Chapter 113
But Hwangbo Cheon levels his red-glowing beam sword at me. The gesture declares, more eloquently than speech, that nothing I say is worth hearing.
Yes. Of course. For a good person, it is hard to leave alone someone whose mere survival promises an unhappy future. By their reasoning, rather than watch a person doomed to be unhappy forever, it is better to erase them completely.
He is still thinking rationally. Then shall I crush the rational part?
I bear down on reality.
Crack. At once, hairline fractures race outward from me, spreading slowly, the way a pane of glass gives beneath a heavy weight. The glass bottle cannot endure the reality I am forcing on it, and it screams. The fissures widen, little by little.
I overturn reality to suit myself. From that alone, how fragile the world is. Or perhaps I am simply too heavy, and it breaks whether I change reality or not. I still don't know which is true. I have learned that light is the soul, and I have heard a theory of how the Harvester is made, but parts of it do not match the facts. So for now, I will set it aside.
I take my steps slowly, on purpose. Offer a threat this easy to read, and the enemy will aim for me. Not for Soo.
Crack, crack, crack. The sound of splitting comes from every side, and the fractures slowly grow. Fear seeps, little by little, into the faces of those who call themselves disciples of immortals. One by one, the muzzles of the Sealing Needles trained on Soo swing toward me.
That's right. Look where you like. The more dangerous one isn't Soo. It's me.
I walk up to Hwangbo Cheon, close enough in height that our eyes meet, and I raise my hand—
"Aaaaaah!"
A Daoist nearby can no longer master his fear, and he pulls the trigger.
A clang. A grinding shatter. In that instant, as if a crack in a window finally gave way, a hole opens where nothing can be seen.
Why?
From beside me, Soo's purple blade lashes out and knocks the Sealing Needle aside. In the same moment needles fire at both of us from every direction, and Soo, watching them come, bats each one away. But there are too many, they are too close, and her sword, snapped in half, is far too short. In a span faster than I can open my mouth, Soo does everything she can.
Soo succeeds. She deflects every Sealing Needle that could have reached me.
And Soo fails. She fails at all the rest.
I had been twisting reality in the first place to warp the space around her, so some blind iron skewer would not find her by chance. I had even thought that if the Sealing Needles struck me, I might steal their warmth and mass-produce monsters. And above all, the strongest person here is not Hwangbo Cheon. It is a man named Cheong Do-jin, watching from a little way off.
Decode the faint memories of two people, and he seems to be something like Hwangbo Cheon's superior. Whether he is a senior Daoist or an immortal, I don't know. But his light is nowhere near as great as Daegon's, so he is probably a Daoist. I had meant to see how he would answer.
Ah.
Mm.
Soo has failed to keep herself alive.
"You really don't listen to me. If I'd known it would come to this, I should have played the parent and trained you to obey when I gave an order."
Sealing Needles are buried in her arms and legs, or have torn the flesh open on their way through. Not a patch of skin on her body is whole. Worst of all, five needles have crushed vital organs as they passed.
"Ehehe... sorry."
She has avoided instant death. She cannot live.
Holding me inside a body to restore it can be done only once. I don't understand the principle to begin with. Force me in, and the only future is a rupture. It was always that way, in the days when I could not control the amount. All I know is that when I am held in light that was simply white, one is born again whole and healthy.
"But... Choseol... you're... family."
Halting, stumbling, as if she could not say it unless she said it now, Soo forces her mouth open.
"The only one... who made me... happy."
Weren't you happy, back when you were with your real family? The question rises to the edge of my throat. Strangely, it isn't the faded memories that stop it. It is the memories of people I gained not long ago.
Soo smiles through a face soaked in blood.
"I did what I wanted. All of it. I did. That I can't win... it burns. Yeah. If I'd died back then, right there, it wouldn't have been strange, would it? Lady Choseol."
Back then, right there. She must mean the time when her whole body was swollen and she was dying. Why is her speech turning formal, little by little? Couldn't she just talk the way she always does, rough and close? Drawing the words out long only makes it harder.
"So."
Soo's expression changes. It is a face I have never seen. And yet I know what sort of person wears an expression like that, and with what heart.
A snap. Dark purple lightning runs along the Sealing Needles driven into her body.
"Impossible! Even a single one is supposed to make it hard for an immortal to use their power!"
"What is this tremendous energy! Can a child really put out power like this?!"
"The Heaven-Defying Demonic Art—was it truly a force this vast?!"
"Everyone! Get behind me!"
As if a wind were blowing outward from Soo, people tumble away, rolling. Even Hwangbo Cheon, who held the upper hand until now, grits his teeth and aims his red-glowing beam sword at her. But as if a great torrent were pouring against him, he is driven slowly outward.
A splitting crack. In time with the fractures in the empty air, cracks run through Soo's body. Then she slips free of the Sealing Needles with ease and lifts her sword above her head.
"I hope you'll treat everyone you meet from now on the way you treated me."
Her face is the face of someone who has finished her resolve.
"For us, that's enough."
Soo looks straight ahead and slowly begins to chant.
"I beseech you. I beseech you. Let me live."
A wish I cannot grant. I am neither an immortal nor a god.
"I beseech you. I beseech you. Let me live, and be happy from this day on."
Pray all she likes. The warmth I invested so heavily only collapses, and comes back inside me. That is all it amounts to...
"I beseech you. I beseech you. And so, may all the happiness I have gained return to you, who have no name."
Who speaks of that one's happiness to the very person they are praying to?
But the words do not come. There is no time for them to come. And then she does not even leave the air time to tremble and reach the one they were meant for.
Soosim Gong Choseol
Six syllables ring out. I cannot be the only one who heard them.
Soo brings the sword down from overhead, and a vast ravine opens before her, straight as a line drawn against a ruler. An astonishing cold fills the gorge. The season for snow has already passed. It is already the season when flowers bloom. And yet snowflakes fall from the sky.
The memories of everyone who knows martial arts glitter. Eunjae, of course, and every one of them, is struck with awe. Warmth rises in countless streams. Heat brushes past my side—not warmth drawn from the warmth that light possesses, but physical heat. A severed arm and a burning sword come spinning through the air, graze my cheek, and drop to the ground. Hwangbo Cheon's final attack. It fails.
Ahead of me, the place where Soo stood included, there is nothing. Only the vast ravine, and the Daoists who survived, frozen stiff. Whether fear froze them, or the cold truly did, I cannot tell.
"You should have just run."
I say it as I roll the warmth through me.
"I could have taken their warmth—their memories too, if I was able—found some way to settle things later, and simply met you again on good terms. Couldn't I?"
Why do something I never asked of you, and just disappear? The time I spent is wasted. You threw a life away for nothing.
Three years from now. I would have left when that time came, but if she had wanted, she could have followed. I never meant to restrain Soo anyway. I should have restrained her. Then I would not have had to feel this.
There is sorrow, and there is anger, but they freeze in an instant, shatter to pieces, and all that remains is the heart that wants nothing but warmth. The warmth vanishes in a moment, and the light that held it crumbles black, turns to dust, and scatters. I have no knack for catching dust on the wind.
If only I were truly a transcendent being, like the Outer God in those faded memories. How good that would be. When there is something I want, I want to do all of it. I don't want to go on like this—shivering in the cold, fretting and wringing my hands, binding myself with paranoid care, coldly calculating the warmth I might yet gain, and walking forward all the same.
Shall I simply feel that old rapture, clean and to the bone? I only have to apply force. Just a little. Apply it, and this glass bottle, already cracked through and through, will break.
I beseech you.
A spell, was it. Soo has her mischievous side, too.
I look far away.
Far off to the southwest, the Heavenly Demon Cult is burning. If there were only the people of the Murim Alliance, I might not be able to tell. But there are humans there carrying strange devices. They are probably what one calls treasured artifacts. On every side unfold scenes I used to see only when those who had gained supernatural powers fought, back in the first world. Middling cultists are swept away without catching so much as an ankle, and even the Guardians confident in their martial arts last a few minutes and die.
Oh Myung-sung and Goo Mil-mil swing their swords with everything they have, but under the troops led by the blind swordsman, their wounds keep multiplying. The Heavenly Demon is ringed by immortals of a standing much like Cheong Do-jin, who evaporated only moments ago. Were his opponents human, perhaps. They are immortals, and his chances do not look high. Because of those who carry the treasured artifacts, man-made catastrophes erupt on every side, beneath a sky lashed by typhoon and rain, by sandstorm and flame.
There is an evil order that exploits people through force and through insects, that holds martial might as the only priority, and under which every law lies crushed. Its name is the Heavenly Demon Cult. But those brutal days end today.
The alliance of the Murim Alliance and the immortals who descended from Mount Kunlun would be hard to defeat by humans alone. I watch them, drunk on righteousness, massacre every follower of the Heavenly Demon Cult. Even if the Heavenly Demon should happen to survive, with no one left to rule, the cult is finished all the same.
Today is the day the Heavenly Demon Cult falls.