A Hot Heart and a Cold Head
A long while passed. Without a word, Ouyang Qiangang and the boy gathered the corpses scattered across the village and buried them together. By the time they shoveled the last earth over the final grave, the sun was already sinking beyond the western hills.
Setting his shovel down before the mound, the boy stood with the crimson sunset at his back and spoke.
"I know the way to Gusan Stronghold. Follow me."
With that, he started walking into the depths of the forest.
Ouyang Qiangang frowned.
"I don't recall ever saying I'd take you with me."
The boy stopped in his tracks and answered in a flat, emotionless tone.
"Then I won't tell you."
Ouyang Qiangang's gaze grew heavy.
"It's a dangerous place."
"I know."
"And you still want to come along?"
The boy held up his shovel.
"I'm going to kill at least one of them with my own hands."
A cold flame ignited in the boy's hollow eyes, and a bone-chilling killing intent pressed down on everything around them. He gripped the shovel's handle so hard it seemed blood might seep from his palms.
Ouyang Qiangang studied him, his gaze deepening.
"Aren't you the one who wants to die, then?"
"Who'd want to die at thirteen?"
"Then why insist on coming?"
"No matter what I try, I can't take revenge on my own. And I doubt anyone would ever teach martial arts to someone like me. But if I go with you, maybe I can kill at least one of them. Then when I die, I'll have something to say to my pa, my ma, and Sol-i — won't I?"
Ouyang Qiangang fell silent, looking down at the boy. It was a cold, calculating judgment — hard to believe it had come from the mouth of a thirteen-year-old.
His parents were clearly no ordinary people...
For a child raised in a village of slash-and-burn farmers, the boy's speech and bearing were far too refined. Something hidden might well lie in his past. Ouyang Qiangang's thoughts tangled, though he let none of it show.
"There will be a great deal of blood."
The boy pointed at the row of stone graves and shot back.
"We haven't exactly seen a little of it so far."
The cold in that voice left Ouyang Qiangang momentarily at a loss for words. He regarded the boy in silence, then asked his question.
"How long to Gusan Stronghold?"
"About two days."
Without a word, Ouyang Qiangang stepped in front of the boy, crouched down, and offered his back. After a moment's hesitation, the boy climbed on — and he kicked off the ground.
Shwaaaaaaa—!
The scenery smeared into a single blur of color and tore madly backward. The expressionless boy, without realizing it, let out a strangled urk and clamped his arms tight around Ouyang Qiangang's back. It was a speed beyond the realm of humans — nothing he had ever experienced in his life.
For the first time since the massacre, awe stirred in the boy's hollow eyes. Extraordinary as his temperament was, he was still a child.
Piercing through the fierce wind hammering his ears, Ouyang Qiangang's clear voice reached him.
"What's your name?"
"...Baek Mu-ok."
"Why did the bandits do that to your village?"
Baek Mu-ok's voice sank cold.
"Bandits kill people. Do they need a special reason?"
At that cynical reply, so far beyond his years, Ouyang Qiangang paused. He could guess how deep a wound had been carved into the child's soul.
"...I only meant this is no ordinary case."
Shaking his head, he went on.
"Bandits who hold a stronghold treat the nearby villages like a wellspring of gold. Even they know that raiding them over and over is profit, and butchering everyone is a fool's errand."
Ouyang Qiangang's eyes sharpened like a blade's edge.
"And yet they did it anyway. Which means something mattered more to them than plunder. Either the villagers saw 'something' they were never meant to see — or there was a 'thing' in that village the bandits had to have. Either way, this was no simple slaughter for loot."
The boy's small shoulders, sunk in thought, trembled faintly. As if forcibly dragging up a painful memory, Baek Mu-ok spoke with difficulty.
"...A few days ago, Uncle Gong, the hunter... said he chased a deer all the way to somewhere near Gusan Stronghold."
Ouyang Qiangang waited in silence for what came next.
"He saw a man and a woman enter an abandoned shrine there... and when they came out, the woman's face was the same, but the man's face had turned into a completely different person..."
Ouyang Qiangang's eyes sank cold.
"Did this Gong fellow tell the villagers that story?"
"Yes. He called it an amazing thing and blabbed about it to everyone."
...And that was what dragged the entire village into death...
Ouyang Qiangang frowned without realizing it.
"Besides your villagers, did any outsiders hear that story?"
"A merchant who came to buy herbs two or three days ago seems to have heard it."
A merchant... The rumor may have leaked beyond the village. So they rushed to seal every mouth this quickly.
Ouyang Qiangang said nothing more. An abandoned shrine... a human-skin mask — or a transformation art beyond even that. A rough picture was taking shape, but the boy's information was too thin for a firm conclusion. Anything more, he could verify by visiting the stronghold itself.
His speed, tearing through the silence, grew faster still.
Gusan Stronghold lay about a hundred li from the farmers' village. Carrying Baek Mu-ok on his back, Ouyang Qiangang arrived barely an hour after leaving it.
The sun had already vanished beyond the western hills, drowning the landscape in jet-black darkness. A wooden palisade two zhang high ringed the stronghold, and within it dozens of crude wooden houses stood in haphazard tangles.
At the center of the wide courtyard, several massive bonfires surged upward as if to lick the heavens, their crimson glow staining the hundred-odd men seated around them like blood-drinking demons. The drinking feast, with whole roasted pigs for accompaniment, was pandemonium itself.
Riding the wind came the smell of roasting meat, the reek of cheap liquor — and the low sobbing of women. Near the feast, dozens of pairs of men and women lay entangled, but calling it passion would have been far too kind; it was one-sided and violent. Here and there, drunken men could be seen seizing the women serving them and dragging them off into the darkness. The women went without a single gesture of resistance, their faces a mixture of fear and resignation. Hope had long since vanished from their eyes.
Ouyang Qiangang and Baek Mu-ok looked down on it all from the midpoint of a peak some seventy zhang away. In the boy's eyes, resentment, hatred, and a terrible killing intent smoldered.
Tremble…
His small fist shook uncontrollably, and the grind of clenched teeth tore through the night air. The will to charge out that very instant and cut every throat poured from his entire body.
Ouyang Qiangang reached out to rest a hand on the boy's shoulder and calm him — and in that moment, a chill ran through him. The killing intent radiating from Baek Mu-ok's small frame was cold and razor-sharp, as though it possessed physical substance. This was not an aura a boy of thirteen should have been able to produce.
Ouyang Qiangang's gaze grew heavy.
This child... one wrong move, and the Heavenly Calamitous Star will awaken this very moment.
It was said that those born under the Heavenly Calamitous Star awakened only when extreme rage and despair reached their critical point. Baek Mu-ok, right now, was in exactly that state.
Akasha's voice sounded, edged with concern.
Doctor, the boy's biometric readings are shifting rapidly. His heart rate has exceeded 150 beats per minute, and his body temperature has risen roughly two degrees above baseline.
"Baek Mu-ok."
Ouyang Qiangang called the boy's name in a low, level voice. But Baek Mu-ok did not answer. A red light was beginning to seep into his hollow eyes, and an invisible killing intent rose from his whole body like heat haze.
"Those bastards... those bastards..."
The mutter seeping from Baek Mu-ok's lips carried a chill that belonged to no world of the living. Ouyang Qiangang's grip closed hard on the boy's shoulder. Baek Mu-ok's reddened eyes turned toward him — and in them swam the madness of a mind slipping loose from reason.
"Let go of me... I have to... I have to kill them all..."
Lightning-like divine light blazed up in Ouyang Qiangang's eyes, and an ice-cold roar cracked through Baek Mu-ok's ears like a thunderbolt.
The impact of the qi-laden voice transmission rocked the boy's body as though he might collapse. Little by little, reason returned to Baek Mu-ok's eyes.
Ouyang Qiangang spoke.
"I didn't bring you along to watch you die."
At his words, Baek Mu-ok flinched and bowed his head.
"I'm... sorry."
The red was slowly draining from his eyes, their original color returning. Ouyang Qiangang exhaled a silent breath of relief. He had, for now, delayed the awakening of the Heavenly Calamitous Star.
But it was, in the end, only a stopgap. The boy's awakening was an inescapable fate, and no one could say when it would come. Ouyang Qiangang's eyes deepened.
I'd rather it happened in a situation I could control...
He looked the boy straight in the eye.
"You will follow my orders absolutely. Revenge is waged with a hot heart and a cold head. Can you do that?"
Baek Mu-ok hesitated a moment, then nodded.
"Yes."
Ouyang Qiangang's gaze returned to the stronghold. The feast at Gusan Stronghold was careening toward its peak. Around the great bonfires, a hundred-odd bandits tangled and reveled, while the dead drunk lay sprawled and rolling in every direction. Women's moans wove together with men's coarse laughter — a spectacle so repulsive it made him want to purge it on the spot. There was not a single reason left to delay the attack.
And yet Ouyang Qiangang did not move. Because Akasha's voice had come.
Doctor, an urgent situation has arisen in the central building.
The central building? They're all reveling out in the courtyard.
Ouyang Qiangang's eyes sharpened.
Three people are assaulting one. It appears to be a fiercely contested fight.
The distance from his position to the central building was a hundred-odd zhang. For Akasha — whose capabilities had leaped by orders of magnitude after the bloody battle with the Death Spirit Horse Corps — it was well within eavesdropping range.
Show me the feed.
Transmitting now.
A single crisp still image materialized before Ouyang Qiangang's eyes. It was a savage scene unfolding in a darkened room: two men and one woman — three in all — had surrounded a man who looked to be around thirty. The besieged man, gripping a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other, was resisting desperately, but the situation was hopeless.
While they hold their feast in the courtyard, this is what's happening inside...
As he studied the image, Ouyang Qiangang's eyes flared. The face of the man under assault and the face of one of his attackers were perfectly, flawlessly identical — down to the last hair.
No way...
The hunter's tale from the farmers' village, as Baek Mu-ok had told it, flashed through his mind. The scene witnessed at the abandoned shrine near Gusan Stronghold — the bizarre story of a face that had changed into another person's entirely between entering and leaving.
A human-skin mask... no, a transformation art subtler than that.
A wintry smile curved Ouyang Qiangang's lips. The massacre of the farmers' village, the unidentified ritual at the abandoned shrine, and now this grotesque tableau before his eyes. Nothing was clear yet — but one thing was certain: this was no ordinary affair.
Things are turning very interesting indeed.
A ruthlessly cold light seeped into Ouyang Qiangang's eyes.
Akasha — first, we save that man. I intend to ask them myself why they're doing this.
I concur, Doctor. However...
What is it?
The man under assault will be in critical danger very soon. His bleeding is worsening.
A deep furrow carved itself between Ouyang Qiangang's brows.
There was no time left to hesitate.