Dawn [1]
A quarter of an hour passed.
"...How did you know I was here?"
I broke the silence and asked Lee Seol-ah. There was no real edge in it. The nausea had ebbed, at least a little, and though old memories kept replaying behind my eyes, they were not all of them bad.
"I just... your face was so pale. So I followed you."
Pale. Yes — that sounded about right.
Then why didn't anyone say anything?
Had they simply assumed I was in a hurry for the bathroom? Impossible to say. It hardly mattered, anyway.
"Oh — and why were you crying...?"
Lee Seol-ah asked it carefully, an awkward smile fixed on her face.
...Should I tell her?
There was no particular reason I couldn't. Whether she would believe me was another matter entirely. It was hardly a life worth boasting about.
....
I didn't know.
Only after my head had cooled a little did I understand. Selfishly, I had wanted someone else to know my pain.
Maybe... I was lonely.
Strange, how light my chest felt. Perhaps that really was it.
So I simply opened my mouth.
"What happened was..."
The god who had given his body to Yu Hajin and sent him down into the lower realm — a True Immortal, as others named him — sensed the anomaly and lifted his gaze toward the station above.
His plaything, that mortal's cognition, had been rewritten without warning.
The jade throne of heaven, and seated upon it the true god, the Demon God of Chaos. It could only have been his hand.
Well. It was no concern of his. They stood, after all, at the summit of Mount Sumeru, ringed by a thousand worlds, and the will of the one who occupied that throne was the will of the world itself. He, who could not even wholly command a single universe, had no means of intervening.
In its place he regarded a planet smaller than his own pupil, and found it interesting.
The master of the world had fixed the future. He did not know what that future contained, yet the act alone was anything but light. No — the mere fact that such a being had turned his gaze upon the lower realm was already far from ordinary.
If the master of the world willed it, there was no immortal he could not kill. Even a divinity from some wholly other world would find few gods able to slip that grasp.
He made no effort to understand the master of the world. He was simply glad his amusement had grown richer. It had been on the verge of turning dull, and not knowing the road ahead only made it more interesting.
The True Immortal set the spiritual energy around him trembling, and chuckled.
"So... you were born in another world, died and were reincarnated into a different one, and then got reincarnated all the way here?"
Lee Seol-ah summed up my story, confusion written plain across her face.
"Yes, well... I don't expect you to believe it, but it's true."
I answered with a hollow laugh.
Honestly, I wouldn't have believed it either. A certificate from a psychiatric ward would have made more sense. Still, it hardly mattered. Simply having said it aloud had already left me lighter—
"That must have been hard."
Lee Seol-ah drew me into her arms and patted my back.
I went rigid, eyes wide.
It felt almost like a parent's embrace. I had never known what a real parent's arms were like, but I thought it might be something like this.
"..."
A faint smile found my face. The warmth of another person reached me, and something in my chest tightened without warning.
"...Thank you."
I said it with a thin smile. I had never once thought she would believe me, and yet she had. I was grateful.
"It's nothing. I've lived all twenty-six years of my life, and what I've learned is that a person needs at least one someone to lean on."
With that, Lee Seol-ah patted my back a few more times and drew away.
She wasn't wrong, but...
"Though I've lived about twice as long, you know."
She looked seventeen at the most generous estimate, so hearing that Lee Seol-ah was twenty-six was surprising enough — but I was older than I appeared. This year I was... fifty-one? Fifty-two? Somewhere around there. Old enough, in other words, to be of her parents' generation.
"Ah."
Lee Seol-ah blinked, vacant for a moment, then broke into a soft laugh.
"Well, age doesn't matter between friends, does it? I hear cultivators sometimes live for thousands of years."
Thousands of years? Cultivators? Did the gods hand out lifespans?
I tilted my head, and Lee Seol-ah nodded as if something had just occurred to her before going on.
"Right. Most people don't even know cultivators exist."
"They existed in the world I came from, too. People who believe in a god and live in abstinence, no? Or people who train while denying themselves?"
This was another world, so the details might differ, but if the word was the same, the sense of it ought to be similar.
Lee Seol-ah, however, cocked her head.
"What? Not even close. Cultivators aren't people who believe in gods. They're people trying to become immortals themselves. And their temperaments are a long way from abstinence."
Trying to become immortals themselves? The thought that this was nonsense never even crossed my mind. This was another world, after all. A body that had already passed through twenty of them had little left to be startled by. So what if a person could become a god? It felt a little off, but it didn't particularly matter.
"And is it all right to tell me that? You just said most people don't know they exist."
If cultivators were some kind of secret society, that could become a problem. In my second life I had stumbled onto one by accident, and they had tried to take revenge for that alone — I had ended up in a knife fight. A frail body. It had been quite the ordeal.
At my question Lee Seol-ah hummed, visibly turning it over, then spoke.
"Well... I don't think it matters, does it? It's not as if cultivators go around killing mortals just because they know they exist."
She said it, then added with a small smile.
"And we're friends now, aren't we? Between friends, that much is fine."
"Friends...? Since when?"
"Mm, since a little while ago? Don't tell me I was the only one who thought so. That's a little hurtful."
"It's been more than thirty years since I last had a friend..."
"...Ah. Right."
Lee Seol-ah looked at me with a peculiar light in her eyes — something like pity, a thread of worry woven through it, and a bewilderment she couldn't quite hide. A complicated gaze.
"Why... are you looking at me like that? I simply never made any, because I was training with the sword."
Even close colleagues had kept a certain distance for that reason. We did not meet in private — or if we did, it was only to train together.
When I said so, Lee Seol-ah offered an awkward smile.
"Ah... hang in there."
"...?"
I was still blinking at her when she changed the subject.
"Then could you show me your sword, just once? I really want to see it."
Her blue eyes glittered, strangely bright.
...What an odd person.
How did someone come to love a sword that much?
There had been people who liked swords back in my hunter days, but even then that woman had been called a madwoman. Her hunter name — what this world would call an alias — had been Blood-Mad Sword Demon from the start, which said everything that needed saying. I had seen her myself. She would let monsters strike her on purpose and shudder all over; it had been genuinely shocking. And every time she took a head she laughed until she split, which made it perfectly clear why the epithet had stuck.
I hadn't understood it then, and I didn't now, but it was not a difficult request. I agreed and rose.
Shrring—
A steel longsword slid from its sheath, every tooth of its edge long gone, incapable of properly giving off a killing aura.
"You should probably buy a new sword, shouldn't you?"
Lee Seol-ah said, scratching her cheek.
"Yes, well... I should."
I knew well enough that it was time to change blades, and answered with a wry smile. Without internal energy, I had no confidence I could cut a boulder with this thing. Severing along the grain of qi was hardly omnipotent; the sword would snap before the rock was fully cut. In short, it was in a very serious state.
Or would sword qi do it?
Thinking it over, I doubted it. With the internal energy I had now, I could not maintain sword qi for long.
I shook off the stray thoughts and settled into the opening stance.
"Oh..."
Lee Seol-ah breathed out in wonder.
I ignored her and lifted the sword.
The form of Mount Tai Bears Down symbolizes earth.
In the martial arts novels I had read before, I seemed to remember it standing for heaven, but that was none of my concern. The reason Mount Tai Bears Down symbolized the earth was that the form itself was gravity given shape. A vertical cut was a downward slash rather than an upward one for the same principle: to borrow the force of gravity.
I cut.
I gathered the form's mystery into that single thought and brought the sword down.
Earth, given form. Gravity brought down in a single stroke.
Shwaaak—!
The sword bisected the air, and the air all around was driven out and erased.
Whooom—!! Wind rushed in upon me to fill the vacuum it had left.
A brief stillness held, and then—
"Haaah...!"
It broke when Lee Seol-ah sucked in a sharp, empty breath, eyes shining.
...She saw it.
Those were eyes that had caught my sword strike. How, when she had never even learned martial arts? At twenty, I myself could not have followed a blow like that.
I was still staring, dazed, when Lee Seol-ah shot to her feet, flushed with excitement.
"Whoa...! How did you do that? How can a sword-path be this perfect...! In swordsmanship alone it's more perfect than even the Peak Realm! Whoa...! And the way you handle internal energy is first-rate, too!"
She trembled faintly, marveling without pause. Her blue eyes glittered with light, and her mouth showed no intention of closing.
I let out a hollow laugh and, on reflex, wiped the drool slipping from her lips with a finger.
"Ah."
Lee Seol-ah came back to herself and wiped her mouth several times with her sleeve.
I rubbed my finger clean on my clothes and spoke.
"...You're the one who surprises me."
"What? Me?"
"You saw my sword strike, didn't you? And you seem to know the sword well. So why aren't you learning martial arts?"
I meant it. And wasn't her surname Lee?
In my first life the name had been common enough, but here the Lee Clan was a sword house whose reputation rang far and wide. Their frost art was famous precisely because it harmonized so well with the sword; at its foundation, the clan was a sword house. And yet Lee Seol-ah, who loved the blade so fiercely that a kind of madness clung to her, did not take one up? Something was wrong with that.
"It's not that I won't learn. I can't."
Lee Seol-ah said it with a bitter smile.
"Have you heard of the Nine Yin Severed Meridians?"
"...The incurable illness. You die before you reach thirty."
The Nine Yin Severed Meridians — a severed-meridian affliction one was born with, extreme yin sealed inside the body. Circulating internal energy was impossible. Breathing itself was difficult, and even moving was said to be hard.
A lonely little laugh escaped her, soft and thin, and she went on.
"Yes. That's why my family abandoned me."