The Wudang Daoist (3)
A disciple of the Sword Immortal.
The moment those words reached my ears, my first thought was simply that it was remarkable. Wasn't that, at the very least, martial talent worthy of a Profound Realm master's recognition?
The Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng had surely played its part, but measuring up to a Profound Realm master's standards was never something a single elixir could accomplish.
Bang Sahu's caliber seemed hardly inferior to Zhuge Yang's. Wudang was bound to possess plenty of supreme divine arts, and just as I had guided Yeon Hwa to the Super-Peak Realm, there was nothing strange about Bang Sahu—trained under the Profound Realm Sword Immortal himself—having blazed his own path to Super-Peak at a young age.
From her reaction, Zhuge Yang's first concern upon hearing it had been for me—but.
"Y-you're going to the Dragon-Phoenix Tournament a-alone?!"
The instant the Sword Immortal entered the conversation, Zhuge Yang burst out.
"Mm. Truth be told, I set out ahead of everyone. I had some business of my own. Anyway, my story isn't finished yet. My master—"
"—Then! When are the others arriving?"
"Mm. There's time yet, so they'll depart in a few days."
Zhuge Yang's desperate struggle to escape the subject of the Sword Immortal was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
My father, Ma Ho, had met his end at the Sword Immortal's hand—and Zhuge Yang knew that fact all too well.
I was fine with it, but the moment the topic surfaced, she panicked on my behalf. It seemed I would have to make unmistakably clear that I bore the Sword Immortal no grudge.
"What manner of person is the Sword Immortal?"
At my question, Zhuge Yang—who had been flapping her chopsticks about in a flurry, trying to divert Bang Sahu's attention—froze mid-motion.
"Hmm... My master is a good man. He's always stressing chivalry to me. Strict when it comes to training, but he respects my own thinking, he does."
So the Sword Immortal truly was a good man. He didn't seem the least bit authoritarian, and he prized chivalry, no less.
I had long since decided the Sword Immortal was a good man. After all, I—a boy carrying the memory of the Hunan Ma Family's fall—had survived childhood only thanks to his mercy.
Of course, Zhuge Yang kept studying my face the entire time.
"I have long held the Sword Immortal in deep admiration. Did he perhaps say anything about what happened fifteen years ago?"
"Fifteen years ago?"
"I heard something grave happened in Hunan."
"Ah...!"
Realizing that I was asking about the Hunan Ma Family, Bang Sahu began his tale.
"He counts that as the greatest regret of his life. In the end it turned out to be a Demonic Cult scheme, and the Hunan Ma Family was proven innocent, no?"
"That is what I heard."
The Sword Immortal's regret. Anyone who had spearheaded the erasure of an innocent clan would naturally regret it.
I hoped that watching me carry on this very conversation with Bang Sahu might ease Zhuge Yang's heart a little.
"He regrets it dearly, saying that had they investigated thoroughly, it would never have come to pass. The Alliance's intelligence bureau sent the report up with the part naming it a Demonic Cult scheme omitted. Had they double- and triple-checked, that tragedy would never have happened."
I nodded along as I gauged Zhuge Yang's complexion. By now the Sword Immortal had surely repented enough, and she had to know I held nothing against him.
And yet Zhuge Yang's face—pale to begin with—had gone utterly bloodless.
'Did something go wrong?'
A loose thread suddenly caught at me, and I put the question to Bang Sahu.
"Who was the head of the intelligence bureau at the time?"
"That much I can't quite recall. He was no one of a renowned family or any great fame."
"Ah, I see."
As long as it wasn't the Zhuge Family, that was all that mattered.
Ma Won had deliberately booked an inn separate from the coachman's for one reason: to share a meal with her, just the two of them.
Knowing that, Zhuge Yang had felt awkward when the Wudang Daoist offered to join their table.
The man had even been quietly making moves on her, so her first impression of him had been thoroughly bad.
But she'd found it odd when Ma Won showed up and didn't push the Daoist away. Whenever men so much as threw glances her way, Ma Won always chased them off. She'd assumed this time would be no different. It wasn't.
The shift in his expression was subtle, but she had watched Ma Won long enough to read it plainly. He was genuinely glad to see the Wudang Daoist.
"Mm, a pleasure. I'm Ma Won."
After the two exchanged introductions, when Ma Won stepped out briefly to help the coachman, Zhuge Yang found herself hoping he would hurry back. Unlike Ma Won, she still couldn't shake that awful first impression of the Daoist.
But soon enough, she learned exactly why Ma Won had been so glad to see him.
"Ma Won, is it? Then let me tell you a rather amusing story."
Perhaps concluding that Zhuge Yang already had a man at her side, the Daoist gave up his flirting and launched into other topics. Truly, a man who couldn't keep his mouth still for even a single moment.
"This is from my days as a secular disciple of Wudang. Back then, there was this boy..."
When he told the tale of how he had once helped a boy with a burned face and accepted a Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng as his reward, the whole picture came together.
Had she not received this Daoist's help, she—who had been at the very edge of her final breath—would have reunited with Ma Won as a cold, lifeless corpse.
The thought made warm gratitude well up in her for the Daoist. And she understood, perfectly, why Ma Won was so pleased to see him.
But greater than her gratitude to the Daoist was what she had learned of Ma Won's heart.
So he wept and begged this Daoist... to save the person he... loved...
Long before I ever came to like Ma Won, he had already liked me—no, loved me...
Throwing pride and everything else to the wind, he had cared for me so much that he wept and pleaded with a man he'd never met...
That Ma Won—fresh from digging up the Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng on Mount Heng—had wandered down from Mount Wudang on some wrong turn, and that he'd happened to be carrying one more Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng besides, hardly mattered at all.
Only Ma Won's heart mattered.
And that was why, upon hearing this Daoist called Bang Sahu was the Sword Immortal's disciple, she had wanted to steer the conversation anywhere else.
Ma Won always insisted he was fine—but how could the boy who watched his parents and siblings die before his very eyes ever truly be fine?
This was a man so starved for a family's warmth that he'd even said he wanted many children of his own.
Contrary to her first impression, the Daoist Bang Sahu was no bad man, and with Ma Won so glad to see him, she had no intention of driving him away—she only wished, at the very least, to avoid the one subject of the Sword Immortal.
Had her efforts shown on her face after all?
Ma Won had gone and brought up the Sword Immortal himself.
Listening to Ma Won and Bang Sahu talk, Zhuge Yang realized she had been misunderstanding all along.
He truly seemed to hold no grudge against the Sword Immortal.
It astonished her. She could never have managed the same.
What puzzled her was this: if not the Sword Immortal, then at whom did Ma Won's fury aim for the deaths of his parents and siblings?
If not the Sword Immortal and the Murim Alliance—the Demonic Cult, then?
Perhaps. Since the whole affair had been engineered by the Demonic Cult, maybe her scrupulously fair-minded Ma Won hated the Cult alone, refusing to let private grievance lead him.
That was what she believed.
Right up until she heard that the Murim Alliance's intelligence bureau had already known it was the Demonic Cult's plot—and let that fact go missing from the report anyway.
The moment the intelligence bureau came up, Zhuge Yang couldn't stop herself from screaming inside.
'It's my uncle!'
She had never thought it important, and the memory had all but faded—yet the instant Bang Sahu's words landed today, it swept across her mind.
A middle-aged man had once come calling at the Zhuge Family. Cold in bearing, he wore a stiff expression at first—but the moment only the direct family remained, he lit up as though the stiffness had never existed at all.
"Hehe, so you're Lin."
"I'm Yang."
"Ah! My mistake. My, what a bright, adorable little thing you've grown into. And the child beside you must be Lin."
"If you're my uncle... does that make you Mother's older brother?"
"Exactly right. What a clever little one you are."
Having showered praise on young Zhuge Yang, he said he was off to see her father and vanished—only to emerge from the Family Head's hall before long, at the side of her father Zhuge Zhongying, who wore a thoroughly satisfied smile.
"Well done, indeed."
Her father clapped him on the shoulder in encouragement, and her mother offered him words of praise as well.
"You've worked hard."
Curious about this uncle she was meeting for the first time in her life, she had toddled after him all over the estate—and by chance picked up who he really was, too.
"They say he served in the Murim Alliance. He retired just recently."
"The Murim Alliance? Where? The Military Affairs Bureau, like Father?"
"No. The Intelligence Bureau. He was its head. Apparently he... made some mistake."
... Looking back on it now, the timing seemed to fall almost exactly when the Hunan Ma Family's name had been cleared.
If...
She shook her head hard, scattering the horrific thought before it could finish forming.
No. Surely not?
But with every last circumstance pointing to it as the truth, there was no dispelling it.
Her uncle, a man of the Seo Family, had made some error and retired from his post as head of the Murim Alliance's intelligence bureau—and that had been something worthy of encouragement from her father, the Family Head of the Zhuge Family, and her mother.
And that, in that very period, by the Alliance intelligence bureau's mistake, the Murim Alliance—falling hook, line, and sinker for a Demonic Cult scheme—had massacred Ma Won's family to the last soul.
Even the bright look on his face despite so dishonorable a retirement was suspicious now, too.
With the pieces fitted together and the conclusion staring back at her from inside her own head, Zhuge Yang grew afraid.
If Ma Won ever learned this truth, he might come to hate her.
No—he would hate her. Without question.
It hadn't been simple deception by a Demonic Cult scheme. Knowing full well the truth, hadn't the Zhuge Family and the Seo Family joined hands to erase the Hunan Ma Family from existence?
For having edged them out of the Five Great Families—and because the Heavenly Martial Body, passed down Ma Ho's line for generations, made them a threat—every last one of the Whirlwind Fist Hero's blood.
Ma Won's siblings had found no mercy among them. Of all Ma Ho's bloodline, only the youngest, Ma Won, had barely clung to life under the Sword Immortal's mediation—his qi core damaged and a metal seal locked upon his head.
And all under the Zhuge Family's watch.
... If this ever came to light, even Ma Won—who until now had believed only his own life was ever the target—would never forgive the Zhuge Family.
And his rage might not spare even her, a daughter of the Zhuge bloodline.
She ought to beg his forgiveness... but her mouth refused to open.
He might even hold her guilty by association. It wasn't the answering for guilt she feared—it was the terror of being forever torn away from Ma Won.
She hadn't the strength to endure the sight of Ma Won's face—always so warm when it turned to her—frozen cold.
What am I supposed to do...?
She couldn't possibly talk it over with Ma Won, absolutely not—and even Yeon Hwa, the one person she trusted without reservation, was not at her side.
Her worry only sank deeper.