The Friends Who Left Their Hometown
He was eight. Half a year had passed since Yuun left, and when a master who happened to be passing through their hometown made the offer, Yang Jeonghyeon nodded as if something had taken hold of him.
He wanted to learn martial arts under a master and become a great expert, so that ten years later he could stand before his friends and boast of the man he had become.
"......I was young back then."
Remembering the childish self of ten years ago, Yang Jeonghyeon—disciple of the Murim Alliance Leader, the Heavenly Thunder Sword—shook his head. He had become a refined young nobleman in white martial robes, a long sword hanging at his hip, and yet the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that he had hardly changed at all.
He had received the true transmission of Cheon Jin-baek, the Lightning Sword Saint and Leader of the Murim Alliance, and had even been told there was nothing left for him to learn. If he allowed himself a little pride, Yang Jeonghyeon was confident that at a mere eighteen he had already surpassed his master's realm.
And what sort of man was that master? Cheon Jin-baek was the greatest under heaven, the man who had single-handedly halted the savage advance of the Demonic Cult and its previous lord, the Blood Heavenly Demon, once called the strongest in all of history. Yang Jeonghyeon had stepped beyond even that realm at eighteen.
For all that he had become such an expert, he felt his heart was no different from the little boy of eight.
How would his friends react when he showed them his sword-gang, sword-qi condensed until it took visible form? The thought hurried his feet toward home. The sword-gang was not the only thing he meant to show them. His master had gifted him a trove of spirit medicines, elixirs that would do him no further good if he took them himself. For friends who had never learned martial arts, though, those same medicines would grant a lifetime of health.
One year after Yuun and Jeonghyeon had left, a foster father appeared before Gyeon So-ryeong without warning, and his words left her reeling.
Her father had died when So-ryeong was five. Her mother had never once said what sort of man he had been, so she could only be bewildered when a stranger in black silk suddenly claimed her as his foster daughter.
The choice, however, was not hers to make. He took her and her mother away from their hometown, and as they went he told her stories of her father that she had never heard. Her father, he said, had been an official of the imperial palace—an expert of the Embroidered Uniform Guard. Saving a comrade in peril, he had lost his martial arts and returned to the countryside for good. The man who now called himself her foster father had been that comrade, a peer from the same cohort. He had long regretted that a gifted friend had lost his arts and gone home because of him, and only at the end of a painstaking search had he found her.
And so Gyeon So-ryeong learned martial arts from her foster father. She mastered arts that surpassed even his—the chief of the Embroidered Uniform Guard himself—and rose to a command within the Guard.
The next leader of the Embroidered Uniform Guard. Gyeon So-ryeong. That was who she was now.
Those were the words Pyeon Ja-in, a girl broken by the loss of her parents to plague, had cried in desperation to her master, the Wandering Divine Physician.
Two years after even So-ryeong had gone, plague swept the village. Of twenty households, nearly half vanished, and Ja-in's parents were among the dead. The sickness that had seemed ready to wipe the village from the earth subsided in an instant when the Wandering Divine Physician arrived. Those who had already left the world, however, did not return.
If I had learned medicine—if only I had—then perhaps I would not have lost my parents, or the neighbors who were as good as family.
Clinging to that thought, Pyeon Ja-in seized the hem of his trousers as he finished his treatments and made to leave, and she would not let go.
"The path of a physician is harsh and wearying, child. It is no work for a girl."
He turned her plea gently aside. The Wandering Divine Physician roamed the world giving medicine with no thought of reward, but he had no wish to pass a physician's grinding life on to anyone else.
"When it comes to saving people, what does it matter whether you're a man or a woman? Please, I beg you!"
The fierce resolve burning in Pyeon Ja-in's eyes changed his mind. For the first and only time, he set aside a vow never to take a disciple. She absorbed his medicine in a flash, and upon that foundation she even devised martial arts of her own, gaining the strength to protect herself as a physician. She had come to understand that a physician without power could never practice medicine as she wished.
Following her master across the world and offering her art wherever she went, she came to be called something else entirely.
Before her mother died of the plague, Woo Cheonghwi was given a little travel money and a single letter. Her mother called it a simple errand. Deliver the letter, look around the city, and come home. But the moment Woo Cheonghwi delivered that letter, her life turned inside out.
She was dragged into a fortress girded by a vast wall of steel, its halls so splendid she wondered whether even the palace where the Emperor lived could compare. Cheonghwi was only eleven, and she knew at once that the letter she had carried had stirred something enormous. The instant she saw the man—his presence so fierce she thought she might faint just looking at him—she felt that everything was over. He wore fine robes embroidered with gold, and he watched her with glittering eyes, as if she were some rare and curious creature.
"Mister, are you His Majesty the Emperor?"
His splendor and his suffocating presence dragged the foolish question out of her before she knew it. She knew perfectly well this was not the capital, and still he was overwhelming enough to pull such words from her mouth.
"Puhaha! The Emperor? Compare me to some mere emperor and I'd be insulted. I am the absolute ruler of the entire Evil Faction—the Lord of Mugang Fortress."
Whether he found the question impudent or simply amusing, the Lord of Mugang Fortress burst out laughing and rose from the jade throne where he had been lounging. He came to Cheonghwi and swept her up in his arms.
"And I am your father as well."
"What? My father? Mom said I don't have a dad!"
"Ha! You think a child comes into this world without a father? You are my daughter. This letter is the proof."
Recognized as the daughter of the greatest man of the Evil Faction, the Lord of Mugang Fortress, Woo Cheonghwi grew up bathed in the love of her father and her older brothers. In time she came to understand them. The Lord, who had only sons, was a hopeless fool for the daughter he had always wanted, and her brothers were no better—a pack of doting idiots who had spent their lives wishing for a little sister. Because of them, she was able to grow strong enough to surpass even her father.
That was the scolding Ma Gyo-bin heard when, orphaned and begging from door to door, she stole the purse of a shabby old man and was caught on the spot.
After the plague took her family, she had gone to her relatives for shelter and been cast out. She became a beggar. Her one piece of fortune was a talent for picking pockets, and that talent at least kept her from starving. She had never imagined being caught by a drab old man with nothing remarkable about him at all. Worse, he had gotten ahead of her—still gleeful over the purse she had stolen—and seized her there.
"Ah. So this is the end."
One look told her he was a master of the martial world, and Gyo-bin let go of any will to live. If a beating that broke a bone or two was the whole of it, she told herself, she would be lucky.
"A brat who has never learned martial arts, stealing this seat's purse. You have some use in you. Will you become my disciple?"
The offer was beyond anything she had imagined. And because there was no doubting it was the only salvation left to her, Gyo-bin nodded.
The old man who became her master was a public enemy of the martial world, infamous as the greatest thief under heaven—the Traceless Divine Thief. But even that name was nothing more than a disguise, a mask worn to hide what he truly was.
And it did not take Ma Gyo-bin long to surpass even him.
Seven years had passed since Yuun and Jeonghyeon left their hometown.
Much had happened in the village. So-ryeong had met her foster father and departed for the capital, and the plague had thinned its people to less than half. Ja-in, Cheonghwi, and Gyo-bin had left as well.
Of the seven childhood friends, only one remained. Baek Seong-hwa.
"I'll stay, and I'll keep this place until we all meet again."
There had been no shortage of chances to leave, but Seong-hwa made that vow and remained. Even if someone returned before the ten years were up, she thought, there ought to be a person here to welcome them with a smile. She would simply be that person.
"Only one survivor?"
Then the village went up in flames. She never learned what had happened. She had fallen asleep as usual and woken to screams on every side. She wanted to get out, but the house collapsed on top of her and pinned her where she lay. Buried in the wreckage, she was fortunate not to be badly hurt, and she struggled free at last—only to be found by men in black martial robes.
They were people of the Demonic Cult.
They were not the culprits of the calamity. They had only sensed that something had happened here and come running.
"No idea what those murderers were after, but take this one along and something's bound to come of it."
And the cultists dragged Seong-hwa off to the Demonic Cult. She thrashed and cried that she would not go, that she had to stay and keep a place for her friends to return to, but they had learned martial arts and she had not. An ordinary girl could not resist them. Thus she was forced to join the cult.
In a cult that moved by the Law of the Strong, where the mighty took everything, Seong-hwa became a worthless fighter of the lowest rank. It should have been a life that simply disappeared. But she possessed a martial talent greater than anyone's, and in a mere three years she rose, toppling the cult's experts one after another.
"Ghk—!"
"This is the Blood Heavenly Demon, the strongest in history? How dull."
With a single blow, she struck him dead—the cult lord once called the strongest of all time. In the Demonic Cult, the strong take all. From the moment she cast down the strongest of them, the lord himself, Baek Seong-hwa could claim the seat of cult lord: the Heavenly Demon.
"This seat returns to her hometown. The promised hour draws near."
The first command she gave as Heavenly Demon was a vanishing so complete it bordered on sealing the cult's gates—and a return to the hometown she had been forced to turn her back on.