Chapter 109
I formed contracts with two more patients in critical condition at the infirmary, and stepped outside.
That was when the disaster struck.
Goo Mil-mil said she understood why I was called a celestial maiden, and asked whether I wasn't an immortal. It was a terribly cruel thing to say, so I denied it outright. I was nothing but a monster.
Perhaps I had spoken too sharply. After that, we parted with hardly another word.
Soo looks at me with reverence in her eyes, and that gaze feels good. But I know it is false, so I have to keep in mind that the day she learns what I truly am, all of it may turn to hatred.
Will I be sad when that day comes? I don't know.
In any case, so long as light is the soul, a rather horrific end awaits once I have taken the warmth—crushed beneath a cold sea, or reduced to dust drifting inside a glass bottle.
Someday the day will come when it is all laid bare. This warmth as well.
But that side of things is rather bleak. Even Daegon knows nothing of warmth as a resource. Souls, they might use; there was never a separate entry for the warmth a soul holds.
Ah—speaking of warmth, it occurs to me. Now I have to prepare to get through the winter.
A long, harsh winter is coming. And it will keep coming after this.
Not long ago the Heavenly Demon received a report from Wolje Hall: the goods they had been bringing in were gone, and from now on they would receive nothing at all. The place that was meant to give them had vanished into the light.
The Jie Cult, and the Fish-Blood Secret Cult. This was never simply a rite in which humans offered humans up as sacrifices. When a person was given as an offering, or when a person became one of the fish-folk, the other side brought goods in return—vast quantities of seafood, and jewels of every kind. That was what they obtained.
The Heavenly Demon Divine Cult has few who do anything productive, and it does not plunder on any great scale. One can guess how they managed to go on living in such considerable wealth without income of that sort.
But the supply has been cut clean through, so from here on they will only grow poorer. And judging by the timing, the Murim Alliance is invading at a very bad moment. So we ought to prepare for winter, shouldn't we?
It looks as though they can scrape through at least this winter somehow. What will actually happen, though—that, we'll only know when it arrives.
The longest night passed, and a season came in which the days slowly grew warmer. The Heavenly Demon Divine Cult was hardier than I had supposed.
They used to receive a staggering quantity of goods from the fish-folk, after all. I thought that once that stopped, they would collapse at once. They didn't.
When Wolje Hall could bring in no income whatsoever, the cult's revenue did shrink a great deal, but they were not so frail as to crumble the moment those goods were gone. That, however, was only true in peacetime. If war came, it would plainly be hard.
Rumors of the Great Orthodox-Demonic War are drifting through the village. Along the border between the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult and the martial world, clashes never cease, and the great sects send their own people on the pretext of those clashes.
They say it is to keep the peace, but there is no one who doesn't know that sects like those keep the peace only inside their own territory. Even among the orthodox, the truly tiny sects—and those of the unorthodox—are beginning to abandon this middle ground altogether, and into the places they leave, sects under the Murim Alliance move in, changing nothing but the signboards.
Weapons are stockpiled. People multiply. Anyone can see that something is about to happen.
As the fighting grew frequent, the Heavenly Demon and those of hall-master rank and above gathered in council more and more often. More than half of the ten hall masters say that, at this rate, they will end up fighting the Murim Alliance.
They say more than fifteen sects have already been confirmed, that the houses called the Five Great Clans are watching this place, and that even men of the government army have begun to appear.
In a faded memory, the phrase the court and the martial world do not interfere glitters brightly—but when packs of thugs start a fight on this scale, it would be strange if the state didn't watch, wouldn't it?
I find myself hoping I might ride that current all the way to the authorities. That would actually be better. I don't need to be treated well. Even if I'm handled like a criminal, or like an object, I don't particularly mind, so long as I can obtain warmth in the end. This time, I can simply take it as the board being played that way.
Still, I have to be careful. There is a transcendent called an immortal, and over there they are building a nation. This side may possess special arts of its own. Whether it ends as a clash between two, or becomes three. Or whether a chaos with no rules bursts open. The future cannot be known.
So I prepared, steadily. I couldn't do it every day, but by persistently turning people into harvesters I reached twenty-six in all—from those who had simply lived as ordinary folk to those who properly bore the cult's arms, an even spread of them.
Once they begin killing and being killed, I can take warmth from anywhere. I pass the time pretending to know nothing, waiting for the great fight.
It became a season when water no longer froze, even in the deep of night. In that time Soo had grown strong enough that even the Heavenly Demon praised her. And she came to know people other than me and the Heavenly Demon.
Goo Mil-mil, and Oh Myung-sung. Unexpectedly, she is even on familiar terms with In Sim-won. It bothers me a little that she has no one her own age, but I'm glad she seems to be learning how to be among people. Ideologically, of course, it is deeply unsteady.
Until now I had told her all sorts of stories in the mornings, but last winter Soo said they were dull and boring, so I stopped. And yet, the world being what it is, living too moral a life seems only to make a person unhappy. Every age has standards that fit it.
People call anyone whose standards don't match the age a madman, and they look on them with cold eyes. For the most part, such people have had to live unhappy lives. That is something only extraordinary people do—an ascetic ordeal an ordinary person simply cannot endure.
And while I was fretting over how much I ought to tell Soo, the fighting began in earnest.
Yes.
The Great Orthodox-Demonic War had broken out.
Martial artists are a host of superhumans. No sooner had true battle begun than the tide of war moved at a staggering speed. In a flash the cult's outposts were smashed, and people came flooding down.
Wherever there was a superhuman markedly stronger than those around them, the line gave way in an instant. Where this side had the stronger one, they drove the others back instead. The shape of it differs somewhat from an ordinary war.
It is a space where power that cannot be neatly written in numbers runs wild, so a front line means nothing, and people die in a breath. And among them are those who shine with a particular brilliance. None other than my harvesters. Every one of them draws me in and uses me.
When it became certain that war would come, the Heavenly Demon gathered the harvesters and taught them, in a crash course, how to use me. Only a very few can pour me into a sword and unfold sword arts the way she does; most can do nothing but take up a spear and thrust. The difference from an ordinary thrust is that a purple beam leaves the point.
They use it almost like a gun—not the kind that sweeps enemies away from true distance, but closer to line infantry once fought with spears of a somewhat longer reach. They form ranks, advance, and thrust and fire as one. Most martial artists are pierced through and die before they can even close in.
If one appears who can bat that aside and come in, then someone who can pour me into a blade and swing it steps forward. They are mostly massed upon a single battlefield, so I cannot see clearly what is happening as a whole.
But on the first day the war began, I gained a great deal of warmth.
Hehe.
The second day after the war began, Soo finally noticed that something was wrong.
"Choseol. Something's weird about the forest."
Soo pointed to the forest in the north. She didn't know. There had yet to be any great uproar inside the cult. The Heavenly Demon hadn't come the day before, but that happened from time to time, so Soo spent the day knowing nothing.
"What about it seems strange?"
I felt nothing at all, so I asked whether she truly sensed it, or whether it was closer to a hunch. Soo narrowed her eyes and looked over the woods. Then, turning to me, she pointed at the heart of the forest.
"The forest's too quiet. Not a sound, like it's fallen asleep."
Ah. That. Now that she mentioned it, the birdsong that used to sit in the background like a murmur was gone. I couldn't tell whether the beasts had truly understood that something was happening and fallen silent, or whether someone had actually entered the trees.
The only harvesters nearby are the Heavenly Demon and Oh Myung-sung, and both of them are in council with the hall masters over what ought to be done. What draws a quiet sigh from me is that they aren't discussing how to fight. They're discussing whether to negotiate.
I had thought the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult the sort to die without question or complaint, declaring it was for their god. After the Heavenly Demon became a woman—no. More precisely, after her heart became a woman's, she grew a great deal gentler. If anything, it is Oh Myung-sung who argues that they should press the attack.
He says they came after this purple hair so relentlessly that they will never negotiate. But there is someone who rejects that. None other than the master of Jigwan Hall.
He is a man who serves not only as a hall master, but as one of the cult's senior elders. He pointed at Oh Myung-sung and proposed they hand him over—said the cult was under sudden attack because of this man, so they should give him up first, steady themselves, and look to another day.
The old man's face, as he said it, was thick with irritation. I could read it from the expression. That later day is after he himself is dead: the peculiar feeling of an old man with nothing left to leave behind, that getting through the present is enough.
But the one saying this holds, in a sense, one of the highest seats in the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, so no one can easily step forward and refute him. And within that silence lies not only the inability to oppose the Jigwan Hall Master, but a loathing of Oh Myung-sung.
He appeared out of nowhere and took the seat of Right Emissary of Light, a post all but equal to that of the next Heavenly Demon. A seat all too easy to envy. Perhaps because of that, the balance in the mirror has tilted, unexpectedly, toward handing Oh Myung-sung over and seeking negotiation.
Hall masters who don't even know why the Murim Alliance is attacking, and who mean to use the chance to clear away what they dislike. No—perhaps, to them, this Great Orthodox-Demonic War is someone else's affair to begin with. Because aside from the master of Wolje Hall, they are not harvesters.
The command stays in chaos, and the war goes on. I turned my eyes to Soo, still studying the forest, and spoke.
"Soo. Something very serious is going to happen."
I had thought it a war that would end easily if the Heavenly Demon and Oh Myung-sung joined their strength and swept the field. Like this, I can't even tell who will win.
Therefore.
I think the time has come to tell her the truth.