The Gathering (3)
"And so Woo staggers, staggers, and collapses…"
Upon the Emei Sect's stage, a tragedy was unfolding — the tale of Hwan and Woo that had first been performed at the Tang Clan, now rechristened The Sichuan Elegy. The older disciples, those who had lived through war, seemed more moved than the young ones; tears welled in their eyes.
Hwan supported Woo and opened a door. The floor gave way, and the two of them dropped beneath the stage.
On the opposite side below, Ak Jun waited already dressed in Woo's likeness. Shintu crossed swiftly under the boards. Watching him pass, Ak Jun gave a single nod.
Jinmyung, his face remade by the art of face-changing into that of a stagehand, slipped quietly out from under the stage. The audience never noticed him leave — all save one.
He unfurled the Eight Immortals Step and cut rapidly across the grounds of Bokhosa Temple. Perhaps because the place had nothing to do with the gathering itself, the area around the Geumjatap stood blessedly empty.
Jinmyung counted himself fortunate that the old monk he had met before was off at the performance. The Geumjatap glittered in the moonlight, as if welcoming him home.
A cypress swayed faintly in the night wind. He circled the pagoda, thinking the scene a touch eerie.
Characters carved tier upon tier drank in the moonlight and shone. Recalling Danjun, Jinmyung studied the inscriptions.
On the first tier, the name of the Donghwa Merchant Group ran clockwise. On the second, the Emei Sect's seal ran the opposite way. With every ascending floor, the direction of the carving reversed.
This has to be a clue… Following the orientation of the characters, he began to walk a circuit around the Geumjatap.
The cypress stirred again in the night breeze. Gukgung-jinryeok saihu-i — bend the body, exhaust every strength, and only then rest. The words inscribed on the third and fourth tiers, together with the cypress itself, were more than enough to summon the memory of Zhuge Wuhou.
At Zhuge Wuhou's tomb, cypresses had been planted in his honor, and Du Fu, seeing those trees, had composed a poem.
Jinmyung murmured the lines of Du Fu's Ode to the Ancient Cypress that Danjun had sometimes recited in the garden. As he walked, matching his steps to the direction of the carved characters and mouthing the verse, the cypress's trembling seemed gradually to still.
"Even the trees before the shrine still receive the care of men…"
As the poem advanced, the highest tier of the Geumjatap vanished. Jinmyung steadied his startled heart. A formation had been triggered.
So it is true — a formation is the arranging of things by pouring will and qi into them…
He pressed on with the verse, fretting that he might stumble over a line, combing through his memory with anxious care.
The words of the monk he had met before the Geumjatap returned to him. If the heart is invested, anything can be moved…
Jinmyung had heard of formations and mystical arts before. In the Martial Alliance's archives there had even been treatises on the Zhuge Clan's renowned Eight Formations Diagram.
But compared to martial arts — which poured will and qi into one's own body — practitioners of mystical arts and formations were vanishingly rare. This was the first time Jinmyung had ever witnessed a formation activate.
Reading the Martial Alliance's records, he had always assumed the accounts were exaggerated. Watching the Geumjatap transform with every line he recited, he understood they had not been exaggerated at all.
As the poem neared its end, the Geumjatap hid itself floor by floor. Yet Jinmyung continued to circle as though the pagoda still stood in place.
"…Since ancient times, great timber has been hard to put to use."
Du Fu's Ode to the Ancient Cypress. The poem was said to have been composed after Du Fu visited Zhuge Wuhou's tomb in Sichuan. At that tomb, fifty-four cypresses had been planted — one for each year of Zhuge Liang's life.
Seeing those trees, Du Fu wrote a poem in Zhuge Liang's honor. That poem was this one… the verse Danjun had sometimes recited.
Where the Geumjatap had stood, a shaft yawned open as though the pagoda itself had been driven into the ground. Stairs led down into the hole.
Danjun had always told his family the same thing: the solution to a problem is always near the problem itself.
Even so, Grandfather… isn't this a bit much?
To take a phrase the people of Sichuan had spoken throughout the war — the very words from Zhuge Wuhou's later Memorial on Leaving for War, Gukgung-jinryeok saihu-i — pair it with a cypress, and expect someone to arrive at Du Fu's Ode to the Ancient Cypress.
Had Grandfather, from the very first time he recited that poem to him, already been handing over the cipher that would release the Geumjatap's formation? No — that was going too far. Jinmyung decided it must have been coincidence; he had left for the Martial Alliance as a child, after all.
In any case, he had the cipher now. The rest would be easy. He started down the stairs. They spiraled, twisting slightly as they descended.
Perhaps whoever built them had not wanted the interior visible. Thanks to that spiral, no moonlight reached inside.
Jinmyung drew out a fire-starter and continued down. The stair was not long. At its foot, a small iron door greeted him.
He held the flame this way and that, searching, but the iron door bore no mark of any kind. After a moment's hesitation, he took hold of the handle.
With a long, grinding screech — rust, no doubt — the door swung open on a sound that set the nerves on edge. A vast darkness waited for him beyond.
He swallowed hard, steeled himself, and stepped through. The fire-starter could not light the whole chamber.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, the floor felt different from the stair. Not earth? He angled the flame downward and looked.
A sharp tearing sound ripped through the dark. The floor split open. Jinmyung tried to launch the Eight Immortals Step, but he was a beat too late.
He plummeted into the darkness — or so he thought. He fell only about the height of his own body.
Buried among gravel in what seemed the bowels of the earth, he clawed the stones aside and pushed his head free.
What kind of trap is this? he wondered, glancing around — and then froze solid. Night-luminescent pearls were set into all four walls, illuminating the chamber.
And he himself was buried in a sea of silver taels, gold ingots, copper coins, and gold pieces. When he lifted a hand, silver slipped through his fingers.
Clink. Clatter-clink. The taels that fell from his fingers struck the gold ingots below. Good God…
"Hahahahahaha!"
Jinmyung could only marvel at Danjun's sheer audacity. He did not bother wondering where the man had amassed such a fortune.
With the privileges the Emperor had granted the Donghwa Merchant Group, gathering money would have been simple enough. What staggered him was that Danjun had sent the same to every one of the Nine Great Sects.
Jinmyung swam through the silver as though through water. The chamber was roughly the size of the Geumjatap above, so the gesture was more for the pleasure of it than anything else.
The room was small, but a hoard of this scale equaled a full year's operating costs for an ordinary sect. A giant like the Emei Sect would be another matter, of course…
Only now did Jinmyung understand Danjun's final will. To a merchant, money was power. If ten Geumjatap held reserves like this… it would have shortened the time needed for a comeback by a full decade.
What Danjun had not known was Jinmyung's martial art. Still buried in silver, Jinmyung began to circulate his qi and regulate his breath.
The art of drawing qi from wealth itself — silver, gold, and coin dissolving into pure internal energy with every breath.
Inki-jeongong. Jinmyung had named the martial art he created himself the qi-drawing money technique, and the name was the principle. That was the whole of its mystery.
Most of the breathing methods he had read in the Martial Alliance described taking in the energy of nature and storing it in the body. Martial arts, then, were the means of wielding that stored energy.
Which had left him wondering: did techniques that commanded fire and ice — Samadhi True Fire, the Ice Soul Palm, and the like — mean their practitioners had absorbed the qi of fire and ice itself?
The texts had answered that the pure energy of nature could be transformed into any natural force. From that answer, Jinmyung had forged a new art.
If one could take in the energy of nature and accumulate power from it, then what was to stop a man from accumulating power from the thing people invested their hearts in most of all — money?
Buying spirit medicines with coin to build a body capable of holding internal energy was slower than turning the money itself into internal energy. With a merchant's eye for efficiency, Jinmyung had invented his art.
And with every breath he took, the depth of the silver diminished. It only seemed to be shrinking — yet there was no other space in the chamber, only Jinmyung's breathing, continuing without pause.
He had named the internal energy method of Inki-jeongong the Hasubun — the River-Water Basin. The name originally meant a miraculous jar that never ran dry no matter how much was drawn from it. He had chosen it because the method converted money itself into his internal energy.
The first time he had turned the information fees paid by the storytellers at the Mt. Hua Sword Discourse into internal energy, he had simply thought he would never need a separate purse again, and so called it the Hasubun. But now, claiming the silver Danjun had left behind… his internal energy was mounting to a monstrous degree.
He could not say how much time had passed. When his circulation ended, every coin in the chamber had vanished without a trace. Jinmyung opened his eyes to nothing but the night-luminescent pearls set in the four walls.
Quietly, he raised an open palm. The pearls arced through the air in gentle curves and gathered into his hand.
"So this is Telekinesis?"
He murmured it softly, then drew a pouch from his sleeve and tucked the pearls inside. He took out the fire-starter again and struck a light.
Leaving the empty vault behind him, Jinmyung climbed the stairs at an unhurried pace, a look of deep satisfaction on his face.