Chapter 120
A moonless night. Pitch-dark.
I'm walking across a wide grassland.
The drunk who put his hands on me resisted the authorities to the end, and now he's dying where he stands, run through with spear and blade. He isn't the one who started the fire. He was simply the one thrashing the hardest there, and that was enough.
More than that, the stretch of wall nearby didn't merely go up in a clean blaze. The heat warped the stone, and part of it came down. Someone has to wear the blame.
Isn't that so?
And the way he died didn't roll out the way I predicted. I thought he would take the gold, deny his crime, and flee far off. His body had grown stronger, after all. I expected him to outlast the others on the run.
The more of them get caught, the more eyes gather on whoever is caught last. And if that someone has unusual hair and an unusual color of skin? An easy mark. If they look like an outright villain, people are quick to commit the fallacy of hasty generalization. All the more in an age when so little information travels. Add a rumor that they carry gold, and it spreads faster still.
Step. Step.
I walk on, turning it over, and the night sky — already dark — goes utterly black. If there were stars, I could walk by them. The weather must be overcast; there isn't a single point of light overhead. This isn't a world where civilization has come that far. The road is nothing but bare earth laid open to the sky, and there is no such thing as a streetlamp.
When I looked earlier, it was grassland straight on from here, with nowhere fit to rest. I'm weighing whether to sit down on the ground and rest as I am when a light shows, far off.
Not a light in the sky. A light on the ground.
If people live there, I'll have somewhere to stay. I head toward it.
It's so dark I fall more than once, but I reach the place somehow.
An old man stands there, holding a small oil lamp.
"Aigoo. Where are you bound, at such an hour of the night?"
He asks in a voice that is terribly hoarse and rough. A very peculiar voice. He asked, so I answer.
"Mount Kunlun."
"Oh-ho. Off to seek a Daoist, are you? From the look of you, some calamity has befallen you."
At that, I look down at myself. I missed my footing several times on the way here, and my clothes are a wreck of dirt and dust.
"I have business with Yuanshi Tianzun."
The moment I finish, the old man stares straight at me. I can't read the expression. He is making some face or other, but my memory throws up a mark it cannot parse.
There is a light in his body. About the size of Hwangbo Cheon's.
In short, that.
"Hee-hee-hee. Not even Yuanshi Tianzun will save you!"
His face twists, shaping itself into a smile. Then his body stretches long, and he comes for me, meaning to eat me.
Right. Not human.
Think of the fish-folk, and it's hard to imagine they are the only strange creatures. And if I look through Tongtian Jiaozhu's memories, this world has monstrous immortals of every kind. Daegon once took them in without discrimination and made war on Mount Kunlun. He lost, in the end.
Which is to say, a common native creature of this world.
It comes at me and bites. Flesh splits. Bone is torn away.
And so?
I seize the light and drink in the warmth.
"Ah, ah, ah, aah? Aaah? C-cold."
Even a monster, it seems, cannot keep the shape of its body. The whole of it boils up as if foaming, and then pieces that should never emerge where they do — arms and legs, eyes and ears — burst out of it.
"What, why is it so, cold. You, aren't, human? Uh. Uh? Uuuh? You're, not a person?"
Come to think of it, I've never tried anything else on someone after taking their warmth. And just now, there is nothing around.
One wretched native life, its whole body twisting, screaming as it shivers in the cold.
A chance to experiment.
Before I regenerate the body, I grab the monster and force myself into the light scorched black. I could control Daegon, so perhaps this is possible too?
Crack.
But unlike Daegon, the light turns straight to dust and vanishes. Nothing remains.
And the monster stops completely.
The body doesn't stop. It keeps boiling, repeating regeneration and collapse, but the consciousness has blown clean away.
Useless.
No. It might still be of use.
The light wasn't produced as some tool. The monster made it by reshaping its own flesh. From the information in the light, it was born a monster that eats people in exactly this way.
If that's the case, then it's fine even if it was born for the purpose of giving light, isn't it?
I'll take only the part I need.
I seize the body, nearly a sphere by now, and crush reality until it becomes a lamp. And while I'm at it, I heal Choseol's body too.
Crunch.
With a sinister sound, the flesh compresses into a lamp I can carry. At first it had the look of a lantern. Now it resembles a gas lamp.
Did my memories get mixed in?
Mm!
Quite bright.
It doesn't seem to be hot, the way fire is. It gives off its own light. Carrying it like this will be convenient.
So I take it up and walk the road I was already on.
Behind me, in the pitch-black dark, a small crack glimmers faintly. Judging by its size, turning that thing into a lamp doesn't seem to have been what put a fracture in the glass bottle.
This is the size of crack that appears when I heal a grave wound.
A good thing is a good thing.
Lamp in hand to light the dark night, I walk toward Mount Kunlun.
The road shows clear and bright.
With this, I can walk a starless night road in safety.
Time passes. A faint light steals into the dark sky, and the sun rises beyond the horizon.
Once the morning sun is up, I can see the lamp I'm carrying. It has a shape like a black gas lamp, but inside, instead of fire, a strange liquid ripples, and the light comes from that.
And the body of the lamp, which I had thought similar to steel, is less iron than a material like leather.
The grip felt soft enough that I wondered whether leather had been wrapped over it. It was simply the body.
If I roughly call it something like a spiritual treasure, there shouldn't be a problem.
If I can use it, it's fine. If I can use it.
I walk on and on, and broad paddies open out to either side. The season is still spring, so most of them lie dry.
And beyond the fields, a large city begins to show.
I hope that this city, at least, won't bar the road.
Thinking that, I head for the city gate. Should I make some gold and press it into their hands? I don't want to drag this out.
Oh?
I get inside with astonishing ease. So easily that I have to wonder why the last city stopped me at all. No one blocks me. They simply let me in.
No need for the gold piece I'd made just in case.
Once inside, before I cut straight across the city toward Kunlun, I look for an inn. I can force the body's condition back into shape, but if the glass bottle breaks before I reach Mount Kunlun, that would be a problem, wouldn't it?
Choseol's body is a human body.
Even if what's inside is me, it needs to be allowed to rest.
The truth is, I'd meant to rest once in the last city...
They made me circle around without resting, and it took longer. They stole my time, so I made them pay for it.
It wasn't such a great price, in the end. A small disturbance rose, and then it was over.
Remember the choices that failed, and reach the goal one careful step at a time.
Current objective. Rest.
I consult the memories of a Daoist who once stayed in this area, choose an inn that had been decent, and go in.
At the entrance I order one night's lodging and two days of preserved rations, toss over a lump of gold, and say I don't need the change.
The man at the inn beams and sees to me.
I can see desire in his eyes, but unfortunately it isn't the sort that crosses the line into killing a person and taking what they have.
It's the feeling of wanting to look good for this guest and eat well off them. Perfectly wholesome.
I follow him up to a room on the upper floor. The inside is fairly clean, just as it was in the memory. Unlike the places that come to mind as hotels or motels in my faded memories, the room is a little narrower. And of course there is nowhere inside to wash.
Even so, for the price, it's decent enough around here.
I set my things down and ask the man I gave the gold to for a place to wash. As if he had been waiting, he leads me there.
There is nothing but hot water and a towel, but for me that is enough.
When I come back out, the area around my clothes has shifted a little from when I went in to wash. There is nothing worth stealing even if someone rummages through them, so I dress without a worry.
The one thing worth stealing is the lamp made from the yokai, and they left it as it was — perhaps they thought it belonged to the inn.
I am about to let it pass when the light ripples oddly bright, so I look closer.
In the part that gives off light, something like a man's face — it wasn't there a moment ago — has gone in, and is slowly melting away.
Aha.
Interesting. I have a rough sense of what happened. But I pretend not to notice, take up the lamp, and return to my room.
The moment I enter, the man I gave the gold to comes in with a bright smile, asks whether the bath was to my liking, and brings a meal.
I praise it as good, and he goes out beaming.
Honestly, I thought he was the most likely to have come in meaning to steal.
Mm.
It wasn't him. Someone who saw me hand over the gold must have slipped in, and become fuel.
A good thing is a good thing.
I eat a proper meal for the first time in a long while, and rest deeply at the inn.
Resting deeply, I sort out the situation as it stands.
Unlike me, trudging along step by step, Wonhugong of the Mount Hua Sect, Cheonbaek of the Mount Tai Sect, and Samabaek of the Mount Song Sect are racing toward their own sects at tremendous speed, using what they call a movement art.
I hadn't given much weight to the fact that they were people of the murim, but it seems they'll reach their sects faster than the rumors will.
I had hoped, just as I expected, that they would clash with people of the Murim Alliance or Daoists of the Chan Cult on the way to their sects.
If I had been a little smarter, I wouldn't have made this mistake...
Then the easy mark I set up in the last village won't do much good.
Anyway.
From here, the distances to Mount Hua, Mount Tai, and Mount Song are similar, so the times they arrive won't differ by much.
My faded memories glimmer faintly. Why is Mount Kunlun in the center, and not at the western edge? This isn't the murim I know.
It's been a while since they shone.
Whenever memories like this surface, I think the same thing. The geography is completely different from the ancient China in my faded memories. There is no point in judging by those memories, so why do they shine like this?
Watching, through their own eyes, the three who will soon arrive at their separate destinations, I let Choseol's body rest deeply.
Once I enter Kunlun, there will be no more time to rest.