Natural Enemy 2
East Lake and countless other beautiful lakes glittered in the evening glow, while far beyond them the Yangtze wound its way past Wuhan.
Atop the highest pavilion in Wuhan, Hubei Province—the tallest and most beautiful hall in the city, which the righteous martial artists of the jianghu respectfully called the Heavenly Martial Pavilion—the Murim Alliance Leader, Fist Emperor Ju Joong-hak, gazed out at the Yangtze flowing with the dying sunset.
Born of the minor martial house of the Ju Family in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, he had polished a family art that could not match the great orthodox sects until he rose to the rank of one of the Three Emperors—a legendary figure. Now past sixty, he watched the river’s current and thought, Just as the rear waves of the Yangtze push the front waves onward, so it is time for me to step down from the Alliance Leader’s seat.
Neither of the Nine Great Sects nor the Seven Great Clans, he had still climbed from a small martial house by sheer skill. Fifteen years earlier, when the Blood Sect Blood Chaos had left the central plains in peril, he had risen in fury, earned brilliant merit, and been elevated to Alliance Leader. The time to retire had come.
While Ju Joong-hak gazed at the flowing Yangtze and resolved to return to his homeland, a maid’s voice reached the ear of the man lost in thought.
“Alliance Leader, I have brought tea.”
At the words, Ju Joong-hak turned his head toward the entrance.
“Very well. Come in.”
The woman who entered was a maid in her early twenties, newly assigned only a short while ago to the Alliance Leader’s chambers on the highest floor of the Heavenly Martial Pavilion. One of the long-serving personal attendants had returned home to nurse ailing parents, and this girl had been chosen in her place.
Clink.
“I have prepared West Mountain White Dew.”
“West Mountain White Dew?”
At the name, Ju Joong-hak’s brow twitched. West Mountain White Dew was a famous tea from West Mountain in Nanchang, Jiangxi—the very place where his ancestral house, the Ju Family, had once stood. The estate was now little more than ruins, but the tea still carried the scent of home.
He sometimes longed for the brew he had favored in his youth, yet he disliked appearing overly particular to those beneath him and usually contented himself with the ordinary Mengding tea or Fangshan Dew Buds served in the Alliance. To receive West Mountain White Dew precisely when old memories were stirring felt almost uncanny.
The moment he took the cup, memories of his younger days rose like the tea’s fragrance. As though she had read his heart, the maid had brought exactly this tea. Ju Joong-hak studied her face. Thick brows, refined eyes, the small mole at the corner of her mouth. He had never thought of it before, but with the aroma of the tea came the past, and he realized the face before him strongly recalled someone from long ago.
Now that I look… she truly does resemble her…
The woman who rose in his memory was none other than the wife he had lost thirty years earlier in the Blood Sect Blood Chaos—the woman who, even as she died in his arms, had begged him not to think of revenge and had fretted over him to the end.
Thump.
The instant he recognized it, a heart that had lain still for thirty years seemed to beat again. Yet his deep cultivation quickly stilled the surge.
It must simply be age…
He brushed the idle thought aside and was about to taste the West Mountain White Dew when a voice called from outside.
“Alliance Leader, it is Strategist Jegal Hu.”
The unexpected voice of the Murim Alliance’s military advisor made Ju Joong-hak glance out the window. The sun was already setting; this was the hour when everyone should have been retiring.
Outside, the last light was indeed nearly gone. Ju Joong-hak looked toward the door.
“What brings you at so late an hour? Enter.”
Jegal Hu hurried in, hastily cupping his fist in salute.
“Forgive the intrusion while you rest, Alliance Leader. A communication has arrived from the Sichuan Tang Family. I judged it best you hear it at once.”
“If the Strategist comes in haste, it must be important. Speak.”
That the Strategist would rush to him at such an hour meant there was good reason. Ju Joong-hak smiled. Jegal Hu bowed once more in apology and laid a letter upon the table. Then he delivered news that beggared belief.
“The Tang Family reports they have recovered the head of the Blood Hand Rakshasa, Tak Un-yang, along with the secret manual of the Blood Hand Poison Claw.”
“The Blood Hand Poison Claw!?”
Crack!
Splash…
At those words the teacup in Ju Joong-hak’s hand shattered, spilling tea across the table. The Blood Hand Poison Claw was a demonic art that had leaked from the Blood Sect—the very art that thirty years ago had driven countless righteous martial artists to their deaths. That its manual had at last been reclaimed shattered the Fist Emperor’s composure. He demanded of Jegal Hu in a voice raw with excitement,
“Where!? Where in the world did they recover it?”
The Blood Hand Poison Claw was the art that had stolen his wife’s life; he could not contain the emotion. Thirty years earlier, when the martial world had burned the Blood Sect’s stronghold, the place had already been empty. Somehow Tak Un-yang had obtained the manual twenty years ago and briefly thrown the jianghu into chaos, yet neither his head nor the manual had been secured at the time.
“After receiving a palm strike from the Ten-Thousand Poisons Divine Lord and falling from a cliff, he drifted to Hainan Island and had been living in seclusion there.”
“Hainan Island!?”
“Yes. I heard the full account from the messenger sent by the Sichuan Tang Family, so allow me to explain in detail. It proved a most entertaining tale—stories of a young hero and all manner of wondrous venomous creatures.”
“A young hero and venomous creatures?”
Having come only to report, the Strategist now settled in to continue. Ju Joong-hak found himself drawn completely into the tale. The welcome news of the Blood Hand Poison Claw’s recovery, and the story of the young hero who had slain Tak Un-yang, proved far more engrossing than even the adventures Ju Joong-hak himself had lived thirty years before.
“We shall have much to discuss. You may withdraw.”
“Yes, Alliance Leader.”
Smiling, the maid left the Alliance Leader’s study and made for her own quarters. Her room lay directly beneath the Alliance Leader’s chambers in the Heavenly Martial Pavilion. It was already the hour of rest; save for the sentries on duty, almost no one moved through the pavilion. She passed a warrior who had already tried to flirt with her twice and reached her room. The smile she had worn in the study was gone. With it went every trace of warmth. Stripped of the smile, her cold face looked almost eerie in the moonlight that poured through the open window.
She gazed outside and murmured words no one else would understand.
“The Blood Hand Poison Claw… Clearly of the Sect’s…”
Still wearing that frigid expression, she sat, drew out a sheet of paper, and—without brush, ink, or inkstone—began to write upon it.
Scratch, scratch.
Wherever her hand passed beneath the moonlight, crimson lines appeared. Anyone watching would have been startled: she was writing with blood drawn from her own fingertip. With the red blood flowing from her little finger she penned a few brief lines, then took an owl from the cage by the window and tied the blood-written letter to its leg.
Flutter.
A moment later the owl left her hand, crossed the night sky, and vanished into the darkness over Wuhan.
Five days had passed since Grandfather left to save the Provincial Governor of Sichuan.
“Here—push a little more energy down toward the feet…”
Clouds hid the moon, leaving the night darker than usual. Unable to sleep, I had lit lanterns in the training yard and was practicing lightness skill. Watching Father-in-law, Grandfather the Ten-Thousand Poisons Divine Lord, Noona, and the warriors use it so effortlessly, I had assumed it was easy. It was anything but.
Use too much internal energy and you gain speed but burn out quickly; use too little and you last longer yet crawl. The real art was distributing your power properly. Sprint after an enemy only to run dry and you would be dead meat in seconds. Even more critical were rhythm and timing. Infinite reserves might change things, but with lightness skill the keys were efficiency and timing. You had to push energy through the tip of the foot exactly when you planted and pushed off. Miss the beat—like failing a rhythm game—and your step tangled and you went sprawling.
It really did feel like those arcade rhythm games from my previous life. I had played a few times back then; without that experience I probably would have suffered a lot more, but I picked up the feel quickly. Similar memories helped.
Still… the people who ran for days on end without a single misstep—are they even human?
The moment I began learning lightness skill, my respect for Noona shot through the roof. Running for days with almost no sleep, like a nonstop marathon of perfect greats on every chart of a rhythm game—that was exactly what she had done.
I was thinking how incredible she was, circling the training yard for the second time in the cool night air, when her voice—decidedly not a gentleman’s—called from the entrance.
“So-ryong?”
“Miss Hwa-eun!? Uh—uh… uh…”
Her voice wrecked my rhythm. I missed the impact window completely. My body should have gone forward; instead it launched upward and then slammed straight down.
Thud.
“Aigoo…”
My whole body rang against the stone. Internal energy protected me from real injury, but the shock was still substantial. I curled up and rolled once. Her worried voice reached me.
“So-ryong, are you all right?”
I lifted my head. In the darkness her face looked down at me with open concern.
“Yes, I—I’m fine. Ow, ow…”
I scrambled up, dusted myself off, and tried to look unhurt. She asked what on earth I was doing alone in the training yard at this hour.
“What were you doing out here so late?”
“Ah, just thought I’d practice a bit of lightness skill… It wasn’t coming together well during the day.”
Her eyes widened. With the lanterns behind her I couldn’t see her expression, but her voice held a hint of shy embarrassment.
“Ah… so even this late at night you’re practicing… to keep your promise…”
“Yeah, well…”
“…”
My answer left the air awkward. Neither of us knew what to say next. She quickly recovered by asking about the technique itself.
“R-right. Which part was giving you trouble?”
Nice recovery.
I silently praised her quick thinking and answered at once.
“Ah, having to push internal energy exactly when my foot lands keeps tripping me up. One miss and everything tangles…”
“Ah, so you’ve been trying to keep every step the same length?”
“Isn’t that how it works?”
I had assumed running meant a steady, even impact. She shook her head.
“We’re only human—that way is bound to go wrong. In my case I picture a song. I match my steps to the melody—sometimes long and swaying, sometimes short. There are times you need a long stride and times you need a short one, right?”
Ohhh. Right—you hit the buttons to the chart; you don’t force the chart to match the buttons.
Her tip sparked something. I immediately launched into lightness skill to the first tune that came to mind.
Tap. Ta-tap. Tap. Ta-da-dak.
“Like this?”
I circled the yard once and returned to her. She nodded.
“Yes, So-ryong, you catch on remarkably well. Hmm… but…”
The technique itself had been perfect, yet she trailed off with a faintly dissatisfied look. I tilted my head.
“But what?”
“No, it’s just… whatever song you were thinking of… it felt a little… frivolous, I suppose…”
So my lightness skill had come out a bit flashy. A club dance track had popped into my head and I had followed it; that would explain the impression.
Does she have perfect rhythm sense? She’s terrifying.
I was considering trying something more classical when a deep buzzing rose from nearby.
Bwoooom, bwoom.
The Golden-Furred Bee Kings that nested in the training yard were beating their wings. They should have been asleep at this hour—strange.
“Kyaaaaah!”
A scream tore through the cold night air. Moments later warning horns blared inside the estate, and warriors’ voices rang out announcing an intruder.
Weee! Weee!
“Intruder! Intruder! Intruder near the training yard!”
Noona and I locked eyes, then immediately shot forward with lightness skill toward the Golden-Furred Bee Kings’ nest. Someone had broken into the house.
If they get caught this won’t end well for them. Those thieves have some serious guts.