The Variable (2)
Word of Yeom Sa-gaek came, of all people, from Seol-ha.
The experiences and memories I carried from before the regression did not hold an answer to everything. Whatever I lacked, I learned as I went. Just as I was doing now.
"Yeom Sa-gaek is one of the Ten-Man Commanders of the Juseong House. You may as well think of him as holding a rank on the level of an elder. He made quite a name for himself, rising to a new Ten-Man Commander's seat so young."
"How do you know that much about him?"
"Don't you remember him saying he was already acquainted with you, Young Master?"
"Ah. Right. He did say that, didn't he?"
"You crossed paths with him once, when you were much younger. You were too small to remember, but at a banquet he attended as a guest of Golden Manor, he made sport of your birth mother. You would have been about two. I still remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday."
Fair enough. Seol-ha and I were five years apart to begin with. There were things she remembered that I simply could not.
"So I took my revenge without even knowing it?"
"Honestly, it was satisfying."
"If it pleased you, Sister, then I'm glad. More to the point, things are only going to get more complicated from here. From what I've heard, the Sichuan Tang Clan is mixed up in this as well."
"Shall we run?"
"Since when do you know how to joke like that?"
"There's some truth mixed in."
I burst out laughing, and Seol-ha let out a short sigh.
"If one of the Juseong House's Ten-Man Commanders has stepped forward, then of course that possibility is strong. I can't even begin to guess how long Geon-hyu has been siphoning the other brothers' funds. If Geon-pyeong learned of this, he'd raise hell and swear to kill him."
"It wouldn't be that easy, though. Geon-hyu is a son both the manor lord and Madam Dae treasure rather highly, for the use they can make of him. They'd step in to mediate—or else they'd throw Geon-pyeong away. In any case..."
Before long, Geon-hyu, or else that man of the Sichuan Tang Clan, would come running the moment word of me reached them. I meant to strip this place bare and be gone before that happened.
"Looks like they've laid a Qimen formation from that door onward."
"How much money must they have gathered, to seal the inside off with a Qimen formation on top of everything else?"
It was a fair question. Raising a Qimen formation took far more coin and manpower than a simple vault.
"Hard to say. My feeling is it isn't only about the money."
Guesses turned over in my head, but nothing clear rose to the surface. I would have to go in and see for myself.
First I searched Yeom Sa-gaek's corpse and came up with a single key. I examined the iron door, found the hidden keyhole, and fitted it in.
Click— grrrrnnn—
A heavy tremor shook the floor, and the formation's first iron door split open to left and right. Beyond it lay a narrow corridor. The moment we stepped inside, the door shut again of its own accord.
Grrkkk—
With a roar that announced the second gate of the Qimen formation, every side sealed shut. A corridor with no visible end. Darkness without limit on all four sides.
"I think it's an illusion formation."
"It is. Walking on won't do us much good. Better to do something that can actually break it."
"What if we just... smash the whole thing?"
"A bit extreme. Do that and there won't be so much as a drop of broth left, and whatever they've hidden in there might be destroyed along with it. A formation on this scale will have prepared for the worst against intruders."
The truth was, Seol-ha was still young. Only a little past twenty. She had endured every kind of hardship inside Golden Manor, of course, but in raw experience she was still lacking. That was something we could fill in little by little, as we came up against it. Just as we were doing now.
I remembered the Heavenly Demon of the past—the one who had forged me. With those memories as my footing, I intended to teach her in my own way.
"Qimen formations come in many kinds, but most of them work by setting formations or sorcery into mechanical devices. The anomalous arts that result can dull the senses, kill you by degrees, or lure you into walking into the trap yourself."
"That's all well and good, but do I really have the time to learn such things from you, Young Master?"
"Getting hands-on experience breaking a Qimen formation without my spending a single coin is a rare thing. Even if you don't have the leisure, it's worth doing."
"Are you saying you've already found a clue that can break this mechanical formation?"
"Yeah."
"I— what?"
At the look of shock on her face, I gave a small laugh.
"Formations like this, the kind built to serve as vaults, almost always have a release gate. Once the intruders are dealt with, someone has to be able to take the thing apart again. Which is why..."
I set my hands on Seol-ha's shoulders.
"You do it yourself, Sister."
"And you, Young Master?"
"I'll move in my own way."
"What if I ruin everything? There could be an astronomical sum in there that would help you. Or something worth just as much..."
"And so what if there is."
"......"
"If I fail to break it and this place comes down..."
"I'll get you out. I will."
The Heavenly Demon had trained me with brutal harshness, and I had accepted that as right. He had not been wrong. I had tempered myself inside an endless terror, and for the coward I was then—a man whose sense of his own worth sat at the very bottom—that terror had been the spur that let me confirm who I was and move forward.
But Seol-ha was not me. Seol-ha was a better person than I was: someone with a loyalty that would not bend, and a courage that did not flinch from death. A person like that needed no other spur in order to grow. All I had to do was thread the first button, show her what had to be done, then trust her and wait.
If I were to add one more of the lessons the Heavenly Demon had so often used on me, it would be this. Absolute isolation.
"Whether this succeeds or fails rests on you alone, Sister. Don't forget that."
Seol-ha understood the weight of the word responsibility. In this moment she would focus on her own senses more keenly than anyone alive.
"We're martial artists. Unlike scholars or sorcerers, a martial artist has to solve a Qimen formation the way a martial artist would. Inside an anomalous art that has sealed every direction, there's only one thing worth trusting."
"Sensation through qi."
Well now. She had the answer already, without my having to give it to her.
"The first button is threaded, so as I said, the rest is yours. Work out what you have to do to find the release gate."
"......"
The moment I finished, Seol-ha was already sunk deep in thought, and thinking fast.
In the end, she would pass this gate. Inside a space warped by the illusion formation, she would find the subtle current of qi where reality itself had been bent. From there she would come to understand what a line truly was—how to feel it, how to undo it, and how to move forward.
Of course, I had no intention of simply standing around either. Contrary to what I had said to spur her on, I meant to see quickly what waited at the end of this gate.
Srrk—
If Seol-ha was working the lock of the formation's great gate open through her orthodox internal art, I chose another way: a side path that would let me enter without damaging the formation at all. First I turned my keen senses on the qi flowing around us. Then I picked out the weakest point in the illusion.
I slipped in through a cold, heavy dark. It was the rift between reality and the illusion formation—a rattling seam that lasted only an instant. To find that seam in a single breath and pass through it cleanly was impossible for anyone who had not accumulated a great deal of experience with illusions of this kind.
Tss— tss— tss—
That someone was me.
When I escaped the endless corridor and came back out into reality, what greeted me was a stone chamber with no great door.
"Hm. So the moment the illusion formation opened safely, a second trap mechanism was meant to follow right after."
Passing along the stone chamber's passage, I realized that crossing while leaving the illusion intact—rather than breaking it—had worked to my advantage. The Qimen formation, it seemed, was built to trigger in sequence. Everywhere, traps of every kind waited to emerge from the walls and the floor the instant they were sprung. Avoiding all of that in so narrow a space would take either the one who had designed the place, or else enough raw power to smash through the lot of it.
Either way, I had sidestepped a nuisance. While Seol-ha struggled against the illusion, I had slipped through the formation's flow, and that had left me in something like a phantom's state.
"Here?"
Once I was past the passage packed with hidden weapons, poison, and traps, the door they had truly meant to hide finally appeared. Perhaps they had trusted the Qimen formation too far, for the last gate held no particular device at all. When I pushed it open and stepped through, a cold so fierce poured out from within that the lightning qi inside me stirred in answer.
A cavern, dug all the way down into the earth and made artificially deep. Colder and keener than any ordinary stone icehouse, it held only a single thing. Astonishing—this degree of cold, in a place where not one shard of ice existed.
"Well now. Look at this."
I followed the constructed stairs and came to a stop before a demonic beast breathing out a sinister aura. To be precise—what bared vivid green eyes before me was a Green Flame Hornless Dragon.
Green pupils. Blue-black scales steeped in poison. A bulk so vast it filled part of the cavern, large enough to be called an imugi, a great hornless serpent. A demonic beast breathing gray smoke laced with fire-qi, as though the smoke were its very breath.
"Now I understand."
This place was a prison filled with cold. An Ice Crystal Prison, built to crush the Green Flame Hornless Dragon's poison-qi and fire-qi. A prison on this scale would have cost a vast fortune, and more than money besides. But if the choice had been made in order to cage a Green Flame Hornless Dragon, then this was the best choice there was.
In rarity and in worth, this was a beast that even the Heavenly Demon—who had never so much as blinked at ordinary anomalous artifacts, spirit beasts, or demonic creatures—would have called a demonic beast of the highest grade.
How in the world had a creature like this been set down here so brazenly?
I brooded for a moment, and one piece after another fell into place.
"I've been thinking about this all wrong."
I had simply assumed the third son had raised this place with backing from that man of the Sichuan Tang Clan. But that wasn't it. A matter large enough to bring a beast like this here was not something Madam Dae could fail to know.
"It would be possible if Madam Dae looked the other way, the third son set it in motion, and that man of the Sichuan Tang stood behind them. Or if someone of the Qingcheng Sect was in on it as well."
I combed back through my memories and what I knew, and one thing from this period surfaced. It was awkward to call it either a fortuitous encounter or an affair of Golden Manor. A fire, and a disaster, that had broken out on a mountain near Chengdu.
I remembered it, because I too had been at Golden Manor then. A blaze large enough to shake not only Chengdu, but all of Sichuan. The flames did not die for more than a month. To put them out, the Sichuan Tang Clan, the Qingcheng Sect, Golden Manor, and others had pushed inward, while the martial artists of the surrounding region helped by beating the fire back from its outer edge.
People at the time said an earth god had grown angry and subterranean fire had burst from beneath the ground. The true cause of that tragedy, most likely, had been this beast.
Then how had it gotten free, back then?
The question flickered up, but for the moment I set it aside and turned my attention to the creature itself.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
I stared at the Green Flame Hornless Dragon, hanging bound inside a gigantic net. It roared in agony.
Grrrrr—
But it was the roar of something that had already spent too much of its strength. Each time it cried out, the ink-black mesh drew tighter around it, and the more it tightened, the blood seeping from between its scales soaked into the specially made thick cloth spread across the floor.
A specially made Cloud-Binding Cloth. No—since it drank blood, perhaps it ought to be called Blood-Binding Cloth.
"The blood of a Green Flame Hornless Dragon... Pills and hidden weapons refined from this would sell as if they'd grown wings. So long as you kept the thing alive on the barest thread of life."
If the venture went well, he would lay hands on both an astronomical fortune and a powerful poison, and that man's standing inside the Sichuan Tang Clan would rise past all measure. And yet I couldn't understand how a place no different from a spring that never ran dry had suddenly gone up in flames. Had something else intervened? Or had the Green Flame Hornless Dragon managed to break free of this—
"It wouldn't have been easy."
I stared at the unidentifiable wire, ink-black as the abyss.
"A Myriad Transformations Wish-Fulfilling Net."
The Myriad Transformations Wish-Fulfilling Net. Among the divine weapons and anomalous artifacts held by the Sichuan Tang Clan, the armament known as the most vicious of them all. I had heard it was originally designed to forge the strongest divine weapon for the exclusive use of the Tang Clan's patriarch. The clan's supreme ultimate art—because it had been made to unleash the Rain of Ten Thousand Flowers, it was perfect in every respect: elasticity, strength, and freedom of form.
And the net before me now was the most special of them, the one known as the Dark Abyss Heaven-Rending Net. Before the regression, it had been one of the trophies kept apart by the Heavenly Demon Cult. It had been refined from dark-abyss meteoric iron drawn out of the remains of a meteor shower, compounded with ice-crystal snow-silkworm silk from a mountain of eternal snow. And yet, for all that, its glaring flaws had kept it from service as a weapon of the poison arts. Instead it had been used as an instrument of torture, and its infamy had spread far.
"Ha..."
It was not the beast, but this unexpected divine weapon, that left me without words.
"A blessing just rolled into my lap."
I had already long forgotten a beast that was merely special and rare. I was already fixed on the Dark Abyss Heaven-Rending Net.