A Knight Remembers and Repays (4)
...Inanna saw.
She had not meant to. It was only that the more she remained in contact, the more naturally the sight came. The Mystery of Insight, which anything born a god could not help but possess, laid a human's memories out before her with perfect clarity.
As if she were standing right there beside them....
"You aren't going to run? This is nothing but someone else's affair."
"If I run from here, I'll just keep on being a coward. I'm more afraid of the regret I'd carry later than I am of losing whatever peace I've got right now."
Despite the old woman's warning, the human man chose not to flee.
"Is that so. Then allow me to give you this. If that thing shows its true form, it will help."
"What is it?"
"Who can say? I hardly know myself. On the first day I left the temple in my youth and set out upon the path of practice, two sparrows brought it to me and went on their way."
"...At that point, a god gave it to you, didn't they, ma'am?"
"Heh. It may be so. Or it may be the will of this bell."
The moment the Star Song came to rest in the man's arms—
"Ah, take this as well. It is nothing much, but it is cloth I blessed with my own hands."
"...And since when is cloth that shines by itself nothing much?"
"It is only cloth I soaked in holy water for a mere fifty years, filling it with the energy of the sun and the energy of the moon. Anyone could make such a thing, with steady effort and time. So it truly is nothing at all."
"...This is too heavy a thing. It might be the heaviest thing I've ever been given in my life...."
She saw the moment that plain cloth was born: silkworms raised by the woman's own hands, thread drawn from their cocoons, and a blessing set, across fifty years, upon every single strand.
And then—
"...Why did you go that far?"
"Whatever do you mean?"
"I'm asking why you sacrificed yourself. Why didn't you ask for help? Why shoulder all of it alone and suffer like this...? For fifty years you never went back to the temple, because of an evil spirit, and you stayed on this land. Alone...."
She saw the moment the man asked it in earnest. And to that question—
"I did. In my youth I asked the temple for help. Only there was no answer, and so I wandered, wondering what I was meant to do. But at the end of that wandering I found an answer. Not to wait for someone to help me, but to do it myself. Not to wait for someone else to change things, but to strive until I could do something."
"......"
The old woman answered with a bright, untroubled smile, and the man was left without words.
"But in the end, it has come to this. In the end I could do nothing. All I can do is pray. And be grateful that someone has come who can help. I am sorry. For being so lacking. For having no strength...."
"Ma'am...."
"My strength was meager. Hopelessly short of what was needed. I was too lacking to do anything, and then I grew old besides. I do not even have the strength to close my hand into a fist. So all I can do is ask, and lean upon another. That is why I am grateful—that you came to this land. Truly... thank you."
"......Don't do this, ma'am. You're going to make me ashamed of myself. I mean it."
The old woman bent her knees, and the man tried to raise her. He told her he was ashamed, and she told him, over and over, that she was thankful.
"May the blessing of light rest upon the road ahead of you."
...That was the end of what passed between the man and the old woman. And Inanna, who had seen every bit of it—
She still could not understand.
What it meant, that the old thing had gone to her knees to beg. Why the man was giving everything he had to grant that request. None of it made the slightest sense.
The weak were there to be toyed with. Better to submit. That was only natural. Rather than sacrifice yourself for someone else, the right thing was to look away from the danger and live for your own pleasure.
That was what was correct....
"Which is why you were thrown out of the kingdom you ruled, you hideous bastard."
Y-you—!
Inanna's eyes flew wide. Words that seemed to have read her thoughts outright left her reeling.
And sure enough.
"Yeah. Living selfishly isn't always a bad thing. Sacrificing yourself for other people no matter what might be a fool's errand, and being good isn't automatically right. But listen."
Crunch.
!!!!!
His fist broke through Inanna's eye at last. She could not even scream. That enormous body lurched and twisted.
It was something other than pain. A foreignness she could not place bored into the eye and turned her stomach.
A beat later, a scream steeped in agony burst free through dozens of mouths at once. But those screams, before long...
...began to die away.
Not by Inanna's will.
Simply—
with a soft, sliding hush.
Petals. No.
The stem of an enormous flower bud had merely stopped her mouths.
Crack. A thick, creaking split.
It was no miracle. It was a bud of inevitability, brought into bloom by karmic bonds and the resolve of countless people.
The beginning of it was the horn the bull had left behind.
A horn left by a bull that had lived in suffering through an eternity of kalpas, beneath a devil that called itself a god. That horn now resonated with Lee Han more fiercely than it ever had, and poured its power out—like a seed that would open a flower larger and more beautiful than any that had come before.
Dong—. Dooong—.
The Star Song, taking up the will of the one who rang it, pealed louder and stronger than ever, and became the rain that would soak the seed. The stronger that song grew, the vaster the seed would become.
Fwoosh.
And the last of it was one man's obsession.
The obsession of a knight who had resolved that he would destroy the devil—the flame of his Intent—roared up and set the horn ringing. No—
It set ringing the sword the bull had left behind.
Resonance is not the mere act of setting a blade aquiver. To wake the will of the sword, and to loose the power within it—that is the true heart of Sword Resonance.
And the moment he drove that sword in and began the resonance, Lee Han understood.
A flower would open. A flower more vast and more beautiful than any he had ever seen would bloom.
And so—!
"......"
Step. Step. Lee Han turned his back, and he did not deal the ending himself.
Th-this bastard...!
The devil raged, humiliated by the arrogance of a human who dared show her his back while she stood before him. For a devil who had once sat a divine throne, there was no experience more revolting than to be ignored by a worthless human. She beat her wings. She would bring an end to that insolent man—
Fwaaat—.
......?
In the next instant, the devil saw that her wings had changed against her will.
A flower.
A lotus bud was there.
Step. Fwaat—. The moment he took his second step, a still larger bud formed upon her body.
Step. At the third step, a greater bud filled her mouth to the brim.
Step. Step. The moment his stride carried him to five steps all at once, her entire sight packed itself full of buds.
Fwaat!
She wrung out one last voice, but even that mouth was wrenched shut by a bud, and the devil could not so much as howl. The pace was endlessly slow. And yet those steps were not declaring a human's end. They were declaring her own.
Step.
"......"
He had walked eight steps, and still he did not look back.
Instead, he spoke.
"Lotus Platform of Nine Grades."
When the Buddha was born, he walked nine steps, and at every step a lotus bloomed. Lee Han held the steps he walked now to be of that same kind, and so—as if granting a sliver of mercy—he spoke the name of the steps that would give her an ending.
If one meant to walk in steps borrowed from the Buddha's mercy, then there ought to be at least this much mercy. Shouldn't there?
"A soft heart's always been my trouble...."
Tok.
So he muttered, as the ninth step came to its end. And in the next moment—
Fwoooosh!
The lotus that had opened burst into full bloom, blanketing the earth and scattering, fierce and bright, into the empty air.
"——!!!"
The scream of a devil who would become new nourishment for this land, and perish, was buried beneath the flower's blooming, and what it received was an ending of kalpas. An ending that would never finish, so long as her life force and her soul were not spent to the last. That could not let her vanish completely—not until she had paid every debt of her sin....
It was nothing short of a merciful sentence.
"........."
The Nameless Nun found herself astonished.
Past eighty, it was no exaggeration to say that nothing remained in the world that could surprise her, and she had been certain she had cultivated the discipline to keep her composure no matter what came—
"...I was wrong. It seems even I am still far short of that discipline."
The nun drew a hand down her wrinkled face and smiled. And to that nun—
"Wow! Grandma! What is all this? Look! Flowers bloomed on the river! They're so pretty!"
"...So they have. They really are pretty."
A girl wearing a bright, fresh smile came running up and went bouncing all around, and the nun could not help but smile herself.
The unholy things were being purified. Each time the flowers blooming on the river opened, they would wipe away the corruption that had tormented this land for so long.
The nun thought, There was meaning. My effort... it has been repaid after all....
She had believed hers was not a life that wished to be repaid. But now that she was looking upon this sight, the nun knew herself for a greedy woman.
Yes. She—
"Huh? G-Grandma? You're crying?"
"...It's because I'm happy. So happy...."
"Mmm? If you're happy, why are you crying?"
"I know. It really is strange, isn't it? But I understand now."
"...?"
"That a person can cry because she is glad."
This was the sight she had wanted to see. The nun was glad that her life had not been meaningless, and she wept because the lake of lotuses, opened in full, was beautiful.
Because there had been no such thing as a meaningless life.