I Don’t Know. (5)
'An enemy?'
If someone had seen the Heavenly Friends Alliance party, what were they supposed to do?
If it was a civilian, maybe they could be made to keep quiet through a softer kind of persuasion. But what if it was a remnant of the Evil Tyrant Alliance, or of the Demonic Sect?
'Silence them!'
They would have to kill them without fail. Tension tightened every muscle in his body.
Then it happened.
"...What are you looking at?"
"Over there. Over there."
"...What?"
"Ah!"
Jo Geol hurried over in frustration and pointed at something sticking up from the ground.
"This, this! Don't you see it?"
"Hey, you—"
Yoon Jong’s tense expression twisted all at once.
"I nearly lost my damn heart there!"
What Jo Geol had found wasn't a person, but a sword buried in the earth, only its hilt jutting out.
"Isn't that amazing? It must have been a hundred years, and the sword's still here."
Jo Geol gripped the hilt and tugged, but it didn't come free as easily as he expected, and he frowned.
"Is it stuck on something? This thing... Hngh!"
"Hey, you'll snap it!"
"No, I think it should come out if I just pull a little more—"
The moment Jo Geol tightened his grip, the earth around it suddenly shuddered, and something large shot up from the ground.
"Huh?"
"...What is this?"
For an instant, everyone stared blankly at the sight.
Silence fell.
It wasn't anything impressive. In other words, they hadn't stumbled upon some priceless treasure by chance.
What had emerged was nothing more than masses of rusted metal. Blades that had once been swords, sabers, spears—whatever they might have been when they still had a shape worth naming.
They had been tangled in a jiujeolbyeon—a weapon made by linking several metal segments together like a whip—and had come loose all at once.
The faded weapons were so badly corroded that their edges had long since gone dull and their original forms were nearly impossible to make out, leaving them looking like they were of no more use as weapons. And yet, for some reason, no one here could look away.
"...What kind of weapon is this..."
Jo Geol scratched the back of his head with an awkward face. He had briefly wondered if these might have been weapons stored here and forgotten, and lowered his gaze.
The moment he saw the pit where the weapon had come free, his face hardened.
"Ah..."
Yoon Jong asked in a slightly heated voice, "What is it now?"
"...Senior brother, here..."
"What?"
Yoon Jong stepped closer and looked down at the ugly pit Jo Geol had exposed. His reaction was not much different from Jo Geol’s.
"This..."
With a groan-like breath, Yoon Jong reached out. Then he carefully began digging around the pit.
Not downward, but outward.
The others, who had been watching without understanding what he was doing, soon grasped his meaning. A heavy silence settled over them.
The wider the pit became, the clearer it was.
Buried not far below the surface, covered by the dust of time, were weapons—and scattered around them were fragments of human bones.
No matter how wide they dug, no matter how much more earth they cleared, more weapons and more bones kept appearing.
"...Sister So-so."
Dang So-so’s hand trembled faintly, and Yu I-seol wordlessly gripped her shoulder tightly.
Yoon Jong kept digging for a long while, but at last his hands stopped.
He had realized that there would be no end to it if he kept going like this. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how much more earth he would have to move to recover all the bones buried here.
With a dazed face, Yoon Jong looked around at the place he had dug open.
A pit wide enough to hold ten people and still have room to spare was packed full of weapons and bone fragments.
"Here..."
The moment he truly understood what he was seeing, a shiver ran down his spine.
Until just a moment ago, all he had seen were blue fields and jagged peaks rising against the sky. If he hadn't known this had once been the Demonic Sect’s stronghold, he might even have thought it was a place of utter peace and quiet beauty.
But now that he knew what scenes had been hidden beneath this soil and this uncaring green grass, he could never look at it the same way again.
Everyone had gone speechless.
How many had died here? How many had killed one another on this ground?
"Just what happened here..."
"There was a battle."
As they stared blankly at the bones, an indifferent voice drifted into their ears.
"To be exact, this is probably just one of many places like this. Nothing surprising, really. This is the 100,000 Great Mountains."
Those brief words sank straight into everyone's chest.
The 100,000 Great Mountains. The place where the final clash had been fought. The place where everything between the righteous sects and the Demonic Sect had been wagered. And the place where the last death squad, sent to cut down the Heavenly Demon’s head, had perished.
Yes. This was the 100,000 Great Mountains.
"Even so..."
Amid the somber mood, Yoon Jong broke the silence and said through clenched teeth, "Shouldn't someone have taken care of them at least?"
"..."
"The ones buried here weren't only Demonic Sect members... These people... these people fought to protect the world..."
"Who?"
"...What?"
"Who was supposed to take care of them?"
But Cheong Myeong’s tone was still bland.
"When your head might be flying off tomorrow, where do you think you've got the time to go picking through dead bodies? For all you know, tomorrow I might be lying on top of them."
"But even after the war was over..."
"You think you could gather thousands, tens of thousands of corpses one by one and drag them back to Jiangbuk?"
"..."
"If they had the luxury to do that, they wouldn't have let things get that bad in the first place. In case you've forgotten, the Demonic Sect wasn't annihilated. It retreated because it lost the Heavenly Demon. If they had tried to wipe out every last one of those bastards, Jianghu would have been ruined instead. The ones who pulled back the moment the Heavenly Demon died were Jianghu."
"...Then at least afterward..."
"Well."
Cheong Myeong sneered faintly.
"If they’d been in a position to do that, maybe they would have."
He could make a rough guess.
Right after the Heavenly Demon died, no one would have been able to enter the 100,000 Great Mountains. The Demonic Sect members, intoxicated with blood, would have been rampaging madly. Hadn't those bastards even used that momentum to push into Shaanxi?
Besides, even if the other sects hadn't been as utterly ruined as Mount Hua, they had still suffered losses close to annihilation. They would have been too busy regrouping to spare the people needed to send back into Jiangnan to recover bodies. It wouldn't have been easy.
So the urgent matters would have been handled first, day after day things would have been delayed, and by then the corpses would have rotted away. Later, the point would have come when there was nothing left that could be recovered.
"Even so..."
"Quit talking nonsense."
Cheong Myeong cut him off in a cold voice, sounding tired of it all.
"You keep saying 100,000 Great Mountains, 100,000 Great Mountains, but this isn't just some single mountain. It's a huge range stretching five hundred li, from eastern Guangdong to western Guangxi, all the way up to Guizhou."
"..."
"And during that long war, battles broke out across the entire range. No, not just the range—fighting happened everywhere in the world. So what, are you going to scour the whole mountain range just to recover a few bodies? A mountain range that might still be full of Demonic Sect remnants?"
Yoon Jong bit down on his lip. Cheong Myeong asked,
"Can you do it?"
In the end, Yoon Jong could only answer with a reluctant sigh.
"...No, it would be difficult."
Cheong Myeong added carelessly,
"It's easy for people who never went through it to stand around and say this should've been done, that should've been done. But the people who actually lived through it didn't let go because they wanted to. They did it because there was no other choice."
Yoon Jong said nothing. His mind understood, but his heart refused to accept it.
Only then did he realize it anew: the ancestors of Mount Hua he had always taken such pride in—among their remains, only one body had ever been brought back to Mount Hua, and that had come much later.
The bodies of the others had remained buried in this faraway land, so casually, so indifferently.
Never having returned to where they had come from.
Who in the world could be blamed for that?
Mount Hua itself had been unable even to imagine recovering the remains of its ancestors. No, they had lived all this time without even remembering that they should have.
Who could be blamed now? Who could be resented?
"Then at least these people..."
He was about to say that they should at least hold a memorial for them, but Cheong Myeong cut him off and tossed out the words as if throwing something away.
"Bury them again."
For a moment, Yoon Jong stared at him, stunned, his eyes wide. There was real anger in his gaze.
It was impossible to search every mountain and recover every remaining body. But shouldn't they at least retrieve the bodies they had already dug up? Wasn't that what a human being ought to do?
But Cheong Myeong gave no reaction at all to that look.
"A corpse is just a corpse. It's nothing more than a body that fell over and died."
"..."
"If some living fool dies trying to recover dead men's bones, isn't that the most ridiculous thing in the world? We don't have time for this, so just bury them again. Quickly. We need to get to Hainan."
"Cheong Myeong!"
"Senior brother."
Then Cheong Myeong spoke in a subdued voice.
"Don't look down on people."
"..."
"Did the people who died here come thinking they wouldn't end up like this?"
Yoon Jong bit his lip hard.
"They knew they'd end up this way anyway. And they still fought. Do you think the ones who died here fought while expecting some grand treatment after death?"
A bitter smile crossed Cheong Myeong’s face. A faint taste of blood lingered in his mouth.
That was how it had been then. Even if a comrade died right beside you, you couldn't even cover them with dirt. Knowing they'd be torn apart by beasts and rot away under rain and wind, all you could do was leave them be.
And yet he had never once thought to apologize.
Because where a comrade fell, not long after, he would fall too, and rot the same way.
So why would there be any reason to apologize?
Pointless.
Cheong Myeong turned his head away completely.
Whenever he thought of the past, he was liable to sink into sentimentality. This was no time for that. What mattered to him was not the already-gone past, but the present.
He should not pity the dead. They had all fulfilled their duty to the very end and gone to sleep. If anything, the one who ought to be pitied was Cheong Myeong himself—he had already completed his role, and yet had been dragged back into this hell once more.
So...
"No time to waste here."
Cheong Myeong shook his head briskly.
"Save the sentiment for later. Unless you really want to see something like this with your own eyes all over again."
Just as he was about to casually cover the earth again,
"C-Cheong Myeong..."
Jo Geol’s trembling voice reached him.
And in that instant, Cheong Myeong had the feeling that whatever came next would be better left unheard.
But Jo Geol’s voice still cut into his ears without mercy.
"Here..."
Cheong Myeong turned his head. Once he confirmed what Jo Geol was pointing at, he saw it.
A rusted sword, thrust in at an angle.
On the end of its hilt—so worn down it could scarcely still be called a sword—was carved...
"It's a plum blossom sword..."
A tiny plum blossom pattern.