Chapter 110
"Something serious?"
Soo looked at me, puzzled.
I pointed north. Not at the forest, the way she had, but farther—very far.
"People who mean to kill the monster are coming this way."
"The monster? You mean they're after you, Choseol?"
Months had passed since I told her I was a monster, and still she caught on at once. I met her eyes and nodded.
"Then we just tell Master, don't we? If it's Master, he'll wipe them out easy."
She said it as if that were only natural for the Heavenly Demon.
Then again, Soo had lived her whole life under the Heavenly Demon Cult. It was no surprise she believed the Heavenly Demon could destroy any enemy at all. And in truth, he was strong. I didn't know martial arts well enough to weigh him against Eunjae with any precision, but if I assumed they were similar, the chance that he could conquer the murim alone was high. Even if the other side had built something to stand against a Heavenly Demon like that, Oh Myung-sung was here as well.
The problem was that the cult's upper ranks, which had looked so neatly stitched back together, were splitting apart.
Is this really all right?
"Do you know the Nine Sects?"
"Yeah. Master taught me. You mean those guys who strut around like they're the guardians?"
A few words glinted inside a faded memory—a grumbling sense of why it was the Nine Sects and not the Nine Sects and One Gang. But when I checked the memory of the spy who had come here, the Nine Sects were not made of nine sects at all. They had begun as nine, yet once sects of any decent size started joining, and the minor schools were counted in, there were a great many of them. And above all, how could beggars ever be let into a gang of thugs?
The Nine Sects hauled in staggering sums from protection money on their own turf and from the collections of every sect that had come under them. Anyone could see how the wealthy despised the poor. Thinking such an arrangement could hold was the stranger notion. So even when the word beggar glinted...
"They aren't guardians. They're a violent organization. I explained it briefly once before. In places the government's authority doesn't properly reach, they're the ones who protect the people by force. Of course, the ones doing it are human, so in the end they become the ones who exploit."
The Heavenly Demon Cult was no different. Ideology alone could not lead people, and once you considered that they put worms into human bodies to keep control, this place was even less stable. It meant there was no clear design anyone could follow. And I knew why.
There was no particular god here. What they believed in was a strong man called the Heavenly Demon. Behind that lay the truth that a single immortal had been raising sacrifices and subordinates for himself—a breeding pen—and had arranged it so they would not even know they were being raised. The thing had been twisted from birth.
And the immortal behind it had been shattered not long ago. The one who could protect this place was dead. Now the master of the pen was gone, and the gate stood open. What came next was obvious. Even if they won today, I could see no future. This group, held together by a thread, would fail to keep every person pressed down, and it would collapse. Because the immortal who had been holding them was gone.
"They took a terrible beating from the Martial God. Some sects vanished outright. When they learn a second Martial God might appear, what choice do you think they'll make?"
"Couldn't they just bow their heads instead of picking a fight for nothing?"
Soo sounded very much like a person of the Heavenly Demon Cult. Submit to the strong.
"And if that Martial God isn't one genius, but infects people like a plague—what should the Nine Sects do then?"
"So that's it. They want to kill you, Choseol."
I hadn't finished explaining, but from my words she had already grasped why the Nine Sects would come for us. I didn't tell her that the Nine Sects had become a larger body called the Murim Alliance. Nor that men I took for government troops were watching this war.
In truth, even explaining the Nine Sects was out of bounds. It was information I should have had no way of knowing. But I expected the Heavenly Demon Cult to break so thoroughly that no one would be able to trace where the knowledge had come from, and so I told Soo facts I ought not to have known. If the cult's upper ranks had been functioning as they should, I would never have thought of saying any of it. They were ready to throw away one of their strongest people, just like that.
He didn't possess the Heavenly Demon Divine Art, but he knew a technique called the Star-Absorbing Great Art, and a sword art called the Evil-Warding Sword. For a martial artist of this world, those were arts so powerful that anyone who could obtain them would do anything—and there was no shortage of such people.
No. In the sense that he could use me, he could use the Heavenly Demon Divine Art as well. Because right now the Heavenly Demon, and everyone else in the cult, believed the art the Martial God wielded was the true Heavenly Demon Divine Art. They thought the one Eunjae had originally used was only an unfinished technique from before. And yet that was the one that could be called the true art.
Anyway. More important than all of that, I gave Soo a single rule to act by.
"If it gets dangerous, running away is one way to handle it."
Quietly, I set one option in her hands for whatever came next.
"What are you going to do, Choseol?"
I shrugged.
"What could I possibly do? All I can do is give pieces of myself away. The way I did with you."
In the council chamber, the Jigwan Hall Master stood at the center, forcing a choice on the Heavenly Demon. The trouble was that he had dragged up the days when Jeonyang was here. He brought out the time the Heavenly Demon had handed all his power to Jeonyang, and accused him of ruining the cult the same way again. Of all things, he used a vicious word that insulted Jeonyang, and he put feeling into it. Emotion is a powerful thing. The Heavenly Demon raised his hand at once, and the Jigwan Hall Master's right arm tore away.
It wasn't cut. The Heavenly Demon only reached out, and the arm compressed in empty air as if some giant hand had seized it and twisted, then spun round and round until it ripped free—like a child pulling the legs off an insect. I couldn't feel it, but Oh Myung-sung and In Sim-won, who were in that room, suffered under a crushing pressure. To my eyes they seemed to be struggling to breathe for a mental reason, but inside that chamber, what they called qi was probably raging.
Suddenly Soo came up to me, caught me around the waist, and pointed toward a high place in the cult's main hall.
"Choseol. Master. He's furious right now."
She could feel it even from here. I agreed with her.
"Someone must have touched a sore spot."
In other words, the meeting had shattered. And Oh Myung-sung, with Goo Mil-mil at his side, had been on the point of drawing his sword against the Heavenly Demon. Unexpectedly, the Heavenly Demon Cult might simply vanish like this.
"No—what would even make Master angry? Master's incredibly calm. What on earth did they say?"
"Ask him yourself, the next time he comes."
I was curious, too, about how he thought of his own past. At any rate, the meeting ended as it stood, on the matter of the Heavenly Demon's mood.
The man in the faded memory lamented that it was ruined. Waste the opening doing nothing, he said, and turning it around again was truly hard. All he had ever done was click his way through strategy games—what did he know, carrying on like that? The thought surfaced, but he wasn't so far wrong. The memory of someone who could actually use strategy and tactics was reaching much the same conclusion.
"Master hasn't been coming by lately. Master's the Cult Leader, so I figure he's too busy with all that to visit. Mmm..."
Soo took a few steps away from my side and looked me straight in the face.
"I'm strong enough that Master praises me, so if bad people come, I'll protect you, Choseol!"
She declared it proudly.
"Do your best."
"Why are you talking like it's somebody else's problem!"
Soo rushed in and batted at my hands, scuffling.
"You're weak, Soo."
Ah.
Her face crumpled. Then she ran to the iron sword lying on the wooden veranda, snatched it up, and raised it.
"I am strong! At least stronger than you!"
A black-violet mist spilled from the blade. Set beside the Heavenly Demon or Oh Myung-sung, whose power stood as neat as crystal, it was quite small. Or perhaps I simply couldn't see the rest of it.
"First of all, Soo—I can't see qi. Even if you do that, I can't see it."
Her face went ah. It shifted into an oh-right-that-was-true, and she quietly slid the sword back into its sheath. Watching her set it gently on the veranda again, I found it hard to call her a proper martial artist. A martial artist's memory glinted: a martial artist should not leave a sword lying off to the side. It wasn't only the man in the faded memory glinting anymore. Other people were glinting too.
"And what good is being stronger than me? You have to be stronger than the enemy."
Plenty of memories agreed with that. At my words Soo dropped onto the veranda with a deeply angry face.
"You're right! You are right, but hearing it from you ticks me off!"
In terms of martial force, yes. I could steal the warmth from living things and make monsters of them, of course, but I was never going to do that again.
"You're annoyed because it's true, aren't you?"
Ah. She was sulking. I must have teased her too far. While I wondered how to soothe her, I stole a look through the eyes of other Harvesters.
A band of them handled spears the way others handled guns, and they were hunting martial artists well. Fighters of middling skill died with holes punched clean through their bodies in a single volley, and anyone who could bat that aside and close the distance was met by the Harvesters waiting behind, the ones whose martial arts were strong. The problem was that they had gone out too far. The Heavenly Demon Cult's domain. Its border. There ought to have been another order, but the command that should have given it was paused. I could already see how it would end, and that made me sorry. If I could, I wanted to use them as bait and get a look at whatever special thing the Murim Alliance had prepared. Thinking that, I went to Soo.
"Soo."
She whipped her head away. So I took her cheeks in both hands and turned her face toward me.
"Hngh—!"
In raw strength, I was the stronger one. The strength that came of this build was considerable.
"Things are going to become truly dangerous. If something unfortunate happens, live only for yourself then. I've always said so, haven't I?"
I had often told Soo to do what she wanted. Whenever there was a choice to make, I waited until she had thought it through and chosen. Sometimes she didn't wait, and simply went. To use me properly, doing what one wants is best. A person goes farthest when they move for their own ideal, and when that ideal is a good thing. The way Tisha had.
"Why are you talking like you're going to die?"
Soo grumbled, her cheeks still caught in my hands. It was a truly funny thing to say.
"Hehe. That I'll die... Soo, did you know?"
I took my hands from her face.
Even the one called Daegon—once named a god of a world, and fallen in this world to an immortal—had found it impossible to kill me.
"Don't worry about me. Move for no one but yourself. Until the day you die, Soo..."
How was I supposed to explain it? I could have told her that death would bring her to me, the way it had in the first world. But I could already see that if I did, Soo would find it easy to give up her life when something happened. So I said it this way instead.
One chance to set her teeth. Just once.
Thinking that, I lifted a hand over Soo's head, then lowered it. I wasn't this child's parent. A gesture like that would have been rude. Instead I pinched her cheek once and sat down nearby.
Time passed, and with it, from behind us, the sound of a peaceful everyday life breaking apart.
Hehe.
The Harvesters were moving fiercely.