The Ripple of Her Influence
The scent in Gwak Cheon-ung’s office, commander of the Wudang escort corps, was heavier than usual, pressing down on the air with an almost tangible weight.
Several days had passed since the mysterious women had left.
He sat in thought as he read the letter that had arrived tied to a hawk’s leg.
Seoan, huh.
Gwak Cheon-ung stroked his long beard, sinking deeper into contemplation.
He was keeping a close eye on Song Hyeon’s movements, but it was not easy to read the mind of such a mysterious woman in full.
He needed to determine whether she had truly gone to Seoan for the sake of the secret manual.
Or whether she meant to visit the Haomu Gate headquarters because she did not trust the Tianung trading company.
He carefully began writing out the instructions he would give the escorts.
Then a thick door opened, and an old monk quietly stepped inside.
“Master Hye-myeong, you’ve had a long journey. Thank you for coming.”
He was one of the Eighteen Arhats of Shaolin, and an old friend with whom he had shared life and death since youth: Master Hye-myeong.
He had rushed here at once after receiving the urgent letter, and deep concern for his old secular friend was written plainly across his face.
Hye-myeong pressed his palms together and bowed.
“May Avalokiteshvara’s mercy be with you, Patron Gwak. I’ve heard the story. First, I need to see the child’s condition.”
Even in the midst of their long-awaited reunion, he worried first about the patient before anything else. Seeing that, Gwak Cheon-ung wordlessly nodded and led him into the secret chamber.
When the massive iron door opened, a chill gust of air slipped out, followed by a groan that sounded almost bestial.
Bound to the bed was his son.
With eyes glittering madly, he muttered incomprehensible words into empty air.
Both ankles had been mutilated so badly that any ordinary person would have judged them beyond repair, the tendons torn to pieces.
“Such cruel treatment… Amitabha.”
Hye-myeong murmured a brief prayer, then pressed his fingers to the young man’s wrist and closed his eyes.
His brow furrowed in an instant.
The internal force flowing through the meridians writhed in a vile, twisted current.
The evil aura he sensed was the same as that used by the ones troubling Shaolin lately with that sinister book.
But what was even more shocking was that this perilous energy had been restrained with terrifying precision by someone else.
As though a ferocious beast had had its vital point pierced in one blow and been rendered helpless, several channels of blood and energy had been cut off with exacting accuracy.
“… Hah. This is incredible.”
Hye-myeong let out a breath of disbelief and admiration mingled together.
With the ability to suppress an opponent so completely, why go so far as to cruelly sever the tendons as well?
He could never have guessed that this treatment had been ordered by his old friend Gwak Cheon-ung himself.
Cheon-ung was cold by nature, the sort of man who hated taking even the slightest loss.
And yet here he was, summoning Hye-myeong in such haste, clearly because he cherished his family enough to rectify even his son’s faults.
Quietly, Hye-myeong took a vajra from his robes.
“Rest easy. I shall completely sever your son’s internal force and seal his meridians. Then this wicked energy will no longer be able to influence him.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
At Gwak Cheon-ung’s nod, Hye-myeong brought the vajra down with all his strength.
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Sometime later, the two men faced each other again in Gwak Cheon-ung’s office.
“Don’t worry about your son. I finished the treatment properly.”
“I’m grateful.”
Hye-myeong lifted his teacup and savored its fragrance before speaking again in a calm voice.
“You said it was a mysterious girl?”
“Yes. To be honest, I’m not even sure she was a girl.”
Hye-myeong fell silent once more.
The traces left behind on Cheon-ung’s son’s body a little while ago flashed clearly in his mind.
A miraculous technique that had precisely pierced the weak point of the evil energy and subdued it.
Since Shaolin’s recent crackdown, he had seen many foolish souls who had fallen into the evil path.
But he had never seen such a refined method, one that seemed to pierce straight through the essence of the thing itself.
“Did you get the book back?”
The question carried a hint of disappointment.
But Gwak Cheon-ung’s answer was firm.
“No. How could I make such a demand of a benefactor who corrected my son’s mistake?”
He was a man who repaid kindness and enmity with perfect clarity, never mixing the two.
Hye-myeong knew that was exactly what kind of person Gwak Cheon-ung was, so he could not press the matter further.
The whereabouts of the book were now in that girl’s hands.
Hye-myeong judged that this matter could not be taken lightly.
Unknown identity, unknown purpose, and perhaps a hidden master even more dangerous than the secret manual itself.
“Patron Gwak. Tell me as much as you can about that girl’s appearance. This cannot end as nothing more than an unlucky event for your family. I must report this formally to Shaolin.”
The light in Hye-myeong’s eyes was no longer that of a kindly monk comforting an old friend.
It was the sharp brilliance of an Arhat shouldering the safety of the martial world.
And that had been one of Gwak Cheon-ung’s intentions from the start.
He nodded quietly and began telling him everything about Song Hyeon.
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In the afternoon, when the mountain plum fragrance of Mount Hua drifted through the wind, Hwa Rin, the Jinshan disciple of the Mount Hua Sect, sat in a tidy tea room across from an old friend.
The woman sitting opposite her was Yu Hyeonju, the second-generation disciple of the Jongnam Sect.
Under normal circumstances, the two of them would have been noisy with the delight of reunion.
But Yu Hyeonju only sat stiffly, absentmindedly toying with her teacup in silence.
“I really am sorry, you know.”
As awkward silence settled over the tea, Hwa Rin spoke first.
She offered her apology with a gentle smile.
A few days earlier, she had broken their long-anticipated appointment, unintentionally leaving her friend waiting alone.
At that one line, Yu Hyeonju let out a long sigh and set down her cup.
Even though her friend smiled so beautifully, she simply could not bring herself to get angry, not when they were both women.
“So why did you break your promise that day, Hwa Rin? Did something happen?”
Yu Hyeonju asked bluntly, true to her nature.
At that, Hwa Rin gave a bitter little smile and lifted her cup.
“Sorry. Something urgent came up. It was my fault for not sending word ahead of time.”
How could she say that she had been bewitched by one girl, handed over the clothes she had intended for the youngest disciple, and then spent the rest of the day dazed, drunk on that dazzling memory?
Hwa Rin hid the truth, but that day had also been the day Hyeonju met the same girl and experienced something equally strange.
“You mean the thing where you gave her Hwayeong’s clothes?”
“Oh my, how did you know?”
At Hyeonju’s perfectly accurate guess, Hwa Rin answered before she could stop herself.
She hurriedly clapped both hands over her mouth.
She had been distracted by an adorable girl and forgotten her appointment with a friend.
Her stubborn, straight-arrow friend was surely going to explode with anger.
Yet instead of getting mad, Yu Hyeonju merely shook her head and knitted her brows.
“So it was true. I met a girl coming down the mountain that day. She was wearing Hwayeong’s clothes, so I thought maybe.”
“Hehe. Sorry.”
Yu Hyeonju recalled the girl she had met that day.
Apart from her formidable martial prowess, she possessed beauty so extraordinary that even Hwa Rin would have had to concede a point.
Given her friend’s complete weakness for anything cute, meeting such a girl would hardly have ended with her being sent away easily.
“You really ought to fix that habit of yours.”
“But cute things are the truth of the world!”
“If the sect leader heard you say that, you’d be in serious trouble.”
Wu-wei ziran.
A woman from a Daoist sect, a disciple of Mount Hua no less, claiming to cultivate transcendence from the mundane, and yet speaking so shamelessly of desire.
Even when Yu Hyeonju shook her head in exasperation, Hwa Rin only smiled brightly.
Seeing her dazed friend, Hyeonju clicked her tongue inwardly and moved on to the main point.
“More importantly, did you know her already? You even gave her Hwayeong’s clothes.”
“No? I only met her yesterday. She needed clothes, so I just gave them to her. Thanks to that, I got an earful from Hwayeong later.”
Yu Hyeonju narrowed her eyes and glared at her friend, who was sipping tea so calmly after saying something so absurd.
Would the men who praised her as the foremost beauty of the martial world even know?
That this peerless woman actually had such a careless, airheaded side to her.
They should have realized it the moment she started ranting about rewriting the Plum Blossom Sword Style because she’d fallen into a romance novel.
Of course, Mount Hua could not tell whether it was fortunate or unfortunate that her overwhelming talent had turned that bizarre idea into reality.
“… I heard she lives on Mount Hua. It’s a surprise you don’t know her.”
“What?!”
Hwa Rin slammed her cup down on the table and leaned forward.
Her eyes widened into perfect circles in shock.
“Who did you hear that from?”
“Who else? The girl said it herself.”
“Really?”
Hwa Rin propped her chin on her hand and sank into serious thought, looking genuinely startled.
Lives on Mount Hua?
Mount Hua was a broad, rugged mountain of stone.
There were very few places fit for human habitation, and lately it had become even more dangerous, with drifters frequently coming and going after taking a dark interest in the female disciples of Mount Hua.
Then, all at once, someone long forgotten drifted through her mind.
A man from years ago.
He had come to introduce himself, saying that he had begun living on Mount Hua.
He had lost his parents and climbed all the way up to the harsh Mount Hua main grounds with a body that held not a trace of inner force, determined to live in the mountains.
Unlike the many drifters who had visited Mount Hua in recent years, he knew proper manners, and he had left a fairly deep impression on Hwa Rin.
Could it be… his child? Or perhaps… merely someone he was looking after?
As soon as the thought struck her, Hwa Rin shot to her feet.
“… I have somewhere I need to go. Hyeonju, will you come with me?”
Within her once-calm eyes, sparks of curiosity were beginning to dance.
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