Geon-gon (2)
A wet rip tore past my ear — the sound of flesh splitting.
I woke in the same instant.
The moment my eyes opened, I had to heave my guts into rain-soaked mud. The most agonizing seizure I had ever known, in a lifetime of pain, crashed down over me. Poisonings without number, internal injuries, wounds that split the body open; great arts undertaken again and again, and rebirths that scoured the very bone. Heap all of that together, and it still fell short of this.
The scream went on without end.
"Aaaagh—!"
I thrashed in the pain and drove my face into the mud. Thunder cracked across the sky at that same moment, and through the sheets of rain I caught the shapes of horses rearing and neighing. Then someone hauled me up onto a shoulder. That was the last afterimage I kept.
"Young... Master?"
A voice circled like an echo, thin as a hallucination.
I jerked my upper body upright on reflex. The room around me was strange for how long it had been gone from me, and familiar all the same. My room, from when I was a child.
"It... worked."
Excitement ran through me hard enough to set my fingertips trembling. Had a woman not been watching me with that calm, level gaze, I might have thrown my head back and roared.
"You..."
A fragment of memory, hardened like stone for having sat so long. But the instant I understood I had been sent back, the whole of the life I had lived returned, vivid as yesterday.
"Are you all right?"
She asked after me in that same even tone, and I only stared.
Skin white as polished jade, as if she had come down from the far north; silver hair; features in perfect proportion, not one line out of place. A cold air, and a noble one with it. She was the guard of my childhood, and the only person my departed mother had left behind.
Not a drop of shared blood between us. At times she was family; when I needed her, a guard; a warmer counselor than anyone, and my closest friend. And the one I had lost.
I could not take my eyes off her. At last I pulled her into a sudden embrace.
"Y-Young Master?"
"I'm all right. Truly. Just let me stay like this a moment."
Seol-ha, who had gone still, left me be and patted my back. Only five years lay between us, yet she was far more mature, and far wiser, than the boy I had been at this age. I held her warmth a little longer, and then I drew away.
Only then did Seol-ha set her clothes to rights and speak again, a trace of worry in her eyes.
"Forgive me for speaking out of turn. The Great Lady said you are not to lay needless worry on the Manor Lord while he is away. She told you to keep quiet."
I let out a hollow laugh. Part of it was simply how long it had been since I had heard anyone say Great Lady. The rest was the sharp, fresh knowledge that I had truly returned to the past.
"Sister. Rolling in the mud isn't a matter of a day or two for me. So — what happened today?"
A quake passed through Seol-ha's eyes.
The child I had been was soured on the world, and I had spent that helpless feeling on her, behaving wretchedly. My sudden calm was bound to startle her. She recovered her color almost at once, though, and parted her full lips.
"The Second Young Master said he meant to practice for this manor's gyeokgu tournament, which opens in fifteen days, and he called you out. You truly don't remember?"
Ah. I remembered.
The white bandage wound around my forehead, and the thin ache beneath it, told me exactly what day this was. I was seventeen — the day a purpose-made iron ball had grazed my brow and left a scar like a knife-cut, and the memory of the day before the match had been knocked clean out of me.
All of it, of course, had been a stage set by Geon A-seong, second son of the lord of Golden Manor, for the open purpose of tormenting me. They had drilled their coordination in advance, mocked me and hounded me through the practice match, and in the end beaten me unconscious.
I had not walked into it unknowing. Ignore them, and the torment only poured down harder; I had stepped out because I could not endure it. Powerless, there had been no other way.
It must have been around then that Seol-ha began to drive her body past reason, tempering herself on training too harsh to last. She blamed herself, and burned with anger, for failing to guard me and attend me as she should. And I, standing before that Seol-ha, had been busy only with spilling my own grief. Before long I came to my senses and looked at the world as it was — but by then she was already gone from my side.
"I remember it perfectly. Take one hit from an iron ball, and you know exactly what has to be done."
"...Pardon?"
Her expression turned subtle, as if she had felt that something in me had changed.
"First, ease off the training. Do you really think my circumstances will change so easily, just because you alone grow stronger?"
Seol-ha swallowed, a dry click in her throat.
The face of someone struck dead-center.
She might hear it as cruelty. It was simply the truth of now.
Because the master of this vast estate was Geon Wi-jin, Manor Lord of Golden Manor — the greatest merchant house in Chengdu of Sichuan, holder of the largest marketplace and a web of other ventures besides. And I was the son Geon Wi-jin's concubine had borne. As a matter of course he was forever away, gone as often as other men sat down to a meal, mad for business and for liquor, and nearly every affair of the estate, great or small, along with the factions inside it, was gripped tight in the hand of his principal wife. The Great Lady.
"Honestly, I know there's only one reason they leave me alive instead of killing me."
She said nothing.
"It's you, Sister. They know your talent is exceptional, so they mean to move you as they please, on the promise that they'll let me live."
It was the truth. The Great Lady was a shrewd woman, and a vicious one. She was superb at playing with people, and just as good at reading what they were worth. One had only to look at Seol-ha, who had taken my mother's tribal legacy art — a thing that had nothing to do with killing — read it into a martial art sharper and more aggressive, and made it new. In that alone, the sprout of a Grandmaster of a Generation showed itself. In any case, the Great Lady meant to use me as leverage and turn Seol-ha into a doll that danced, without a twitch of resistance, exactly to her taste.
"I'm not telling you to stop training. Your choice was excellent, even looking at it again. Under the Great Lady's shadow you can take the full backing of Golden Manor, and no one will torment you for it. Officially, you're cold to me. Officially, you're drawing away."
She was silent.
"Thanks to that, I get to keep my life, and I get to keep you as my guard. But rush, and the qi clots. Don't force yourself. Slow down. You have to cultivate your qi while you temper mind and body in balance."
I didn't spare a glance for how she took it. I caught her wrist, read her pulse, and sent my own qi flowing in. There was no need to look her over from head to heel. The fragments of qi I spread were enough to judge her talent. I had taken part in raising more talents than I could count for the Heavenly Demon Cult, and at sounding out aptitude I was better than most divine physicians.
Ha. Beyond belief.
The Great Lady was wrong. Seol-ha, no different from a sister to me, was not merely exceptional. She was past the level of exceptional. Give her only the proper martial arts, and her talent was a thing to fear.
The eyes I saw with now belonged to a martial artist of ninety, worn smooth by the years — the Number Two Under the Heavens, who had kept the side of the Heavenly Demon, the strongest master in history. Not because my own martial skill had stood so high for my age. I had cluttered myself with too many stray arts, and the place had been possible only because the Heavenly Demon trusted me. Perhaps that was why I could see it so clearly. Set her talent beside the aptitudes of the countless masters I had watched, and it still ranked inside ten fingers.
But before long she would meet the wall called the limit of martial arts, and that wall was mine to mend. Mend only that, and she could grow, on talent to be feared, into a master counted among the best under heaven — so long as she did not, by some needless excess, fall early into qi deviation and die by her own hand. So I had to tell her. The burden of my life was mine to carry. Not hers.
"Did you hear me?"
I was saying it to myself as well.
She gave no answer.
"I asked if you heard."
Only then did Seol-ha nod.
"Yes..."
"For the next fifteen days, train with an easy heart, and don't come looking for me. I'll be shut in this room. I won't go anywhere, so you don't need to keep watch through the night. If they hear I'm bedridden, things will stay quiet for a while. Those bastards will be delighted, if anything. They'll think they tormented me properly."
"Young Master, what in the world..."
Her eyes were full of questions, unsettled by a version of me that seemed to see through everything. I had no intention of kindly spelling it all out. I didn't need to. Seol-ha would follow my will regardless.
"I'm asking you with my life on the line. Do as I say. All the more if you take me as your lord."
Seol-ha, whom my mother had taken in. Seol-ha, who called my mother her Graceful Mother, and had guarded me out of that gratitude. This time, it was my turn to guard those feelings.
"Don't let the maids attached to me — don't let anyone — so much as come near this room. And leave. Make it look like pure contempt."
At last Seol-ha hardened her gaze, flung the door wide with a bang, and went out.
"I said leave with contempt. Who told you to break the door..."
I set the half-dangling door back into its frame and shut it.
Cold. Just like that day.
Myself, face-down in the snow, bleeding until the breath before death.
And the young Cult Lord looking quietly down at me — Cheon Yu-wol.
A soft breath of a laugh left me. It was a first meeting from very long ago, and yet every winter that day came back.
A winter chill shivered through me, brief, and I cut the thought short.
Right. This is no time for useless reminiscence.
The great events, and the small ones. I had to gather everything I knew and be reborn as something stronger than the Heavenly Demon — and sooner than she. Only then could I, by my own strength, hold off even the danger of the being presumed to be her father.
What she had gained, or what she had lost. Or what she had taken. People, spirit beasts, prized treasures — if a thing had use, I had to take it first.
I sank deeper into meditation and cleared the fog in my head. If I did not give everything I had, I could not surpass her. She was the strongest Heavenly Demon in history, and the only one who had swallowed the world. To go beyond that would take plans laid without a gap, and, added to them, my talent and my luck. Of those, what I could control right now was the ground called Golden Manor — and one thing more.
"Talent."
I turned the word over on my tongue. Had anyone heard, they would have dismissed it as nonsense.
Talent is the sum of the vessel. As the clay that becomes porcelain hardens when it meets the fire, inborn talent, too, sets harder as time passes. Train in the martial arts after that, and what you achieve is still ruled, in large part, by the talent you were born with. That far is common sense — for changing an inborn gift by artifice ought to be impossible.
And yet the saying was right, and it was wrong.
Astonishingly, pass through the work of waking the potential hidden inside, and inborn talent sheds the skin that conceals it, and its limit climbs. Essence, qi, and body are strengthened, and you are made over anew. In exchange, the pain is enough to shave the bone. And you must carry on an act like the Great Art of Turtle Breath until you touch death itself — drawing out every foul qi a life has piled up, and pouring pure qi without cease into sinew and bone, into the dantian, the acupoints, the blood vessels.
Before I was sent back, I had been forced through it under the Heavenly Demon's own guidance. Now it was my will. All the better. Right now, when no one would come to torment me, was the perfect chance to see it done.
The Heavenly Demon had called this the Heavenly Mortal Transformation Art.
The molt passes through many stages.
This time — the starting point. The first.
I remembered it clearly. The words the Heavenly Demon had spoken to me.
The Heavenly Demon was never the sort to waste words like those on a height that could not be reached. If her judgment held, then my talent — once the Heavenly Mortal Transformation Art was carried out at the proper time — might rival the heavenly bone she possessed, the Transcendent Demonic God Constitution.
In truth, the speed of my growth had become something to fear only after she herself helped me carry the art out. How far my talent might reach because of this return, no one could know.
I drew a thin breath in. Little by little my consciousness drifted, and the senses of my body closed. The preparations were finished. For fifteen days, I was ready to die.