The Most Perfect Enough
It felt like a red-hot iron ball had been driven straight into my gut.
I swallowed hard.
And nothing happened.
I blinked.
“What, I got scared for nothing. Nothing’s…”
Clunk.
Something burst inside me.
It was a volcano.
It felt ready to erupt and tear me apart.
“Gaaaaah!”
I crawled across the ground. Even the lotus position I had forced myself into came completely undone. I rolled and thrashed in the pain. This is bad, I realized. I can’t even hold the posture.
“Haaah… uuuugh!”
Drool spilled from my lips. Every inch of my skin flushed a violent red, as if it would split open. Kaaaaah. The nails on all five fingers of one hand snapped off as I clawed furrows into the dirt. Veins stood out starkly. My teeth ground together hard enough to crack, blood seeping from my gums. Blood sprayed from all seven orifices.
“Mu… Mumyeong…! Grrrk!!”
Crack, crack-crack. Whatever method Mumyeong used, the quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes of my lower body seized up as if struck by violent cramps. Snap, crack-crack! Bones twisted as though they would break. My legs were forced into the lotus position against my will.
I fought to release the strength in my lower body. Breathing was agony. My vision washed white.
Whooooom!
Internal energy surged without restraint along the meridians that had already been opened. A colossal force of fire poured through me. It was like a massive landslide roaring down a mountainside, sweeping through a village at the foot. The problem was that the dry earth was parched to dust, and everything the great wave touched simply crumbled.
I gathered my trembling fingertips.
With a blood-soaked, violently shaking hand I snatched up the Heavenly Thunder White Ginseng. The act was like throwing a lump of charcoal onto a burn that had already been seared by fire. Nothing remained but pure malice.
Lightning crackled. I chewed the entire root of the Heavenly Thunder White Ginseng, grinding it between my teeth. I tasted the metallic tang of blood mixed with its bitterness.
Mumyeong’s urgent voice reached me as if from a great distance. I had never heard him sound so desperate. He was shouting something, the words cutting in and out.
So it begins now, then. Through a mouthful of bloody foam I managed a nod.
Boom!
Crack, crack-crack!
My entire body was fried and roasted by flame and lightning. My hair burned away. The air filled with a choking stench. The clothes on my body caught fire, turned to ash, and rose into the sky. The valley, already filled with the starlight of night, blazed with the light pouring from my body.
“G… ggghk…!”
I swallowed even the groans. My eyes rolled back as I endured. I shook violently. My teeth chattered. My lips split and cracked open. Even the blood evaporated.
It hurt.
How many days had passed? Had any time passed at all?
Hard.
It was so hard that only such a fragmentary word could express it. Truly hard. There was no other way to put it.
And before I reached this state, I had muttered the words I had driven into my own bones like a broken wooden puppet, endlessly, without soul.
“G… guuuuh!”
Click-click-click. My clenched jaw trembled. Bloody tears burst from both eyes. I wept from the pain. I howled without sound, without words, until I nearly forgot my own name.
I thought the sun had risen. I thought the sunset had fallen. I thought the moon had risen again. I thought the stars had come out.
It hurt.
I thought I never should have done this. I should have eaten only half a root.
What am I even doing right now?
Stay conscious!
No.
I no longer wanted to be ignored. I no longer wanted to live in humiliation under others. I had lived treating endurance as a virtue even while being treated like a cripple and mocked behind my back.
My past life. My wretched, abject past life…
Hearing and pretending not to hear. Seeing and pretending not to see. Feeling and pretending not to feel. That was all it had been.
I had lived believing that was the natural virtue. Mother had said it was a virtue. Everyone said that was how people lived. That was life, they said.
But it was far too hard to simply dismiss as “life.” It hurt. It was torment.
I recalled that pain. I forced myself to relive the agony of that hellish bottom-rung existence and swore an oath.
I would never walk that path again. I would not freeze to death in a cold room like Mother, simply waiting with empty hands for someone else to come. This was my reality, and I would no longer turn my eyes away from problems and run.
Physical pain was fine by comparison. Compared to the agony of a soul being torn to shreds…!
As I brought my palms together I simultaneously turned my left palm outward. It felt as though a water gate had been opened in a massive torrent. Like forcibly turning a ship’s rudder in the middle of a storm. Like breaching one side of a great dam to open a channel.
The wolf-like energies that had been rampaging through my body, unable to be absorbed and tearing me apart, suddenly gathered as if sucked into my left hand.
Crackle-crackle-crack!!
Residual internal energy condensed in my left hand. It was dazzling flame and lightning. Fire and thunder boiled over and overflowed—
Whoooooom!
—and erupted, sweeping one side of the valley clean. It was like a storm of the gods.
On the very brink of qi deviation, the residual internal energy that could not be absorbed was expelled all at once through my left hand as an outlet. At the same time the white haze that had filled my vision cleared. It felt as though I had returned to reality.
Thud.
My left hand, having expelled every last scrap of internal energy, fell limp to the ground. My dry lips, which had been stuck together, tore open. Thick blood seeped from the split mouth.
I knew without being told.
It was over.
Mumyeong spoke calmly. The slight hoarseness I thought I heard in his voice was surely my imagination.
Smoke rose from my entire body. From within it I smiled weakly with completely burned-away eyebrows and said,
“Heh heh… so? This time it really feels like enough, doesn’t it?”
Mumyeong was not human. He was a remnant of the Demonic Cult, a fragment of the Heavenly Demon Jade. So of course he would not smile. Yet for a moment I had the illusion that if he had a face, he would be smiling right now.
My entire skin felt shriveled and burned. Recovery was clearly underway. Perhaps because I had consumed two of the rarest Heavenly White Ginsengs at once. Though my body had suffered burns that should have been catastrophic, recovery progressed rapidly on its own—thanks in part to Mumyeong’s assistance. Yet the process was unbearably slow.
The backs of my knees where I had held the lotus position, my elbows, and my armpits would not move. As a result I spent nearly half a day collapsed forward in the lotus position with my face planted in the dirt.
That was Mumyeong’s assessment of me with my rear pointed at the sky and my face buried in the ground.
“I didn’t expect to end up like this either.”
According to Mumyeong, nearly twenty days had passed while I went through the five stages of energy circulation. I had thought it was only an instant.
At first I did not believe him, but when I opened my eyes and truly registered reality, I saw that although it was the same place, enough time had passed for it to feel unfamiliar. Rain had fallen and stopped, leaving puddles. The grass that had been right in front of me had withered a little and grown again.
Lap, lap. By licking the muddy water pooled on the ground with my face still planted, I managed to endure the torment of thirst.
Shut up. I’m thirsty—what else am I supposed to do? I survived the threshold of hell; I’m not dying of thirst here.
“Hm?”
Mumyeong continued only after a long pause.
“You thought I’d kill myself or something?”
“….”
It was a rare, naked admission from Mumyeong, who almost never spoke his true thoughts. I answered with silence as well.
We were like looking into a mirror. A desperate craving for life. That was the driving force behind every action we took, an absolute standard that allowed no compromise with anyone. Because we understood each other, I knew that if this bastard became even slightly unnecessary to my survival or a problem, he would replace me without hesitation. That was why, even sharing one body, we ultimately did not trust each other.
Mumyeong broke the silence between us.
“Getting praised by the parasite living in my body is so touching I’m about to cry.”
I answered dryly with my rear still pointed at the sky. Mumyeong ignored my reaction completely and continued as usual with only what he wanted to say.
“So… let me ask one more time.”
At my casual question Mumyeong answered as if fed up.
“…Heh heh.”
“I still want to hear it once more from someone else’s objective perspective.”
If I didn’t laugh at this, I would be insane. Even earning ten million gold pieces could not feel more satisfying or fulfilling than this.
Mumyeong spoke with a sigh.
“Hey, even if you’re going to talk, could you….”
It felt like he was subtly feeding me, so I complained.
“Heh heh heh.”
I nodded with a foolish grin. As time passed the stiffened joints of my body began to loosen. My arms regained freedom first, and the first thing I did was push my upper body upright.
“I’ve been curious for a while—what exactly is a Guardian?”
If my memory was correct, the silver-haired woman who had saved me had also called herself the Guardian of Mount Hua.
“….”
A Guardian was a far greater existence than I had imagined.
“Mumyeong, you heard it too. That silver-haired woman called herself a Guardian. But for someone that significant to be here in the first place…”
“…I thought something was off as well. Maybe she misspoke some other term.”
I carefully recalled that fleeting moment of encounter. Looking down at me as I lay on the ground, her eyes had been endlessly calm and cold silver. Those eyes had held a deep, bone-chilling grudge. It was the gaze that appears only when regret and remorse have soaked into the marrow. A person with eyes like that has only one way of acting: they will stop at nothing to achieve their goal. And in that process there will be absolutely no concession or compromise.
Mumyeong’s sensitivity to energy was unmatched by anyone. If he said so, she was definitely hiding something.
“Well, we’ll find out by watching. Let’s see… my body…”
I steadied my trembling legs and rose to my feet. Only now did the joints straighten.
“I look like a complete wreck.”
My eyebrows were almost entirely burned off. My whole body was little better than a tattered rag, covered in scrapes and wounds. If someone had tumbled down a cliff for a week they might end up looking like this.
“Still, luckily there’s about a week left.”
I dragged my feet forward with difficulty. Internal energy boiled and overflowed, yet the body and mind that contained it were little more than rags.
“Which way is Chunmu Hall again?”
I compared the surrounding landmarks with the map I had received along with the Jade Stream Pill and estimated my current position.
Mumyeong’s voice grew faint.
“I can barely feel any internal energy—there’s no problem with that, right?”
The indescribable sensation I had always felt, as if something stood behind me, vanished as if washed away. Only then did the silence that one is supposed to feel when alone settle over me.
“So this is what being alone feels like.”
It should have been natural, yet because Mumyeong was always there, the feeling itself was extremely unfamiliar.
“Anyway, it’s too far.”
I dragged my legs and walked with difficulty. On the way here I had run like a bull with its tail on fire through the downpour, so I hadn’t noticed, but I never imagined it was this distant. No matter how far I went, the valley showed no sign of ending. My body was already at its absolute limit. Concentration steadily faded until even taking a single step became hard. Leaning on a wooden stick as a cane, I advanced one painful step at a time and sighed.
“I really came in deep. Not a single disciple in sight even though they should be scattered across the whole terrain.”
“That’s right, you filthy low-born mongrel.”
I lifted my head. In the middle of the only path through the valley where there had clearly been no one, a group of people now blocked the way.
“What’s the point of a lowly seed who’s going to fall anyway struggling this hard?”
“Even if the Family Head’s noble blood is mixed in, a low-born is still a low-born. Hahaha.”
At the unfamiliar mockery directed at me, the fine hairs on my body stood on end.
Mumyeong wasn’t mistaken after all.
Damn it. The moment I grasped the situation I urgently checked my body. I checked my joints. Naturally, my body had not even recovered halfway.
“The Moyong Family, is it.”
A tall, slender man in blue martial robes pushed through the group and stepped forward.
“If you recognize us, then hurry up and kneel. To me, Moyong Gangcheon, second son of the Moyong Family and the next Family Head.”