Fated Encounter (3)
Do you know the pin-and-run tactic?
It’s a strategy built on traps, ranged chip damage, ambushes, sniping, and all manner of other tricks—setting up so many means of attack that the opponent can do nothing at all unless they close the distance, then luring them into close combat.
Of course, in murim there are sects that use such tactics. And if you were to point out the common thread among them, it would be this: every one of them was skilled with hidden weapons and had a knack for laying traps.
Whether the trap was literal or metaphorical, it made no difference.
The prestigious Sichuan Tang Clan of Sichuan.
The prestigious Zhuge Family of Hubei.
The Beggar’s Guild, an intelligence merchants’ organization and one of the great orthodox-rank powers of the unorthodox factions.
And then there was the Mo Sect, which existed in Daemyeong Pungwhajeon only as a setting.
Yes, that Mo Sect. The same one founded by the philosophers of the Hundred Schools.
In Daemyeong Pungwhajeon and other martial arts stories alike, the Mo Sect was one of those schools that got dragged in whenever the author needed something that felt vaguely over-technological.
And there was a reason for that: in actual history, the Mo Sect really had been a band of genius engineers.
Just look at what Mozi, the founder of the sect, was said to have invented:
spring-loaded siege devices, repeating crossbows, poison gas sprayers, mechanical dolls, jars that detected enemy intrusion through vibrations in the ground, primitive camera-like devices....
He had developed such a wide range of inventions that it was hard to believe he had actually been a man from the fourth century BC. Still, in a wuxia novel, that made for excellent material.
After living with my master all this time, I had never imagined that before I even entered the martial world, I would come across traces of the Mo Sect.
And yet here it was, turning up right now.
That’s a wooden hawk.
A Mo Sect mechanical bird, derived from the wooden bird that Mozi was said to have created—the one that flew for a single day after three years of work before breaking apart.
Whenever I searched for Mo Sect-related content in Daemyeong Pungwhajeon, this thing kept showing up. In the story, it was practically a symbol of the Mo Sect itself.
But why is this coming out of Master’s room?
The most likely answer was that Master was a member of the Mo Sect.
But among the hermits who appeared in the game’s main storyline, there wasn’t a single character who followed the Mo Sect.
If you pushed all the way into the unorthodox factions or even the Demonic Cult, you’d occasionally get one or two fallen Mo Sect eccentrics, but...
I didn’t think our master—the woman the people of Mureung County called a fairy because she had cared for them for decades—could possibly be some demonic arts practitioner.
She had to be something else.
Because if she wasn’t, my world would collapse.
Then what if, as I suspected, Master was an NPC from the game’s setting, one of those retired masters from the Mo Sect?
Based on the circumstantial evidence I’d gathered so far, that was entirely plausible.
If so, then the book I had just read—the one disguised as a secret manual, but really The Standardization of Mathematics and Logic and Fun—would make sense.
After all, that was the sort of content contained in the Mo Jing left behind by Mozi.
To examine it more closely, I pulled away the cloth that had been hiding the wooden hawk.
The wooden hawk was now fully revealed.
Meticulously crafted from wood and bronze, it stood there with a faint current of wind seeming to leak from behind it.
Can I actually see wind because of the Mind’s Eye?
Whenever I activated the Mind’s Eye in the game to find hidden passages, it would show secret routes accompanied by just this sort of visual—flowing wind threading through the darkness.
Then if this wooden hawk was the mechanism that opened the passage, and if there was something hidden inside that passage by Master....
I want to know.
As a disciple, wasn’t it only right that I learn what sort of person my master actually was?
Besides, I didn’t even know her name.
Of course, that was Master’s fault for brushing me off with “You don’t need to know” whenever I asked after her honorific.
So if my curiosity had been stirred like this, it was entirely her fault.
Maybe she had hidden away some martial arts manual because she thought I wasn’t ready to know yet.
And even if something went wrong, wasn’t it enough to flee back to her side with my tail between my legs?
Sure, I’d probably get punished under the guise of instruction.
At that thought, I remembered the time she’d ground medicine with a careless handful of dirt in it by accident, then made me lie face-down and endure a merciless rain of punishment for half a day, and my scalp started throbbing.
Let’s see.
In the game, the wooden hawk was activated through pressure-point strikes.
It sounded ridiculous to strike pressure points on a machine, but the Mo Sect’s mechanisms—including this mechanical bird—had internal springs and trigger points the same way humans had meridians.
Strike the spring in the right place, and the spring moved, and the mechanism came to life.
If that wasn’t magic engineering, what was it? Terrifying. The Mo Sect was terrifying.
But I hadn’t even learned a single internal energy method yet, let alone pressure-point techniques, so there was no way I could trigger the wooden hawk with a finger strike.
So I decided to try a more primitive, more savage method.
I quickly searched through Master’s toolbox and rummaged around inside it.
What I needed was a chisel—more specifically, a very thin, very sharp chisel.
After tossing tools aside and digging through them several times over, I finally found one that was just the right size.
It was like using a SIM ejector pin to remove a phone’s SIM card,
and when you didn’t have that, substituting an ordinary paper clip instead.
The finger that would have struck the pressure point would be replaced by the chisel,
and the burst of force that should have come from inner energy would be replaced by the hammer that would drive the chisel down.
Good.
Now it was time for the real thing.
I narrowed my eyes and activated the Mind’s Eye, searching for the spring that would set the wooden hawk in motion.
Finding it wasn’t difficult. The spring set into the nape of the wooden hawk and the inside of its beak glimmered clearly before my eyes.
I slipped the thin chisel between the hawk’s neck and body, wedged it into the spring, and aimed the hammer at the handle.
With that, even the strength of an eight-year-old child would be enough to push the spring.
As far as I remembered, it only needed to be triggered once.
Tap, tap, tap!
After several dull knocks echoed out, I felt the chisel smoothly pushing the spring beneath my hand.
Shrrrriiik.
At the same time, the spring began to move, and the sound of gears turning echoed from inside the wooden hawk.
Did it work?
Then, as if it were a living creature, the wooden hawk slowly opened its eyes.
And then—
“Skaaaaaaaaaaaaak――!!”
“!?”
It started screeching at a volume and sharpness that felt capable of splitting my eardrums in half.
I tried to clamp my hands over my ears and stop it, but once the spring had been set in motion, it had no intention of stopping.
In that instant, the words I had thought right before turning the spring came back to me.
Did it work?
Damn it.
I shouldn’t have jinxed it.
The mountain wind of Zhangjiajie was fresh, yet cold.
Though it was still early in the hour of the snake, a wind like a blade slicing through night air blew across the mountain, and Mukjeok quickened her steps slightly as she descended.
But just as she did so, a wave of stabbing pain spread through her entire upper body, and her steps came to an abrupt halt.
“Kh.”
Her chest felt wrong.
Thunk, thunk—she hammered her fist against it a few times, but the heart still refused to beat in a steady rhythm.
“Cough, cough!”
Only after a harsh coughing fit did Mukjeok finally manage to steady her chest and lower the hand that had been covering her mouth.
“Damn it.”
Seeing the sticky red liquid clinging to her palm, she flicked it away briskly and started walking again.
With a body like this....
Even if she stretched the time she had left to the very end, it would only be another ten years at most. No one understood the state of her body better than she did.
This year, she was fifty.
For a peerless master, that was not especially old, but neither could it be called an early death.
Mukjeok looked up at the sky and recalled the prophecy she had once heard.
“You will pass from this world within ten years, Great Hero.”
The childish voice of the Zhuge Family’s daughter, whom she had met in Xiangyang while accompanying Baekhyeon there just before retiring from the martial world.
She was a girl said to have understood the workings of the heavens through the purple brilliance of the Zimeng star in her Mind’s Eye. She was probably the same age as her own disciple.
When she had been forcibly dragged by Baekhyeon to face the Zhuge Family head and the girl, the latter had spoken those words to Mukjeok instead of offering a greeting.
As everyone around her had panicked and tried to cover the girl’s mouth, Mukjeok had stopped them and asked the girl, calmly, “How do you know that?”
“Your star, Ox Lodge, tilts toward the northwest. That means the star of a great hero will be offered up as a sacrifice, opening the Heavenly Gate before falling away. In other words, death.”
The gate that opens the heavens—the Heavenly Gate.
So my death has already been ordained by the Heavenly Gate, has it?
Mukjeok lifted the corner of her mouth slightly.
“Then do you also know how this one will die?”
Even as those around her tried to dissuade her, Mukjeok asked, and the girl answered:
“Great Hero, you will be seized by inner demons and your dantian will be ruined, and the vital energies of your life will already be withdrawing. Within ten years you will cough up blood from all seven apertures and meet your end. If not, you will die by another’s hand; even if a miracle that defies heaven should come, the fate of death cannot be escaped.”
“Hm. What a fixed destiny that is.”
Everyone else had rebuked the girl for her rudeness and apologized to Mukjeok, but Mukjeok knew.
Everything the girl had said was true.
And that time was drawing ever closer, tightening around her throat.
The battle with the Blood Demon eight years ago, when she had overturned her retirement and returned to the front line.
And the duel of martial principles with the White Lotus Cult’s Heavenly Dao King that she had fought before the wounds from that battle had even fully healed.
Her already damaged dantian had been completely sealed by that final battle, and the inner power she had spent years accumulating had worn thin like tattered cloth.
In the end, she had once again retired from the martial world and returned to Zhangjiajie, the land of her ancestors, where she had lived in seclusion for seven years.
Even after using Zhangjiajie’s spiritual energy to cultivate through a full inner circulation, the blood coughing had not stopped. It was clear her ruined dantian had reached a point beyond full recovery.
The best she could do was to govern what little inner energy remained and keep the illness at bay.
If that was all she had left, then Mukjeok intended to decide her own end.
She would turn her back on the mortal world, emulate the sages and immortals of old, accumulate virtue and do good deeds, and on a day when the wind was gentle and the sun bright, she would cast away all regrets and cross the Sanzu River.
But in the twilight of her life, one final attachment had taken root.
Wolyeon.
The unexpected fortune that had rolled into her hands when she destroyed the Blood Demon in Gansu.
“You foolish disciple, I told you that’s not what I meant. Have you really turned a deaf ear to your master’s teachings?”
[Master has taught me more than a hundred medicinal herbs, and what you explained today was over two hundred things. How am I supposed to keep track of all of it?]
“Don’t talk back with such weak words. Your master had memorized all of them by your age.”
[Even if I learn all of this, I don’t think it’ll make me especially strong.]
“How dare you answer back to your master as if she were the heavens themselves?”
[But this disciple can’t speak.]
“Do you think only what comes out of the mouth counts as speech? You filthy disciple who betrays master and ancestors.”
She was clumsy at teaching, cold and sharp toward her disciple, but after they finished bickering, she would turn away with the corners of her mouth lifting in amusement.
An insufferable child who couldn’t speak, yet was somehow excellent at making things up with words.
A child who, when taught one thing, would act as though he had known ten all along and beg to be taught more—a child who made teaching feel worthwhile.
Mukjeok did not want that disciple of hers to follow in her footsteps and shoulder the burden of the Mo Sect’s legacy in Zhangjiajie.
The child was not a scion of the Mo family; he was only an orphan who had lost his parents through bad luck.
She did not want to force such a child to spend his life guarding Zhangjiajie, condemned to a future full of cultivation and solitude.
That was why, before she left this world, she planned to teach him everything she knew—medicine, pharmacology, carpentry, and more—then send him down the mountain to live in Mureung County.
And she herself would bow beneath the tombs of Yu Hou, Zhang Liang, and her own ancestors, and bury herself there.
But martial arts were the one exception. Mukjeok would never teach her disciple martial arts.
Although she had taught him the light-foot technique that was practically required for survival in Zhangjiajie, she had never gone further and taught him breathing methods or internal cultivation.
Mukjeok did not want her disciple to plunge into the martial world.
The child she had raised from the time he was still nursing—she did not want to admit it, but he was as good as her own flesh and blood.
She did not want such a child to be swept away by the sinister, savage currents of the martial world.
And yet—
Of all things, he had been born with the Mind’s Eye.
A child with no family, no ability to speak, and no martial skills of his own, yet gifted with eyes that could pierce the weak points of every master under heaven.
The hypocrites of the righteous sects would try to use him, praising him as a “clairvoyant who would destroy the Demonic Cult,” while the unorthodox factions would fear that their own weaknesses might be exposed and try to gouge his eyes out. The Demonic Cult would seize his sight and boil him down whole into a human elixir.
If even the only support behind him—herself—were to die, then that child would be standing helplessly in the middle of the martial world’s waves.
What else could this be but a crime for possessing a precious treasure?
As Mukjeok thought of her disciple, her pace quickened even more.
Her steps grew faster and faster until, before she knew it, she had reached the entrance of the thatched hut.
And then—
“Skaaaaaaaaaaaaak――!!”
“....”
Mukjeok’s expression froze instantly.
The warning cry released when the wooden hawk’s trap spring was triggered rang thunderously through the forests of Zhangjiajie.
Her hand had already gone to her waist to draw her ink-black sword.
In the next instant, she unleashed her light-foot technique and flew toward her hut.