The Withered Bamboo Forest
“What the—?”
Mujin’s eyes went wide as he whipped his head left and right.
Gone. Just like that.
Jegal Mun-Hyeon had been standing right in front of him a moment ago—and then, with a soft, almost liquid blur, his figure had simply vanished into nothing.
Mujin hadn’t blinked. He hadn’t looked away. So how in the world had this happened?
He gave chase at once, but Mun-Hyeon was nowhere to be found.
When a person runs headlong into something that exceeds the limits of thought, the first thing that takes root is unease. And unease, left to itself, becomes fear.
Ssshhhk.
The wind dragged across the bamboo leaves and set them whispering in a cold, desolate voice. Goosebumps prickled up Mujin’s arms.
He swallowed hard and called out, his face tight with tension.
“Y-Young Master, stop fooling around!”
He forced a smile into his voice and shouted carefully into the trees.
Ssshhhhhh…
As if mocking him, the wind only rose harder, making the forest sound even more haunted.
The chill crawled over his whole body.
“Young Master! Come on, cut it out already! I hate this kind of joke!”
He shouted again, louder—but the only answer was that same unlucky, rustling whisper.
“A-Are you really going to do this? You think I can’t find you?”
Mujin kept telling himself Mun-Hyeon was only playing a prank. But the longer he waited, the more fear crept into his heart.
One ke, two ke…
The longer the silence stretched, the deeper the anxiety took hold.
He should have come out by now.
He isn’t the type to pull a joke like this…
A grown man hiding in a bamboo forest playing peekaboo? Impossible.
Wait—what if it’s a formation?
No. That couldn’t be it.
Who was Jegal Mun-Hyeon? The man who had broken through the Eight Trigrams array laid over Hyeoncheonja’s hidden cave—an array that generations of martial artists had failed to crack. Even the Jegal clan’s own people said it took anywhere from a month to over a year. He had walked in overnight and come out carrying the Azure Yang Sword and Hyeoncheon the Founder’s remains.
There was no way a formation had trapped him.
Then what?
“A g-gho—”
Mujin couldn’t finish the word.
It felt like something he should not say out loud.
Didn’t the old stories claim that once they knew you had noticed them, they only grew more vicious?
The innkeeper had said so. All those wild tales that drifted down from the shores of Dongho.
Jade flutes. Will-o’-the-wisps. A bamboo forest that spoke…
And here he was, standing in that very forest.
And what, the man had said, became of those who fell for the legends?
They were bewitched. And they died.
A great demon more powerful or more cruel than himself did not frighten Mujin. Ghosts did.
He carefully felt along his belt and drew out a small hand-mirror of bronze.
A Bright Mirror.
The Wudang Sect was famous as a martial school, but at its root it was a Taoist order, and its disciples were steeped in the arts of the occult. Driving off spirits was part of that work.
A Bright Mirror was said to force a ghost to look upon its own face—and flee in terror.
In his other hand he held a talisman drawn in luminous cinnabar on paper dyed yellow with Japanese pagoda-tree fruit.
A Body-Protecting Talisman.
Any Taoist who had properly inherited a true lineage carried one. Learning to write talismans was among the first things they were taught.
“O Nine Heavens Responsive Origin Thunder-Sound Universal Transformation Heavenly Worthy—shatter all evil with the voice of thunder, part the darkness with the light of lightning, and by the power of light banish every unclean spirit and ghost that lingers in this place. Let ten thousand evils be extinguished, and pure vital essence fill the world… Muryangsubul. Muryangsubul.”
Only after chanting the warding prayer with all his heart did Mujin feel his nerves settle. Then, still wary, he began to search the bamboo for Jegal Mun-Hyeon.
“Young Maaster…”
In the tiniest of whispers.
Very carefully.
“Young Master, where are you?”
How long had he been walking?
He was still picking his way forward with the utmost care when it happened.
Tuk. Tutuk.
Tiny sounds rose from every direction at once. Mujin flinched and spun around, eyes round.
And then—
“The leaves…?”
The bamboo leaves were yellowing, withering, falling. And in every place they dropped, pale barley-colored flowers bloomed like sudden grain.
The green vanished. In a single breath the whole world turned gold. The sight was so overwhelming that Mujin forgot he had ever been afraid; he simply stood there staring, blank-faced, at the flowers.
It was magnificent.
Simultaneous Bloom.
In the span of a few blinks, the entire forest had changed.
“What on earth…?”
A wonder he had never seen in his life left him reeling.
But the flowers that had just reached full bloom withered just as fast. They lost the strength to cling to their stems and scattered on the wind.
A storm of petals.
Caught by that brief, dazzling grandeur, Mujin stood frozen, vacant-eyed.
And once every flower had fallen, the bamboo began to die as if it had finally fulfilled a lifelong vow.
Tutuk. Crrrack!
It withered, split, and toppled.
That short moment of flowers might as well have been an illusion—or the last flare of life before death, a final surge of borrowed vitality, the hui-guang-fan-zhao.
Splendid. And merciless.
A nameless sorrow and pity rose in him. Without thinking, Mujin murmured the Taoist blessing.
“Muryangsubul…”
He was still watching the bamboo shatter with a dry crackle and a rain of debris when it happened.
Just as suddenly as he had vanished, Jegal Mun-Hyeon appeared before him.
It felt as if a single transparent veil had melted away and revealed the world on the other side.
“Y-Young Master!”
Mujin ran toward him as if greeting a sworn brother after decades apart—though they had only been separated for a short while.
Then he stopped short.
Seated in the middle of the dead bamboo forest, Jegal Mun-Hyeon looked terrible. His teeth were clenched. His brows were furrowed into deep trenches. His complexion shifted by the second, and his whole body was soaked in sweat. Something had clearly gone very, very wrong.
And then—
“M-Muryangsubul.”
What in heaven’s name was that?
Where the bamboo had died and the roots had been torn free, something lay exposed.
Bones.
The tiny bones of an infant so young its skeleton had barely hardened.
The roots wound around them as if they were one and the same—as if the child itself had been the fertilizer that fed the bamboo.
Cognitive dissonance snapped into rage.
“T-This is monstrous!”
That once-brilliant green had become a vision of hell. Mujin could not hide the devastation on his face.
What had happened in this place?
What in the world…
And why was Jegal Mun-Hyeon…
But before he could find answers, there was something more urgent: protecting Mun-Hyeon from whatever external energy was working on him.
The man of old has ridden the yellow crane and gone;
Only Yellow Crane Tower remains in this empty place.
The yellow crane, once departed, returns no more;
White clouds drift alone through a thousand years.
By the clear river, Hanyang’s trees stand bright;
On Parrot Isle the fragrant grasses grow thick.
At dusk, where is my homeland?
Mist rises over the river and sinks the heart in sorrow.
So someone once rendered the legend that has been told for ages at Wuhan’s Yellow Crane Tower—one of the Three Great Towers of the South.
The legend of the yellow crane and the immortal.
Some say the tale was born because the view from that tower looks like the immortal realm itself. Others claim it was the lived experience of the man who first built the place.
In the end, the world dismisses it as legend.
They are wrong.
It really happened.
A very long time ago…
And after the immortal departed, another took his place. His name was Geumri.
He settled on a nameless little island in Dongho and practiced the art of pill refinement in pursuit of immortality.
Taoist fools believed that if you boiled spiritual herbs to death through nine successive transmissions you could make an Immortal Pill—but that was only one method of the craft.
There was another path in the art of pill refinement: the Nine Yin Human Pill Art.
The method of refining people into elixir.
That process was called the Young Fetal Treasure Fruit—selecting only those newborn infants rich in spiritual energy, using them as fertilizer, and growing the spirit fruit that would become the material for the pill.
Geumri had lived by Dongho for a long time, raising those spirit fruits.
Bamboo, seeded with a child of spiritual destiny and grown in a place thick with yin energy.
Through the Young Fetal Treasure Fruit, the long bamboo would bear fruit; from that fruit he would craft the pill.
And then he would ascend to the half-immortal realm.
How long had he waited for this moment?
After years of labor, the harvest was finally at hand.
Geumri set out, as he did every day, to look over the precious bamboo he had tended so carefully.
Plenty of people crossed Dongho, and from time to time some even wandered the bamboo forest for pleasure—but he had never needed to worry.
The forest he had made was sealed behind a barrier. Anyone who had not opened the Yeong-an—the Spiritual Eye—could not even see it.
And yet.
“……”
When Geumri reached the edge of the bamboo, his face turned to stone.
The bamboo…
Bamboo he had cultivated for a full hundred years—every last stalk—had withered and died.
He had checked it the day before yesterday. He had checked it yesterday. He had known the time was near. So how had this happened?
Could it be?
Had some other immortal coveted his work?
No. Impossible.
The Young Fetal Treasure Fruit was only a stage for producing pill materials; it was useless to anyone who had already become an immortal.
Then—another cultivator like himself?
That was the likeliest guess.
Without the Spiritual Eye, no one could even have entered the forest he had made.
Grrrind.
His teeth clenched. His face twisted into something monstrous.
The power that surged up through him turned vicious and spilled in every direction.
Waves shoved against the water’s edge where his feet stood. The ground cracked open in a spiderweb of fissures.
“Which bastard….”
Rage flooded him to the crown of his head. When Geumri stepped forward, the earth boomed and shuddered, and his figure shot toward the bamboo forest.
Every stride left footprints deep enough to swallow an ankle; he skidded forward by the jang, racing through the dead trees.
“I’ll kill him.”
Whoever had swallowed the fruit of a hundred years of his labor—he would tear that creature to shreds and drink even the blood steeped in its spiritual energy.
Mujin kept watch on their surroundings, worry written across his face.
His mind was still a mess.
Who could have committed something this appalling?
Raising bamboo on infants…
It was a crime that would make heaven and earth cry out in fury—an atrocity without precedent in all of history.
But then why had Jegal Mun-Hyeon set foot in this place and begun circulating his energy in such agony? Did it have something to do with the golden light his weapon had given off?
He had no way of knowing what had happened, and the frustration only kept mounting—when the back of his neck went cold.
“What is this…?”
Something was coming. Fast.
The aura was so ominous he had to swallow hard just to keep from choking on it.
And then—
“Hah… hah…”
A middle-aged man appeared, breathing hard as if he had run the whole way.
Bloodshot eyes.
An enormous wave of malevolent qi shimmering around his body like heat haze.
He rolled his widened eyes over the clearing, then fixed them on the seated Jegal Mun-Hyeon.
“That’s him.”
“……?”
“That one ate it. The thing I spent a hundred years making—that damned wretch!”
Mujin could not make sense of the man’s words.
But the killing intent the stranger was pouring toward Mun-Hyeon taught him one thing for certain.
This man was the forest’s master.
And—
“It was you. You’re the one who turned this place into hell.”
Mujin’s eyes went cold.
The emotion that sank through him froze deep in his heart and woke the power of the Gwanghongyeol. His hair stirred. Eyes like polished obsidian came into view.
He tucked the Bright Mirror and the Body-Protecting Talisman away and drew his sword.
He would not ask.
He would not wait for an answer.
No matter who the man was. No matter how strong.
Even if his own blade never reached him.
A Taoist raised in the way of the righteous was bound by duty to punish evil.