Because I Love You, Kneel
Mist was rising off the clear-flowing waters of the Yangtze.
It seemed to murmur in a voice of perfect calm: all the joys and sorrows of the world reflected on the water's surface are but a single dream dreamt in spring.
Which, of course, it couldn't.
In the next instant a wind swept through, and the stillness began to churn. Fixing my attention on the direction it blew from, I laid my hand on the hilt of my sword. A breath later, from the windward side, came the light slap-slap of water being kicked up.
I pivoted my shoulders toward the sound and brought my blade around.
Clang!
There in the open air, a blade had met my sword before I knew it, flashing cold where the first light of dawn struck it. My opponent wrenched free and slid back into the fog, the slap of water shrinking softer and softer. As if I had any intention of losing her.
"Not so fast."
I gave chase, Treading Duckweed, Crossing Water carrying me across the surface in her wake. The gap closed until she stood out sharper than she had when our swords last touched. Yet, as though she had read my move in advance, she did not so much as quicken her pace upon spotting me. Instead she turned, held her lightness technique in reverse, and lifted the sword she had been dragging low behind her, setting its point on me.
I added speed until only a sword's length separated us, then drove my blade at her in Azure Dragon Emerges from Water, calling out as I thrust.
"Eun Ae-hyang!"
The one I had named swept her sword around and parried the thrust without a hint of strain. That motion parted the fog between us, and I saw her, plain as day.
It was her, of course. The jet-black robes peculiar to the Kongtong Sect; long hair dampened quiet by the mist; and skin like white porcelain set against all that black.
With her figure bared to view, Eun Ae-hyang spoke, a smile resting at the corner of her mouth. "So even Wudang's good name has gone hollow, has it? To think a candidate for the next Wulin Alliance Leader would be you, of all people."
"What was that? 'Of all people'?"
Me? Seong Hyun, the Blue Cloud Taoist, who had committed every secret manual of the Wudang Sect to memory by my twentieth year—of all people?
Eun Ae-hyang pressed on. "Yes—and 'Blue Cloud Taoist' at that. A taoist like a drifting blue cloud... Truly an epithet as dull as your sect."
Ugh. That one stung.
"Oh-ho? Dull, is it—our Wudang, which carries intact the teachings of Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng, a man who actually walked this earth, unlike the immortals of legend?"
"If it's not a boring sect, then..." Eun Ae-hyang let the words trail off, raised her sword, and leveled it at me once more.
"Prove it with your sword!"
The sentence had scarcely left her lips before she unfurled her signature art, the Lesser Yang Sword Art, and closed in on me.
The Lesser Yang Sword Art. Just as its name promised, it was a style whose movements gleamed like sunlight breaking through darkness. Set in motion, it first unloosed a whirl of flamboyant feints that symbolized pitch-black night—and in the instant the enemy reeled, in came a thrust like a flash of lightning.
To break it, I kept my gaze from being stolen by the feints, kicked the water hard, and turned a somersault clean over Eun Ae-hyang's head.
Clicking her tongue, she gathered the art back in just short of the thrust.
There. With the gap opened and my composure restored, I said, "No matter how deep the darkness, before the Taiji of Wudang it is but one of two poles."
It was self-praise, plain and simple—but it must have come across as an insult to the Kongtong sword, for her eyebrows twitched ever so slightly.
"Are you saying, this very moment, that Kongtong's sword is simpler than Wudang's?"
'Crap. Wrong thing to say.'
While I was still casting about for an excuse, Eun Ae-hyang seized the opening. Sword leveled like light laying down a road—the Fifth Form of the Lesser Yang Sword Art, Sunlight Carves the Path—she came charging at me. Her speed had grown since I last laid eyes on it; answering was beyond me. Had I moved to lift my sword, my heart would already have been skewered.
So this is how it ends, huh. I was watching the blade come when, at the last instant before it touched, Eun Ae-hyang clicked her tongue, snatched the sword back, and vaulted over my head.
What was that? I turned, bewildered, and found her standing with her back to me.
I opened my mouth to speak—and then, all at once, she raised her sword and began performing the Lesser Yang Sword Art's first through thirteenth forms against empty air.
In the middle of the Yangtze, no less.
Merely to unfold the entire art while sustaining Treading Duckweed, Crossing Water—a footwork that demands attention with every single step—was enough to gauge her martial attainment.
Truly astounding. The rumors ran that she was a genius the Kongtong Sect saw once in a century... but has anyone in Kongtong's history ever made a name with the Lesser Yang Sword Art instead of the Demon-Subduing Sword Art?
Her forms unfurled one moment as serenely as a night sky with no stake in the world's storms, the next with the sudden, endless shifts of a leaf flung on a gust. Each time the speed ebbed, Eun Ae-hyang breathed out long and slow.
Meanwhile, dawn was coming. Under the morning glow the mist thinned by degrees, and the scenery of the Yangtze stepped into view. It was beautiful, truly—beautiful enough that old Su Shi, the Northern Song poet the world remembers as Su Dongpo, might have wrought it into a poem to be recited for ten thousand years.
But.
My eyes had no thought of straying from a beauty that lost nothing to the river's astonishing grace. Eun Ae-hyang, spreading her sword art beneath sunlight that sliced the mist apart, was truly...
...worthy, plainly, of being called a peerless beauty. At least in my eyes.
Yes. I am in love with Eun Ae-hyang.
In truth, the two of us had first met at Toemagwangmyeong, the academy the Wulin Alliance established to raise the successor generation that would subjugate the Demonic Cult. There we bickered and scrapped our way through the years, growing up side by side until we came of age. Adulthood came, and we parted to return to our own sects and master our secret arts—only to meet again as the Great Demon War loomed.
And then, of all things: the exact image of my ideal was standing right before my eyes. Lips of pale pink that glowed without a grain of makeup, eyes like the quintessence of gathered sunlight, a fine, straight nose—and even her ears, unmarked despite years of martial training thanks to her inborn talent, were perfectly formed.
Fish sink; geese fall. Didn't the old tale say that a fish which beheld Xi Shi forgot to swim and drowned? Raised under our Daoist masters' strict education, I used to blow a raspberry at any such story I met in a book—but the moment I saw Eun Ae-hyang again, I was convinced that fish had drowned, every one.
Struck at first sight, I wanted to confess on the spot. But the great charge of subjugating the Demonic Cult stood before us, and the feeling had to be folded away for a time. When the war was over, I resolved, I would confess with merit enough to my name.
Yet the martial world, where I had assumed eternal peace would arrive the moment the cult fell, was soon thrown into fresh turmoil by two variables.
The first was that during the Great Demon War, the Wulin Alliance Leader had fallen in battle to a poison art. The other was that the imperial court had moved to honor our merit in destroying the cult.
First, the Alliance Leader. With him dead, a successor had to be chosen—and the will he left behind was the problem.
"Let the next Wulin Alliance Leader be chosen from among the Toemagwangmyeong graduates whose merit in this war was greatest."
Most likely a maneuver to keep Toemagwangmyeong—one of the achievements of his own tenure—alive and well, so that his name would shine on after death and its benefits would flow to his clan. Whatever his intent, what mattered was that it was an unmistakable will, and the Alliance resolved to honor it.
That was when the second variable barged in. The court, since we had razed the cult, naturally meant to reward the feat—but the man who in ordinary times judged each merit great and small was dead, and with him vanished every standard for who had accomplished more. Grand General Cheonram, who had kept close company with the late Leader, attempted to honor each deed one by one, but from that point on he was barred by the long-standing pact of non-interference between the officials and the martial world.
The confusion dragged on for about a year. In that time the Orthodox and Unorthodox factions, grown close over the course of the war, soured on one another again as their aims diverged, and even relations among the Orthodox sects coarsened. And none coarsened more than the one between my Wudang Sect and Kongtong.
Since the history of the martial world began, our two sects—setting aside Shaolin, the orthodox seat of the martial way—had been the most legitimate names in the alliance and had produced the most Wulin Alliance Leaders. That was precisely why, when it came to claiming the next Leader's seat, no sects threw themselves into the contest more eagerly than ours.
The trouble was that the two of us had each become the master who stood for Wudang and Kongtong. And as such masters, we both took fierce pride in our sects and our martial arts. Neither of us was about to declare defeat on purpose.
Laying the situation out before myself again, a sigh escaped me of its own accord. I murmured, eyes on the sky, "We bickered plenty, sure—but we were never meant to be on this bad of terms."
I looked again at Eun Ae-hyang, who had just finished the twelfth form. Huh?
Damn it. Still gorgeous.
At last she completed the thirteenth form, lowered her sword, and looked my way. Her cheeks were strangely flushed—her sword art had carried her off. Ah. Our eyes met.
She soon steadied her breath until the color drained back to porcelain, looked at me again, and tilted her head. "What is it you're pondering so hard?"
I drew out one more long sigh and raised my sword. "How to make you kneel."
Eun Ae-hyang grinned and raised hers. "Oh my. I guessed right."
And so we faced each other once more, blades leveled between us. This was our hundredth duel. A hundred battles, a hundred draws—that is our record. We had clashed so many times that we could now capably imitate one another's arts; indeed, we had each unveiled the other's techniques as a gambit more than once.
Over all that fighting, a few rules had taken root between us. One: the duel is fought between dawn and mid-morning. Two: the one who kneels loses. Three: once defeat is decided, there is no further contest. There were a handful of smaller provisions besides, but they were so inconsequential that their contents changed with every review we ran after each duel.
But in my head I had added to that list one rule far greater than the rest. The day I become Wulin Alliance Leader, I will confess to you.
The sun climbed to its height, and the mist was gone. Ah—time was up. I loosened my stance and slid my sword into its sheath, and at the sight, Eun Ae-hyang withdrew hers as well.
"Another draw today, then."
"Merciful me spared you, of course."
Would you look at that? Spared me, she says?
"Wasn't it me who went easy, holding my hand the entire time you performed the Lesser Yang Sword Art all by yourself?"
"By that count, you'd have lost if I hadn't pulled my thrust," she shot back.
That was... I had nothing to say to that. The moment I shut my mouth, Eun Ae-hyang's face lit up in open triumph. It's a draw—why so pleased with yourself?
If you can stand that proud without a victory to your name, then kneel before me instead. That's the only way I'll ever get to confess.
Whether she knew my heart or not, Eun Ae-hyang spun on her heel, crossed the Yangtze, and vanished into the woods on the far shore. She'll go straight back to Mount Kongtong in Gansu just like that, I thought.
A moment later, when her presence had faded from the world entirely, I drew in a long, deep breath. I packed my lungs with all the air they would hold.
And then I shouted.