Closed-Door Seclusion — Part 1
Closed-Door Seclusion Training.
The reason the warriors of the murim call what they master not musul—mere martial technique—but mugong, martial attainment, is that theirs is a discipline of learning, one that prizes the tempering of the heart and the arrival at enlightenment rather than the conditioning of the body alone.
Seclusion seals off every interference from the outside world, letting one quiet the mind in a tranquil setting, contemplate the self, and wage war against one's own afflictions—a training of the heart that those who have struck a wall truly need if they are ever to take the next step.
[How many times has it been now?]
Even when it meant, at times, having to drag the demon out of one's own heart.
“……”
The training cave of Salmak.
A woman with a young face and a perfectly blank expression stared down the being she had been forced to meet at the end of that long look into her own heart—one shaped exactly like herself.
[Isn't it about time you gave up?]
Though the thing before her was a phantom no one else could see, it was, beyond any doubt, a demon that truly existed.
“Shut up.”
The Heavenly Killing Star. Cheon Sohee spoke to the killing intent dwelling in her heart—to the will of the star.
[What do you think has become of your brother, the one who went to the Sichuan Tang Clan?]
The heart demon asked, sneering, prodding at the worry that loomed largest in Cheon Sohee's heart.
“Nothing will have happened to him.”
[Sohee. Save me. Save me, I'm begging you!!! …Hup!]
Her blade swept out in an instant. Had the thing possessed substance, the blow would have cut it clean in two—yet it never connected.
The demon wore Cheon Sohee's face, but it smiled with a ludicrousness she had never once let cross her own.
“Don't you dare imitate Yoonho.”
Cheon Sohee re-gripped her sword, leveling it at the demon before her.
It had crawled out from inside her own self, and yet in all the time she had faced it, she had never beaten it. Not once.
And that was only natural.
The heart demon was Cheon Sohee—but it was also the Heavenly Killing Star. For a girl not yet twenty, the will of the star was far too mighty to overcome.
The demon raised its blade in precisely the same stance she held.
[Just how many times do you intend to lose before you're satisfied?]
The demon's question dripped with exasperation, but the answer was a simple one.
“Until I win.”
Yoonho had promised to give everything he had. So she had to give everything she had, too.
In the end, Cheon Sohee failed to settle the contest.
They dealt each other fatal blows without number; they took each other's heads. But this had never been a fight in which either could truly destroy the other.
She circulated the Asura Life-Seizing Skill to take stock of her body. At some point, treating the internal wounds the demon left behind had become second nature.
[Wasn't he someone precious to you?]
The moment her treatment was finished, a whisper sounded at her ear.
“He is precious.”
[You love that man. Are you going to let someone else be the one to make him die?]
“Yoonho cannot die.”
She had entered the training cave because she trusted him. She had volunteered for seclusion so that the bloodlust would not devour her.
[You're worried too—admit it. Come out already. The Sichuan Tang Clan? Is that all it takes—a pack of poison-slinging vermin? I'll help you.]
The demon, which had always come at her swinging, made its proposal this time in a voice gone tender.
“You'll help me?”
[Give me your body. Leave everything to me. How long are you going to keep playing this game?]
“No.”
[How could you let someone else kill the thing most precious to you?]
“I can't.”
[Right. You can't. And if he is to die, it has to be you who does the killing. It has to be us. Isn't that so?]
The demon's offer was sticky and sweet.
Yes. He is precious. My Yoonho. More precious to me than anything—the boy I played house with as a child. A man who carries the same wound I do. The only being in this whole world who knows me.
And that man—
“I can't…”
She could not leave him to die at any hands but her own.
In that instant, a warmth bloomed up from deep within Cheon Sohee's heart.
It was a fragment—no more than a single wisp of energy remained—and yet it held warmth enough to keep a woman's freezing heart from turning to ice.
[Getting in my way again?]
Annoyance rippled through the voice; something like regret threaded beneath it. And that single wisp of energy stood alone, proud and unbending, barring the path of the colossal heart demon.
“Disappear.”
What had she been thinking, just now? Gathering herself at last on the energy Yoonho had left within her, Cheon Sohee spoke with renewed resolve.
[I'll help you. All you have to do is nod.]
But the demon was nothing if not persistent.
“I don't need you.”
[Let's get out of this suffocating place already!!! Let's take our revenge!!! Let's kill them!!! I'll lend you my strength!!!]
The voice screamed as though the walls themselves were closing in. A will starved of its meal hounded the body's true master.
“Even if I kill—it will be by my own will.”
She had no intention of surrendering command of her body. Cheon Sohee's voice was resolute.
[Ha. You?]
The demon laughed as though at something absurd.
“Yoonho is mine to protect.”
She would not hand herself over to a beast that knew nothing of protecting anything.
[And if you fail to protect him? Won't you need the strength to take revenge?]
For a breath, Cheon Sohee allowed herself to imagine the one thing that must never come to pass.
Yoonho, gone to the Sichuan Tang Clan. Suppose the Tang Clan had done him harm.
Then only a single road would remain open to Cheon Sohee.
“I would kill them with my own hands. I have no intention of yielding that to the likes of you.”
With greater strength, perhaps, she could exact a greater revenge. But then it would not be her revenge at all.
Yoonho's vengeance had to be carried out by her own hand, down to the very last moment of her life. Even if that hand belonged to something nesting inside her own heart, she would not yield an inch.
[You? The one who trembles at the mere thought that trying to take a life might get you devoured by me?]
“That's right. Which is exactly why I have to face it.”
[What?]
Cheon Sohee turned her gaze inward once more.
She could see the sea of killing intent. The sea into which she had periodically thrown sacrifices, begging it, please, please stay calm. The sea she had never dared wade into, for fear of being swallowed whole.
But today was different.
It has to be by my own hand.
Cheon Sohee plunged her hand into the sticky morass of bloodlust she had always refused even to look at, let alone touch.
Had this been the past, it would have dragged her under then and there—had she not spent these months inside the cave confronting it, endlessly, over and over.
From the sticky sea of the star's bloodlust, Cheon Sohee sought out her own. What rose from those depths in her grip was not the killing intent of the Heavenly Killing Star. It was Cheon Sohee's own.
It looked like a blade not yet honed—and yet it seemed sturdier than any blade there ever was.
[Ha. How fun. This is fun. A first, for me. Very well… this time, I'll withdraw.]
A heart that wished to kill—and yet it did not answer the demon at all. However stickily it coaxed, everything slid off like water down polished steel, gone in an instant.
The voice faded away, laughing as though this were the funniest thing it had ever seen.
“I won't need it.”
At the end of that long facing of one another, she had found her own within the thing she had always turned away from.
The seething waters settled. The sea of killing intent no longer stirred.
What she held now was neither the heart demon's nor the star's will—it was hers. And Cheon Sohee understood, finally, that the time to leave had come.
She opened the door of the training cave. Far off, a light showed. She passed down the long corridor and met, for the first time in half a year, a brightness almost too fierce to bear—
“What is this?”
And then she saw it: drawn up in ranks at the mouth of the cave, the assassins of Salmak.
“So you've come out at last.”
The first person Cheon Sohee laid eyes on as she stepped out of the training cave was her master—the Red Rakshasa, Dan Seowol.
“Why is everyone gathered here?”
Warriors of Salmak stood waiting in force all around the cave. This was no welcome for one of their own returning—it was a formation, plain to any eye, for surrounding someone.
“First sight of your master in half a year, and a greeting comes before anything else. Just when do you intend to learn courtesy?”
Dan Seowol let out a small sigh, her manner no different from any ordinary day, and spoke.
“Half a year?”
“That's right. Half a year has passed since you entered seclusion.”
She had fought the heart demon in a haze of endless combat—and half a year had already slipped away. Even Cheon Sohee, who had not so much as wavered at the sight of an ambush, found herself briefly staggered by the passage of time.
So much time had gone by. Which meant—
“…Yoonho. What happened to him?”
She asked after the worry that had never once left her through all those months of training.
“……”
The Red Rakshasa's stiff lips showed no intention of moving.
“Yoonho. What happened to him?”
With all those people standing there, only a long silence hung over the ground.
Surely not.
A dark premonition flashed through Cheon Sohee's heart.
“And if something has gone wrong—what will you do then?”
Dan Seowol studied the subtle shift in her disciple's expression for a long moment before she asked.
“I'm going to the Sichuan Tang Clan.”
The answer came without a heartbeat's pause.
“And once you're there?”
“I'll kill every last one of them.”
Killing aura that belonged not to the Heavenly Killing Star but to Cheon Sohee herself erupted in every direction.
“Huk—!”
“Eeeek! Ninja arts! The Art of Clear Mirror, Still Water!”
“Those whose attainment runs shallow—fall back.”
The Red Rakshasa raised a hand, and the air around them settled.
“Tell me. Yoonho. What happened to him?”
“……”
Seowol did not answer this time either.
“He's really… not all right?”
Anxiety bled into Cheon Sohee's voice. Despair seeped across her young face. Her pupils were trembling.
The sticky killing intent she had believed, at long last, to have settled was beginning to boil up from the deepest reaches of her chest.
“Steady your heart.”
The Red Rakshasa tried to soothe her disciple with a level voice.
“If Yoonho dies, then I die too.”
“There is more than one way to hold your killing intent in check.”
The Red Rakshasa's eyes met Cheon Sohee's.
The woman who had lost the one thing she must never lose opened her mouth, her expression piteous.
“If Yoonho dies, there is no reason left for me to live.”
“……”
“Move.”
At a single step from Cheon Sohee, the assembled assassins of Salmak flinched as one.
“If I send you out into the world like this, countless people will die.”
“I'll kill only the ones who killed Yoonho.”
“Is that the truth?”
A strange flicker of pleasure colored Dan Seowol's voice, but her disciple never noticed. Cheon Sohee held her teacher's gaze for a long moment, then nodded.
“If I'm still alive after that—kill me.”
By then she would have tasted too much blood to keep her sanity. Better to die on her master's blade than be devoured by bloodlust and become the Heavenly Killing Star entire. Cheon Sohee's words to her teacher were cold and clear.
“My disciple has a gift for saying the most dreadful things.”
Dan Seowol said it as though she could hardly believe her ears.
“Nin-nin! It's true! There's nothing Sohee can't say to her own master!”
Seolja, who had somehow sidled up beside Dan Seowol, chimed in.
“…Because I trust her.”
If Yoonho was no longer of this world, then the only person she could entrust the aftermath to was her master. Cheon Sohee looked at her teacher with eyes full of trust.
Dan Seowol's mouth fell open, briefly taken aback by Sohee's words—then she let out a small, wry laugh.
“Enough. Her reason is sound. Dismissed!”
“Dismissed it is!”
“She's sound! Fall back!”
When Dan Seowol raised her hand, the assassins ebbed away like the tide.
“Huh?”
“It seems your training was not wasted after all.”
“What is going on?”
As Cheon Sohee stared at her master, quite unable to follow, Dan Seowol smiled with no small pride and said the one thing Sohee had never expected to hear.
“Your beloved is safe.”
“That Yukiko! She thought she was going to die!”
Assassin No. 6—Seolja—heaved a sigh of relief and made a grand show of it.
“Did I not tell you—if you were going to carry on like that, you needn't have come at all.”
“This Yukiko simply has too much love in her heart! She could never just stand by and leave No. 5 to face it alone!”
“What happened?”
Pointing at her disciple—whose fury had not yet fully settled—the Red Rakshasa began to explain what had just transpired.
“It has been over a year since you last took a life. Not one soul in Salmak believed you would come out of there with your reason intact.”
“Nin-nin! Lies! The Red Rakshasa believed in you!”
“Quiet.”
“Playing favorites with your own disciple! This is far too unfair!”
Seolja planted her hands on her hips in a huff and turned away.
“So all of that was because of my berserk state?”
Only now did Cheon Sohee understand why Salmak had turned out in force.
She had taken on regular assassination missions to keep her killing intent under control. But in all the time since parting with Yoonho, she had not taken a single life.
Had it not been for Yoonho's gift, a descent into rampage would have surprised no one.
Had she burst from that cave with the Heavenly Killing Star in full rampage, she would have cut down everything in reach. That was why, the instant the cave door opened, every blade Salmak could muster had come pouring out.
“It seems I was right to put you to the test.”
The Red Rakshasa had withheld the truth until now for one reason alone: to make certain the killing intent had not devoured her and left a stranger wearing her face.
“As long as Yoonho is safe, the rest doesn't concern me.”
“Then all is well.”
The disciple's numb indifference—a thing that would have stung on any ordinary day—was, this once, a mercy the Red Rakshasa gladly accepted.
“So Yoonho really is safe?”
One moment she was relieved at her own numbness; the next, worry was written plain across her face. Dan Seowol gave a small, exasperated snort, then drew something from within her robes.
“A letter from your beloved. Will you read it?”
To my beloved Sohee.
It was the letter Kang Yunho had sent to Cheon Sohee the very moment he returned from the Sichuan Tang Clan.