Where Are the Others Now? (4)
Chung Myung slowly opened his eyes.
What he saw was an unfamiliar ceiling, washed in the faint flicker of lamplight.
He stared up at it blankly for a while, then frowned slightly.
So I had another dream about the old days.
With a snort, he let out a groan and pushed himself upright.
Throb. Throb. Throb.
“Ow, ow, ow...”
At that moment, a familiar yet strangely alien pain surged through his entire body. Not just his upper body—practically every inch of him was wrapped tight in bandages.
“What the hell...?”
He groped at his face and found bandages there too. Unless someone had been planning to turn him into a hopping corpse, that meant his injuries had been serious indeed.
He was letting out a bitter laugh when—
“Mmnh...”
“Huh?”
He turned toward the sleepy murmur coming from somewhere nearby.
In the room, lit by a small oil lamp, several people were curled up asleep wherever they’d collapsed.
Jo Gul was sprawled on the floor. Baek Cheon was leaning against the wall in the corner. Yoon Jong too. And right before his bed, Dang Soso and Yu I-seol were sleeping with their heads down side by side after dozing off where they sat.
Feels like I’ve seen this scene before...
Chung Myung scratched the back of his head.
They must have stayed by his side to nurse him and eventually fallen asleep from exhaustion.
Of course they had. Dang Soso had probably worn herself out treating him and the other injured, while the others had fought Jang Il-so alongside Chung Myung. Even the Five Swords had bandages wrapped around them here and there.
Fools.
They’d taken Jang Il-so’s force head-on, so there probably wasn’t a single part of them that was unharmed. That was what it meant to face a master.
And yet they were sleeping on that cold floor like idiots.
Chung Myung watched them breathing softly in their sleep, then quietly got to his feet. He moved with the utmost care so as not to wake them.
“Kii.”
“Shh.”
Baek Ah, who had lifted its head at Chung Myung’s movement, opened its mouth, and Chung Myung quickly brought a finger to his lips. Understanding, Baek Ah nodded twice, then scampered over and leapt onto his head.
With Baek Ah perched atop his head, Chung Myung slipped outside as quietly as possible, closed the door behind him, and looked around.
This doesn’t seem like Jiujiang. They must have taken lodging nearby.
After circling the building, he headed toward the patch of woods ahead. He kept his footsteps silent and went deeper into the trees until he found a suitable spot. Chung Myung roughly settled himself down and looked up at the night sky.
The moon was brighter than usual.
“Ha...”
As he exhaled slowly and sat there in a daze, Cheong Mun’s face from the dream rose in his mind. Overlaid with the moonlight, Cheong Mun looked down at him, smiling gently.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Chung Myung muttered irritably, puffing out his lips.
“I said, don’t look at me.”
But Cheong Mun kept smiling that same soft smile, and Chung Myung ended up flopping backward onto the ground.
“Ow! Ah, damn it... That hurts like hell.”
His face twisted in pain as he ripped off the bandages around it.
“I’m seriously embarrassed here...”
He had been beaten nearly one-sidedly.
Of course, there were many factors one could bring up in his defense. But Chung Myung knew better than anyone that none of them amounted to a proper excuse.
There was only one reason this had happened.
He had been weak.
Trying his best in the situation he was in?
That was nothing more than an indulgent thought. What mattered in the jianghu was not doing your best within the circumstances—you had to create the kind of circumstances where you could win in the first place.
Jang Il-so.
Chung Myung ground his teeth softly.
He had landed one good blow at the end, but that wouldn’t soothe his frustration. Bluntly put, everything that happened in that canyon had ultimately unfolded according to Jang Il-so’s calculations.
“If Cheong Jin had seen this, he’d have laughed his head off.”
He could already hear that bastard’s words as clearly as if he were standing right beside him.
— Sahyung. I kept telling you that war isn’t fought with swords alone, didn’t I? Huh?
You’re right.
Chung Myung covered his face with one hand.
I’m lacking.
He lacked everything.
If this had been Mount Hua in the past, they would have swept aside Maninbang in one breath.
But Mount Hua was lacking now. No—Chung Myung was lacking. In every respect.
He didn’t have Cheong Mun’s ability to lead people and inspire harmony.
He didn’t have Cheong Jin’s razor-sharp mind.
Even his martial prowess, compared to the Plum Blossom Sword Saint of old, was nothing to speak of.
If he had recovered even half of his former strength, the entire course of the battle would have changed. And if he had fully regained his past strength, then the war might never have happened at all.
Leadership to guide a sect.
The intelligence to seize victory.
And the force to turn that victory into reality.
He lacked all three of the most important things in war. Talk of falling into some scheme or another, of betrayal by this or that person—those were nothing more than excuses for his own shortcomings.
No matter how foolish Heo Do had been, if this had been the Mount Hua of old, they would have overcome it without a second thought. No, if the Mount Hua of old had been there, Heo Do wouldn’t have dared to try such a thing in the first place.
In the end, it had been his own inadequacy that brought about defeat.
Chung Myung’s eyes, fixed on the moon, were dark.
This was not his first defeat.
Far from it. He had suffered countless defeats. That was what war was. The war against the Demonic Sect was, in a sense, nothing more than a history of the defeats he had accumulated.
But the defeat he had suffered this time was different from the others.
Now...
“Don’t smile, damn it.”
Lost in thought, Chung Myung threw a sidelong glare at Cheong Mun, who kept smiling down at him, and pouted.
Seeing Cheong Mun smiling so serenely despite not understanding a single thing about his inner turmoil only made him irritated for no reason.
But what could he do?
That smiling face was the one most deeply etched into his memory.
Chung Myung slowly closed his eyes.
“...It’s not like I’m lonely or anything. The idiots in there don’t exactly give a person a chance to feel lonely. So it’s not that, but...”
His low muttering seeped into the dark night scenery.
“You know how it is, right? What if I hadn’t come back alone? If Sahyung... and Cheong Jin, and the other disciples had come back with me, things wouldn’t be like this now. No... even if that weren’t the case...”
Chung Myung fell silent.
After hesitating for a long while, he parted lips that seemed unable to open.
“If you had come back instead of me, Mount Hua would probably be better off than it is now. At first I didn’t know anything, but... now I think I understand. I was the stupid one, Sahyung.”
When he opened his eyes again, Cheong Mun’s face was still there, smiling in the same place.
“...Damn it, seriously.”
Chung Myung’s face crumpled all at once.
“You really are heartless.”
How was he supposed to sound weak while staring at that face?
Of course Chung Myung understood.
This was just the grumbling of a spoiled man. If they were watching him from the immortal realm, they would probably be lamenting that he still couldn’t lead Mount Hua on his own.
“I was just... sighing a little. If you had been here, I’d have complained to you too. If Cheong Jin had been here, he would’ve nagged me. But on my own... yeah. Being alone means there’s nowhere to say any of it.”
Somewhere in the distance, the sound of crickets drifted through the night.
“Kii.”
Baek Ah, still clinging to his side the whole time, looked up at him with worried eyes. Seeing those black little eyes, Chung Myung let out a soft laugh and tapped Baek Ah’s head with his index finger.
“I’m not so bad off that I need you worrying about me.”
A sigh escaped Chung Myung’s mouth.
It was difficult.
Becoming much stronger than he was now wasn’t that hard. He only had to follow the path he had walked in the past. But he couldn’t do that.
Because that wouldn’t be enough to stop the Heavenly Demon.
He had to become stronger than he had been in the past—far stronger. So much stronger that the two couldn’t even be compared. To do that, he had to keep planting each step carefully, one by one, even if it was slow.
That was why he felt impatient.
Because Mount Hua might fall before he was complete. Because the Heavenly Demon might reveal himself before he was perfect.
With each passing day, the burden on his shoulders did not lessen; it grew heavier. The kids had grown enough to support his back now, and yet the pressure only became more crushing by the day.
“Weird.”
Deep in thought, Chung Myung scratched his head.
“Come to think of it, I haven’t been like this lately, but why the hell do I keep thinking about Sect Leader Senior Brother today? Maybe because I got beaten up... What am I, a child?”
Chung Myung gave a snort of laughter.
“I know, I know, so don’t look at me like that. I’m Chung Myung, all right? I’ll probably just whine for today and be fine starting tomorrow. It’s just... people need this kind of time too, you know?”
The daytime had been clear all along, and the night sky was no different—clean and bright, making the moon seem even sharper.
Cheong Mun had truly been a strong man.
And yet, he had also been someone suffocatingly stubborn. In the past, Chung Myung had often found Cheong Mun’s rigid devotion to the proper path frustrating and hard to understand.
But now... he thought he understood, at least a little.
So Sahyung was lonely too.
To stand in the position of a leader was like that. No one told you whether the road you were walking was truly the right one. With no one ahead of you, you had to keep asking yourself, doubting yourself, and agonizing over it again and again.
For someone like Cheong Mun, righteousness and fellowship had likely been the lamps that kept him from straying—to keep both himself and Mount Hua from walking the wrong road.
He must have wanted to walk the path of righteousness no fewer than a hundred times, and yet he would have restrained and suppressed that desire. Not for himself, but to guide the people who trusted and followed him onto the right road.
Only after standing in Cheong Mun’s place could he understand how difficult and lonely that had been.
Which meant that even Chung Myung of the past had never fully understood Cheong Mun.
How lonely had Sahyung been?
As Chung Myung vaguely tried to picture it, he closed his eyes.
I want some alcohol.
If only there were a little liquor nearby...
That was when—
“Chung Myung!”
“Where the hell did that bastard go again!”
“Find him! Now! He might be guzzling booze somewhere!”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“...”
Boisterous voices shattered the quiet and came flying in. Chung Myung let out a sigh and looked toward the source.
Those ghostlike bastards.
They must have noticed he was gone and rushed out in a flurry. Startled by the stream of curses, Chung Myung tilted his head back toward the sky with a sour expression.
“See? I told you. They don’t give me time to feel lonely. Those guys are a lot better than I was back then.”
Chung Myung rose to his feet.
“Hup.”
He brushed off his backside, then caught Baek Ah as it climbed up his body and set it on his shoulder. After that, he muttered in a low voice,
“Don’t worry. I’m strong. So just keep watching comfortably, all right? I’ll beat the hell out of those bastards for you.”
The moment he grinned and took a step forward, a voice echoed in his head.
— Strength...
Chung Myung lifted his gaze to the sky again.
— Isn’t the power to never fall. It’s the power to get back up again after you do, Chung Myung.
It was something Cheong Mun had once told him.
Cheong Mun’s face, which had been looking down at Chung Myung together with the moon, began to fade little by little. Watching that figure in a daze, a faint smile appeared at the corner of Chung Myung’s mouth.
“You sure do love nagging, don’t you?”
He straightened his back and looked ahead. There was far more resolve in his eyes now than there had been moments ago.
It was all right to be lacking.
It was all right to be incomplete for now.
A vessel already filled to the brim could hold no more water. Being lacking also meant there was still room to go further.
So...
Chung Myung started walking toward the sect brothers and sisters shouting for him at the top of their lungs.
There was no hesitation left in the two legs carrying him forward.