The Heavenly Demon Copies Martial Arts
“What is the meaning of this?!”
So Cheonpa shrieked.
“You—who the hell are you?! How dare you stand in the way of Unwol Jiju!”
He spat the words with venom, but his aura had already been broken, visibly crushed. Only moments ago he had looked ready to charge me like a rabid dog—ordering his men to rush in, and if they hesitated, ready to draw his own sword and leap himself. Even that man was now edging backward, step by reluctant step.
A low hum filled the air. Seven blades, clear as ice crystals, drifted through the empty space around her. They quivered like a bowstring drawn to its absolute limit, ready to fall at a single motion of Eun Seollyeong’s hand.
“Stand down.”
Eun Seollyeong spoke. The face-veil covering her lower face stirred with her breath.
“The match is over. This was, without question, a life-and-death duel agreed upon by both parties, and we all witnessed every step of it. Is the outcome a martial artist can most justly accept not the result of strength meeting strength?”
Her frost-edged silver eyes swept the gathered crowd.
“I was under the impression that nothing is more contemptible for our kind than to abandon the field and refuse to accept that result.”
“Kh—!”
So Cheonpa, who had been on the verge of exploding into a charge, faltered at her words. The Unwol Jiju throng began to murmur.
“It can’t be…”
“…That woman.”
She never once named herself. Yet in that moment, a single phrase rang through every mind as she barred their path.
“The Guardian of Mount Hua.”
Someone whispered it in a voice gone dry.
“It’s the Specter of the Battlefield.”
That was the spark.
“The existence said to have wandered for more than a hundred years—here?”
“The blood-mad butcher who freely wields a hundred and twelve weapons and slaughters everything in her path…!”
Voices tumbled over one another, thick with terror. Every tale was new to me; I had known nothing of the wider Jianghu’s lore.
“A slaughterer.”
“I heard she hadn’t been seen lately.”
“Where has she been, to show up here?”
“Has she taken shelter with the Jegal Family?”
I looked at the line of her back as she stood before me. Even when we first met, she had not been living with her own sect, Mount Hua. She had been lodging at Cheonsubaekryeonsa. A remark she once made in passing floated up in my mind.
There is no longer any place for me in Mount Hua.
Eun Seollyeong gave no reaction to the whispering about her. The wind rose. Unmoving, she barred the way ahead of me, shielding me. Her silver hair stirred. The murmuring swelled louder still.
Her fist clenched. Beneath the silver veil, I saw her jaw lock.
…
We had only known each other a short while, yet we had been through more than a little. She had always worn that same unreadable, untroubled expression—always composed, always bold. She had lived a life I could not begin to imagine, and commanded a force I could not begin to grasp. With that experience behind her, almost nothing ever moved her face.
Even now she looked the same from the outside: ice-proud, still, her gaze sharp as frost. But I could feel it. She was suffering. It was the reaction any human would show when forced to face some clear, buried fact of the past they had wanted to keep hidden. She might be called a natural disaster—a Guardian—but she was still a person with the same feelings as me. A woman.
…
I started to step forward.
Her hand closed around my wrist. She forced me back behind her.
“Wai—”
“You stay behind me.”
Her voice was pure frost.
“There is nothing more for you to do today.”
“What?”
“If I let you step out any further—”
What traveled up my wrist lasted only the barest fraction of a second. If I had not trained a martial artist’s senses to the extreme, I would have missed it even with her hand on me—so brief was the touch.
“—I may choke on the guilt and die.”
…
Her hand trembled, for that single instant.
“What I felt, watching your duel… worn thin through long years and every kind of storm…”
Eun Seollyeong murmured beneath the veil, her voice little more than breath.
“For a greater righteousness, for a greater chivalry, to save the many… I made a habit of treating the sacrifice of the small as the most natural thing in the world. And now that I have realized I have become no different from those I so despised…”
She could not finish. The words were not meant for me. They were for herself.
“…Everything has become so painful. So exhausting.”
She was ashamed of herself. Humiliated.
A fine crack of tension ran through the nape of her neck. And what flashed through my mind then was not my own memory.
It was a landscape under a blood-red twilight. In the course of copying Mount Hua’s basic forms as a trial of the Heavenly Demon’s matured power, I had unintentionally drawn up a fragment of Eun Seollyeong’s past with them. Beneath that crimson dusk she had been screaming herself raw atop a mountain of corpses, pounding the earth until her fists split open. Her silver hair, soaked in blood and pus, tangled across her torn armor and clothes. A burning twilight. Under the red sunset, every body at her feet wore the robes of Mount Hua. Her silver eyes, drowning in tears, were a tangle of savage regret, rage, despair, loneliness, and loathing.
In one corner of that twilight-flooded memory, the feeling held in her gaze was unbearably familiar to me. It was the kind of emotion that made you want to smash your head against a wall and die—something ready to burst.
I did not know what life she had lived. I did not know what past she carried. I had thought we had spoken of many things, yet I still knew less of her than others did—not a fraction more.
“Eun Seollyeong.”
I opened my mouth to say something.
Then—
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! A man and a woman both completely out of their minds!!”
A woman’s sharp, furious voice shattered the choking silence, ringing across the grounds.
Jegal Sea vaulted the platform in a single leap, swearing at the top of her lungs.
“Jegal Family First, Sixth, and Twelfth Guard Divisions—all of you, move! Protect those two damned idiots even if it kills you!”
“Lady Jegal Sea!”
The Jegal martial artists cried out as if about to faint.
“You mustn’t—if this goes wrong it becomes open war—! Uwaagh…!”
The moment Jegal Sea hit the platform she tore toward us where we stood before Unwol Jiju, running like a madwoman. With the eldest daughter issuing orders and charging the front line herself, the rest of the Jegal Family had no choice left.
From every direction, martial artists in the white robes marked with the black insignia of the Jegal Family poured out like a storm. The eyes of everyone who had been enjoying the banquet until a moment ago changed at once. There was not a breath of hesitation.
Steel rang as true blades cleared their scabbards. In an instant they closed around Eun Seollyeong and me the way a crane shelters its egg, facing off against the Unwol Jiju throng.
“Th-that—!”
The Unwol Jiju men reeled. The Jegal force more than doubled their numbers.
“You bastards!”
From the premium seats, the head of the Hwangbo Clan finally grasped the situation and roared.
“Hwangbo Clan—all of you, out! Protect Unwol Jiju!”
“As you command!”
All around the arena, every martial artist connected to the Hwangbo Clan drew steel and took Unwol Jiju’s side.
“Kyaaak!”
“Uwaah! Full-scale war between the great families!”
“Merciful heavens!”
High officials of Shaanxi and the courtesans mixed among them screamed, overturning banquet tables as they scrambled away from the platform.
“You two are really…!”
Jegal Sea planted herself in front of us, seething. Eun Seollyeong answered with absolute firmness.
“Jegal Sea, do not worry. Since it has come to this, this lady will take full responsibility and—”
“Shut up!”
Eun Seollyeong stared at me, blank. I shouted back just as fiercely.
“Eun Seollyeong, Jegal Sea—both of you, get out of the way right now! I started this duel. Stop talking about protection and whatever else and shut your mouths and fall ba—”
“You are the one who needs to be silent!”
This time I was the one staring blankly at Eun Seollyeong. She was shouting, brows drawn tight.
“Do not make this lady feel any more ashamed!”
My face went scarlet.
“I didn’t say anything! Why do you keep saying I made you feel ashamed?!”
“Th-that…!”
Eun Seollyeong’s face flushed to match.
“There is simply such a thing! A common man should keep his mouth shut and accept protection from behind!”
“Protection? Do I look that weak to you?”
“The mere fact that you traded blows with martial artists of that wretched level proves you are still frail!”
“Wh-what did you just say?!”
I worked my mouth open and closed, speechless.
“Wow. These two are a complete disaster.”
Jegal Sea muttered from between us. Eun Seollyeong was far more heated than usual.
“Spare this seat the nonsense and receive this seat’s protection from behind!”
That set me off in turn.
“What am I, a child?! Protection, my ass! And the only reason I traded blows like that is because I wasn’t using my real martial arts at all—if I used my actual skill—”
“Both of you, be quiet.”
Jegal Sea spoke.
“I’m begging you—could you both just shut your mouths? In a situation like this, what do you think you’re doing?”
Eun Seollyeong and I both looked at her. Jegal Sea’s eyes were blazing as if they might explode.
“You damned martial artists with nothing but duels and chivalry crammed into your skulls—do you think if you just charge in and make a mess, it’ll somehow work itself out? In my family too, whenever my father or my little sister causes a disaster, the one left cleaning it up is always a scholar like me.”
…
At those words, I half-caught a man who looked like a scholar over in the Hwangbo lines nodding and wiping his eyes.
Jegal Sea went on in a low voice that sounded ready to detonate.
“If you don’t want this to get any more tangled, both of you stay quiet for now, trust me, and just watch. And later, when we get back, both of you are having a talk with me. Understood?”
…
She looked at the two of us with our mouths clamped shut and let out a hard breath.
“That’s a little better.”
Then she sighed deeply and added,
“Fine. I’ll admit it. Honestly speaking…”
“…?”
“It did feel good.”
She turned to look toward the Hwangbo lines and murmured,
“And a little shameful, too, in its own way.”
…
I watched her. She said,
“Anyway—just trust me and stay back. I already told you.”
Jegal Sea snorted a short laugh and glanced over her shoulder.
“It’s always you martial artists who charge the front line. Cleaning it up is our job. Just watch. I’m Jegal Sea.”
“And in that sense—how exactly are we to interpret the present situation?”
Hwangbo Cheonseong, head of the Hwangbo Clan, shoved his subordinates aside and came forward on unsteady legs.
“Strategist and eldest daughter of the Jegal Family.”
Jegal Sea pushed through her own people and stepped out to meet him. Hwangbo Cheonseong frowned as he looked over both formations with blades leveled.
“Are you truly proposing we do this? I had thought you would make an incomparable match for my son—a clever young lady—but it seems that, too, was only rumor.”
“Ah?”
Jegal Sea’s brow twitched as if a forgotten memory had just surfaced. I recalled her once mentioning, in passing, that she had received a marriage proposal from a son of the Hwangbo Clan.
“If that’s the expectation, I would welcome it being shattered a hundred times over.”
“What?”
At her cutting reply, Hwangbo Cheonseong’s eyebrow jumped. Elite troops from both great families stood with blades drawn, eyes locked across a distance of fewer than twenty paces. If even a single arrow flew from one side to the other, a war between orthodox great families—the kind that would be written into Jianghu history—would begin right here today.
Hwangbo Cheonseong said,
“I have long heard of the Jegal Family’s custom of inviting guests of every station without regard for rank to enjoy conversation—but I never expected those guests to include that famously lofty Guardian, and of Mount Hua no less, or even an assassin of the Blood Death Sect.”
…
He looked from the silent Jegal Sea to Eun Seollyeong, and then to me behind them.
“I am more surprised than I expected. I had heard the Guardian of Mount Hua places discipline and a martial artist’s pride above all else—but I did not think she would value the laws of the martial world enough to personally step forward and protect even an assassin—”
“I apologize, but kindly do not change the subject.”
“What?”
Jegal Sea’s voice went cold.
“Instead of talking about the guests our Jegal Family invited, look at me. The current internal and external representative of the Jegal Family—recognized even by our family head—is the one standing right here: Jegal Sea. And—”
She flicked the feather fan in her hand.
“You asked a moment ago how we should interpret this situation? It’s simple.”
Without a moment’s hesitation she pointed past the Hwangbo Clan head to So Cheonpa, who was shrinking his shoulders behind him.
“That black-path man ignored the result of a fair, mutually agreed duel and life-and-death match conducted under the laws of the martial world, and tried to crush it with the power of his organization. In answer, we sought to protect the weaker party according to the principles of the Jianghu.”
So Cheonpa flared up and shouted,
“Who do you think is going to listen to that kind of nonsense treaty?!”
“Nonsense treaty?”
Jegal Sea did not so much as pause.
“Where did the man who so boldly declared to Gang Ilbi that he would never speak falsehood before his betters go, that he now says one thing with one mouth and another with the next?”
“Th-that… that…!”
So Cheonpa’s words died in his throat.
A rising murmur. The Shaanxi officials and common folk who had scattered before the arena began to gather again. Jegal Sea pressed without rest.
“Surely you aren’t suggesting I am inventing things that never happened?”
Every gaze rolled toward So Cheonpa like a wave. He worked his mouth open and shut.
“Or are you about to try some word game claiming that, in truth, none of the betters you acknowledge are present here at all?”
So Cheonpa’s face flushed so hard it looked ready to burst.