Let's Go Together
The clearing at the fork in the road toward the village was a broad stretch of ground that passing merchant caravans often claimed as a campsite. Dense trees crowded its edges, and a stream ran close by—as fine a place to pitch camp as anyone could ask for.
And there, at the stream's edge, Yuun was indulging in a luxury he had never known: a bath drawn in water heated by Samadhi True Fire.
"Hehehe. Young master, how do you find the water?"
"Ah, it's wonderful. Thank you for going to such trouble."
Adepts of the Demonic Cult and martial artists of Mugang Fortress had dug a makeshift tub beside the stream and filled it with water warmed by that same fire. Nowhere else in the world was anyone enjoying a comfort quite like this. Warriors elite enough to be chosen as escorts for the Demonic Cult Lord and the princess of Mugang Fortress were waiting on a wandering beggar.
"I'm not about to die, am I?"
The unimaginable luxury made Yuun picture his own death before he knew it. With his memories restored, he understood that dying would only send him on to the celestial realm, so death itself held little fear. What unsettled him was enjoying a comfort so far above anything he had ever known—anything that suited him—that none of it felt real.
If he ever became a master who could stand shoulder to shoulder with his friends, perhaps he might come to take such treatment as his due. But even with his memories back, Yuun himself had hardly changed. His martial arts were still a worthless wreck, incapable even of the foundational work of accumulating inner qi, and the Five Stars his master had sealed away had never returned.
Worse, because his body had been shaped by the arts of Yangui Mun, he could learn no other martial art at all. The techniques of that mysterious sect—passed down to a single heir—ran on an entirely different path from ordinary martial arts. Its foundational heart method did not store inner qi. It laid its base by drawing on the qi of the natural world.
To wield that singular inner power, Yangui Mun remade the practitioner's very constitution. One became the perfect body for its arts, and in exchange lost the ability to learn anything else. Yuun had been forged into the ideal vessel: that foundational training alone had opened even his upper dantian, so that all he needed was to absorb the rest of Yangui Mun's arts. His master's malice had made that impossible. In the end, he was nothing more than an ordinary man with a healthy body.
"Catching up is going to be damn hard."
"Then just create a new martial art."
Jeong Hyeon had been listening to the mutter. He came over with a wide grin, and Yuun shook his head.
"How is someone who's only ever skimmed the surface of martial arts supposed to invent one?"
The accident had struck just before he could properly learn Yangui Mun's arts, so he had never truly practiced them. He shrugged. Jeong Hyeon shook his head.
"Hard for you, sure. But for us? Maybe not. We may not look it, but people have been calling us geniuses our whole lives."
At the suggestion that he lean on his genius friends, Yuun's face tightened.
"You already saved my life. I figure that's more than enough help."
"Figured you'd say that. Turn it around, though. If we were in your place, would you refuse to help us?"
There was no world in which he would refuse. He would have done everything in his power. Before they found one another again, he had not possessed that certainty; he had clung to them only because they were the last hope left in a life too painful to endure. But they had remembered the promise—all of them—and they had come back. That had changed his mind. And so he only smiled, bitter and small.
"Same here. We've got room to spare, so we're going to help you with everything we've got. Use your friends a little."
Yuun nodded at that.
"Then I'll use you as much as I like?"
"Just be ready to get used yourself later."
Being useful enough for his friends to lean on him in turn belonged to a future so distant he could barely see it. He would gladly accept that burden all the same, and he nodded.
Once the bath was done, the patchy beard shaved off, and his hair put in order, Yuun had been transformed into a young nobleman who could stand beside Jeong Hyeon himself. It was the fruit of the spirit medicine that had restored his body. He had not undergone a full rebirth of bone and flesh, but he had been completed into a vessel perfect for a martial artist. And when he put on the fine clothes Cheonghwi had brought, every trace of the wandering, begging orphan vanished.
"So clothes can be this soft."
Dressed now in an outfit that had been brought along as a gift for his friends, he walked back to the campsite where the carriages stood. Those same friends—wearing clothes identical to his—were warming themselves at the campfire.
"You've completely changed. Looking at you now, you could pass for a scholar cramming for the civil exams."
"A scholar? Trust an official to take one look at someone and call him a scholar."
So-ryeong had been marveling at the transformed Yuun, and the rest of them shot her sidelong looks. For Yuun, the compliment drew nothing but a bitter smile.
"Haha. Whatever else I might manage, I can't sit the exams."
"Huh? What do you mean? Someone like you ought to have a perfectly clear status, right? If I vouch for you—"
"Then you'd be in serious trouble too, So-ryeong. My whole family was wiped out for involvement in treason."
At those words—wiped out for treason—every face twisted into something grotesque. They had already guessed that Yuun had become a beggar. They had never truly thought about why. They had only heard that his uncle's business was prospering and that Yuun had gone to help, so they had assumed the shop had simply failed. But treason? Had his uncle, chasing a windfall, invested in some man plotting rebellion and been dragged down with him?
"Just hear me out first. If you still feel like helping after that, then help me."
Curiosity stirred by the tale of a house destroyed for treason, his friends nodded. He had asked them to help only if the heart moved them, but every one of them had already decided they would help no matter what. Even if it meant making an enemy of the Emperor, they meant to stand by their friend.
Gyeon So-ryeong's rise was astonishing in itself. She had studied letters and martial arts under her adoptive father until she became an officer of the Embroidered Uniform Guard. The Guard might be an organization of martial artists, but its members were military officers under the Emperor's direct command. For a woman to become an officer at all was difficult enough. That So-ryeong was spoken of as its next commander put her standing very high indeed.
When a woman of that standing heard Yuun's story, she felt at once that something was wrong. Given what the Embroidered Uniform Guard was—the Emperor's own guard—she could never simply overlook someone from a house destroyed for treason. But to exterminate an entire family merely for selling goods? That went far past any reasonable measure. Traitors were executed, yes, but it was hardly common to put to death an ordinary market merchant one might see any day on the street. And this had not even been the master of some great trading company. It had been a small merchant who employed ten people at most. It made no sense.
"Could there have been some deal Yuun didn't know about?"
So she suspected there must have been something he himself had never known. Cold looks from the others stabbed into her at once—looks that asked whether she was doubting Yuun.
"I'm not doubting Yuun! I mean his uncle might have sold something that turned out to be enormously important, and gotten implicated without ever realizing it. That's all I was saying!"
At her hurried excuse they withdrew their stares and nodded. If that was what had happened, then yes—he could have been dragged in, however unjustly. The murim saw people ruined that unfairly often enough that it was entirely possible.
"Once I'm back, I'll look into the case. And I doubt there's a warrant out for you, Yuun."
It was a plausible guess, not a certainty, which was why she declared she would investigate. Still, she was convinced his status was clean enough that he did not have to live as a fugitive.
"For one thing, back then you were a boy who hadn't even turned twenty, and you were a nephew, not an adopted son. You would have slipped under their notice."
Because she had memorized the names and descriptions of every wanted person in the empire, So-ryeong could say it with confidence: Yuun had no need to live as a beggar. He could hold his head up. He had lost everything so young that he had never known it, but he was literate. Even without martial arts, reading and writing for others would be enough to eat. And if no warrant had been issued, then—so long as he did not try to sit the exams and become an official—his identity was sound. Hiring himself out somewhere would cause no trouble.
"And unless we're talking about calamities on the level of the Traceless Divine Thief or the Reaper of the Dark Night, I can cover most things on my own authority. I'll vouch for your identity."
"Why are the Traceless Divine Thief and the Reaper of the Dark Night suddenly in this?!"
So-ryeong had only meant that he could live openly. Ma Gyo-bin—disciple of that very Traceless Divine Thief, that very Reaper of the Dark Night—flinched and blurted it out. She could hardly announce that she was their disciple, so the looks she received in return only found her strange.
"Ah. Even a hermit master's arts are still an assassin's arts. Of course those two would be who you look up to. Sorry."
So-ryeong nodded, having interpreted the outburst however she pleased, and Gyo-bin could only nod back, unable to argue. Her masters might be called public enemies of the murim, vicious killers—but that was the story of their youth. These days they worked as righteous outlaws. Their infamy from those younger years was simply so great that even while they played the chivalrous bandit, people still feared the day they would show their true colors.
"Even if his identity is guaranteed, Yuun still has nowhere to go. That hasn't changed."
"What do you mean, nowhere? He can come to the Murim Alliance."
Seong-hwa had been working her way toward a proposal of her own when Jeong Hyeon cut in. She answered by quietly drawing up her inner qi and pressing it down on him.
"Wh-what? You want to fight it out right here?"
"Shut up, you idiot! I was about to say that if he has nowhere to go, he should come with me to the Demonic Cult!"
It was only by luck that Yuun had come through unharmed. Seong-hwa was the one who had fed him a massive dose of Demon-Subduing Pills and brought the crisis down on him. Guilt had her planning to take him to the Demonic Cult and help him however she could, and the words came out as a shout.
"No. Absolutely not. I may not look it, but I'm the disciple of the Murim Alliance Leader. You think I'm going to turn my friend into a cultist?"
"...I'm not your friend? That friend happens to be the Heavenly Demon of that cult, you know?! And the Demonic Cult is still a place where people live!"
Seong-hwa had become the Heavenly Demon, yet she felt no particular loyalty to the cult. Jeong Hyeon's words simply rubbed her the wrong way, and she ended up defending it. Had the cult's elites who followed her overheard the exchange, they might have bowed to Jeong Hyeon on the spot. She had defeated the Heavenly Demon and taken the title for herself, but she loathed the Demonic Cult. For her to speak in its defense would have been a genuine joy to them. It was only a shame they had not heard it.
"I, uh, was thinking of imposing on you. I just hadn't thought that far. I was only going to ask to borrow living expenses."
"Shin Yuun."
"Y-yeah?"
Even so, living off a friend's household felt too awkward, and he had been about to refuse. When Seong-hwa called his name with inner qi threaded through her voice, he answered while avoiding her eyes.
"O-okay."
Now that his memories had returned and he could sense qi, he could not shake off the pressure of her inner energy. He nodded, and answered against his will.
And so it was decided. Yuun would go to the Demonic Cult.