The Heaven Even My Father Could Not Ascend
The mountain was quieter than the rumors had promised.
She had climbed for half a day. This was supposed to be a mountain where ten tigers roamed, yet it was filled with nothing but birdsong. The forest that had supposedly burned down stood green and untouched. Rumors, it seemed, were just that—rumors.
She snorted.
It was laughable that she had come all this way. What on earth had she been expecting? A living, breathing painting. After half a year of drifting until she was worn down, apparently a single piece of gossip had been enough to capture her attention.
Still, having come this far, she had to see it for herself.
She crested one last ridge, and a house came into view.
She stopped and looked down at it.
...That's it?
For a place where an immortal was said to dwell, it was unbearably plain. Just an ordinary mud-walled farmhouse in some mountain hollow. A few heads of lettuce in the yard, a laundry line strung between posts. Not a single trace of mystery anywhere.
And there, in the middle of that yard—
A man was sprawled on the bare dirt, painting.
She observed him from behind a tree.
His appearance was a sight to behold. His hemp clothes were caked with mud, his knees pressed directly into the ground, his hair tied up any which way, sticking out in every direction. He hunched over a sheet of paper with a single brush, nose nearly touching the page.
Martial arts?
She probed for his presence. Nothing. No flow of internal energy, no tension of a trained body—she sensed nothing at all. He was simply an ordinary man. No, less than ordinary. The kind who'd gone half-mad from starving in the mountains.
Her disappointment curdled into a hollow laugh.
A scam after all.
Now the picture was coming together. It was obvious. Once this man finished his painting, he would pull some sleight of hand to captivate people. Shadow puppets, a beast hidden away in advance, an illusion array—something like that. He'd fool the villagers with cheap tricks and live off their alms.
Dealing with con artists like that had once been her job in the Demonic Cult.
Once.
She stepped out from behind the tree. She intended to reveal herself, demand he confess his trickery, and then—perhaps—work off some of the frustration of this wasted journey.
Almost done. Just the last touch.
The Cintamani pearl. The radiant orb clutched in the dragon's claws.
One stroke and it would be finished.
Just then, a voice seemed to drift over from somewhere.
"You there."
...A customer?
But she couldn't stop now. One stroke left. If she lifted the brush here, all that immersion would scatter to the wind.
"If you're a customer, come back in a bit. This is the important part."
I answered without lifting my head.
The voice said something else behind me, but it didn't reach my ears.
I drew the final stroke.
A single dot, on the Cintamani pearl.
Tap.
When the man answered without so much as lifting his head, she was utterly dumbfounded.
If you're a customer, come back in a bit. This is the important part.
The audacity. He didn't even know who she was.
She was the woman before whom the entire Demonic Cult had once bowed its head. And now a destitute painter in beggar's rags, sprawled in a mountain hollow, was waving her off with a single flick of his hand—like shooing an annoying fly.
Her brow twitched.
"Do you have any idea who I—"
Her words never finished.
The man drew his final stroke.
In that instant, the world turned upside down.
Something surged up from the paper.
It was something impossible to believe had been contained on a single sheet. A colossal shape tore through the paper and rocketed skyward, its ink-black scales glistening in the sunlight that poured across the earthen yard.
A dragon.
A black dragon, the size of a house—no, larger. Its long body coiled through the empty air. Its whiskers streamed in the wind, its claws grasped at the clouds, and black mist bloomed from its horns.
The dragon roared toward the heavens.
RRRRRROOOOOAAAR——!!!
The entire mountain rang with it. Trees bent, flocks of birds scattered in every direction, and the clouds parted.
The black dragon twisted its body and climbed into the sky.
It was an ascension.
A dragon painted in ink was rising into the actual sky. Its dark body punched through the clouds, higher and higher, until it was a distant speck. In the sunlight, every single scale flashed and gleamed.
The dragon's enormous shadow swept slowly across the yard. The moment that chill darkness draped over her body and slid away, she found herself holding her breath without realizing it. It felt as if the sky itself were passing over her.
She couldn't move a single step from where she stood. The fury that had surged through her mere moments before stood frozen, half out of her mouth.
"Th-this is... what..."
The words slipped out of her unbidden.
Her voice was trembling. This was a voice that hadn't shaken even through her first ambush at twelve, even through the first time she cut a man down at fifteen. She, who had never once lost her composure in any situation, was now stammering like a child.
But she wasn't even aware of that much.
Hollow-eyed, she simply stared at the sky.
At the dragon ascending into it.
She had grown up her whole life believing that the strongest being in the world was her father.
The Heavenly Demon.
Heavenly as in the heavens, Demon as in the devil. The Devil of the Heavens. True to that name, her father had been the sky itself.
The entire Demonic Cult had knelt before him, and the whole martial world had trembled at his name.
To her, the sky had meant her father, and nothing in this world stood higher than he did.
She had believed that.
And yet now—
A mere painter, a man in a beggar's rags sprawled on the dirt—
With a few strokes of his brush, he had painted a dragon and was sending it up into the heavens.
The heavens.
That heaven which even her father had never ascended.
For a man to raise a dragon into the sky with a single brush was something beyond every law of the world she knew.
It was true...
The rumor she had laughed at so mercilessly. That an immortal lived in the mountains, that his paintings came to life. The whole ridiculous tale she'd dismissed as a vulgar con—it had all been true.
...I was wrong.
At the tavern, she had been certain of it. That sort of thing was nothing but trickery, she'd said. That real power came from blood and blade.
And that certainty was shattering to pieces up there in the sky, right before her eyes.
But... her paralysis lasted only a moment.
Her mind began turning again.
As the shock receded, something else rushed in to fill the space. A long-trained instinct. The instinct of one born and raised in the Demonic Cult: upon seeing power, measure its use first.
That power... if I could just get my hands on that power...
She calculated rapidly. What he painted became real. Draw a dragon, and a dragon appeared; draw an army, and an army appeared. Which meant that this one man was a weapon capable of facing not just a single sect, but the entire martial world.
Even Father. Before that power—
Her eyes changed.
Where the fear had drained away, ambition took its seat.
I have to have this man. No matter what it takes.
Persuasion, threats, manipulation—whatever it took. Before that power fell into someone else's hands, she would take it first.
And even as she made that resolution—
The master of that power himself was watching the dragon with nothing but indifference.
Ah, the proportions are off.
I clicked my tongue.
The ascending pose looked distinctly awkward. The body was passable, but the hind legs were the problem. Painting in such a rush, I'd drawn the left hind leg shorter than the right, so the climb was a little crooked. Look closely, and you could see it rising with its body tilted ever so slightly.
This is why you don't rush. The customer kept talking and broke my concentration. If I'd just paid a bit more attention to the hind legs, the balance would have been perfect.
The dragon was already disappearing above the clouds. Proportions aside, it was alive, so it would get along fine somewhere up in that vast sky. No need to summon it back.
I picked up the sheet I'd been painting on.
This one was a failure. If I left a painting with lopsided hind legs lying around, it would grate on my eyes forever. I crumpled the paper roughly and tossed it aside.
Next time I'd start with the hind legs.
Then I spread out a fresh sheet.
Only then did I remember that customer from before. Wondering if she was still there, I raised my head—
Some woman was standing frozen like a stone at the entrance to the yard, staring at me.
Her face was quite a sight. Eyes stretched wide to the point of tearing, mouth hanging half open, and beneath her straw hat, a complexion gone ghost-white. She looked like she'd seen a ghost.
I studied that face for a moment.
...What's wrong with her?
She doubted her own eyes.
Just now, that man had muttered something while gazing up at the ascending black dragon. But his expression was strange. It wasn't awe. It wasn't reverence. It wasn't pride.
It was dissatisfaction.
Faced with a sight that could upend the world, this man wore the face of someone merely annoyed that a painting hadn't turned out well.
And then he had... crumpled it.
The paper bearing the dragon that had risen into the heavens—he crumpled it and tossed it away, as casually as discarding a botched doodle.
At the sight of it, her mind went white again.
...What on earth is he?
She finally managed to open her mouth. Her voice trembled as if it weren't her own.
"That thing you just did... what was it?"
The man didn't even look at her. He was already dipping his brush into fresh ink on a new sheet, as if the dragon that had ascended to heaven mere moments ago was already beneath his concern.
"What thing?"
At that languid reply, she found herself at a momentary loss for words.
"That dragon, just now—!"
"Oh, that."
The man glanced briefly at the crumpled ball of paper he'd tossed aside. Then he said, entirely unbothered:
"A failure. The hind leg proportions were off."
A failure.
She turned the word over in her mind.
That black dragon, which had shaken the mountain and split the clouds as it rose into the sky—to this man, it was nothing more than a botched painting with misdrawn hind legs.
...And then, suddenly, she was afraid.
It wasn't the dragon that frightened her. It was the man who could call such a dragon a failure.
If this man ever set his mind to it, and painted a true, flawless masterpiece—
What on earth would come out of the paper then?
It was the first time in her life.
She, who had never trembled even before a blade at her throat, felt an icy chill run down her spine in front of a man holding nothing but a brush.