Chapter 114
I walked toward the sword still blazing where it had fallen on the ground. It was the last trace of a man who had never given up on me—who, knowing full well he was going to die, had resisted to the very end.
I tore free Hwangbo Cheon's severed arm, the hand still locked tight around the hilt. The Moxie Sacred Sword. I had barely taken hold of the blade that bore that name before it flickered like a lantern that had spent the last of its charge, and the light went out. A true beam-sword, then.
I looked around. Only a few Daoists were left, the ones who had tripped partway through or been flung too far to flee. They clung to their Sealing Needles and trembled with terror. In the instant before Soo swung, Hwangbo Cheon had gathered his subordinates behind him, and so the enemy had been sheared away cleanly. Snow drifted down out of the sky and slowly gathered along the deep ravine that had opened in front of me.
What now.
I thought for a moment, then decided to head for wherever my contractor was. The Daoists did not attack even as I started walking. They only gripped their weapons and stared at me, faces rigid with fear. In the end, not a single blow touched me before I was clear of that ground.
I climbed the hill toward the main hall of the Heavenly Demon Cult. Far off I could see the hall, and above it the fight still raging. The weather just then was a localized downpour of concentrated sword-force, flashing overhead, and against every expectation it looked as though the Heavenly Demon might actually survive. As for the rest—well.
Gapjae had died to a weapon much like a gun. It may not even have used gunpowder the way a Sealing Needle does; he died to a round that made no sound but the tearing of air. Even if I turned over my faded memories and every other memory besides, a bullet is, at bottom, faster than sound. By the time you hear it, you are already too late.
Guns, of course, already exist in this world. But they are weapons of the military, and someone who has lived an entire life inside the Heavenly Demon Cult would not know them. That was why Gapjae, and a great many of the guardians and hall masters with him, died without ever mounting a proper response. To someone seeing one for the first time, a projectile weapon is no different from a hidden weapon they have never encountered.
Even so, they were people of the murim. Once a few had died, even those ranked below Gapjae managed to resist—but there was no longer anyone left in numbers enough to turn the battle around.
And In Sim-won. He went straight into his own den and set the arts meant to hold off outsiders working. But more than half of them depended on fish-folk linked through the Blood Cult and the Jie Cult, and those did not function. The devices that were still alive managed, at best, to snare a foot for a brief moment. Even so, he desperately did everything within his power. Someone among the attackers, though, already seemed to know that Daegon's arts were woven through the Heavenly Demon Cult, and they had a technician who could counter them. Most of the devices broke before they were ever properly used.
Around the time Soo died, In Sim-won was killed as well, by the immortals' disciples—the people called, for short, Daoists. He had the skill expected of a hall master, so he did not die alone. Thanks to that, I learned both that the ones who had tracked him were Daoists, and that they already knew Daegon's techniques.
There is a chain of cause. Daegon once fought the immortals of this world, and he lost to them once. After that he fled beneath the sea and built his strength, carefully, over time. The immortals, in other words, possessed information on Daegon. From Jung Jae-u and Byeong-il they discovered traces of him inside the Heavenly Demon Cult, and that was why they committed so many immortals to ambushing me. At the very least, these people believe Daegon is still alive.
Tongtian Jiaozhu. They had been on guard against the chance that the one called by that name might appear. They don't seem to know that the place was already vaporized in the blaze of Daegon's outburst. Well—it was a city he built in hiding. It would be stranger if Kunlun could learn at once what had happened there.
Now and then, as a Daoist dies, I receive warmth together with memory. The memories come out like shards, but fit them together and a great deal of information spills free.
Tongtian Jiaozhu. The Jie Cult. The Sea-Island Faction. If those are the words that describe Daegon and his subordinates, then the opposite is this: Yuanshi Tianzun. The Chan Cult. The Mountain Faction. The Chan Cult takes its name from the character for illumination, not the one for heaven. Even after their victory they remained wary of what was left of the Jie Cult, and once that remnant came to light, they sent this many Daoists. That was why Hwangbo Cheon, and his master Cheong Do-jin, were a Daoist and an immortal who had come out of the Chan Cult.
Daoist is the word for those who are still human. Immortal means someone who has half-slipped the fetters of a lifespan. Unexpectedly, not every immortal seems to carry a light as vast as Daegon's. Cheong Do-jin was an immortal, and to my eyes he was only about ten times Hwangbo Cheon's size. Hwangbo Cheon himself is about ten times the light of someone who lived well. Which is to say, not truly enormous. People on Cheong Do-jin's level even turned up here and there in the first world. Or perhaps they simply never used a method that swells the light that way.
Daegon's light had been immensely vast. If you consider that swallowing an elixir grinds apart the light of whatever the elixir was made from and adds it to the swallower's own, then perhaps even the one called Yuanshi Tianzun does not, surprisingly, possess a light so huge. Daegon grew by greedily devouring the light of others. These people may have won without ever doing so. The size of a light may not be a pure account of strength.
Until now, greater light has meant greater strength, but it need not always be so. At least in the memories I have taken from Daoists and immortals, there is no knowledge of grinding people into elixirs and eating them. If anything, they keep their distance from meat and grain. They ate a great deal of bitter herbs, mushrooms, beans, and fruit. Not every immortal, of course, grows by grinding human beings down and consuming them. Rather, because it was made with the techniques of another world, the Jie Cult is the aberrant thing.
In other words, it is fair to say the Heavenly Demon Cult is falling because it deserves to fall. Their side is founded on moral law, on pure goodwill, on the fellow-feeling a person ought to have. This side is a world of utmost atrocity, malice boiled down to its dregs. Just because the people here were not bad to me, I have no intention of denying that the ground they stand on is twisted. If anything, the one standing at the far end of that evil is me.
At least I am not mistaken about what I am. A monster, through and through. I cannot turn time backward. I cannot make the world as I imagine it. I have no omnipotence that could grant anything to everyone I meet. I can never become anything like a god. Because I am that kind of monster.
To obtain warmth, I can do anything. Anything.
Thinking that, I watched an immortal fall to the earth, cut in half beneath a sky dyed sword-violet.
A wet smack.
One of the fragments dropped beside me as I walked toward the main hall of the Heavenly Demon Cult. Only the left half of a man remained. He, too, was an immortal—one of the Twelve Immortals, whose names stand high in the Chan Cult, though not a tremendous immortal. A newcomer who had borne the title of True Person for only a little while.
At the peak of the main hall, the Heavenly Demon and a powerful immortal were colliding. Daegon had been so overwhelming, and she had been the Heavenly Demon who barely held out before him, so I had thought she would struggle to beat an immortal. Unexpectedly, she was killing them rather well.
When I crested the hill and reached the hall, the left leg of yet another immortal fell beside me. This one wasn't dead. Only severed. The sword-violet sword-force blazing in the sky showed no sign of stopping, but the calamities rising around it were weakening by the moment. By now they could hardly be called calamities at all. They had fallen to the level of mere magic—the sort I sometimes saw in the first world. Exactly that.
The Heavenly Demon really was going to survive. But the Heavenly Demon Cult was finished. If no harvesters remained in this vicinity, that said all there was to say.
A harvester besides the Heavenly Demon did remain, of course. The spear unit that had first used me the way a line of infantry uses a bullet. Only nine of them were left now, but they had pushed so deep into the Murim Alliance's territory that they survived by avoiding the strong. Aside from them, the only living harvester was the Heavenly Demon. Which meant almost no true adherent of the Heavenly Demon Cult was still alive.
Thinking that, I lifted my head to look at the top of the main hall, where she was. This time a vast ring of sword-violet light appeared above the cult. Through the Heavenly Demon's eyes, I saw someone murmuring sword-ring torn apart by that ring and die where they stood. When the ring burst outward in every direction, the magic-like phenomena covering the area vanished in an instant.
Her gaze swept the surroundings. Several immortals, and not one of them whole anywhere. Then the Heavenly Demon found me.
A small cough. She let it out and came toward me, and before long she stood in front of me.
She was a wreck. There was no unbroken stretch left on her blue skin. Wounds had opened all over her, and blood nearly purple ran down. The blood itself wasn't purple, of course. The hem of her clothes was stained a proper red. One eye was shut, perhaps from the blood flowing out of a long wound across the top of her head.
The moment she arrived, she asked me,
"Soo?"
"She's dead."
At my answer the Heavenly Demon only nodded. Then she lifted her face to the sky, though her gaze didn't settle anywhere. She was thinking of something.
"What were her last words?"
She spoke as if she already knew Soo was dead. I nearly asked her about that, then decided to answer her question first.
"Soosim Gong Choseol."
At that the Heavenly Demon laughed under her breath. She tried to wipe the blood from the corner of her eye, failed because far too much of it was flowing, and simply pressed the wound. Even so, with both eyes cleared, she looked straight at me and asked,
"That would be enough for me. But there's no way you'd be wearing a face like that just from hearing it. What did she say before?"
A way of speaking that knew me far too well. Unfortunately, I cannot read the Heavenly Demon's thoughts directly. I can only confirm things through the body's reactions, and her body was too ruined to guess from that. So I told her what I had heard in the moment just before. I spoke that incantation.
Hearing me, she turned her gaze toward where the house had stood. For the briefest moment she held that place, then looked beyond it—a vast ravine, snow falling out of the sky. The place where Soo had died. And then the Heavenly Demon looked at me.
She took her hand from the wound. She stared at that vividly blue hand, thick with her own blood, and stepped up in front of me.
A soft tap. She left a handprint of blood on my chest.
While the surviving immortals drew near, their faces full of awe and resolve, the Heavenly Demon laid a spell on me too.
"Three years from now, I thought I might give back the name of Heavenly Demon and set out with you, and with Soo, on a journey to grant your wish. It didn't come to be."
She let out a small sigh and looked to the sky.
"I was always like that. But I've swept away the emptiness of having nothing I can leave behind, and I've done everything I could for the person I love."
Then, with the arm that would not rise any higher for the wound, she held her sword out before her.
I knew what she was going to do. Knowing it, I answered.
"My contractor. The Heavenly Demon."
The Heavenly Demon smiled.