Chapter 123
The approaches of Mount Kunlun. This place is still the domain of humans.
Unlike the cities I have seen until now, no stone wall closes around the settlement. There is a wall of wood instead. Even so, I can guess it will hold about as well as stone. Here and there, the script the immortals use is carved in intaglio along the pillars, and from the memories of immortals and Daoists I know Daoist arts are laid over them. Defenses like these only multiply the farther in you go. Better, then, to enter as quietly as I can.
I go to the gate first and take my place, politely, in line at something like a checkpoint. The eyes of everyone passing through fix on me—or, more precisely, on the single flower in my hand. It does look strange, the first time you see it. The nine petals of the bud are arms. The calyx is writhing meat with eyeballs stuck to it, and the long stem is plainly a spine pulled out of shape. It looks thoroughly dangerous. Put another way, anyone who saw it would have to think this had nothing to do with human affairs, wouldn't they?
And just as I expected, the moment I reach the entrance a knot of badly rattled people steps forward with spears in hand.
"What business brings you here?"
See? They're asking politely. I was only half certain, but this far from the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult they don't simply drag you off for having purple hair. My hair is purple, you see. A perimeter is always strictest at the outermost edge and grows duller the farther in you pass. This is hardly a world where social media flings news from one end to the other in an instant, either. To people living this far off, the annihilation of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult is someone else's trouble.
"I've come to reach Yuanshi Tianzun."
It isn't a lie. It is, strictly speaking, the truth. And this much ought to be enough. If some strange-looking person announces they have come to meet Yuanshi Tianzun, how do humans react? I can't claim to know them well, but a great many put on the face of someone who would rather not be involved. Once a thing stops being their business, people want to shove it aside and think about it later. Now and then a diligent soul will try to clutch the rules and not let go, but most of them only want to pass it up to someone in a position to deal with it.
"If I may, whose name shall I give?"
Hmm. What should I do? Ordinarily this is where I would soothe the wary ones—say I had no connection to anyone, only that I had come. But that method is for when you mean to seep in slowly. If I want to meet someone high up quickly, as I do now, it is far easier to sell them a name from on high. And I know someone high up.
"Please tell them that the one who fought Tongtian Jiaozhu Daegon has come."
An enemy, yes. And because he was an enemy, there were many who fought him once. They will remember. The war ended in Kunlun's victory, but it was a war in which a great many immortals died on both sides. Among people who live so long, few can shrug off the name of Tongtian Jiaozhu. On top of that, I have spoken a name no ordinary person has any reason to know. Those who know it are rare. This should make it plain that I am not someone who picked up a myth somewhere and wandered in.
I lower the line a little at a time and wait for the prey to bite. I'm almost there. I have already pressed the glass bottle down more than once. If I fight the people here, never even lay eyes on Yuanshi Tianzun, and drop to the bottom, it will have been a loss. Everyone knows that the more urgent a thing becomes, the more carefully you have to move. How many can actually live by that, I couldn't say. That is the fate of proverbs. The words get said because people can't do it, don't they?
"Will it do if I wait here?"
"Ah—no. If you would wait inside, we will send for you."
I ask politely, and they answer politely. Their eyes have changed completely. They are looking now at someone important who has come from somewhere else entirely—the way one looks at an immortal, or a Daoist. Under their guidance I step into a small space near the gate, the sort of room used as a rest stop. They leave a single guard out front and leave me alone inside.
Oh. What a shame. If someone had come in, I might have tried talking about this and that.
I sit and sort through what I have seen, through other people's eyes, on the way here.
First, Cheonbaek of the Mount Tai Sect. Things had gone best for him. Yes—past tense. The Mount Tai Sect took in the Cheonbaek who had survived. They heard him out, sympathized with his circumstances, and worked themselves into a fury. But his luck ended there. Mount Tai demanded that the Murim Alliance open a strict investigation into Jeong Chil-jin. Jeong Chil-jin, who had returned to the Mount Song Sect ahead of them, was one step faster. He bound the matter up with Sama Baek of Mount Song and declared Mount Tai a wicked sect that had gone over to the Demon Cult.
It was the very moment they were drunk on the elation of having destroyed the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, and then word spread that there had been not merely remnants, but a traitor. From old times, people have been crueler to traitors than to enemies. The Daoists and the immortals stayed out of it, but the Murim Alliance members who remained went straight for the Mount Tai Sect. It was not even a proper operation under anyone's command. A great many simply showed up at Mount Tai on their own. Seen through the eyes of Cheonbaek, who was still there, the picture is badly fragmentary, but some of them came only to ask whether it was true. There is always someone, though, who floors the accelerator. Someone cut a person down, and the moment blood was seen it ran past anyone's power to stop.
If it had ended there—if someone on the level of a sect leader had simply come out and mediated—there might have been a chance to settle the thing somehow. But in that moment Cheonbaek, who had been hiding and watching what was happening to Mount Tai, was found. In a place thick with the smell of blood, what looked like evidence no one could talk their way out of had appeared. By then the society called the murim was too straight a line for right and wrong to be sorted out. A Mount Tai disciple was cut down. A Mount Tai disciple drew a sword in self-defense. What would a martial artist of the murim make of a scene like that? They would decide Mount Tai had been in league with the Demon Cult, had been caught at it, and so had seized their swords. And if Jeong Chil-jin's breath touched that thought, a lie put on the clothes of fact.
A massacre broke out at the Mount Tai Sect. A great slaughter, in which anyone with even the slightest tie to Mount Tai was killed.
Cheonbaek fought. Whether it helped that the Heavenly Demon had compressed the Heavenly Demon Divine Art into a single stroke for him, he fought a long, long time, scattering dark-violet internal energy—long enough that a great deal of warmth came in. The funny part is that the harder he fought to protect the Mount Tai Sect, the further Mount Tai fell into the pit. He fought for days. But a person is a person. Even with a power like me supplied without limit, it seems exhaustion cannot be held off. And enough time passed for masters who had heard, from far away, that someone was being hard-pressed at Mount Tai to come flying in. For all those reasons, Cheonbaek died fighting on slopes that had burned into a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.
When he died, Jeong Chil-jin appeared. Seeing that, I feel my faith in people was rewarded. Cheonbaek died with his head cut off, shouting at Jeong Chil-jin through a face packed with resentment and grudge. Jeong Chil-jin had probably come to make sure that anyone who could threaten him had been properly dealt with. Through Cheonbaek's dimming eyes, I look at him. Anxiety is mixed into the face, but he is relieved. He seems to think it is almost over.
From now on, though, the one being hunted will be Jeong Chil-jin. I don't mean Sama Baek, who somehow fled the Mount Song Sect, crawled into a cave with no one in it, and went feral. The rumor will have spread far enough.
Jeong Chil-jin has the Moxie Sacred Sword.
Human greed has no end. We have the example of Jeong Chil-jin, don't we? No matter how carefully you try to stop it up, no matter how you try to crush the truth with force, no matter if you even succeed at that—the truth does not disappear. A rumor that has drunk blood will be harder still to erase. Judging by the way Jeong Chil-jin acts, someday an enemy will point that part out to him. And it will burst in the moment he feels safe.
While I am sorting through all of that in my head, the door opens—perhaps the talk above has finished—and two people come in. One is the person who was here earlier. The other wears clothes unlike anything in this place: a robe the color of cloud. The man in that robe comes up to me and offers a greeting. Introducing himself as a Daoist of the Kunlun Sect, he says, politely, that an immortal wishes to meet me in person, and asks me to follow.
He sees this purple hair and doesn't so much as mutter about the Demon Cult, so wiping out the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult really was a story only for people who travel far from here. Or else, looking at the single flower, he has decided I am not human. Among the locals Daegon gathered when he first came to this world, many were what people call yaoguai. Some were the kind I had made into lanterns. Others were beasts, or objects, that gained power and intellect and became yaoguai. Yaoguai immortals. With beings like that around, it is easier to mistake me for a yaoguai than for someone of the Demon Cult. I gave Tongtian Jiaozhu's name so that mistake would come easily. It works well.
Of course, they might lead me in like this and then lock me away, sneering that I crawled in like a fool without even knowing the ground was hostile. But I don't have the leisure to choose another road merely because that worst case might exist. Sometimes you have to take the risk.
I follow the Daoist through the human village and into the district where the Daoists live. Entering, of course, does not mean I get to meet anyone at once. We walk a long way up the mountain. The higher we climb, the thicker the fog becomes—but I know it was made that way on purpose. In the immortal's memories I obtained, this is set down as a device for defense. How to break it is not written there. I remember only the correct path. Well, for a thing like this, remembering how to use it is enough. Come to think of it, Daegon knew a similar art. Is it exactly the same? Or a wholly different technique that happens to end in something similar?
Thinking that, I follow the path upward, and suddenly the fog is gone and a broad village lies open before me. People who look like Daoists wander here and there, and far off, high overhead, several islands float in the air.
Kunlun.
Those islands are not the Kunlun where the immortals live. The Kunlun of the immortals—the Chan Cult—is an entirely different space, one you enter through those islands. The most troublesome place of all to get into.
I look at the Daoist. He is taking me toward where the islands are. In other words, it seems I will be able to go up safely. I think I have gotten past the Daoist, more or less.
At last, the time has come to enter the immortals' nest.