Chapter 115: Ascending to the Highest — 15 (End)
"Yes. That's right."
With that, the Heavenly Demon let the sword fall from her hand. A murmur rose from the immortals overhead, but I knew this was not her giving up the fight.
She lifted her foot and stamped the ground, and a violent quake tore through the earth. The main hall of the Heavenly Demon Cult shuddered, and the flames clinging to the buildings swelled past all control. Then the sword she had just released rose level with her eyes, trembling in time with the world.
And then, all at once, every vibration ceased.
That did not mean it was over. Everyone here knew it, because the sword hanging in the empty air had not stopped shaking.
The Heavenly Demon trod the sky and climbed. She walked up through truly empty air as if ascending a flight of stairs, and her sword followed after her, shuddering violently in her wake. In all that time, no one attacked. She rose higher than the highest roof and stopped.
The moment her steps halted, the immortals adrift in the sky and those standing upon the rooftops each hurled an attack, as if they had been waiting—or as if they knew it would be dangerous to watch any longer. Lightning. Wind. Fire. Water. Not one of them touched her.
When the Heavenly Demon looked at her sword, it stopped its trembling and began, slowly, to move. So slowly that it seemed it could never turn aside every attack pouring in. At least, that was how it looked to me.
A short, spare swing. Each time it cleaved the empty air, the lesser attacks either vanished or rebounded and flew back at the immortals. One stroke undid two or more. However many came, cutting them down in order was nothing but a task. Even currents of water and wind—things that ought to have been impossible to cut—disappeared the instant the blade moved.
Beneath a sky packed with storm clouds, whether from the smoke of the burning Heavenly Demon Cult or not, she stood alone against the immortals. As if offering up her own life, she stepped in toward those who did not flee, and when the sword swung, they died. At last even the final immortal to charge her lost their life, passed their warmth to me, and was gone.
She had won.
Half of the Twelve Great Immortals who stood directly beneath Yuanshi Tianzun, head of the Chan Cult, and besides them the immortals who had prided themselves on being able to fight. But it was still too soon for relief. In their memories I had seen something terribly dangerous.
I understood too late.
All at once the empty air was sheared, as if cut to fit a rectangular frame. At its center the Heavenly Demon looked about and swung her sword, but the blade's motion hardly mattered. Space that had been three-dimensional shrank flat into a plane. Even so, her sword split the seam of that flattened space and slipped free.
Through the Heavenly Demon's eyes, the space around her remained as it was, while beyond the cut face a pitch-black darkness spread.
A treasure in the form of a hanging scroll.
Spread it open, and it takes an enemy inside. Roll it shut, and whatever it holds disappears.
But she could not get out. The sword tore through the only space where the outside could be seen and went on, yet her body could not follow, as if an invisible wall stood there. Far off, she looked toward the one holding open a human-sized scroll. She should have had no information at all, and still she found at once the culprit who had done this to her.
An instant later the sword flew at tremendous speed and buried itself in the head of the one gripping the scroll.
Won.
That was what I thought. But the Heavenly Demon's sight turned to darkness in a flash. The last thing to enter her eyes was the boy beside the man whose head had been sent flying—seizing the scroll on which the Heavenly Demon was painted, and folding it shut.
I had the Taiji Diagram's location. Without a thought, I ran that way.
In the meantime the Heavenly Demon swung her hands through the empty air. The first two strikes seemed to hit nothing, and yet they met a solid wall, and that wall was drawing gradually closer. Soon she stopped swinging and let out a long breath. She drew air in again, let a little of it go, and held.
She swept both hands in a wide circle—right hand above, left hand below—gathered them at the center, then reversed the sequence. A vividly shining black-violet light appeared.
Yes. Light. Through the Heavenly Demon's eyes, I saw the Heavenly Demon's light. That was something that could appear outside a person? Wasn't the light a soul? No answer came back to my question.
She pressed in from either side with both hands, as if joining them in prayer. Whether the thing between them had volume or pressure, her palms never met. Both of her hands shone pure white, and the brighter that shine became, the thinner the light before her grew.
I watched, certain she was doing something tremendous, and then something felt wrong. Sensation vanished from the tips of her fingers. Through the Heavenly Demon's unfocused gaze I looked at them, and the fingers that had turned to pure white light were crumbling away like dry mud. The fragments glittered in the empty air and disappeared. By the time not only the hands but even the elbows were gone, the black-violet light had become a single thin, straight line.
No. Before she did anything more, I had to get her out of there. If the Taiji Diagram folded completely, the space that held the Heavenly Demon would vanish. Find it and take it before she broke any further, and I could draw her back out. I knew how it was used. When the Heavenly Demon killed the one who had first owned it, I had read the memories.
I ran with all my strength. Before long I saw the boy folding the scroll-shaped Taiji Diagram, the headless corpse beside him, forcing the scroll down whether it would go or not. The instant I thought I had to close in and snatch it—
The Heavenly Demon opened her eyes clear, and the thin line moved like a sword. She had no hands, and yet it came before her as if invisible hands were there.
"Heh. To think Soo would climb higher than I have. So that is why it isn't a Divine Art, but a Heart Art……. Yes. That was it. What you place in a sword—the heart alone is enough. But there is someone I have given my heart to, so a Heart Art won't do for me."
In the darkness, holding that thin strand of light, the Heavenly Demon murmured to herself.
"Instead, I will leave behind the Heavenly Demon Divine Art."
No.
That was not a murmur to herself. It was words meant for someone. From a place where no one could hear, she spoke to that someone, took hold of the line, and swung it from above to below.
Single Stroke Heavenly Demon Divine Art
The sky split. Cleaving the void, a sharp wound was left upon the world.
In the space of a blink, the boy vanished together with that powerful treasure, the Taiji Diagram, and in their place rippled the deep darkness that appears when I pour in too much power. Only one thing differed from mine. Where my edges are messy, like shattered bulletproof glass, this left nothing but a cut as clean as a line drawn with a ruler.
A heavy, wet impact. From far off came the sound of something falling. The Heavenly Demon's senses—the feeling of a body striking something. In that instant I looked up toward where she had vanished. The peak of the roof. Something that looked like the Heavenly Demon was tumbling down off it.
I ran, but she fell faster than I could reach her, striking the roof again and again on the way down. It was not long before I arrived where she lay.
She looked like a corpse dropped from a rooftop. A woman with black-violet skin, much of her crushed, dying. Blood spread out from her in every direction, and from the sky a few raindrops began to fall.
They say rain comes where a great fire has burned. Dust lifted high into the sky gathers water about itself and falls. Which is to say, I had arrived before a Heavenly Demon with no hope of living, one breath short of a corpse.
"Heavenly Demon."
When I called her name, she coughed, wet and ragged. I came close, knelt, and lifted her head.
"You saw, didn't you?"
"Yes."
I had seen it well. It was carved into memory—short, and yet fierce enough that the next time I sent the Heavenly Demon Divine Art on to someone, I could send it at once.
"I must have been fated to die in a fall. It's the same as when I was born again."
Seen that way, perhaps it was. The day the Heavenly Demon became a woman, she had been dying just like this, fallen from a height. She opened her eyes against my knee, looked up at me, and moved that ruined face. The flesh was so wrecked I could not tell a weeping look from a smile, nor grasp with what feeling she was watching me. She gathered what strength remained in her chest and opened her mouth.
"My friend. Do not weep."
"I'm sorry, Heavenly Demon. This is rainwater."
Unfortunately, my heart is not ample enough for tears. Sorrow, anger—such things are buried at once beneath the scream of wanting to do something about the cold, and they disappear.
"For a monster, my friend, you are far too... guileless. If you mean to hide it, then deceive me a little... better."
After that strange claim, that I was crying, the Heavenly Demon closed her eyes and drew in a breath.
She let out her last breath, and the straight line that had rolled to her side slowly faded. It offered up only a small warmth, then unraveled thread by thread into a thin strand, and soon became dust and was gone.
The rain swelled to a downpour and beat upon the Heavenly Demon Cult, until the corpse lying before me turned pure white.