The Blood Demon's Question
Beneath the red star that heaped its light, layer upon layer, across the snowfield of the earth, the Blood Demon opened her eyes.
What words could possibly describe this? It was no emission of overwhelming killing intent, nor any art that vented qi to crush the surrounding air. Such tricks were unnecessary. Simply by standing there, she had turned this very place into the heart of a world where ironclad laws wavered and causality dissolved, a nexus where heavenly fortune followed her pointing fingers and possibility itself shifted with every step she took. At the throat of the world, on that very spot, the Blood Demon unfurled the small fingers of her frail body.
"..."
A slender hand. Within that body, no trace of the Blood Demon Art remained.
The Blood Demon Art was no common demonic art to be ranked among the myriad others. It was not something one merely learned, trained, and carried to its peak. It was the curse of solitude itself: the congealed resentment and craving of eighty-four thousand demons who had failed to reach transcendence since the age of Cheonma, a devouring collective that had swallowed the countless ones who perished on transcendence's very threshold. In truth, it would be more correct to call it not a demonic art but a demonic entity.
The Blood Demon Art had left her. But the Blood Demon was the Blood Demon not because she had trained in it. Had she mastered the Heavenly Demon Divine Art instead, she would have been Cheonma; had she polished the third-rate arts of the back alleys, she would have been called Cheon-goe. That is what a transcendent is.
But where there is no root, there can be no branches. So the Blood Demon dismantled the martial principles the Blood Demon Art had engraved into her before it departed, leaving only the bare frame, tempered that frame with the intent of transcendence against the principles of the stars risen into the heavens, and wrought, like a miracle, a new martial art befitting this frail body.
Its name: the Forged Blood Art.
The curse of the demonic art was gone. This was not the Blood Demon Art that had ruled the blood outside her body and gorged itself upon it, but an art for slowly tempering the vessels within, the purest possible way to train the inner body, and yet unfinished. It required no dantian, and so it required no accumulated qi either. It was a training art for tempering this incomparably frail body from the very first breath. And just as power seeps into the blood of a spirit creature until that blood itself becomes an elixir, the day she completed a new realm by tempering her blood with the unfinished Forged Blood Art, another path to transcendence would open.
And so, taking the newborn Forged Blood Art as the root of her inner strength, she took a single step forward.
"You there. I have kept you waiting."
A shudder ran through the air, and yet it was nothing more than a girl's limpid, impossibly small voice. But that voice shattered the world around Kang Mu-jin and drew him out into a new one the way a chick breaks its shell, and the sturdy body of Kang Mu-jin, who had been thrashing in an illusion of a sea of blood risen to his chin, shook with a violent tremor.
The Blood Demon extended her hand, and formless energy flowed out through the blizzard like a warm wind, gently casting Namgung Ye-rin far off to the side. The step she took then slid across the snowfield as though gliding. Treading Snow Without a Trace. Because it left no mark upon the snow, she seemed to sway closer and closer like a formless ghost.
Amid the surging dread, Kang Mu-jin barely managed to force his trembling mouth open.
"Wh-who... are you...?"
"How pitiable."
A tone steeped in pity, soft with compassion. Though the words had been cut short, there was no room left for humiliation. Instead, a shame welled up from the deepest part of his chest, as though a child's reckless arrogance had been gently pointed out by an elder.
The tip of the Blood Demon's finger rose toward the night sky where the red starlight wheeled.
"Your eyes gaze upon the stars of heaven,"
Longing. Yearning. And arrogance. A human's eyes can touch any corner of the sky by nothing more than lifting the head, and yet,
"what those short arms of yours can grasp is no more than a sword of three feet."
As if this were the one prop left to hold him up, the arm with which Kang Mu-jin had been gripping his sword with all his strength lost its power and trembled in the wind. Crimson eyes rippled. A sea of blood swayed. The Blood Demon spoke.
"Behold."
Fwoosh! Without leaving so much as a pinch of trace on the snow-covered ground, the Blood Demon's figure, vanished in one instant, stood before his eyes the next, footsteps that even a superhuman's eyes could not follow, that left not even a mirage behind. This was none other than the fabled art of shrinking the earth. Her crimson eyes trailed red afterimages, and in the current of a world that had left sound behind, the Blood Demon's will crossed time and space to drive into Kang Mu-jin's mind as a voice.
"One who has never seen a tiger race along a mountain ridge, how could such a one speak of the vastness of the range?"
RRRUUUMBLE!!!
Tiger Thunder Roar. There was no need even to strain her throat and cry out a roar; the mere extension of her fist sent the tiger's thunder tearing through the air behind it.
Tiger Cannon Chain Strikes
Overlaid upon the small fist that shot out was a tiger bounding along the ridgeline, baring its claws at its prey.
"...!"
Kang Mu-jin's body, its flesh and bones torn by those savage forepaws, screamed from the depths of his soul, a cry like a dying man's final word. There were no wounds on his flesh. But just as a tiger's roar drains the strength from every limb, in the instant his soul-rending agony sent him flying across the snowfield,
FWOOM! The Blood Demon kicked off the ground and soared up and up into the night sky, silhouetted against the dazzling backlight of the stars.
"One who has never seen a shooting star bite the tail of the high winds, how could such a one speak of the boundlessness of the sky?"
Meteor Shot
A single stream of shooting stars, each biting the tail of the last, fell from the heavens wrapped in blood-red flames that roared to life as they dropped.
KRA-KOOOOOM!!! As a fallen meteor leaves a colossal scar upon the earth, so in an instant heaven and earth overturned. He had not taken it head-on; it was merely the aftermath of a force that carried its shock in its wake. But like an insect shut inside a shaking barrel, he was helplessly swept up and tumbled along by the cascading avalanche. Even channeling his mana to root himself in place and exert the Thousand-Pound Weight meant nothing. Reduced to a human utterly powerless before the calamity, Kang Mu-jin dragged out every last thread of mana in his body and screamed.
"Ugh, aaaaaaah...!!!"
Shring! He swung a sword into the pouring drifts of snow. Perhaps because it was a sword path unfurled in a life-or-death crisis swept up in disaster, with every distraction cleanly forgotten, seven flowers blooming from the tip of his blade split the shockwaves and embroidered the empty air in brilliant color. A dark exultation flickered through Kang Mu-jin's eyes, which had wavered between fear and dread. A more perfect Seven Plum Blossom Sword could never exist. The buds unfurling now were more beautiful than any he had ever produced, beautiful enough to make him certain of it.
And then. Tss-tss-tss! The hot blood Namgung Ye-rin had sprayed across the snowfield came gathering through the air. The flowing blood drew a half-circle, rose as a rampart, and whirled about her body as though dancing. A demon submerged in a sea of blood. What congealed in the Blood Demon's hand, taking firm shape, was a three-foot sword made of blood.
"Ah, ahhh...!"
The exultation in Kang Mu-jin's eyes warped into horror. The technique of the Seven Plum Blossom Sword he had unfurled with the last of his strength. The same stance. The same sword path.
"One who has never seen a single flower bloom in a meadow, how could such a one speak of its fragrance?"
They bloomed. Along the sword path as it curved, seven flowers. Seven Blood Plum Blossoms.
Seven Flowers Raging Tide
He had believed no more perfect Seven Plum Blossom Sword could exist. But the blood-plum strikes, released far later, came pressing in slow and ponderous. Crack, crack! The exquisitely budded flowers of mana shattered petal by petal. It was the negation of his life itself. His Seven Plum Sword, the one he had forged by forgetting sleep and meals, forgetting life, forgetting existence, lost in nothing but obsession and rapture, was clashing against hers and crumbling to pieces.
Kang Mu-jin's feet, which had done nothing but give ground and retreat, stopped at some point. There was nowhere left to fall back to, and the sword that had once bloomed such free-spirited plum blossoms lay broken in two. Small as she was, a girl far smaller than the tall Kang Mu-jin, this was a cliff. A sheer cliff barring the very heavens. Just as the old warrior in his dream had wailed and despaired before a cliff, only now, facing a colossal wall no human strength could defy, did Kang Mu-jin grasp the true meaning of despair.
A man left behind. A man defeated. Like the old warrior in the dream, was he too now sunk in a swamp he could never crawl out of, left with nothing but despair? What had broken was not the sword.
'...Was it this heart of mine?'
The thick swamp of his heart split open, and eyes steeped in blood color came to rest before Kang Mu-jin's vacant pupils. A girl who had climbed the empty air as though ascending a staircase had risen to stand level with him. Her eyes met his gaze, yet held the starlight of the heavens, a light no craned neck could ever reach. Hands folded behind her back amid the driving blizzard, the Blood Demon spoke in a voice that rang clear.
"To a chivalrous hero, martial arts are a shield. A means to guard the weak and to cast aside one's own life so that another's hardships may be shouldered."
Perhaps such a life had once been open to him. He might have walked the hero's road without stubbornly clinging to the way of the sword, bearing the duty of protection as one hunter among many.
"To a demon, martial arts are a blade. A means to harm others to fill one's desires, and to strip away what others crave."
That was the life he had come to live. However many fine words he wrapped around the way of the sword, Kang Mu-jin had, in the end, done no more than take the wrong road. He had swung his blade for selfish desire. He had become evil, and he had become a demon. And yet. And yet, even so...
"What are martial arts to you?"
"What is martial arts?"
The voices overlapped. Light returned to Kang Mu-jin's eyes. Yearning and longing. What surfaced in his mind was the cliff, and the wrinkled back of the old man who had wrestled through question and answer before it. What had the old man been gazing at, all that time? Was it truly nothing but the cliff? The cliff, and what had been there was...
"...A flower."
No flower carries its life on forever. Someday summer will come, and it will bend and break in the scorching sun, be trampled into the dirt, and its end will arrive. Even so, he had wanted to witness that final moment.
"...A single cluster of plum blossoms, blooming on a cliff."
And so, through his clouding consciousness, he slowly traced his sword path, one flourish of the Seven Plum Blossom Sword, unfurled with a broken blade. In that moment, a thread of dazzling fragrance seeped through the blooming flowers.
"Ah, ahh...!"
In the slowed current of time, Kang Mu-jin's sword drew his own world in the shape of plum blossoms. A scholar's ink fragrance travels a thousand li; a warrior's sword fragrance carves ten thousand. Sword Fragrance, Ten Thousand Miles. In a darkness where nothing could be seen, a road appeared for the very first time. Along the curving sword path, plum blossoms carved the trace of that fragrance into the world, spilling out the scent of his longing.
"Aaaaaaah...!!!"
Awe and ecstasy. How could this feeling, boiling up from the deepest pit of his belly, be squeezed into a mere two words? At last he could know. At last he could make it known. What waited at the end of this road, what he might see there! And just before the sword path of the Seven Plum Blossom Sword reached its culminating peak,
Thud.
"...A fist?"
A single fist. At some point, the casual punch the Blood Demon had thrown was already resting against his body. And then, with a long, grinding crack, the world split open. Kang Mu-jin's origin. It had no physical existence, yet from the moment of his awakening it had let him wield mana and become superhuman. That origin, the small world within his body, had been pierced through.
KRAKOOOM! A thunderclap only Kang Mu-jin could hear: the sound of his soul and flesh being shattered apart.
"...!!!"
A soundless scream reverberated. His mana scattered. His awakening force scattered. Everything that had made up Kang Mu-jin dissolved into nothingness, like a murim martial artist whose dantian had been shattered. But most despairing of all was this: even his enlightenment was scattering away. With his awakening force gone, Kang Mu-jin's body, now just an ordinary man's, could not endure the blizzard and crumpled into the snow. The violent offender of the Gate terror. All that remained for him now were years sealed in the deepest level of an underground prison, chewing over nothing but despair until the moment his life ended with neither sword nor enlightenment to his name.
And then.
"Next time,"
The Blood Demon's crimson features curved into a smile as faint as a crescent moon.
"I will be expecting a better answer."
...Next time, she says.
"What is the pinnacle of martial arts?"
The old man who had wrestled through question and answer before the cliff. That wrinkled back. He had despaired; he had wailed. And still he had not given up. He had asked and answered once more, searching for a new answer.
"...So that was it."
His vision dimmed, blurring at the edges. As if to light the darkening world, the red star shone above the girl.
"How distant... it all is..."
Surrounded by the blood blossoms blooming in lavish profusion across the snowfield, Kang Mu-jin closed his eyes.