only two main libraries,” Taerae answered. “The scholars’ library, and the cultivators’ library. The other eight libraries are smaller and more specific.”
Gyuvin had never been to Seven Star Manor before, but he’d heard tales of the Manor’s grand hall being walled entirely by bookshelves that stretched from the ceiling to the floor. Seven Star Manor was one of the sects with more unique practices; children who entered the sect would choose between two paths when they reached the age of twelve, the scholar path or the cultivator path. Both routes were equally prestigious, as was to expected, and even though Taerae had obviously chosen to follow the cultivator path, some of the scholarly upbringing from his childhood clearly still shone through.
Funnily enough, people liked to say that Seven Star Manor cultivators learned how to fight from reading books, which honestly wasn’t far from the truth. Rumors said that if you gave the same sword to a hundred different disciples, they would swing it the exact same way. Their emphasis on studying techniques worked in their favor, clearly there was a reason they were one of the top five sects in the cultivation world, but it was still a little funny to think about. Gyuvin wondered how it felt training alongside a bunch of clones.
“Enough of this, it’s making my head hurt,” Zhanghao said, laughing. “Can we go and have lunch, or are we waiting to eat it tomorrow?”
mini theatre!
“ten silver for the young master with blonde hair to come to my house and stand by my window”
ricky: ?
ricky: do you need an exorcism?
“thirty silver for the cultivator in black to come and fix my front door”
jiwoong: i’ll do it, no problem. do you want to see an acrobatics performance too? there’s a new spinning kick i just learned
“forty silver for the cultivator named han yujin to say ‘noona, i love you’
yujin: absolutely not.Â
Comment