* * *

CLINK

Limon dropped ice into an empty glass. From the bottles on the shelf, he chose an amber whiskey, filled the glass, and sat down on the sofa.

As he brought the glass to his lips, the rich aroma reached him before the taste. The peaty scent peculiar to whiskey, as though the long years themselves had been smoked, mingled with the amber liquid on his tongue, then broke apart and seeped into his body. It was the dense taste of age, enough to make an ordinary person drunk on the smell alone, never mind the alcohol.

But Limon did not get drunk. He was a superhuman Sword Master, and he had lived a long time. The poison of alcohol and the weight of years alike dissolved all too easily in his mouth.

"Why are you still up, Princess?" His voice was clear as he addressed the black-haired girl who had appeared behind the sofa. That was why.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Why? Have you got insomnia?"

"No. I couldn't sleep because I was wondering why you were still awake at this hour, Sword Lord."

"You sleep less when you get old."

"If it were just your age, you wouldn't be awake this late tonight in particular."

Li Qingyu smiled. Limon gave a short chuckle at her sharp observation, swallowed a sip of whiskey, then spoke quietly.

"The night is restless."

It might have sounded like an abrupt thing to say, but she was not taken aback. She simply looked at him with obsidian eyes and asked calmly, "A Sword Master's intuition?"

"Hard to say. If I had to call it anything, it's the intuition of an old man who's spent his whole life on battlefields."

Limon shrugged, then turned to look out the darkened window. "When you've spent your life in battle, there are nights that feel restless like this."

There was no particular fixed sign. The insects might be unusually quiet, or a strong wind might die down. The stars might seem too bright—or not be visible at all. Ordinary things that happened every day would somehow feel strangely unfamiliar. Soldiers who had lived on battlefields simply called that indefinable feeling a restless night.

"The funny thing is, on nights like that, there's always a night raid or a major battle, and people die in droves, like ants."

"A kind of premonition?"

"Nothing that grand. Just an instinct everyone has coming to the surface."

The wind died before a storm. Animals ran wild before an earthquake. Rats would not board a leaky ship. Everything in the world had warning signs; human senses simply could not detect them. But when their lives were at stake, even the dullest people grew sensitive. That was the instinct of a living creature.

After explaining this matter-of-factly, Limon scratched his cheek. "Young people these days just call it PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—or something."

"Since the Iron Age began, people have come to put their faith in things they can define clearly, like levels and skills, rather than something as vague as intuition."

"Well, that's better than letting charlatans who call it the will of heaven run the government, like they did in the old days." Limon chuckled.

In the end, a hunch was only a hunch. Even an old man who could predict rain with uncanny accuracy from the ache in his limbs could be wrong. Deciding everything on a personal hunch that changed with one's condition or mood was like gambling one's entire fortune every time. Get it right ninety-nine times in a row, and one mistake could cost everything.

"Is that why you're keeping watch instead of warning me or her?"

"If it's something I can stop, I can handle it alone. If I can't stop it, keeping watch won't do us any good anyway."

"That doesn't mean you have to take on the burden alone."

"What burden? I call it keeping watch, but I'm only passing the time with a drink."

"I see. You have a point." Qingyu nodded slightly, then added with a smile, "In that case, may I join you in passing the time?"

"Nothing might happen."

"Then I'll simply have a pleasant evening alone with my future husband."

Either way, she had nothing to lose. Limon chuckled at her blithe reply. "Suit yourself."

"I will."

Whatever made her so happy, she sat beside him beaming and filled her own glass with ice and whiskey. Watching her, Limon muttered inwardly, 'She really is an odd princess.'

From the Bronze Age until now, he had dealt with several princesses of the Seven Dragons Society, but none like Li Qingyu. Nor was it merely that a princess of what was considered the noblest bloodline in the world, someone who had been waited on all her life, could pour another person's drink so naturally. There was her knack for seeing straight through him, the inexplicable kindness she sometimes showed him, and her strangely unwavering trust. Everything about her was odd, from beginning to end.

'Well, does it matter?' Limon chose not to probe into what made her so unusual. They were allies out of necessity, after all. As long as Qingyu did not betray him, he had no reason to force out whatever she was hiding.

He had just settled that thought and raised his glass again when both their pagers sounded.

["Your Highness, there's a problem."]

["I have something to report."]

Yo U-in, Leviathan's general manager, sounded stiff despite rarely losing his composure, while Wei Ling's voice was urgent.

Limon remained unperturbed. He drained the rest of his whiskey in one swallow and waited for Qingyu to refill his glass. Slowly swirling it in his hand, he murmured, "So it's finally begun."

* * *

Meanwhile, when Limon had poured his first glass, he and Qingyu were not the only ones spending the night awake. Yo U-in remained at his post solely because his beloved princess had not gone to bed, while Wei Ling was working late under a mountain of work. But someone else had been up for days already, for a graver reason than either of theirs.

"Still nothing? I told you money is no object. I don't want excuses. Find me a lead on that stranger by the end of today. Without fail."

CLICK

The middle-aged man with the handsome mustache hung up irritably and sank into his chair. Wang Gi-neung muttered, "... It may already be too late."

Since the day the black-cloaked stranger had defeated the combat units and killed Ryu Gang-cheol, Wang had worked without a wink of sleep to contain the fallout. He had little to show for it. After all, he had loudly announced to the clan that he had captured Ryu alive and was extracting information from him, using that claim to shore up his family's declining standing. Then he had lost Ryu before extracting anything. Of course things had gone badly.

'If we could catch the other culprits, perhaps...' Wang dismissed the only way he could salvage the situation as soon as it occurred to him. For over a month, they had searched using not only the Wang family of Shanghai's resources but the Seven Dragons Society's intelligence network, and still had not found the culprits. They were hardly going to catch them now.

'Where did I go wrong?' Had it been forcing Ryu off to the Torture Hall? Snatching him away from Limon? Or trying to catch the culprits himself? Countless possibilities came to mind, but Wang found no answer.

Each choice had been the best one at the time, made by weighing gains and losses and choosing what would most benefit the family. That only made it more ironic that those choices, one after another, had brought the family to the brink of a collapse he could no longer prevent.

THUD

"...?" In the middle of a sigh, Wang frowned. With the keen senses of a master-level expert, he had detected a strange commotion outside the door.

"I'm tired enough already. What's all this noise in the middle of the night?" he muttered, his voice tinged with suspicion, puzzlement, and fatigue. He pushed himself up from the desk and trudged toward the door.

CRASH

He shot out a hand like lightning, punching a large hole through the door and seizing the throat of whoever lay in ambush outside. It was a perfect surprise attack, a bolt from the blue for the assailant who had meant to strike Wang the moment the door opened.

"Whoa!"

The assailant reacted quickly too, throwing his upper body back to avoid Wang's hand while kicking the door. Wang hesitated to dodge the splinters, allowing the assailant to escape his grasp by a hair. Rubbing his bloodied neck, the man whistled. "Whew, you're the real deal, aren't you? I came to say hello and nearly got myself killed."

"Huh?"

Wang doubted his eyes. It wasn't just that his two guards now lay dead in the corridor. The familiar narrow-eyed young man grinning at him with a bloody knife left him dumbstruck.

"Mr. Ryu Gang-cheol?"

"Why the look? That surprised to see me alive?"

Ryu grinned as though savoring Wang's expression. Twirling the knife in his hand, he declared triumphantly, "No need to be so shocked. All kinds of things happen in this world, don't they?"

"..."

"I get it, though. When you had me tied up and were having such a fine time torturing me, you couldn't have expected me to come back in one piece."

"..."

"So now it's your turn to get carved up by my hand, comrade. What goes around comes around, eh?"

"..."

"... Comrade? Come on, say something."

He had gone to all the trouble of returning from the dead, only to find that talking to himself was no fun. Wang stared for a long moment at Ryu, who was pressing him for an answer with a displeased look, his own expression impossible to describe. Then Wang slowly raised a hand. He rubbed his eyes, pinched his cheek, and tried everything he could think of to confirm that this was real and not a dream.

"Ha, ahahahahaha!" He burst out laughing. The sight of Wang suddenly laughing fit to burst was so bizarre that Ryu, who had been gleefully mocking him moments ago, looked confused, uneasy, and even a little concerned.

"... Comrade? What are you laughing at?"

"Oh, no, no. I'm just thinking how fortunate this is."

"Fortunate? What is?"

Ryu eyed him openly as if he were a lunatic, but Wang did not take offense. Instead, he gazed at Ryu with the delight of a man to whose doorstep a fortune had just rolled.

"The son of a bitch I thought had run off with a lump of gold in his belly has walked right back here on his own two feet. How could I not call that fortunate?"