The Bottom of the Abyss
—Bubble…
I opened my eyes.
When I parted my lips, a massive air bubble rose from my mouth.
“—!!!”
The instant I felt the putrid water flooding into my nose and mouth, I kicked off the floor and surged upright.
“Puhwaak!!”
Wind rushed in and whipped my bangs aside.
“Hah! Hah! Hah!”
—Splash.
The putrid water came exactly to my knees.
—Clank!!
Iron chains rattled with a harsh, jarring clamor.
It was a straight, impossibly deep cave, nearly vertical. The walls were damp and clammy, thick with rotting water-moss.
I looked up.
Far, far above, a scrap of sky showed blue with winter light.
“What is this place.”
I muttered blankly.
“Why am I… here.”
—Crack.
My vision hazed. I tried to seize a memory and it slipped away. Memory refused to join to memory. Cause refused to join to effect.
—Clank!
My arms and legs hung from iron chains—thousands of thick links. I could force some movement if I strained, yet my limbs were as good as pinned to the earth. Barely enough play to shift my weight; restraint in all but name.
“What is this. What’s going on. How did I end up like this.”
—Thud.
I sank to my knees in the black water. How I had come here, where the beginning met the end—none of it connected. Everything floated in a murky haze.
—Thump. Thump. Thump…
I scanned the space. The vast, near-vertical chamber pulsed with a steady beat, as if the cave itself were some colossal living thing.
Hm? Host?
A voice that had no business sounding in that darkness reached me.
I lifted my head.
“Mumyeong?”
A black dog sat there, crimson eyes glowing as it looked back at me.
…? You recognize me? Impossible… This is the space of the unconscious. You should not be able to know me.
The black dog flinched.
“No way I wouldn’t know you. What are you doing here. And where the hell is this.”
Mumyeong’s red eyes narrowed; he shook his head.
This reaction is unmistakably Moyong Bi—the Host. And if it is not the child’s form but that body… then this is the unintended result of some half-baked idiot casting the wrong sorcery. No matter. You will forget the memory again anyway.
I shook the wet hair from my face and looked around once more.
“Where is this.”
I stared up at the scrap of sky between stalactites that jutted like a beast’s fangs, then down at my knees submerged in black water.
The black dog spoke.
This is the bottom of the abyss—the crossroads of soul and flesh that the Host only ever sees when death stands at the door and the heart is about to stop. A landscape you were never meant to witness for all eternity.
He gathered the light in his crimson eyes and muttered,
Yes. Originally, that is.
A massive forepaw rose and settled on the crown of my head.
Forget what you saw here and rest.
The black dog glanced about.
It is dark; you likely could not make out this hellscape in detail. Well, even if you saw it you would not remember. I have been working hard adjusting to the stage of Demon Escape for the first time in a while, so I am sleepy. I will send the Host back and sleep myself… Ah, right—it would be best to return straight to your lodgings and look. Traces of the Blood Cult have been found around the Host… Ah. You will forget every word of mine this time as well, won’t you.
My eyelids grew heavy with sudden force.
—Thud.
My head sank halfway into the black water.
“Guh—gah—glug…”
Water poured in through my half-submerged mouth.
Too late, I understood.
What had reached my knees was no mere putrid water.
It was blood.
And not ordinary blood. Like the blood of a spiritual beast once sealed in a secret cave of the White Lotus Demon Sect, it was blood thick with concentrated demonic qi.
That vast reservoir of demonic qi flooded unchecked into my nose and mouth.
How can a space this saturated with demonic qi even exist…
I no longer knew where reality ended and dream began. My insides twisted. Even as consciousness receded I felt the dread. When I had bathed in spiritual-beast blood I had learned, thoroughly, never to take such power lightly. And this was demonic qi—denser than anything I had ever heard of or seen in my life. Even if it were only a delusion, even if it ended as a dream and a misstep, that would be fortune enough. But if I simply let it be and the demonic qi I felt was real, my body would melt and I would die without question.
Then what?
The answer was already set. I possessed an internal cultivation art that even Asura had originally never intended to pass on—an art unmatched when it came to handling demonic qi.
Patcheon-hyeol-ma-mu-geuk-gong.
My greatest difference. I had felt more keenly than anyone the bitter regret of reaching a late age without an internal art. As if to answer that regret, I had obtained one of the strongest cultivation methods in existence. Yet even the hardiest seedling needs proper fertilizer before its worth can show. Until now I had never truly received that nourishment. Moreover I belonged, strictly speaking, to the orthodox path, and because Patcheon-hyeol-ma-mu-geuk-gong was rooted in demonic arts it required demonic qi. In the rare moments I trained it, meager refined demonic qi had accumulated—but that was nothing compared to circulating the art while pure demonic qi from outside stood ready.
I closed my eyes. This time it was less for the benefit and more to keep my body from collapsing under the invading demonic qi.
Fighting the consciousness that fled at a geometric rate, I operated Patcheon-hyeol-ma-mu-geuk-gong.
Time lost all meaning. A moment became an hour; a year became a moment.
Just before memory vanished completely, large characters carved into the distant cave wall swam into view.
Here rests in bitter, eternal sleep the forgotten demon of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult—strongest of every generation—the Heavenly Demon Emperor.
—Crash!!!
“Elder?!”
Hwanggeumseong overturned the fortune-telling table and toppled backward. Even though his treasured long pipe snapped clean in two, he made no move to pick it up.
—Bang.
I too had my eyes wide open and had shot to my feet.
“…That landscape just now was…”
I whispered the words that brushed faintly through my mind.
“Ah… Aaaah! Uwaaaaah!!”
The scream snapped me fully awake. I looked ahead.
The face of Hwanggeumseong, always so full of easy leisure, had gone paper-white.
—Crack!
The fortune sticks that had lain before him had fallen and shattered across the floor. The silver sand used for the reading was scattered everywhere. Hwanggeumseong kept screaming.
“H-how can this be, how can this be! Because he had a friend’s face I only meant to glance at his saju or a few hexagrams, yet how can there be a result like this… To think I would see this saju again…!”
“Elder! Pull yourself together!”
The giant who always attended him supported Hwanggeumseong, at a complete loss.
“Are you all right, Elder?”
Sa Ga-jun, master among the Four Divine Flags and head of Baekho Armed Escort, stared with eyes round as saucers.
Only then did the events come back to me one by one. Hwanggeumseong had claimed he could read a man’s fate to some degree. He had prepared to examine my saju; not long after he began, I seemed to have slipped into something like a hypnotic trance. Whether fortunate or not, he did not appear to have seen the landscape I had. He was simply fixed on the result he himself had drawn and found it impossible to believe.
I had no leisure to spare for him.
—Grind.
I clenched my teeth and muttered under my breath.
“Mumyeong… you bastard dog. I don’t know what happened before, but what do you mean I can’t remember…”
Heavenly Demon Divine Cult… strongest forgotten demon of every generation… Heavenly Demon Emperor… rests eternally… here…
Whether Mumyeong had deliberately hidden it or not I still did not know, but the eerie, ominous phrase I had discovered this time was now carved deep into my memory.
—I shot to my feet.
Along with it I recalled Mumyeong’s final warning as well. This was no time to sit still.
“Excuse me. It seems urgent business has come up with someone I know.”
“Ah… Th-that…!”
Hwanggeumseong pointed at me and tried to speak in a rush.
—Bang!!
I did not hesitate for a heartbeat. I kicked away from the seat and bolted out the door.
Still sitting on the floor, Hwanggeumseong slowly lowered the finger he had been pointing.
“If I may ask… what was that saju you saw again? What on earth made you react like that?”
Lee Ga-ju-bu of Hyeonmu Armed Escort, standing beside him, asked carefully.
Hwanggeumseong stared for a long time at the door through which the man in black martial robes had crashed. It was the look of a man faintly recalling a connection from long ago—someone who had once borne the exact same saju.
Only after a long silence did he part his parched lips.
—Thud-thud-thud!
“Hah, hah!”
I ran like a madman. Even as I sprinted I knew it made no sense. Who was worrying about whom? A dog fretting over a tiger. No matter how much I had grown, her skill still stood far above mine.
Even so.
Even so…!
“So Yeomgyo!”
—Bang!
I kicked the door open hard enough to nearly tear it from its frame.
It was late evening. At this hour she should have been here. She herself had stressed that when one stood on the defensive—searching rather than striking at a fixed target—dusk was the most dangerous time, the hour when vision began to fail. She hated operating then. She always came inside before it fully fell.
Right now, the moment I burst through the door, she should have been glaring and scolding,
Why come in making such a racket.
Or flipping a page and waving me toward the bathroom with,
You’re filthy. Go wash.
—…
And the room was empty.
Nothing on the table and chair where she always sat.
“Is it true?”
Nothing on the bed. Nothing on the dining table. I paced the not-large room and the bathroom like a man possessed.
“So Yeomgyo?”
Not a single change from the traces of her departure that morning.
“… … …”
Only my own ragged breathing filled the space.
“Is she really gone? Truly?”
I tried to cool the heat that had risen to my skull under the impossible reality.
“No. Wait. Calm down.”
I forced myself to be calm.
“Huu.”
I bit my lip, fighting to quiet the boiling in my head. Recalling Asura’s teachings, I struggled to master the fear that imagination was amplifying, the dread trying to swallow me whole. I forced myself to consider every possibility of what might have befallen her.
While I competed in the tournament she had taken the mission of exploring and rooting out the underground space where Unwol Jiju’s Hundred-Eight Phantom Night Festival was underway. If she were discovered mid-task she would have no choice but to fight. And depending on how that fight went—abduction, or killing to silence witnesses…
—Whoosh.
The window stood open a half-span. My gaze locked on it.
“….”
Cool night air of the late hour drifted in through the gap.
—Huff… huff… huff…
I left my breathing exactly as rough as it was. I neither cut it short nor forced it natural. My eyes stayed on the floor; only the pupils rolled. In the right edge of my vision the bed appeared. Though my face pointed down, in the darkness my true focus fixed on the shadow behind the bedpost.
—Crack…
I loosened my fingers.
—Crack.
I rolled my wrists.
—Huu.
I exhaled.
—Creak… creak…
The wooden bathroom door, stirred by the wind, slowly opened and closed, opened and closed again.
My eyes narrowed.
The thin red cloth of the curtain beside the bed fluttered. One span forward. Two spans back. One span forward. Half a span back.
—Crash!!
The instant my foot left the floor my hand shot out. I seized the entire shadow behind the bedpost and slammed it into the wall.
“Keuk!”