The Frozen Gate Breaks
Ju Pyo emerged from the shadows of the forest. As he stared down the direction in which Ouyang Qiangang and some five hundred pirates had vanished, worry clouded his face. But this was no time to be drowning in emotion. He had his own task to see to.
Flaring his light-foot art, Ju Pyo closed on the wooden cage beside the altar swift as the wind.
"Ugh..."
"...Hnngh."
The children caged within, terrified by his sudden appearance, shrieked and clung to one another. To them, this unknown figure was nothing more than another demon.
Crack!
With his bare hands, Ju Pyo snapped the solid wooden bars as easily as dry twigs. Then he spoke to the children in as gentle a voice as he could manage.
"Children, it's all right. This old man didn't come here to hurt you."
His gaze came to rest on a boy who, even in the midst of that terror, had gathered the younger children into his arms and was the only one meeting his eyes squarely.
"You look to be the eldest. What is your name?"
"...Du Jin-seong."
The boy answered, his voice shaking.
At that name, Ju Pyo's eyes lit up.
"A descendant of the Du Clan Manor?"
"...Yes."
"Thank the heavens. Your grandfather Du Jeong-gwang and I are sworn brothers."
Strength poured into Ju Pyo's voice as he went on.
"He is waiting for you at the bay even now. Can you look after the little ones and follow me?"
Du Jin-seong—a boy who had found hope in the depths of his fear—read nothing but honest sincerity in the old man's eyes. Biting his trembling lip, he nodded hard.
"Yes."
Entrusting the children to Du Jin-seong, Ju Pyo went to the twenty-odd women slumped around the altar, half-sunk in shock. Without a word, he removed his outer robe and covered the naked body of the woman nearest him.
"Pull yourselves together. It's over now. Get up, quickly, and follow me."
At the grave earnestness of his voice, the women began, one by one, to help each other painfully to their feet.
With the terror-stricken children and the gravely wounded women in tow, Ju Pyo left the ghastly altar behind and began guiding them out of the forest, toward the promised bay.
Ouyang Qiangang sprinted at full tilt, turning Blood Pearl Island's rugged terrain to his advantage.
"Doctor, swamp at your three o'clock! Cut left, into the rock field!"
Guided by Akasha's warning-laced directions, he ran, clearing by a hair's breadth the marsh where rotting gas hissed and burst. At his back, the pounding footfalls and war cries of hundreds of pirates hounded him like an army out of hell.
Ju Pyo led the thirty children and twenty women toward the dock where the boats lay at anchor. Thanks to Ouyang Qiangang luring the pirates away, no one barred their path—but it was far too early to relax. No one could say how the situation might turn.
Ju Pyo kept the pace up, endlessly soothing the children and the women. Du Jin-seong followed at his heels, propping up boys and girls on the verge of collapse and cheering the women onward. Each time Ju Pyo glanced back at him, a flicker of admiration crossed the old man's eyes.
"Doctor, Ju Pyo and the children should be reaching the bay about now."
At Akasha's report, Ouyang Qiangang halted. He had come to a stop at the lip of a sheer cliff, forty jang from crown to base. There was no longer any reason to flee—or any strength left to evade. His internal energy had bottomed out, and the cold of the Nine Yin Severed Meridians was freezing him to the marrow.
A dozen jang away, the pirates' eyes smoldered with fury, bloodlust, and madness.
Gazing at them, Qiangang murmured under his breath: Akasha, I'm going for the sea. Keep me alive.
"I will do my utmost, Doctor."
Without a flicker of hesitation, he threw himself from the cliff, plunging dozens of jang into the depths below.
Whoooosh!
The pirates could only stare blankly after him, like dogs that had lost sight of their chicken.
A grim stillness hung over the northern bay of Blood Pearl Island—the pirates' harbor. There, a single seized ship waited quietly in the darkness to make sail, Du Jeong-gwang and Geum Wang aboard.
Geum Wang, eyes fixed on the pirates' lair, gave a low cry—Skreee——as Ju Pyo came sprinting in with some fifty haggard figures behind him. Du Jeong-gwang rushed them aboard.
"Grandfather!"
The moment Du Jin-seong recognized his grandfather and ran to him, Du Jeong-gwang pulled him into a tearful embrace.
"Seong! You're safe. Thank heavens..."
All were aboard and the preparations complete, but Ju Pyo could only glance anxiously between the dark forest where Ouyang Qiangang had disappeared and the open sea.
"The Grand Young Master... he's still..."
Du Jeong-gwang, too, could not bring himself to order the ship out.
Just then Geum Wang, perched at the bow, loosed a sharp cry and jabbed a finger at the water close alongside the hull.
Skreeee!
Every eye turned. The black swell heaved once—and up from the water, with painful effort, rose Ouyang Qiangang's head. The human-skin mask had come away at some point, baring his true face: past pale, drained a corpse-like white. Worse, a film of frost had crystallized over his body, making the sight grotesque beyond describing.
He seemed to lack the strength even to leap aboard; he gasped in ragged breaths, barely keeping himself atop the water.
"My lord!"
The instant Ju Pyo shouted in shock, something moved faster than his cry. Geum Wang. The little fellow became a single streak of golden light and plunged without hesitation into the freezing sea. Then, clamping his teeth onto the collar of Qiangang's limp form, he exerted a strength impossible for so small a body and dragged him up onto the deck.
Ju Pyo steadied Ouyang Qiangang where he lay, drenched to the bone.
"...Well now. To look upon the Grand Young Master alive and breathing again. My thanks for keeping your word."
Leaning into the old man's supporting arm, Ouyang Qiangang smiled without strength.
"Set... sail... quickly."
With those last words, consciousness left him.
"Raise the anchor! We sail this instant!"
Du Jeong-gwang shouted the order to the boys. He himself, together with Ju Pyo and a dozen-odd boys in their mid-teens, seized the oars at once and began to pull. Children raised in the clans of Poyang learned the handling of boats and oars from their earliest years, heirs of great houses included—for every enterprise of their clans was bound up with the waterways.
The ship slid away from Blood Pearl Island—that island of hell—and glided out toward Poyang Lake. Far behind, the pirates belatedly grasped that their prey had escaped; bellowing, they swarmed up onto their ships to give chase. Fear clouded the faces of the rescued women and children once more.
But Du Jeong-gwang looked at them and smiled, wholly at ease.
"Rest easy, all of you. Those devils will not be following us."
Scarcely had he finished speaking when the dozens of pirate ships readying for pursuit began, strangely, to list to one side—and then, helplessly, to go under. In the space of a breath, the harbor dissolved into shrieking pandemonium. The holes Du Jeong-gwang and Geum Wang had bored through the bottom of every last hull were announcing themselves at last.
Three days later, in a detached hall of the Du Clan Manor, the chill of a midwinter morning hung in the great room. Du Jeong-gwang stood hands clasped behind his back, staring out at the desolate winter garden. Anxiety and restlessness were tangled in his eyes. Beside him, his son Du Wi-pyeong kept his lips sealed tight, fists clenching and unclenching as though his father's dread had caught like a fever. Unlike the two of them, Ju Pyo sat like a boulder, eyes closed, without the slightest stir. A heavy silence bore down on the room.
At last Du Jeong-gwang broke it, his voice cracked and raw.
"Brother... when do you think the Grand Young Master will wake from his coma? He faced five hundred pirates alone on Blood Pearl Island. He tore the children out of that hellish island. And yet he has not woken for this long... is he truly going to be all right...?"
He could not finish.
Ju Pyo opened his eyes. Not the faintest waver stirred in them.
"Worry no more. The Grand Young Master will shake this off and rise. He is not a man to be laid low by a trial of this measure."
Du Jeong-gwang took a moment's comfort in that certainty, but his anxious gaze kept drifting to the door behind which Ouyang Qiangang slept.
"Even so... if the worst should come to pass, our main house will never be able to hold its head up before the Ouyang Clan."
"Enough of this useless talk. Wait. The Grand Young Master will wake—I am certain of it."
But contrary to Ju Pyo's confidence, Ouyang Qiangang's condition was grim. By all rights, he should have died. The internal injuries from his final exchange with the Blood Spirit Human Demon had dealt lethal damage to his organs. More terrifying still was the extreme yin energy of the Nine Yin Severed Meridians, which had seized on the moment his internal energy ran dry to rampage like an unbridled colt. The horrific cold of the severed meridians was wrenching every meridian in his body out of true.
That he still breathed at all was thanks to a single strand of Tiger Heart True Qi, finer than a hair. That qi was, paradoxically, power absorbed and purified from the Blood Spirit Human Demon—the very man who had tried to kill him. Not yet fully fused into Ouyang Qiangang's own energy, it had lain dormant and faint between his meridians. But when its master stood at death's threshold, it had roused itself and was fighting desperately to keep his heart meridian from being sealed shut by the cold.
Akasha mobilized the full might of her computational power to guard the last ember of Ouyang Qiangang's life.
"Imminent cessation of function across all meridians. Life support systems: critical threshold reached."
The analysis was despair itself, but she refused to surrender.
"Searching for alternative pathways. Probability of harnessing the pure yang energy of the Ten-Thousand-Year Warm Jade in the Doctor's breast pocket as a power source: 1.3 percent."
The odds were vanishingly slim—but it was the only road left.
"Executing emergency protocol: 'Yang Synchronization.'"
Desperately, riding on the last thread of Tiger Heart True Qi, Akasha dispatched every nanobot she could spare to the pot-bellied Buddha statuette of Ten-Thousand-Year Warm Jade tucked in Ouyang Qiangang's breast pocket. The nanobots swarmed across the jade's surface and began drawing out the yang energy slumbering within.
"Yang energy extraction successful. Routing this energy directly into the Doctor's Transcendent Formless Divine Art continuous-circulation system to forcibly reactivate the stalled flow of qi."
In place of the unconscious man, Akasha took command of his body. The Warm Jade's gentle heat, ferried by the nanobots, flowed into his dantian, frozen stiff with cold. It served as the ignition spark for an engine—the Transcendent Formless Divine Art—that had all but died.
How much time passed?
Wooooom—!
As though fresh kindling had been cast upon a dying furnace, the energy of the Transcendent Formless Divine Art began once more to turn within his dantian—thread-fine, but turning.
Akasha did not let the opening slip away. Taking the purified energy absorbed from the Blood Spirit Human Demon, still lurking in wait, as her detonator, she honed the newly stirring current of true qi into a single spear, whetted razor-sharp. Then she drove that spear forward with painstaking care, toward the colossal gate of ice: the third great acupoint of the Nine Yin Severed Meridians, the barrier that had nailed his meridians shut.
KWAAAAAAANG—!
From deep within Ouyang Qiangang's body rolled a thunderous roar, as though some invisible colossal dam had come crashing down. His unconscious body heaved once, violently, atop the sickbed.
The spear of true qi and the fortress gate of frozen energy collided with savage force. Through the long battle of the two powers, swelling and contracting against each other, hairline cracks at last began to spiderweb across the ice gate.
Akasha poured every last erg of energy she could move into a single point of the great acupoint.
Krrrrk—CRACK—!
The cold energy that had been backing up like an unbridled colt now began to pour down the newly opened channel like a mighty river. The current of the Transcendent Formless Divine Art swelled far more torrential than before, shoving back the domain the Nine Yin Severed Meridians' cold had seized and claiming total command of the flow of true qi.
A warm flush began, ever so slowly, to steal into Ouyang Qiangang's ashen face. He had crossed the brink of death.
Geum Wang kept watch at the head of his bed for days on end, refusing all food and water, never stirring so much as an inch.