Don’t Cower and Cry, Stand and Laugh
[[What did you just do?]]
As the spider demon’s intent, which had been swelling close to the point of frenzy, gradually began to ebb, a shadowed figure spoke to her.
Baek Sang-ah looked at the demon for a moment, then answered. “I saw its memories.”
[[Memories? You mean you saw the memories of the earth?]]
“No. I saw this spider demon’s memories.”
At Baek Sang-ah’s answer, the incarnation of the Mountain-Piercing Immortal fell silent for a moment, then gave a low murmur as though deep in thought.
[[You saw the spider demon’s memories...? Were you mistaken?]]
“I really saw them.”
[[Impossible. Even I have never, in all my long life, heard of a technique that casually steals another’s memories.]]
Baek Sang-ah tilted her head.
[[Do you know what it means to peer into another’s memories?]]
“W-what does it mean...?”
[[Memory is the pillar that forms one’s inner world, challenger. You, too, have seen your own inner world, so you should understand.]]
“Mm. I think so.”
[[Therefore, to see another’s memories is no different from forcibly intruding into that other’s inner world.]]
“I-is that bad?”
In principle, a cultivator’s inner world could be said to be the accumulation of everything they had built through their practice over time: consciousness, spirit energy, enlightenment, intent, selfhood, and more. It was a gathering of all those things into one whole.
The same was true for demons and beast-folk.
In other words, Baek Sang-ah seeing those memories meant that she had brazenly intruded into that inner world and interfered without the slightest resistance from the other side.
For an ordinary cultivator, it would have been an impossible feat.
[[Hah. You are always doing things beyond all my expectations. Is this, too, the strangeness of the Malrangjiche? Or perhaps... no, that can’t be.]]
The bear-shaped shadow’s voice trembled low.
It was as though he were denying something even while faintly, unwillingly, feeling a possibility rise in his mind that he could not push away.
Baek Sang-ah did not ask about it. In the first place, she had no idea how extraordinary the thing she had done actually was.
Instead, she looked at the spider demon.
“So I-I-I have to protect it.”
Transparent tears slid down the spider demon’s cheeks.
Baek Sang-ah reached out as if to wipe them away, then stopped. She did not know how to comfort others.
There’s something I haven’t heard yet.
Then Baek Sang-ah closed her eyes.
As her long, dense lashes lowered over her blue pupils, she leaned forward.
The tip of her nose touched the spider demon’s.
It was the greatest expression she could manage as a shark.
The spider demon, sensing the strangeness of it, moved her eyes toward Baek Sang-ah just as Baek Sang-ah spoke.
“Tell me.”
“Y-y-y-you...?”
“What happened to the cultivators?”
The spider demon’s pupils shook violently.
The moment she heard the question, the final memory she had forgotten rose once more to the surface.
Her lips quivered.
“They’re h-h-h-here.”
“On this mountain?”
“T-they’re h-h-here, so I have to p-p-protect them. I do. I have to protect t-t-them...”
Only then did Baek Sang-ah understand why the spider demon had seized Hyeongeuk and the mole monsters.
And why she had not eaten them the instant she caught them. And why there had been no trace of human scent on her at all.
She must have caught the mole monsters and Hyeongeuk because they had been carrying the scent of humans from spending time with the cultivators of Ungyu Sect.
And the reason she didn’t eat them was because she never meant to. She only wanted to protect them.
She had probably been unable to distinguish the cultivators who had invaded Monster Mountain from the cultivators of Ungyu Sect.
That also made the beasts’ wariness when she first came up the mountain understandable.
“You. Kind.”
“I-I... I couldn’t protect anyone...”
Baek Sang-ah reached out with her awareness again.
She could still feel sorrow, fixation, and rage radiating from the spider demon.
At that moment, Muyeonja’s voice rang out in her mind.
[It must be killed.]
Why?
[A demon is a beast that might once have become a beast-folk, but has been corrupted by falsehood and twisted beyond recognition. It is a monster that retains only its fixation on that falsehood.]
But...
[Falsehood means being abandoned by Heaven. There is no way back. This beast must carry that fixation for the rest of its life.]
Baek Sang-ah’s brow furrowed sharply, displeased by Muyeonja’s words.
In the past, she would have accepted whatever he said, but lately she found herself strangely irritated more and more often.
Muyeonja also found this odd, though he had no intention of voicing it.
[Rather than let it live out its entire life swallowed by fixation as a monster, would it not be kinder to put it at ease with your own hands?]
Baek Sang-ah did not answer.
She simply met the spider demon’s eyes, those trembling blue-black pupils.
Inside them lay emotions more desperate than anything else: guilt for failing to protect anyone; loneliness born of holding up a collapsed mountain all by herself; and even now, in this very instant, a desperate will to protect someone once more.
“Muyeonja said...”
[Me?]
“Cultivation is defying Heaven and climbing upward.”
[Hmm...?]
Baek Sang-ah lifted her nose away from the spider demon’s and spread both arms wide.
“So you can’t go along with Heaven.”
[What did you say?]
Muyeonja’s voice rose abruptly.
“Heaven may abandon someone, but the Greatest Baek Sang-ah doesn’t abandon anyone. Because she’s the greatest.”
And then Baek Sang-ah embraced the spider demon’s upper body.
Of course, hugging her tightly was no easy thing.
Baek Sang-ah’s enormous reservoir of spirit energy and the spider demon’s enormous reservoir of demon energy were pressed together in the middle, each one crushing the other into its own shape.
Still, Baek Sang-ah held the spider demon in her arms.
“So I’ll protect you too. Not alone. You can’t protect things alone. You never can.”
“Y-y-y-you...”
Baek Sang-ah’s intent slowly wrapped around and covered the spider demon’s own intent of sorrow.
Soft, yielding, warm, and colorless intent.
“Whyyyyyy are yoooooouuu...”
The spider demon’s body trembled.
Even as she twitched her shoulders, as though trying to wriggle free of Baek Sang-ah’s embrace, and lifted her arms to shove her away, for some reason the tears streaming down her cheeks stopped.
It was because the sincerity contained in Baek Sang-ah’s intent had reached the spider demon.
[The corruption of a demon may stain your pure spirit energy. Are you saying that’s fine?]
“Mm-hm.”
At Muyeonja’s words, Baek Sang-ah quietly closed her eyes.
Her inner world was calm.
It did not churn, or rage, or collapse under grief.
She simply understood the spider demon’s sadness.
Then a deep, dark indigo light began to flow into her inner world.
It was sorrow.
That emotion called sorrow rose like a pillar atop the foundation of water among the Five Phases.
[Hah. Are you telling me that even this becomes enlightenment for the child? How in the world can such a thing... ]
[[This is neither the way of beast-folk nor the way of humans. Does it even make sense for emotion to build itself atop the foundations of the Five Phases in the first place?]]
I don’t really know either. But I’m sad.
With that, the water foundation among the Five Phases that she would need to complete to reach the Golden Core was finished.
Baek Sang-ah released the spider demon, then looked straight into her face, where the tears had stopped.
“Protecting things is something you do together.”
“T-together?”
“Yeah. Together. So let’s drive them away, all of us.”
The rocks that had been holding the spider demon in place retreated back into the cavern wall and vanished.
Baek Sang-ah sat atop one of the spider’s legs.
“We’re going to protect everyone.”
“P-protect them...”
The spider started moving with Baek Sang-ah riding on its back.
The moment Baek Sang-ah folded into a seated meditation posture and brought her hands together, a yellow-brown light flowed over her entire body.
Earth-colored spirit energy spread like veins in lines across her form, making itself visible all over her body.
“Open sesame.”
“Se-se-se-same...”
Rumble—!
The spirit energy spreading from Baek Sang-ah’s body seeped into the cavern walls, and the ceiling of the cave split open to reveal the blue sky.
It was Earth Heart Shifting Art, a technique taught to her by Dam So-dam.
It meant moving the heart of the earth, a form of earth technique that allowed stone, rock, and soil to be manipulated through spirit energy.
The spider demon moved forward, using all seven of its legs except the one that carried Baek Sang-ah.
“I can feel it. I can find them.”
With earth energy flowing like lines across her body, Baek Sang-ah sensed the currents of the ground and picked out the foreign presence.
The energy was slightly muddy, yet also spiritual and formidable, and to Baek Sang-ah it stood out with perfect clarity.
“This way.”
The spider demon, now linked with her consciousness, moved without hesitation in the direction Baek Sang-ah pointed.
At its size, speed, and sharp legs, no trees or thickets could stand in its way.
In particular, its swift movement despite its bulk was one of the spider demon’s special strengths.
“There’s a barrier.”
Before long, the smell of blood grew strong.
In an instant, the spider demon came to a stop, because a transparent barrier stood directly ahead of them.
“I-I wasn’t taught how to break barriers.”
Then a voice came from behind them.
“I know how, Senior Baek.”
“Huh?”
“Humaaaaaaans?”
Baek Sang-ah turned at the sound and blinked wide-eyed.
There stood one of the Ungyu Sect cultivators.
No, not just one.
There was Hyeongeuk, limping on one leg, Dam So-dam looking at Baek Sang-ah with concern, the other Ungyu Sect cultivators with dazed expressions on their faces...
And Rangi, puffing herself up with an “Ahem!” as though she were the one who had brought them all here.
“Huh? How did you get here?”
“I heard everything from Hyeongeuk and Rangi. I was worried something might happen to Senior Baek, but this is beyond what I imagined.”
Ung Sa-jeon raised an eyebrow as he looked at the spider demon and Baek Sang-ah, who was perched naturally atop it.
He had expected them to be fighting, so the sight of the two of them standing together peacefully before a barrier came as quite a surprise.
“Could it be that Senior Baek even tamed that fearsome demon?”
“I didn’t tame it. We became friends.”
“I-I see.”
“Uuuuuuuuuuh...”
Ung Sa-jeon let out a sigh and asked no further questions.
After all, this was not the first time Baek Sang-ah had behaved far beyond common sense.
Taming Rangi, who had ruled the mountain; discovering the Spirit Stone Cave; defeating a Golden Core cultivator with ease, and so on.
From the very beginning, she had been an existence that had little to do with ordinary reason.
More than anything, Ung Sa-jeon trusted Baek Sang-ah.
He wanted to repay the debt of kindness he owed her. And since the opportunity was right in front of him, he intended only to follow her wishes.
“Shall we break the barrier, then?”
“Yeah. Beyond here are the villains, so—hmm?”
Just as Ung Sa-jeon was ordering the Ungyu Sect cultivators to break the barrier, Baek Sang-ah suddenly prickled her soft, plump tail and turned her head again.
This time, even the spider demon let out a startled sound.
“Eh?”
At the same time, the Ungyu Sect cultivators all turned around in surprise as well.
The reason was simple.
“Yip!”
“Grrrroooowwwl!”
“Moooo!”
“Maaah!”
Dogs, bears, boars, deer, foxes, sparrows, and more.
All the beasts of Monster Mountain had come rushing over in a great swarm.
Baek Sang-ah could understand what they were saying.
“You came because you wanted to protect the spider demon?”
“Grrrroooowwwl!”
“You didn’t want the spider demon to cry?”
“Youuuuuu, allllll of yooooooou...”
The spider demon, moved by the words of its beast friends, began to well up with tears again.
“Because you’re friends, you want to protect it?”
Baek Sang-ah nodded at the spider demon.
“Yeah. That’s right. Protecting isn’t something one person does alone. It’s together. And it’s not just one side protecting the other. You have to protect each other.”
“I-I’ll p-protect...”
[[I have broken the barrier, Senior Baek!]]
The moment that was said, the wind stilled.
The spider demon’s body moved toward the other side of the barrier.
“Let’s beat them all up.”
“Beaaatttt them up...”
Beyond it, five Golden Core cultivators were waiting.