Meeting the Heavenly Demon's Fan (9)
The moonlight filtered through the clouds as the woman called my name.
“Baek Hwaryeong!”
It was the first time I had heard that name since meeting her as a child at the Sapa harmony gathering.
“Please. Stay here with me until I die. It won’t take long.”
Tears slid down her cheeks, freezing into ice the moment they left her skin. They shattered against the ground like fragile crystals.
The memory still haunts me.
The woman never overcame her blocked meridians. She died without leaving any last words. By the end, she could barely speak at all.
As her guest, I was driven out the day after her death without even being allowed to attend the funeral. I understood that my presence had become a threat to the Ice Palace, so I left quietly without resistance.
Unfortunately, the Ice Palace had already been marked as an obstacle by the righteous factions long before that. They were targeted for destruction regardless of me.
Without their leader, the Ice Palace was weak. I remember they lasted less than a month before being wiped out. When I returned to the site later, only ashes remained.
I slowly opened my eyes, shaking off the dizziness. A completely different landscape greeted me.
It was a serene mansion nestled deep within a forest. The lake inside looked like it would be home to colorful koi, and I could almost hear the gentle clack of bamboo water features somewhere nearby. The atmosphere was nothing like the Ice Palace I remembered.
I spread my Qi Sense to scan the interior. Countless martial artists were hiding throughout the mansion. Many of them were at the level of the old man I had met at the Company. This place would be quite entertaining.
Once again, I followed the same path as before. I approached the main gate and pushed it open. It wasn’t locked. The door slid open smoothly, revealing the scene inside.
Martial artists stood lined up on both sides of a stone path. Rather than preparing to face an enemy, they looked more like they were receiving an honored guest.
I had expected something to come flying at me the moment I stepped inside.
“What is it? Even you don’t recognize this scene, Harin?”
“Normally, the martial artists swarm you the second you walk in. They go all out trying to kill you. It’s seriously hard.”
Then why were these people acting like this? I wanted to know the reason too.
“Greetings.”
An old man standing by the gate gave a respectful fist salute. He had just stepped into the Transcendence Realm. He was probably one of the Ice Palace elders. To him, my avatar in this game should have been nothing more than a blood-soaked monster. So why was he showing such courtesy? Martial artists usually looked down on those beneath them in cultivation.
I have no idea, Harin. You know more about this game than I do. If you don’t know, then neither do I.
“This one is the First Elder of the Ice Palace. My name is Seol Yoo-hyun.”
“I am Baek Hwaryeong. May I ask why you are treating me with such respect?”
“It is because of the mercy you showed.”
Even though you had every right to massacre us all for the sake of your family’s revenge, you killed no one. You merely gave a warning. Our leader judged that it would be improper not to respond to your upright character. That is why we have been waiting for the day you would visit us as a guest.
“Is that so.”
I felt no particular emotion. The matter didn’t strike me as particularly impressive. I listened to Harin’s excited explanation with one ear and let it flow out the other as I followed the elder deeper into the mansion.
When the door to the central building opened, I saw a woman sitting on a wooden chair, smoking from a long pipe. Her snow-white hair, her red eyes that resembled a snow rabbit’s, and her skin so pale it could only be described as deathly white—all of it reminded me of the woman from the Ice Palace in my memories.
Only, the girl from my memories had been more beautiful. It was only natural. She had once commanded the entire continent with nothing but her appearance.
“Please understand that I cannot rise to greet you properly.”
“I understand.”
Even at a glance, her condition was dire. Most of her meridians had frozen solid as a side effect of her Nine Yin Blocked Meridians. Because of that, her qi, which should have flowed endlessly, was beginning to stagnate. Necrosis had already started spreading from the areas where qi had pooled.
It was impressive that she was even conscious. Breathing alone must have been excruciating. How could she still wear such a sorrowful expression? Tsk. She really didn’t have to resemble her in that way too.
“Elder. May I speak with her alone?”
“I will wait outside.”
The Ice Palace elder closed the door, leaving only me and the woman in the room. She gestured for me to sit, but I refused her offer by asking a different question.
“Are you the mastermind behind all of this?”
“Yes, Avenger. Everything that has happened until now occurred because I desperately clung to life.”
The woman confessed that, terrified of approaching death, she had turned to evil deeds. At first, she had relied on sorcery. But the righteous factions stood in her way, so she destroyed them. All to survive.
In the process, she stole secret manuals from the righteous path in an attempt to cure her blocked meridians, but she failed. There was no method to heal Nine Yin Blocked Meridians anywhere. If martial arts wouldn’t work, she decided to rely on modern technology. All to survive.
But that failed too. The doctors only called her condition incurable and offered no solutions. So she thought—if one path wouldn’t work, why not combine two? Surely something would come of it. That was why she created the research lab and sacrificed so many. The equipment they wore was merely a byproduct. All of it was simply… to survive.
I did not condemn her. I had no right to judge her evil deeds. The right to revenge belonged solely to the protagonist of this game. I was merely a stranger borrowing her body. It was not my place to weigh right and wrong.
“And yet you still couldn’t find a solution.”
“Correct. Thanks to that, I am now living on borrowed time.”
It certainly looked that way. I was no physician, but from a rough diagnosis, lasting even another month would be a miracle.
What a ridiculous story. Whether the game’s protagonist chose revenge or not, this woman’s true enemy had been destined to die in despair and sorrow anyway.
My hands felt restless. If I had known this would happen, I would have asked Enry how to summon a pipe. For now, I would make do with a temporary measure. I took the pipe from the woman’s hand and placed it between my lips. The sharp, medicinal scent told me it wasn’t ordinary tobacco.
“Medicine for pain relief?”
“Could you return that, please?”
“I refuse. This seat is a rather willful person, you see.”
My mind was too tangled to grant her request. Originally, I had planned to end things moderately. After all, this was just a game. This building wasn’t the Ice Palace I remembered. The people staying here weren’t the sect members from my memories. Even the woman before me wasn’t the one I remembered.
There was no reason to feel any lingering attachment. My head understood that perfectly. So I had intended to simply enjoy it as a game.
But looking at this woman, the face from my old memories kept overlapping with hers, making it impossible to see the game as just a game. I must be getting old and senile. At this rate, I might end up throwing a tantrum someday, claiming I want revenge while suffering from dementia.
A sigh escaped me. It seemed I couldn’t turn away after all.
“Harin. Let’s stop here for today. I’ll send the next schedule later.”
I cut the connection and sat down on the chair opposite her.
“As you said, I am the avenger.”
It was a lie. I hadn’t been thinking about revenge at all. I only said it because it seemed like the only way to convince her.
“I kept thinking about it. What kind of revenge I should take when I finally met the mastermind. Should I kill her? Death is merely an escape. That alone could never resolve all my suffering. Should I slaughter everyone around her and leave her alive? That would certainly be tormenting. But then the culprit would resolve to start a new life out of hatred for me. That ending doesn’t appeal to me either.”
Every word was nonsense. I was simply saying whatever came to mind to create justification for treating her.
“Then a good idea occurred to me. To bestow a favor upon her. To make her realize that she can never repay the benefactor who saved her life. To force her to live the rest of her days in endless regret, frustration, and sorrow. To make her question whether she even deserves the happiness she holds every time she grasps it. What a beautiful, utterly wretched form of revenge, is it not?”
I will treat you.
When I said that, the woman blinked. Then she let out a laugh.
“Are you joking? You think you can break me with that kind of false hope—”
“Nine Yin Blocked Meridians is a disease where overwhelming yin energy freezes the meridians. To resolve it, you need an equally overwhelming yang energy capable of triggering Nine Yang Blocked Meridians.”
I paused and deliberately let my voice carry a hint of arrogance. For the first time, the woman frowned.
“Do you think I wouldn’t know that? I searched for such yang energy with everything I had. But I failed every time. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“Look.”
I gathered qi above my palm. It was energy like the sun itself. A divine blessing that descended from the heavens to embrace all things on earth, melting snow and coaxing new sprouts from the soil.
The woman must have felt it too. She tried to stand without thinking, but her legs gave out and she collapsed to the floor. Even so, she didn’t stop moving. She crawled until she was right in front of me, then carefully placed her hand over mine. And she felt the warmth.
“How… How can a woman like you possess such yang energy…”
“The true qi of the Ice Palace is like sharp ice. Then naturally, somewhere in this world, its opposite must exist as well.”
I had simply imitated it.
Back when I sent that woman away long ago, I didn’t shed a single tear. That was why I had cursed myself, thinking I was indifferent even to the death of my benefactor.
But I had been wrong. It wasn’t that I felt nothing. The shock had simply been so great that even I couldn’t measure its depth.
No matter how much time passed, I could never shake her from my heart. The reason I wandered the continent the moment the affairs of Murim ended was solely to find out if there was a cure for Nine Yin Blocked Meridians. To determine whether fate had truly sentenced her to death, or if we had simply distorted it as fate and given up.
I had hoped it would never be found. Only then could I accept it and move on.
But reality was cruel. At the end of my journey, I learned how to imitate this very energy.