I'll Believe You Once
“…The gem?”
My voice as I asked back held no rise or fall.
My body was fine. No—it was even lighter than before. That was why, even before Eun Seollyeong answered, I might have already felt it unconsciously.
Something irreversible had been crossed. A line that could never be undone.
Common sense said I could never be this whole. When I had stacked Heaven and Earth Great Shift atop Asura’s Great Destruction Calamity Formation, only one sound had filled my head—a crunch, and with it the vivid sensation of every memory shattering like ice shards in the dead of winter.
If porcelain cracks, even the cleanest repair leaves a scar. Drive a nail once and pull it free as carefully as you like; the hole remains. More than a hundred words, I knew it myself. I had clearly burned through my innate true qi and broken multiple taboos. To commit such acts and then expect to recover cleanly every time through some elixir or stroke of fortune was nothing more than a child’s foolish hope for luck.
First, check.
I began by examining my memories as objectively as I could. Name, status, the important events of the past—they all returned. Then, from one corner of those vivid recollections, an unpleasant sensation surged up with a sharp crack. It felt like a torn wound forcibly sealed by fire, stitched shut against its will.
For a long time I had carried one intuitive symbol for memory: a white winter field. The day that white field no longer came to mind would be the day Moyong Bi died. Fortunately, for now, if I simply endured a faint unease, everything remained.
Next I checked my body. I clenched my hand and opened it again. It felt light—too ideal a response to accept. That settled it. If I still possessed this intact flesh after what I had done, something significant, something I could not ignore, had happened to me.
I asked Eun Seollyeong, “Why is the Jeomchang Sect’s gem inside me?”
“Because this seat arranged it so.”
She spoke without the slightest hesitation. “I was not certain either. There had been similar cases. There were things I could guess at. Honestly, I did not believe it.” She pointed at me. “Seeing you alive with even your body restored like this, it seems that, result-wise, what I thought was correct.”
I parted my parched lips. “Why did you save me? There’s no reason to. Moreover, I… whatever the reason.” I recalled her face twisted with passion as she shouted at the sight of my eyes turning red. “I might be connected to the Demonic Cult.”
“Of course that is true. I did not save you because I trusted you, nor because I was moved by that incomprehensible recklessness of yours. And do not misunderstand yet.” Her silver eyes, sharp enough to sting, fixed on me. A black bandage was wrapped around her hand; beneath it the torn flesh of her palm showed. “I still have not fully decided your treatment.”
“Then?”
Eun Seollyeong crossed her arms and let out a sigh. “It began exactly ten years ago. I had suspicions long before, but a situation different from anything until now is rapidly taking shape at the bottom of this Jianghu. Guardians are moving in haste, are they not? Families that had kept silent are approaching so fiercely, demanding the Covenant of the Sacred Mountain, are they not?”
Every word she spoke in that flowing manner carried weight for me. Faint though they had been, those same currents had left clear footprints through my own days. A memory surfaced: the Blood Cult’s sudden withdrawal during their assault on Emei. I had felt only relief then, but Flame Eye So Yeomgyo had grown uneasy.
Eun Seollyeong continued. “In the midst of it all, though it has not yet fully surfaced, even the one who stands as a public enemy of the martial world—the man I have hunted for nearly ten years—broke his seclusion and appeared…”
Her eyes were complicated. He had been an existence like the reaper of death itself, appearing against a burning twilight, wrapped in flies and maggots. I had burned everything, even the Ryu stage of Asura’s Great Destruction Calamity Formation, trying to save the village from him. And he, as if mocking me, had at the last tried to collapse the dam and drown the entire place. My fist clenched of its own accord. I ground my teeth.
“Is that man even of the orthodox path? That behavior back then—”
Eun Seollyeong frowned and cut me off flatly. “Orthodox? No. If there is a martial artist in all of Jianghu closest to the root of evil, leaving orthodoxy aside, it is him.”
The expelled Guardian of the Jeomchang Sect, Gang Chisang, had recognized her at once. He had pursued her with blind obsession. He had claimed they were once promised to each other in marriage.
“…Is that bastard dead?”
In the instant he moved to kill my fallen self, Eun Seollyeong had joined the fight and torn the gem free. For a Guardian the gem is no different from a dantian. It had been ripped out whole, leaving a gaping hole in his belly. Any ordinary martial artist would have died twice over.
At my question she bit her lip. “Even before he turned to the demonic path he was a man whose terror of death ran extreme. He would never accept his own end so defenselessly, without any preparation. That fear was powerful enough to drive his entire life.”
Asura had told me much the same. He had stressed that my strongest power was neither martial art nor internal energy, but that very emotion—and that I must learn to master it.
“The sole reason he joined the Demonic Cult was the goal of becoming an immortal existence and pursuing eternal life. Moreover, his martial prowess at that time…” She looked at me. “Something did not add up. The Jeomchang Guardian I knew, even shackled, was never a man of that level.”
“….”
“I cannot say for certain, but I estimate it was not a form in which he could fully unleash his power. I do not know what he schemes, yet when he appears before us again it will absolutely not be in that shape. And.” Her gaze deepened as it settled on me. “You asked why I saved you. It is simple. You truly seem to know nothing about your own body—even less than I do.”
That was not wrong. As if reading my thoughts she nodded. “Yes. That look in your eyes right now, for instance. So… I suddenly wondered whether there might be some story.”
She fell silent for a moment. Outside the window, leaves stirred in the passing wind.
“More than a person’s status, affiliation, or appearance.” She raised her fingers. My own hands were so rough and scarred I was ashamed to call them human. Absorbing the Jeomchang Guardian’s gem had healed the wounds, yet it had not erased every mark left by years of brutal training and the desperate struggle simply to stay alive.
A cool touch settled against my thick palm.
“The actions I take—only those actions define who I am now…”
Those had been my own words, shouted beneath the collapsing dam with death already accepted. She was slowly reciting them back to me.
“Yes. Before making any hasty decision or move, I wanted to hear your story once.”
“….”
“If you are willing.” Her voice dropped low. “Could you tell me everything that has brought you here?”
A clear splash sounded as water tipped from the bamboo waterwheel.
This place, she told me, was one of her residences—far enough from Wareung-chon, where the great battle had raged, that even her lightness skill required a full two shichen to cover the distance. I had lain unconscious for two entire weeks.
“It is also one of the few dwellings I possess. I built every part of it myself.”
She sat on the veranda, dangling her feet in the soft breeze. One side of the courtyard held a quiet garden of white gravel, black stones, and small pines. Beside it a pond had been formed from stacked black basalt riddled with holes. A little waterfall spilled into it; beneath the fall a bamboo waterwheel turned. When enough water gathered to tip the balance, the wheel spun and released a cool, clear sound.
“Speaking of which,” I said, standing on the veranda and watching the pond, “don’t you have any larger clothes?”
“No.”
She cut the request short. “I have greeted fifty-seven New Years since I made this place. In this remote spot no one comes but me; clothes prepared for outsiders would make no sense at all.”
“…Well, true enough.”
I looked down at my bare upper body, navel exposed, and my expression hardened. The lower half was merely wrapped in a rough blanket.
She propped her chin on one hand. “It could not be helped. Even a damaged half of the Jeomchang Guardian’s gem would leave no clothes intact during absorption.”
We talked for a long time. From the moments right after I lost consciousness holding back the dam’s collapse, all the way through everything I had lived until now. There was no longer any point in hiding. She was the one who had saved my life. That she had swallowed her own revulsion to pull me back was an unchanging fact, and I chose to answer that trust with honesty.
Whenever the Demonic Cult entered my account, Eun Seollyeong’s brow furrowed and she flinched. Yet until the last word left my mouth, no blade flew from her hand.
“How detestable.”
Biting her lip and murmuring those few opaque words was her only reaction that was not quite a reaction.
“…So is it really all right?”
“In what sense do you ask if it is all right?”
“Well.” My lips were dry with tension. “Whatever the reason, you treated the Demonic Cult as a mortal enemy. And I…” I remembered the fierce hostility she had shown against Jeokmaryeong’s Surayeomrang Squad. “I’m not certain yet, but I may carry the gem of the one called the Heavenly Demon.”
Throughout the battle with the former Jeomchang Guardian who had turned to the demonic path, her emotions had burned raw. She clearly carried some past tied to the Heavenly Demon Cult.
“….”
She regarded me steadily, then spoke. “I do not trust you.” Her fingers traced down her wrist and fell away. “I still do not know what manner of person you are. But.” Her silver eyes blinked. “As much as the action you showed beneath that twilight, ready to die—”
The wind stirred.
“I will try trusting it once. Moyong Bi.”
Long earrings hung from her ears. Those ornaments that answered her emotions had always been pure black. Now, swaying in the golden spring sunlight, they retained only a faint darkness and shone silver.
“…You, the earri—”
“Haa.”
Her deep sigh cut me off. Eyes closed, she spoke. “Even if the damage is incomplete, to think something presumed to be the Heavenly Demon’s gem rests inside a Ha-mu-gwan student of Cheonsubaekryeonsa. No matter how much chaos is about to erupt, this is truly… and that the bearer is a scion of one of the Five Great Families.”
On her closed face countless tangled thoughts seemed to race, piled high with every kind of worry. She muttered as she ordered them. “Having the power of a Heavenly Demon Cult gem within an orthodox martial artist is not necessarily a strategic misfortune… yet a gem that seizes another gem to evolve and reinforce itself is clearly the same as then, and that means…”
“Eun Seollyeong?”
Her eyes snapped open and fixed on me. “That power of the Heavenly Demon… hard as it is to believe, you said it ‘copies martial arts’?”
“That’s right.”
She looked at me and spoke with finality. “This seat will confirm that ability directly, right now.”
“Now?”
She nodded. “If my hypothesis is correct, a significant change must already have occurred within that power.”