Chapter 204: A Day Without Work is a Day Without Food (1)

Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, Lanzhou Branch.

As they returned to the estate, Dam Bin couldn't hide the pleased expression on her face as she spoke.

"That was truly an excellent decision befitting our doctrine, Young Master."

"...I just didn't want unnecessary bloodshed."

It wasn't the blood of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult he was referring to. The elites of the Hao Clan might pose some challenge to them, but the rest were just cannon fodder. The Lanzhou branch could have been slaughtered without any losses on their side.

"I wouldn't call it unnecessary. After all, every single member of the Hao Clan is a scumbag, aren't they?"

Il-mok shook his head at Dam Bin's comment.

“Sure, but they aren't exactly scum on the level of the Red Serpent Gang or the Heavenly Orchid Society.”

They were criminals, yes, but not utterly depraved villains. At most, they were just a gathering of petty criminals.

But they were a far cry from the Beggar Gang.

If most of the beggars in the Beggar Gang were innocent and pitiful folk, these guys were criminals through and through.

While he would have felt uneasy killing members of the Beggar Gang just because they got in his way, the Hao Clan members were the type where there was no real reason not to kill them if they became troublesome.

That's why Il-mok had gone out of his way to visit the Red Blossom Pavilion Madam to give her a warning.

'I can't just go around on a killing spree just because I could.'

It wasn't because he felt squeamish about murder.

Il-mok slightly lowered his head to look at the sword tied to his waist.

‘...Something just feels... off.’

It was discomfort with himself, with the fact that he felt no guilt about killing.

There was a nagging fear in the back of his mind that if he started killing whomever he wanted just because he could, he'd eventually cross a line and wouldn't be able to come back.

***

Several days had passed since his meeting with the Red Blossom Pavilion Madam.

It seemed the woman had not ignored the warning, as no Hao Clan’s rats were caught sniffing around the cult’s area.

In the meantime, Dam Bin and Jin Hayeon kept up the training for the new recruits of the Hidden Guard Pavilion, and Baek Cheon was having a grand time harassing the three rookie actors.

And so, on the evening nine days after the last gathering...

People gathered once again at the same location where the previous assembly had been held.

Watching the situation unfold from that same tree as before, Il-mok let out a hollow laugh.

‘We didn’t even try to recruit anyone, but more people showed up.’

The catchy hymns and midnight snacks seemed to have worked a bit too well.

Not to mention how addictive those hymns were.

‘And look at how many of these beggar bastards have shown up.’

The number of beggars who came to the gathering site had easily quadrupled.

What's more, all the new beggars were ones who hadn't learned any martial arts.

As you'd expect, the crowd split itself into three main cliques.

You had the folks from the brothels and taverns. Then the regular townsfolk. And finally, the beggars.

While the beggars had mingled with the regular folks at the first gathering, they were now completely segregated.

This was due to the horrendous stench emanating from them.

When their numbers were small it was tolerable, but now that they'd come in droves, people started avoiding them.

Naturally, the beggars huddled together with other beggars, and the mass of beggars gathered in one place gave off a horrendous stench.

As a result, Il-mok's alter ego was about to have a fit.

- Slaughter those filthy animals!!

The last time, he'd been far enough away, and there weren't that many of them, so he could handle it.

But they were now packed together in a huge crowd, and he could smell the stink all the way from his tree.

But now they were gathered in a mass, so even from a distance, he could smell them.

'Crazy bastard. Killing them just because they're dirty is too much.'

Though Il-mok cursed inwardly at the side effects of the Soul-Stealing Heartless Sword, he couldn't endure it any longer.

Pat.

Il-mok equipped the wrathful Buddha mask just in case and descended from the tree.

He gathered his internal energy but didn’t draw his sword nor did he channel his energy according to the principles of the Soul-Stealing Heartless Sword.

Instead, his internal energy began resonating with the energy of the world around him.

"You scoundrel!"

"So you finally show your true colors!"

The moment a few beggars belatedly sensed the mighty flow of energy and shouted in alarm—

Kwaaaaah!!

A torrent of water flew toward the huddled mass of beggars.

Every beggar—except for a middle-aged guy who looked like their boss—was completely soaked like drowned rats.

Their miserable state somehow got even more pathetic, and the local boss of the Beggar Gang—who had hastily leaped away thinking it was a surprise attack—just stared at the watery scene with the weirdest look on his face.

While the beggars were too confused by the sudden situation to gather their wits, Il-mok gave his orders.

"Bring the lye soap left at the washing area and scrub their bodies clean."

His plan all along was just to bath them.

It was the only thing his last bit of sanity could come up with to keep himself from slaughtering them all.

This whole plan was only possible because they were next to the washing area, which was overflowing with water qi. His super-sized internal energy from the elixir was just the icing on the cake.

A few people scrambled to obey Il-mok's order, grabbing the stone tubs and starting to scrub down the resisting beggars.

Throughout all this, Il-mok remained standing where he'd shot the water stream, watching the situation unfold.

He couldn't bring himself to wash them directly. If he got any closer, he felt like he'd really go berserk.

Then, the Beggar Gang local leader who had alone dodged the water stream, let out an enraged shout.

"What the fuck are you doing?!"

Hearing Hong Gae’s furious shout, Il-mok also shot back with veins on his forehead.

“What am I doing? I’m washing you, you filthy rats!”

“Are you seriously telling me you don’t get that you’re starving them to death?!”

"......?"

As Il-mok and everyone else just stared in confusion, the others started chiming in.

"That's right!"

"Please, stop this!"

"Oh, this is killing me!!"

The beggars getting the forced scrub-down began groaning in protest.

And thanks to one washed beggar's wailing, Il-mok was able to grasp the situation.

"If we become this clean, how can we beg for alms?"

Even though he was one second away from completely snapping, Il-mok almost let out a hollow laugh despite himself.

‘I see now, these sons of bitches. It’s not that they couldn’t wash. They just refused to!’

Come to think of it, there is a big fucking river right over there, so how the fuck can they not wash?

It’s obvious.

They had to live without washing because people only gave them money when they looked pitiful and dirty.

‘Honestly. A big part of me wants to just kill them all.’

Their sheer nerve, their disgusting filth that set off his obsession, and the way they kept annoyingly trying to dig up dirt on his people.

There wasn't a single thing he liked about them.

—That's right! Kill them! They should be grateful that you’ll carve the perfect sword paths on their filthy bodies!

Ironically, the Soul-Stealing Heartless Sword’s egging on him instead made him pause and rethink what he should do.

After a very brief moment of pondering what to do with those damn bastards, Il-mok came up with a useful idea.

And it was all thanks to what the beggars themselves had said.

“You wretched fools! There’s an old saying that goes: 'Those who do not work shall not eat!' You're so lazy, you're worse than livestock!"

The crowd started to buzz at Il-mok’s declaration.

(TL Note: Lol, the audacity.)

"Was there such an old saying...?"

“That’s the first I’ve ever heard of it...”

While everyone muttered in puzzled tones, one middle-aged man dressed as a scholar clicked his tongue and spoke.

"Tsk tsk. This is why people need to read books. It's an old tale from a monk named Master Huaihai during the Tang Dynasty! He said that on any day he didn't work, he wouldn't eat either! A day without work is a day without food (一日不作 一日不食)! Isn't that clearly what that masked man is talking about?”

Hearing the scholar, Il-mok breathed an inward sigh of relief.

'Damn. I didn't know this saying didn't exist in the Central Plains either.'

Thank god there was a similar story he could piggyback on.

Meanwhile, thanks to Il-mok's scolding and the scholar's backup, all eyes turned back to the beggars.

But it wasn't the usual look of pity. Now, they were looking at the beggars like they were pathetic trash.

It made perfect sense, really.

These guys won’t wash themselves for the sake of handouts. For regular folks who had to slave away at their jobs every day, that was just insulting.

“And to think I actually gave food to those kinds of people.”

“Hah. They’re not beggars, they’re con artists.”

As accusations poured from the crowd, the beggars who had cast aside their pride to survive on alms had no choice but to lower their heads in shame.

One beggar couldn't take the humiliation anymore and screamed. “You think we want to live like this?!”

The moment that beggar's outcry burst forth. Hong Gae instinctively sensed something was going wrong.

In a night where the only source of light was the gentle moonlight, Hong Gae’s eyes caught something.

The man who’d turned the crowd on them, that sorcerer bastard who’d blasted them with water, he was smiling.

"Then why are you lot living like that when your limbs are perfectly fine?"

From the very beginning, Il-mok had no intention of merely shaming the beggars and chasing them away.

"We live as beggars because there's no work! No one will give us jobs!!"

Hearing that desperate shout, Il-mok wiped the smile off his face and asked with a serious voice.

This was the method Il-mok had devised to eliminate the beggars from Lanzhou without killing them.

“Alright then. If we give you guys jobs and pay you for it, will you stop begging?”

It was to give them work and pay them wages.

It was a solution that came to him instantly because he had worked as a social welfare civil servant.

Don't just give them a fish; teach them how to fish.

In the welfare-related work Il-mok had done, this was the most obvious and most important principle.

The problem was that it was a principle difficult to implement due to practical reasons.

'But thanks to the Heavenly Orchid Society's wealth, I have more than enough money to give them work.'

But right here, right now, it was a perfectly feasible method.

Especially in a situation like this, where countless people's disdainful gazes were focused on the beggars.

If any beggar was dumb enough to say, ‘Nah, I’d rather keep begging than work!’ he wouldn't just be a beggar anymore—he'd be a lunatic.

"Y-you'll give us work and wages?"

"I-is this really true, sir?"

As the beggars suddenly used extreme honorifics with Il-mok, Hong Gae finally came to his senses and shouted. “Don’t fall for his honeyed words! What makes you think you can trust anything these people say?!”

Since his shout was laced with internal energy, everyone's gazes naturally turned to Hong Gae.

"I am Hong Gae, a Five-Knot Beggar of the Beggar Gang and the Branch Leader in charge of Lanzhou. Following the will of our Founding Ancestor, I will do anything to protect beggars!"

Hong Gae went so far as to reveal his identity while declaring war against the Maitreya Luminous Cult.

“That’s a strange thing to say.”

But the masked sorcerer just tilted his head, as if he was genuinely confused, and asked a question.

“One side offers them jobs and pay. The other just lets them keep begging and maybe stops them from getting kicked around a few times. So tell me, which one is really helping the beggars?”

The sorcerer's tone was calm.

"......"

But he hit Hong Gae with a question that Hong Gae had never considered in his life and couldn’t answer.