A God Manifests? [1]
The speed of treading the void defied imagination. Ah—and since we were lying down the whole way, perhaps I ought to have called it Reclining Through the Void instead. Anyway. It was easy to wonder how fast merely stepping on empty air could possibly be, and yet this was about the speed of a train.
"Whoa... how is the land this enormous?"
"I know.... This is the first time I've come out this far, too, and it's even vaster than I thought."
Seated in the empty air and grilling meat, we said it in open wonder. Sleep included, we had flown the better part of a fortnight without a stop, at a pace to rival a train—and we still hadn't arrived? That was time enough to cross the Asian continent from end to end and back again, twice, with room to spare. The land really is monstrously vast. No other thought offered itself.
"Ahh~."
I slipped a piece of meat, seasoned with wild fruit, into Seol-a's mouth. That had its own pleasure, too. Why? Because Seol-a was with me.
"Oppa, you say ah~ too."
"Ahh."
Seol-a fed me a piece in return. In truth I had no need to eat, and little appetite besides, but food from Seol-a's hand was another matter entirely. I was chewing in earnest when she stifled a laugh and spoke.
"Living in the sky might be better than I expected."
"Yeah."
Food was simple enough: fly low over the ground and drag up wild animals or fruit with spatial manipulation. I was holding the temperature steady with gang qi, and the wind was kept off by more of the same—what Seol-a had named Body-Protecting Gang Qi. Thin as the air was, thin enough that it had to be gathered by hand, it was clear all the same. And the most important thing of all: I could stay stuck to Seol-a, perfectly legitimately, all day long!
True, I could simply have floated her up there with spatial manipulation.... But why bother?
In any case, it was a novel experience—quite a different feeling from the airplane I had boarded once or twice in my life.
"Come to think of it, it's lucky our way runs through the forest."
"Hm? Why?"
"If anyone saw us lying in the sky and flying like this, word would get around that we're immortals."
"Ah. Yeah, it would."
....
...Wait.
"Then couldn't we just do exactly that?"
Why were we heading for the capital in the first place? To negotiate with the Dao cultivators. The leadership of the Soil Kingdom was concentrated in the capital, and the whole decision rested on the guess that the Dao cultivators would be in contact with them as well. There was a flaw in it, though. If those cultivators met with the imperial house only at set times, we would have to wait out that window.
But if I were mistaken for a Dao cultivator myself? Then that would simply be the end of it.
Dao cultivators, much like martial artists, often belonged to Daoist sects or Daoist clans. Did every cultivator who made up such a group have to be born inside it? Probably not. Unless the group was vast, it would have to bring cultivators in from the outside, or something of the sort, simply to keep existing.
I meant to use that.
The plan was this. Fly about through the sky, rampage as spectacularly as I could, and sweep the black-path sects away—just as an immortal would. Then the Dao cultivators would come looking for me. Whether to recruit me or for some other purpose, the odds were better than nine in ten.
Turning back over Seol-a's explanation, that Dao cultivators approached even the masters of the murim, I figured that revealing myself as a martial artist would hardly be a problem. If they sought out martial artists who had entered the ranks of the masters, it meant there was something to be gained from that power. (It might be for status, of course, but in this world, martial strength enough and status of that order followed on its own.)
Why hadn't I thought of this sooner? Had the old plan been so firmly set that I couldn't think past it? No matter. I'd thought of it now, and that was enough. Done this way, it would be better than the method from before.
Seol-a's reaction, once she had heard the explanation:
"Uh, um.... Isn't that too dangerous? What if they decide you're a threat and try to eliminate you?"
"If they're the sort of temper to take that and move to wipe us out on the spot, they'd pick a fight even if we stuck to the original plan. And I don't particularly feel like we'd lose."
"That's.... true."
From Seol-a, nodding along, I caught a faintly sulky air. We had been going there partly for the sake of enjoying ourselves, and this way rest would be hard to come by. That had to be it. But it couldn't be helped. The public matter had to come first, and my own pleasure after. It must not run the other way.
"...If we want the rumors to spread fast and wide, we'll have to go all over the place anyway.... So a little sightseeing, a little playing around, ought to be fine, right?"
My mouth, it seemed, was the natural enemy of my head. What else was I supposed to do? If Seol-a grew gloomy by so much as a fingernail, my heart hurt.
"Whoa, you mean it?!"
In a single instant, the color flooded back into her face. Wasn't that a little too simple...? Well. She was cute, so it was fine. I answered with a soft breath of a laugh.
Songwon, capital and imperial seat of the Soil Kingdom—the place where more people made their lives than anywhere else in the realm, and where amenities and offices of government alike stood packed together. But where there is light, shadow is never far behind. The capital had its back alleys.
"Stop right there!"
"You think I'll stop just 'cause you said so, dumbass?!"
Pickpockets were a constant.
"Pay the tribute on time, every time!"
"I—I'm sorry...!"
And the black-path sects wrung the commercial districts dry with both hands.
For these past several decades, the Soil Kingdom had lived under threat from Seongjo-guk and Woljin-guk. It was an empire that had achieved wealth and military might in splendid fashion, so neither neighbor could stroll in easily—but it was true all the same that a state of war always had to be kept in mind. That was also why the shadow of the black path, once all but absent from the capital, had come to fall across it. The black-path sects were not something one could ignore, and yet the soldiers preparing for war could not be turned aside to deal with them; and the great sects and clans, being no charitable societies, had no wish to involve themselves in the problem. Officially, that is. Behind the scenes, cases of favors traded with the unorthodox factions were anything but rare.
In any case, that fallen shadow had gathered where it could hide from the light, and so the back alleys ran stronger than in other regions. That a dozen-odd Transcendent First-Rate masters and several dozen First-Rate masters teemed through those streets was proof enough.
There were no Peak Realm masters, granted. Then again, among unorthodox factions with no center of gravity at all, whose own members spent their days biting and tearing at one another, it would have been the stranger thing if a master who had reached the Peak Realm were among them.
Above a back alley passing an ordinary day, two silhouettes rose side by side before the sun.
"B-Boss! What is that?!"
"H-hiek...!"
"Th-the immortals have descended! At last—they've come to save us!"
Two immortals came down as if descending a staircase, treading the empty air, and only then could the people make out their forms.
The man wore a black robe, and a black mask covering the upper half of his face, and in his hand was a sword of flame that resembled the sun. Red pupils burned with inner light through the eyeholes of the mask, their depth impossible to fathom, and the sculpted face—smooth-skinned, its presence undimmed even half-hidden—made it impossible to believe he wore the same human hide as anyone else.
The woman wore a white mask cut to the same shape, and a long robe in which pale blue mingled with white. Blue eyes, and white hair so pale it was nearly silver, felt nothing short of bewitching, and a beauty like some craft shaped by a god stopped the breath of men and women alike for a moment. Even a frame somewhat small for an adult did not look childish. It only stirred the urge to protect her.
The pair of immortals, shedding a strange white radiance all of their own, stood tall in the void and simply stopped there, doing nothing at all. ...If one set aside the several men who had been staring blatantly at the immortal maiden, and who fainted where they stood.
Even so, the people could not easily move. As if the sky itself were pressing them down, they only dropped in haste to their knees.
The silence broke soon enough.
"Ahh...! Lord Immortal...!"
Some only wept, overcome with gratitude.
"Punishment for those wicked bastards—mmph!"
Some prayed that heavenly punishment would fall upon the black-path martial artists who extorted the common folk.
"You there—the immortals will see to it themselves! What business do base creatures like us have, meddling with them?"
And some scolded the ones who had grown too excited.
"...M-mercy, please...!"
There were black-path martial artists as well who, knowing their own sins well enough, begged earnestly that mercy be shown.
"..."
The black-haired, red-eyed immortal looked leisurely down upon the scene, his gaze moving over them. When he slowly opened his mouth, every other mouth closed.
A voice steeped in majesty, borne not on the air but on the qi of the natural world as its medium—together with a mystery that later days would name Voice Transmission, for the sound arrived in the very instant the lips parted, as if conveyed directly.
Slowly, very slowly, he raised the sword of flame. Those who had never learned the martial way were overwhelmed by the dignity held in that languid motion, and those who had so much as set a foot into the martial way burned with awe at the martial principle contained within it. Lifted as far as the upper left, the sword of flame stopped there.
No sooner had the words ended than a sun swung from the immortal's hand.
Destroy the wicked, and thereby reveal the righteous. Upon that principle, the enactment that later ages would come to call by this name began.
And so—the immortal who had declared he would extinguish the wicked path and reveal the righteous way. Quietly, I thought:
Ugh. So cringe.