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It had always been something like this.
The men who had killed my uncle, Jang Dae-bu, and Mok-i had been worth only this much.
I felt the depth of my own stupidity. I should have done this sooner.
-
Two of them fell.
“...”
Eight of them fell.
“Ah, ha ha…”
Only ten were left.
“Kyahahahahaha—!!!”
I had no time to indulge in some metaphysical treatise on what was right and wrong.
I could only focus on sensation.
Bone and flesh split apart.
The skull of a weak oppressor crumbled beneath the weight of my blade.
Yes.
I was savoring the highest pleasure of all, right now.
“Y-you monster bitch! Stay back! I said don’t come any closer—”
Father, tell me.
Was this all I had to suffer at the hands of such trash?
-
And then there was no one left.
No—exactly one person remained.
“I’m sorry. What I said earlier was… ”
“...”
“So please, please spare my life. I wouldn’t even mind bowing all the way to the floor, all right?”
Lady Banghosa, who had been strutting and shouting in the bathhouse, was now begging for her life.
“Say, what was it you said just now?”
“My apology—no, nyaaah!”
I laid the axe lightly atop the crown of her head.
I couldn’t bring myself to kill her as simply as I had her husband. She would pay for the sin of tormenting a tender heart.
“Speak properly.”
For a long moment, she hesitated.
I couldn’t wait any longer, so I slowly, just a little, put force into the axe where it rested.
I broke the fragile balance that had kept the blade from splitting her skull open.
The satisfying weight sinking in through her hair and scalp traveled cleanly to my fingertips.
She couldn’t endure it. Of course she couldn’t; she was a woman with no backbone, no conviction.
“You said you’d kill me before I was sold to Hongru… ”
“Good. Next?”
“N-next…?”
Bang!
Something came loose with a wet little sound. A strip of meat. When I looked closely, it was one of her ears.
Still, perhaps because my hand was not yet steady, a piece of her cheek had been torn away with it.
“Kyaaaah! W-why are you doing this! Why are you doing this to me!!”
Man-seok used to tell me to smile and live. He told me not to ruin a pretty face.
So I smiled.
“Ha! Hah, haha… Right. There’s no way you’d remember. Of course not, huh?”
Thunk!
“You whore with no mother or father.”
One arm came off.
Thunk!
“You filthy rag even good for nothing but playing concubine.”
The other arm came off too.
“Hm, that’s a bit easier on the eyes now.”
I wasn’t Man-seok’s uncle.
I wasn’t the kind of person who could stand serenely in the midst of such a flood of emotion.
What I needed most right now was someone to take it out on.
Yes. There she was, wasn’t she?
My heart had turned to slop.
Then all I had to do was dunk her in the slop.
I brought over one of the remaining tubs of bathwater and splashed it over her.
By then, she looked like a rat caught in the rain, and had already fainted.
I looked down at her.
She had only cursed a few times.
But in the murim I had lived in, a world ruled by the law of the strong devouring the weak, a few words of abuse were more than enough to warrant execution.
I had no desire to argue over right and wrong.
The law of the strong devouring the weak might not have belonged only to the murim—it might have been the principle by which the whole world turned.
But it wasn’t something I could follow without question. Even there, there were things good and bad.
I knew the subtle difference between principle and moral duty.
Up until now, I had pursued duty. I had believed in what I thought was right and acted on it.
The result was the deaths of my uncle and Mok-i.
So from now on, I would live strictly by principle.
If this was a world where the strong ruled, then I would rule.
If the weak had to be trampled, then I would trample them.
There would be no more wildflowers, crushed again and again no matter how many times they bloomed.
“Strip down, even your underclothes, and lie face-down.”
I gave the order while looking at the woman, who had come to her senses and was staring at the muddy water on the floor.
I had already taken off her upper garments, so she hesitated with her chest exposed.
Bang.
In a ridiculous state, having lost both arms, the woman buried herself in the filth and rubbed herself against the floor until she had stripped off every last scrap of clothing.
It was a desperate struggle, the sort that would have been admirable if not for what it was.
But I had no intention of letting her live.
I would slowly, cruelly slowly, snuff out the last ember of hope she had left.
I fetched a rope from the storehouse behind us and bound her ankles with it.
I cut a small piece away to make a gag and forced it between her teeth.
The rest of the rope I finished with a looped knot.
Then I hung her upside down from the eaves of the courtyard roof where her husband had slept.
“Mmph! Mm-mmmph! Gnnngh!”
Her real hair, hanging down like willow branches, swayed with every movement.
Dangling there upside down, she tried to curl her upper body a few times before quickly sagging limp.
How did it feel, having the heavens beneath your feet?
And what of the humiliation of looking up at the ground as though it were the sky?
I felt like composing a poem, but as an ignorant fool with no learning, I couldn’t summon a single word, so I simply turned away.
-
At the threshold of summer.
I could feel the night growing deeper and deeper.
It wasn’t only darkness. The scent of blood, the stink of corpses, the silence.
Everything compressed into the word death had unraveled and filled the air around me.
Scenes flashed past.
The back of the Official Go’s head. The deaf maid. The final moments of the Banghosa. And me, soaked in madness.
The oak hairpin. The child collapsing before my eyes.
Come to think of it, Mok-i…
It took me half a watch of searching before I understood. It was the work of a ghost.
Mok-i’s body was nowhere to be found.
-
I somehow managed to find my way back. I didn’t even know how many torches I’d made and replaced along the way.
I wanted to pat myself on the back for having learned the terrain in advance, just in case.
It was spilled water.
If the higher-ranked murim men began investigating, we were all as good as dead.
There would be no hiding the slaughter I had wrought.
So I had been about to tell everyone to run together.
There was no need. It was gone. No— it was disappearing.
A home gone up in wildfire. Blood splashed thickly over the ground. A place turned into a slaughterhouse.
It wasn’t the Banghosa’s house. It was reality, right here in Go-chon.
The familiar faces I had been so glad to see no longer moved.
They stood there now, dead, staring blankly at the village turned into a sea of fire.
“Ah, ah…”
Emotion surged up in me.
If I had stayed silent. Would everything have been different?
“Father—!!!”
-
A crimson light blazed in eyes no human being should have had.
Those eyes became a line. The monster, advancing with appalling speed, struck down with a straight, knife-edged hand.
I didn’t even think of trying to block it.
I had seen the abnormal force spilling from that hand split a boulder in two.
The raging monster was my father.
Even with the veins bulging and his body swelling grotesquely, I knew it was him.
It was my father’s face. The stains on his body were the same. Even the faint sounds leaking from him were the same.
“Kyaaaak!!”
“Father! Please… come to your senses… ”
He couldn’t understand me. He had completely let go of reason.
I didn’t dare think of attacking him.
The shock of it all made my head swim.
Maybe because too many things had happened, I lost my balance and went down.
I had to admit it. He was nothing but a monster.
And yet, until the very end, I had believed in my father without a shred of doubt.
In the brief instant before his hand struck down, everything came flooding back.
Man-seok. Mok-i. The people of Go-chon.
Father. Father. Father.
In the end, I couldn’t find a reason to keep living.
Clang!
Even if it hurts, even if it’s unbearable, even if I want to die, I have to live.
…Unless it had been a curse.
My instinct to dodge the knife-hand had been right.
The axe I thrust up reflexively lost one of its blades in the collision and fell apart at my feet.
That memory of him being a Kunlun swordsman didn’t seem like nonsense after all. Apparently not.
The axe hadn’t stopped the hand-strike. But it had succeeded in throwing off its path.
It had been a blow meant to split my body clean down the middle, but all it cost me was a lock of hair.
If I was going to survive after all—
I had to run. First I had to keep my life, then find some way to restore things to normal—
Something I had forgotten suddenly came back to me.
The simple, horrifying fact that the entire area was filled with corpses.
Too frantic to notice, I caught my leg on something and stumbled.
It was Hwa-yeong’s.
It’s over.
The world tipped backward. I looked straight into my father’s face. He was still insane.
Moonlight poured into my eyes.
It was only for a moment, but I truly wanted to live.
And then—
Whirrr—!
I saw a light unlike anything I had ever known.
A crimson horizon.
Above it, appearing and vanishing all at once, my father’s chest flew through the air, severed from his body and hurled into the sky.
I was still seated on the ground, staring blankly ahead.
My father was gone.
-
A man was standing there.
He wore black clothes, as though he had stolen darkness itself and draped it over his body.
He was young. At most, he seemed a few years older than me.
His tired red eyes still carried an air of authority, but they were dead.
He lowered the single-edged blade in his hand and slid it back into its sheath.
I was tangled up in too many feelings to get even a single word out.
That man had saved me, for one thing.
And yet—
Bang!
The blow carried murderous hatred.
Even so, it wasn’t as though he had swung wildly like that Banghosa bastard had.
He was the one who had slain the monster that had been my father in a single strike, from a distance where the blade shouldn’t even have reached. To think my attack could touch someone like that would have been arrogance.
What I had imagined was a follow-up attack: a surprise strike, throwing away the axe and hurling myself at him to bring him down by force.
By any objective measure, I had been thorough.
But—
Even among murim practitioners, there are levels.
That was as far as it went. Once the axe haft caught on the sheath, I couldn’t take a single step.
My body had fallen prey to the man’s unknown trick and frozen solid.
The bastard folded his hands behind his back with eerie ease.
A vile energy, blackening everything around us, pressed down on my whole body.
Only after a long while in that state could I speak.
“This is a place outsiders can’t come and go as they please.”
It was true.
The surrounding mountains were steep and the paths wound on and on, so even if you knew where the Heoksan Fortress site was, finding the way into Go-chon would have been difficult.
And on top of that, for a man like that to appear in the dead of night—it could only mean one thing.
The one who had turned my father into a monster was right here, in front of me.
“...Your guess is correct.”
I hadn’t expected him to admit it so readily.
Even knowing that, I asked again.
It was nothing more than a denial of reality, a desperate wish that he would soften it with a lie.
“I burned the village.”
His eyes moved to my father.
“That, too, was my amusement.”
“Aaaaaaaah—!!!”
The force controlling my body vanished. Shamefully, the man had let me go.
I got up and rushed him again and again. It was, in plain terms, a struggle.
Memories of my father kept crashing over me, one after another, without mercy.
I swung the axe just as desperately.
Of course it didn’t reach. I wasn’t stupid enough to cling to hope.
It was, if anything, a war—the body and the mind driving blades into each other, even while knowing one would ultimately have to yield.
-
In the end, my body raised a white flag.
My limbs wouldn’t move. I couldn’t even make a sound.
I collapsed quietly onto the dirt floor and slipped into a state close to death.
“Do you want to kill me?”
It was true. My teeth were grinding, my eyes rolling back in fury.
Right now, I really was… beyond words.
But I had no strength.
Forget fighting—I could hardly even stand on the ground.
“Then get up. Get up and help me.”
Out of nowhere, the bastard made me an offer.
“Learn everything from me, and try to kill me. I’ll give you the chance.”
And yet—
No matter how strong he was, it didn’t matter.
It was the tongue of a murim schemer who had turned my father into a corpse.
Even if I did kill him as he said, I’d only be the one dancing on the end of his strings.
I’d rather die here and now.
Crunch.
I made up my mind to die.
But it wasn’t enough. It felt as though something had been jammed into my jaw joint.
I couldn’t even bite my own tongue.
The incomprehensible power he possessed refused even my suicide.
So there was no choice to refuse, after all.
There was nothing for it.
Lying still, I shook my head.
I had nothing left to lose, so I decided to let the world do what it would.
I refused. What are you going to do about it? Rip my nails out, maybe?
“The Samcheonghyeon Sword. It’s the title bestowed upon the three finest swordsmen in Kunlun. The child you called father was one of them.”
“You bastard, how long have you been watching us—”
It was a voice wrung out by force.
This bastard…
He had been watching us from the very beginning.
The Banghosa’s abduction. My father’s madness.
Maybe even my coming here.
Was everything just part of the bastard’s plan?
I felt something I should never have felt.
Something inside me snapped.
From this moment on, that man was no mere arch-enemy.
He was the source of every tragedy in the world, a wretch that had to be erased.
“And I’ll tell you one more thing. Mok-i was a—”
A thin, greasy smile.
“Stop. Sto-o-op!!”
It seemed I really would have to see this man through to the end.
“What… what do I need to do?”
-