I Will Not Die Here
Clang!
A colossal tremor shook the sealed chamber.
"Kyaaaaaah!!"
The chamber, which must have lain silent for centuries, filled with a desperate, ghostly wailing.
Thud-thud-thud-thud.
I sprinted madly deeper inside. Countless long corridors linked together like a spider's web.
"Goddamn it! What the hell even was this place?!"
"They're catching up. Left!" Mumyeong snapped into my mind.
I threw myself into the left-hand corridor.
Slash!
The wooden puppets' fingers raked past my waist like grappling hooks.
Kwa-du-du!
A tidal wave of puppets surged past my eyes like a tsunami.
"…!"
The speed of the ones chasing me defied imagination. The puppets had no carved eyes, yet I could feel their gazes locking onto me. For a moment they held still, sensing that I had changed direction—then:
"Kyaaaaah!!"
Arms outstretched, they charged straight at me.
"Tch!"
I clenched both fists.
"I'll sweep the lot of you in one go, you bastards!"
Whoooom!
Heat-haze shimmered around my hands as internal energy flooded them. I had no sword, so I wasn't sure I could properly condense the force—but at the very least I could crush them with sheer momentum…!
"Don't! Large-scale techniques like Ssangryong-seonpung-geom or the Blood-Grinding Serpent Wheel Sword could bring the whole chamber down! Face them with close-quarters arts only!"
"…!"
The energy coiling around my hands died in an instant. In that same heartbeat, the wailing puppets' razor-sharp nails filled my vision.
"Tch!"
Kiiing!
My eyes blazed crimson.
Rank 4 — Shaolin Temple: Vajra Demon Subduing Fist, Twelve Fundamental Forms
Rank 4 — Kongtong Sect: Hwan-yeong-dae-sin-bo
Kwaang! Kwa-wooong!
Dry dust exploded outward as puppets went flying in every direction and smashed into the walls. But that was only the first one or two surprise blows.
"These things know how to coordinate!"
Crimson light spilling from my eyes, I poured everything I had into the fight. The puppets deflected and blocked my punches.
Crack!
Every so often I ripped an entire arm clean off a puppet that tried to stop me and shattered it—but another filled the gap at once and pressed in hard. My whole body was being shredded. Those stiff, gaunt fingers were each like iron hooks. And they weren't living creatures.
"Gah!"
One of them, its lower half already torn away, sank its teeth into my shoulder and dangled there. I smashed its jaw with a straight punch and hurled it aside. It burst apart in a spray of dry dust—and from inside came the wet slap of a half-dried rag, flesh that the long years still hadn't fully desiccated exploding outward like ruptured meat.
"They are offerings and thralls for the demonic aura of the Heaven-Cleaving Blood Dance. Guardians meant to keep the artifact from anyone unworthy…! They will not stop until they have torn the Host apart!"
"For fuck's sake—who the hell wanted to touch that cursed sword?! They shoved me into it, so why are they taking it out on me?!"
Kwaaang!
One puppet slammed upside-down into the ceiling.
"Continually offering sacrifices to the Heaven-Cleaving Blood Dance is also part of their duty as its thralls…."
"Hey, Mumyeong! Great that some of your memories are back, but you can skip the useless explanations that don't help at all! The exit—where's the exit?! At this rate I'm actually going to die!"
I wasn't joking about dying. My internal energy was bottoming out. Breath already burned all the way up into my throat.
"Host, as you already know, the exit is…."
I already knew the answer. Far down at the end of the corridor—the way I had come. That was the only way out. The farther I fled deeper inside, the farther that sole exit receded. To reach it, I had to retrace the path I had taken.
Between the fingers of the countless puppets lunging at me, I looked back the way I had come. Beyond them, set once more into the jade stele as if nothing had happened, was the Heaven-Cleaving Blood Dance that had shattered to pieces right before my eyes only moments ago. But something else stole my gaze even more completely.
"This place really is connected to hell."
Writhing. Squirming.
Along the enormous hole of unknown purpose that yawned in the center of the cavern, countless wooden puppets were crawling up on all fours like insects. Snuffling, they hauled themselves onto solid ground and came thrashing toward me with both arms flailing, hungry to tear me apart.
Tung. Tung. Tuuung…!
One by one the night-pearls that had been lit went dark. Darkness began to settle. Fortunately my blood-red demon eyes still gave me clear sight—but it was definitely dimmer and narrower than my normal vision. My breath caught in my chest. This must be what it felt like to be thrown into a vast ocean and drown without hope of rescue.
I fought hand-to-hand until the ones clinging to me were roughly cleared, then ran along the corridor. When they caught up, I fought again. I repeated it dozens of times. It felt like a rabbit drive. I was thrashing for my life, yet the exit only drew farther away. I had become a wild animal that knew the snare was tightening around its neck the more it struggled—and still had no choice but to move.
"Mumyeong, think of something!"
"Kh—! Understood!"
Fwoosh!
A fistful of fingers raked across my shoulder. A desiccated puppet's teeth clacked, straining for the vein in my neck.
"…This energy—it's Amjeong Azure Water!"
"You found something?"
Mumyeong's spiritual sense was especially sharp when it came to artifacts steeped in spiritual energy.
"I found it, yes, but I'm not certain. The odds are even…!"
"Whatever it is, it's got to be better than this!"
I spun and ran with everything I had. Full tilt down the endless corridor. On either side stood countless doors whose purpose I couldn't guess. I shot past them. Behind me a cataclysmic wave of human-shaped flesh came roaring in pursuit.
"Now! The door on the left—right now!"
Kwaang!
I smashed the door open with my shoulder. The thick wood exploded in a cloud of dust. Another endless corridor stretched beyond.
"This is the right way?!"
"The White Lotus Demon Sect held Amjeong Azure Water sacred and forbade access to all but the Cult Leader, the Protectors, and the High Priest. If that's correct, then surely—!"
A faint sound of running water reached me. The corridor shaped by human hands was coming to an end. Once more the path gradually turned rough and natural, the same kind of cave I had first entered through.
"An entrance?!"
The moment I passed the end of the corridor, the space opened up. A cavern smaller than the first one I had seen. On either side stood a pair of enormous doors. Down the center, a thread-thin trickle of water seeped over wet rock moss and dripped away.
"Lower right from the entrance! Do you see the chains?!"
A rust-eaten pulley wound with heavy chain came into view.
"Smash it! Hurry!"
Woooong!
Internal force flooded my fist as I brought it down on the pulley.
Kuuung!
Dust and rust powder shook loose; the pulley cracked halfway. My energy was almost gone. It wouldn't break in one blow.
"Kyaaaaah!!"
The puppets were charging like madmen. The chains hanging from the pulley swayed, and the iron grate in the ceiling shuddered, shedding stone grit.
"Break it already! If you fail, you die!"
"Damn it all!"
Kwaang! Kwaang! Kwaang!
Blood sprayed from both fists as I hammered the pulley in a frenzy. I smashed it like a man fighting for his life.
Crack—crack-crack!
It split. The chain began to run free. Puppet fingers stretched to within a hair of my nose, stealing the flesh from the tip as they brushed it—
Snap.
The pulley shattered. A massive iron grate dropped from the ceiling like a guillotine, shearing off the puppets' fingers and burying itself deep in the earth. I toppled backward.
"Hah—! Hah—!"
Severed wooden fingers stuck to my cheek, then rolled to the floor trailing sticky fluid from their interiors. Beyond the bars, countless puppets stretched their arms through the gaps, howling in silent fury. Those clinging, thrashing hands were nothing more and nothing less than the gestures of starving dead.
"…That was… a hair's breadth."
"The odds were even. I reasoned that a place restricted to high-ranking members would have a proper gate mechanism."
It felt like I had barely clawed my way out of a crack in hell. As if resentful they hadn't killed me, the puppets filled the air with the sound of their teeth grinding between the bars. The grate looked solid. They grabbed and shook it without rest, but it didn't seem likely to give way easily.
The immediate fire was out. That did not mean my situation was solved.
"So now I'm just buried alive."
I muttered, staring around the little cavern. With the crisis past, another reality sank in. The quiet sound of the water Mumyeong had called Amjeong Azure Water trickled down the walls. I clung to a thread of hope—that the puppets might give up on me and crawl back down the hole they had come from.
"Do I look that delicious?"
Several hours must have passed. My prediction was half right and half wrong. Most of the puppets standing farther back, unable to see me directly, eventually returned to the hole they had first emerged from. But nearly a hundred of those closest to the grate showed no intention of leaving; they clung to the bars and stared fixedly at me.
My stomach screamed with savage hunger. I opened the doors on either side of the cavern and searched for anything edible. Everything I could scrape together, down to the last speck of dust, I dumped in the middle of the chamber.
Three thoroughly rusted iron swords. One rotting torch. A snake that looked relatively recently dead. An armful of chain. Two sacks big enough to hold a pair of grown men—presumably once filled with grain. Not a single grain of rice left inside, of course.
"I'm screwed."
Despair filled my sight. At first I had still believed there had to be some way—an entrance I had missed, a hidden shaft. There was nothing of the kind. Perfectly nothing.
"…."
When I could hold out no longer, I cooked the snake—my only food—over the feeble torch flame just enough to char the outside and ate it piece by piece. The one small mercy was the thin film of water running down the wall; I could at least press my mouth to it and wet my throat. Even that was only a stopgap.
Time passed.
"…."
Cold sank into every bone. I hugged myself. One section of the iron grate was built so that a person inside could open it and slip out. I tried to escape. I fought several times. But with my strength drained, one puppet was about my limit. I circulated energy with the One Wheel Three Seals Heart Method, but without proper rest and food it did nothing for my exhausted body. In a damp place without a single ray of sunlight, with the gloomy drone of the wooden puppets for a backdrop, I slowly began to sicken.
"…Someone out there must be thrilled. Whatever else, their scheme worked."
So this is what it is to waste away and die, I thought. The world spun. No one was coming to save me from here.
Damn it.
Goddamn it.
"Host, are you all right?"
"I'm fine, for fuck's sake. So fine it's a problem. Even while I'm drying up and dying, I can feel those eyeless stares watching my death in real time like crows eyeing rotten meat. Crystal clear."
Crack.
The faint torchlight left after I roasted the last scrap of snake kept burning on and on.
"That flame lasts forever. Look at it—still going after all the times I've lit and snuffed it."
I coughed. The air here was foul and hard to breathe.
"I half-doubted the words on the stele at first, but looking at that torch… they may have been right."
"What now. At this point nothing much is going to surprise me, so spit it out."
Mumyeong spoke.
"There was a passage: Those who remain in this place age and grow heavy tenfold faster than any being beyond the human."
"Thorough, aren't they. Now they're going to age me to death too?"
"No. At first I didn't understand, but I think I do now. That torch is burning at roughly one-tenth the normal rate—imprecise, but close enough."
"So."
"Time is flowing slowly," Mumyeong said. "Relative to the outside. Whether it's a formation or sorcery, I can't say…."
Those words snuffed out the last of my hope.
"Meaning I'll turn into a complete corpse and die of old age in here before anyone out there even notices I'm late."
"Correct."
"So my options now are starve once the food runs out, or go mad and walk out to those puppets myself. One or the other."
I bowed my head. Buried my face against my raised knees. And muttered into them.
"Mumyeong."
"I am listening, Host."
"Mother always said it. Think realistically. Don't hope for anything, don't expect anything—think realistically. Face reality."
"…Yes."
"Funny thing is, the same mother who said that died still believing, right to the end, that the family head would come for her. But even so, those words of hers—"
I lifted my head.
"—together with the fear of death, have always given me one hard reason I refuse to die like this."
Before me, the wooden puppets rattled the bars and stared. My eyes gleamed, steeped in red.
"But how?"
I answered Mumyeong's question.
"The only way to live is to break straight through those hundred-odd puppets and get out. And with my skill right now, that's impossible."
"Host, are you in your right mind? Your words are not even consistent."
"And to make it possible, there's only one thing."
I clenched my teeth until they creaked.
"Training."
"What? Here? With no food? Impossible."
"It isn't a question of possible or impossible. If I want to live. If I want to live through this…!"
My nails bit into my clenched fists until red blood welled.
"I have to make it happen somehow!"