Chapter 102
When I came home, Soo was sprawled across the yard in a full spread, arms and legs flung wide.
The Heavenly Demon sat quietly on the wooden veranda and raised a hand to me in a small wave.
"How long would it take her to grow to your level?"
I nearly ignored Soo, lying there with her eyes shut and playing dead, then thought better of it and asked.
"If the girl applies herself, forty years."
The Heavenly Demon turned the question over for a moment and answered at once. Forty years. Does it truly take that long? And by then the Heavenly Demon will only have grown stronger.
"An opening!"
"Mm. No. Lie back down."
There was a soft pop of air, and Soo—who had risen behind me to slip out from under the Heavenly Demon's gaze—took something square in the belly. She had meant to spring up from where she lay, snatch her iron sword, and charge. Something struck her solar plexus, and she went down on the ground again.
"What did you shoot?"
"Qi. You can't feel it at all, can you?"
"No."
From everything I have learned so far, it stands to reason that I shouldn't be able to feel it. But I have found that if I am shoved into a monster possessed of truly immense power, it becomes possible. The price is that the monster is ground down for fuel!
"You didn't sense a shred of that Tongcheon cult leader's qi down below, either."
"That's right."
Now that I think of it, he was not born of this world either. He was born in another, and only afterward crossed into this one.
Somewhere I do not yet know, there must be a place where world is staked against world. If I can go there someday, I will meet the ones who fight with glass bottles in their hands, won't I?
I look forward to it.
I have learned that if I can reach them, I can control them as well. Which is to say that if I can enter that battlefield, I can obtain a great deal of warmth.
Spreading like a plague, I could gather warmth in heaps. If there are enough of them, it would be truly warm.
Hehe.
Ahem. No—enough of daydreams that run too warm. They only leave me colder.
"I truly can't tell what you are."
I went and sat beside the Heavenly Demon, who was gazing at me steadily. Then, having put myself in her place as a human would, I said what I could.
"You called me. Unfortunately."
I am a monster people ought not to call. I will do anything for warmth. Even now I have been deliberately advertising the location of my house to a great many people, so that the Heavenly Demon Cult will be shaken, and I have summoned Goo Mil-mil and Oh Myung-sung.
She will have to bear it. She kept me pinned here for four years, didn't she?
But the Heavenly Demon only crossed her legs and rested her chin on one hand.
"That isn't yours to decide. To begin with, no one here thinks meeting you made them unhappy."
Soo, who had crept along the ground, climbed onto my back. I saw every bit of it, of course, through her eyes and the Heavenly Demon's, but I let her be.
"Me too!"
The child was filthy, caked in dirt and sand. How was I supposed to get her clean? I caught the face that had popped up beside me in one hand and pressed, lightly.
"W-wait, just a moment! No, Choseol, not like th—kyaaaaa!"
I was not pressing with raw strength. I was pressing the places that hurt. And I am large to begin with; my strength is nothing to dismiss. Has she forgotten all the housework I have done, and the exercise besides?
"Soo. You smell."
When I said it and let go, Soo scrambled back, pulled her clothes up to her nose, and sniffed. Her brow creased.
"It's sweat! What am I supposed to do about sweat!"
"You kept your distance when I smelled like fish, didn't you?"
The moment I dragged up something from only a little while ago, guilt crossed Soo's face and she retreated.
"That's cheap! Those are completely different!"
"While you're going down the cliff, draw some water and bring it back."
Told to fill the jar on her way to wash, Soo grumbled off toward the kitchen, hoisted the big jar there, and hopped straight down the cliff.
An ordinary person would have been paste on the spot. Soo caught the rock with her feet a few times, bled off her speed, and landed safely at the bottom—balancing a jar enormous beside her own body.
Qi grants a person superhuman strength, powerful enough that you begin to wonder where such output comes from at all. The gulf between those who can use it and those who cannot is immense, which is why a society of superhumans—the murim—lies over the society of ordinary people.
Looked at coldly, this world is strange as well. Their flesh performs at the level of an entirely different creature, and yet the difference is not passed down by blood. It passes as knowledge: the martial arts. To my eyes, the martial arts are an informational life-form living in symbiosis with human beings. Bloodlines that have trained the same art for a long time do coevolve with that life-form, and they profit by the partnership, but standing outside the bloodline does not mean the art cannot be learned. So the realm of humans bound to that informational life-form is the murim, and those who are not are simply the ordinary human world. That is how it seems to me.
I came to think this way because of what I learned from Daegon.
Daegon itself has no ordinary body. In the far past it did, but in its original world it became a being called a god, cast off its flesh, and came to exist as mind alone. Once it had, though, it could no longer adapt well to reality. The more powerfully it acts upon the real, the more change it must take back from the real in return. In the terms of a game, it raised its attack and lowered its defense. So it keeps to a place a little removed from reality, and when it must, it sends word through its subordinates—or enters the world by means of a body like Choseol's, the one I inhabit.
I thought this resembled the martial arts. There are arts that cost you your sense of self, and if you consider that, it is not so different from calling something powerful down into the body and growing strong.
I was still setting the thought in order when I noticed the Heavenly Demon watching me, smiling.
"What is it?"
"You think of yourself as a monster. You don't look like one. You look like that child's mother."
If I look like a person, then the disguise is holding. There was a point to performing a human shape while pretending I did not know I was performing it.
No. But—
"Her mother? No. A friend, at most. Both of Soo's parents ought to still be alive."
I even know where they are. Soo fainted partway while she was being brought here, so I cannot trace the exact road, but I know the place. The scenery she saw as a child—match the mountains in particular, and finding it is not difficult.
At that, the Heavenly Demon wore a calm, knowing look.
"So that's why you mean to leave Soo behind so lightly?"
Ah. Right. When I went down to the village, Soo had gone to the Heavenly Demon for counsel—that in four years I would leave her and go. A child consulting her master means the two of them are close, so I put it out of mind. And she speaks as if I am throwing the girl away. That is a misunderstanding.
"It isn't light."
But I shook my head, because I truly am not leaving lightly. We are not family, yet we are as close as family.
"There is only something more important than that."
"Warmth, you mean."
"Yes."
Understanding passed across the Heavenly Demon's face. She, too, has known the cold I feel. She straightened her posture, sat facing me, and asked with care.
"That day. When the one they called the Tongcheon cult leader turned into a monster, you said it was warm."
What?
No—wait. I had been so genuinely glad that I let go of every line of sight. I don't know with what kind of gaze the Heavenly Demon was watching me. I don't even know what state I was in.
Aaaah. What am I supposed to do with this?
No—but Daegon really was warm. It is like standing naked at the heart of Antarctica every moment, and only sometimes, for the briefest instant, closing my hands around a hand warmer. That time, it felt like stepping into a hot spring. My whole body came undone at once into a truly happy heat.
The trouble was being hauled straight out of the spring and thrown back into the middle of Antarctica, until I thought I might genuinely lose my mind. Somehow, I held on to my reason.
"Are you still cold?"
At that question I nodded. If I opened my mouth, I did not think I could hold it; it would all come spilling out. So I only nodded, and said nothing. That ought to be enough.
Warmth is a moment. The cold is forever. It is not even the same cold. Felt from within, it keeps deepening—endlessly colder, and yet the nerves never break. They say that when a person grows cold enough, the brain fails, and they feel the cold as heat and strip off their clothes. There is nothing like that. Every day, every instant, it grows colder.
At times like this I am almost envious of the monster that died making sport of me…….
No. I will not think about that.
Then the Heavenly Demon looked at me and asked.
"What would it take to make you warm?"
Mmm. Mm. Hm.
The words rose all the way to the tip of my tongue—if the Heavenly Demon went out into the murim and slaughtered people, I would be warm—and somehow I swallowed them.
Yes. The rules have to hold. If I let go even once, I do not trust myself to catch them again. I know that unless I keep them with a foolish, narrow focus, I can never return to what I was. It is not a question of who might be watching. It is a question of what I can bear.
I can see the future with perfect clarity. In an instant I degenerate into a single cell that craves only warmth, and in the end I can go nowhere at all. Just as clearly, I see the future in which even the warmth that falls now and then is gone. Where there is intelligence, one can see ahead.
So I have to cry out that I love freedom, and nothing else. Strictly speaking it is freedom without responsibility, closer to license than to freedom. But license has an ugly sound, doesn't it?
"Heavenly Demon."
"Speak."
"You have to live freely. Ignore my will. You don't need any of that. Don't empathize with anything. It doesn't matter if no one understands you. Just do what you yourself wish."
I believe that if human beings are given infinite freedom, they will kill and be killed, and go on living without end. I stake myself on that, and I divide myself. Do so, and warmth will come to me forever.
"And if that wish is to move for your sake?"
The Heavenly Demon said it while quietly studying my face. So I shook my head again, and quoted her own words back to her.
"Don't move for the sake of nothing. Do you remember Jeonyang?"
When I spoke the name of the man she had loved, her expression went hard. Yes. This is certain.
"I want you to live doing what you wish. You, Heavenly Demon—and Soo as well."
Only then can I be warm.
At my answer the Heavenly Demon let out a deep sigh, said she would withdraw, and returned to the main hall of the Heavenly Demon Cult. The thought brushes past me that it may have been too much, to name the dead.
But this is right.
I stilled my breath and waited, pretending not to know that Soo was behind the house, listening to every word we had said.