Heaven Above, Earth Below, I Alone Am Supreme
From time immemorial, the methods of fraudulent cults have always been the same.
They approach those whose lives hang by a thread, seize that desperate heart, and shake it until it yields. Offer a lavish sacrifice, they whisper, and serve the cult leader who claims to channel the divine, and everything will fall into place. To them, a human being's dream is nothing more than one more condition required for their own profit.
And that is not all. They insist that some tremendous secret exists in this world, and that you are the chosen one who has drawn near to it. With staged spectacles and cheap parlor tricks, they brainwash their victims into taking a hollow fiction for truth.
That is how they make a person truly believe. A nameless god with neither history nor tradition, neither meaning nor cause—and more often than not, the cult leader himself is the one they come to worship as that god.
"Child, why did you throw yourself into this nest of corruption? What dream did you carry when you first set foot in this place?"
I opened my mouth in a tone not unlike that of an old master from a martial arts novel, and looked at the woman before me as if I had seen through everything—as if I pitied her. Recruiter or not, she too was a victim of the cult's brainwashing. The first thing I had to do was open her eyes.
"A dream is a radiant thing. So sublime, so high, that people have always pleaded their wishes to the stars. But what of this age we live in? Even if you lift your head on a whim, the stars have grown hard to find in the night sky."
East or West, past or present, people have always wished upon the stars. Grown adults no less than runny-nosed children who knew nothing of the world. They looked up at wishes hung so high they could not yet be grasped, hoping that someday those wishes would rest in their own hands.
"And so, now that the stars have vanished from the heavens, shameless men have taken to impersonating them."
Gaejeon Cheonjingyo was like that. Every fraudulent cult in this world was like that. Things that had never even climbed to the sky dared to speak as if they had become its stars, spinning honeyed lies so they could exploit other people's dreams for their own greed.
"What did your cult leader promise you? Has that promise been kept? Is he even trying to fulfill what he swore to you?"
I doubted it. No—he would not even remember. To the leader of a cult, a believer was nothing more and nothing less than a wallet that handed over money.
"The reason I stand here is the answer to that question."
There is no one who does not despise fraudulent cults. And yet, if you ask why, few people can give you a reason that is truly their own. They hate them and shun them because they harm society, because they hurl people's lives into the abyss—and that is all.
Of course, that judgment is not wrong. It is entirely right. But I had a reason of my own, a reason that was certain.
Someone making money off Kim Clan Tai Chi Chuan? Honestly, that part did not particularly move me. If I had to choose, I welcomed it. Even if someone opened a school to turn a profit from Kim Clan Tai Chi Chuan, the end result was still more people living healthier lives than before. I knew that even a motive of self-interest could produce a good result. That, after all, was the very foundation of modern capitalism.
"The brilliant, lofty wishes you were cheated of—stolen by a false star that can neither shine of its own accord, nor hang itself in the heights."
A fraudulent cult was different. At a glance it might look as if they were teaching Tai Chi Chuan and making people healthier, but their ultimate purpose was not good at all. A man who opened a school wanted money. A cult wanted puppet-slaves who moved exactly as it wished.
I had no intention of stopping Kim Clan Tai Chi Chuan from becoming a tool for someone's dream. But I had equally no intention of letting it be used as bait to deceive people, bewitch them, and steal those dreams away.
"Ah...! Hic—"
The woman's eyes flew wide. And then, at last seeing that she herself had been the victim, tears welled and spilled from them.
I said nothing. It was not only tears that were falling. The body that had been standing so straight collapsed under the weight of what she had lost. What she needed, crouched there and sobbing without pause, was time.
"Rise."
That silence, that waiting, did not last long. There was still something she had to do. I stirred my hand and lifted her with Object Control, and the gaze that had stopped crying locked onto me.
"Does it hurt? Are you bitter? Do you feel wronged?"
"...Yes."
"Then tell me why those feelings rose in you."
"The Cult Leader took the wish that meant more to me than anything and toyed with it for his own greed. That's why it hurts. Thinking of all the luxury he's enjoyed until now makes me sick, and realizing the truth only now is just so unfair."
Two brief exchanges. A woman who had once been a recruiter, her eyes now open to the truth, answered as if she were giving testimony. It was exactly the answer I had wanted. I nodded.
"There are many children here just like you."
"Ah...!"
The look on her face was that of someone who had been struck a heavy blow. The believers she had seen before she met me, and the many more she had passed while guiding me here today, must have been rising one after another in her mind. Last of all, she would have compared her former blind self with those people as they were now—and understood why I had made her stand.
And so I spoke to her as the surest ally and guide she could have, telling her I would make her the example I showed to everyone else.
"Child who has found her dream. Lead me to those who still cannot see—just as you brought me here today."
At the same time, I wiped the tears running down her face with my sleeve, and sealed it with a promise.
Today, Cheonjingyo would vanish by my hand.
Choi Dugwak, Cult Leader of Gaejeon Cheonjingyo, had been in an excellent mood of late.
While browsing internet streams in an effort to grow closer to the son who would one day inherit his congregation, he had stumbled upon a pearl—one that would feed the cult's future for years to come.
Who would have thought luck like this would come my way. Yes. This is how the world ought to be. Exactly how it ought to be.
Kim Clan Tai Chi Chuan, was it? At first he had taken the boy for a seedling laying groundwork to run a cult of his own, just as Choi Dugwak had. And inwardly, he had looked down on him. Blurting out from the start that Tai Chi Chuan training was the key to overcoming every illness was a sure way to get yourself branded a con man.
The hospital told me to get a little exercise, so I tried the training out of idle curiosity. Who would have thought my body would grow this vigorous.
That opinion lasted all of a few weeks. Train Tai Chi Chuan, and vitality really did course through the body; the sickness really did recede. He had grown so hearty it was as if he had been rejuvenated. There was no way left not to believe.
To just give something like this away to everyone... what kind of idiot is he?
If it had been up to him, he would have hoarded the study for himself. But there was no way to monopolize Tai Chi Chuan, and after turning the problem over and over, Choi Dugwak changed tack.
"Thanks to the Cult Leader's teachings, my illness vanished as if it had been washed away!"
"He is truly one who has received a god!"
"I confess the sin of doubting you, even for a moment! Please, forgive me!"
He would use it as the sharpest blade of the fraudulent religion he already ran. His congregation had been little more than a second-string outfit, crowded out by other sects—but with Kim Clan Tai Chi Chuan as bait, there was a real chance it could become the largest cult in Korea.
Cheonjingyo, the other outfits—it's all the same racket. Pretty words to fleece the suckers. Christianity, Buddhism, they may have pedigree, but their gods never actually answer!
There was no god in this world. There were only people who believed in one, people who wished that one existed. Remember that, and you saw just how powerful a weapon Tai Chi Chuan truly was.
Pray all you want, sit in meditation all you want—Jesus in the churches and Buddha in the temples never answer. So if I, the doctrine's appointed proxy of God, am the one teaching this Tai Chi Chuan that actually answers effort...?
It was not even a question worth pondering. The existing believers would become even more devoted suckers, and new suckers would pour in like a bursting dam.
And his scheme had, in fact, landed. Obedient believers multiplied. Those who had felt Tai Chi Chuan's effects dragged in the people around them, and the congregation swelled by the day.
These days, Choi Dugwak's hobby was watching the believers train.
The opening stance of a stolen art, rebranded as a divine blessing.
"Begin!"
And so it was today. With a look of deep satisfaction, he had gathered several of his most ardent believers, intending to watch them train until the evening banquet—when a voice suddenly rolled out, vast and solemn.
Choi Dugwak's face twisted at the blasphemy. He drew himself up to roar with a cult leader's dignity—and then—
"...Huh?"
A sudden wrongness dragged a stupid sound out of him.
"W-what...?"
The aura he had so carefully inflated collapsed. His head jerked this way and that. His eyes shook as if an earthquake had struck them, and cold sweat ran down the wrinkled nape of his neck.
"What's the matter? Standing there with that vacant look, like a fool."
He swallowed, unbidden—and in that gulp, Choi Dugwak understood what the wrongness was.
"Though I suppose that vacant look does suit a sinner who, without cause or justice, dared to impersonate a god and twist Heaven's solemn will."
He had not raised his voice, and yet the words drove into the mind with unbearable clarity. Worse: the sound was not coming from any one place. It arrived at once from above and below, left and right, front and back—from all six directions.
Six Directions Voice Transmission — a profound esoteric sound art, projecting one's voice simultaneously from all six directions into the listeners' minds.
He was still gaping in shock at that fact when it hit.
A pressure that crushed not only the flesh, but the soul.
Instinct whipped his head around toward the roof of the ardent believers' dormitory. Not Choi Dugwak alone—everyone on the training ground turned as one to look.
From a place where no one should have been, a presence wrapped in five-colored clouds of mist revealed itself.
"Th-that's—that's... what in the world is that...?!"
Until it permitted itself to be seen, not so much as a hair of that fierce presence could be felt. Was this what the martial world's peerless masters had meant by the realm of Banbakgwijin—Returning to True Simplicity?
The ultimate martial state, in which a master's overwhelming aura retracts completely, appearing outwardly like an ordinary, flawless human.
He seemed merely to be standing there, and yet from crown to heel there was not a single opening. The noble, beautiful bearing of Cheonuimubong—Heavenly Robes Seamlessly Woven—called forth awe of its own accord.
Heavenly Robes Seamlessly Woven — a state of natural perfection, without flaw or opening in one's posture and bearing.
"Ah... ahh...!"
Who in that place would have dared look upon that figure and deny it?
And so, with someone's murmured recitation, everyone understood.
"G-God..."
That a god was there.