The Promised Day
Eighteen-year-old Shin Yuun thought of the promise he had made with his friends ten years ago, and shifted the long wooden staff he had taken for a cane. Each time it met the earth it gave a small, gloomy thud — nothing one would expect from a young man's hand. It was not the overgrown, deserted grass that swallowed the sound. There was simply no strength left in the hand that held it.
"Hhk..."
A metallic rasp scraped out of his parched throat. Yuun drew a scrap of wood from his pocket and set it between his teeth, working it slowly. A little sap welled from the grain and eased his thirst by the barest fraction. For a full week he had gone without a proper meal, keeping himself alive on wood chips and grass alone.
Skin over bone was no exaggeration. His hair had clumped into mats, his beard grown in patchy tufts, and his skin — ruined by days without food or washing — completed a figure so wretched that no one alive would have taken him for a youth of eighteen.
An ordinary man would have been dead long since, and then some. No. Yuun had been ordinary. As a child he had learned the common breath-nourishing method, easy to come by and said to be good for the health, and that was the whole of his martial learning. He had never, like those called geniuses, drawn decades of internal energy out of it. However long he practiced, he had never once felt anything like internal energy at all — enough to make him wonder whether a dantian even existed.
There was only one reason a body that might collapse and die at any moment, with no internal energy to hold it up, could still be made to move.
Will.
He moved on a single thought: even if he died, he would die having kept the promise made to his friends ten years before. When he was eight, leaving the home where he had been born, he and his friends had sworn it together — beneath the tree where they always gathered to play, they would meet again in ten years. That promise, at least, he wanted to keep before he died.
People called it a beggar's fate, living hand to mouth. He still refused an end in which he starved alone in some street, and not one person left alive remembered who he had been. If nothing else, he wanted to die in front of his friends. That was the last desire left to him, and the will that drove his body on.
"Ha... haha..."
His legs folded, and he went down. With the fall, that last desire crumbled.
No — not yet. It had not crumbled yet. But the moment his eyes took in what lay before him, Yuun believed it had.
He ought to have known from the road home, grown over with grass and empty of any human trace. The hometown he had carved into his mind, so that closing his eyes would call it up whole, no longer existed. He had not lost his way. The traces of the village lay spread before him even now; they had only burned, and fallen, until all that remained was enough to say that a small place of some twenty households had once stood here. And the tree at the village heart, where he had promised to meet his friends, had lost the green of ten years past. Nothing was left of it but a blackened, twisted dead thing.
Yuun — Flowing Cloud. His parents had given him the name in the hope that he would live forever as free as a cloud adrift. But his life had not been free. What he had lived, true to the name and nothing else, was a life of drifting: wandering without a destination, begging for his rice.
It had not been so from the moment of his birth. Until the age of eight, in this very village, his life had been an ordinary one. From eight, it changed. His father's elder brother, his uncle, had started a trade in the city, and the trade had done rather well, so the uncle called Yuun's family in after him. As the business swelled he needed hands, and the only people he could rely on were his own blood. So the family moved to the city.
Parting from his friends had hurt, but those days were happy even so. His uncle's trade grew and grew, and Yuun's life grew easier with it. His uncle and aunt had no child of their own, and so Yuun was treated very nearly as a son taken in. Where once he had been wholly illiterate, he learned to read and to write. He made new friends. Every day was a pleasure.
The happiness lasted three years, and no more. One of the officials his uncle dealt with was implicated in a plot of treason and put to death, and the family — his uncle among them — was executed for the crime of having aided a traitor. Yuun had been out at play, and so the calamity passed him by. He ran. The moment he saw his family's heads mounted in the marketplace, he ran. He was only eleven, but he knew what capture would mean, and so he ran. He left the city behind and lived by begging.
He had wanted to work for his food. No kind soul would take in a beggar boy whose origins no one knew. The greatest kindness he was ever shown was a single bun, tossed to him because a child so young was pitiable. The slums would not have him either; even there, factions held their ground and did not open it to drifters. The Evil Faction, little better than street thugs, would not take a beggar with no talent to his name.
He learned it in the course of begging, but the best marks of all were the Righteous Faction. Go to one of them and ask for a little rice, and a stiff bun of nothing but wheat flour was the least you could expect; with luck, there was meat.
"Hhk..."
The thought of food woke his hunger. Yuun groped through his clothes, searching for the wood scraps he had kept back as emergency rations. They would give him no strength. He still needed something in his belly.
"Hah..."
Nothing came to his fingers. He had chewed and swallowed every scrap on the road here. Ransacking the village might have turned up something, but the place was already a ruin, and food was hard to find in a bed of ash. So he reached for the branch he had used as a staff all this way.
"Not... yet..."
I can't die. Even if he died, he had to see first whether his friends came or not. On that will he set his teeth into the branch that had come all this way with him, the one thing that had been as good as his other half. What did it matter that the village was a ruin? His friends might be living scattered, each gone their own way. Today — until this day was over, he could not give up.
"Is it... today?"
Now that he thought of it, whether today was even the promised day had gone hazy. It was not that he remembered wrong. He had simply wandered and begged so long that his sense of the date had worn thin. But he was not late. The ruined village and the dead tree were proof of that. Had he come late, the friends who arrived first would have left some mark behind. He no longer had the strength to walk, and sat leaned against the tree — but he had already searched every inch around the dead trunk. There was no mark of any kind.
"Ha... ha... this is the end..."
He had meant to wait, since his friends had not yet come. The branch he had been chewing dropped from his teeth. He no longer had even the strength to hold a thing.
"My will... will you read it...?"
The branch was gone, and with it the last of his strength, and Yuun let go at last of his will to live. Slowly he closed his eyes, and what rose in him was the testament he had written in ash and kept against his chest — inside clothes that were, if he was honest, little more than rags. He could only hope, sorry as he was to ask it, that his friends would find those words and see him buried.
And toward Yuun, his eyes already shut, a woman in black martial robes was walking, slowly.
Do-deung, Beggars' Sect Leader and the man known as the Wine Beggar, had come into a strange piece of intelligence, and it had sunk him into thought.
Word had reached him of late that Yang Jeonghyeon — the Heavenly Thunder Sword, disciple of the Murim Alliance Leader — was going home. It was not that the Alliance Leader's disciple, heir to the seat itself, meant to wash his hands of the jianghu and leave the martial world. He was only visiting the home of his childhood, to keep a promise made to old friends.
That home, though, was no ordinary village. Not one of those places where the reclusive masters of an older generation were said to live. By the reports, it had fallen to ruin four years ago for reasons no one could name, and was now a stretch of country where no one lived at all. Had the man going there not been Yang Jeonghyeon, even Do-deung of the Beggars' Sect would never have known such a village existed. It was that common a hamlet of slash-and-burn farmers — twenty households at the most. Go there, and was there any real chance of meeting the friends of one's childhood? That was the sort of place it was.
And yet something out of the ordinary was happening there now. The Demonic Cult, half-sealed behind its own gates since the sudden replacement of its cult leader, had moved. Fifteen martial artists on horseback had set off at a run along the road that led to the village. At their head, the reports said, rode a beautiful young lady in the bloom of her years.
Her age put her close to Yang Jeonghyeon, and one might wonder whether she was one of those friends. The Alliance Leader's disciple, friends with someone from the Demonic Cult? That was speculation unworthy of even a third-rate tale. Far more reasonable to think the cult's martial artists were moving to assassinate the Heavenly Thunder Sword. He had meant to report it to the Alliance Leader at once. Other intelligence caught him before he could.
Mugang Fortress. From that place — the greatest sect of the Evil Faction — a single splendid carriage had departed, bound for the same hometown. A disciple of the Wandering Divine Physician had abruptly parted from the master and started toward it as well. The Alliance Leader's disciple. The Demonic Cult. Mugang Fortress, pinnacle of the Evil Faction. And a divine physician's disciple besides. That was what had already been confirmed as heading for one tiny farmers' hamlet. There might be more. And already, at this stage, a doubt had risen: was it even right to report a thing like this?
Report it wrong, and if a fight broke out in that ruin, it would be nothing less than the outbreak of a great war among the Righteous, the Evil, and the Demonic. Not a war of Righteous against Evil. Not a war of Righteous against Demonic. A war in which the martial world split clean into three, and fought until death.
But what if every one of them was a childhood friend? Then the blood-soaked history of the murim might grow peaceful, if only for a while. A scene of accord might take shape around them. Unable to cast that possibility aside, Do-deung hesitated to make his report.
"Well. I'm not obligated to report it. I'll watch, for now."
In the end he put the report off altogether. Nor was he alone in it. The Hao Gate, and the sects of the demonic path, had reached the same conclusion. There was a cautious argument in it as well: roads might simply happen to run the same way, and it would not do to raise an alarm too soon.
But if the first guess was the true one — if all of them were childhood friends, and if it had also been known that among the friends no one had yet identified there were ties to the Embroidered Uniform Guard and to assassins — then the first response might have been different. Different, though in the end, not so very different at all.