The Four Symbols
Something like a meteor speared down out of the sky and turned the ground into a sea of fire.
Explosions rolled up from below, tangled with wails and screams, and I looked down. I had shut off part of my too-keen hearing, so I couldn't make out what they were saying. It hardly mattered.
Decades in the wild had taught me how wretched it was, and how little any of it meant. However beautiful or noble a life, weakness made it the weak. However vulgar and ugly a thing, strength made it the strong. Down at the bedrock, where one's last breath was what lay on the table, power was the only voice that spoke for anything.
They were not dying because they had laid hands on me. They were dying because they were weak.
Even a dictatorship like North Korea ought to have grown gates the same as anywhere else, and hunters along with them. So why wasn't there a single proper hunter in the lot? They had already called in fighter jets and picked the fight themselves—why, then, send no hunters at all? I couldn't see the reason.
Their response made no sense, and it nagged at me, but it didn't seem worth the attention. This place was only somewhere I was passing through. I'd more or less learned the lay of the land. There was no reason left to stay.
I turned my back on the burning base at once and flew toward Mount Baekdu. Contrary to my expectation of a few more ambushes along the way, I reached the mountain with nothing in my path at all.
What was that? They'd taken a look and pulled out, and that only made it more suspicious. Getting through had been so easy it felt wrong—but I decided to stop caring, and flew on for Heaven Lake. I took the climb slowly, drinking in the view, and though it cost me a fair stretch of time, the time was well spent. The scenery, at least, was more beautiful than anything in the gate I had come from. The trouble was that there was no beast or monster here worth eating, so it was no place to linger.
A little snow still lay unmelted across Heaven Lake, and scenic wonder was too small a phrase for it. I had wanted to see this place back when I was human, but I hadn't expected it to satisfy me quite like this. I descended slowly and set my feet in the water. Cool water soaked me, and a clean, bracing freshness wound around my body.
The lake looked clear enough that a drink of it ought to have been refreshing, but it was standing water. A human who drank it could look forward to a stomachache and a whole mess of petty illnesses. That, of course, applied to humans. Most monsters were immune to nearly every disease and germ there was. Which meant I could drink it without a care.
I bent and drank. Cool water slid down my throat. It wasn't much different from any other water—if anything, the standing water gave it a faint stale reek, an aftertaste that would get irritating if I kept at it. Failed, then, as drinking water. For a swim, though, it was just about perfect.
I slipped under at once. Cold water closed around me, and it felt as easy as being wrapped in a cushion, my whole body held.
"Ah... now this is nice..."
The languid feel of it was like being gathered into a warm embrace, and I could have asked for nothing better. I let the time go by in a daze—drifting on the surface, or diving down to sleep, pressed gently beneath that quilt of water. A dragon's lungs can go three days without a breath of air. How long I stayed, I couldn't say. Only when the heat pouring off my body had turned the water lukewarm did I finally climb out.
I was a little hungry. Fair enough—I hadn't eaten a thing since leaving the gate. I searched the area to fill the empty ache in my gut and came up with nothing at all. Hardly a surprise. This was North Korea, a place so short of food that they shaved down mountains to make fields. What were the odds of a proper animal still living anywhere nearby?
I was turning over whether to cross into China as I was and find a meal when a powerful tremor rose out of Heaven Lake. For a moment I thought Mount Baekdu itself was erupting. Then the shaking cut off all at once, and a fierce pulse of mana registered at the lake's center.
"A gate...?"
I turned toward the source of the mana, and there it was, standing wide open. Wide enough, at that, for me to pass through. However I looked at it, the intent was plain. An invitation. Fine. Let's stick a head into the tiger's den and see what bites.
I stepped through without hesitation.
On the far side, I looked around. It was nothing like the broad forest I had left behind. This was a cavern on the scale of some enormous temple, its walls stacked with architecture that made no effort to hide how artificial it was. What caught the eye above all else was the figure painted across the ceiling: a tortoise's body, a serpent's tail—Hyeonmu of the Four Symbols. Even I, ignorant of art, could feel the grandeur in it. The image, inlaid in gold, was wrought with that much precision.
I was still taking the picture in when a voice struck directly inside my skull.
"What are you?"
I turned my head toward the presence I could feel.
"Do I look like I'm afraid of the likes of you?"
And there he stood, a match for the painting on the ceiling down to the last line. A shell and scales of a deep, refined green. At his rear, a serpent's head, sharp and pointed; at his front, set against it, the benevolent face of a tortoise. Hyeonmu of the Four Symbols.
When he had first addressed me, he had called me one who wore a dragon's hide. An Eastern dragon and a dragon are plainly not the same thing, but I could guess well enough what he meant. His tone all but said he knew I had been human. The title of the Four Symbols was hardly something handed out by order of age, so there was something to him after all.
"Why did you call me here?"
"Unfortunately I grew up without parents, so this thing called manners never really took. I did learn the posture the strong are supposed to keep."
The kindly face carried the weight of ages, and the air around him was not one a man could lightly dismiss.
"Career counseling, out of nowhere? And what are you supposed to be?"
"The likes of you?"
Hyeonmu drew his power up at once. Those eyes, heavy with the years, carried the pressure of a sage; meeting them alone was enough to bear down on me. Mana past mere weight—dense enough to choke—flooded the cavern and tried to crush me under it.
I had heard the stories. Among the Four Symbols, Hyeonmu governed water, the divine beast who announced death, the end of life. True to the telling, I felt my life threatened for the first time. This was the moment I had been waiting for. A true fight. A fight with one's life on the line. At the arrival of a strong enemy who could make me feel that threat, battle-hunger boiled up in me. At last, it seemed, I was going to get to fight.
"Long-tongued, for a turtle, old man. Monsters like us don't settle things with words."
Hyeonmu glanced about for a moment, then drew out his mana.
With the words, he stamped a foot down. Deep green mana wrapped the cavern, and in a single instant the space became somewhere else.
I vented flame from my scales at once, clad my body in mana, and rushed him. His scales flashed, and a massive foreleg swept toward me. I jetted fire from my scales, kinked my path in midair, and slipped the blow. Hyeonmu was undeniably slow, but the weight and force carried inside that slowness could not be ignored. When his foreleg struck the ground, the earth shuddered, and a vast green shockwave burst outward.
I climbed at the last instant and cleared it.
The voice had barely finished ringing through my skull when a compressed jet of water shot forth.
Insane. Since when does a water cannon come with a homing lock?
The moment I dodged, it bent after me. I dropped, flared my fire hard, and boiled the pursuing stream away. But Hyeonmu's assault did not break. Evade one jet, and dozens more came screaming in from every direction at once.
No dodging that. I swept my wings hard forward, flew backward to open the distance, and raised fire to meet them head-on. Flames fed with mana wiped his water clean away and tore open a narrow gap. I couldn't afford to miss it. I poured mana into wings and legs and detonated it, closing the distance in a breath, and before the slower Hyeonmu could answer I lashed his shell with my tail and drove my claws down onto his head.
KRAAANG—!
The sound rang out like steel being struck, and a vicious recoil and pain shot through my claws and my tail.
"Ghk. Hard. Damnably hard. I meant to snap your neck clean off."
The serpent's head lunged to bite the nape of my neck, and I pulled back for a moment.
Hyeonmu looked at the blood running from his own head and pattering onto the ground. How many years had it been since he had seen his own blood? Hundreds? Thousands? Faced with blood he had not glimpsed across a span of years too vast to count, he felt a heart he had thought would never race again begin to pound.
"Yeah. Not weighing who's right and who's wrong—only pitting strength against strength. I've never seen anything purer."
Hyeonmu bowed his head, apologizing for his own discourtesy, then lifted it again at once. The sage's light that had been in those eyes a moment ago was gone. What remained was the look of a monster, and nothing in it but the hunger to tear his opponent apart and kill him.