Is This Really Okay? (3)
“Father! Please, open your eyes, Father!”
Baek Cheon stood there, staring blankly at the back of the middle-aged man who was weeping his heart out.
Father?
That old man? His father?
The father of the man who, just moments ago, had sneered that some doddering old geezer’s life wasn’t worth anything?
“M-Master healer! Master healer! Please, save my father! Please! Please, I’m begging you!”
“P-please calm down. You’re getting in the way if you keep doing this!”
Dang Soso looked just as flustered; her surprise was plain on her face.
“The wound isn’t deep, so if he holds on, he can survive. So first, please calm down.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much… truly, thank you.”
The man kept slamming his forehead against the ground over and over.
Watching him in a daze, Baek Cheon found himself walking toward the man before he knew it. Something in his chest had become so tangled he couldn’t even begin to name it.
“This man….”
He hesitated, as though afraid of asking the question, then forced the next words out of his mouth.
“Is this man… your father?”
The man flinched, then nodded. His face had already been smeared with tears. It was hard to believe this was the same face that had just been wearing a servile smile while calling the old man “some doddering old geezer.”
“Yes… yes, he is my father.”
“Th-then how could you…?”
How could he say something like that?
How could he belittle his own father and beg so pathetically before the very fiend who had cut him down with a blade?
Some instinct told Baek Cheon that this was a question he should not ask. And yet, he found he couldn’t stop himself from asking it.
At that, the man burst into even more desperate sobbing and answered.
“Then… then what was I supposed to do? Then….”
He looked down at his father, who had lost consciousness in his arms.
The guilt in those eyes stabbed straight into Baek Cheon’s chest.
“If I could, I’d tear them apart a thousand ways—no, ten thousand! I’d want to sink my teeth into them and make them spit out how they’re going to save my father right now! I’m a person too—how could I not feel that way?”
“…….”
“But what would that change? It would only get everyone else killed too—everyone!”
The man clutched his father’s hand.
“The living… the living have to be saved. If I had power, I wouldn’t have held back. If I had power, I wouldn’t have begged so humbly before my enemy. But what was I supposed to do? I had no power. If you’ve got no power and want to survive, if you want to save even one more person, then you’ve got to lick your enemy’s boots if that’s what it takes! What else am I supposed to do? What!”
A raw, broken cry exploded out of him. It was fury, and it was grief, and it was long-suppressed resentment.
“Ordinary folk… ordinary folk have to live like that. Swallow your shame when you’re wronged, swallow your resentment when you’re humiliated… just live as if you know nothing. If you don’t, then… if you don’t….”
The man could not finish. He simply collapsed into sobs.
Baek Cheon bit his lip hard.
If anything, he felt like tearing out the tongue that had so casually condemned this man just now. What right had he had to judge so carelessly when he hadn’t even begun to understand what this man had felt as he bowed his head to his enemy?
“Hrk….”
After sobbing for a long time, the man roughly wiped his face with his sleeve and bowed deeply to Baek Cheon again.
“Thank you.”
“P-please, don’t do that.”
“No. You knew they were members of the Saperyeon and still stepped forward for the sake of folk like us in this village. How could I not be grateful? Thanks to you… thanks to you, this stubborn old life of ours can last a little longer. Truly… thank you. On behalf of the village, I thank you.”
Baek Cheon’s eyes trembled.
He wanted to say that wasn’t it. He wanted to shout that just moments ago, he had been weighing the worth of their lives. He wanted to cry out that he had been placing on a scale the dozens of lives here against the danger that might befall them.
But he couldn’t bring himself to speak those words.
Behind his back, the ones who had beaten the Sapa scum into the ground slowly approached. It seemed they had caught enough of the story from over their shoulders, because their faces were heavy and dark.
“Would… would I be so bold as to ask for the identities of our benefactors?”
“We are….”
Baek Cheon started to answer, then shook his head.
“Don’t ask.”
“…….”
“If, by some chance, anything happens, it would be better that way.”
The man seemed to understand and did not ask further. He simply nodded.
“Thank you… truly… truly, thank you.”
The man pressed his head to the ground, still lying prostrate. Baek Cheon couldn’t bear to watch it any longer and turned away.
Just then, Chung Myung’s rather indifferent voice came from behind him.
“How’s the old man?”
“He’s… a bit serious. The wound isn’t deep, but he’s so old I’m worried his body won’t hold out.”
“Hey, Tang Bighead.”
“……Pardon?”
“You got that magic pill thing, right?”
“I do, but this is….”
“Quit yapping and hand one over. The stingiest bastards always hoard those pills and die before they can even swallow them. Then later they’re all, ‘I should’ve used it all up.’”
“……Understood.”
Nodding, Tang Pae took out a small pill and handed it to Dang Soso. She nodded and accepted the pill.
It was a precious medicine made by the Tang Family’s secret arts, so it would do wonders for the old man’s recovery.
“And you.”
“Yes, Daoist brother.”
Namgung Do-wi, noticing he had been called, answered with a stiff expression.
“What about those guys?”
“……We’ve subdued them for now.”
Which meant they had not been killed. Chung Myung spoke in an unusually low, flat voice.
“Crush their dantians and cut the tendons in their limbs. Even if they live, don’t let them ever function as people again.”
“……Pardon?”
“What? Can’t do it?”
Namgung Do-wi looked at Chung Myung for a long moment, then nodded with a dark expression.
“I will.”
He drew his sword and walked toward the fallen men. Watching that, Chung Myung’s mouth tightened.
This was why he didn’t treat Sapa bastards like people.
If the Sapa bastards only ever killed each other, Chung Myung might not have hated them so much. At the very least, that would have been something they all understood and accepted. But the blades of Sapa never distinguished between the strong and the weak.
Power, when left unchecked, becomes a calamity for those who can’t possibly defend themselves.
To drive back a greater evil, to avoid some looming danger—there were endless excuses for letting small evils stand. But one day, that small evil could collapse someone’s entire life in an instant.
And the one broken by it would inevitably be someone’s parent, someone’s child, someone’s own flesh and blood.
I really am getting soft as hell.
Chung Myung bit his lip hard.
If this had been the old him, he would have shot out before that bastard could even raise his blade against the old man and cut his throat on the spot. But he had hesitated for a moment, and that hesitation had led to this result.
Excuses? Of course there were some.
No matter how much protecting common folk was the very mission by which Chung Myung honed his sword, they were not the only ones he had to protect. So he had no choice but to hesitate.
But if even Chung Myung hesitated in that moment—if he held back for the sake of his own life and everything else he had to preserve—then who in the world was going to protect these people?
Chung Myung studied the expressions on the faces of the Heavenly Alliance members looking at the old villager. They had clearly done a righteous deed, yet instead of pride, every face was weighed down by something heavy and dark.
Perhaps they were feeling something similar to what Chung Myung felt. Maybe they, too, were ashamed of themselves for hesitating until the very last instant.
“You planning to stay up till dawn?”
At his words, everyone snapped their heads up and looked at him.
“Treat the wounded, clean up what’s left. We don’t have time to waste.”
“Yes, Daoist brother.”
“Take the carts down the mountain and get rid of every wheel track. Don’t leave behind even the slightest sign that anyone came to this village.”
“Yes.”
“What do we do with those guys?”
Chung Myung clicked his tongue and glanced at the unconscious Sapa bastards. Then he turned and looked at the middle-aged man.
“Is there a cave or something nearby?”
“A-cave, you say?”
“Any cave will do. As long as it’s empty.”
“……There are caves everywhere around here. This is the mountains, after all….”
“Then send me someone decent to guide us. Senior brothers.”
“Fine.”
“Throw these bastards into a cave and seal the entrance.”
“Then they’ll die.”
“Dead or not, I don’t care.”
“……Understood.”
Yoon Jong and Jo Gul moved off with the others to tidy things up.
Watching them, Chung Myung shifted his gaze to the old villager lying on the ground. It seemed the Tang Family’s pill had already started working, because the pale, ashen color was slowly returning to his face.
“Sasuk.”
“……Right.”
“We’ve got work to do.”
Baek Cheon nodded quietly.
Chung Myung did not say anything more, because he knew exactly what Baek Cheon was feeling right now. When he had left Mount Hua and first faced the reality of common folk’s lives, he had been struck with much the same shock.
The common folk must be helped. Righteousness exists for the powerless.
It was a phrase he had heard and learned countless times. But most people never truly understood what it meant.
Only after they came face-to-face with the reality of common folk, who had no power and therefore had to endure their suffering, did they begin to understand what had been drilled into their ears for years.
Once you realized that your own small hesitation and indecision could become an enormous despair to someone else, righteousness was no longer something you could choose to set aside.
Baek Cheon turned his head and saw people who still did not dare approach this side. Even though the situation had been settled this far, they still could not come near the members of the Heavenly Alliance. The fear etched across their dirt-stained faces was plain to see.
A sigh escaped Baek Cheon’s lips.
To practice righteousness—that alone was enough to make one worthy of admiration, he had thought. Of course, he had never done it for praise, but he had assumed that admiration would naturally follow.
And yet even now, after they had plainly acted righteously, the gazes returning to them were still full of fear and worry.
It wasn’t offensive. It was only pitiful.
They weren’t acting like this because they didn’t know there was no malice in what had happened. They knew it and still couldn’t help themselves. It was a primal fear of people who could decide another person’s life on a whim. Those villagers would have to live their entire lives with that fear.
“Chung Myung.”
“What?”
“Honestly, I still don’t know whether we did the right thing.”
Baek Cheon looked at the people busily erasing all traces.
Given the circumstances, the chances of causing any great danger were probably small, but even so, it was hard to compare this to having done nothing.
“If this ends up causing the mission to fail, or if any of the people here get hurt because of it, then maybe I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”
“…….”
“But still,”
he said, letting out a short breath.
“Even knowing all of that, if I faced the same situation again… I think I’d still run out there.”
Chung Myung grinned.
“Yeah.”
“…….”
“Then that’s enough.”
Maybe a person spent their entire life doubting the choices they made.
They wanted not to waver, but waver they must. What such people needed was nothing more than an unmoving landmark.
“That’s enough.”
That was the moment a straight, unwavering marker was carved clearly into Baek Cheon’s heart.