The Man Who Took My Mother
That man stole my mother from me. In my previous life, I had been a child of the murim. By the fortune of having a Taoist for a mother, I received enough instruction to roughly grasp what the great sects call the oral formulas—gugyeol—and though I could never lay hands on rare ingredients, the inner-alchemy pills she refined with such painstaking care gave me the seed from which internal energy might one day grow. Through her acquaintances I trained hard enough to defend this one body of mine, but no further than that.
My mother despised the very idea of my becoming a murim warrior, and I was never cold-hearted enough to abandon the woman who had raised me alone just to make a name for myself in the world of blades. So I believed I would live out my days at her side—scraping by as an herb gatherer, a woodcutter—and that someday I would take a beloved wife, raise a family of my own, and care for her in her old age. That was the whole of what I expected from life.
But the everyday I had taken for granted was shattered by a single encounter.
It was a day when the mountain was quiet to the point of strangeness. Out of nowhere, Mother told me to pack. I had no idea what was happening, but I had never owned much of anything to begin with, so I gathered the two wooden training swords I practiced with and the little pouch where I kept my savings. Our household was so spare that what little mattered could be bundled neatly, as though we had long anticipated a day like this—everything else could be procured wherever we happened to land.
I was just about to follow Mother out the door, her hastily bundled belongings clutched to her chest like a woman fleeing disaster, when at last I noticed him. A man with hair white as fresh snow, a stark contrast to the long, night-dark tresses my mother wore.
"It has been a long time, madam."
He spoke from behind her as though he had been standing there all along, and her face drained pale as she hastily put distance between them, angling herself to shield me.
"Tracking you down was no small toil. A full fifteen years you've made me search."
His tone was impeccably courteous, but the smoldering obsession in his gaze was nothing short of insolent, and the energy whirling off him was openly aggressive.
It was Mother who spoke first, her voice bitter. "You still insist on calling me your madam? Fifteen years of failing to find me—that was my oversight, then, thinking you might have given up."
"And yet the madam still insists on addressing This Seat as mere 'sir'?"
I had never once seen my mother speak to anyone while trembling with fear. The mother I knew was always composed, always at ease—a woman whose very presence put others at peace. To see her steeped in dread as she faced a man was foreign to me after fifteen years of living in the mountains, and it frightened me in turn. Who was that madly arrogant man, daring to style himself This Seat?
Through the gap in my mother's shielding frame, my eyes met his. And in that instant I felt myself flung into a deep, bottomless darkness—as if I stood toe-to-toe with a sheer cliff plunging into the abyss. The moment I met those eyes with their savage energy coiled inside, it was like being submerged in deep water: my whole body grew sodden and heavy, my breath jammed in my throat, my limbs bound fast.
Just as my vision spun and I began to black out, a warm, enveloping energy wrapped around me and tore me free of his.
It was my mother.
"Come back to yourself, Yeong-ah. You must never look into those eyes so carelessly."
"Mother."
I hurriedly turned the energy pooled in my body and shook my frozen limbs awake.
"Have I angered you? He is still a child who cannot tell right from wrong. I ask you to forgive him with a heart as vast as the rivers and seas."
"So you fled This Seat only to take yourself a new husband after all. And already you've borne him a son, I see."
Ignoring the white-haired man's blunt question, Mother looked at me with grieving eyes, as though trying to press my face into her memory for even a moment longer. No words passed between us, but I could feel it in my bones: if this went on, I would never see my mother again.
"Mother!"
Perhaps I could have shown her my resolve and earned her trust—but I was fifteen years old that day, and in her eyes I was nothing more than an endlessly fragile chick.
"Must I wait still longer? I find I have little patience left for it."
"It will be finished soon. Before that, I have a request for you."
Mother took another step forward and planted herself between us once more.
"And why, pray, should This Seat grant the madam's request?"
"In that case, I shall have no choice but to end my life here."
At the resolute ring of her voice, the man answered, his eyes boring into me. "...Threatening This Seat with your own life—let this be the first and last occasion. Did you truly imagine you could die by your own hand before my eyes?"
"I could leave behind a wound you could never wipe away. That would be enough."
"...Very well. Speak."
I was bewildered. What on earth was my mother trying to do?
"Spare this child's life."
"Maternal love, is it?"
"He is my own child—the very apple of my eye."
"And what manner of man is the father?"
"You have no need to know, and you never will."
"Good. If he is dead, he is no concern of mine; and even were he alive, no man could take the madam from This Seat a second time."
As if bestowing some great act of grace, the man reined in his blazing gaze. Only then did it occur to me that this was a man with eyes of truly profound depth.
"Is there more?"
"Let this child go. And do not pursue him. If you will grant me that..."
"Mother!"
"Forgive me, Yeong-ah."
My mother soothed my protests while the man looked on, visibly entertained. I was powerless. I didn't know how any of this had come about—couldn't even begin to guess.
"And what, then, will you offer in return?"
"I will never seek out this child again."
"Mother, what are you saying?!"
"Absurd. Did you not just call him your precious child? If it pleases you, I have no objection to taking him along as an honored guest of our cult."
Wearing the expression of a man amused, he began walking toward us—and Mother rushed out, almost desperately, to bar his way. But rather than barring it, she looked for all the world as though she had stepped into his embrace, and a futile fury coiled through me.
"I beg of you, Sung-rang."
Rang. That is what a woman calls her beloved. I should have understood it then—the true nature of the bond between my mother and him. But to the child I was, the bare fact of being abandoned by my mother was already more reality than I could bear.
"Today is the last time I will ever set a condition with you, Sung-rang. Please."
"Very well. But just as the madam sets her conditions with me, I shall set one of mine with her."
With the look of a man who had finally found an offer that could not be refused, he laid out his terms slowly, almost savoring them. "Enter our cult—and become the mother of its next leader."
The color drained from my mother's face until it was white as bone.
"Th-that would mean...!"
"It means precisely this: until you bear the next Heavenly Demon—one capable of surpassing even This Seat—whenever I desire you, madam, you will share my bed, heedless of hour or place."
I could bear no more. Young as I was, I was no fool; I understood exactly what he meant.
"Take your hands off my mother!!"
Desperately driving every scrap of energy I possessed through my body, I gathered it all into a single point—and in the same breath as I lunged one step forward, I drew both wooden swords and thrust them out. Even now, I believe that was the best move I could have made at the time. The pair of wooden swords, each carrying what force I could muster, were stopped dead by a single one of the man's hands—and even that, with my mother still held in his other arm...
"The Two-Form Sword Art and the Two-Form Blade Art, was it? Wielding the arts of Kunlun and Mount Hua simultaneously—what on earth have you been teaching this child, madam?"
At that very moment, blood rose in my mouth.
"Yeong-ah!"
"My, my. The spirit and the ingenuity are fine, but your handling of qi is rather crude. Is that the part you have not yet learned?"
It felt as though I had flung myself at full power headlong into a wall of rock. The gulf between us was so absolute that even my shallow learning could grasp it. But in a moment when I might lose my mother forever, stopping was never an option. Even as I retched up blood, I took one more step and raised my wooden swords to strike again.
The bones and muscles of my body creaked and groaned, my qi and blood tangled into knots, and my energy was evaporating with every breath. My instincts told me plainly: one more step, and you die. But I did not stop. I stepped forward even as bone and muscle were ground to pulp; I circulated my qi even if it meant tearing my channels apart; and defying the instinct that screamed at me to halt, I tried to convert something deep within myself into raw energy.
My vision bleeds red. My body burns. My mind burns. Even my soul goes up in flames. Even if everything I am burns down to ash, I will protect my mother. Her, above all...!!
Mother wrenched free of the arm entwined around her and ran to me, crushing me against her.
"No, my darling! Not that technique—never that one! You'll die, my darling, please come back to yourself. Please!"
She who had been ready to give me up only moments before was trembling now as though nothing in this world terrified her more than watching me burn my life away.
The man came toward the two of us, intending to calm us both.
"Let go of me! If anything happens to my child, I will end my life on this very spot!!"
"Calm yourself. I only mean to treat him. Delay any longer and the boy will die."
In place of my mother, who retreated a wary step or two with an uncertain look, the man stood before me. He shifted my body into a cross-legged seat, then drew a wooden case from his robes and opened it. Nestled inside the case, overlaid with gold leaf of a rather luxurious make, sat a single pill exuding a cool, refreshing fragrance.
"You would do well to think of it as destiny. Your heart, so devoted to your mother, pleases This Seat—consider this a second life bestowed by my hand."
"Th-that's...!"
"The Heavenly Spirit Pill. A treasure permitted to none but the leader of our cult."
The moment the pill touched my tongue, that cool fragrance wrapped around my body, and the pill melted away before I knew it, sliding down my throat. The man moved behind my back and breathed his energy into me. His energy became a single fine thread and began to survey my interior with delicate precision.
"This is... hmm... I see. So that is why the timing lines up so neatly."
Probing here and there through my body, the man seemed profoundly startled by something he found. An inexplicable ticklish feeling rose up, and my body lurched of its own accord.
"...! Honestly, this child. None of that pointless defiance—follow where I guide you."
Energy flowed out of him, pure and yet imperiously dominant, and coursed along my body. The melted pill, which had coiled itself in my dantian in the shape of energy, began to follow his current, streaming along my meridians. Some passages were blocked; some had gone murky; some were severed and dissolving. But that energy—serene, indeed almost pristine—moved along the man's overwhelming internal force, restoring order to my ruined body and carving away everything broken.
Even as I vomited blood, the further I followed his energy, the deeper I felt myself sinking into it.
"Steady your mind. Sink in without a center and your inner demons will devour you. Circulate your qi and commit the formulas I teach you to memory."
The one who fished my spiraling consciousness back from the brink was the very man who was stealing my mother from me—and the very man who had just saved my life.
We completed the Minor Heavenly Circuit, then the Grand, and I lost count of how many times we repeated them, so complete was my absorption—until at last the man gathered his energy back out of my body and withdrew his hands.
"Well, well..."
"How is he?"
Mother, who had kept her eyes fixed on us the whole time for fear the man might do me harm, asked him how I fared.
"The immediate fire is out, for now."
"Then why can he not rise!"
"I taught him the formulas of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. They seem to suit him remarkably well—so well, it appears, that he has lost himself in them."
"You taught him the Heavenly Demon Divine Art?! What conceivable reason could you have for such a thing?! That art is passed down to a single heir alone—the demonic art of the Cheonma Divine Cult...!! Why would you teach such an art to this child?!"
"Madam, more to the point, let This Seat ask you once more. Who did you say the father of this child is?"
"That is...!"
My mother could not finish—and the words that would have come after, I learned only much later, when everything had careened into catastrophe.
"How sly of you, to attempt such a sin against This Seat. You had best prepare yourself."
"It could not be helped."
"Whatever the excuse, it is no reason under heaven to sever the bonds between parent and child."
As the energy raging within me slowly settled, the man ended the conversation and sealed our acupoints, locking our movements away. And so, mother and son together, we were carried off in the hands of the man and his subordinates—taken to Mount Heaven, the stronghold of the Cheonma Divine Cult.