Chapter 129: Voyage to the Bottom - 14
I look up at the second world. In the end, I lost. I had meant to drag it into a draw somehow, all the way to the very last — but.
Yes. Yuanshi Tianzun won.
I don't think Sama Baek will stir himself to summon me. The martial artists I have watched for years want to settle their own debts, gratitude and grievance alike, with their own hands. Favor or grudge, the best of it is whatever one can do by one's own strength.
The first world held a grave mistake, and yet it was warm enough to call heat. I knew already, didn't I, that taking in a whole world as it came would amount to about that? I got everything there was to get. There was a slip at the very end, but we'll call it a success.
The second world is a failure.
I didn't gain much warmth. Sama Baek will likely supply some, but this is no different from contracting with a light that has fallen all the way to the bottom — an utterly ordinary soul cast down to the lowest place, choosing a contract so he might resist what is unreasonable, loose a flood of resentment, and take revenge on those who insulted him. It's fortunate that even something like this supplies warmth. It still isn't enough.
Fortunately, it isn't a failure in which I managed to do nothing at all. I gained knowledge — far more than when I endured so long in the first world and took what a person named Yasle knew.
Tongtian Jiaozhu — Dagon.
A being who, on the strength of biotechnology advanced to the editing of souls, conquered his entire world and launched wars of invasion into others. But he invaded too far. His original world struck back, and so he abandoned it and fled, crossed into the next, massacred the natives, and meant to begin again.
There was an indigenous power there, though, with Yuanshi Tianzun at its head. More often than not the natives are slaughtered and the invader comes to rule their land. Here it was different. They won.
Tongtian Jiaozhu did not fight only once, of course. He threw himself in utterly alone and was defeated; he brought the subordinates he had somehow kept alive, threw himself in again, and was defeated again. Realizing that even this was not enough, he raised a group set squarely against the Chan Cult: the Jie Cult.
When a group appears that openly opposes another, people gather. That is why politics needs an enemy.
Anyway. The Chan Cult had originally been an assembly of immortals, and aside from them there were only monsters — little more than wild beasts wandering the earth — and fallen immortals. Once a power appeared that made an open enemy of the Chan Cult, those who resented it banded together, those it had persecuted gathered, and those who latched on in case there was something to be picked up were added in, until the whole of it became a vast collective.
The ones who claimed the Chan Cult persecuted them were, of course, that sort. That sort. The vicious kind who, if a mother has twins, force her to choose one of the two before their eyes or else they'll kill them all — then kill the one she chose and send the other back, and seem to do it for fun. The kind of wickedness that runs its mouth about persecution by the Chan Cult, when all they ever did was play.
Such things gathered and clumped together, and that was the Jie Cult. Surprisingly, it ran properly.
Why? Because if you rebelled, he beat you down, and if you disobeyed an order or did the work carelessly, he ground you up and made an elixir pill of you. Direct violence, and elixir pills handed out when the work was done well. Condition a beast with the whip and the carrot, and it obeys. Every time they obeyed, they ate a pill that made them visibly stronger. The pleasure of power — you can see it plainly enough in how many people will run a cheat program in an online game, so long as it means they win. Once addicted, there is no getting out.
Drawing on every method he had, Tongtian Jiaozhu swelled his strength, led the Jie Cult, and carried war to the Chan Cult. In the end, he lost.
His technology was formidable, yes. But people who gather easily betray just as easily. In a fatal moment they choose to run, rather than charge in for the sake of killing one more of the enemy, and when one flees, those who can no longer fight multiply in an instant.
So after the defeat, Dagon fled into the water. It was a place the Chan Cult found difficult to search, and there was a rule besides, against catching and killing those who ran. He clung to life with a grim persistence and started over from nearly nothing.
He contracted with the first Heavenly Demon and had the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult raised under him, or he worked his schemes so that dominion remained with the Heavenly Demon while he drew people out from within and put them to use. The third Heavenly Demon was Eunjae. Drawn to the power Eunjae wielded, Dagon goaded Gu Seongyong through Wolje Hall, had Choseol kidnapped, and reared her from childhood the way one rears livestock.
But the Heavenly Demon interfered in the midst of it, and before Dagon could properly approach him through Wolje Hall, he used Choseol's body as he pleased. That was when I entered her. And in the end, Dagon died by my hand.
There was a truly vast quantity of warmth — no, of heat — so much of it that the feeling was beyond wonderful. Hehe.
And I know there are a great many things like that. Even now, if I lift my head and look up, a huge light shines relatively near. It isn't light alone. It holds warmth in proportion to its size, and now that I know as much, every one of those lights is prey.
Or I could make one into a harvester.
Hmm.
No.
I can't make it a harvester. I know that. If that heat touches me, I won't be able to bear it. I won't bear it. Never. Because I could erase this cold — not soothe it for a little while with some small warmth, but escape the cold itself, completely.
In that sense Yuanshi Tianzun was so paltry I hardly knew what I was looking at, and I was disappointed. No. I see it now. From that moment on, I was already the one being struck.
I had eaten the three-tiered cake called Dagon, and I went in expecting something of the same order to come of it. What came out felt like a single grain of rice.
He had a long history of his own, on his side of things, and he did commit evils for the sake of leading the vast collective called Kunlun. He was no perfectly flawless immortal. But he resisted. His soul shattered and scattered, his flesh twisted, broken down until he was effectively no different from an object, and still he resisted.
It wasn't me he was resisting. He was resisting the cold.
A cold so horrific it could not be borne. Material heat warms it not at all. According to Yuanshi Tianzun's memories, he and I were in the same state as being plunged into the sun. The moment the calyx broke, I truly came within a breath of sublimating and flying apart. But the world was already smashed to ruin, and my body was leaking out in faint streams, so I took Choseol's body back more simply than I had thought. The immortal realm sank under that weight!
For reference, a small dimension made by artifice is an immortal realm. There are several, and the largest and most vast of them — the one used as the dwelling of the immortals — is named Kunlun. The name was taken from Mount Kunlun, where the entrance to the realm was set. What existed first was the mountain. In the days when there was still no immortal realm, right up until the great war with Tongtian Jiaozhu, the immortals lived on Mount Kunlun in an ordinary way.
I don't know how they raised their arts that far within a single world, without any contamination or destruction. It exists in reality, so I suppose that means it can be done.
And after Dagon, they exterminated me as well. There was the sacrifice of Yuanshi Tianzun, but he knew, and even I know, that they will live properly from here. This is my defeat.
Factions have split away from the Chan Cult that centers on the Jade Emperor, and so on, but there is no need to know that now.
Yes.
I look at the last connection that remains. Down here there is no such thing as the flow of time. Let it stretch, and it stretches without limit or end; draw it in, and it passes in an instant. I skipped through quickly.
Sama Baek built his strength until he was satisfied, and then he returned to the murim. Perhaps because he had spent more than ten years inside a cave, when he came out there was already no one left who cared about purple hair. So when he set out for the Mount Heng Sect to find Jeong Chil-jin, nothing stood in his way.
After a long time, he came back to his own sect. And he looked for Jeong Chil-jin.
But if someone expelled ages ago comes seeking a person of the Mount Heng Sect in the name of revenge, will those who belong to it hand them over? They will not. Those who remembered Sama Baek came out instead, and tried to kill him — fallen to demonic energy, and still he dared to show his face.
A blood calamity began. Sama Baek killed everyone who stood in his way and tore through the Mount Heng Sect, hunting Jeong Chil-jin for his revenge.
The Mount Heng Sect holds the foremost seat in the gathering of the five sword sects, because the alliance leader of the Five Sacred Mountains Alliance — that very gathering — was a man of the Mount Heng Sect. The Alliance came to save them.
In the meantime Sama Baek had failed to find Jeong Chil-jin, and to make up for the failure he was extorting information. The method? When you are someone with power, is there any way to dig out what you want except violence?
Evil deeds accumulate. They increase, and increase, and increase. To cut them off completely, you must dispose of them perfectly — or else build an organization on a scale no human being can perceive, and hide inside it. That latter is what the great corporations do. They work people until they die, and if someone breaks down or dies in an accident, they shove it aside; the dead were at fault, in any case. A person with a grudge resents the company's name, not the individual responsible. A fine method. No one is going to stab you in the street.
But Sama Baek could do neither. And the evil deeds, swollen as far as they could swell, come back upon him. Those who would kill him for the sake of justice. Those who would take revenge because he killed their martial brothers. Those who would kill him for nothing but honor. He crushed every one of them with martial arts.
And somewhere in the midst of it, word began to drift of the Heavenly Demon's return. The faintly lingering tales of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult met the Sama Baek who existed in the world, and the two fused. Then the Murim Alliance moved to be rid of him.
Draw on me and put me to use, and he won't die for lack of fuel. Even swinging internal energy the size of a mountain, so long as he can control it, he can swing it without end.
A mountain of corpses. A sea of blood.
Kill, and kill, and kill.
In the end a man appeared before his eyes, bearing the Moxie Sacred Sword. He could not beat Sama Baek with a treasure like that. Sama Baek had been growing too, fighting as naturally as he breathed. So he subdued the man, tortured him, and learned the truth: Jeong Chil-jin had been robbed of the treasure long ago, and murdered somewhere. They couldn't even find a corpse, and so everyone merely thought him alive, and the lack of news no more than that.
Sama Baek killed the man and took up the Moxie Sacred Sword. And because he used the treasure, he rampaged with it in hand until the immortals came, and at last he died amid a great gathering of immortals and the masters of the Murim Alliance.
There had been a similar scene. That time, it was Eunjae. Eunjae lived, and Sama Baek died, but if you look only at the incident, it is the same.
The murim flows now as it did then. Only the people have changed. The jianghu has not. I expect that place will go on like this for a lifetime.
While I was thinking so, the last of the warmth I had gained from the second world went with it, and every connection was severed.
"Goodbye, second world."
"If you're alive, we'll meet again."