The Moon Waxes Full
Hyein Satae’s residence lay in the deepest reaches of Mount Emei.
An antique building called Lotus Hall, steeped in the breath of every generation of sect leaders who had come before.
Rustle.
The hem of her white robes whispered against the floor. A screen painted with lotus blossoms trembled faintly in the breeze, and beyond the window the ridgelines of Mount Emei unfurled in soft, hazy folds.
“The moon is truly bright tonight.”
The sun of the night gazed down upon the earth in brilliant radiance. On nights when the moonlight swelled like this, she was always seized by a strange tide of recollection.
Once there had been a woman thrashing and screaming behind the wall of the Flame Realm during closed-door cultivation.
In a place where no one else existed, where not even a cry could reach another living soul, only moonlight had poured down upon her as she coughed blood and died alone, possessed by heart demons.
Her once-unbreakable spirit shattered, Hyein Satae had clawed the walls until her nails broke, pleading desperately to be saved. Before that bone-chilling terror she had been neither the leader of the Emei Sect nor a famed heroine—only a creature of flesh and blood.
Just when everything seemed finished, a transcendent being approached her through the falling moonlight.
A daoist who had stepped beyond the mortal coil introduced himself as Ilseong—One Star—to the woman standing on death’s threshold. To the woman who could only mutter that she wanted to live, he transmitted a mind method that could keep her alive.
Despite a name that spoke of stars, the method he whispered taught her how to imprison the moon’s energy within her body and wield it as power.
That night Hyein Satae had desperately absorbed the moonlight raining down upon her, clawed her way back from death, and even reached the Flame Realm she had so long dreamed of.
Yet as with all things under heaven, there was a price. The mind method that handled moonlight far vaster than any tiny starlight carried one fatal flaw.
How can a mere human contain the great moon? You will slowly go mad.
Unlike the stars, shattered into countless glittering fragments, the moon was dizzyingly brilliant even by itself. A human’s fragile reason, confronted with that vastness, would inevitably drown in madness.
So Hyein Satae had desperately asked how she might stop it. Ilseong, face empty of all emotion, told her to enlarge the vessel that held a human’s fundamental essence—the True Origin Qi.
But that essence was fixed at birth; the only way to increase it was to seize another’s True Origin Qi.
Realizing this, Hyein Satae had wailed that no one walking the path of the Dao could make such a demand. The mysterious daoist merely regarded her as one might watch a laboratory specimen, utterly without feeling.
Seized by an unnameable terror of that otherworldly being, she watched him murmur as though he could already see her future, then turn and leave.
“After that day… I tried so hard.”
Once the being from beyond the heavens had gone, Hyein Satae had used every means imaginable to hold her mind together against the rising madness. But this was not a problem that effort could solve. Because she had forced something far too great into a vessel far too small, her spirit crumbled without end.
“O Primordial Heavenly Lord… why do you visit such a trial upon me…”
Before the slowly approaching madness of the moonlight, the demon she thought she had cast out of her heart raised its head once more. Death. Earth and dust. Return to nothing.
Unable to endure any longer, she had finally let Hye-yul Sinni notice her condition. Then the strange sensation had reached into her very marrow, and from time to time she had begun to act as though she were no longer herself.
“I cannot die yet…”
The body would remain, but the mind would be extinguished—that was the fate Ilseong had whispered awaited her if she did not take True Origin Qi. Yet before he left he had muttered one more cryptic line.
If you ever face a star, you may yet be able to master this.
How could a human face a star floating high in the night sky? Amid such questions Hyein Satae had gone steadily mad, until even her cherished subordinates Gi-hyo and Jeong-yo had begun casting strange glances her way. Completely surrounded. If her mind slipped again, their number would only grow.
She wondered whether reaching the Profound Realm—those absolute masters—or even the Life-and-Death Realm might widen the vessel enough for her to endure. But for one who had barely touched the Flame Realm, those heights were distant dreams.
Thus only one long-postponed method remained if she wished to reclaim her sanity.
“I used to wonder why the wicked cross that line…”
Why leave the orthodox path for the demonic. Understanding that process now, she hated herself. Yet her last shred of reason still forbade her from absorbing the True Origin Qi of the disciples she herself had raised.
Then who should become the sacrifice? Outsiders. Outsiders who had come to Emei with wicked intent.
“Seo Muhong.”
At first an inexplicable, subtle energy had drawn her gaze. Then, examining the bone structure of a lay disciple to gauge his martial talent, she had instantly seen through the disguise.
“A man dares… set foot in a place forbidden to males.”
Had he truly thought a mere bone-shrinking art could deceive the eyes of a Flame Realm master? Utterly laughable. After taking his True Origin Qi she would simply claim she had cut down a suspicious man who had snuck into Emei while hiding his gender. With the Blood Cult and Demonic Cult stirring everywhere these days, that story would cover everything.
With that plan in mind she had lured him with talk of accepting him as a disciple and sensing benevolent qi from him.
“Do not resent me too much, Muhong. From this day forward you will live and breathe within this body.”
As moonlight poured down, her eyes clouded and the familiar madness surged. Standing in the cascading moonlight, Hyein Satae radiated the elegant air of a celestial maiden.
“Sect Leader, the lay disciples you summoned have arrived.”
She had yearned for the faint light of stars, yet only the endlessly bright moonlight ever reached her. At the female martial artist’s report, the leader of the Emei Sect curled her lips into a crooked smile.
“The moon’s especially bright tonight, Boss.”
Even walking through the dark of night, the flooding moonlight made the scenery around them clear as day; Ilhong murmured in quiet wonder.
“Yeah. Downright lunatic.”
I muttered something she couldn’t possibly understand and followed after her. Before long we reached the Emei Sect Leader’s residence—Lotus Hall.
Hyein Satae was already waiting outside as though she had come to greet us, welcoming us with a smile of pure delight. Her expression dimmed slightly at the sight of three of us instead of one, but she quickly chose to overlook it.
“The moon is beautiful tonight. Let us walk a while.”
She said there was a place she wished to show us and led the way along the mountain path. When someone of her station spoke thus, we simply followed without complaint for quite some distance.
At last a small clearing appeared, along with what looked like a stone closed-door cave. Hyein Satae introduced the place.
“This is the closed-door cave where the successive leaders of the Emei Sect have always cultivated in seclusion.”
Her face was lightly steeped in reminiscence. I wondered what she intended to say, bringing us all the way out here. Inside the cave, savage traces remained—walls clawed by fingernails, stains of blood that had been spat out.
When our gazes fixed on those marks, Hyein Satae smiled faintly.
“To cultivate the martial path is, without fail, a painful thing. Body and heart are both worn away; that is why I have always stressed the cultivation of the mind.”
That regretful air reminded me of Abbot Beopseong of the Shaolin Temple. An elegant woman of noble bearing, looking on with pity at the suffering her juniors would face, her compassion glowing softly in the night’s gentle light. No matter how I looked, I saw none of the madness Hye-yul Sinni had warned of. Perhaps even the faint killing intent I had sensed earlier had been a misreading.
Beneath the moonlight she looked so like a celestial maiden that I began to wonder whether I had simply thought wrong—when she spoke again.
“Truly a pity.”
Standing with her back to the cave entrance, Hyein Satae turned to face us and murmured those words.
“Sect Leader Hyein, what do you mean by a pity?”
“It would have been enough for you alone to die, Seo Muhong. Yet you had to stick your nose where it didn’t belong and drag two innocent women to their deaths as well. How could that not be a pity?”
“…”
For a moment I thought I had misheard. Then I saw the blank faces of Ilhong and the thief who had introduced herself as Angun, and knew I had heard perfectly well.
You idiot… I told you something was wrong…
Salsung, the crimson killing star, seized the chance to scold me. Of course I had known something was off. I just hadn’t expected a sect leader of an orthodox school to be this far gone, her eyes completely overturned.
“The area around this closed-door cave is special. Enclosed by dense forest, no matter how you scream or wail, the sound will never reach anyone else.”
Her tone suggested she had once endured that very terror herself. How charming. Hyein Satae was no longer even bothering to hide her true nature; she was flaunting it openly.
“Uh, what is this situation? I just came to swipe the Heaven-Interceptive Sword and leave…”
The gentleman thief she had brought along as insurance finally realized something had gone very wrong.
“Do not resent me too much. I shall overcome this evil karma, reclaim my reason, and once more accumulate good deeds…”
Under the moonlight, Hyein Satae’s eyes glittered with madness like stars.
“Boss… this is…”
“Yeah. We’re screwed.”
It wasn’t the first or second time we’d been in a mess like this, so I answered Ilhong calmly from beside her. Things always seemed to turn out this way.
“It’s all your fault, Boss. This always happens when I follow you around.”
“What did I do? And who insisted on tagging along?”
I felt a little wronged. She was the one who had declared she had to go wherever I went and forced her way along.
“Tonight I shall take all three. O Primordial Heavenly Lord, look down upon this sinner…!”
Rather than apologize to us, Hyein Satae begged forgiveness of the gods as she exploded with energy. The situation was a hair’s breadth from disaster. I gave Ilhong permission to unseal the very thing I had absolutely forbidden her to use.
No matter how loud the screams, sound never reached anyone else? Let’s see if that still held true for this.
“Ilhong!”
“Yes, sir! Strike first, win first!”
Back-alley fighting etiquette that needed no words. Ilhong hurled several iron spheres trailing sparks of flame straight at the Flame Realm master who was still mid-prayer. Extremely short fuses burned in the darkness. A moment later a tremendous blast and a storm of fire shook Mount Emei to its roots.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM—!
There was a woman who had infiltrated the Emei Sect in search of a certain mysterious sword. Her true identity was none other than the Fifth Divine Thief, the one who had inherited every secret art of the Fourth Divine Thief who had recently passed on.
The goddess of thievery herself had set foot in Lotus Hall tonight to search the last place the Heaven-Interceptive Sword might be hidden—by blackmailing two completely innocent women, no less.
At first she had thought:
I feel a little bad for dragging those pure-hearted girls into my business…
She had even been planning to leave them something nice once the job was done.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM—!
Apparently it wasn’t they who had gotten tangled in something serious. It was her.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—!”