The Rumor of the Mountain Immortal
Well, they say there's a real immortal living on that mountain.
Around the same time, at a run-down roadside inn some hundred li from the mountain.
A woman sat in the corner seat.
A worn black robe and a straw hat that shadowed half her face. Her appearance was shabby, but anyone who knew what to look for would have seen it at once — the ramrod-straight posture, the calluses on the fingers wrapped around her cup, and above all, her eyes.
They were the eyes of someone who had drawn a blade more times than she could count.
She was still young. Twenty, perhaps. Yet on that youthful face, only her eyes looked weary — worn in the way of someone who had lived for decades.
She was the Young Cult Leader of the Demonic Cult.
Or rather, she had been.
Daughter of the Heavenly Demon. The sole bloodline of the Cult's supreme leader. A woman destined to one day ascend to the seat of the Heavenly Demon herself.
She had thrown all of it away.
As she took a sip of Dumgang liquor, the past few months replayed in her mind.
Half a year since she'd left the Cult.
She felt no lingering attachment. No — she'd told herself she didn't even deserve to.
Life in the Demonic Cult had always been the same. The title of the Heavenly Demon's daughter was not a shield but a target. Rivals circled the Young Cult Leader's seat from every direction, and shadows climbed past her bed curtains night after night. She survived her first assassination attempt at twelve. She killed for the first time at fifteen — a man who had come to kill her.
After that, she'd stopped counting.
There was no one she could trust. Not even her father, the Heavenly Demon. No — least of all the Heavenly Demon. He saw her not as a child but only as a successor. Weak, and she would be discarded; strong, and she would be used. Somewhere between the two, affection had no place.
She had grown sick of it all.
Sick of her father, of the Cult, of the very name "Daughter of the Heavenly Demon."
So she left.
One night, she walked out of the Cult without a word to anyone. There was no one to stop her — and no one who would have tried.
But leaving wasn't the end of it.
Half a year of drifting had taught her a bitter lesson: a nameless one is a weak one.
As the Heavenly Demon's daughter, no one dared touch her. That single name was power in itself. But stripped of it, she was just another wandering swordsman in a black robe. She was still stronger than most in the martial world, sure — yet roaming that world with the entire Demonic Cult at her back as an enemy was another matter entirely.
The Cult had not let her go gently.
Traitor. That was her name now. Pursuers caught her trail from time to time, and she could never stay in one place for long.
This couldn't go on.
To survive — to stand back up — she needed power.
Power that had nothing to do with her father. Nothing to do with the Cult. Power that was hers alone.
What form it would take, she didn't yet know. A formidable martial art. A faction of her own. Or something else entirely.
Whatever it was, she had to find it.
That was the frame of mind in which she'd been drifting through the martial world.
And today, at this run-down inn on the edge of nowhere, she happened to pick up a very strange rumor.
The table beside her was loud. A few merchants were deep in their cups. She was the sort of person who normally let other people's chatter slide right past her — but one word snagged on her ear.
Immortal.
"Well, they say there's a real immortal living on that mountain."
"Oh, come off it. An immortal, my foot."
"I'm telling you, it's true! They say he paints pictures and the things come alive. Paint a fish and it swims. Paint a tiger and a real tiger leaps right out of the page."
She gave a scornful snort.
An immortal. Living paintings. What a laughably provincial con.
She'd seen that breed a hundred times in the Cult — charlatans dangling divine power and Daoist miracles before gullible crowds, all of it sleight of hand or outright fraud in the end. Real strength didn't come from any of that. Real strength came from blood, from the blade, from training. She had been raised with that truth hammered into her bones.
Paintings that moved?
A bedtime story for children.
She turned her attention back to her cup.
And then —
"You know those thugs, the ones in Pockmark's gang? Went up to rob that immortal, and they say a tiger scared them so bad they pissed themselves and bolted."
"Pwahahaha, seriously?"
"A big black tiger drawn in ink, apparently. Big as a house, they said. One roar and Pockmark soiled himself right there on the spot."
A tiger drawn in ink.
Her hand stopped above the cup.
Something was off.
She'd already concluded it was a scam, and yet that one detail had lodged itself strangely in her mind. A tiger drawn in ink.
Ordinarily, a con artist would lead with something grander. Golden radiance, a celestial maiden descending from the heavens — something people could gawk at as divine. But a black tiger, painted in ink?
Too plain. Too humble.
For a scam, the imagination behind it ran in a strangely specific direction.
And then there was the gang in question — Pockmark's boys. She knew the type. Seasoned at shaking down everyone around them, and hardly ever startled for it. Fearless and shameless. A man like that had wet himself and run?
A simple optical trick couldn't have managed it.
Of course, rumors always swelled in the telling. One tiger became ten, and tales of a mountain set ablaze got stitched on. She knew that as well as anyone.
But rumors have seeds.
No rumor is born from nothing. At the heart of every inflated tale, there is always some kernel that existed before the inflation began.
What was that kernel?
She set down her cup.
That night, she lay in her room at the inn, staring up at the ceiling.
Sleep would not come.
The story kept circling back. A tiger drawn in ink. An immortal living deep in the mountains. Paintings that came to life — an impossible tale.
But what if.
What if, just what if, it were true?
She let herself imagine it. Paint a picture, and it becomes real. Paint a tiger, and a tiger appears. Paint an army, and an army marches out of the page.
That would be —
Before she realized it, she had sat up in bed.
That might be the very power she was searching for.
A power utterly new, existing nowhere else in the world. If something like that truly existed, whoever claimed it could turn the entire martial world on its head. Even the Heavenly Demon's own arts, perhaps.
Of course, nine times out of ten it would be a load of nonsense. Some mad hermit's party trick, or a story invented out of thin air. Rationally, she was certain of it.
And yet.
Her feet kept trying to turn toward that mountain.
I'll just go and see it with my own two eyes. That's all.
That was what she told herself.
If it was a fraud, she could expose it as one and be done with it. She was a drifter with nowhere to be anyway; crossing one more mountain was no great burden. And in the unlikely event it was real… she'd think about that when the time came.
Right. Just verify it. That was all.
Once she settled on that, strangely, her mind eased.
She told herself it was pure calculation. A cold, dispassionate calculation in search of usable power.
A tiger drawn in ink.
House-sized. Pitch-black.
What kind of man, she wondered, lived buried in the mountains drawing such things?
Before dawn the next morning, she pulled her straw hat low and left the inn.
And turned her steps toward the mountain.
Off to verify an impossible rumor.
The weather was beautiful.
The breeze was cool, the sun warm — a perfect day for sitting out in the yard. The tiger was sprawled beside me, deep in an afternoon nap.
Days like this made my brush itch to paint all on its own.
I tilted my head back and looked up at the sky. Not a single cloud — just endless, flawless blue, spread out before me like a fresh sheet of paper.
…And yet something felt empty about it.
Was that it? Too clear, maybe. A bare, vacant sky somehow looked lonely. It needed at least one thing in it to become a proper picture.
So what should I fill that vast expanse with?
A bird? Too ordinary. Clouds? Their absence was the whole point of the day. A kite?
Then it came to me all at once.
A dragon.
Yes — a dragon would be perfect. A single dragon cleaving through that azure sky, coiling through the clouds as it ascended to the heavens. Something magnificent. Even imagining it made it feel like a finished painting.
I'd drawn dragons a few times in my past life too, but those had always been manga dragons. If I was going to paint on a sky this fine, I wanted to paint the real thing.
The dragon of Eastern painting.
Clutching a flaming pearl in its jaws, every single scale writhing with life, whiskers streaming in the wind, claws seizing hold of the clouds. The genuine article.
I spread out a fresh sheet of paper.
Then I ground the ink thick. This was not something to dash off carelessly. A dragon is all about momentum — a dragon without spirit is nothing more than a very large snake.
I lifted my brush.
First, I painted it in my mind. A body surging up through the sky. The winding curves of that long, coiling form. Whiskers scattering like a mane. Wide, glaring eyes. And claws that could tear the heavens open.
I drew a breath.
And made the first stroke.
The body swept across the paper in one powerful, unbroken line. Break the stroke midway and the momentum dies, so it had to be one long pull, all the way through.
I carved in the scales, one by one, each one alive. Light where the light fell, deep shadow where it didn't — the whole body given dimension through nothing but the dark and light of ink.
I painted the whiskers, long and fluid, rippling as if caught in the wind.
I dotted in the eyes — fierce, gleaming, unblinking.
I sank into the work. The world around me dissolved. Whether a customer had arrived, whether the tiger had woken — none of it reached me. There was only the brush tip, the paper, and the dragon in my head.
These were the moments I loved best.
The moment when you forget every care in the world and lose yourself completely in a single painting. When in my old life had I last known immersion like this, buried as I'd been under deadlines? Here, no one hurried me. I could fall as deep as I pleased.
While my nose was buried in the painting —
The tiger, who had been dozing beside me, quietly rose to its feet.
It stretched out long and luxurious, then sauntered off into the forest with an unhurried amble. Apparently it had decided to go for a stroll out of sheer boredom — whether its belly was rumbling, or it just wanted some fresh air, I couldn't say.
Go or don't, it would wander back on its own once it got hungry anyway. Two or three days would pass without hide nor hair of the beast, only for it to materialize at the smell of dinner like a demon drawn to a feast — the exact behavior of one enormously oversized alley cat.