Climbing to the Highest — 11
The situation was worsening, little by little. Once it turned urgent, people came looking for me — especially those who had taken grievous wounds in the fighting and fled. They came at the risk of their lives, bowed their heads, and begged me for a blessing.
The Hall Master of the Heavenly Palace had forbidden anyone to enter the place where I stayed, but the people of the Heavenly Demon Cult were not kept out by that Hall Master's authority, nor by the Heavenly Demon's power. They followed only because they feared the worms inside their bodies. The Three Corpses.
Within the cult, defy a superior and these worms swim through your flesh, dealing hideous pain. They had built a structure in which you climbed only by staking your life. Then people learned that when my Harvest came, the worms inside the body vanished. And once they learned that severed arms and legs — parts of the body ruined past saving — regenerated without a trace, they began seeking me out prepared to die.
But only three a day.
A wary standoff had begun. Those above, who ought to have put a stop to it, looked the other way, since someone who could no longer fight might be sent back to the front. Higher still, they were simply too busy with their faction fights. One camp wanted Oh Myung-sung pushed aside. Another meant to set Goo Mil-mil up as cult leader. Another still nursed designs of an entirely different sort. Quite the variety.
On top of that, Hall Master Wolje was drawing out, one by one, the pegs of this loosely lashed-together Heavenly Demon Cult. They were remnants of the Severed Doctrine, yes — but they had also been the cords that bound a mass of people. As those remnants, the old art of suppressing people through pain, disappeared, people grew steadily freer. Put another way, control was slipping. An act undertaken for the sake of something better was destroying the cult's cohesion and, in the end, dissolving it. An irony. Hall Master Wolje had helped along the fall of the Heavenly Demon Cult.
And yet the Murim Alliance that the cult had to face was immense.
When a Harvest kills, I receive the dead one's warmth, and with it, memory. Not all of it, of course. Still, gather the shattered pieces and set them in order, and you can learn a great deal. The Murim Alliance is vast, and it is still growing. Once it swelled large enough to touch every region where people lived, it became so large that staying out meant taking a loss.
Drawing lines between sides is an ancient human custom. Especially so in a world that has spent ages building closed, self-contained groups, kind only to those inside their own fence. No — to be precise, it is the opposite. This is the tribal age, unchanged. Unless a war comes vast enough to break people's very sense of who they are, some terrible event that shatters every norm and every value, a larger idea is difficult to accept. They have lived well enough, after all, on the social identity piled up until now.
It is close to muddling through. Even so, a great collective runs smoothly enough while it has an immediate goal in front of it.
The extermination of the Heavenly Demon Cult. A world in which masses of people will never again die as they did in the age when the Martial God appeared. They were the victims, and so there is no moderation in the harshness. There is no resistance in them to killing people. Because they are not killing people. They are killing the wicked — for our families, for our interests, and for the great cause of the world.
An idea, at times, spreads through the world more fiercely than any drug.
In the Murim Alliance, anyone who can use a sword at all comes to catch the Heavenly Demon Cult. As a cause, there is a great righteousness. As a practical matter, the more you kill, the higher the seat you can climb to. Grown to that size, it seems the central government ruling this vast land called Gwan has taken notice — but they are likely to keep their hands off until the cult is gone. They don't pay taxes anyway, do they? No different from wild animals.
What comes after the cult falls, I couldn't say.
At any rate. The Heavenly Demon Cult is splitting apart, and the Murim Alliance is growing. By numbers alone, the cult will fall. The signs are already there. It has been roughly ten days since the war began, and in all that time the Heavenly Demon has not come once. More precisely, he could not. With each day that passes, believers of the cult die. And misfortunes overlap, don't they? In the villages near the Heavenly Demon Cult, more and more people are selling it out. From the Alliance, meanwhile, the numbers coming in have been rising little by little — and not merely weak replacements. Martial artists of real skill are arriving.
The answer is plain to see.
I turned that over as I sent away the Harvests who had come all the way to the house, and sat down on the wooden veranda. Unlike the war as others' eyes reported it, nothing so very large was happening here. Word had spread that only three people a day could become a Harvest, and so, whenever more than that turned up out front, a round of shouting would pass back and forth. That was the worst of the trouble. Aside from that, nothing much had happened.
Not yet.
The next day, martial artists at last reached a place from which the Heavenly Demon Cult could be seen. Bells rang loud enough to carry from the main hall and the village all the way to the house. Alarm bells, it seems, are much the same everywhere. Kang. Kang. Kang. The great noise flooded the grounds of the cult. Even so, those who arrived at the council chamber were only half of those who should have come. In the end, the Heavenly Demon, Oh Myung-sung, and whoever else had gathered resolved to throw themselves into the fight at once. At the northwest, where the village entrance lay, a Murim Alliance host had appeared with white bands bound about their heads, and the fighting had already begun.
"Choseol. Don't come outside."
I had been watching events drift past from inside the house, taking my time, when Soo suddenly frowned, took up her sword, and rose.
"What's wrong?"
"There's killing intent."
With that, Soo opened the door. The wooden door swung wide and the yard lay beyond it, but there was no sign of anyone nearby. No light, either. I thought she must have sensed what was happening in the village — and then, the moment she stepped out through the door, something sheared the air.
Clang!
Soo brought her sword up and struck it aside. What fell to the ground was an oddly shaped arrow. No — not an arrow. The shape was similar, but the whole of it was metal.
"Choseol, outside. Ngh—!"
All at once she closed on me, seized me, and bolted for the open. A moment later a long iron rod punched clean through the house. Had I still been inside, I would have been pinned on a skewer.
The cult's headquarters sits atop a cliff, and the only way in is a gentle slope running from the north around to the west. The gentlest ground, on the west, holds the village, and that is where the Murim Alliance is pouring in now. Which means this side is the feint.
"Choseol. They're bad people."
Soo held her sword out and laid a violet haze over it. I turned my eyes to where she was staring, fierce and sharp. The northern forest, where the arrow had come from. At the tree line now, human shapes were closing on us, bodies hidden behind whatever the land offered. The distance from here to the forest was considerable. And they had fired iron skewers from all the way over there? With internal energy, a person can bring out strength beyond human limits. Grant that, and I couldn't call it impossible. But this many?
The people coming this way had strange things in their hands. Not bows. Not crossbows. They looked like harpoon tubes, and when the skewer had flown a moment ago there had been no sound of anything bursting. So it wasn't gunpowder, at least. Soon they leveled the tubes and aimed the bladed ends our way. And right after that, with no sound at all, the skewers came.
Soo caught my arm, flung me aside, and raised her sword.
Kragagagak!
Shards of iron buried themselves in every direction. But Soo was still standing, sword in hand, untouched. She had struck down every one of them.
"No!"
"Ghk—"
I tried to answer Soo's scream. With the iron buried in my chest, all that came out was the sound of air escaping. Lung and diaphragm, both run through. My body is on the large side, and the skewers had come in so wide a spread that heaving one person out of the way was never going to be enough to escape an attack like that. One had pierced my chest. One had pierced my thigh.
So I touched the light of the two of them, and took their warmth at once.
Far off, flesh and bone burst outward, and the weapons in their hands were swallowed by meat and drawn inside. I looked through their memories — only a portion — and what I found was astonishing, and also something I had already expected. The thing was called a Sealing Needle. An immortal's art. Two things about it were peculiar.
First, the tube. A device for launching the needles. From what I could tell, it fired them with qi, the way mana had worked in the first world. And then the iron skewer that bore the name Sealing Needle. Once it lodged in a body, it drank that person's qi. Its shape before it was fired and its shape after were different, which suggested the mechanism that drank qi armed itself only when the thing was launched.
The two humans, warmth stolen and twisted into monsters, thrashed about in a frenzy to seize warmth for themselves. They were put down in an instant by weapons that might as well have been blades of light.
Strong.
They were disciples of the immortals — people who go to the place where immortals live and study there, in order to become immortals themselves. Piecing it together from the memories left scattered here and there, it seemed much like Daegon making fish-folk of those who followed him. Using humans to produce one's own kind. Perhaps every immortal works this way. They had come carrying special objects called spirit treasures, to eliminate the one who makes Harvests.
Yes. I had thought the feint was aimed at the Heavenly Demon. It wasn't. The Murim Alliance is here to remove the Heavenly Demon Cult's Harvests, and these ones mean to remove me. Strictly speaking, both decisions would have been made by the immortal side, the one tied to the Alliance. They had drawn out the souls of Jung Jae-woo and Byeong-il and taken from them all manner of knowledge about the cult. Which is to say, the target of this group that calls itself the disciples of the immortals is me.
I looked at Soo, fretting and restless at my side. Well now. I hadn't known she was that strong. I had known she would be strong to some degree, but not like this. I watched the ones called disciples of the immortals start forward again, and then I looked back at Soo. At this level, even on her own, she isn't likely to die just anywhere.
I pointed east with one finger. That way there is nothing but stone pillars and a tangled lake. I was simply telling her to run far. If the Heavenly Demon Cult wins, she can come back later. If not, she can keep running just like this. You have to live first, or what was the point of all that raising?
Soo looked at me with her face full of tears. I took her cheeks in both hands, pressed my forehead to hers, and pointed again toward the distance. She muttered on and on for a long while, and in the end she took up her sword and turned forward.
What?
No — not forward. I had told her to run.
Soo said it as she lifted her sword.
Truly. She wasn't listening.
Foolish.