The Mantid Maiden - 12
The Changbai Sect.
The reclusive sect of Joseon—guardian of the Changbai Pure Silver, a sect so vast and unfathomable that even the title Number One Under Heaven was spoken in the same breath as its name.
It was said the sect would reveal itself to anyone who made an offering at its shrine, and everyone had assumed some formation stood watch there, one that would open only to a tribute of rare and extraordinary things. Never had they imagined the answer would be a food.
The assembled company, struck dumb by the absurdity, could not bring themselves to open their mouths.
"Offered at the shrine, you say. Still—an unexpected tribute, this."
It was Moyong Sang-ah who broke the silence.
"That much, I understand. Train in the mountains long enough, and something sweet comes calling now and then. Even the young disciples, whenever they were allowed down the mountain, went looking for sweets before anything else."
Seeking to settle the bewildered mood, Cheongun nodded along in sympathy with the herb gatherer's account.
"Once, while digging for herbs, I happened upon a rare spirit fungus and offered it to a Taoist of the Changbai Sect. He was so pleased that he gave me a whole bundle of spirit herbs in return. It—it's the honest truth, I swear it."
When several disbelieving gazes swung his way, the herb gatherer protested desperately, half-frightened out of his wits.
"Everyone is only half-believing because none of us imagined such a food. Go on, tell us the rest."
Moyong Sang-ah soothed the herb gatherer, signing to her subordinates to withdraw their stares.
"He said he wished to repay the debt of the life I'd saved, and that what he wanted was to eat a macaron. But what would a backwoods herb-digger like me know? I had to ask him again what a macaron even was, and he told me it was a food that was all the rage in Joseon—that what he truly longed to taste was a Ddungcaron."
"And that food is popular in Joseon?"
"I made inquiries of my own afterward, and I heard it is quite popular indeed. The Joseon-style Ddungcaron especially—being a delicacy found nowhere outside Joseon, there are even folk who joke that it ought to be called a Makcaron instead."
"A food popular in Joseon... By any chance, do the men there enjoy it as well?"
As though something more lay behind the question, Moyong Sang-ah pressed the herb gatherer.
"When even a Taoist of a hidden sect goes searching for it, how could they not?"
"I see..."
A food that the men of Joseon enjoyed. A food even a Taoist training high in the mountains sought out. Moyong Sang-ah nodded slowly, as if some piece of the puzzle had finally settled into place.
"My lord? Is something the matter?"
Changbong Corps Commander Moyong Pyeong asked, watching his lord sink into thought with a worried eye.
"No, it is nothing. So to meet the Taoist of the Changbai Sect, we need only prepare this food?"
Moyong Sang-ah shook her head and turned to the herb gatherer, who was still floundering.
"Yes. As you can see, the village I live in is so remote that making such a thing is simply beyond us. I never did promise the Taoist I would come by any particular day, so if you only bring it with you, your chances of meeting him are high."
Mount Changbai was high and treacherous. But if it meant repaying a benefactor's kindness, what dish could possibly matter? Moyong Sang-ah nodded.
And as it happened, the Moyong Clan kept a Joseon cook of its own.
"Have the Joseon cook prepare the offering we shall present to the warriors of the Changbai Sect."
Cheongun did marvel at why the Moyong Clan would keep a Joseon cook rather than one from the Central Plains—but he had no intention of pressing for the reason.
For the moment Moyong Sang-ah had mentioned the Joseon cook, a curious shadow had fallen across the faces of the Changbong Corps.
"Yes, my lord!"
"A-as soon as everything is prepared, I shall set out at once with the Taoist here—"
"See that you do."
The training grounds, in the early evening.
"A food loved by the men of Joseon..."
Moyong Sang-ah murmured the words as she extended her blade.
Solving a problem with no path to its solution was a task farther beyond one's reach than cleaving empty air. For Moyong Sang-ah, the food of Joseon was exactly that.
The memorial table she laid out year after year. Every time she arranged its countless delicacies of mountain and sea, the same unease had gripped her.
'Because I do not even know what my lord liked.'
She did not know a single dish her lord had loved. Yearn as she might to know, there was no way left. The Kang clan had been annihilated—by her own fault, no less.
"Haa."
If she set the food the herb gatherer had spoken of upon next year's memorial table, would her lord come and spare the offering even a single glance?
From those beautiful lips, which even the crickets in the grass seemed to watch with hushed breath, escaped a sigh heavy with an unnameable sorrow.
"Lady Moyong. So this is where you were."
"Young Hero Cheongun? What brings you here?"
Moyong Sang-ah swiftly buried the face she could never let another soul see, and asked as Cheongun approached from a distance.
"Well... it seemed tonight was my only chance to apologize, so I came to find you."
"Apologize? For what?"
Cheongun regarded her with a rueful look, once, twice, then bowed his head.
"Thank you for indulging my insistence that day. However I turn it over in my mind, it was an overreach."
Only then did Moyong Sang-ah understand why he had come.
When the herb gatherer had begged for rescue from the bandits, Cheongun's declaration that he would go alone had surely been a deed worthy of any orthodox martial artist—but the circumstances had been unfortunate.
"Your Moyong Clan cannot, but I can." To insist on helping alone could all too easily have curdled into an insult against the Moyong Clan.
It was, in a word, a matter of face.
"Not at all. Thanks to you, my subordinates were shown the banner of the orthodox sects."
Of course, it would only have become a slight had the one receiving the apology chosen to take it as such.
Thanks to him, the warriors of the Changbong Corps—men accustomed to chasing nothing but profit—had been granted a precious experience besides. Moyong Sang-ah waved her head as if it were nothing at all.
"Is that so...?"
"It is. Did your talk with the herb gatherer go well?"
To the still-bewildered Cheongun, Moyong Sang-ah passed along the change of topic with practiced ease.
"I intend to depart at dawn the day after tomorrow."
"Is that so? I am to leave tomorrow on an inspection tour, for the Horse Market that will soon open."
Moyong Sang-ah spoke as though the timing troubled her a little.
"Then I had best pay my respects now, while there is time."
To linger a while longer and leave amid a proper send-off—or to depart without delay, for the sake of his sect's business? Cheongun did not agonize over it.
At the clean decisiveness of his answer, Moyong Sang-ah lifted her brows in faint surprise—then let a slight smile cross her face and raised her scabbard.
"...Is there any real need for us to bow our heads and trade farewells?"
"Pardon?"
"Let our swords stand in for the greeting instead."
They had met by the sword, and grown close through an exchange of blades; it was only fitting that they part by crossing swords once more.
Cheongun, too, was smiling as he stepped onto the training grounds.
"I am coming."
No matter how she reached, she fell just short of touching it. The same age as him, and yet she was the one being driven back. Moyong Sang-ah was still unaccustomed to being the lesser hand, asking another's leave to strike first.
"Come, then."
With that leave granted, a star blazed to life.
The swift blade and the tyrant blade of the Moyong Clan. A meteor that had severed the necks of countless enemy commanders now hurtled toward Mount Wudang itself.
Mount Wudang, whose majesty had never once faltered before the endless ranks of challengers, did not waver before the onrushing meteor either.
The starlight dies. Like a star fallen into the sea. The star that had plunged from the heavens at furious speed lost its radiance in a single instant.
The sword of Wudang is the sword of those who protect. Even dressed in the Eight Trigrams Sword Technique, the foundation of the Wudang Sect had not changed. To Moyong Sang-ah, it felt like trying to cut an ocean that no blade could part.
"This time, I come."
With Cheongun's words, the tide of the duel turned.
The calm sea became a raging torrent. The Eight Trigrams Sword Technique—an art of Ten Thousand Variations was never merely a sword for defending.
The meteor that had been plunging toward the sea found itself driven onto the defensive. The woman who had first faced the Eight Trigrams Sword Technique had lost her bearings before its sudden offensive. But that was all a thing of the past.
Block the dangerous moves when they can be blocked. Wait out the ones too knotted to answer. And when the dizzying chains of sword paths finally converge into one, turn them all away at once.
All haste had drained out of Moyong Sang-ah's sword.
"I can scarcely picture now the skill you showed when we first crossed blades, Lady Moyong. Yours has been progress truly worth a second look."
As the duel settled into a lull, Cheongun offered his praise with open admiration.
"That is thanks to you, Young Hero Cheongun."
"People sometimes let slip, quite carelessly, the things they already know. I merely stirred them awake again."
As a Rising Prodigy of Wudang, Cheongun had never once felt himself the lesser of anyone. But they do say the jianghu is a wide place.
The woman before him might have felt him as a wall—but to Cheongun, the reverse held true as well. Her pace of growth, forever one careless step from overtaking him, kept him buried in training without a moment's rest.
"...There is something I wish to show you, Young Hero Cheongun."
As if she meant to give this farewell her whole heart, Moyong Sang-ah stretched her blade out long.
"Come."
He, too, wished to part with a proper exchange of greetings. Cheongun nodded.
The star blazed once more. But this time, it did not charge with its old ferocity.
Spent already, is she? There—an opening. Cheongun pivoted from defense to offense in a heartbeat and thrust for the gap in Moyong Sang-ah's guard.
"Wha—?!"
The swords tangled. Water meeting water, and mingling. Cheongun recoiled, staring at Moyong Sang-ah in shock at the blade that had come to nothing in the space of a breath.
"The sword of Wudang?!"
Cheongun could not shut his gaping mouth. That move just now had worn the shape of Wudang's sword.
Could the Eight Trigrams Sword Technique, devised by the previous Sect Leader, truly have leaked beyond the mountain? It was the sect's most guarded secret art. If it were true, it was not a matter that could be waved away.
"It is the sword of the Moyong Clan."
Moyong Sang-ah declared it flatly, without drama.
Lady Moyong was not one to prattle nonsense. And Moyong Sang-ah simply took her stance again, as if to say: come and see for yourself, if you doubt me. Cheongun thrust at the woman once more.
His blade tangled in the raging torrent. It was not the Moyong Clan's sword he had watched all this time. But neither was it the sword of Wudang.
"So it truly is the sword of the Moyong Clan."
It moved like a burning meteor burning the very moisture from the air. Only then did Cheongun nod, looking visibly relieved.
"If you suspected it, then..."
"Then would you care to see my sword once more as well?"
Cheongun said, shaking his head.
"Come."
Cheongun's Eight Trigrams Sword Technique unfolded anew. A sword that began not from a defensive posture, but from the offensive itself. And this time, it was Moyong Sang-ah's turn to be stunned.
"The Moyong Clan's sword?"
For Cheongun's Eight Trigrams Sword Technique bore, at a careless glance, the likeness of the Moyong Clan's own blade.
"It is the sword of Wudang."
This time, it was Cheongun who declared it plainly.
"Yes. So it is the sword of Wudang."
Just as she had won her enlightenment through dueling Cheongun, so had he won his through dueling her. That was all it was.
Their swords had, a moment ago, unquestionably resembled one another—yet each remained, just as unquestionably, the martial art of its own sect.
Just when she believed she had finally caught up, he would go and pull ahead again. As if she could not bear to let it stand, Moyong Sang-ah nodded.
"I should go and make ready for my journey."
Setting aside his lingering regret over the duel, Cheongun sheathed his blade.
"I can only hope your stay at the Moyong Clan held no discomfort for you."
As one who lived for the sword, Moyong Sang-ah had her own regrets in letting the bout end—still, the hour to part had come regardless.
"Haha! What discomfort could I possibly have suffered? Only..."
"...?"
"I only hope that next time, we might speak as people who lay their hearts open to one another."
Cheongun's gaze drifted toward the inner depths of the Moyong estate as he spoke—as though something had come to mind that he had chosen, deliberately, not to say.
"If someday we become the sort of friends who can share their secrets openly, then perhaps I shall."
However warm they had grown, there was no obligation to bare the affairs of her clan to an outsider. Rather than refuse him outright, Moyong Sang-ah offered her benefactor a faint smile.
"Haha, well—sect business being what it is, that much I truly cannot..."
"..."
The faint smile on Moyong Sang-ah's face did not fade.
"Eh?!"
"Take care of yourself on the road."
Moyong Sang-ah bowed her head toward her benefactor, who stood flustered mid-sentence. Cheongun, bewildered by the sight, bowed his own head in return.
"If fate wills it, we shall meet again."
A sword art that must go out into the world to be completed—the sword of Ten Thousand Variations, the Eight Trigrams Sword Technique of the Wudang Sect.
And the Meteor Sword Technique of the Moyong Clan, heir to a thousand years of martial learning, much of which has already slipped from the world's memory.
Because both were unfinished arts, because each could watch and learn from the other, their swords remained in the end their own swords—yet by learning from one another, both grew stronger.
As friends, and as rivals, they had honed each other like blades upon a whetstone.
For two martial artists, it was a most agreeable farewell.