I Will Never Let You Go
“…I’m sorry.”
“Master….”
The short word reached me through the tangle of my worries, and with it a warmth began to gather. Holy power? No. Had it been holy power, there would have been no texture to it, and no weight.
I opened my eyes on that thought, and Hyeon was already drawing me into her arms. An embrace, I could understand. She had held me often enough in our previous life. But this was not that life, and my mind was a knot.
Even buried in that warmth, I could not yet believe it. Had my disciples truly regained their memories, or was this moment nothing more than an empty dream?
“Master….”
It was Hyeon who spoke first.
“Is it really you, Master…?”
“Hyeon….”
My voice came out low. I had sworn to protect them, and then I had slain the Heavenly Demon with their lives as the price. What could a man like that do, standing before his own disciples? I was nothing but a sinner. The fear that they might resent me made the next words stick in my throat.
But Hyeon—whether she had read my face, or had seen the fight with her own eyes—went on, already certain that I was her master.
“It really is you… Master.”
There was no hatred in it anywhere. Only warmth. Warmth without end. As if the black blood staining me meant nothing at all, she laid her hand gently over the back of mine, painted red.
“Why are you crying?”
This time the voice was Seol’s. Those deep eyes quietly held my blood-streaked face.
I was not crying. Or so I had thought. I lifted a hand to my eyes and found the corners already wet. Was it joy at meeting my true disciples again? Hope that I might beg forgiveness? Or the fear that I was about to hear their voices thick with hate? I didn’t know.
“…I’m sorry.”
After all those thoughts, what came out was one short, simple line. Words I had wanted so badly to say, and words I had believed I would never be able to.
“I meant to protect you, and I couldn’t…. I’m sorry…. I’m sorry….”
Once the words broke loose, they would not stop. Every time I looked at their faces, that day returned, and not a single moment since had left my heart at ease. I had carried that weight inside me, and at last I stood before the only people who could hear a plea for forgiveness and grant it. How could I have stayed silent? When I had poured out everything I had sworn I would say if they ever remembered, Hyeon answered with a single line.
“Master, you are the hero who saved the Central Plains. Why should you be sorry?”
One eye swollen, she smiled softly and comforted me. It was only comfort—a short, careless sentence that could neither turn back the past nor change the future, that could do nothing at all. And yet, spoken by the one who had the right to say it, those words sank into me all the way to the bone.
Somewhere inside me, a cold hollow that had ached for so long began, little by little, to close. Not all the way. The fear that they might die again someday was still there. But for this moment—
“Yes….”
I steadied my breath and drew my disciples into my arms.
I swore it. In this life, I would not lose them. Not ever.
“I won’t let go either. Not ever.”
The same answer came from Hyeon. She believed in a master who had failed to protect them, and she forgave him. How could that fail to move me?
In that moment, Seol quietly opened her mouth.
“…What are you talking about?”
Hyeon and I looked at her at the same time.
Come to think of it, Seol hasn’t said a word.
The moment Hyeon saw me, she had called me Master, and she clearly remembered our previous life. Seol had only been listening to all of this in silence.
“Seol. Do you remember me?”
I asked it carefully, but her answer was short.
“Cheon Hwi. My junior at the academy.”
Right. This may be better.
There is a reason people call forgetting a blessing. That life must have held good memories too. But to recall being killed by the Heavenly Demon, watching one’s comrades die, and in the end losing even one’s master—that did not seem like any sort of kindness.
“Yes. You’re right, Seol….”
And so I could not bring myself to tell her. Even if we were not master and disciple, I only hoped the tie between us would hold.
“This life, I will live it for all of you.”
Whether they had lost their memories or found them again did not matter. We had been fated to die and meet again in the celestial realm, and yet we had been born anew and met anyway. There were still disciples I had not found, but I had already discovered three. I felt certain I would meet the last as well.
This life, I will live for my disciples.
I made the vow inwardly even as I spoke.
“Thank you.”
“All right.”
In Hyeon’s voice and in Seol’s, I felt an absolute will to remember those words no matter what. The resolve seemed almost too fierce, but what did that matter? If a master does not protect his disciples, who will? The bond of master and disciple is no different from that of parent and child. A tie ordained by heaven does not snap so easily.
Listening to them, I embraced my disciples once more.
“Don’t worry. I swear it. I will never abandon you.”
Perhaps the words had moved them. They gave no answer at all, and simply held me in return. I swore, with them in my arms, that I would not lose my disciples in this life, and they swore they would not lose me. The vows were the same in their wording. The meaning inside them, however, was as far apart as heaven and earth—and I, in that moment, did not know it.
When that stirring reunion with the disciples who had regained their memories was over, I went to the man who had set all of this in motion—the caravan master. Beside the carriage his groans still drifted up, and the blood pouring from his severed wrist had already soaked the earth into a red mire. Cecilia stood at his side.
“You’ve come, Cheon Hwi?”
“I have.”
“More than that… Miss Hyeon seems somehow changed.”
Did she truly look so different? No. There was something more important just now.
“Why didn’t you treat him?”
Judging by the blood leaving that wrist, it would have been no surprise if he bled out at any moment, and still Cecilia had not healed him.
“…Is this the right thing? The only reason you’re telling me to heal him is so you can torture him.”
As she said it, holy power gathered in her hand and faded, again and again. Her face could not decide whether to heal or to stop. Given her nature, I had never expected her to accept a request to heal a man merely so he could be tortured. But torture was only a means toward an end, not the end itself. When I told her so, Cecilia’s fingertips trembled, and she sent light down into the caravan master’s wound. Sacred light caught the torn flesh and bound it, and little by little the color returned to him.
“…Cheon Hwi.”
“Why do you call me?”
“More than that… is it all right not to treat your disciples?”
In the shock of learning they had remembered, I had failed to see it, but they were hardly unhurt. Killing all those bandits had left small wounds all over them, and some were still bleeding.
“…I would be grateful if you tended them.”
I asked her to heal my disciples as well. Once she heard the request, she did not hesitate this time. She treated them gladly. While she worked, her face looked almost startled—surely at the size of the wounds.
“Get up. I know you haven’t fainted.”
“…”
“Then I have no choice but to kill you.”
I drew my sword without hesitation and brought it down toward the caravan master’s throat.
“I’m awake!”
The blade stopped when it was not even an inch from his neck.
“I am going to ask questions. Stay silent, or ask one back, and I will cut.”
“What did you…?”
The hand she had only just healed came off again, and blood leapt.
“Aaaagh!”
“A wretch who cannot understand plain speech. And do not think of dying. As you just saw, a little healing is well within reach.”
“I understand….”
Cecilia, returning after she had finished with my disciples, swallowed and gathered holy power at her fingertips once more.
“Cheon Hwi… again…?”
“Mend it.”
There was not a hair of hesitation in the order. She nodded with difficulty. Soft, pure light rejoined the caravan master’s flesh.
“Spare me…. Spare me, and I’ll give you my entire fortune….”
“Spare you? Your fortune? I have no need of rubbish like that. If you want to live, you have only to answer me.”
I seized his hair roughly and ground his face into the earth. Gritty dust drove into his nostrils and his mouth.
“What did you feed my disciples?”
“That was….”
“Stammering again.”
This time the sword grazed his ear. A single red line opened beside it, and drops of blood fell, heavy and slow.
“If you cannot understand words, you have no need of ears.”
“I—I understand! I’ll talk!”
The caravan master lifted his head with every ounce of strength he had. Caked in dirt from head to foot, he no longer looked like a wealthy merchant lord.
“I was told it was a simple sleeping draught.”
“Told? What, exactly, did he say?”
“He said that if I drugged academy students with a sleeping draught and sold them to him as slaves, he would pay a great sum. I’m a merchant. He said I could make a fortune, so I went along. That is all….”
“Where is that draught?”
“In my robes.”
“Take it out.”
“Yes….”
From his breast he drew a single bottle. It was far too fine a thing to hold a mere sleeping draught.
“Does that bottle look to you like something meant for a simple sleeping draught?”
“I thought it strange and asked, but he never answered, to the very end. For me, it was enough to be paid.”
Far too suspicious. And yet there was nothing I myself could know. There was, however, someone who might.
“Cecilia. Do you know what this is?”
“…Cheon Hwi. Do you know of Mnemosyne?”
“I don’t.”
I had not been in this world long enough to know a name like that. As if she had expected the answer, Cecilia began to explain.
“This bottle is a forbidden holy relic called the Pool of Mnemosyne.”
“A holy relic?”
I knew the word. The Central Plains had possessed a few of its own—the Shaolin Temple’s Green Jade Buddha Palm, the Mount Hua Sect’s Purple Haze Divine Sword—so the name was familiar enough. What Cecilia meant, though, felt slightly different.
“Yes. The Pool of Mnemosyne… has the power to call forth the memories of a previous life.”
“What… did you say?”
I had thought something was wrong. I had kept training my memory-lost disciples in ways as close to true combat as I could make them, and still they had not remembered. Yet they drank that water, collapsed, and woke—and their memories returned at once. At first I had wondered whether brushing death and living through it had done it. The cause was this strange relic.
“And that is a problem?”
Countless people long to know their past lives. From that vantage, a relic like this did not seem as though it would do harm. So why the word forbidden?
“Cheon Hwi. The Pool of Mnemosyne is not a holy relic one may use lightly.”
“What do you mean?”
Cecilia began to explain the holy relic called the Pool of Mnemosyne, and the longer I listened, the deeper the shock pulled me under.
“Is that true…?”
By her account, drinking it returned the memories of one’s previous life—and in exchange, one had to follow that life’s fate once more.
“My disciples will die again…?”
No. Absolutely not. If they had to take that fate upon themselves again, it would be better if they never remembered at all.
“Even so, that fate can be overcome. Only… the path is an extremely hard one….”
She went on after that, telling me just how hard the path would be, but the words never reached my ears. All I could hear was that the fate could be overcome. Heard at a slight angle, hard to overcome meant possible. If I grew stronger than I had been in my previous life—strong enough to defeat the Heavenly Demon by myself—then perhaps I could break that fate.
When I had set my thoughts in order, I looked down, quietly, as if it were hope that lowered my gaze. On that blood-dried face, nothing remained but the terror of a man already dead.
“Last question. Who handed you this bottle?”
“That….”