A Thousand Miles Without Pausing for a Breath (3)
Mukjeok once told me that long ago, there were two beggars.
One was blind.
The other could not walk on both legs.
By chance, one day the two of them ended up begging in the same place.
Seeing the blind beggar go hungry because he couldn’t properly beg for food, the crippled man said to him:
"You have two legs that can walk, and I have eyes that can see the world. If we join forces, wouldn’t we be able to beg for more food?"
So the blind man carried the crippled one on his back, and together they went around begging until they were well fed. A heartwarming little story.
But there was one thing Mukjeok had overlooked.
I didn’t know whether that blind man could read, but at the very least, couldn’t the crippled one speak?
What if a blind man met a mute?
The mute could only communicate by writing, but what if the blind man couldn’t read?
The answer to that question could be found in the female Taoist priestess in front of me, fidgeting shyly as if embarrassed by her own existence.
I let out a long sigh.
It was a soundless sigh, but if Yu Seojin had her senses sharpened the way she did, she would have caught even the faint movement of breath escaping my lips.
As expected, Yu Seojin shrank in on herself and bowed deeply, at a loss for what to do.
Her hair drooped with the tilt of her head, and beneath it, two high hills rose in reverse.
"I-I’m sorry. I’ve focused on the sword since I was little, so I never had the chance to devote myself to scholarship…"
Her pure white cheeks flushed red with shame.
After glancing this way several times, Yu Seojin carefully spoke again.
"Great Hero, if you aren’t trying to humiliate me, could you please say something? I’m embarrassed…"
No.
I’m the one going crazy from awkwardness right now.
I want to say anything, anything at all.
I just can’t.
I sighed again.
Once more, Yu Seojin’s keen intuition caught the sigh, and she hunched her shoulders even more timidly.
"Ah, you sighed. So my foolish mistake was the cause after all, the one that made you kill someone, Great Hero. My master always said so too. Yu Seojin, she’d tell me, you need to be more careful with your conduct than with your sword…"
Then she lowered her head miserably.
She muttered to herself after that, and most of it was self-reproach. Listening to it made me uncomfortable.
The misunderstanding kept tangling tighter, growing bigger with every passing moment.
Their shortcomings fit together with perfect cruel symmetry, producing the worst possible synergy.
Before it got any worse, I had to explain somehow.
Sure, we were just people who’d happened to meet by chance on the road, but there was no reason to leave a bad impression on a direct disciple of Wudang.
What should I do?
I fell into thought for a moment.
Yu Seojin was blind, but she could read a person’s movements through qi.
Yu Seojin was illiterate, but she wasn’t stupid. Probably.
I couldn’t exactly shove my fingers into my mouth and say, Look, I don’t have a tongue, I don’t have vocal cords, so take a look for yourself.
Then what about hand signs, body language? Could that work instead of writing?
To be honest, the reasonable suspicion that an illiterate person wouldn’t recognize sign language was taking root more and more firmly in my mind.
But there was a language of the hands that anyone in the world could understand—even a man from medieval China, surely.
Quietly, I extended my right hand.
Then I waved it back and forth at a ninety-degree angle and waited for Yu Seojin’s reaction.
Her head moved faintly, following my hand.
As expected, she seemed able to sense movement at least.
If the vision of my Mind’s Eye was similar to X-ray sight, then the way Yu Seojin saw the world was something like a multicolored infrared camera.
All things in the world were made of the qi of the five elements—fire, water, wood, metal, and earth—and the sense Yu Seojin had developed by training her innate constitution through martial arts was the ability to see the flow of that qi.
The reason she could see me flapping my hand like this was probably because she was reading the movement of qi in my body.
After confirming she was watching properly, I brought that right hand up to my mouth.
Tap the lips twice.
I have a problem with my mouth.
Then I shook my head.
I can’t speak.
"Hmm?"
Yu Seojin tilted her head, thinking hard for a moment, then suddenly let out an exclamation in an excited voice, as if enlightenment had struck her.
"Ah! So you can’t speak, Great Hero!"
Happy to have come close to the answer, Yu Seojin asked me next,
"Then are you perhaps practicing vow of silence?"
I shook my head.
"Oh… then perhaps it’s congenital?"
I nodded.
"Then Great Hero, you’re a mute!"
Clap, clap, clap.
Uh…
She wasn’t wrong.
But don’t sound so happy while applauding that someone is mute.
It makes things weird.
As I wore a faintly strained expression, Yu Seojin must have realized how she’d sounded, because she quickly shut her mouth and stole a glance at me.
"Ah. I-I’m sorry, Great Hero. I was thoughtless."
So she did have enough sense to notice that.
Still, Yu Seojin wasn’t stupid, only empty-headed in the scholarly sense. She wasn’t a shameless person.
In the game data too, Yu Seojin might have had the lowest cultivation parameter and been labeled a "simpleton," but her morality parameter was maxed out as "heroic."
Having intelligence but no wisdom and having no intelligence at all were very different things.
Since I had to finish introducing myself before I could do anything else, I pointed up at the sky to continue explaining.
Yu Seojin’s head followed my hand and looked up as well.
"Is there something in the sky?"
Yu Seojin stared upward, opening her unfocused eyes wide.
While she was gawking at the sky with her mouth hanging open, I stepped closer and took her right hand again.
"Eep?"
I didn’t understand why she kept making those little gasps every time I touched her hand. It wasn’t like she was a toy that squeaked when you pressed a switch.
Ignoring the strange noise she made, I lightly pressed my fingernails into her palm and drew a curve.
The curve was a semicircle.
The shape of a crescent moon.
"Hmm?"
Yu Seojin frowned.
"A circle… cake? Are you hungry by any chance?"
No, you fool of a Taoist.
Whack.
I gave her palm a light smack.
"Ow."
I didn’t hit that hard.
Again I drew the curve on her palm, then pointed to the sky.
A semicircle floating in the sky. The moon.
"Ah!"
At the second attempt, Yu Seojin’s face brightened.
"Moon? You mean the character for moon, "月"?"
I nodded.
I nodded to confirm it.
So she wasn’t completely unable to read Chinese characters. At the very least, she seemed to know the meanings and pronunciations.
She just didn’t know how to write or read them properly.
That reminded me of my own Japanese ability—being able to hear and speak, but not read or write.
One problem solved. Next was the swallow.
This time, I crossed my hands, opened them wide, then hooked only my thumbs together.
The way you form a bird in shadow puppetry.
When I moved my fingers to imitate flapping wings, Yu Seojin narrowed her eyes and fell into thought.
"Bird… sparrow? Pigeon? Crow? Wait, since it’s being used in someone’s name, maybe jué? gū? wū?"
Close. Just a little more.
After nodding, I drew a simple bird on Yu Seojin’s palm, then gave the tail a sharp V-shape.
"A bird with a forked tail?"
After thinking very deeply for a while, the word I’d been waiting for finally slipped from Yu Seojin’s mouth.
"A swallow? Yan?"
I nodded.
Then I brought my palms together and clapped once.
Put the two together.
Yu Seojin opened and closed her mouth for a moment, and then, as if struck by sudden realization, she cried out.
"Wolyeon! Your honored name is Wolyeon!"
Nod, nod, nod, nod.
At last, it got through.
Feeling triumphant and relieved, I nodded twice as hard as usual, and far more vigorously.
What came after that, however, was a heavy wave of exhaustion.
What a miserable way to live.
It wasn’t like I was acting out charades for fun.
Unlike me, who looked tired to the bone, Yu Seojin brightened with visible relief and smiled.
That smile was so pure and sunny it was hard to believe this was the same person who had nearly become tiger food moments ago.
Yu Seojin clasped her hands respectfully toward me and bowed once more.
"So your name is Wolyeon Daehyeop. You went to such lengths to tell me your name for the sake of this foolish Taoist, and I’ll never forget it."
I returned a light salute with a small bow.
Now that introductions were over, I had to be on my way.
I was in a hurry. I’d already wasted ten days just getting here on the road to Yichang, and the journey onward to DaeMyeong and Anhui would take even longer.
Turning my body, I looked north.
That was the direction of Yichang. I was almost there.
And then, at that very moment—
Rumble.
The heavens seemed to shake.
The sound came from two directions.
One was from the sky, where dark clouds had gathered as though rain might fall any second.
The other came from Yu Seojin’s stomach.
"Ah…."
Just when I’d managed to create a warm, touching atmosphere, Yu Seojin ruined it in an instant with a thunderous growl from her belly and blushed furiously.
From her face to her ears, her hands, her neck, every patch of skin that showed was red, to the point that one might have believed she was a descendant of Guan Yu.
I left Yu Seojin to stew in her embarrassment and looked up at the sky.
Though Hubei and Hunan were often overcast, they weren’t regions where rain usually came down in great quantities.
But when it did fall, it tended to keep falling for a day or two without end.
On a day like this, it was best to give up on traveling far and instead find a thick stand of trees or a cave where the raindrops weren’t getting through, then wait for the weather to pass.
It was a good chance to find drinking water, too. Being soaked to the skin made light footwork a pain, and if my internal energy ran dry, I might even catch a cold.
At least, thanks to Yu Seojin, dinner was handled. All I needed now was somewhere to avoid the rain and get some sleep.
I drew a small dagger from my waist.
Then I began skinning the tiger I’d just killed.
Tiger hide was quite tough, and even though the dagger had been sharpened well, the blade didn’t bite easily.
"Wolyeon Daehyeop? Why the tiger… surely you’re not planning to eat it?"
After nodding, I jerked my chin at Yu Seojin.
Help out.
Come on, give me a hand.
Those who work are the ones who eat.
Yu Seojin looked at the tiger that had been trying so relentlessly to take her life only moments ago with a wary expression, but soon she brought her hands together, pressed her palms in prayer, and threw herself into the work beside me.
She drove her sword into the tiger with her eyes squeezed shut, muttering Taoist prayers without pause all the while.
Listening to her incantations, I used the dagger to strip the tiger hide away in one long sheet. At the same time, I opened my Mind’s Eye toward the forest spread out behind us.
My Mind’s Eye flashed and combed through the forest with relentless precision.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
"I didn’t know it would come down this hard."
In a small cave where three or four people could crouch and fit inside, Yu Seojin stared at the rain pouring down outside and gaped.
After giving a slight nod, I used a fire starter to coax a spark into the dry grass.
Carefully, I blew on it, and before long the spark grew into a soft, steady flame.
I skewered the tiger meat on makeshift sticks and propped it carelessly beside the campfire, then stared vacantly into the flames.
As I felt the small warmth of the fire, Yu Seojin’s voice came from beside me.
"Um, Great Hero?"
Her lips moved hesitantly.
Could it be?
No way.
"Where are you headed, Great Hero?"
Ah.
Please.
My brow furrowed on its own.
It wasn’t that I was annoyed at hearing a question I didn’t want to answer. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t tell her, anyway.
And it wasn’t even that I was irritated by how naturally the mood seemed to be sliding toward traveling together. If the direct disciple of the Wudang Sect offered to accompany me, I’d welcome it with both hands raised.
Even so, my expression had darkened of its own accord because the sheer exhaustion of having to go through that maddening charades routine again was overwhelming.
Honestly, I was curious where Yu Seojin was headed too.
How had a direct disciple of the Wudang Sect’s head disciple ended up venturing into a place this remote?
But I’d just gone through all that trouble a moment ago, and I didn’t want to do it again, so I kept my mouth shut.
And now she’d shattered even that tiny bit of endurance I’d managed to preserve.
Yu Seojin must have remembered how tedious the conversation had just been, because she waved her hands frantically and hurried on.
"Ah! If it’s inconvenient, you don’t have to say anything… no, you don’t need to tell me! Just forget it as my childish question and move on…"
Being unable to speak is infuriating beyond belief.
Still, seeing her scramble and apologize like that made me feel guilty for keeping my mouth shut.
I reached once more for Yu Seojin’s hand, then stopped in place.
How was I supposed to express that I was going to Yichang?
After a brief moment of thought, I took hold of her shoulder.
"Ah!"
Then I turned her body north.
After that, I lifted the sword at my waist—sheath and all—pointed the tip of the scabbard north, and stamped the ground twice.
North.
I’m going north.
She should get it now.
After seeing the second sign, Yu Seojin tilted her head.
"North, you say… Great Hero, are you going to Yichang?"
I nodded.
Reading my movements, Yu Seojin seemed to think of something, then suddenly asked an unexpected question.
"By any chance, on your way here, did you see a woman?"
A woman?
"A very pretty, lovely girl. Her eyes are purple, and she wears clothes made from white fox fur. As for her looks… I suppose you could say she resembles a cute marten?"
At Yu Seojin’s words, I searched my memory.
Purple eyes, white fox-fur clothing.
A marten-like impression.
She really did have a striking appearance. If I had seen her, I wouldn’t have forgotten.
But the only things I’d encountered on the road down from Zhangjiajie to this forest had been wild beasts and insects.
And if I could call anything a human shadow at all, it was the bandit gang that blocked travelers on the road and robbed them of their money.
Those kinds of things were hard to classify as human, so they belonged in the wild beast and insect category.
So I hadn’t met such a woman, but—
I had seen her before.
The moment that face came to mind, a vague unease washed over me.
In Daemyeong Pungwhajeon, there had only ever been one person in my memory who fit that description.
Jegal Yeona, the clan’s treasured jewel.
A genius so extraordinary in reading the heavens and seeing the future that she was called Cheongi, the Heavenly Skill.
Yu Seojin’s dearest childhood friend.
And one of the NPCs players least wanted to run into in this game.