Back to Mount Heng (3)
On the day she miraculously came back from the dead after taking the Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng, Zhuge Yang realized that she had achieved the Pure Yin Extreme Body. Her Nine Yin Severed Meridians, once her Pure Yin Body had evolved past them, had vanished as though washed clean away.
The contents of that medical text—said to have been completed over a single lifetime by a strange eccentric of the ancient murim, who studied every constitution under heaven—had not contained a single error. It was, after all, merely one of the many copies circulating far and wide, yet that precious book, still bearing the stains of Ma Won's tears, lay tucked inside her bundle even now. Together with the letter written in his own hand, folded between its most weathered pages.
'I've achieved the Pure Yin Extreme Body...!'
The first emotion Zhuge Yang had felt upon realizing it was joy. Why wouldn't it be? She had earned it clawing her way back from the very brink of death. What was more, she might yet live to see the Zhuge Family—who had thrown her away—writhing in regret once she blossomed into a master for all the world to see.
And yet, something weighed on her mind. It was because of Ma Won, who had planted such a tangle of confusing feelings in her the day he saved her life.
If the Pure Yin Body was a blessed constitution that promised outstanding achievement in yin-attribute martial arts, then the Pure Yin Extreme Body was the supreme constitution of them all—the pinnacle that promised achievement at the very limit. The one constitution any woman who trained in the yin arts would give anything to possess!
The key word, however, was most. Not every woman belonged to that number.
Namely—a woman who wished to bear a child.
Save for a vanishingly rare few, the yang essence of a man could not... survive within a woman who had achieved the Pure Yin Extreme Body.
"The Heavenly Martial Body... Getting born with bones and muscles this blessed and still being unable to learn martial arts—of course that feels hollow. But honestly? I'm fine with how things are now. I cured your illness, after all. If I could treat my dantian but couldn't cure you... that, to me, would be far more dreadful. I mean it."
His matter-of-fact words, meant to comfort the her of that day—the her who had apologized, over and over, for being able to do nothing for a Ma Won who could never again form a dantian.
The moment she heard them, Zhuge Yang felt her heart slamming against her ribs like a pair of sledgehammers.
"Ugh... uuuuugh..."
As if she had somehow contracted Nine Yang Severed Meridians, her heart burned hot—so hot she half feared it might burst then and there with a pop.
Instinctively, she understood exactly what the feeling was.
'Love...!'
She had fallen in love with Ma Won.
Looks had never mattered. He was the savior of her very life, and once she came to know his warm, sincere heart, Zhuge Yang had been left with no choice but to love him.
...And so she had folded her feelings for Ma Won away, as neatly as the letter tucked inside the medical text in her bundle—deep, very deep within her heart.
'Because I'm a woman who can never have children...'
Ma Won wanted a child of his own someday, and she would never be the one to give it to him...
A soft drizzle came drifting down, as though to console a girl who loved walking in the light rain—yet that day, it stirred nothing in her at all. The strength simply drained out of her.
Zhuge Yang had grown up beautifully. At fifteen, her body fully restored, her large eyes still shone as brightly as ever, yet she carried a new maturity about her. A little of the roundness had left her cheeks, sharpening the lines of her face; her long black hair flowed soft and glossy where it once hung dull; and her skin had cleared to a luminous, translucent glow.
Watching her, I worked hard to bury what I felt. True, I had shared a kiss with her—she hadn't the strength to chew the snow ginseng herself—but I had decided to keep that as a precious memory of my very own. It had been for treatment, after all.
It was a thought I'd had back at the little spring we'd found as we neared Mount Heng—the moment I bent to drink, caught my hideous face reflected in the water, and stared down at a body that was sturdy, and nothing more, a body that would never form a dantian. A bright, pretty girl like that... what lucky bastard would come along and claim her one day? He might have saved the nation in a past life for all I knew, but to me, he'd still be nothing but a bastard.
"The water's amazing—so cold! A spring this chilly in midsummer... maybe it's all the thick shade the trees pack in around it!"
"Isn't it? Back when I traveled to and from Hengshan, I took refuge here myself more than once. We're nearly there, but let's fill up plenty anyway."
"Ahahahaha! It really is reassuring to have a guide along!"
"Now, now—none of this 'guide' business. Call me the Captain. Follow me, all of you!"
"Yes, Captain!"
Dodging the level stare Yeon Hwa had fixed on me, I went on stacking precious memories with Zhuge Yang again that day—because if I ended up all alone someday, these might be the only moments I had left to live on... my ass!
Had the thought that I might never master martial arts, that Zhuge Yang might one day leave me, dragged me so low that I'd started indulging such idiotic fancies?
Internal energy! Right. Internal energy was the one thing I could not build.
So what?
This wasn't the transmigration into a murim world I'd fantasized about, but it was fine. I still had a sturdy, able body—nothing much to look at, perhaps, but whole and hale.
And it wasn't as if everything was over. The odds were slim, but if a treatment existed out there, I might yet form a dantian again. And hadn't I my true weapon besides?
"Yang. Is there anything you want to do?"
"Hm? What do you mean, all of a sudden?"
"You know—taking revenge on the Zhuge Family, becoming the finest martial artist under heaven, unifying the murim. Things like that."
"R-revenge? Finest... under heaven? Unify the murim...?"
"That's right! Whatever it is, just say the word—I'll make it all come true! You know I'm the kind of man who delivers once he sets his mind to something. Right? Huh?!"
I cried it out with all the bravado I could muster. If she wanted revenge, I could sweep the Zhuge Family away with astronomical sums of money. If she wanted to stand at the very summit of the world, I would simply shower Zhuge Yang with the supreme secret manuals and peerless elixirs. And if she wanted to unify the murim, that would be more of a chore, but couldn't I raise her to the pinnacle of the martial world while building a great power around her at the same time? Even if I could never be the protagonist of this world, I could still be the supporting lead who made Zhuge Yang's dreams come true. I could stand proudly at her side for all the world to see. That was what I'd been thinking when I asked her, in complete sincerity.
"Well... I've never really thought about revenge. They're still the ones who gave birth to me and raised me."
Kind to a fault, this girl. From what I'd heard from Yeon Hwa, what her family had done amounted to outright abandonment.
But if that was how Zhuge Yang felt, there was nothing for it.
"Actually... there was something I desperately wanted. A dream I'd all but given up on, because I didn't think it could ever come true."
"Mm. Just say the word."
So it was finest-under-heaven or unifying the murim, was it? Looked like I'd be a busy man running around.
"But I've already achieved it."
"Hm?"
"You saved my life, didn't you? What I wanted... was to survive."
So the thing she had longed for more than anything in the world had simply been to live. Even with it achieved, remembering the Zhuge Yang of the past—the girl who had been quietly putting her life in order—my heart ached all over again at how badly she must have rotted inside, all on her own.
"Then is there nothing you want to do going forward?"
"...There is. Something I really, truly want to do."
Right. I'll help you make that new dream come true. And I'll stay proudly by your side while I do it.
My eyes stayed fixed on Zhuge Yang's lips.
"I... want to help you, Won. You saved my life, so from now on, I want to live for you."
"What...?"
Her expression was utterly serious. Something like burning resolve had kindled there as well.
Then, a moment later, the seriousness slowly melted away, and her face turned impish.
"Mm. Except for the baby-making part."
"What did you just say?!"
"Ahahahaha! Kidding!"
And just like that, the solemn, touching mood dissolved along with Zhuge Yang's mischievous little prank. But when I realized that she—who thought of me as the one who'd saved her very life—meant to stay at my side for good, my tangled heart finally settled. If what she wanted was to help me, then so long as I did what I wanted to do, the two of us would naturally end up together anyway.
So what was it I truly wanted to do?
Becoming the finest under heaven... had slipped to dead last on the list. My odds had dropped, after all.
Then what came next?
The answer surfaced on its own—the goal that had lain at the very foundation, back when I first possessed this world, back when I'd first conceived the idea of winning Zhuge Yang over.
"Unification of all under heaven..."
It was a mutter to myself, but Zhuge Yang was a martial expert who hung on my every word—there was no chance she hadn't heard.
"You want to become Emperor?!"
"Absolutely not!!"
As it turned out, this was the Ming Dynasty. Gwak Jin and the village kids were too ignorant to notice, so I'd caught on late, but Zhuge Yang and Yeon Hwa knew exactly what era they lived in. Which meant that while unifying the murim might slide, for a man without a drop of imperial blood to speak of unifying all under heaven was outright treason. No matter how firmly the court and the murim observed their pact of mutual noninterference, world unification was... a dream for which I'd deserve the headsman's block as a traitor, and no argument at that.
I turned it over once more. Unify the murim? Honestly, I didn't even want it that badly. And with a body that couldn't properly learn martial arts through anything but external cultivation, chasing that dream would mean Zhuge Yang suffering untold hardship on my behalf, wouldn't it?
So instead—weighing my grudge against the Zhuge Family—I set my sights on something more modest.
"I want to build the greatest family under heaven."
"The greatest family under heaven?"
"Isn't that what the Zhuge Family wanted so badly they were willing to do all that to you? Then if we build one even greater without actually hurting anyone... doesn't that count as revenge all the same?"
"I-if that's all it is... yes! I'll help you with everything I have!"
And so the girl who had already severed her ties with the Zhuge Family in her heart pledged herself to my cause, gladly and freely.
...Somehow, along the way, it seemed I'd succeeded in recruiting Zhuge Yang after all—exactly as I'd planned from the very start.
A question had been quietly nagging at me, so I asked.
"By the way—if your name is Zhuge Yang... doesn't that make you the same as your ancestor Zhuge Kongming?"
"He was named with the character for 'bright,' so he's Zhuge Liang. I'm named with the character for 'to assist,' so I'm Zhuge Yang. Same sound, different character."
...So that was it. If I'd actually known the characters, I'd never have mixed them up in the first place.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms games I'd played most back in my old life never received official Korean releases, so I'd run them on fan translation patches—and that, it seemed, was where my grand misunderstanding had been born.
"All right! Then let's build the greatest family under heaven—the Hunan Ma Family!"
It was a name I'd thrown together on the spot—we were headed for Hunan, where Mount Heng stood, so why not raise the Ma Family's banner there?
Naturally, I'd expected Zhuge Yang to cheer right along, but for some reason her reaction came out lukewarm.
"What is it? Did I say something wrong...?"
"No, it's not that... but I think we'd better pick a different name. The Hunan Ma Family that already existed... they were exterminated ten years ago."