Chapter 116: The Sword That Severs the Yoke 2
Chapter 116: The Sword That Severs the Yoke 2
The Sword That Severs the Yoke.
Strictly speaking, she came from a xianxia world.
A world of murim and martial arts, immortals and yokai.
And as the greatest swordmaster to come out of that world, she was a powerhouse Constellation who fought her way to the end and survived.
The exact opposite of me, you could say—someone who holed up and survived by pure chance.
The Incinerating Tyrant was called the mightiest Constellation of the Northern Continent.
By the same token, The Sword That Severs the Yoke was called the strongest Constellation of the Eastern Continent.
Because if The Incinerating Tyrant was a Commander leading fleets of warships and armored soldiers,
The Sword That Severs the Yoke was a Constellation who could match him with nothing more than the single sword at her hip.
Which was why her words hit me harder than I'd expected.
"So you're saying... you have no Incarnation?"
Enough to make me stumble over the words.
"I do not. What need is there for a contract in the pursuit of principle and the crossing of blades? What we require is a well-forged sword and a situation that demands its use—not some scrap of paper conjured by sorcery."
The Sword That Severs the Yoke kept not a single Incarnation.
No points earned through Incarnations' activities. No Authorities purchased with points.
All she possessed was the swordsmanship she had honed since her previous life.
And that alone was enough to make her the strongest on the continent.
"This continent is a beautiful place indeed. This Academy alone—the old women of my previous life would've come stampeding, eyes blazing, grabbing at trouser-legs to beg to become my disciples. Men and women alike bear talents that make their souls shine—humanity's future seems bright indeed. Outside my swordsmanship I'm near-illiterate, but surely there are many overflowing with talent in those fields as well."
"And the matter of treatment...?"
That was all well and good as an explanation of how extraordinary a Constellation The Sword That Severs the Yoke was.
But hadn't she said the purpose of her visit was to treat her one and only disciple?
"I have, at long last, obtained a single disciple."
The Sword That Severs the Yoke, who had been toying with her empty teacup, forced herself to continue.
In place of Incarnations, she had many disciples—but, strictly speaking, they were never true disciples.
She had passed on the swordsmanship she knew, along with various other weapon arts, but they were never her sword.
Was that the difference between people you simply taught what you knew, and a disciple to whom you taught your own art?
The murim way of thinking was a little hard to grasp.
"A child of truly radiant talent. Because of it, I grew... greedy. Yes. I grew a little greedy."
Her explanation could be summed up in a single word.
Qi Deviation (走火入魔).
The Sword That Severs the Yoke, who had taken on a disciple of overwhelming talent, had let greed get the better of her.
Judging that the disciple possessed the same talent as herself, she had tried to pass down everything she had.
The result: unable to meet The Sword That Severs the Yoke's expectations, the disciple had fallen into Qi Deviation.
A mindscape twisted, a heart broken, a person turned mad—that was Qi Deviation.
Viewed one way, mental illness. Viewed another, a sickness of the soul itself.
"Even had my disciple run wild and bred a heart demon of her own accord, the fault would still lie with me, her master. But to see her end up like this because of my own excessive greed—I have no words for this wretchedness. I beg you: can you cure her?"
A swordmaster who once commanded the world with a single blade at her hip.
A Constellation whose name thundered across the continent as the mightiest of them all—
She had no way to do anything about the heart demon dwelling in her disciple's mind.
Well. Can a UFC world champion punch away cancer cells with a nuclear haymaker?
"I can certainly attempt it..."
The sight of a beautiful woman desperately pleading made me want to promise her I'd do it right away, but there were a few things I needed to think through.
What we'd treated up until now were patients with trauma and soldiers suffering from PTSD.
The ratio was overwhelmingly skewed toward soldiers with PTSD—1:9 at best, closer to 5:95.
Our treatment method was the removal of Nightmares.
To be precise: the erasure of the "fear" lodged in the domain of the unconscious.
It sounds simple when put like that, but since it means meddling with the human mind, it requires more power than you'd think.
Take, for example, a soldier who fears the roar and crash of the battlefield.
We wrap him in a mana veil, then erase the cause of that fear from his memory.
The exaggerated memory vanishes, and the healed soldier can shrug it off with a "Guess it wasn't such a big deal."
Not a big deal? It's a procedure that distorts a soldier or Incarnation's memories and extinguishes a part of their emotions.
Kim Ha-eun, brimming with talent as she was, was handling it well enough on her own, but—
should things go slightly wrong by some accident, you could end up with the sort of thing you only see in comics: an emotionless killing machine,
or a former Incarnation reduced to an imbecile with her memories entirely wiped away.
And there was another issue.
'Is Qi Deviation even a Nightmare?'
From the sound of it, it was what happened when you trained your soul in the xianxia fashion and got a demon tangled up in it, wrecking your mind.
But a Nightmare was still something dreamed by a being with intellect. If the mind was already shattered and no emotions were being felt?
If she'd become an imbecile with no fear left for us to remove?
What we did was remove fear—not perfectly restore a ruined soul.
"Even so, I beg you. This is the only way left."
At that, a woman in a wheelchair was brought into the room.
Unusually, her hands and feet were bound in the sort of restraint suit you'd see in a horror film.
On top of that, the three people pushing the wheelchair each wore a sword at their hip.
And at that same moment, the sensation I'd felt out on the training field hit me again.
'This is... killing intent?'
It wasn't just her wrists that were bound.
Gleaming metal rings clamped over the backs of her hands, her wrists, forearms, elbows, upper arms.
Similarly, her neck and the area beneath her chest, her stomach and waist, her legs and thighs and knees—all of her bound tight.
Unlike her master, The Sword That Severs the Yoke, her chest was large, which gave the sight a slightly indecent cast—
'I can't breathe...'
But with the wild tangles of her hair, the eyes streaming bloody tears, the grinding sound of a gag being crushed between her teeth—
far from indecent thoughts, I nearly threw myself under the table again.
The Sword That Severs the Yoke, realizing her mistake, immediately reined in her own energy.
But you could hardly expect that same consideration from a person so deep in Qi Deviation she'd been locked into restraints.
"Ah, what a fool I am... I nearly repeated the same mistake."
It took only seconds for The Sword That Severs the Yoke to murmur the words under her breath and, with a sweep of her great sleeves, step in front of me to shield me.
Again my eyes stung, and instead of the sweet taste of milk tea, a rank iron tang of blood filled my mouth.
Lee Ha-rin, physical-type that she wasn't, leaned against the back of my chair on trembling legs.
If anyone was going to examine the situation, Kim Ha-eun would do a better job than me.
I tapped lightly on the back of Lee Ha-rin's hand where it rested on my chair; pale-faced, she looked down at me.
I had experience rolling through the gutter, but Lee Ha-rin was, if anything, a hothouse flower.
No—calling her a hothouse flower felt wrong, given the many upheavals her family had gone through, but...
"What is it?"
Exposed to that raw, unfiltered killing intent, she appeared to have lost her usual quick wits.
"Could you get in touch with Ha-eun and ask her to come here?"
Of all the times for this to happen—right when Lee Ha-rin was on her way to request a smartphone for me.
If I stretched a thread of magic power far enough, I could send a message even from outside the Sanctum,
but a smartphone—that pinnacle of science—was faster than the clumsy message magic I could use.
With the continent's strongest Constellation having descended in person, there was no way Kim Ha-eun hadn't noticed.
Buried among patients and staff as she was, her location was practically the most heavily trafficked place in the area.
At a single text, Kim Ha-eun came scurrying over and gazed at the woman bound in the wheelchair.
"Ah, this... this one's going to be a little tough."
Kim Ha-eun, who had wrapped herself head to toe in a mana veil like a bulletproof vest—no, like a hazmat suit—
and the female disciple, who reacted sharply to magic power and was gnashing her gag like a beast.
At the sight of Kim Ha-eun scratching the back of her head, I felt a pang of regret.
But The Sword That Severs the Yoke's instincts seemed a bit sharper than mine.
"Does 'tough' mean there is, nonetheless, a way?"
"Yes, I believe it's possible. It'll take a while, though, and there's some risk involved."
She shot up from the table and, before I knew it, had taken both of Kim Ha-eun's hands in hers.
Never mind how the female disciple had gone docile the moment The Sword That Severs the Yoke drew close—like a yellow dog in front of a dog-meat trader.
Kim Ha-eun, claiming she could even treat Qi Deviation, glanced furtively at me.
At this timing—at me?
"Is there something I need to help with?"
"Yes. This doesn't seem like ordinary trauma. I can't just press it down with magic power and pull it out lightly the way we do with other patients. I think I'm going to have to go directly inside..."
Kim Ha-eun surpassed me in both the quantity and quality of her magic power.
But a vast difference still remained between a quasi-Dream Demon Incarnation and a Dream Demon Constellation.
The fine control of magic power. And the question of whether you could enter directly into a dream.
To resolve the Qi Deviation, it seemed I would have to step forward personally, not Kim Ha-eun.
"It looks like I'll need to use my magic power externally to regulate that Incarnation's body while you, Constellation, go directly into the dream and eliminate the root cause."
While I was having the stray thought—should I explain to her that the female disciple wasn't an Incarnation or not—
The Sword That Severs the Yoke came rushing to my side like the wind, sailing over the table.
Then, she dropped her head so low that her neatly arranged ebony hair scattered through the air.
"Please! I beg of you! Unworthy as I may be, I bear the hollow title of the continent's mightiest. Think of it as bestowing upon me a life-saving debt, and—though it may be a great trouble—could you not lay your hand to the task yourself? My disciple may be no Incarnation, but I swear the talent for the sword she possesses is the genuine article. I cannot send her off like this."
"Raise your head."
"I beg of you!"
"We beg of you!"
At this rate, people were going to start calling me a saint instead of a Dream Demon.
But if I left her like this, she looked ready not just to bow her head, but to throw herself into a full five-body prostration.
The three who had wheeled in the chair were already on their knees—they must've been disciples of The Sword That Severs the Yoke as well.
"Very well. I'll see to it personally. Please, raise your head."
Still, she was an Incarnation acknowledged by the continent's strongest Constellation.
If I could swallow her Nightmare, it would be an enormous help.