What's the Doctrine?
The day after Yuun pleaded exhaustion and brought the experiments to a halt, his friends still wanted to press on. But he had driven himself far too hard the day before, and once a fever laid him out, the experiments were finished.
It was true that the foundational arts of Yangui Mun were said to let a practitioner reproduce another's martial arts exactly — yet Yuun himself had never opened that realm. A spiritual elixir had mended his body, but the body beneath it was no different from any ordinary person's, wholly untrained. To unleash every sort of martial art from such a frame, with no properly attained realm to bear it, was to guarantee a fever. The only reason it broke in an instant was that his friend Pyeon Ja-in was disciple to the greatest physician under heaven, the Wandering Divine Physician, and was herself the Divine Physician of Life and Death.
And so the experiments ended. Yuun and his friends moved on to a nearby city and, at last, properly unburdened ten years of longing. They rented out an entire high-class inn, ate and drank their fill, then swept through the market in a noisy pack to buy souvenirs commemorating the reunion.
It was a city, yes, but only a small county seat rather than a provincial capital, and not a single martial artist recognized them. The others might have passed unnoticed in any case — yet Yang Jeonghyeon was the Murim Alliance Leader's own disciple, and he even carried the epithet Heavenly Thunder Sword, and still not a soul knew his face. It was almost uncanny. With no one to recognize them, the seven spent their time at ease and in high spirits.
Three days passed that way. When the hour came for Jeonghyeon to return to the Murim Alliance, they all agreed to go back to their own lives.
"Ah! If it weren't for Jeonghyeon, we could keep having fun!"
"Then leave me out and keep enjoying yourselves. Why blame someone else?"
Even Soryeong of the Embroidered Uniform Guard had scraped together every last day of leave to secure more time than Jeonghyeon, and when Soryeong teased him over it, he answered in a curt voice.
"Send only you back, and play without you? Leave that sulky Yang Jeonghyeon behind?"
"Call me the Heavenly Thunder Sword. Sulker? What's that supposed to mean? Would you like it if I called you a bookworm?"
Being addressed by a childhood nickname instead of his perfectly good epithet made Jeonghyeon scowl, and Soryeong let out a short laugh. Sulking over something this small — he really was the Sulker.
"Oh, right. I forgot to give you all this."
As if to prove he wasn't sulking at all, Jeonghyeon drew six jade tokens from his robes and passed them out, and every eye fixed on them.
"Bring this to the Murim Alliance and they'll pass you straight through as my friend, so come visit whenever you like."
A token proving their friendship, each carved with a name — it was plain how much Jeonghyeon had looked forward to everyone gathering again. His friends were moved. Gyobin alone wrinkled up in distaste.
"Hey! You wrote my name wrong! It isn't Gyobin as in 'crossing' and 'pearl' — it's Gyobin, 'lovely' and 'refined'!"
"I-it is? Sorry."
"Ah, mine's wrong too! It isn't this Hwa, the one for 'flower.' It's the character for 'splendor,' and you botched it!"
Gyobin had flown into a rage over the miswritten name, and at that everyone examined their own with care. They had known one another only as children, by the sound of a name, and no one had ever once shown how those names were written. A mistake was understandable — but the thought that one's own name might have been carved wrong was difficult to set aside.
"Mine's fine. Maybe because it's easy?"
"Nothing wrong with mine either. Well, I was famous, so maybe that's why."
On inspection, Yuun, Ja-in, and Soryeong were written correctly. The mistakes belonged to Seonghwa, Cheonghwi, and Gyobin — exactly half the tokens right, and half of them wrong.
Beginning with Jeonghyeon's gift, the friends exchanged ways to reach one another, even the places they lived, and then set off down their separate roads.
Yuun, as they had first decided, took the road to the Demonic Cult in Seonghwa's company. The cultists gathered around Seonghwa had all come on horseback, but Yuun couldn't ride, so they had bought a carriage in the county where he had spent those days with his friends, and the journey was no hardship.
"Yuun, you don't actually have to join the cult. You're my guest — a retainer at my table, nothing more."
She had already sent a courier ahead to announce that she would be bringing a friend as a guest, so Seonghwa said it with an easy heart.
"I wasn't planning to join anyway. Thanks for the consideration."
"H-huh?"
She had meant to be considerate, but the moment he cut it off so cleanly — no intention of joining at all — Seonghwa's mood turned strange, and a strange look crossed her face. She had risen to the seat of Heavenly Demon, yet she felt no attachment to the cult. Even so, the cult was hers to command, and the feeling was something she couldn't quite name.
"Honestly, I know the Demonic Cult is a religious order. I just don't know what kind of religion it even is."
"The Demonic Cult is a faith ruled by the law of the strong. The strong take everything. That's common sense in the murim."
He had no thought of joining because he didn't know what the cult did — or so she took it — and Seonghwa explained the cult as she knew it. Yuun was no martial artist. It was only natural, she thought, that he wouldn't know.
"No, the law of the strong and all that — that's famous. I already know it. I mean the cult itself. You call it a religion, but you don't proselytize, and you don't spread any doctrine. Don't you find that strange?"
"Uh, well, the doctrine is..."
With a clack, the thought stalled. The moment Yuun called it suspicious — a religion whose doctrine couldn't even be named — a question the Cult Leader had never once harbored rose in Seonghwa, and she flung the carriage door wide. A martial artist riding alongside turned to look at her.
"Have you an order for me?"
"What's the Demonic Cult's doctrine?"
"The law of the strong!"
Caught by the sudden question, the cultist answered on reflex. The strong possessing all things was the cult's providence. Nothing explained the cult better than that.
"No, not that. The doctrine — the doctrine. Does the cult have something like Buddhism's liberation, or the Daoists' ascension to immortality?"
At that, the martial artist stared at her with a look that plainly asked, Why are you asking me? You're the Cult Leader. He only thought it. He did not say it. He knew very well how, across three years of ranking duels, she had slaughtered her opponents.
"I will inquire of a Guardian Envoy — those who preach the cult's doctrine."
"A Guardian came with us?"
"Yes. A Guardian Envoy is accompanying the party."
"And where have the Left and Right Guardians gone, that nothing but a Guardian Envoy is tagging along?"
She felt no sense of duty as Cult Leader, but she was the Cult Leader, and she had moved — and the Left and Right Guardians had not followed, only a Guardian Envoy. Her face hardened. The Great Guardian, who stood above the Left and Right, had plenty to do remaining with the cult, but shouldn't one of the two beneath that seat have come with her?
"Th-that is... they are setting the cult in order in place of the Great Guardian, whose seat stands empty."
"Empty? Why is the Great Guardian's seat vacant?"
She had cut down countless people while fighting through the ranking duels, but she had no memory of ever issuing a challenge to the Great Guardian. When she tilted her head, the man she had questioned looked deeply troubled.
"Cult Leader. When you challenged the previous Cult Leader, do you remember the old man who burst out and called it insolence?"
"Ah! The one who said that if I wanted to challenge the Blood Heavenly Demon, I should beat him first? I'm sure I sent him off with a single flick of qi."
"That old man was the Great Guardian."
At the martial artist's obliging explanation, Seonghwa recalled the day she had brought down the Blood Heavenly Demon — and remembered that the Great Guardian had not been the only one she killed. There had been quite a few.
"Ah. By any chance, are a lot of the cult's high seats empty right now?"
"F-forgive me, Cult Leader! We have been inadequate..."
She had only asked on the off chance, but when the roundabout answer came back as yes, Seonghwa was at a loss for words. If a seat fell empty, the people below ought to have filled it at once, one after another. What were they doing? Even if she, the Cult Leader, had tossed her duties aside, weren't the people under her supposed to do their jobs?
"Just how many did you kill, for him to come out with something like that?"
"Sh-shut up! You — go fetch the Guardian Envoy!"
Yuun had recoiled and needled her, and Seonghwa, with nothing left to say, shouted at the martial artist instead and summoned the Guardian Envoy.
The Demonic Cult began in a rejection of Buddhism's faith in Maitreya.
Its founder, the First Heavenly Demon, held a fierce loathing for that faith. The belief that Maitreya would one day come, repair the world, and save all living beings was, to his eyes, profoundly offensive. That a human might cultivate the Dao and become a Buddha, or an immortal — even the First Heavenly Demon could grant that such a thing might be so. The Maitreya faith alone he could not endure. Not a liberated human saving the living, but a god descending to remake the world?
In his mind, this world belonged to humans alone. It was no place for a being like a god to intervene. And so he wished to deny the Maitreya who would one day descend upon it. What he made for that purpose was the Demonic Cult.
The founding of a world led by humans, not by gods.
That was the cult's ultimate aim, and its doctrine. To kill gods who were not human, they pursued overwhelming power, and that pursuit hardened into the law of the strong. And because Maitreya was a god of Buddhism, they created martial arts founded on demonic qi — the natural counter to the techniques of the Buddhist schools.
"And so demonic arts were born as the counter to Buddhist martial arts. In turn, the martial arts of the Buddhist schools became the counter to demonic arts."
Summoned by Cult Leader Seonghwa and asked for the doctrine, the Guardian Envoy explained even the origin of the demonic arts in a flush of delight, eyes shining. The true strongest Heavenly Demon in all the cult's history — the one who had slain in a single exchange the Blood Heavenly Demon, himself once called the strongest of any age — was learning the doctrine. The Heavenly Demon, the Cult Leader, was beginning to awaken to what she was. How could he not be glad?
"In short, the Demonic Cult has nothing that could be called an object of worship. If one must name one, human beings themselves are the object of faith."
"...So he says. Well?"
Seonghwa, who had been listening to the Guardian Envoy's rapturous lecture, looked at Yuun as if to ask whether he understood now, and Yuun nodded.
"I'm surprised there was actually a proper doctrine. But more than that — if a doctrine like this exists, shouldn't you be preaching it properly?"
They used the word demon, and the feeling it gave off was ominous enough that he had honestly assumed this was an evil cult, the sort that went as far as human sacrifice. He was genuinely surprised. Demon, in other words, was a means, not the goal. And when one considered how many rebellions had risen on the back of the Maitreya faith, this was a doctrine even the imperial palace would welcome.
"In truth, our cult aimed at precisely that, and attempted both proselytizing and contact with the imperial house many times. Each time, we ran into the opposition of the Buddhist schools and failed."
Hearing that what Yuun had only just thought of had already been tried, Seonghwa found herself thinking that a perfectly sound religion had been dragged into madness by the law of the strong.
"You talk well. From now on, you're the Great Guardian."
"What? I am merely a single Guardian Envoy. The Great Guardian ought to be chosen from between the Left and Right Guardians..."
"If you're going to fuss over rank like that, I'll have to kill the people of the Guardian Hall until you're Great Guardian. How many would that take?"
He had only explained a doctrine everyone of the Guardian Hall already knew, and when the Heavenly Demon named him Great Guardian, the Guardian Envoy shook his head as if the whole thing were impossible. But at the declaration that refusal meant a mass purge of the Guardian Hall, he had no choice but to accept — with the wretched air of a man forced to swallow bitter mustard and smile.