Should I Die?
Should I die?
"Where in the world is this place...?"
He had slain the Heavenly Demon together with his disciples, and yet when his eyes opened, Cheon Hwi found himself awake in a land he did not know.
I have lived long enough to take some pride in it, and still I have never seen clothing like that. Not in the Central Plains. Not even in the Western Regions.
The buildings around him were not clay tile and timber. They were raised from white stone he had never seen in his life, and from glass of every color. The people were dressed neither in the martial robes and monks' vestments of the murim, nor in the hemp of common folk. Nor were they wearing the flowing robes and long coats of the gentry. What they had on clung tight to the body and looked stifling beyond belief. A few faces might have passed for people of the Central Plains, but far more bore the sharply carved features peculiar to the Western Regions.
The longer Cheon Hwi stared at that alien scene, the more certain he grew that he alone did not belong to this world. Nausea climbed his throat until he could no longer bear it, and he broke into a run.
"Hah... hah..."
What is this? I cannot have run for long. Why am I this winded? Why do my legs feel ready to snap?
Were the wounds the Heavenly Demon had given him still unhealed? Or was it some sorcery of the Maoshan Sect? There was far too much to suspect, and not one thing he could be sure of. Seeking the cause of this strange weakness, Cheon Hwi made for a stream nearby.
"Hah...! Hah...! Ah. I shall rest a moment!"
But the strength he would have needed to examine himself had deserted him long ago. Only after he had clawed back the barest scrap of it did he lean out over the water, and there a child's face looked back at him. A face he had never seen.
When Cheon Hwi twisted his expression, the boy's twisted with it. When he swung a fist at the stream, the boy swung a fist back at him. The water broke apart under the blow, shattering into disordered ripples, and that was more than enough to speak for what churned in his chest.
"......Just what is happening to me?"
He could not believe it. And yet the child reflected there was, without any doubt, himself. Even the art of turning back one's years could show him no more than the face of a man in his thirties, while in truth he was eighty, and old he certainly was. A younger face was no great grievance. Face or body, young was better than old. That was simply the way of things.
Though I do seem to have grown rather too young...
It differed a little from the face of his previous life, but this one was handsome enough. He had no complaint on that score either. The trouble was the body that had shrunk along with the face, and the inner energy and muscle that had vanished with it. One look told him a dantian had not even formed, and his arm was so thin, as if he had never eaten so much as a bowl of gruel, that he could close a single hand around his own forearm.
"Well. Alive, at least. I am alive."
Was I even the right word? Had it been nothing more than his flesh growing young, he might have let it pass. But he was looking at another person's face, and the word itself had begun to ring false. It was not that the Heaven-Breaking Sword Saint, Cheon Hwi, still lived. It was as if the Heaven-Breaking Sword Saint, Cheon Hwi, had entered a child's body. Memories and all.
The Heavenly Demon, then? However high that monster's martial power might reach into the heavens, the exchanging of one body for another lay beyond anything martial arts could do. Cheon Hwi cast the notion aside.
The Maoshan Sect, then? They were a faction whose strength lay not in martial arts but in the esoteric arts. Rumor said they commanded blood fiends, raised hopping corpses, and bent human souls to their will, masters of sorcery and shamanic craft, so it was not impossible. But Cheon Hwi had no tie to them. They had styled themselves an orthodox sect to begin with, and after the followers of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult dealt them a devastating blow, he had never had cause to spare them a thought. That theory, too, he discarded.
Which left the last of them.
"Then is this the reincarnation the Buddhists speak of?"
From the day he was born he had cared nothing for religion, Daoist or Buddhist. Yet if it was neither the Heavenly Demon nor the Maoshan Sect, nothing remained but reincarnation as the Buddhists taught it. In that teaching the flesh perished and the soul did not. After death, the soul was born again as a new human being. By that logic, it was not so hard to understand how Cheon Hwi's memories could be whole while only his body had changed.
Even the Dalai Lama, called the Buddha reborn, loses his memories when he returns. Why have mine remained?
Was that not why the Potala Palace, knowing a reborn Dalai Lama would remember nothing, had gone so far as to create the office of the Panchen Lama in order to find him? So why should he, who had never been devout, who had never so much as taken an interest in religion, still be carrying his memories?
He was the Number One Under Heaven, and he had been pressed often enough to take up his own sect's faith, but he had brushed every invitation aside for lack of interest. Had he known it would come to this, he ought at least to have learned a little Buddhism from Shaolin. Turning his back on the devotion that had risen in him unbidden, Cheon Hwi let out a long breath.
"When I struck that stream, I felt the cold of the water exactly as I should have."
So it was neither dream nor illusion. He could no longer look away from it. This was real.
Then is this the Central Plains? Has time simply passed? What is this place?
Turning the question over and over would answer nothing. He resolved to catch the next person who passed and ask.
Aigoo... poor little thing.
Charlotte, who kept the inn, looked at Cheon Hwi with open pity.
However did he come to this?
The world was peaceful enough these days, but out on the frontiers it was no rare thing for families and friends to die to monsters and packs of bandits. Children who lost everyone they had in a single stroke, and drifted all the way to the imperial capital as orphans, were not so rare a sight either. Charlotte decided this boy, too, had lost his family all at once and gone mad from it. She was not far wrong.
Cheon Hwi had lived without parents from the moment he was born, and his disciples had been his only family. Every one of them was dead. He had come to his senses in a strange land where he did not know a single soul, and it would have been stranger if he had not lost his mind. Even now he was holding himself together only barely, by the patience and restraint of a man who had reached the Profound Realm.
"So. Where did you say this was?"
"This is the Elysia Empire, dear."
A subject of the empire kept asking where the empire was. Mad or not, there were limits, and this was odd. She had seen a few people lose their minds, but those people had only acted strangely. They had not stood there stripped of common sense, asking where the empire was or what age of the world this might be. This child seemed sound enough in the head. It was only the ordinary knowledge any soul in this world ought to have that seemed to have gone missing.
"You mean this is truly the Western Regions? No. However far into the west a land may lie, if it is great enough to call itself an empire, there is no way I would not know of it."
The Western Regions? And what are those supposed to be?
"Then I will ask you one thing."
"Child, you have done nothing but ask questions..."
"Do you know the Heavenly Demon?"
Has he truly gone mad?
"This Heavenly Demon... why are you looking for such a thing?"
"You will answer me first."
"I wouldn't know. I keep an inn, mind you, so I hear all sorts of news, but the Heavenly Demon? That's the first I've heard of it."
"What?"
"I said I've never heard of it......"
In that instant Cheon Hwi lunged and seized Charlotte by the collar.
"You don't know the Heavenly Demon? How can that be? Not everyone who saw that catastrophe is dead, and even if they were, history would have written it down. What? You don't know?"
"......"
What is this Heavenly Demon that he's flying into a fit over it!
By now it had gone past pity for a madman and into plain fear. The most frightening person in the world was, first, someone with nothing left to lose, and second, a lunatic. This child was both.
"Not a shred of that is true, is it?"
"What would I gain by lying to you..."
Cheon Hwi, who a moment before had looked ready to devour her, worked his mouth without a sound, then shut it and let go of her collar.
Now I'm frightened. Please, just go...
Pity only stretched so far. Watch a thing like that go on, and there was nothing else a person could think.
"You don't know?"
"I don't..."
"......I shall go mad."
He looked up, hoping that even a stretch of blue sky might settle him. The sky repaid that hope as if in betrayal, with a sullen bank of ink-dark cloud.
"You don't know, you say?"
"......"
"What is it? Why is there no answer?"
He turned to where she had been standing only a moment ago. All that remained were the footprints of someone who had fled in a hurry.
"She ran?"
Charlotte had grown more afraid of him with every repetition of the same question, and while he stood lamenting at the sky she had long since slipped away.
"Maddening..."
Had she been some commoner who truly knew nothing, he might have kept hold of a last thin thread of hope. But by her own account just now, her station was that of an innkeeper. That meant she could be taken to serve, at the very least, the office of the Beggars' Sect or the Hao Gate.
The orthodox faction's eyes and ears were the Beggars' Sect. The unorthodox faction's were commonly held to be the Hao Gate. And why were they intelligence networks at all? Because every beggar under heaven was a Beggars' Sect hand, and the common folk who lived among rumor, the innkeepers and the merchants and their like, belonged to the Hao Gate. Famous as both organizations were, though, most of their number were ordinary folk and beggars, and no sect could feed every last one of them. So, apart from their chosen agents, they bestowed on the rest some plausible title, Unsworn Beggar or Hao Gate Affiliate, and loosely marked them as their own. An ordinary tavern keeper or innkeeper, in other words, was better informed than the common run of people.
Her word, then, carried a certain weight. And this was a place strange to him from the names to the clothing to the buildings themselves. That she had never heard of the Heavenly Demon was not, in itself, beyond understanding.
I understand. I do understand...
"But understanding it and accepting it are two different things! I could have borne being born again, had it only been in the same land. Why must I be born in a place I have never once laid eyes on!"
He had to admit it now. This was no dream that at least offered the hope of waking. It was a reality cruel past all enduring.
I thought that even in the realm of immortals I might see my disciples again. Is even that to be denied me...?
What was he to do now? Should he die? If he died again, would he be able to see them? Then he would die. What good was there in living? He ought to have died with his disciples when he killed the Heavenly Demon. Dying now would leave him nothing to regret, and living on alone in a strange land, after everyone he had ever known was dead, was no life worth living.
He was turning over whether to snatch up a stone and break his own skull, or to throw himself out of a tree, when his eyes fell on a notice fixed to the wall.
At any other time, with nothing left in him to linger over, a notice like that would hardly have moved him. But Cheon Hwi could not look away.
For on that notice was not merely someone he knew. It was the one he had longed for more than any other soul in the world.