Plum Blossom Descends Like a Dragon
I had once been a hero whom anyone in the martial world would have recognized at a mere mention of my name. That was all in the past, of course. Just now, I had killed seven commoners who had come up from Hwaum County and put my sword away.
A cripple who could no longer even use martial arts had no right to speak of righteousness, you might say.
But until the day my dantian was shattered and I became a useless cripple, I was considered one of the rising stars of the jianghu.
To try and capture me with only seven commoners was to underestimate me far too much.
Unfortunately, those who came looking for me did not stop with them. Even now, dozens of people were climbing Mount Hua for no other reason than to seize me.
When they arrived, I would be as good as dead.
Having lived a life where I was called an extraordinary genius, the regrets that surged up from the end of my downfall ran all the deeper and darker.
What had my life been, after all?
I stood at the edge of the cliff and looked back over it.
Everyone, at least once in their lives, hears that they are different from other people.
I had grown up hearing those words from the time I was little.
The winter of my seventh year had been especially bitter.
My parents had abandoned me, so they could feed one fewer mouth and survive the winter.
It was the Mount Hua Sect that took me in.
To repay that kindness, I trained with all my might, and after only half a year people began calling me a genius.
Before long, I was chosen as the sect leader’s direct disciple and marked as Mount Hua’s next chief.
Even though my dantian was now shattered and I could not gather even a thread of inner power.
Even if a vessel breaks, the essence once contained within it does not change.
Talent was neither a well-honed blade nor the ability to forge one, but the way the blade was wielded itself.
Only after losing everything and becoming a cripple did I understand my true talent.
It was not a gift for learning martial arts, but a pair of eyes that could see through the essence beneath them.
For the past two years, I had shut myself away in Mount Hua’s Library so completely that people called me the Book Ghost, devouring the sect’s secret manuals.
I studied the thoughts and intent that had gone into each form, trying to understand what pain and what conviction had guided the creator of each art.
And so, six days ago, I had finally restored the lost Violet Mist Divine Art of the Mount Hua Sect...
Unfortunately, it seemed I would not be able to complete the great work of passing Violet Mist Divine Art down to the next generation.
I was going to die soon.
At the hands of the very people I had once risked my life to save.
Who in a world like this could dare speak of righteousness?
What a tragic thing.
What made it even more tragic was that I had no strength left to stop this madness.
* * *
It was a late afternoon, the sun sinking behind the western ridge of the mountain. Perhaps because the summer heat was so oppressive, both the sky and the sunset had become equally temperamental.
Rather than the usual red, the heavens were spread in a purple hue.
By contrast, everything below my feet was red.
Mount Hua, the Mount Hua Sect, and, though I could not see it from here, Hwaum County too was probably burning.
Just as I was about to glance up at the sky and return to the book I had been reading, someone called to me from behind.
“You must go now.”
The speaker tried hard to sound calm, but it was the most anxious voice I had heard in a long time.
I answered as though I were soothing him.
“Goodness, what’s the rush? I’m almost done, so wait a little longer.”
“They said if we’re late bringing back the Grand Hero alive, the Blood Sky Demon Sect will start killing the hostages one by one.”
“Your families are the ones whose lives are being held hostage, not mine. What do I have to rush for?”
“Grand Hero!”
“Please don’t call me Grand Hero. It’s terribly uncomfortable to hear. You’ve come to kill me, and yet Grand Hero? What kind of Grand Hero is that?”
As I casually turned a page, someone finally lost their patience and thrust a foot forward.
I could not see them, but I heard the sound of grass being trodden underfoot.
I immediately turned around and reached out behind me.
“Hey now, don’t come any closer. True, my dantian is broken and I’m a cripple, but killing a few of you who haven’t even learned martial arts would be no trouble at all. Don’t you see the sword I stuck into the ground for all to see?”
Blood stained the blade planted in the earth.
Not far behind it lay several bodies, dead and sprawled in the grass—commoners, not martial artists.
They were the ones who had come here before the others, trying to kill me.
“Besides, I’ve laid poison needles all over the ground. You came to catch me because you didn’t want to throw away innocent lives, didn’t you?”
The man who had stepped into the brush eyed the distance between us and replied, “I don’t see any poison needles.”
“That’s because they’re hidden in the grass. If I’d placed them where you could actually see them, how could you call it a trap set by a martial artist?”
Several villagers standing beside him seemed to accept that explanation.
The one who appeared to be their spokesman looked at the bodies lying face-down and then at the people around him, before slowly nodding.
“That does make sense.”
“So wait just a little longer. If I die before I can recall the ending of this book, I’ll be full of regrets and wander the mortal world even after death.”
After glancing toward the anxious people of Hwaum County, I turned the page.
The moment I read the words, my brows drew together.
“Then spring came.
Spring blossoms piled up so thickly they were within reach of one’s feet.
The child bent his knees and gathered a handful of petals in both hands.
Longing piled up as deep as the petals he had gathered.”
I closed the book, with only a few pages left, and gave it a shake toward the man I had been speaking with all this time—the one who was probably their spokesman.
“This is the biography of a hero written by some nameless scholar. It’s been so long since I read it that I’d forgotten how it ended. And I’ve only just remembered. Have you read this tale of a hero? It’s called The Unnamed Heroic Record.”
The man answered rather awkwardly.
“I have. It was entertaining.”
“I found it utterly unentertaining while reading it. In the end, the hero in that biography perished together with the demonic leader for the sake of the world. And yet how well was his sacrifice remembered? In the end, only one child who got to eat steamed buns remembered him. Can you believe that?”
Halfway through speaking, I threw the book I had been reading across the burning forest and over the far side of Lakan Peak’s cliff.
“How empty a hero’s life is.”
Next, I staggered to my feet with my sword in hand.
“My situation is much the same as the protagonist’s in that book. Look at it this way—don’t I seem rather miserable?”
I broke off and quickly swept my gaze forward. One, two, seven, ten... There were well over a hundred people by rough count.
Each of them was glaring at me with torches, sickles, hoes—whatever they could lay their hands on to hurt another person.
These were the residents of Hwaum County.
It had been they who burned the sect and set fire to Mount Hua’s forests, not the demonic cultivators.
“Among you are refugees who came from Hubei two years ago. I see quite a few familiar faces.”
Who would have thought the Blood Sect and the Demon Sect would one day be joined together as one force?
The demonic cultivators who called themselves the Blood Sky Demon Sect had attacked villages in Hubei Province two years ago.
“At the time, my comrades and I did everything we could to protect you while you fled.”
All the comrades who had fought beside me died that day.
I alone survived, my dantian broken, and have been limping along in this pitiful state ever since.
In truth, “living along” was generous; I did not have many days left. I had used most of my innate true qi back then, and my hair had gone white while wrinkles spread across my face.
Not even thirty years old yet, and already on the verge of dying from age.
“My life is just as miserable as I thought. The people I spent my whole life saving are the ones trying to kill me.”
If they had reached this place, that meant my fellow disciples were all dead or captured.
When I turned my head toward the foot of the cliff, I could see the forest burning.
What had the Founding Patriarch been thinking when he personally planted trees at the time he established the Mount Hua Sect?
Had he not imagined a future Mount Hua in which plum blossoms bloomed in full abundance?
“The plum blossoms of Mount Hua carry the dreams of the Founding Patriarch, the successive patriarchs, and the sages who followed them. They are not something you can burn so easily.”
Even if they themselves could not see it, when future generations entered Mount Hua, they should be able to look upon those plum blossoms, so much like Mount Hua’s sword, and nurture their own dreams.
The plum trees planted with such hopes were now being swallowed by the flames.
Come to think of it, it’s been a long time since I last saw plum blossoms.
Since becoming a cripple, I had only ever looked at the ground.
Even seeing the sunset from Lakan Peak like this was something I had managed only by borrowing a little courage from alcohol.
Watching the plum trees burn away had left my insides in a state too ruined for words.
Twice as much flame as was burning Mount Hua had already been stuffed into my chest.
“Not a single plum tree remains, only fire. Is this truly Mount Hua, or is it a volcano?”
As I said that, I turned my head and calmly swept my gaze across the crowd, taking in their faces one by one.
Most of them turned away, unable to meet my eyes.
But a few did not.
Among them was a woman clutching a newborn in her arms, and men who kept women who looked like their wives behind them as though protecting them.
It would have been nice if they had shown that courage when fighting the Blood Sky Demon Sect.
“My comrades died on that battlefield that day to protect you. Until the very moment before they died, they cared nothing for their own lives and only worried about the lives of the refugees. Was the teaching of the sages, that one should draw a sword for the weak and embody righteousness, wrong? No. I may not be a martial artist now, but my heart has never changed from the days when I was one.”
And yet, strangely enough, my chest was calm.
Even now I was holding a sword, so where had the me who once burned with righteousness gone? I was uttering words that came not from my heart at all.
But at least the words I was speaking now were sincere.
“My life is precious, you see. Truly precious. My comrades staked their lives to save me.”
The man arched his brows.
“What are you trying to say?”
“That if I die at the hands of the Blood Sky Demon Sect as well, how will I have the face to meet them in the underworld?”
I backed slowly toward the cliff.
Too late, the man sensed my intention and shouted to the people behind him.
“...Catch him! We have to catch him! He means to kill himself!”
A life lived for others from beginning to end. At the very least, I wanted to choose my own ending.
At the edge of the cliff, in the span of a single instant, I had many thoughts.
Was this the right choice?
Was suicide truly the best option?
Would it not be more sensible to surrender here and spare their lives instead?
Countless questions circled through my head, but in the end there was only one choice left to me.
Be captured and die miserably at the enemy’s hands, or take my own life. One or the other.
I poured all my strength into my toes and hurled my body backward.
A weightless sensation unlike anything I had ever felt before swept through me as my body rose into the air and turned over.
With my head pointed toward the ground, I found the sky spread out before me.
Ever since I became a cripple, I had shut myself away indoors and walked with my eyes fixed on the earth, and in the process I had forgotten how vast the heavens really were.
Only after the world inverted did I realize it.
The sky had always been this wide, this boundless.
I was robbed of both sight and breath by the strange color created where the blue sky and the red sunset met and mingled.
“Ah...”
Violet mist was beside me.
* * *
When I came to my senses, I was in the dead of winter, heavy snowflakes whipping through the wind.
I was lying among the steps halfway up the mountain, and I had no trouble guessing that they were the stairs leading to the Mount Hua Sect.
Perhaps it was a late-arriving flash of memory before death, but I suddenly recalled a conversation I had once had with children of the same generation as me when we were young.
One day, while we were eating, I had excitedly declared that the sages must surely have built a place like the Mount Hua Sect in the immortal realms as well.
Who could have guessed that the foolish things said in a childish moment would turn out to be true?
So this is the test they want me to climb if I wish to reenter Mount Hua after losing my martial arts.
This was one of Mount Hua Sect’s entrance trials.
If children who wished to become disciples climbed Mount Hua alone and reached the main sect, they were given a simple examination and accepted as disciples.
Because Mount Hua’s terrain was so treacherous, even for a child to climb it alone was enough to prove whether they possessed the effort or talent that mattered for a martial artist.
Of course, fewer than five people in ten years ever made it in that way.
The sages are really far too much.
To tell a person who had lost his martial arts to climb a mountain in weather like this.
I’m the one who didn’t lose Violet Mist Divine Art.
I restored the lost art that had vanished one hundred and fifty years ago.
Is it really my fault that Mount Hua’s traditions have been said to be barely hanging on, outmatched and pushed down by the other nine major orthodox sects?
Had they been upset that I chose suicide and failed to pass it on to future generations after all?
Muttering to myself, I stretched out my arms and legs.
And yet... had my arms always been this short? They were far too short to be explained by merely bending.
White, slender hands. Hands that had not even fully grown yet. A child’s hands.
“Ha...”
When I opened my mouth, out came not a hoarse voice but a youthful one.
Looking up the mountain path, where the falling snow made it hard to see ahead, I let out a dry laugh.
“This is bleak. Utterly bleak.”
So he had become a transcendent immortal and was truly using some kind of miracle art?
Because I had burned through most of my innate true qi, I had grown old before I had even reached thirty.
And now, this time, I had become a child.
Shivering from the cold, I moved my short limbs, stiff as firewood, and began climbing Mount Hua.