Were You Jealous?
"Last question. Who gave you this sickness?"
"That..."
The guild master's throat worked, the apple of it shivering. Was the name itself too dreadful to put in his mouth?
Something's wrong.
This was more than a man afraid to speak a name. His face had gone far too bloodless for that. Cold sweat poured off him as if he stood in the rain, and his eyes were webbed red—the look of someone already dying.
Not 'any moment.' He's dying now.
Cecilia seemed to have caught the wrongness of it too. Before I could so much as tell her to heal him, she had already begun, and it did nothing.
"Wh... why?"
How could it have? What was killing him was no prohibition written in the magic of this world, nor in its oaths. The binding had been laid by some other means entirely. And still, one thing was strange.
Who is using Gu poison?
I had gone through every text I could lay hands on, and the common sense of the Central Plains did not hold in this world at all. Even the dantian—the well where inner power pools, the most basic foundation there is—was a concept this world had never possessed. That true cultivation had never arisen here was no surprise. Even ordinary martial skill had scarcely developed. The height of what passed for training was the building of stamina and a little quickness of foot, and there it ended.
And a world like that had the Gu?
No. Even supposing it did, there was no cause to use one here of all places. Why not? Ask it the other way around. What reason could anyone have? Speak a single spell and a prohibition set itself. Sign your name once and a constraint took hold. Who would go to the trouble of breeding a thing like a Gu?
And yet one was being used, right before my eyes.
I'll have to look into this.
First, though, the guild master had to live. His lips had already gone blue, and black veins were standing out beneath the skin. Leave him like that and even a child passing in the road could have told you he would be dead within a quarter-hour.
I looked him full in the face and drew a slender needle from my belt.
"Seol. Hold him fast."
"Mm."
While she pinned him down, I called fire up into my fingertips.
Flame kindled at the fingertips, fierce enough to turn steel red.
I held the needle in the fire, and in a breath it glowed a fierce red. My fingers found the hollow just beneath his sternum. I drove the heated needle in without a moment's pause.
"...Khk! Guh—!"
His body jerked and heaved, and blood came spurting out of him.
"He's giving up quite a lot of it."
A few minutes passed, if that. When the flood at last began to ebb, a final drop fell from his throat, and with it came a small insect sheathed in black ichor. It had lived through even that spray of blood. Its legs twitched, and it crawled.
"What is that...? It certainly isn't like any parasite I've seen..."
Most people, faced with such a thing for the first time, never even thought to blame an insect. Young as she was, a Saintess was still a Saintess. She understood at once that no old illness had done this, nor any fit of fear—that the creature itself was the cause. What she did not know was precisely what she was looking at. Fair enough. The Gu was a thing that did not exist in this world to begin with, and she had every cause to be shaken. Holy power, so perfectly suited to healing, had failed to kill a single insect bent on taking a life.
I'll have to explain it to her later.
Cecilia was an ally, and a sure one. Telling her could only do good. No harm would come of it. So that I might explain, and so that I might study the thing, I sealed the insect inside an empty bottle.
With the creature that had occupied his body gone, the guild master's ragged breath began, little by little, to find an even pace.
"You can speak now, I'd say. Answer me."
My voice came out low. Low, and threaded with a rasp of iron that seemed to catch and tear at the chest. At my side, Cecilia gathered holy power at her fingertips, ready for whatever bleeding might follow.
"...I never saw his face. He wore a mask."
"Did you think I spared you just to listen to talk like that?"
None of what I wanted. Only the shell of an answer, dressed up as words. I couldn't stomach it. My hand closed on his throat, and when I put a little more strength behind it he gagged, the breath cut short out of him.
Hyeon stepped in and laid a light hand on my arm.
"Master, go on like that and you won't hear the answer you want either. Please, calm yourself. Just a little."
"Hah... You're right. Rush a thing, and even what might have been done comes to nothing."
I eased my grip. My eyes did not. They still ran him through, thick with the will to kill.
A guild master, it seemed, knew how to read a room. Unasked, he began to offer more.
"He wore a black cloak, so I could tell neither his build nor whether he was man or woman."
I judged there was nothing further worth the hearing, and I was drawing my sword when he lifted his voice.
"But."
"...You swear that was truly said?"
"I-it was! I will swear it on everything I have!"
The Heavenly Demon. That was the thought that struck me. His last words had been just that—that the Demon would soon return.
I had killed him. I was certain of it.
No. There was no point in thinking so. Had I myself not been born into this world, and my disciples along with me? There was nothing strange in the Heavenly Demon being born here as well.
"Have you anything else to say?"
"...Nothing. This is all I know. I have told you everything, so please, spare me!"
"I shall spare you."
The words were barely out of my mouth before I drove his head into the ground, as if it were of no consequence at all.
"I didn't kill you. Don't worry."
"What do you mean to do with him?" Cecilia asked, careful.
"I'll take him to the Academy. He was under our escort to begin with, and this touches the Demon. Better that we deliver him ourselves."
She called it a sound judgment, and closed his wounds only far enough that the breath would stay in him. Light shivered over his body, then quickly sank away. I couldn't take my eyes off it.
As I thought. That was never mere healing.
When she had done what she could for him, Cecilia came quietly to my side.
"Will you explain it to me now...?"
"I will. What is it you want to know?"
"That insect. Please, tell me what it is."
"Have you ever heard of the Gu?"
"No."
She took it as a word she was hearing for the first time.
"Put simply, you may think of it as a parasite."
"Holy power is the greatest of all arts for the healing of a person. I can say that with certainty. And it could not kill a single parasite...?"
An art strong in healing. In a sense, she wasn't wrong. It could restore a body cut apart—how could anyone say it was not strong in healing? But even I, with no deep attainment in holy power, could see that the claim was only half true.
"Let me ask you the other way around."
"Then ask."
"Since when did you decide that holy power was a power of healing?"
"...What?"
It was a question she had never once imagined. Chosen as the Saintess, she had been taught—in the Church and at the Academy alike—that holy power held a rare and excellent power to heal. And she had not merely been taught. On the strength of that teaching she had healed thousands of times over. To be told, all at once, that holy power was no power of healing could only stop her mouth.
Whether I knew what that did to her or not, I said what I thought.
"Have you never found it strange? That the power of a god should be strong at nothing more than healing?"
Healing was no petty thing. But healing itself lay, in the end, within the reach of human hands. And the power of a god was only that? It was plainly strange.
"As I see it, holy power is nothing so small as healing."
"...Then what do you take it for, Lord Cheon Hwi?"
"The turning back of time. Or the restoring of a thing to the form it had at first."
Only power of that order deserved to be called a god's. And why did I think so? Because Cecilia herself had told me. Holy power, she had said, could not mend a defect present from the moment of birth. I hadn't understood why, at the start. Then I watched it fail against the Gu, and I knew. The art was not healing at all.
A Gu becomes one with the body, until it is taken for part of the body's original form. Had the power been simple healing, the Gu might have lived, but the color, at least, ought to have returned to his face.
It hadn't. He had only grown worse.
If what I suspected was true, then even that worsening made sense. I told her as much, and for a long while she said nothing.
It is a hard thing, when the world you have believed in comes apart.
But she would have to bear it. If she stopped spending holy power on healing alone, she would grow further still, and she would grow strong. I stepped aside so as not to intrude on what was coming over her, and my disciples were there.
"Finished?"
"Yes. Seol, you did well, holding him."
I stroked her hair as I praised her. At that she smiled, just a little, and Hyeon watched the way one watches a thing she envies.
The hand moving through Seol's hair was a careless one. To Hyeon, even the carelessness was something to be envied.
Why only Seol...
She couldn't bring herself to say that it stung. She could only watch his fingers travel softly through the gentle disarray of Seol's hair. And Seol, as if hoping the touch might last even a moment longer, as if she meant not to let that hand escape, leaned her head further into it.
"Come to think of it, the memories of this life and the memories of the last may be tangled together. Talk a while with Cecilia. It will help you set them in order."
He said it idly, drawing his hand away. Seol looked up at him with the disappointment plain on her face, but he was already far off. When the last of that warmth left her hair, she turned at once to Hyeon.
"Jealous?"
"Yes. Horribly."
She could never have said it to him. But that was the hand of the master she loved so dearly, and how could she help but envy it? The answer came out carrying all of that with it.
"Then, here."
Seol reached up and stroked Hyeon's hair.
"...Seol? What are you doing?"
She had said she envied their master's hand. Why, all of a sudden, was Seol petting her head?
"Hyeon, you said you were jealous of being touched. So I'll touch you."
"That isn't what I—"
"Your hair's soft."
Seol went on stroking, for all the world as if she couldn't hear a word.
"Stop..."
"Really stop...?"
At that, Seol looked down at her with the eyes of a puppy whose toy has been taken away.
"...You can touch."
Caught by that look, Hyeon nodded in spite of herself and allowed it. She didn't dislike it so very much, and the hand was close enough to the one from long ago that, faced with actually refusing, she found she had no wish to.
For now, just as he had said, the memories of this life and of the last lay jumbled together. She would have to speak with Cecilia and set them straight.
"Miss Hyeon, Miss Seol. Might we talk for a moment?"
Hyeon had been just about to go looking for her. As if on cue, Cecilia came to them first—perhaps having finished ordering the understanding he had left her with—and was the one to ask.
That the invitation would soon become a thing she regretted was not far off at all. Cecilia, as she was in this moment, simply had no way of knowing it.
