A Dragon Ascends the Holy Mountain
“Can I really interrogate him?”
I waved the second-class assassin I’d captured in front of Rin, and her eyes sparkled with excitement as she hurried over. Interrogation?
Rin, I trusted my gut that she already knew about the Murim Gallery, but her martial-arts credentials were decent enough to make me nervous. “Hold on, are you planning to pluck out eyeballs or something?”
“Hee, hee-hee… gak!”
The second-class assassin beneath my rear end twitched like a fish out of water. I pressed my fist into his spine just hard enough to silence him—no need to spell it out. Anyone who’d kill people for money was never going to run. “I’m not that barbaric. And anyway, I didn’t have to squeeze you so tight—men and women are different, Rin. Tone it down a little.”
“Whatever. You couldn’t do anything to me anyway.”
“Young Master Hae, even if I told you every one of the one hundred and eight humiliating ways a woman can be treated in Murim, this time was just luck. I wasn’t prepared either. We all need to be careful.”
“Fine. Just don’t.”
I sighed at Rin’s nagging, dusted myself off, and stood up. The second-class assassin, freed from my weight, glared at Rin with pure fear. And then Rin…
“Kkuk!”
She gave the assassin’s jaw a cheerful kick and opened the interrogation with a grin. “The heavier your mouth gets, the more pain you’ll feel. Suicide is…”
Rin’s gaze wandered until it locked onto a loose tooth on the ground. “You tried to swallow it, huh. Too bad.”
“I reached for it with my hands.”
“Well done. Salmun assassins usually flee to death when they’re cornered—keep your eyes peeled.”
I nodded. As Rin spoke, the assassin finally spilled. “A request came in from the branch—only the neck for a huge sum. There’s a Murim person carrying a Divine Dragon around.”
“That couldn’t have taken long. There’s no Salmun branch anywhere nearby.”
“That’s why they couldn’t find it. Salmun branches in the righteous Murim only communicate via carrier pigeons. Those encrypted pigeons are only given to trusted contacts. Finding a hidden base is easy.”
“Hah…”
Rin let out a long sigh and glanced at me before looking away again. “What? That sigh?”
“Just… Master Hae is too noticeable. Even if we found the Salmun base, they’d spot us first and run. And I’m not saying that.”
“And even if you killed me here, it wouldn’t end. My 1st-class Salmun colleagues are already moving. I’ll keep my neck safe… just in case.”
“Bam!”
The Salmun base comment fired me up. I drove my fist into the back of the assassin’s head and ended him on the spot. “Actually, that’s all I wanted to know. Salmun usually sends backups, but they rarely commit to them.”
“From what you said, it sounds like the backup was already on its way.”
“If it was just a regular report, they could have waited, but since the backup was already deployed, there’s no turning back. Our destination is locked in.”
“We’re heading to the Wudang Sect. We’ll ask the elders there for protection and then return with the Murim League.”
“Not the Zhuge Clan?”
“Honestly, the Zhuge Clan’s been acting weird lately.”
“Weird how?”
“Their current head is way too radical—there’s a lot of internal tension.”
“Aha, a civil war?”
“Not exactly civil war, but the Zhuge Clan has always been a safe, stable place for centuries. For their middle-aged elites, this new head feels completely alien.”
“So basically…”
“Even if we asked for help, they’d probably give us nothing. If the Salmun hadn’t attached themselves, they might have treated us decently, but with the tail, there’s no solution. Let’s go straight to Wudang Mountain. Let’s go.”
“Sounds good. But…”
“Young Master Hae?”
Just before we left, I looked into the kitchen of the inn we’d almost entered. There lay the jinyosi who’d brought me food and the real chef who’d cooked the proper meal I hadn’t tasted in ages, both with their necks snapped. “What’s with me suddenly turning nostalgic?”
“You used to see this kind of thing all the time?”
“No, I never got used to it. But right now…”
“At least let’s handle the cleanup, right?”
I felt a baseline settle inside me. “I can run away even in a crisis, but at least do the bare minimum for these people.”
I was good at dodging even when surrounded. I could push straight through crowds. Poison didn’t touch me. But these people weren’t like that. They weren’t evil like the bandit horde that stormed my cave, and they weren’t poisoned like the one who tried to harm me in my car. They’d just been living normal lives, cooking and selling food, and this is what happened. Not even ants. “That’s why I said to stay in your nest until you’re stronger.”
If I’d stumbled on a madman, I’d have ended up dead like these two. Especially since I was a Divine Dragon—mad people were likely to drool and lunge. I was finally starting to feel the weight of that meaning. “Should I go to the Wudang Sect and learn some martial arts?”
“Eh, Wudang Sect? It’s a Daoist sect, right? It should be good company for a Divine Dragon… but…”
“But?”
“Honestly, I can’t. Formal entry has strict rules. I’ll just ask directly.”
“Handle the cleanup first.”
“Yes, cleanup.”
I’d been laughing off “I can hide” and “it’ll be fine” for so long, but not anymore. I needed to learn proper martial arts and start a real Murim life. This kind of pointless death was over—I’d already been targeted.
—
Fortunately, the 1st-class Salmun didn’t show up. We safely reached the foot of Mount Wudang. “See that clearing ahead? That’s where the Wudang Sect starts.”
“It’s not that big?”
“Not big? This isn’t the main hall—that’s just the Sword Untying Pond. Haegeomji.”
“Haegeomji?”
“Literally a place to untie your swords. The Wudang Sect is a demilitarized zone for righteous Murim. No one can carry weapons except the Wudang Sect monks who manage the mountain.”
“What if you refuse?”
“It’s simple. The Sama outsiders.”
“What if a good Sama outsider unties his sword?”
“He’s considered a good Sama outsider? You can’t force someone who’s already handed over his sword and offered to cooperate to leave. Even if you don’t let him in the main hall, you can at least talk.”
I thought it was weird that a fighting Sama outsider would cause a big fuss, but I kept it to myself. Murim culture was still foreign to me—I couldn’t fully understand the unwritten rules yet. I followed Rin toward the Haegeomji anyway. “Wait a sec—”
A Murim man strolling around with a sword spotted us and came running, then froze. “Eh?”
“Little Brother? Why the serious face?”
“Eh!”
The man with a huge sword on his back looked like he’d just realized something grave and clutched his head in despair. Then…
“Welcome! This is the Wudang Sect’s symbol, the famous Mount Wudang—Haegeomji!”
He started rambling cheerfully about the Haegeomji as if he’d just woken up from a coma. “Since our founding ancestor, the enlightened Zhang Sanfeng, settled here and began training disciples, he left a saying for those who come to harm them: draw your sword, ascend the mountain, and speak with them! For those who cross the threshold without drawing a sword, impose a price! This is the cultural tradition born from that famous saying…”
“…What’s a founding ancestor?”
“The patriarch. The sect patriarch.”
“Aha.”
We ended up sitting through a full twenty-minute passionate history lecture on the Wudang Sect, and neither Rin nor I could interrupt. After we’d “absorbed” every detail…
“…That’s all. Does that cover everything you needed to know about the Wudang Sect?”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“I already knew most of it. I lived in Hubei for a while.”
“It’s good that we could help. Especially for you, Young Master Hae, the Divine Dragon. You’ve fulfilled your duty as the third-generation disciple guarding the Haegeomji—something you haven’t done in a long time.”
“Eh?”
The Wudang Sect third-generation disciple—Sugang—felt oddly familiar, like he was trying too hard to be close. The familiar tone mixed with his distance left me a little suspicious. “Thank you for the kind words, Brother Sugang. May I leave my sword here and head up?”
“Of course.”
“And… this is the broken arm of a man whose severed arm I severed. I couldn’t bring a broken sword all the way to the main hall, and I don’t want to leave the owner’s sword behind. I’d appreciate it if Brother Hae would take it.”
“No problem. I’ll take it. One last question—why are you here?”
“I need protection all the way to the Murim League headquarters. A Salmun is attached, so I’m officially requesting aid.”
“Understood. That’s something you’ll have to discuss upstairs.”
Rin expertly handled the handover of Sugang’s sword, his broken arm, and the owner’s sword. Then…
“All right, let’s go.”
She grabbed my wrist and led me forward. But…
“Go? Where? This isn’t the Wudang Sect?”
“I told you—this is just the Haegeomji. The Wudang Sect isn’t that big.”
“Eh, so then…?”
“Right there.”
With an exaggerated drawl, she pointed at a tiny shack on the summit, half-hidden behind thin clouds. “The summit of that mountain is the Wudang main hall. Most major righteous sects build their headquarters on mountain peaks—like the Shaolin Temple, except smaller.”
“Whoa…”
So I’d have to climb all the way up? For a dragon who lives by the river, asking him to climb when he could just swim? I sighed at the thought, but with Salmun on my tail, I had no choice. “Fine. Let’s go.”
“Yes, let’s.”
We passed the Haegeomji and began the climb past the Wudang mountain gates. “The tail isn’t heavy, is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only lived by the river, so I never had to deal with uphill. Time to test it.”
Having a traveling companion made the climb surprisingly bearable.