Chapter 112: Climb to the Highest — 12
Soo stepped forward, sword in hand.
To protect me, she raised the blade against the group that called themselves disciples of the immortals.
I had said it any number of times. I am a monster. I had shown her that monstrous face on purpose, again and again, and I had told her more than once that this body was nothing but a vessel. If I told her to run, then she ought to have run. Why was she advancing on them?
Soo was not yet strong enough to stand as the Heavenly Demon's equal. The Heavenly Demon was out of the question. There was every chance she did not even reach the level of a hall master, to say nothing of Oh Myung-sung. Running was the right choice.
I seized the iron skewer driven into me and slowly pressed down on reality, so this body might be clean again.
At once the skewer buried in my flesh turned a deep violet. The sensation was different. Ordinarily there was no resistance at all. This time something soft waited at my fingertips, and then it burst.
Crack.
It split badly. Deep fissures raced outward from me in every direction, like bulletproof glass after a bullet has punched through — cracked clear across, and yet, apart from the hole, unbroken.
Which is to say there was a hole. Inside it gaped a darkness without end. When I brought my hand to that place, it passed straight through, empty as a phantom, meeting nothing.
Well. The break had spread with me at its center. If anything had come of it, Choseol's body would already have been affected, one way or another.
I walked forward. Soo was already ahead of me. She had probably gone first so that I would not be attacked.
Through Soo's eyes, I watched her sprint ahead without a word, sword in hand.
A finger closed on the trigger of a leveled Sealing Needle, and the needle shot out at speed.
Clang!
Right in front of Soo. Some three seconds later, the sound reached my ears.
Soo's eyes picked out every Sealing Needle in flight, then struck them down in order. The weapon took time to reload, so that single volley was the last chance its wielders would have.
She looked at the person nearest her, raised her sword, and swung — truly, lightly. Blood sprayed, and warmth poured into me at once.
Killing did not weigh on Soo. That was not strange in the least. She had killed before: the sordid rite carried out when she first entered the Heavenly Demon Cult.
They bound a child, wailing and throwing a fit, in the middle of an empty lot, and made the others strike that child with stones, one by one. If a child with a stone in hand refused, saying they couldn't do it, then that child was bound next. To live, you had no choice but to throw. And it went on until the child died.
After that, children who rebelled dropped away to almost none. They had taken part in a killing, and that was an easy thing to feel. And if emotion still burst and someone rebelled anyway? Then the next sacrifice was brought out.
In that way, every child of the Heavenly Demon Cult was trained from the youngest age to kill a person without difficulty. Look closely, piece by piece, and it was all arranged to educate human beings as if they were beasts. This, too, had been ordered by Daegon not long after the cult was founded, with treasure and food as the price.
In other words, the malice of a civilization advanced enough to rule one world and trade attacks with another had been built into it.
It worked. Without hesitation, Soo cut down the next person at once.
But those first two were all she managed. The sword she swung toward the one after that was sliced in half in an instant, and the deep-violet mist was severed along with it. The faint heat left where a crimson light had passed made the power of that weapon impossible to mistake.
Soo turned her head. A man stood watching her, dressed unlike the ones who carried Sealing Needles. Her eyes went to the red beam sword in his hand, then climbed, slowly, to the man himself.
"Well, now. Has that cruel immortal ruined even a child like this with wicked arts?"
He pitied her as he said it.
"Who's the cruel immortal? Why are you after Choseol all of a sudden?"
Soo asked in a low voice I had never once heard from her. He drew something like a cigarette from his robes and touched its tip to the beam sword in his hand. Ordinarily you would have to draw on it, feeding the ember a steady breath, before it caught. The heat must have been tremendous. He only brushed the very end against the blade, and it lit at once. He set it between his lips, took a drag, and pointed the beam sword at me where I was still running hard toward them.
"Look at what that wicked immortal did to you."
Soo flared.
"What. My hair turning purple? Or my skin going white? Choseol gave me a blessing, and this wreck of a body went back to the way it was. No — it got even better."
But he only kept looking down at her, pity on his face.
"That dog of an immortal calls it a blessing? Yes. It would look fine. Because that is the last flame, bought by selling every possibility you had."
What spilled out then was something I myself wanted to know. The true nature of a Harvester — why a Harvester grows so strong. Judging by the strangely certain look on his face, he at least believed it was true.
"My possibilities?"
Soo asked it with her sword still aimed at him.
"The soul transmigrates through the world. Every living thing dies and is born again, going on as a better life, and at the end of that path lies ascension. Ascension means escaping the wheel of life and death to become an immortal. But when this life of yours ends, you will turn forever at the bottom of that wheel, born and dying as some low, contemptible insect. You will never climb upward again. All of it is being drawn out and spent."
Soo blinked.
"Reincarnation is actually real?"
Among the stories I had told her, there had been one like that, so she understood at once. The man before her was startled.
"You know that much? It exists. A person is born again and seeks the chance to polish the soul. But for you, that is impossible. That wicked god stole every possibility you were ever going to gain, and the dregs left behind are what you are now."
At his explanation I turned over the memories I had just taken from these disciples of the immortals — these so-called Daoists — and a doubt rose. Why would holding me inside someone do that? Soo still had warmth. I was only set within the light that carried it. Wasn't it strange to say that this alone had stolen her possibilities? Soo still possessed them. I had taken nothing. Why say that I had? Did he truly know?
While the two of them spoke, I finally reached Soo's side.
"Is it true?"
She asked the moment I arrived, with a face that said of course I would know. I had been running a fair distance. There was no way their words should have carried clearly. Perhaps, somewhere along the way, she had noticed that I was watching through their eyes. This was not the time to worry over it, so I set it aside. At the very least, I would speak only what was true. I do not make excuses.
"I don't know."
The instant I answered, the man beside us waved the Sealing Needle wielders well back and raised the red beam sword toward me.
"So the monster that deceived even a child has come. Let us hear what drivel this fox-demon bitch out of myth spills with that cunning tongue."
The man they called a disciple of the immortals, or a Daoist, was named Hwangbo Cheon. Among the people of this country, where so many have no family name, or a name of only a single character, he was unusual. Hwangbo was the surname, and Cheon the given name.
"I portioned myself out to those who contracted with me. Every living thing has light. I place myself within that light. Until that person dies, I take nothing from the one I contracted with."
He sneered almost before I had finished.
"Laughable. Do you mean to claim you did not know what happens when you force a wretch like yourself into a person?"
"Wounds heal. They grow stronger."
He had been looking at me with a sneer. Little by little, his expression changed. It was not the look one gives a liar. It was closer to the face of someone who has seen something fouler.
"You were doing this to people without even knowing what it was?"
"Don't they get better?"
At least until that moment, that was what I understood.
Rage gathered in him. Soo darted in front of me and thrust the broken sword toward Hwangbo Cheon.
"So you committed such wickedness without hesitation because you were ignorant? What you lodged in the soul was not power, but you? And you did it as freely as you pleased? Because of you the soul warps, and wrings out everything it has accumulated until now."
But he did not swing at once. He condemned me instead.
"And once all of that has been wrung dry, the soul shatters, breaks into small fragments, and scatters."
"It's the same once you're dead anyway. What's so bad about choosing to start over like this, instead of living through something this awful now?"
Soo let it drop, blunt.
Hwangbo Cheon pitied her for it. Toward Soo, the pity never wavered. It was the gaze one turns on a victim of a wicked immortal. Set against everything said so far, he was probably a good man.
"Then you would not even be born properly. You would repeat without end a life of coming into the world as some insect-like speck and vanishing again. And that is still only the larger pieces. A piece too small must wander this world, neither living nor dead, until it is ground away to nothing."
If such a piece fell all the way to where I am, it would simply melt into me and disappear — if the light were drawn in as well. But I leave the light as it is. Warmth alone is enough.
Even so, I understood. So that was how it worked. There was something similar within Daegon's knowledge: a part of what was called soul engineering.
"To live a single life, and then to suffer until the soul is worn away to nothing."
Hwangbo Cheon pitied Soo, and turned his anger upon me.
"And at the hands of a wicked monster that does not even know it is evil."
That was wrong. I know that I am wicked. I simply had not bothered to say so aloud.
Hwangbo Cheon raised his hand. At once the people around us leveled their Sealing Needles at me and at Soo, and Soo went rigid with tension. Then he spoke.
Ah. So that was why Jung Jae-woo and Byeong-il had been put into that strange flame and incinerated — the flame that burns even the light. A portion of that flame rested in Hwangbo Cheon's hand. He had truly come for me in earnest.
So I stepped forward, caught Soo's shoulder, and said:
I would treat it as an investment in the future.
In it, a man laughed — a rough, booming laugh.
Loudly.