Chapter 126
When Yuanshi Tianzun finished speaking, Zhenren Bohyeon's body was already outside Mount Kunlun. And when the Outer God wearing Choseol's flesh finished in turn, the petals that had formed a bud of meat spread wide.
Nine arms opened where nine petals should have been, baring the inner flesh at their center. At the heart of the flower, a small sun was blazing.
It had originally been one particular weapon: a special organ devised by a nation called the Empire for the disposal of aberrants. The agency that made it was a peculiar public institution, somewhere between the Chakho constables who hunted tigers and the anomalous-phenomena containment bureau of a certain urban fantasy. It had belonged to a general who led one of that institution's great hosts — an object he carried against whatever disaster might come.
It bore the name Son of Hwahui. Know that Hwahui was the name of a goddess of the sun, and one could roughly guess what sort of thing it was. The weapon was the Spear of Utmost Yang. Its method was that of a hydrogen bomb, but its manifestation unfolded like a solar eruption. It was not mere heat. Mythic powers of every kind had been mixed into it, until the thing became a sun descended upon the earth, a weapon that tore unreality apart. Precisely because it was a weapon of that order, a man who had risen as high as general had kept it in preparation for the worst.
And it had been used properly.
But in the instant the explosion began, the Outer God stamped reality down upon it and twisted it. Had it burst as it was meant to, the domains of humans and Daoists upon Mount Kunlun would have been swallowed in flame and melted away where they stood. The weapon held a fire fierce enough to melt every defense that existed there, and to burn out even the passage leading to the place where Kunlun's immortals lived.
Even that, however, was nothing to the someone wearing Choseol's body.
Caught in the state just after the blast had begun, she forcibly twisted a human being, melted the weapon into the mind he possessed, and made of the two a single tool. The biotechnology of the Daegon — advanced enough to surpass a world — lent its aid. Yet that alone was, in truth, subtly short of enough.
The imagination that could seal an explosion of that kind inside a person drew its foundation from somewhere else entirely. From the days when the Outer God had been human: a line glimpsed in a comic, that a person's heart is a world unto itself. There is knowledge, and there is a doctrine to lead it. The two fused with vicious completeness.
Into the place where a light had flowed in with the Outer God and then gone out, she set a physical light. The single flower, in other words, was a lump of meat containing a bomb that had begun to explode and then been stopped. To say that it bloomed meant this: open the mind, and the explosion held in pause resumes the work it had been about to do.
In that instant, where the Outer God and Yuanshi Tianzun stood, there was light.
The blast distinguished neither friend nor foe. Just as it had always meant to, it burned every reach of space around the point of detonation with the power of the sun. The hypocenter evaporated in the literal sense, and fire blanketed more than half the vast space called Kunlun.
Amid a tremendous thermal storm, radiation scattering in every direction, Choseol stood with the flower she had opened worn over her like a parasol — as if she were merely keeping off the heat of a summer noon, and without a single wound.
"It's good that it has a function for protecting its user, but the flame can't be reloaded. This thing is single-use."
The principle was simple. If the calyx could seize and hold a sun, the reverse was also possible. But that was all. It could protect, and beyond that it had no function whatsoever. Crossing a space that had become a scorching hell would take some other means, and the Outer God, who had none, was glancing about in difficulty when a voice reached her.
"I thought you meant to kill yourself with a bomb. A personal spatial shield, then."
It came from a place where no living person could exist: the voice of a man so young he was nearly a boy. The Outer God looked toward the sound, and a boy came into view, floating in the air a considerable distance away. The shell had changed, but she knew him at once.
"This time it isn't a something. It's a living person."
She spoke while watching the white light at the boy's center.
"Yuanshi Tianzun."
The boy, his robes snapping and fluttering all about him, stood in the air and looked down at the Outer God — the Anti-Taiji, draped in the shell of a girl. Set beside the fight against Tongtian Jiaozhu, who had invaded from outside, she looked far too weak. The monster had no power at all, so little that it would have been strange if she could not be beaten.
Yuanshi Tianzun remembered the day Tongtian Jiaozhu had come at the head of a mixed host, locals gathered from this world joined to outsiders brought in from beyond. There was none of that sensation of the blood running dry. Nor the sense of danger he had felt when he faced the Daegon and fought him directly. No matter how he looked, what stood before him was nothing more than an ordinary human girl.
That was what frightened him.
Word that something had gone wrong with Tongtian Jiaozhu had reached him about fifty days earlier, when he joined forces with the human realm and annihilated a subordinate organization of Jeolgyo that bore the name of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. There were traces of Jeolgyo, and following them he found only the remains of a vast city in the deep sea. The intelligence he received suggested the city had been vaporized in a single blow by the power of a mighty immortal.
Far from that hypocenter, he discovered recorded images of the city vanishing. The place was presumed to have served as a kind of outpost, but there were no survivors. Those who had been clear of the blast had, without exception, died in wretched states, having taken their own lives.
Those who had fought the Daegon directly knew this phenomenon. When Tongtian Jiaozhu, the Daegon, revealed his true body, the overwhelming presence tore frail souls apart without distinguishing enemy from ally, unless one's mind had reached a certain level. So many corpses of people who had killed themselves meant the true body had manifested — and that even so, it had suffered a wretched defeat.
Who killed Tongtian Jiaozhu? Or is he truly dead at all?
Yuanshi Tianzun began an investigation. Then someone came looking for him.
He himself had learned of the visitor only through a communicator. He had been too busy searching for whatever killed the Daegon, and meant to ignore it. But when that someone said she had killed the Daegon, Yuanshi Tianzun sensed the danger and moved at once. He urgently evacuated every immortal in the celestial realm of Kunlun, and ordered the Kunlun that remained in the real world to aid him. After that, to see the enemy's condition for himself, he piloted a reception puppet from afar and went to meet her.
While the puppet pretended at conversation and bought him time, he drew on every resource of Kunlun to observe her and interpret what she was. The power and knowledge that Kunlun, that the Chan Cult, had accumulated until now showed their true worth in a moment like this. The interpretation was over at once.
What stood there was less a malice than a being who, in essence, occupied a place symmetrical to this world. And his judgment had been correct. Only then did Yuanshi Tianzun barely come to understand what it meant that Tongtian Jiaozhu was dead.
She still looked like nothing but a person. Yet inside that hide was one whom not a single world — not even every world with its strength combined — could wound, let alone defeat. Traces of the Jade Emperor and traces of Tongtian Jiaozhu were mingled together into that shape, and she held a living weapon.
"At the very least."
She was full of openings. A tall woman stood there who did not know how to fight in the slightest, and so all of it looked like a lie. Therefore Yuanshi Tianzun did as he had all along, and opened a conversation in order to find a gap. The thing seemed, unexpectedly, disposed to answer in earnest when addressed, and he would make use of that.
"Yes?"
"At the very least, I would have you tell me why you attack Kunlun. Through Zhenren Bohyeon you condemned us, saying one you held as family had died. Is it revenge?"
Yuanshi Tianzun knew tragedy well. To have lived long was to have broken through just that many tragedies. And so he put his question to a monster that looked as though it possessed humanity.
Did we make some mistake? Did we only set a chain of vengeance in motion?
But the monster shook her head.
"No. I don't know the principles of the world in any great detail, but I do understand human morality to a certain extent. Judged by that, the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult I belonged to was harm itself, and every one of them deserved to be caught and killed. If the age had developed a little further, one could have sorted out those worth saving and set about correcting the living. In this world, that can't be done."
To Yuanshi Tianzun's ears, it sounded like this: what you did was right, and I am not angry over it.
"You did condemn us."
"If someone you'd lived with like family was murdered, isn't that about as far as you'd go? So I don't hold you to the crime. The ones in the wrong are entirely over there, and the ones in the right are you."
"No. Even from a human standpoint, a slaughter carried too far is a wrongful thing. We did not distinguish you one from another. We disposed of you as a single mass. This is, without question, our fault."
It was his true feeling, and also a probe meant to shake the monster before his eyes. If this side admitted guilt, what viciousness might she unleash? He watched for that danger with calm eyes.
But the monster's reaction was not what he expected.
"You're a good person."
She praised him purely. So full of nothing but the truth that it was awkward enough to make the face itch, the monster looked straight at him and spoke.
"In the end, the bad one is this side."
The monster folded her arms.
"I know that souls stripped of their warmth are thrown away like garbage, and even knowing that, I'll increase the Harvesters in order to obtain warmth. From here on. Continuously. Forever. Never stopping. Until the cold inside me fades."
In a certain age, they put it like this.
Sociopath.
If there are those who commit wickedness because they are in pain and suffering, there are also those who, however harsh it may be, do not collapse, and practice good. Even if crumbling under pain and dipping one's hands into evil is the natural thing, upon the strict logic of good and evil it remains an evil deed — just as evil is evil even in an age when society holds that doing so is right. Were it otherwise, the practices of a certain culture that kills by cutting out a person's heart would themselves become right. Even if, by the sensibility of that time, they were clearly the correct thing, what is not must be said to be not.
That is what the monster claims.
"So the ones I called family, I'd already turned them into Harvesters. To shove them in a trash bin, throw them away, and then take revenge would be shameless."
Yuanshi Tianzun was ground down to nothing by that, and yet he found the traces of something that had been there. Before he could point them out, the monster went on.
"Your light is large, yes, but next to the Daegon it's as small as dust. It may be unfair to compare you with a Daegon who stacked Sacrifices layer upon layer to grow his own light. Even so, it isn't large enough to gain warmth by fighting this way."
Each of them knew she was speaking of the soul. Yuanshi Tianzun, too, remembered the power of the soul Tongtian Jiaozhu had heaped up to such bloated size. The one before him now was saying that had been truly sweet, and that a small light like his own was less than she had expected. But he could already anticipate what she would say next.
"That's why. With a light that small, you fought the Daegon. That knowledge. It's a truly admirable technique — splendid enough that I have to marvel."
She looked at him with greedy eyes, as if to say she needed that technique. Knowing the path she walked was pure evil, she would commit whatever sin she required, and freely.
"What will you do with this knowledge?"
"Everything that can be done."
Yuanshi Tianzun nodded. Judging there was nothing more to be gained, he called forth his instruments. Countless refined tools appeared, wood and metal intermingled, moving in forms more organic than any machine, and every one of them took aim at the monster.
"Then I, too, shall do everything I am able, and stop you."
Yuanshi Tianzun hardened his expression, pointed at the monster, and spoke.
Thousandfold Gravity
Ignoring the calyx that wrapped the Outer God as a world unto itself, the force called gravity — a force that moves by piercing straight through the world — slammed into the monster.