All Things in Balance
Martial artists were, as a rule, well-versed in mechanical traps. Encountering a trap formation out in the jianghu was nothing unusual. Every sect and clan — even merchant caravans and escort agencies — plastered their most important sites with mechanisms as a matter of course. Learning to read the nature and type of a trap was simply part of surviving as a martial artist.
That did not, however, mean one could smash every trap to pieces.
"These are an assassination sect's traps..."
Muhwa surveyed the wreckage with startled eyes. Shattered materials lay scattered in a filthy mess — ink-dark short spears, blades, shards of metal, and every kind of hidden weapon imaginable. They had been the vicious killing devices that made up the formation.
"How is the building still standing?"
She ran a hand along one of the hall's thick pillars. Sun Wukong had smashed his way through in a storm of dust, and yet the hall had kept its shape. It had not collapsed. The sight was less curious than it was staggering.
"Why?"
Had he sensed her bewilderment? Seowol caught her sleeve and asked, his eyes bright. Muhwa explained calmly to the boy she regarded as a little brother.
"An assassination sect's traps have a different nature from other kinds."
"Nature?"
Seowol frowned in thought for a moment, then narrowed his brow.
"I don't get it."
"Traps have types, and they have natures. Take a prison, for instance. What's a prison for? To keep the inmates from getting out, right?"
"Right."
"So the traps installed in a prison aren't designed against enemies coming in from outside. They're designed so no one can escape from within. Ordinary traps, on the other hand, exist for one purpose only — to kill whoever comes in from the outside."
"And that's what you mean by different natures?"
"Exactly. But an assassination sect doesn't belong to either of those."
"Hmm..."
Seowol sank into thought. Meanwhile, Sun Wukong was still rummaging through every corner of the hall. After a while, the boy arrived at the answer with that sharp mind of his.
"They're for buying time?"
Muhwa's eyes curved into a smile.
"That's right."
This was the same Seowol who had been famous for his cleverness since he was small. The older he gets, the more he starts to look like an idiot who only knows martial arts — probably those childish adults in the clan rubbing off on him. But he was always a bright kid.
Muhwa smiled inwardly and went on.
"An assassination sect's true headquarters is hidden with obsessive care. Even the Beggars' Guild and the Hao Clan can't find a mere safehouse belonging to one of the Three Great Assassination Sects of the Central Plains, let alone the headquarters itself."
"So they never needed traps in the first place. Nobody can find them."
"Exactly. Which means that by the time those traps actually go off, the situation is already over."
Anyone who came knocking on an assassination sect's door was bound to be someone of tremendous martial power, or of tremendous influence. Assassins were terrifying only so long as they remained hidden. Once their faces were known, the blades of those who hated them would cut them down in a heartbeat.
"When their headquarters is in danger, an assassination sect doesn't stand and fight to the death. A regular sect or clan can't abandon a stronghold tangled up in so many interests — but an assassination sect couldn't care less."
They simply packed their bags, walked away, and fled somewhere far off. That was all there was to it.
"Their traps are specialized for one thing: buying time."
That did not mean they lacked the power to kill. These were the trap formations of assassins who ranked among the finest killers in all of Murim — the distilled product of instinct, of countless experiences, of blood they themselves had shed, teaching them exactly where to strike to be fatal and exactly how to ambush to succeed.
"They built all of that for the sole purpose of stalling, thoroughly and completely. To buy the leadership enough time to grab the important ledgers and run."
Muhwa finished her explanation and flicked a glance at Sun Wukong. Because their purpose was to snag an intruder's ankles, an assassination sect's traps were fiendishly difficult. They were hidden in places no one would expect, concealed with obsessive care. Dismantling them was hard. Even specialists taking them apart one by one would need more than a full day and night.
Martial artists did sometimes smash their way forward the way Sun Wukong had.
"But still..."
What had stunned Muhwa was that he had destroyed only the trap formation. The pillars of the hall still stood as solid as ever. Places throughout the building were broken and ruined, and yet the structure itself had held. Which meant Sun Wukong had found every trap with perfect accuracy and struck it down.
"Unless he has the blueprints inside his head, how is that even possible?"
Muhwa's face grew complicated. It wasn't as if the human body came equipped with a separate sense for detecting mechanisms. And this was no empty boast. After Sun Wukong had smashed the traps, not a single one of them had triggered.
There's nothing left now.
He had intercepted every last one. Not a single trap remained. Just how high did a person's martial arts have to be for that to be possible?
Then again... the martial arts he showed that day...
It had been a shock to Muhwa as well. Namgung Jinbaek had conceded defeat even to the point of dropping his sword. Namgung Jinbaek, who occupied the foremost seat among the Ten Great Masters, had lost. And what did that mean?
He was a master of at least the Ten Great Masters' caliber.
Even knowing that, she still wondered whether a Ten Great Master could pick off only the traps like this.
Are the Yusal Sect's traps just a bit low-grade?
The thought crossed her mind despite herself.
While Muhwa was still groaning over it, Seowol — who could never stand not knowing — stepped forward.
"How'd you do it?"
He caught the collar of Sun Wukong, who had been bustling from place to place. A look of irritation crossed Sun Wukong's face.
"Do what."
"You only smashed the traps."
"Well yeah, I smashed just the traps. You want me to wreck a perfectly good building?"
"So how did you do it."
Seowol did not flinch at the curt reply.
"Tell me, Master. I'm your disciple."
"...Aigoo. I'd rather just die."
Sun Wukong let out a sigh. Those shining eyes. That was the look Seowol got when martial arts were involved — a fierce curiosity and a stubbornness that would not bend. After traveling together for a while, Sun Wukong had more or less figured the boy out.
The resonance he felt in that word, Master, was something he still could not get used to. Was it because he himself had once called Tang Sanzang by that name? His thoughts threatened to turn sentimental all of a sudden, and he shook his head hard.
Easier just to answer him and get it over with.
Sun Wukong glanced aside. Muhwa was watching too, her eyes bright with the same curiosity. He spoke as if it were nothing at all.
"The balance was off."
"Balance?"
"Everything in this world looks crooked at first glance, but somehow it all holds a strange kind of balance."
His explanation unfolded slowly. He pointed to the walls, the pillars, the foundation that made up the hall.
"Buildings are especially balanced. They have a harmonious sense of proportion — because people built them on purpose. The horizontals and verticals don't waver. They're balanced as if someone took a ruler to them."
He pointed at the wreckage of the smashed traps.
"When the balance is off, that means something foreign is in there. Something that doesn't belong."
"..."
Muhwa listened carefully, and then her mouth slowly fell open. He had found the places where the balance was broken. And he had smashed only those places.
It sounded so simple. Listening to it, one could almost believe that dismantling traps was easy. But if you thought about it for even a moment, you realized how absurd it actually was.
Muhwa asked in a voice thick with astonishment.
"So you're saying... you could tell... just from your energy sense... that the balance was off?"
"Yeah."
"...!"
His energy sense alone. He had grasped the entire building's balance with nothing but that. It was a divine feat beyond all understanding. If that was possible, what was the point of a trap formation at all?
Muhwa stared at the wreckage in stunned silence. Sun Wukong furrowed his brow.
"If you're done being curious, how about we find those ledgers?"
The ledgers were not sitting out in the open. When searching turned up nothing, Sun Wukong spread his energy sense wide and focused. Mixed in among the countless traps, a faint, peculiar imbalance made itself felt — something he had not noticed before. The corner of his mouth lifted.
"Of course there'd be a hidden chamber."
The reason he had not found it at once was that it had been built so well. The space sat in harmonious proportion with the balance of the entire hall. If not for the hidden steel door one had to pass through to enter, he would never have felt that subtle discrepancy at all. It was a mechanism crafted with exquisite skill. Anyone other than Sun Wukong would never have found it.
"What a pain."
He clicked his tongue and swung his staff at once.
Bang. KRAANG. Bang!
The door of solid steel crumpled with a grinding shriek. Not a scrap of qi rode the blow — nothing but raw, monstrous strength. The steel door tore apart like a sheet of paper.
"...Don't people usually look for a key?"
Muhwa stared from behind with dazed eyes. The moment she had discovered this place, she had started bustling about in search of the key that would open the door. All that effort had been rendered meaningless. Sun Wukong had simply opened it.
"It's open, isn't it?"
"You tore it open."
"We can go inside, can't we?"
"Well, yes."
"Then the door's open."
"That... does sound right."
The one who agreed at the end was not Muhwa. It was Seowol. Muhwa let out a sigh.
"Seowol, you're too much of a blank page."
"A blank page?"
"A clean white page with nothing drawn on it."
"Why?"
"You tend to take on colors a little too easily."
Seowol tilted his head. When he had been living among the elders of the Namgung Clan, he had turned into someone just as obsessed with martial arts as they were. And now, after traveling with Sun Wukong for only a short while, he was already starting to give off a similar scent. It worried her.
Whether he understood her concern or not, Seowol trotted along at Sun Wukong's heels. It rather felt like a puppy tagging after its owner.
"Found it."
Sun Wukong had located a thick iron safe. A key was, once again, unnecessary. He crushed the locking mechanism between both hands and pulled the ledgers out from inside.
Muhwa hurried over. The ledgers were considerably thick, packed densely from cover to cover. She gasped.
"Good heavens. A volume this size — every assassination they've ever carried out will be written in here. We'll have to take these back to the Namgung Clan to decipher them. It's all written in cipher."
The characters were clearly those of the Central Plains, and yet they refused to yield any meaning. A cipher. They had written even their ledgers in code, to keep them secure.
Sun Wukong tilted his head.
"Why take them somewhere else to decode?"
"Analyzing a cipher like this is more than one person can handle. Even if it were possible, it would take an enormous amount of time."
"That's a human problem. I'm different."
You're human too. The words nearly leapt off Muhwa's tongue; she caught them just short of her teeth.
Sun Wukong spread a ledger as if a cipher were not even worth decoding and flipped through it at speed. The pages rasped past in a rushing flutter. It was ferocious speed-reading.
Muhwa's eyes went round.
"Are you actually reading that?"
"Yeah. Here's the assassination of the Cheongsang Sect's Great Immortal Pavilion Master, a county magistrate, and this one's the master of Huaseon Pavilion. Says they killed some pleasure-house owner too."
"...!"
Muhwa's eyes flew wide. Sun Wukong was reading it all off as if he genuinely understood it. She could not believe what she was seeing.
How?
She had known his martial arts were at the level of the Ten Great Masters. But this was an entirely different matter. There was no way she could have known who Sun Wukong's teachers had been.
Tang Sanzang, who had interpreted and taught countless Buddhist scriptures, had been the foremost authority on the Buddha-dharma in the mortal world. Deciphering sutras twisted and tangled in Sanskrit was nothing to him. And that was not all. Sun Wukong's first teacher had been Patriarch Subodhi himself — an absolute being whose attainment in the Tao already stood on a level with the Grand Supreme Elderly Lord. Sun Wukong had studied directly under him. Thanks to that, he could read even the ancient Taoist scriptures composed not of writing but of diagram-like illustrations as if they were nothing at all.
A cipher like this? He could grasp its rules and its form just by looking at it.
Sun Wukong decoded the ledgers as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. His pupils flicked left and right; the pages rasped on and on. Muhwa could not tell whether he was truly deciphering them or simply flipping through at random. The cipher looked fiendishly complex even at a glance.
That's impossible!
Taken back as they were, this volume would take months to decode — and that was if the brightest minds in the Namgung Clan all set to work on it. They would almost certainly need the help of Elder Chae, a former Grand Scholar, as well. Even then, it would take months at the very least.
Muhwa's mouth fell further and further open as Sun Wukong read on without the slightest trouble. These ledgers were the entire fortune of the Yusal Sect — a sect that ranked among the Ten Great Assassination Sects of the Central Plains, and in Hubei Province was as good as the foremost assassin guild of all. They were, in the truest sense, a treasure map. If they ever fell into the wrong hands, a storm of blood would surely follow.
The pages kept fluttering. His eyes moved fast. He was unquestionably reading and decoding at the same time. Decoding and speed-reading, simultaneously.
I don't understand. I really don't.
Muhwa gave up on understanding altogether.
Then the hands that had been flipping through the ledgers like a madman came to a dead stop. The pupils that had been sweeping left and right locked onto something, and his expression changed in a way that was anything but ordinary.
Muhwa asked carefully.
"What's written there?"
Sun Wukong pointed at a single line and muttered.
Target: Taecheong of the Wudang Sect
Annotation: Sect Leader of Wudang
Muhwa's mouth closed all at once.
Sun Wukong added, quietly,
"It says Wudang Sect Leader next to it."