When the Sun Sets, Night Comes (2)
"I am a cultivator of the Severance Realm. That much is true."
Their eyes had not changed. Words, then, would never be enough. Deeds always spoke louder.
"I'll show you."
I raised my sword overhead. Crimson flame-qi sheathed the blade, and frost settled over it, winding its body through the fire.
A Severance Realm cultivator... this had better be enough. If it wasn't, I'd punch a hole through my own chest and close it again. What else was there to do? They'd believe me then. Honestly, I didn't think this was something martial arts alone ought to be able to manage—not that it would need to come to that.
A low thrum, the cry of the sword, rolled out across the empty air.
The sword fell as a mountain falls, and the sky had no choice but to open.
The blade split the void, and the aftermath could only follow. With a grinding roar the clouds parted along the sword's path and opened a road; a mountain peak cracked, crumbled, and broke apart. Dust bloomed up into the sky where the clouds had been, and once that curtain was drawn aside the blue laid the sun bare.
Damn it. Half my internal energy was gone in a single stroke, and refilling it would take more than a minute. I turned my eyes on the cultivators without letting the searing, prickling pain in my arm show.
"...!"
They couldn't shut their mouths. Their pupils shivered. Fortunately, it didn't look as though I would have to fight with half my energy spent.
"Well. Do you understand now?"
"Y-yes...!"
"...But why are you seeking the True Sun Fruit...?"
...What am I supposed to say to that? I wanted to draw as much as I could out of these cultivators.
While I turned it over, the other one nudged the man who had asked, elbowing him as he spoke.
"It makes perfect sense if he was shut away in closed-door cultivation as a mountain ascetic! A Severance Realm cultivator is a monster who can live past ten centuries. The market could easily have moved in all that time—of course he would ask!"
He was making my excuses for me. And they even sounded plausible. I still had no idea what any of this about thousand-year lifespans and mountain cultivation was supposed to mean, but it was about time I simply accepted it. An immortal living ten centuries or so—why not.
"Ah...! Forgive me for daring to doubt you!"
Watching the cultivator gasp as if revelation had struck him, I smiled on the inside.
"It's all right. A perfectly natural reaction. I am not so small-hearted. Cross no line, and I will not kill you."
Right. I was supposed to refer to myself as this immortal. It hardly mattered. This way of speaking was more comfortable, so I would keep it.
"Th-thank you."
"Think nothing of it. So—I wish to visit the Jin Clan Domain. Is that possible?"
"Ah...! Yes, it is! Then... might you happen to have spirit stones? Please don't take this the wrong way. It's clan law, you see..."
"Spirit stones?"
The question slipped out before I could stop it, and the cultivators looked at me strangely. Had that fallen under common sense? No matter. I had already prepared a specious excuse before I opened my mouth.
"I don't have any just now. Could it not be done with something else?"
"Ah...? You don't have spirit stones..."
"You! What is wrong with you today? Do you have any idea how much spiritual energy it takes to ascend to the Severance Realm? He must have absorbed every last measure of it during the advancement rite!"
"Ah, of course! Senior, forgive the discourtesy."
"You apologize over the strangest things. A heaven-defier who climbs against the sky ought not to be so fickle."
I stitched together what I knew of cultivators and let the remark fall as if in passing. That ought to keep suspicion off me. Not that either of them looked as if he even dared to doubt.
"Then allow me to guide you."
"I must remain at the Lee Clan Manor and investigate the full account of the clan's annihilation... I will follow shortly."
The one who kept harboring doubts would stay to look into the extermination of the Lee Clan, and the grateful one who had spoken in my defense would lead me to the Jin Clan Domain. Welcome news, as far as I was concerned. If I had to keep company with one of them, this was the better one.
"Very well. When I heard the uproar and arrived, the young masters were all laid out, every last one of them. Ask them once they wake, and you'll have the whole of it."
"Er... couldn't we just scorch those mortals with fire and wake them that way?"
...This one is no better. Was this the average cultivator?
"You... You took a blow to the head at the Battle Assembly. Did it actually break something in there?"
Ah. So that wasn't the average cultivator's character.
"Have you forgotten how easily mortals come apart? What do you mean to do if you sear them into corpses and ruin the heads?"
"Ah, right!"
"Good grief. A wooden buddha would catch on faster. You weren't like this before."
Never mind. However I looked at it, cultivators did not understand the human heart. If someone had read what was inside me before I met Seol-ah, would it have sounded like that? All at once I was in mirror therapy.
"Still, he isn't a cow you can't preach a sutra to, is he? Tell him something and at least he can understand it. He even has the will to listen."
"As expected of your discerning eye! Truly worthy of the Severance Realm!"
"It's nothing."
"Haha, nothing, he says... Ah, we've kept our honored guest waiting! Let us be off."
"Yes."
I answered short and followed the cultivator as he flew on ahead, matching him with Void Treading. His flight art was slower than I had expected. I had to rein my speed in on purpose.
If I take too long, Seol-ah will worry...
"Can't we go any faster?"
"Pardon...? We're already at about half the speed of sound..."
"I see. Pardon me."
I lifted him with Void Grasp and flew at full strength. Once we broke the speed of sound the air tore, and the landscape bolted backward and away.
"Wh-what is this...?!"
The cultivator was aghast.
"Guide. This is the right way, isn't it?"
"...Uh... yes..."
He answered with a vacant look. Wasn't someone of the Severance Realm supposed to manage at least this much? I couldn't see why he was so shocked. Then again, perhaps he understood it in his head and was simply startled that the real thing was faster than he had imagined. It didn't matter. What mattered was finishing quickly and getting back to Seol-ah.
Once I have the True Sun Fruit, the two of us could live on nothing but the hut, couldn't we? I wonder what Seol-ah would be like if she learned martial arts... How do we even hold a wedding? We can skip the meeting of the families.
Merely letting the thought unfold, I had to hold down the smile that wanted to spread at my lips. It struck me as strange all over again. I had been a man who never laughed no matter what he thought, who always felt as if the inside of his heart were hollow—and yet simply calling the one I loved to mind could make me this happy.
Yes. That's why life is hope.
I could forget all the pain from before, and all the dark. The brightest light—the sun—had come, all at once, to shine on me.
"Ah, we've arrived! This is the place!"
At his voice I stopped dead in the air and looked down beneath my feet. Trees stood thick, and every manner of plant carpeted the earth. A forest, yes. At a glance, nothing but a forest...
A formation?
I could see it. The natural earth-qi, each current flowing steady in its own course, was violently warped and twisted out of shape.
"Yes. So it would seem."
"Yes? But the main house has a barrier raised over it—how did you..."
"The space is plainly distorted, is it not? More to the point—may we simply go in?"
"Well... yes. Then, since I bear the clan's brand, first I'll—"
By the time he said it, I had already carved away one corner of the barrier. I studied the ward where that corner had been torn. It was formless, and yet from that point sound cut off and the flow of qi ran wrong, so to my eyes it was no different from a thing with shape. The round hole in the barrier was slowly knitting itself shut.
"Hmm... It even has a regenerative nature."
This might actually prove useful. Wrap the hut up tight in a barrier like this, and it would be safer, wouldn't it? I nodded to myself and committed the barrier's structure to memory.
"Ah, and. What was it you meant to say, Cultivator Jin?"
I didn't know his name, so I used the same form of address I had been given when they mistook me for a cultivator. That drew less suspicion.
"Ah, it's nothing..."
He chose silence, and looked up at me with eyes steeped in longing, awe, and fear. The Severance Realm had seemed so tremendous—and they couldn't even do this? A little disappointing.
"How tame."
I sank the idle thought beneath the surface of my mind, murmured the words, and threw myself through the hole in the barrier. I did not forget to drag the cultivator in after me with Void Grasp.
"Th-this is the Jin Clan Domain..."
Leaving his slightly cowed voice behind, I came down to the ground and looked over the towers. Even Songwon, capital of the Soil Kingdom, had not held so many skyscrapers, and here they were strewn everywhere. Had it not been for the peculiar colors and the style of the buildings, I might have thought I had returned to Earth, where I had lived my first life.
And more than that—
A prickling, a prickling. The moment I stepped into those spheres, great and small, centered on the cultivators' heads, a sense of peril and alarm rose, as if needles were pecking at my skin.
"Goods for sale! Cheap or dear, we deal in the lot of it!"
"Talismans! Buy a talisman! We even carry Ascending Strike Talismans—with one, a Linking Realm cultivator can reproduce an Accumulation Realm cultivator's blow, and an Accumulation Realm cultivator can reproduce a Severance Realm cultivator's blow!"
Taking in the clamor of the market, the thought came to me that wherever people lived, it was all the same.
And then—
At last, I heard the name I had been searching for.