The Jin Clan Domain [1]
I did not set my foot upon the void. I only walked. One step, and then another—and wherever my foot came down, all of creation dwindled into nothing more than a single black rose.
The assassins who had run riot through the village were gone now, for whatever reason. There seemed to have been bandits mixed in among them. It hardly mattered.
I lifted empty eyes to the sky. Cultivators hung there, afloat.
“…Huh?”
“Did the other cultivation sects catch on…?!”
Of course. Assassins do not raise havoc like this with no reason behind them, and no one at their back.
I forced the words through a voice dried out and splitting.
“That won’t do.”
They were in the way. Then they would be removed—even if I had to shatter the sky and set it standing again. I would see my purpose through.
What spilled from me were black tears—no. Resentment, so thick it had taken on the shape of tears. The stream of it poured down and was forged into a sword of black flame. Along the blade I had named the Dusk-Sun Divine Sword, black lightning crackled.
Black sword-qi swung in silence, and burned their lower bodies away. The qi within them, all of it, as well.
“Guh—gaaah—!”
“R-regeneration… it won’t regenerate.”
“Th-the flight artifacts…!”
Thud. Thud. Thud, thud. Bodies yanked down out of the sky struck the earth and were reduced to scraps of meat, and the sound of it beat against my ears.
Killing ought to have been unpleasant. And yet I feel nothing. It was as if everything inside this shell called a body had been emptied out. A mind that had already collapsed once—and the sun that had held it up and filled it had set. It could hardly be otherwise.
I flicked a hand and turned the scraps of flesh into black roses. Then I closed my eyes, settled cross-legged upon a black lotus, and rose into the sky.
“Jin Gi-hwan.”
Still without opening my eyes, I spoke the name of the one waiting before me.
“Heh… to think a thing like this is possible. A monster. In every sense of the word.”
“A monster… perhaps.”
There was no one left, now, to tell me I was not. And if she was gone, what did it matter whether I was a monster or a human being?
The thought carried me that far. I opened my eyes and closed my hand hard around the sword.
“But are you any different? You, who would reach heaven by a mountain piled from what you stole from others. Shameless.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You aped someone else to draw me to the main house, and you meant to disguise the annihilation of the Lee Clan Manor as mutual ruin born of an uprising in a neighboring village. You left me alive so you could take your time learning whether I was a person you could control. And you would tell me that is not a mountain built of other people’s corpses?”
And the turbid qi that had been gathering in my body—that, I supposed, was meant to press my momentum flat while he worked his shape-retention art and sealed my spiritual power. I was not dull enough to miss it. Had I been a little wiser, I would have seen it long ago.
“Hah… haha. Hahahaha! Yes—yes, that’s right! Hahaha!”
Jin Gi-hwan laughed, near enough to raving.
“That laughter is rather unpleasant.”
I said it without feeling, and stems of rose stitched his mouth shut. The gesture was wasted on him. He laughed and tore the stems out with his hands, and the ripped corners of his mouth knit themselves whole in an instant.
“Will you fight?”
“And if I said I wouldn’t, would you let me live?”
“So long as you don’t stand in my way.”
“Haha! Fine! I’ll step aside!”
Jin Gi-hwan moved off to the side and spread his hands, making a show of it.
“Unfortunately, you have already stood in my way once.”
Black lightning spat from the Dusk-Sun Divine Sword.
“So you mean you can’t let me live?”
“That’s right.”
“Kehahaha! Then do it, if you can!”
“You think I can’t?”
He had underestimated me, it seemed.
A swift stroke, and Jin Gi-hwan’s right arm left his shoulder. Even that much was only possible because he had twisted his body on reflex.
“What—!”
He slapped the arm back into place and reeled away in shock. I was already at his right.
A thrust that allowed no time to answer punched clean through his flank.
Black lightning leapt, and wherever it touched, it burned and froze, and burned and froze again.
“Ghk…!”
Satisfied, I slid back.
Flame flared. Just as I had expected, a bow and arrow of fire—each as tall as the man himself—rose into Jin Gi-hwan’s hands.
The bowstring sang a clear note, and a fire-arrow left that sound behind to come howling down.
“Ignorance, through and through.”
I lifted the sword.
“Does the sun in the sky burn, just because you set a fire?”
Black flame roared up as if its fuse had burned to the end, and a black sun fell. The sound arrived late, and perished together with the fire-arrow.
“Wh-what is this…!”
Jin Gi-hwan, thrown into panic, wrapped himself in crimson flame and fled. A speed beyond sound itself—beyond even what I had originally been.
Yes. I had surpassed my original self.
The void shattered, and the rupture flung me on.
“Too slow.”
I murmured it, and my sword moved.
“…!”
Jin Gi-hwan wrenched himself around to flee, but turning in the middle of a full-speed flight only bleeds your velocity. It is a loss.
Certain of that, I sent the sword out, and it split the empty air.
A black arc took his head. A red line of blood followed after it.
“…!! This is insane…!”
He snatched his falling head, set it back against his neck, and the words came by spirit speech.
“Persistent. Cut the head off, and you still don’t die.”
“Then it’s simple. I keep cutting until you do.”
Shoulder, arm, thigh, abdomen. Under the storm of cuts, his body was ground away.
From the chest of that body, torn to shreds, I plucked a pellet shining with gold light.
“Here you are.”
“…!!”
Scraps of flesh writhed madly in the empty air and birthed a mass of fire. A sphere of crimson flame, the very image of a sun, dropped toward me.
The sphere of flame blew my chest away whole.
“…Ha. Haha.”
Seeing it, Jin Gi-hwan laughed like a madman.
“Heh, hehahaha! You let your guard down! Your chest is gone, a hole punched clean through—your golden core must have been destroyed with it!”
In that brief span he had finished regenerating around the golden bead, and so the laugh came in a living voice, booming out.
I watched him, and let my own chest knit itself back together.
“I see. So that’s what you call a golden core.”
With my chest blown away, the voice had been ringing out as spirit speech; as the flesh returned, it changed back into a voice of the body.
“B-but the golden core should have been destroyed…?”
“I was never a cultivator to begin with. Why would I have anything of the sort?”
“Impossible… I saw your divine sense, clear as day!”
“Divine sense. You mean this.”
I released, without holding anything back, the spirit I had kept compressed outside my body. A divine sense that had been roughly a match for Jin Gi-hwan’s erupted outward, more than a hundred yards in every direction.
“W-what…! The Primal Spirit stage…?! No—this is closer to a cultivator of the Upper Realm…”
The Upper Realm. So I had not been wrong. Above this world, there were higher worlds still.
I had learned enough. Whatever I still lacked, I could take while I erased the Jin Clan Domain.
“I’ll ask one last thing.”
I lifted the Dusk-Sun Divine Sword overhead. Black flame rippled along it, heavy with lightning.
Jin Gi-hwan flinched, a thin gasp torn out of him, his whole body shaking.
“Don’t be afraid. Answer me properly, and I swear—upon what is most precious to me—that I will do you no harm.”
I meant it.
Jin Gi-hwan saw that in my eyes, and answered in a trembling voice.
“Th-that… what would that be?”
Whether from the instinct to stay alive, he was already speaking up to me.
“Why did you attack the village? I want the reason. I don’t mean to weigh a crime against whatever you tell me, so answer.”
I asked it without inflection. He hesitated, and then he opened his mouth.
“…Even a mortal is born carrying an energy of his own. A power called Innate True Qi—or True Origin Qi. And so we of the Jin Clan Domain, in order to refine the mortals of the village into elixir pills…”
An interesting tale. Refine a human into medicine, swallow it, and you can take that energy in and grow stronger.
Shall I try it?
Erase the Jin Clan Domain, and the method would come of it. So I could.
“I understand.”
“Th-then… you’ll spare me…”
My left hand punched through Jin Gi-hwan’s chest.
“Khk…! That’s not what you—”
I did not listen to him. I wrenched his golden core out.
“Not what I promised?”
I held it up into the sunlight, and went on.
So saying, I tightened my fingers and shattered the golden core.
“Guh. N-no…!”
“I envy you. That you can truly set a period at the end of a life.”
I meant that, too. And I drew my hand, gently, across his throat.
A soft, clean cut. He made no sound in answer. His body, already emptied of life, fell from the sky, and I listened to a human body burst apart against the earth, and then I left.
“…How empty.”
Yes. Revenge had always been like that. To carry it out is only to confess that what you treasured is already gone. Set revenge upon the scale if you wish. The balance has tipped toward loss, and it will not stir by so much as a hair.
The Jin Clan Domain.
This time, it was their turn to be laid upon the pan. Not that the scale would ever tip.