The Butterfly Dream
Agamemnon, son of Atreus who ruled over Mycenae... that is to say, me. It was on a certain day shortly before my tenth birthday that I first awakened to my past life.
In that past life, 'I' had been a martial artist. Not one of this land's heroes, who wielded power beyond the human by right of divine lineage or the gods' favor, but the other kind of warrior—one who took the qi of nature into his body and refined techniques that crossed the limits of humankind. When the leader of the Demonic Cult kindled his war, I stood with the knights-errant gathered from every corner of the murim and turned back their invasion.
When the memories of a life spanning decades first poured into my unripe upper dantian, I suffered through agonizing confusion, laid low and groaning with fever for days and nights on end.
"Brother! You mustn't go like this! Agamemnon, Brother!"
"B-Bwobber... bwaaahh... waaaaahh..."
"Don't cry.... Big brother isn't going anywhere...."
Even while straining to think through a skull boiling hot with fever, I found myself agonizing over whether these were truly the memories of me, Agamemnon. Was I Agamemnon, or was I 'he' within those memories? Just as Zhuangzi once spoke of dreaming he was a butterfly flitting through his dreams, was I not simply caught in an absurdly vivid dream?
But even the delirium conjured by the sorcerous sound arts of the Ghost Crying Demonic Venerable—the Demonic Cult Leader's hound, whose arts had drowned countless martial artists of the Orthodox and Unorthodox factions in despair—had never shown me phantasms half so vivid.
And the very fact that, even in the depths of questioning my own identity, I was recalling the old tale of the Butterfly Dream, led me at last to a conclusion: I could not simply write off a past life remembered without the slightest omen as a worthless dream. Besides, once I admitted in my heart that this past life had, in truth, been a life I myself had lived, I—as the boy Agamemnon—could not help but be appalled by the state of this world, so much of which I had accepted until now as a matter of course.
"This is... a sword?"
"It is indeed, Your Highness. King Atreus himself commanded the city's finest smith to forge it, that it might be given as a gift to his beloved son."
As the master-at-arms—my father's hired sword instructor—held forth at length on the toil and treasure that had gone into the blade, I thought:
'...This piece of garbage?'
What hung in my hand was far too small to be called a sword. Objectively speaking, my past-life self had never been picky about weapons. The war against the Demonic Cult was, quite literally, a bloodbath—blood running in rivers, corpses heaped into mountains—and since the demonkin so loved their savage, grotesque demonic arts, the fighting all too often dissolved into a roiling melee.
The swordsman of some great and venerable sect, mowing down his foes like autumn leaves with a gleaming famous blade, would lose his grip at the worst of moments—and the instant his sword went sailing off into the distance, he would reach out to fetch it and die a pitiful, pointless death. To avoid dying such a dog's death, you had to know how to snatch up whatever weapon happened to be rolling across the ground and swing it with everything you had.
Well, granted, if you were a supreme master armed with a weapon on the order of an actual divine sword—never mind a mere famous blade—and possessed the peerless skill to match, you'd have no need to demean yourself prying a hilt from a corpse's rigid fingers. But back when the war against the Demonic Cult raged at its height, I was a mere wandering swordsman for whom even commissioning a plain iron sword was a weighty expense; spear, sword, or sickle, I used whatever came to hand, without discrimination.
That was precisely how I managed to outlive the precious sons of great houses—the ones who'd had their birth hair plucked and been scrubbed with medicinal washes before they could so much as walk, and who grew up gorging on elixirs as if they were rice.
But no matter how forgiving I tried to be, this was too much. By time-honored convention, a proper sword ought to measure a good three feet from blade-tip to pommel, and its blade should stretch straight as bamboo—only then could it rightly bear the name. Could this thing, barely the length of a forearm, its blade curved as queerly as a leaf, truly be called a sword?
With me, it stopped at disappointment. Had a madwoman like the Sword Empress been standing in that room, she would have loosed a lion's roar the moment she clapped eyes on it—there is no way anything this stunted can be a sword!
"Open your eyes, Your Highness! Behold the figure of this streamlined bronze sword—more wanton, nay, more elegant, than the curvaceous nudity of the goddess Aphrodite herself!!"
Let the shape and length of the thing pass. The truly damning part was this:
'Precious materials like cold iron were beyond hoping for, fine—but bronze? Not even ordinary iron... bronze.'
What was more despairing still, this bronze sword was no slapdash toy knocked together for a ten-year-old boy's games of war. It was, just as the sword instructor claimed, a genuine famous blade that any warrior in the hot blood of his prime would covet—by this world's standards, at least.
I had no choice but to admit it. The land of my rebirth was one where weapons of bronze held sway—bronze, which had flourished in the far-off age of Yin and Zhou, then vanished entirely from the world after the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. A distant land of the far West, where people bore eyes and hair in a riot of colors so extravagant they would have shamed even the colored-eye tribes. And it was the fabled Age of Myth of deepest antiquity, when gods and heroes, fairies and monsters—beings of literally monstrous strength and uncanny power—walked the earth.
'So this is what reincarnation meant? Wongong, you accursed, bald-pated fraud of a monk. You never said a word about any of this....'
Wresting the sword from my spittle-spraying instructor, I strapped it to my waist and thought of the monk with whom I had once set out, in my past life, on the journey to bring down the Demonic Cult Leader.
By rights he should have been cast into the penitence dungeon with the tendons of his four limbs severed and his dantian shattered, his due for breaking his precepts; instead, he was an apostate monk of the Shaolin Temple whose sentence had been commuted to being flung onto the front lines against the Demonic Cult.
And Wongong—who gorged himself on meat on the excuse that he had to maintain the burly physique built through the Tendon-Changing Classic—would trot out a sermon at the slightest idle moment, as if to prove that a Shaolin monk was exactly what he was. According to him, the merits a person amassed and the sins they committed over a lifetime determined their next birth: they might be reborn a beast, or reborn a human.
Though I had lived as a man of the murim and stained my blade with no small amount of blood, I could swear I had never once raised it against the innocent for private gain. That was the chivalry I had witnessed and learned from my master, from Wongong, and from my other comrades-in-arms.
If so, had I been reborn as a human and not a beast because the judges of the underworld had ruled that the merit of my chivalrous deeds in felling the Demonic Cult outweighed the sinful karma of all my killing?
'Not that any of it amounts to anything now.' I had gone and been reborn into a world where humans and fairies alike could, at the caprice of the gods, be turned into dumb beasts—or into trees, or flowers. Rebirth, in itself, was hardly a blessing.
With a sigh deep enough to cave in the palace floor, I brought my palms together with tremendous force—my face caught square between them. Smack! Rubbing the palm-shaped welt blooming red across my cheek, I muttered to myself with a feigned air of steely resolve:
"Hoo. Positive thoughts. Positive thoughts..."
Naturally, being reborn into this world was not without its blessings. Unlike my past life, which had begun as an orphan cast adrift and spent its youth as a penniless vagabond without a coin to its name, here my station was nothing less than that of a prince—and no ordinary one, either, but the legitimate eldest son of King Atreus, ruler of Mycenae, a great power of Achaea—that is to say, Greece—and this life's own father.
Measured against the ranks of the Central Plains, it would be fair to call me the heir of the Son of Heaven's realm—in other words, a crown prince. Of course, unlike the Central Plains, which had long been governed by the authority of a single emperor ever since Shi Huangdi destroyed the Six Kingdoms and unified all under heaven, this world lay splintered into far more nations than even the Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras of old, and Mycenae hardly possessed the prestige to style itself the throne of the Son of Heaven. That is not to say it lacked the strength to swallow the rest whole, as Qin had devoured its rivals at the Warring States' end—Mycenae could boast, even now, of being the strongest in Achaea.
In past-life terms, I suppose it was something like the Namgung Clan, which, holding down the Zhuge, Hwangbo, Murong, and Tang clans alike, had been hailed as the foremost family under heaven. For someone carrying the full memories of a past life born and raised in a fallen scholar's house—ruined and disgraced so many generations back that its sons had rolled up their sleeves to till the fields, and who had himself been reclassified as an out-and-out orphan at the age of ten—a background like this was nothing short of a gift from heaven.
I drew the bronze sword from my belt and gave it a few test swings. Whoosh! The hiss of cleaving air brushed past my ears. It was decently ferocious—crisp enough to border on a true air-splitting crack. And this, swung by the hand of a ten-year-old child who had never learned a single proper martial technique. In my past life, before I met my master and set foot on the path of martial arts, it would have been beyond imagining.
'Diluted as it may be, so the blood of a god does run in me?' My great-grandfather Tantalus was a son of Zeus, and by the goddess Dione he fathered my grandfather, Pelops. Which made my brothers and me fifth-generation descendants of Zeus, the King of Gods; trace the line far enough back, and the blood of Ares, the god of war, ran through it as well—though by that reckoning, few mortals alive could claim a family tree unpolluted by divine blood.
I was no Heracles, the demigod hero said to have lately undergone astral ascension and become a constellation in the night sky—but even so, the young body of Agamemnon, one half of one half of one half of one half god, would have been called a born martial skeleton in the murim of my past life.
And then... more than anything else:
'What a waste. Had he taken me as his disciple five years sooner... no, even three—had I entered the gates of martial arts at a younger age... how much faster I might have climbed, how much higher a realm I might have gazed upon.'
A 'child's' body, whose blood pathways had not yet gathered a single speck of impurity. The very quality that some named the single most important condition for bringing one's martial arts to perfection—that quality was mine, here and now.