Why Would I Do That?
"Why on earth would I do that?"
"……"
Steadying her heart, she approached the man.
The trembling lasted only a moment. She was a woman raised in the Demonic Cult. No matter how great the shock, she knew how to turn it into a tool. If something frightened her, that was precisely proof the power was worth coveting.
"You. What exactly are you?"
The man, still waving his brush about, answered offhandedly.
"What's there to be? I'm just someone who paints."
"You have that kind of power, and you're buried in the mountains? With that power, you could do anything. Found a sect. Take the entire martial world for yourself."
Only then did the man stop his brush and look at her.
He wore the expression of someone listening to something absurd.
"Why would I do that?"
"…What?"
"Why found a sect, why take over the martial world. What a hassle."
She was struck speechless.
Every master she had ever met wanted power. Stronger martial arts, wider influence, higher positions. That those who held power would crave ever more of it was, to her, as natural as water flowing downhill.
And yet this man couldn't even comprehend that obvious truth.
"Then… what do you want?"
The man thought for a moment, then answered as if it were nothing.
"Hmm. Before I die, to paint a single picture? A really, truly satisfying one?"
"…That's it?"
"Yep. That's plenty."
She stared hard at the man's face.
He didn't seem to be lying. This man truly, with the power to turn the world upside down in his hands, lived with nothing more than a single painting as his goal.
She couldn't understand it.
Truly, not even a little.
And if she couldn't understand it, there was only one thing left to do: verify it.
Something in the pit of her stomach sat uneasily. Was that dragon real, or was it an illusion that beguiled the eyes? Words could dress up anything, and eyes could be deceived at will. The only thing she trusted was what her body had tested and confirmed.
Besides, she couldn't very well turn her back on a stranger of unknown strength. Was he an enemy or not? How dangerous was he? That had to come first.
If in doubt, poke at it. That was always how a survivor of the Demonic Cult operated.
"Your name."
"…Lee Hwabaek."
Even his name was painterly. She chewed on it for a moment.
"And you?"
She hesitated.
She couldn't give her real name. Her name was a key that laid bare exactly who she was. Her father, the Demonic Cult, the yoke of being the Heavenly Demon's daughter. Having cast all of that aside and fled, she couldn't simply hand her identity over to the first man she met.
She would just use a false name. Any name at all.
And yet.
"…Seol-ah."
What left her mouth was not any name at all.
She flinched at her own words. She had no idea why that name of all things had come out. She'd fully intended to offer something completely made up — and what sprang out instead was a piece of her real name.
Well, it didn't matter. Half a name was enough that no one would recognize her. Without the surname, it was as good as an alias.
She let it slide.
"Seol-ah."
Lee Hwabaek repeated the name once, without any particular intent — just confirming it. Then his eyes returned to his brush.
That was the moment she made her move.
"Sorry about this."
Even as she spoke, she raised her right hand.
"Let's just verify one thing."
She channeled demonic qi into her fingertips.
A strand of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. Though not with the intent to kill.
How would he react to martial force? Did that power truly have substance?
It was a sneak attack meant to sound out just that one thing.
This just got annoying.
That woman had been staring at my face from the moment she stepped into the yard. With appraising eyes.
Eyes that were already weighing what to strip away from me. I knew that look well. I'd spent twenty years drawing people.
I'd seen it all — how she froze at the sight of the dragon, how her gaze quickly shifted afterward.
First fear, then that fear transmuted into greed. People with that face, without fail, one hundred times out of a hundred, end up making a move. The type who can't rest until they've verified things with their own body if words won't do.
So when she opened her mouth with 'let's verify one thing,' I wasn't particularly surprised. I just figured: here it comes.
Seol-ah, she'd said.
It snagged on my ear. That name was in my manhwa too. But that girl should have been back at the Demonic Cult's headquarters by now, holding down the position of Young Cult Leader. Not the type to throw on a straw hat and come poking at some mountain hermit painter. How many Seol-ahs could there be in the world? I let it go at that.
And I was already drawing something on the paper across my knees.
A shield? No. Shields are no fun. If I blocked head-on, she and I would both just end up eating a faceful of dirt and dust. Why bother.
The trick wasn't to block it — it was to let it slide off.
I drew an umbrella.
A perfectly ordinary item from my past life. Long curved ribs, oil-treated fabric, a single handle. The kind you'd carry on a rainy day — exactly that. I focused on making the surface slick, so things would glide along its curve.
The moment that blackened aura drew near.
I popped the umbrella open.
Whoosh—
The black qi ran down the umbrella's curve and slid away.
Instead of clashing head-on, it skated sideways like rainwater running off an umbrella — and slammed uselessly into a boulder on the back ridge with a thunderous boom.
Not a speck of dust so much as touched me.
Umbrella propped casually on my shoulder, I looked at the woman.
She'd just tried to sound me out. Well, fair enough. That's just the face she was born with. When they don't believe you, they poke — that's how her kind survives.
Now, what do you normally do in this situation. Strike back? Scare her a little so she never tries it again?
…What a pain.
I yawned.
The hit never landed in the first place, did it? Nothing injured, nothing hurt. Wasn't that the end of it? No matter how I turned it over, I couldn't find a single reason to dirty my hands paying her back.
"Long as nobody got hurt, all's well…"
I folded the umbrella and stood it beside me. It wasn't a living thing, so it wouldn't vanish on me — I'd just consider myself the new owner of an umbrella.
Retaliate? Why would I do that. Nobody got hurt.
.
.
.
.
She doubted her own eyes.
The thing that man had just unfurled.
It was an umbrella.
The one you use on rainy days — that utterly common umbrella. Oil-cloth stretched over ribs, the kind sold at every stall in the market town. Neither a weapon nor some storied divine artifact. A thing even a child would recognize.
And yet that umbrella.
Had shed the Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
It hadn't blocked it. Had it done that, she might at least have understood.
Deflecting it with a famed shield or a legendary divine weapon would have made its own kind of sense. But this man had taken her strike — with a mere umbrella — and let it glide away as if dodging an annoying drizzle.
Half a step backward escaped her before she knew it.
Vigilance bristled through her entire body.
That was no technique, no internal cultivation, nothing within any martial principle she knew. She'd never seen its like in any record of the Demonic Cult, nor in any orthodox sect's forms.
She prided herself on knowing nearly every martial art in the martial world. And this man had done something that appeared nowhere in her catalogue of known arts — casually, no less, with nothing but an umbrella.
And then, as if that weren't enough.
He'd set the thing down beside him, like tossing aside some used-up trinket.
That nonchalance — parking an object that had just shed the Heavenly Demon Divine Art wherever it happened to land.
She couldn't take her eyes off the umbrella.
But the truly astonishing thing was what came next.
Lee Hwabaek did not retaliate.
In the world she knew, anyone who shed a killing strike repaid it in kind. That was the law of the gangho. All the more so when it had been brushed aside this casually — punishing the offender was simply the natural order.
Yet this man had picked his brush back up as if nothing at all had happened.
Absurdity welled up in her, and she fired back.
"…What are you doing right now?"
"Doing what?"
"I just attacked you… and you didn't even counter?"
Waving his brush, the man replied as if it were nothing.
"Nobody got hurt. Then that's that. What more is there?"
"What is that even supposed to—"
"Look here, miss."
Only then did the man lift his head. His eyes were those of an old man scolding a thoughtless grandchild.
"Someone swung a fist at me. It didn't land. Then it's over. If you chase them down to pay them back, and they come after you for that, and you keep trading blows back and forth like that — does it ever end? It doesn't. Grudges carry ruinously steep interest."
"……"
"Nobody got hurt? Let it go. That's how you live a long life."
And his eyes dropped back to his brush.
"Not that it comes easy when you're young. I know from experience."
She was struck dumb.
To the person who had just absorbed her strike, this man was dispensing life lessons instead of punishment. Serenely, like some old man who'd seen everything the world had to offer.
Even though his face didn't look more than a few years older than her own.
He didn't regard her as an enemy, or even a threat. She was simply a reckless guest deserving of a scolding — at most, a reason to pick his brush back up.
All her life, she had divided people into two kinds.
The strong and the weak.
The strong take; the weak are taken from. That was the entirety of the world she knew. Her father, the Demonic Cult, she herself — all fit within those two kinds.
But this man belonged to neither.
Stronger than anyone alive, yet reaching for nothing. Possessing power, yet refusing to wield it. The thing every master in the world thirsted for — this man alone didn't want it at all.
He was the first of his kind.
And standing before that unprecedented something, something long congealed within her cracked and wept. The truths she'd believed all her life kept slipping out of joint in front of this man. Strange tingles stirred in the corner of her chest.
…No.
She crushed the feeling at once.
Get a hold of yourself.
This was no time to waver. Only one thing mattered now. That power. Power that existed nowhere else in the world — power to overturn it. And its owner was currently letting it rot in the mountains, without so much as a thought of using it.
Which meant that power was, for all practical purposes, ownerless.
And the first to seize it became its master.
'…I'll stay by his side.'
She reached her conclusion.
She would remain at this man's side, unravel the nature of that power, learn its conditions, and make it hers in the end. If coaxing failed, other means. A body with nowhere to go anyway — settling into a mountain hut was no obstacle at all.
Don't mistake yourself.
It wasn't that her heart wavered at the man himself. She coveted the power. That was all.
So she hammered the nail into herself. Again and again.
But… how each repetition of those words made them lose a little more of their force — she did not yet know.
