The Mantid Maiden - 13
"Daoist Cheongun! Mind your footing!"
"The mountain path is rougher than I expected."
Cheongun lifted his head toward the summit rising so high it seemed to graze the distant sky.
Changbai Mountain.
Unlike the verdant land below, its peak was wrapped in pristine white snow. Some people, he gathered, called it Baekdu Mountain as well, but there was little difference between the two names. "Long white mountain" and "white-haired mountain" meant the same thing, after all.
Hadn't they said there was a lake at the top? At the end of his long, long journey, the realization that he had truly arrived made Cheongun's footsteps feel lighter.
"In Joseon, they say every mountain begins at Changbai. Thanks to that, an herb gathered on Changbai can fetch a premium anywhere you take it."
The head of the great Baekdu Range—the ancestral peak from which every mountain on the peninsula springs. Cheongun gazed up at the mountain towering higher even than Mount Wudang and nodded.
"There is certainly a numinous energy here. It looks worthy of the name 'sacred mountain.'"
He didn't need to consciously reach out to know it, and he didn't need the breathtaking scenery before his eyes to be certain. His whole body could feel how saturated this place was with the breath of nature. Truly, it was a sacred mountain rarely seen even in the Central Plains.
Hope swelled in Cheongun's chest—hope that the person he sought might truly be here.
"Even for a Daoist who once stood at the side of that fearsome person of the Moyong Clan, you mustn't let your guard down. Who knows when the Mountain Lord might come to carry you off."
"Do you mean Lady Moyong?"
Cheongun's light footsteps stopped.
"Oh dear, perish the thought. Honestly, the whole time I was begging for your help, I was half convinced I'd wet my trousers. Where I ever found the courage, I still can't say."
The herbalist shuddered at the mere memory of it.
"There must be some misunderstanding."
Cheongun defended Moyong Sang-ah with a bitter expression.
The Mantid Maiden. Moyong Sang-ah.
The woman who had devoured her husband and seized the family fortune for herself. A rumor so lurid that anyone in the Central Plains with open ears could not help but hear it. Undeniable facts were surely mixed in among the embellishments.
And yet Cheongun chose to trust the conversation of blades they had exchanged every day.
For Moyong Sang-ah's sword was endlessly upright, and at the same time a sword that writhed in sorrow and anguish.
"That's true. My benefactor certainly didn't seem the sort to devour men with a mere glance, as the rumors claim. Still, a lowly worm like me can't help being afraid of her. Ah! We've arrived!"
Grateful to Moyong Sang-ah though he was, the herbalist nodded only half-heartedly, evidently unable to forget how her venomous gaze had once chilled him to the bone.
"There really is a shrine. And that would be...?"
Old and half-collapsed, but a shrine beyond all doubt. Cheongun asked as the herbalist began fishing something out, piece by piece.
"A cauldron. I only need to warm it through, so please wait just a moment."
"So that was the thing you lugged up here on your shoulders."
What the herbalist produced was a small iron cauldron. It must have been heavy. That he had climbed this high a mountain without a single word of complaint—perhaps that was how eager he was to repay his debt.
"That said, I am rather worried about one thing."
With all his preparations finished, the herbalist stirred the fire with his poker and struck up conversation.
"What sort of worry?"
"The Daoist we're to meet has a rather eccentric temper."
"I know plenty of Daoists with that sort of temper."
To assume that cultivating the Dao made a man mild and free of rough edges was a grave error. He had seen no end of oddballs in the Wudang Sect. Cheongun answered with a soft laugh.
"Ohhh, it's nothing like that. Everyone besides me who has ever met the Daoist of Changbai calls him not a Daoist but a monst—"
"Quiet."
Cheongun was at the herbalist's side in an instant.
"Was I too loud? It's all done now. The offering has been made, so you need only wait a little longer."
"Be quiet, I said."
Cheongun's expression had gone rigid. What had gotten into the Daoist all of a sudden? Why was he ignoring both the offering and the herbalist himself, his eyes sweeping the surroundings?
The herbalist followed Cheongun's gaze—and only then understood why.
"What are you looking at that—Gah! Th-the-the Mountain Lord!"
A tiger.
An enormous tiger was fixing the shrine with its stare.
"That's... that can't be..."
A tiger the size of a house? Its eyes, glinting in the shade of the trees, were as large as lanterns. A voice thick with disbelief spilled from Cheongun's lips.
"This is not the Mountain Lord's domain! Why on earth—?!"
"Fall back."
Cheongun moved the weaker man behind him and drew his sword.
A spirit beast.
This was not Cheongun's first tiger. In over half a year of wandering as a chivalrous swordsman, he had more than once lent a hand in hunting down tigers that preyed on people. But the beast before him was somehow different.
Call the tiger the fiercest of beasts—it was still an animal. When he blazed with martial pressure and hurled out killing intent, beasts would retreat a step on instinct.
Cheongun loosed his honed killing intent once more. Just as he thought: with something close to contempt, the tiger slid its gaze from him to the herbalist.
The judgment to single out the weaker prey in an instant. The will to master its own instincts. And a size that defied all reason.
Beyond any doubt, this was the Mountain Lord of Changbai.
"Wh-what do we do?! Ah! I have it—there's a way!"
"What way?"
He had heard that herbalists each brewed their own tiger repellent and carried it wherever they went. Without easing his guard in the slightest, Cheongun asked.
"The tiger of Changbai is, in the end, a Joseon tiger, is it not?"
"I'm listening."
"I once heard it from the Black Hairs. They say a Joseon tiger won't devour you if you hand it a macaron! There! A Ddungcaron!"
The macaron, fresh from the cauldron and perfumed with sweetness, arced in a gentle parabola and smacked the Mountain Lord square on the forehead.
"Grrowl..."
Of course it accomplished nothing. The macaron rolled limply away into the grass.
"HIYIK! I distinctly heard they can't resist macarons?!"
"It seems you've done nothing but enrage it."
The gaze of I will eat you if it's the last thing I do settled on the herbalist.
"Th-thinking it over, I must have gotten it wrong! The story I heard ended with the macarons running out—and the last thing it swallowed, gulp gulp, was the macaron seller's own mother!"
"If the tiger pounces, get inside the shrine."
Cheongun's sword tip leveled at the beast.
"I-I cannot abandon you, Daoist! Ah! The story also said that if you offer up a macaron, a rope will descend from heaven!"
"Stay calm."
Cheongun's voice was level, but every trace of color had already drained from the herbalist's face. The killing intent of a house-sized tiger was aimed at him and him alone.
It was the kind of situation in which spouting delirious nonsense came far more easily than keeping one's head.
He would have to carve out an opening himself. Cheongun spread his qi-sense wide, every nerve strung taut against the smallest twitch of the tiger's body.
"O Moon! O Moon! Pl-please, send down even a rope!"
Not that any rope had reason to come.
Then it happened.
"Now who's been leaving good Ddungcaron to rot on the ground?"
Since when?
Cheongun's heart plummeted.
This was a man who had not missed even the midnight raids of assassins. Every nerve he possessed had been poured into his qi-sense. And yet a voice drifted from behind him as though its owner had been standing there all along.
"Daoist!!!"
"Oh no—!"
At the herbalist's scream, Cheongun's eyes snapped to the front. The arrival of the strange figure had torn a momentary gap in his awareness.
A gap of a single heartbeat. The spirit beast pried it wide open, casting its colossal shadow of death across the two men.
Strength flooded Cheongun's grip. A mistake need only be redeemed. He would swing his sword at the beast lunging for the herbalist—
Had his eyes deceived him? The tiger's gaze held a thread of mockery, as if it had seen through exactly this much.
The tiger is feinting?! Danger—!
The beast swerved. The herbalist had been the decoy all along. It had merely been manufacturing an opening, the better to deal with the tiresome interferer.
Cheongun met the primal violence hurtling toward him head-on. Could he stop it? The instant he bared his teeth and moved to swing—
— BOOM!
With a crack like a thunderbolt tearing the air apart, the beast was slammed bodily into a tree.
"What dangerous nonsense do you call that!"
A roar of fury rang out at the tiger.
"What in the world...?"
Cheongun turned to look upon the man who had saved him in the space of a breath. Wild, tangled hair—black streaked through with white, like a tiger's pelt.
With that hair veiling him, there was no telling whether he was old or merely middle-aged, but his voice brimmed over with rage.
"Nabi, you wretch! You're the one who came after my snack—and here you thought I'd come sniffing after your slop?!"
"Nabi?"
The fury was aimed at the tiger. Don't tell me they knew each other?
"HRRRAAAWR!"
"HIIIIIYIK!"
The tiger's roar was aimed at the man who had appeared without warning.
"Rebelling now, you insolent beast?! Seems you haven't had your fill of the rod!"
"Yipe!"
Cheongun could not make sense of anything unfolding before his eyes.
What the man held was, unmistakably, an ordinary tree branch. And yet at every blow the tiger shrieked like a puppy bound for the stewpot.
Like a dog handler schooling a mongrel that had bitten him, the man kept up the beating until the beast turned docile as a lamb.
"What on earth is going on?!"
"Ah?! The D-Daoist of the Changbai Sect?!"
The master's identity was revealed by the herbalist's own mouth.
"Ha! So you're the one reeking of sweets—the herbalist from before! I took you for an ordinary hick, but you've got better sense than I gave you credit for!"
When the tiger flopped onto its back, belly up like a cat, the Daoist of Changbai finally came over, his voice almost cheerful.
"Hahaha."
"Our Nabi's belly was starting to spill over, so I gave him the cold shoulder and told him to slim down. I never dreamed he'd flounce off in a sulk. You came all this way to repay a kindness, and I nearly had you served up as a human sacrifice!"
"Not at all. I-I'm perfectly fine!"
As the man clapped the herbalist on the back again and again, the herbalist bowed his head over and over through gritted teeth.
"Pardon the intrusion."
Was this man truly the Changbai Sect Daoist he had been searching for? Setting his still-racing heart aside, Cheongun approached with the most courteous bearing he could summon.
"Eh? And who might you be?"
"Ugh!"
A pressure like being crushed beneath a boulder crashed down over Cheongun.
At the very least, a Sect Leader of the Nine Great Sects. No—he could stand beyond even that!
Enduring it was all he could manage. Cheongun barely kept his knees from buckling.
"I asked who you are."
"A Daoist come here in search of training, sir! And this Ddungcaron was prepared for you as well!"
Sensing the atmosphere turning dangerous, the herbalist desperately threw himself in front of Cheongun.
"Doesn't look to be a suspicious hick, then."
"Hah! Hahh... hahh!"
Only when the pressure that had crushed his whole body withdrew could Cheongun finally drag in ragged breaths.
"Nabi! Because of your antics, has dirt gotten on my precious snack or not?!"
"Grrmph."
Suspicion was slowly hardening into conviction. This man was, without question, connected to the Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon. Cheongun approached the man once more.
"It is an honor to make your acquaintance. I am called Cheongun of the Wudang Sect. If it pleases you, Venerable One, I would humbly ask your name."
"Ddungcaron! Did someone with a deft hand make this?! Quite delicious!"
"Please don't eat the one that fell on the ground—there's one fresh out of the steamer right here."
As though Cheongun's voice simply did not exist, the master chattered on about his snack.
"Venerable One, might you know anything of the Wudang Sect?"
"Even dirt-caked ones are a delicacy. It's fine!"
Ignored. An overwhelming, total snub. Perhaps because the man before him was a master without equal, Cheongun felt like an ant standing before a person.
Even so, he did not give up. He had not spent more than half a year on the road merely to learn whether a master lived on Changbai Mountain.
"Venerable One, I wish to ask whether a Daoist of the surname Kang dwells in this place."
"Kang, you say?"
For the first time, interest kindled in the master's eyes.
The man who had met everything with indifference was responding—and responding without ambiguity, at that. Cheongun fought to restrain the hope set fluttering in his chest.
"If you know anything of him, Venerable One..."
"Looks like rain."
"Venerable One."
He was deflecting. Or did he truly know something? Could the martial legacy of the Wudang Sect—the chivalrous road of Unhyeon in the Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon—truly have ended here at Changbai?
"Venerable One. Venerable One! My ear's itching. Rain's coming, so follow me."
The master scratched at his ear as though embarrassed, then turned away, gathering up his snacks as he went.
"Then by what name should I address you?"
Could this master before him be the very Kang Mo he had been seeking? Cheongun asked after the man's name as casually as he could manage.
"Call me what the others call me."
But the Daoist's answer was not what Cheongun had hoped for.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I am no Venerable One. I am the Eccentric of Mt. Changbai."
A journey that had begun with one man's writing.
Fate begets fate, and fate ever weaves new fates in its turn. The bonds one man had tied now tangled together, each pointing the others toward roads they had never walked before.
And so the wheel of yet another fate turned on.