You Won't Be Alone Until the End
Gang Ilbi, whom I had crossed paths with during the Unwol Jiju conflict, was third-rate.
He had founded a tiny, nameless minor sect and opened a dojo, but no one had ever acknowledged him.
He had no gifted physique—only a frail, weak body.
He was nothing like the martial artists common at Cheonsubaekryeonsa, those who had been handed an entire cycle of inner force or more from childhood by virtue of superior bloodlines and privileged backgrounds, and who rode that advantage straight down the road to success.
And yet, with nothing at all to his name, he had stood before the black-path thugs to the very end—even after being beaten half to death—to stop them from exploiting the tenant farmers.
And when he left Shaanxi for the last time, he had finally earned everyone's recognition.
"How have you been all this time?"
"Haha. Well now. At first I wasn't sure, but that back of yours is so distinctive I couldn't miss it. I knew it was you, Moyong Bi."
When we had parted ways, I had told him everything—my name, my past, all of it.
He had promised to keep the secret.
A long time had passed since then, and still no rumor had ever spread through Shaanxi that an illegitimate son of the Moyong Family had been wandering the province.
He had kept what we shared locked away.
"My back?"
"Even just standing there turned away from me, you give off the feeling of some solid, gnarled old tree. Something firm and unyielding—and at the same time, somehow pitiful?"
Gang Ilbi stroked his chin as he spoke.
"…I'm not sure I follow, Master."
He waved a hand over his shoulder.
"Haha, truth be told, I don't really know what I'm saying either. Anyway, two grown men standing around talking like this is a bit awkward. There's an inn I frequent just over that way—how about we grab a meal—"
Gang Ilbi looked at me.
The hand he had been waving over his shoulder dropped.
"Ah, damn. I forgot I've got an upset stomach. No wonder I've been running to the latrine so much lately."
"An upset stomach?"
He slowly waved both hands left and right.
"Mm. And you don't drink anyway, do you? So how about we talk while we walk the streets instead? I'll gladly show you around. A lot has changed since then."
My eyes widened.
"You even remember that."
Gang Ilbi smiled.
"You're my one and only disciple. As a master, of course I do."
"…"
I found myself letting out a short laugh before I could stop it.
"Right. Master. Then let's take a walk. Has Shaanxi changed much since then?"
"Of course. It'll flip you right over with surprise."
I followed him through street after street.
As we walked, I carefully asked,
"But why are you still dressed like…"
Gang Ilbi scratched the back of his head, face reddening.
"Ahaha, a bit shabby, isn't it? The disciples keep telling me I ought to get myself some new clothes."
"Hasn't the sect's enrollment grown since then? Then naturally the income should have—"
"It has. A great deal. You stirred up quite a storm before you left."
"Then why?"
Under the clear autumn sky, Gang Ilbi let out a hearty laugh.
"Maybe it's because prices have gone up across the board these days? Even for a third-rate like me, where inner force climbs by tears and drops, spiritual elixirs have gotten terribly expensive."
I blinked.
"Don't tell me."
Gang Ilbi looked at me.
I could see his sunken cheeks.
"A disciple is like a child. I can't pass on the same third-rate suffering I lived through to them. Other sects might treat their lower members as hired hands. But I think of them as family—not a means of making money. They came trusting a third-rate martial artist like me."
"…These days,"
I said in a dry voice,
"no sect among the Orthodox, the Unorthodox, the Demonic, or the Blood Cult operates that way."
"I know that better than anyone. I act like a fool, but I'm no fool. But listen."
Gang Ilbi winked at me.
"If everyone else is like that, then shouldn't there be at least one oddball like me, so the world stays a little more livable?"
I tried to answer, but the words would not leave my mouth.
"Even if it's a third-rate master, even if it's near-nonsense chatter—when you talk it through,"
Gang Ilbi said, looking at me,
"you feel a little better, don't you?"
"Pardon?"
I lifted my head.
Gang Ilbi was smiling gently.
"Your feelings show entirely on your face."
"…"
"If you look like you're about to drop dead any second, what master could eat in peace?"
The upset stomach had been a lie.
He had suggested the walk out of consideration for me.
Gang Ilbi took the lead.
"Follow me. There's a view I want to show you."
Before long we had climbed a hill from which the whole of Shaanxi's city streets lay open at a glance.
Reeds swayed up to our waists.
It was a hill so broad it was nearly a plain.
Beneath the blue autumn sky, brown reeds rolled and shuddered.
Shhhh—
The reeds leaned as one like a wave, then rose again, then bent the other way, making a sound like spray against the shore.
Gang Ilbi nodded toward something.
I turned my gaze that way.
A sky without a single cloud.
The once-scorching sun was going down into it.
The day was ending.
Below it, houses crowded thick and full.
"…It's beautiful."
All of Shaanxi's landscape stretched endlessly beneath the twilight sky.
The edge of the blue sky was dyeing itself red.
It was a dusk that felt as endlessly soft as a sun-dried cotton quilt, with the warm, comforting scent of one.
My eyes met Gang Ilbi's.
On the hilltop stood a wooden fence so old it was nearly collapsing.
Leaning against it, Gang Ilbi said,
"Say what you need to say. Doesn't have to be ordered. Go on. That is…"
He spoke the words he always had.
"If you trust me as your master, Disciple."
I looked at him.
Without meaning to, I spoke in a trembling voice.
Before us on the hill was that collapsing fence.
I rested my hand on it.
My fingertips shook faintly.
"Toward this place… a single demonic being is coming. A true god of death. Disaster itself."
"…When?"
I hesitated a moment.
"I'm not certain, but likely within a day or two."
"…"
Gang Ilbi took a step forward.
He set his hand on the fence and looked down at Shaanxi sinking into the twilight.
"Whatever the reason, if that demonic being you speak of arrives within a day or two, everyone dies. And the fact that even with it this close there has still been no evacuation warning from above means evacuation itself is already meaningless."
"…To prevent unnecessary panic, most likely. The Jegal Family's plan was always to stop that demonic being somehow before it ever reached Shaanxi."
"And that's why you've come back here."
I wet my dry lips.
I nodded.
"…Honestly, I'm truly afraid."
"…"
It was the truth, spilling out before I could stop it.
"I've thought about it endlessly. People often told me I didn't seem like a martial artist at all, and I wondered where the difference began. Then at some point I was sure of it. I hate fighting. I take no pleasure in killing someone, or even in watching someone die. In all the life I've lived, I have never once fought of my own free will. Every time I came to my senses, I was already being shoved onto a life-or-death stage. That was my life. And…"
Gang Ilbi watched me without the slightest change in expression.
"I've already faced that thing once. And I nearly died without being able to lift a single finger. I've felt many close calls, but this was something new…"
"What kind?"
I hesitated, then forced the words out.
"The feeling of everything that was me being erased—that was the feeling of death itself, the one I had imagined now and then."
The steel killing bolt, loaded with a fragment of the Thunder Emperor's flesh, had buried itself in my gut and seared my entire body with lightning.
And through it all, that demon-like sensation of him screaming for the Constellation Pearl and trying to seize my body had clung inside my skull like sticky filth that would not come free.
If the same kind of attack came again, I had no idea how to counter it—or anything else. Nothing was certain.
My opponent was a demonic being filled to the brim with the unknown, and the one approaching now was the Non-Human Demonic Realm itself.
"Even with a child right beside me—a child I had promised to feed a meal—I was pinned without being able to move a finger, and that child was blown apart in a massacre. And an entire village I had spoken with only moments before was slaughtered without a trace."
"…"
"Honestly, I don't know anymore. What I'm supposed to do. Or whether thrashing about in front of that existence has any meaning at all."
Gang Ilbi spoke as if tossing the words out.
"Don't look to anyone else for cues."
"…Pardon?"
He turned to me.
"If your heart shouts that this place must be protected, then do that. But if you want to run, then run."
Gang Ilbi spoke with force.
"No one exists who can block the path of a man who listens to the cry of his own heart and walks where it leads. And even the right path carries no strength if the heart does not command it. We've already lived through that, haven't we?"
"…"
I stared at him with a blank face.
"And as your master, I make you one promise. If you decide to protect this place—even if every last person runs at the final final moment just to live—"
Gang Ilbi laid his hand over the faintly trembling back of mine and patted it.
"I, at least, will stand on this hill to the very end, together with you."
He said it with strength.
"You will not be alone until the last."
"That's not what I meant—!"
Gang Ilbi smiled beneath the red dusk.
"Didn't I say it? A master, by rights, must set an example. And a disciple is not merely a disciple—he is also a son. Have you ever seen a father throw away his child?"
"…!"
My father had thrown me away.
My mother, until the moment she died, had not looked at me before her eyes, but had yearned for the father who abandoned us.
My pupils shook violently.
Beneath the red twilight, Gang Ilbi's hand—callused from farming and odd jobs, thin and unremarkable—closed firmly over the back of mine.
"I will never do that. This isn't some grand thing like chivalry or duty. You don't need to feel burdened by it either. This is simply…"
Gang Ilbi said softly,
"because as a man, I don't want to be ashamed of myself."
The wind blew.
Gang Ilbi smiled a pleasant smile and nodded toward the foot of the hill.
"Look down there."
Below, a different kind of bustle from the daytime's clamor rose up—drowsy, peaceful noise.
It was the laughter of families.
Mixed into it came the laughter of children sword-fighting with sticks in the alleyways.
The children's cheeks were plump with good flesh.
I could hear puppies yipping and scuffling over a little ball.
Kids, stop playing and come inside!
You wash your hands too, dear. Dinner's almost ready.
Everywhere, family members who had finished their days were gathering and talking.
You worked hard.
You too.
Anything happen?
Well, today there was this thing that—
Under the warm twilight they laughed and chattered with one another and went into their homes.
Clatter-clatter.
The sound of dishes knocking together as meals were prepared.
Beyond the warm dusk, white steam from cooking rice rose into the air.
The smell of rice bloomed.
Crack-crack…
Firewood burned down with a soft snap.
Cluck-cluck…
By the edge of a yard, chickens pecked at scattered feed.
Yellow chicks smaller than a fist cheeped and spun in circles around their mother hen, playing.
Standing side by side with Gang Ilbi, I looked down on every last bit of it.
"No one may know it. No one may remember it."
In the warm twilight, Gang Ilbi looked at me and said,
"But this entire landscape is something you made and protected."
"…"
"No matter what anyone says, no matter how many point and call you a fool—you endured, you fought, and you won.
Not by gifted blood.
Not by gifted background.
A man they called nothing more than an illegitimate son of a family, a man no one spared a second glance—he protected this with effort and will."
Gang Ilbi's steady eyes held mine.
"In that sense—whatever choice you make now—when you are old and lying on the bed where death comes for you,"
I looked at him.
"do you think you will regret today's choice?"
"…"
"What does your true heart command?"
I met the red wind.
My bangs stirred.
I took my hand from the fence.
I lowered my head.
I clenched my fist.
I looked at the ground.
Gang Ilbi added not a single word more.
I clenched my teeth as if they would shatter.
The fist with veins standing out on it trembled.
Above my brow I felt my flying bangs.
The hem of my black martial robes stirred.
And beneath the red twilight, I raised my head.
"I will protect it. No matter what."
KWAANG!
Jegal Sea slammed her hand down on the desk.
"Everyone, attention! I will now explain the defensive operation against the Eight Demon Dragons' Thunder Emperor!"
Before her were gathered every martial artist present—myself, Eun Seollyeong, and the martial artists of the Jegal Family at the head of them.
"Eun Seollyeong! Moyong Bi! And every last martial artist of the Jegal Family—listen carefully! This operational briefing is the first and the last! Shaanxi's fate will be decided by this plan! If we fail, there are no exceptions! Everyone dies!"
Whoosh!
A massive torch blazed up.
Jegal Sea shouted in a resolute voice.
"Here—ten majang out from Shaanxi! At this place, we will stop the Eight Demon Dragons no matter what!"