My Name Is Moyong Bi
“Hah!”
The moment I opened my eyes, a pure white world filled my vision.
A blue sky stretched overhead.
A familiar world.
A world I hated more than I could put into words.
Beside me, a black dog sat quietly. Its red eyes left the strongest impression.
“Your name?”
the black dog asked.
The obvious question of how a dog could speak never even crossed my mind. As if it had always been this way, I answered in a daze.
“I am…”
Something strange was happening. At first it had felt wrapped in fog. I thought I would never be able to think of it again. But at some point, with a sensation like every last scrap of mist being washed away, the answer came without difficulty.
“Moyong Bi.”
The black dog nodded.
“Good. The rest of the questions would be meaningless. Knowing the name is enough.”
A moment later the black dog muttered again.
“While I was sleeping… so that is what happened.”
It fell silent for a long while, then opened its mouth once more.
“Still. Well. It’s fine. In the end, it worked out as a gain.”
I shook the snow from my eyes and stood. It was a winter plain blanketed in white snow steeped in love and hatred.
I wonder when he will come.
Beside me, Mother was gazing toward the distant horizon the same way she always did.
White breath rose from the black dog’s muzzle. This freezing field should have been cold.
“I’m not cold,” I murmured. “Why?”
“Because there has been a change,” the black dog continued. “In the host’s mind, and in the body as well.”
Suddenly I realized something odd. Looking at the black dog that was both familiar and strange, I tilted my head.
“Have I seen you before? Why do you feel so familiar?”
“….”
“But… but you know…”
In my child’s form I looked up at the black dog.
“Were you always this big?”
Staring at it, I somehow recalled a version of it that had been a little smaller than me. The black dog before my eyes boasted a massive frame. Even seated with its legs drawn together, it looked quietly down at me from above.
Calling it a dog was only a guess. I could not tell whether it was a dog or a wolf. No—the longer I looked, the stranger it became. It was like a single rippling shadow. I could not tell where the black dog’s fur ended and empty air began.
“Host,” the black dog said. “For me, survival is always the highest priority.”
“….”
A pure white room. It was hard even to register when I had opened my eyes. At some point I was simply lying there, staring blankly up at the white ceiling.
Thock.
A clear water sound, and the bamboo waterwheel in the pond tipped over.
“This is…”
I thought I had spoken, but no voice came out.
Dream? Or waking?
“I am…”
There had been a time when Mumyeong had advised me about my condition. The sequence I had to follow whenever I lost consciousness. First, try to recall my name. Next, my identity. Then think of what I held most precious.
For a long while it had not come naturally. Mumyeong made a habit of asking me every morning when I woke, drilling it into my body. It was because of the side effects. Reality was merciless to a fault. At times it seemed sweet, yet it was always cold. There was never a one-sided reward without a price.
The power of the Heavenly Demon granted to me one day was a vast enough ability to mark a turning point in my life. I still did not know what it truly was. I did not know the exact principle either. Before that—whether it was martial arts, demonic arts, or sorcery—something was happening in my own body, and I knew nothing about the phenomenon with a carelessness that bordered on irresponsible.
I took another person’s martial arts received through my eyes, spent a certain amount of time, and copied them exactly as they were. The process did not merely copy simple techniques. It brought over everything bound up in those arts: the subject’s sensations, emotions, past experiences—all of it. I might not remember or consciously recognize every piece, but all of it was clearly alive and breathing beneath my unconscious. For all I knew, it might already be influencing my personality and values without my noticing.
In a way it was an absurd ability that tore off a fragment of another person’s life and grafted it onto me. So the more I used the Heavenly Demon’s power, the more overload piled on, the more my brain died—perhaps that was only the natural result.
It was not as if I had simply sat back and done nothing. I tried to restrain myself as much as possible, and through thorough internalization of the arts I worked not to rely on the Heavenly Demon’s power.
Crack.
That unpleasantly alien sensation of glass shattering showed no sign of stopping. Still lying down, I swallowed dryly.
Thock.
Again the clear water sound, and the bamboo waterwheel in the pond rang out its pure note.
I closed my eyes. Breathing slowly, I reviewed. I told myself I could do this.
First of all, I recalled my name.
My name is…
My name is…
—That this seat would help a man from a filthy Demonic Cult like that…!
With crimson twilight behind her, she had stood before me. Close enough that our noses nearly touched.
—Don’t die! Hold on! Moyong Bi!
A woman with silver eyes flung wide had shouted my name with everything she had.
“Ah.”
I remembered my name.
As if hauling up a single fragment from the abyss of death, I remembered my name. The name spoken in that clear, ringing voice—the woman who had always referred to me with the utterly foreign word “commoner”—had felt so strange for only a moment, and then the fog in my head cleared all at once.
…
A regular sound of breathing reached me. It was not my own. I turned my head to the side.
“….”
Silver hair spilled to one side. The Guardian of the Mount Hua Sect was sleeping soundly beneath the warm sunlight by the window.
It was a chair that allowed one to half-recline. It had endured long years, worn and faded, polished smooth by the touch of hands. Clearly a chair that had been carefully tended.
Flutter.
Spring wind through the window stirred the pages of a book and turned them. She must have fallen asleep reading; an open book rested on her lap.
This was the woman who normally went about with blades of steel bound beneath the martial robes that wrapped her body. She slept so still in the spring sunlight that she might have been dead. If not for the gentle rise and fall of her half-loosened chest, the misunderstanding would have been complete.
A soft spring breeze blew. The wind crossed the windowsill, passed through her silver hair, and reached even me where I lay on the bed. What came through my nose was the scent of a woman’s skin, and the smell of sunlight—as if the cloth had been starched stiff, freshly washed, and hung out to dry.
My dry lips moved.
I survived.
Afraid she might wake, I carefully raised my upper body and looked around. It was a room I had never seen. Extremely spacious, and everything was white. Orderly. Cleaned and arranged so thoroughly that not a speck of dust remained.
Landscape paintings with a faded, ageless feel hung in a row along the pure white walls. One showed a solitary pine growing from a cliff. Another, bamboo. Another, plum blossoms in full, brilliant bloom. There were paintings of sunset, of the sea, of a lake. Beneath them, old porcelain so worn it was hard to guess the years was displayed with meticulous care.
With gratitude for the Guardian’s grace.
Below that, on brown paper where the ink had nearly all been bleached away by sunlight until it was faint, crooked characters had been written.
Thock.
The clear water sound again, and the bamboo waterwheel in the pond poured out its stream. Spring sunlight slanted into the half-open wardrobe. Martial robes I assumed were hers stirred in the spring breeze.
“You are awake.”
If not for her voice, I might have thought this place another world entirely, like Maseonrim. That was how endlessly quiet and still this place was.
“Your condition looks fine. It was certainly a gamble, yet…”
Her red lips moved. She rubbed her eyes and sat up.
“I must have been exhausted as well. To miss even the presence of one who has risen.”
The only people in this closed room were her and me. She was clearly looking at me and speaking to me, yet it lacked any sense of reality. Even a single movement carried dignity; she seemed to live in another world, on a higher plane. The figure watching me under the golden spring sunlight felt that far removed from this reality.
“…Moyong Bi?”
“….”
Her silver eyes narrowed, and her brow furrowed.
“I’m listening, Eun Seollyeong.”
I spoke her true name, yet it felt endlessly foreign. Until not long ago I had been crawling through the bottom of the capital, and she remembered my name and called it. The woman before me was no ordinary martial artist. She belonged to the Mount Hua Sect, one of the ten great powers of the jianghu counted among the Nine Sects and One Gang, a name of high renown—and within that Mount Hua Sect she was the Guardian, a figure revered as legendary.
Rustle.
With the faint sound of fabric sliding, she rose from the chair. In a dry voice I said,
“Is this… Eun Seollyeong’s room?”
“It is this seat’s room. And now that I think of it, to speak honestly…”
She looked around the room and smiled faintly. It was the first smile of hers I had ever seen.
“Seeing you lying on my bed, even I was startled for a very brief moment.”
“Startled?”
“Well, it is the first time an outsider has entered even this private space. And a strange man lying on my bed, at that.”
I looked down at the blanket covering me. Only then did I notice. Scattered across the white coverlet were strands of silver hair. The blanket I was under carried her scent.
“….”
I swallowed. In a situation like this, any man who failed to tense up was no man at all.
Eun Seollyeong spoke calmly.
“Do you remember what I said last time?”
“What?”
“That I entered the Mount Hua Sect at a young age, devoted my fate to the path of the sword, and so matters of male and female flesh and the finer details of that sort do not particularly concern me—so there is no need to worry about it.”
I remembered. It must have been during the first punitive trial. While I was searching for the Sacred Lotus Flower, she had found something odd about the trial’s difficulty and demanded the paper that listed the contents of the trial I had received. Analyzing everything from the handwriting to the paper itself, she had shared her thoughts with me—and then pressed her nose to the sheet that had touched my skin, trying to gather additional information from the scent.
Back then, for certain…
The words just now were exactly what she had said to me when I had been flustered at the time. I grew uneasy for no good reason.
“I-I remember. But why bring that up?”
“I mentioned it in advance before raising the subject, in case you would be flustered.”
“Me, flustered?”
She pointed with a finger.
“…?”
I looked down. Beneath the white blanket I was naked. The cover that had slipped as I sat up was draped across my hips, on the verge of revealing everything below.
“Ah.”
I could not stop my mind from going pure white. I had no idea what to say. “I moved in surprise” would have required a moderate level of surprise. Back when I crawled the bottom of the capital, even a freckled young lady from a rich house walking past had made me tense up from her perfume and leave me unable to meet her eyes. Doing that in front of a woman whose presence did not even seem of this world dealt me a massive psychological blow and then some.
“Uh, yeah. Y-yeah.”
Stiffly, slowly, I clutched the blanket. I pulled it up. I lay back down. I hid even my head. Covering myself to the crown only made her scent steeped in the blanket strike my nose more strongly. But hiding my burning face took priority.
“…Moyong Bi.”
At her voice, which sounded as if she found me pathetic, I poked only my eyes out from the gap in the blanket and spoke quickly.
“I can hear you fine. Even with the blanket over me, I hear perfectly well. So for just a moment at least, how about we talk like this?”
“….”
Eun Seollyeong sighed.
“Then let us speak of what has been left pending. Regarding the circumstances in between, this seat also has things to say. You as well…”
She suddenly cleared her throat.
“I also have things to say. You must have many questions too.”
“….”
A beat later I asked,
“That way of speaking just now—were you putting effort into it?”
“…I also try, in my own way, to always keep pace with the current of the times… the times. Of course I am still woefully inadequate.”
I decided to pretend I had not noticed. She cleared her throat several times more and said,
“Do you feel any great difference right now, by any chance?”
“Difference?”
“The state of your body, or a change in your state of mind.”
Her voice grew grave.
“Or a change in your values.”
I kept silent for a moment, then said,
“No. Not at all.”
“…How can this be. Was such a thing possible?”
A faint surprise colored one corner of her gaze.
“…Is there some kind of problem?”
Now that I thought about it, there was not just one or two points that raised questions. Beneath the blanket I looked at my palm. There was not a single wound. I felt no pain even when I moved. On the contrary, I was light enough to fly. My body was so completely fine that if someone had told me the desperate battle floating up in my mind had been a dream, I could have nodded at once and accepted it.
“A problem… yes, there is a problem.”
Eun Seollyeong crossed her arms and spoke.
“The gem of the Jeomchang Sect’s Guardian.”
“The gem?”
A scene rose in my mind. After my strike had weakened Gang Chisang, the Guardian of the Jeomchang Sect, Eun Seollyeong had one-sidedly dominated him. In the end she had even pulled the gem from his dantian. That gem had been half-shattered, not quite a complete orb, yet she had certainly seized it from the belly of the Jeomchang Sect’s Guardian.
Eun Seollyeong raised a pure white finger and pointed at me.
“Moyong Bi. Right now, the gem of the Jeomchang Sect’s Guardian has been absorbed into you.”