Chapter 106
A day had passed.
On the way home yesterday, I had watched the child with particular care, wondering whether some lack of affection was making them cling to the people around them—especially to me. There was no sign of it. Nor did the thought of my disappearing seem to throw them into any great panic of separation. Children are difficult. Four years still remain, though, so I can simply keep a careful eye on them until then.
And today, at last, the Heavenly Demon came.
The moment she arrived, Soo latched onto her and launched into a breathless account of everything that had happened the day before. She talked so much that, partway through, the Heavenly Demon actually looked to me for rescue. I found it entertaining, so I pretended not to notice, announced that I was going out to exercise, and left the house.
I turned my steps farther north, toward the ruins that wait out that way. I hadn't come this far on a run in some time. I was thinking as much, glancing around, when I found a corpse planted squarely in the middle of the ruins.
Hm? A corpse?
Bones lie scattered all through this place, weathering where they fell, but this was fresh—the innards hadn't even dried. A hole had been opened in the head. It didn't look like a death by the blade. Why die out here alone?
I went over to the body and looked through the clothes. A search of the inner folds turned up nothing I could identify. Or perhaps there was something, and I simply didn't recognize it. A faint warmth still lingered, though, so I crushed the chest with my hand.
It gave with a wet crack. As the corpse crumpled, the last warmth—already on the point of vanishing—came into me. At once the light stained black, shriveled, and peeled away from the flesh.
That was when it happened.
A blunt strike. The ground rushed up at me—or, more precisely, the body was hit and pitched forward. The blow had landed on the back of the head.
A ruined body doesn't cost me my awareness, of course. Choseol's body might be another matter, but I don't sleep, and I certainly don't faint. From the moment one can still think with one's head blown off, it is already clear that the flesh and I are not the same thing.
"Damn it, you cult bastard. How'd you catch on? If it's come to this, has Samho been dealt with too—the one who went dark?"
A man's voice came from behind my fallen body.
No one here calls the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult the Demon Cult. That talk belongs to the outside. The Five Peaks Sword Sect, the Nine Factions—those are the powers that hold the murim in their grip, and the word is mostly theirs. The one who had fallen was a man sent by the Nine Factions. I also knew that the Five Peaks, newly made one, had sent more than a few spies of their own.
The man came closer and kicked me aside. My eyes were shut, so I couldn't tell exactly what he was doing, but I heard him searching through clothing.
"Ah. Here it is. Let's see."
Oh Myung-sung. Defection to the Demon Cult.
Transcendent peak or above.
Threat to our power. Judgment required.
"Ha. So he betrayed us after all."
I hadn't known it before I took the warmth, but an encrypted record was hidden in the cloth against the dead man's chest. The one who had ambushed me was reading it. Not long after, his footsteps faded away.
I knit my torn-off neck back into place and stood. When I crushed that man's chest I had already grasped the shape of things well enough, so I held myself back from taking the warmth of the one who attacked me. Hehe. Good thing I did.
The spy hadn't come solely because of Oh Myung-sung, it seemed. According to the dead man's memories, the intelligence service he belonged to held a promotion tournament around the same time every year, and dispatched people whenever it did—to scout how the rankings of martial strength shifted inside the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. This time they had meant to confirm Oh Myung-sung's situation on top of that.
Hehe. Things were flowing in an interesting direction. There was a good chance the murim would move. Then again, the distance was so great they might do nothing more than answer it in some halfhearted way.
Fear of the Martial God still lingered in the murim. Yes—the incident that let Eunjae bear that name. That must be why they had never stopped watching the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. I had only known as much from people of the cult itself; an outsider's memories made it plain. This is why a person has to go far. The memory had faded badly, but it was still there: the murim scythed down to the roots by Eunjae.
I had never understood why the monks suddenly named Oh Myung-sung a Demon Head merely because his hair had changed color and he used an energy like mine. Now it made sense. Oh Myung-sung himself hadn't known any of this. I could understand that. Rummage through the memories and you find he did learn of it at Mount Hua, where he had been—but he never had much interest in learning such things. He remembered it only dimly, as some calamity once witnessed by his grandmaster, his master's master, and that made it fainter still. You have to call a thing to mind often before it becomes easy to know.
In other words, there had once been cause to suppress the Harvester, and now a cause had arisen again. Whether they would actually march all the way here, I couldn't say. I hoped they would take it seriously and answer it.
I loosened my body, ran the course I usually ran, and went home, arriving a little late on purpose. By then the Heavenly Demon had already gone. Soo lay sprawled across the wooden veranda like ice half melted in the sun. Perhaps because Soo had pestered her the instant she arrived, her hands had been especially rough this time.
"You took quite a beating, didn't you?"
"I thought I was gonna die!"
Soo grumbled that her master had gone too far—she had only asked a question, and been made to learn the answer with her own body. Wondering whether some other thought might be tangled up in the complaint, I went to the kitchen to prepare dinner.
Once the sun was gone, a season of truly cold air arrived. Parts of the forest had begun to blush red and yellow. I couldn't begin to say what latitude this place occupied. If I dug through the memories I had gained of the second world, it was at least not the ancient China preserved in those faded recollections. Similar names existed, but they differed in subtle ways.
No—this alone would do. The Kunlun Mountains of this world are crowded with land floating in the sky. The original, of course, is Daegon's memory, and it is a very old matter, so I have no idea what has become of it now.
In the meantime, a great deal had happened within the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult.
First, Byeong-il left. At Sanseok Hall he had tried to establish his authority by killing those who would not follow him, and he killed so many that he drew the fury of the other hall masters. Whenever I go to the village, In Sim-won sticks close to my side, and when I asked him, he said they had taken Byeong-il for the next Heavenly Demon early on and supported him in all sorts of ways. Byeong-il treated that support as his due and kept demanding more, and the offense of his presumption was added to the rest. In truth, several hall masters and a guardian had meant to join forces and kill him. He noticed, and fled the cult.
They tried to finish him with the parasite assigned to him, only to find the bug already dead. In Sim-won didn't tell me that part, of course. I only saw it through his eyes. Ever since I said I disliked the bugs, he has not spoken a single word about them in front of me.
Byeong-il is still fleeing north without pause. And someone is following him: Jung Jae-woo, guardian to the master of Cheongung Hall. He left the cult under the pretext of hunting Byeong-il, volunteering himself on the grounds that an ordinary person would have trouble facing a Harvester. He has no intention of catching Byeong-il and bringing him back. He means to use the chase as an excuse to escape the cult for good—follow him far away, then sever contact completely. He, too, knows that the bug is no longer in his body.
How do I know? I told you. I'm following him. He has already met Byeong-il and spoken his wish aloud, and now, under the name of pursuit, he deliberately keeps his distance while drawing farther and farther from the cult. I like the look of someone moving according to his own desire.
Next is Gapjae. Of the original three, he had stood the lowest, and in a single year he has climbed to the highest place among them in the cult. He became master of Sanseok Hall, which had been Byeong-il's. Unlike Byeong-il, he keeps his relations mild—though it also helps that Byeong-il killed the hardliners. So, without any great resistance, he is muddling his way through a hall master's work. There are too few people. He pulls them in from here and there, and the masters of the other halls push him about as they please. That will be his problem to solve.
In Sim-won is seeing to the duties of Wolje Hall's master, though not in quite the same way as before. He has cleared away every task tied to the Blood Cult, and he is setting down in writing an account of the Blood Cult and the Jie Cult. Inside it there is also material on the Tongcheon Cult Lord, and on yokai in human shape with fish mixed into them. That is information I have no way of knowing, so I can hardly ask him why he is writing it. I am gathering it slowly instead.
And the girl he had wanted to save—she has been taken off Wolje Hall's principal work. She still belongs to the hall, but she has been assigned duties closer to what they do at Cheongung. Put simply, he removed her from the difficult, dangerous labor and set her somewhere easy to speak to. The girl, of course, finds the kindness a heavy burden. I can't tell how that side of things will twist.
And Oh Myung-sung. He has set up a newlywed household with Goo Mil-mil, and the two of them are living happily. On the day of the promotion tournament, the Heavenly Demon gave him the post of Right Emissary of Light. I had thought it nothing more than a captaincy of the guard. It turns out the seat also goes to someone with a strong chance of succeeding the Heavenly Demon.
There are two: the Right Emissary of Light, and the Left Emissary of Light. One of them has fled to some remote place under the name of convalescence, because the Left Emissary took Goo Sung-yong's side when Goo Sung-yong came to kill the Heavenly Demon. So Goo Mil-mil and Oh Myung-sung are watching the Heavenly Demon's mood, thinking of calling him back.
The Heavenly Demon? She knows, and she is letting it be. It came up in idle talk while Soo was training: if they can move politically and draw the Left Emissary of Light back out, she will restore him to the post as a reward. Until then, she means to test them while scattering, quite generously, every sign that she wants no such thing.
"Are you thinking of making him the next Heavenly Demon?"
One afternoon I asked it of the Heavenly Demon where she sat on the veranda, Soo as usual stretched full-length across the yard like a prize fish. She only smiled at the question, and said nothing. I have no idea what she is thinking.
Meanwhile, there is a strange absence of news about the man from the Nine Factions who fled that day—whether he was caught and killed in the end, or not. If the murim moved, word would reach the Heavenly Demon, and the reports she receives contain nothing of the kind. At most, the blind alliance lord of the Five Peaks Sword Sect has bowed his head and gone in under the Nine Factions, forming one enormous body called the Murim Alliance. Some sects of the Five Peaks already belonged to the Nine Factions, so it isn't a joining of wholly separate camps, but this, too, is complicated.
Thinking it would be nice if this were the omen of a war, I poked the cheek of the Heavenly Demon, who still hadn't answered. All at once she burst out laughing. I couldn't tell why.