Even If It Means Becoming a Shura
“…Who… are you?”
It was a man with a half-bald head.
He had a gentle look about him. A middle-aged man with reddish skin, thick eyebrows, and a protruding belly. In his hand he held a broom.
“You’re asking who I am?”
Parting the folds of his old, tattered martial uniform, he stretched a hand toward me.
“Can’t you tell just by looking? I’m just an ordinary caretaker looking after this temple.”
“…You know me?”
“No.”
“But you said you were waiting for me.”
The man wore a smile of indeterminate meaning.
“Well now, I wonder why those words came out.”
I knew this feeling. Instinct told me that trading words with him would put me at a loss.
“I’ll cut to the chase and make one request.”
The strange sense of wrongness made me tense without realizing it; my voice cracked.
“May I use the pond in the temple courtyard?”
The man nodded readily.
“No problem.”
“Thank you.”
“For what purpose?”
“The purpose is…”
“To detoxify the egg of the Snowman-Faced Spider, I presume?”
He spoke without the slightest shift in his smiling expression.
“…!”
My eyes changed. At that single phrase, dozens of thoughts flashed through my mind at once.
The man continued.
“Foolish. A great mountain fire is raging right now, and you mean to fight it with a single bucket of water?”
“Mountain fire…?”
I ran through every possibility I could conceive. The most fundamental question first: enemy, or ally? From there I traced every doubt, all the way to How did he know that?
“If your foremost goal is, ‘just as you have always done until now,’ simply to live—”
The middle-aged man lifted a short, thick finger and pointed at my toes.
“—how about taking one more step inward from there first?”
I looked down at the ground, then raised my head.
The fog had not simply cleared. Up to the place where I stood the mist still hung thick; only the ground immediately before the temple, centered on the building itself, lay clear of it.
“Th-this is…”
As cleanly as a knife slicing tofu, one side remained densely packed with fog while the other was pure and open.
“In life, there are times—”
The man smiled, turning the expression this way and that.
“—when a single immediate action matters more than a hundred thoughts.”
“…I’ll ask once more.”
I lifted my black eyes and met the middle-aged man’s gaze.
“Who are you?”
He clicked his tongue.
“Someone who will give answers to the questions you carry. Is that enough? Whether you come in or not is your freedom. But I guarantee you this—”
He furrowed his brows and wagged a finger.
“If you keep standing there like that, within one shichen your limbs will be torn off and you’ll die. Can’t you see the reaper flickering at the nape of your neck?”
“….”
“I ‘can’t see blood,’ so if you’re going to die, make sure you go far away to do it.”
The middle-aged man waved a dismissive hand, spun on his heel, and walked off. He passed through the half-collapsed temple gate and vanished.
“….”
There was no real choice. I took one step from the fog-shrouded ground onto the clear earth beyond it.
He treated me as though I had always lived here and had merely stepped out for a short while before returning. I changed into the comfortable clothes he handed me. The outer walls looked like a collapsing ruin, yet the temple within was clean. Aside from this man, no one else was present.
-Trickle, trickle.
Off to one side, the egg of the Snowman-Faced Spider lay soaking in cold water that flowed down from the mountain peak.
I ate the food he set before me: five kinds of mountain greens and barley rice. The chopsticks were moldy wooden ones already half-rotted. One action flowed seamlessly into the next as he issued instructions.
“You’ve eaten, so you should work off the meal, yes?”
When I next came to myself, I was chopping firewood.
“What is this…?”
“Finished? If you’re done, let’s go fishing.”
“A man who tends a temple speaking of killing—of fishing…?”
He had not shaved his head, so he was no monk. Holding a fishing basket, he laughed with a soft heh-heh.
“I literally only guard and manage the place. Even if I tried to take refuge in Buddhist doctrine, I couldn’t. It simply doesn’t suit my nature. Especially—”
He smacked his lips.
“—when it comes to the matter of killing.”
A white butterfly drifted past my eyes.
-Kii-kii-kii-kii……
The cry of cicadas that should not have been audible rose faintly from far off in the winter sky and then faded. My unfocused gaze sharpened. My senses grew razor-keen.
Sensing the change in my expression, the middle-aged man gave a short snort of laughter.
“So, are you coming?”
He shook the fishing basket in front of me once more.
-Plop.
The lake lay below the cliff behind the temple. I cast a float fashioned from trimmed reeds. I had never fished in my life. I sat blankly beside him.
“My only hobby here is fishing. There’s nothing else to do.”
“….”
“Still, it’s nice sometimes. Clears the head. It’s rather contradictory, isn’t it—that a being capable of thought must perform some action in order to forget thought. You’re the sort who thinks a great deal ordinarily, aren’t you?”
He spoke as though he knew everything about me.
“…Yes.”
I answered in a hoarse voice.
It was as if every living thing in the world had died. Not even the common chirp of insects or mountain birds reached the ear. The fog-veiled lake held not a single ripple. No wind stirred. It was a perfectly dead world.
-Whooosh.
The only movement was the quiet sound of the breeze and the water-mist drifting slowly past my eyes.
“What is your name?”
“No learning ability at all.”
-Whizz.
The middle-aged man rolled up the sleeves of his worn clothes and pulled on the rod. An empty hook rose from the water.
“‘Here’ is not a place for asking names. And honestly, with only you and me present, is a name even necessary? When you truly need to call someone there are plenty of substitutes—‘Hey there,’ ‘Over here,’ ‘Elder.’”
“…Then I’ll change the question. Do you know about me?”
He pursed his lips, fiddled with the hook, and cast again.
“I know as much as others know. That’s why you made it this far. In that spirit, let me ask you something. You must have many questions. Yet the privilege of asking every curiosity and having it resolved is a privilege granted to children—not to an adult like you who already lives in ‘reality.’ Am I wrong?”
His eyes were ash-gray. Wearing an endlessly benevolent smile, he spoke.
“What is the answer you need most at this very moment? From now on I will hear exactly one question.”
At the end of those words he whispered,
“Make your next choice ve-ry carefully.”
The fog stopped. The wind stopped. The world stopped. Even breathing stopped.
The answer I need most…?
Countless thoughts raced through my mind. The question that had pursued me my entire life. The thing I wanted.
-Crack.
I remembered wailing beside my mother’s frozen corpse. I recalled being beaten with a broken sword and driven out under an expulsion order.
“I… I…”
Even when others mocked and slandered me, I had pretended not to hear while listening all the same. Even when I was ignored as a bastard and blocked by a background and status I could do nothing about—receiving a disregard that was not quite open contempt—I had tried to endure.
I looked at the middle-aged man. He watched me with that same gentle smile, as though he already knew everything.
“I want to become strong.”
My voice had gone hoarse; I spoke in a low, almost wailing tone.
“Truly—so that I need never bow my head to anyone, not to a single soul.”
I did not know why tears suddenly rose. Resentment had built up. It had built up terribly.
“Without ever having to make a pitiful voice.”
It was not simply a matter of winning or losing. Even though I understood that right now, because I was still lacking, it was wise to bow my head rationally—
“So that I can carry my will through to the end.”
Pride being broken. That feeling of myself being gnawed away. That feeling of living with my head lowered under the excuse that endurance is what makes an adult.
“Not a strength that is only flashy on the outside—I want to become truly strong.”
“Even if that means becoming a Shura?”
The question was familiar, endlessly similar. It was almost identical to the question I had heard the first time I bit into the Heavenly Demon Jade. And this time, too, my answer was the same.
“Even if that means becoming a Shura.”
The man stared at me for a long while without speaking, eyes boring into mine.
“There’s something I haven’t told you.”
He spoke while gazing at the lake.
“No living creature dwells in this lake.”
“What?”
“That is why the question you asked before setting out had no meaning from the very beginning. More than that—although I am not a body that has taken refuge in the Buddha—”
The middle-aged man rose, dusting off his seat. His protruding belly jiggled.
“—in a certain sense I ‘cannot see blood,’ so I must not take life. From the start, even if I fish, catching and killing fish is forbidden to me.”
The same words, yet the meaning was subtly different.
“Do you know the saying? Through a lifetime of resentment building up, of nails being driven into the chest and calluses forming layer upon layer, a person can finally derive a single ultimate question. Seeking the answer to that question is life itself, and the color of a person’s life is decided by what that question and its answer turn out to be.”
In some lights he looked middle-aged; in others he seemed an elderly man. Everything about him was ambiguous. Sparse white hairs dotted his half-bald scalp, and deep wrinkles marked his face. Yet that face was always full of nothing but a gentle smile and soft cheeks.
“Those who have never once derived an ultimate question that ‘can be summarized in a single sentence,’ and who have never even felt the need, have—regardless of age—simply not yet endured that much hardship. Such people can never understand the journey of asking and seeking. And someday they will pay the price for it. This world—”
He reeled in the fishing rod.
“—is not so easygoing that it will leave the sheep endlessly, thoughtlessly, peacefully grazing on the plain.”
Gathering the bamboo rod, the chair, and the basket, he said,
“It will take a short two months to a long three months for the toxicity in the Snowman-Faced Spider’s egg to be completely washed out by the water and drained away.”
“At least two to three months… then—”
My pupils dilated. I opened my mouth to speak.
“If you leave now, you will die.”
He cut me off with a single stroke.
“Die?”
“It was an instant. If you had not stepped inside just now, you would certainly have met that existence.”
“That existence meaning—”
He pointed far off, toward the world beyond the fog where nothing could be seen.
“Right now it has followed your traces this far, lost them, and is wandering nearby. You have no choice. And do not worry about time. There is a saying in the world, is there not?”
He smiled, turning the expression this way and that, and gestured at the empty air.
“‘The reason immortals live long is that the flow of time in the immortal realm and the human realm differs.’ Heh-heh. Quite an amusing saying.”
He gave a short laugh from within the fog.
“I will answer that earnest question of yours—the question you derived at the end of your desperate life. Ah, and—”
With his jiggling belly he laughed cheerfully and pointed at me.
“I like that saying too.”
“What?”
He tapped the tip of my nose.
“A person lives only the life they themselves have drawn. Nothing more, nothing less. Is there any sentence that is at times more powerful than any other, yet terrifyingly cold, rational, and chilling? I do not believe so.”
“……”
This man knew everything. Just like Mara Jin. Just like the Heavenly Blood Demon.
“In fact, it is also because of that saying that I rose. Because—”
He patted his protruding belly.
“—I myself have lived a life that is that saying itself.”
In a place where every sound of the world had been erased, in a world blanketed by fog, only he and I were speaking. Standing between dream and reality, I had overlooked an important fact.
From some point onward, Mumyeong’s voice had not been heard at all.