The Blacksmith of the Pine Forest
The place she brought me to was so remote it took a full shichen’s hard travel just to leave Shaanxi behind.
“What is this place?”
“You’ll find the atmosphere rather different.”
It was a vast pine forest. Shaanxi ran mostly to bamboo groves; a wood packed solid with pines alone was something I had never seen in this region. The ground lay soft under a thick carpet of brown, brittle needles.
—Clang. Clang.
Beyond the pines, clear and bright, came the regular ringing of steel on steel.
“From this point on you follow behind me. There is one thing you must keep in mind.”
—Crunch.
She took a single step to the side. Her foot sank deep, and two clear prints appeared in the needle-strewn floor. Only then did I realize that nowhere she had walked until now had left so much as a mark.
“Feels like being toyed with by a phantom.”
“Up to here, Master Yunjin left the path open out of consideration for any herb gatherers or woodcutters who might pass through. Beyond this point, things change.”
She pointed at her own footprints.
“I will lead. You will step only where I have stepped, overlapping my prints exactly. That condition holds without exception until I tell you it is safe. Remember it.”
“And if I step somewhere else?”
Eun Seollyeong indicated a green needle still hanging on a branch.
“You will wander this place until that needle withers, falls, rots, and turns to soil. Martial skill will not matter in the slightest.”
“Just who is this Master Yunjin? A blacksmith, or some Daoist or yin-yang master?”
Eun Seollyeong answered flatly.
“All of the above. That is why this lady’s connection with him has lasted.”
“Fine…” I drew a long breath. “For now I’ll call him a blacksmith-Daoist.”
“If that helps your understanding.”
She walked ahead. I watched the white hem of her martial robes sway along the line of her waist, then lowered my eyes and fixed them on her footprints.
—Clang. Clang. Clang.
All at once the trees opened and a forge stood before us, as if the forest’s curtain had been yanked aside and the place simply thrust into view.
“We have been granted leave,” Eun Seollyeong said, in a tone that meant nothing to me, and led the way in.
In the open-walled space a furnace blazed. A skinny, bald old man worked the hammer half-naked, bathing in his own sweat. Wrinkles creased every inch of him; what flesh he had hung loose on bone. Yet between the folds ran wiry muscle he could not hide, and his hands were armored in callus. On one wall of the forge, characters I could not read had been gouged as if with a knife.
“It has been a long time, Master Yunjin.”
Eun Seollyeong approached and greeted him in a clear, measured voice.
“Two years, is it?”
“Yes.”
Master Yunjin jammed the billet he had been working into the furnace. He ignored Eun Seollyeong and flicked his fingers.
“Here for the shackles again, I expect. And that unfamiliar face is the free extra this time.”
“….”
She said nothing, only stepped forward and held out her wrists. The old man glanced at the pure white shackles, clicked his tongue, and scolded her.
“Look how worn they’ve gotten already. How long do you mean to keep circling like a ghost, locked up in resentment and old grudges?”
“….”
Eun Seollyeong’s face did not so much as flicker. Master Yunjin rummaged through a corner of the forge, came up with a poker that carried a blue glow, and tapped the shackles she offered as if it were nothing. Each time the blue iron touched the metal, a pattern branded itself onto the surface the way a red-hot seal marks flesh—then faded away.
“You’ve been stuffing yourself with Sacred Lotus like there was no tomorrow. My word. Ruthless. Truly ruthless.”
“As always, Master Yunjin, this lady needs only one answer from you. That is—”
“I know, I know. You half-rotted, hate-soaked specter with nothing left but the shell. The only thing you care about is whether you’ve recovered enough to take the shackles off.”
He scrubbed the sweat from his face with a soot-blackened rag.
“You have. Force-feeding yourself like you wanted to die got you halfway back. What, itching to grab a sword and go dance with it already?”
“No. It is not yet complete. Thank you.”
Eun Seollyeong only stroked the shackles and offered her thanks, as if Master Yunjin’s bluntness were nothing new.
“Haa. I can’t live like this. I must have been out of my mind. I should have just watched back then… I never thought…”
The look he gave the faintly blue-glowing shackles was complicated.
“I saved a half-dead brat who’d been cast off, despised, and used up. I tossed out a few words. Who would have thought she’d spend endless years refusing to give up, actually putting them into practice. I can’t live like this. And now—”
Without warning Master Yunjin whipped around and bellowed at me.
“—she’s even dragged along a lunatic worse than herself!”
“…Me? All of a sudden?”
I pointed at myself, thoroughly lost.
“Yes, you! How much of a madman do you have to be for the earth spirit to start thrashing around the moment you set foot in the pine wood, saying it can’t breathe? Even when the Alliance Leader of the Martial World walked in, that thing just yawned and said it was sleepy!”
“…I am an ordinary person who has done nothing at all.”
“Madman. Since when does ‘ordinary’ mean you go around picking up the stink of every freak in the lineup—Asura, the Heavenly Blood Demon, Mara Jin, the whole damn celestial realm included—so they can sit in a row and count off first, second, third from the back? Huh?”
“….”
I blinked. I swallowed.
“How do you even… No—who exactly is the honored master?”
“Ha! Eun Seollyeong!”
“Yes. This lady is listening, Master Yunjin.”
Master Yunjin roared.
“He walks into my domain and asks the landlord who he is. What do you make of that?”
“I deliberately offered no explanation. And if it is Master Yunjin, you will already know why we came. I trusted you would handle it as you saw fit.”
“What?”
Eun Seollyeong looked at me, then back at Master Yunjin.
“This lady had no wish to leave even a scrap of room for him to be tangled in my filthy, revolting, chaotic fate. He is—”
A lonely expression crossed her face for a moment.
“—only a willow leaf that will pass by in the end.”
“….”
Master Yunjin let out a short sigh. One of his legs jittered as he stared at the floor. He spun the hammer in his hand. The iron he had hammered and then shoved into the furnace was melting red; he had long since missed the moment to pull it free, and the billet was losing the shape it had been taking, slumping into slag. Even so, Master Yunjin made no move to retrieve it. He clenched his teeth.
“Damn it. That face of yours, looking so pitiful—it softens me. I can’t live like this. I stepped wrong and now my old age is this ditch…”
From where I stood, Eun Seollyeong still wore no expression at all. But Master Yunjin seemed to find something beyond that face—something like the way I could always read Mumyeong’s mood and thoughts even through that unchanging voice. Between the two of them, I guessed, ran a vast river of years I knew nothing about.
Master Yunjin sighed again and pushed himself to his feet.
“I’d like to talk, but I suppose I have to send you on your way again. So that’s him? The one you mentioned when you stopped by before?”
Eun Seollyeong nodded. Master Yunjin looked me up and down.
“Looks dumber than I expected.”
“….”
“That Eun Seollyeong would acknowledge for the first time a man with eyes that vacant—the sigh comes out by itself. Still, the child chose him, so what can you do.”
His rear waggled as he rummaged through a corner of the forge.
“Though it doesn’t seem like full acknowledgment yet. Ah, here it is. Catch.”
—Whoosh.
What he tossed me was a Go-a of five interlocked rings.
“Treasure it. Same material as the one the Great Sage Equal to Heaven wore on his head, so no need to worry about it breaking.”
For a moment I doubted my ears.
“…I think I just heard something absurd.”
“Quiet. Every time you open your mouth I can feel that battle-mad black bastard’s energy and it makes my head spin. Eun Seollyeong—don’t tell me you mean to take this man to the shrine as well?”
Eun Seollyeong looked at me.
“…I still have to explain how to equip and use the Go-a.”
Master Yunjin’s brow furrowed.
“This isn’t like you. You’re unsettled in a way that doesn’t suit you at all. Did something happen while you were in Shaanxi?”
At that I looked at Eun Seollyeong. Her face was the same as always. Yet Master Yunjin seemed to have found something in her. She neither confirmed nor denied it. He clicked his tongue.
“You never change. I’ve told you again and again—none of that catastrophe was your fault. Looks like even hearing some useless talk has stirred you up again—”
Useless talk. I could guess what that meant. Between Unwol Jiju and the meeting of the Jegal and Hwangbo great families, people had thrown words at her one after another.
Murderer.
Butcher.
Fugitive.
Their eyes had been full of fear as they looked at the woman who was also a Guardian. At the same time I had felt a gaze I knew too well. They had despised her. Feared her, and despised her.
I felt it again.
I really know nothing about her at all.
Eun Seollyeong spoke in a dry tone.
“We will take our leave. As always, this lady is grateful.”
Brief thanks, and she made it clear she meant to go. Master Yunjin said nothing more. He waved a hand and turned his back.
“Go on, then. Talking after so long has worn me out.”
He turned away. Behind him, the billet that had been taking shape in the furnace had long since melted down into pure slag.
She bowed toward him. Until we left the pine forest, she did not speak another word.
—Flutter.
Along the wind that ran the length of Inhyeon Gorge, the black cloak around her shoulders billowed. The bamboo hat was pulled so low it hid her face to the eyes; beneath it only black hair showed, loose and straight. On her knees before her, eyes swollen black, was a Green Forest bandit.
“S-Sister. That is—well—you see—we thought about it, and—no, no—I thought about it, and I was wrong. So—”
“Haa. Really, that man. I taught him how to conduct himself in the rivers and lakes so carefully, and he still can’t manage a scrap of ruthlessness.”
The woman looked at the sky and let out a deep sigh. Far off, the sun was sinking. Along the blue vault the red of dusk was flooding in. Staring into that twilight, she swallowed her temper and muttered to herself.
“Right. I even bankrolled the restoration of Inhyeon Gorge village. This much is nothing. I’ll take double. Double. Yes—get it back double. It’s in the pledge, isn’t it? Yes.”
She nodded.
“Right. First things first—the work right in front of me.”
“Um, Sister…?”
Sensing something wrong, the Green Forest bandit trembled as he asked again. Beneath the pressed-down bamboo hat, the eyes that showed were clearly black.
—Fwoom.
In an instant those black eyes became burning Flame Eyes of red.
“From this moment on, the thrashing I’m about to give you has nothing to do with personal feelings. It isn’t because I’m angry at a certain man who’s been running around stirring up trouble while claiming our sect’s name. It isn’t because this is the fifth wild goose chase I’ve run trying to find his trail and I’m sick of it. And it isn’t because the number of useless men who’ve hit on me while I was just walking the road has gone past five fingers.”
“…Anyone looking would say that’s exactly what it is.”
“Shut up.”
The bandit flinched. The woman under the bamboo hat burned with Flame Eyes and clenched her fist.
“Just take the hits. Take them one by one, and from now on you spill everything you know about where that bastard Biryu is. Got it? Especially anything about the silver-haired woman who was with him—I want that in detail.”