Why Use a Sword? — 14
The main hall of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult.
It stood on ground where the earth, rich in limestone, had been eaten away by water until only hard bedrock remained, and stone pillars had thrust up like a forest. From the outside it looked like one enormous building perched atop countless columns of rock. It had the beauty of a palace hall, but its true nature was a fortress raised against intrusion: dwellings sat atop the pillars, and walled, roofed corridors stitched them together. The layout was tangled enough that anyone who blundered in would circle endlessly among the houses crowning those randomly risen columns.
To someone who had lived inside it for a long time, however, that maze was no different from an ordinary home. To the man most of the cult called the Holy Cult Leader, the main hall was as familiar as the inner room of his own house. He led those who followed him into its deepest reach.
"Burn this one too."
"Yes, Cult Leader."
The moment the order left Goo Sung-yong, the previous cult leader, his subordinate did as he had been doing all along. He smashed a stretch of wall in a corner of the corridor and shoved a fire-starter through the hole. The instant the party cleared the passage, it caught.
The spark was no more than the ember of a tobacco pipe, but the corridor had been laced with a compound meant to roar up in ferocious heat the moment any flame took hold.
"Is it right to burn the place like this?"
The young man following at Goo Sung-yong's back put the question to him.
"The device was made to be burned, so the path would be cut. I used it as it was meant to be used. Why? Worried the place you intend to live in might be damaged?"
When the middle-aged man turned the words back on him, the young man set his face and answered.
"I am helping you because of a promise."
"Good. For now, that is enough."
Goo Sung-yong had never expected much more than that. He went in without any particular reaction. The small things did not matter. His aim was to kill the enemy who had driven him out and taken up the name of Heavenly Demon, and to return to the place that had been his. That was why he had gathered men and struck the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult.
In truth he had already turned more than half the cult's hall masters, so it was less a raid than the driving out of an outsider. With help from people inside, they reached the Heavenly Demon without a major fight.
The room at the innermost heart of the main hall.
The moment they stepped through the door, they saw something profoundly shocking to the people of that age. A middle-aged man was dressed as a woman.
"So it was you, Goo Sung-yong. If you had lived, you should simply have fled. I would have pretended not to know."
And the voice that said it was a woman's.
"Jung-ha. Have you finally gone mad?"
Goo Sung-yong spoke the Heavenly Demon's true name with the look of a man staring at a loathsome insect. The Heavenly Demon only looked back at him and indicated himself.
"The Sunflower Manual had a fatal flaw, didn't it? Isn't this the very outcome you hoped for when you gave me the secret text?"
The people around them started violently.
"The Sunflower Manual!"
"A peerless demonic art!"
"An absolute divine art!"
Their eyes turned, of their own accord, to Goo Sung-yong.
"Cultivate it, and a tremendous yin energy rises. A man falls to qi deviation when yang and yin collide; a woman cannot endure the yin that wells up in her. There is no denying it is a martial art too powerful for a human being to learn. And yet you learned it, did you not?"
He answered with perfect calm. He had known the Sunflower Manual's flaw from the beginning. He knew it was an art first made by a eunuch, and that while its power was certain, the conditions demanded for that power were brutally harsh. He knew one thing more: that it held a demonic fascination a martial artist, having once seen it, could hardly resist the urge to learn. So he had obtained it and, without even unrolling it himself, given it to the Heavenly Demon. He had offered it as a gift in the certainty that it would destroy him. He had not foreseen that even the man's heart would turn female. Even so, the ruin was success enough.
"Hmph. You do talk well. But it's already too late, Goo Sung-yong."
The Heavenly Demon rose. Trailing silk hung all about him, a costume cumbersome to move in, and there was no weapon in his hand, nor any within easy reach. Turning over what the man could possibly intend, Goo Sung-yong leveled his sword at him.
"Already too late?"
The young man and the woman nearby, and the middle-aged man and the old man as well, drew their blades and went on guard. The Heavenly Demon's words had made them wonder whether they had walked into a trap. There was no trap.
"Because the one who takes the Heavenly Demon's seat will not be a man wielding that counterfeit Heavenly Demon Divine Art of yours, but one who commands the true art. Jeon-yang."
Speaking the single name, the Heavenly Demon pointed to the door that led still farther in.
The door banged open, and a large man walked out. Something about him was wrong. His skin was so starkly white it looked like sickness, and the hair showing through the cloth that bound it, together with the beard covering his face, was purple. This world, much like the newer martial tales, had people with hair of every color, but this purple was far too vivid, too alien, to be a shade one met on the street. The man, his face swallowed by a beard like Zhang Fei's, grinned and lifted his sword, and a brilliant purple force lanced from the blade like a beam-saber.
At the violence of that energy Goo Sung-yong reflexively poured his own into his sword and raised a sheath of sword-force. Purple, the same. Set before the eyes like this, however, the difference was plain. The power latent in the light was as distinct as a stream of water set beside molten lava.
"We held no rite to pass the name down, but at this level he's worthy to be called Heavenly Demon, wouldn't you say?"
"Already. The name of Heavenly Demon is mine."
With that, Jeon-yang hurled himself at Goo Sung-yong, swift as an arrow.
"Get in your grave, old man!"
The sound was less blade meeting blade than heavy siege engines ramming one another.
"The lover of that male cur certainly has a mouth on him!"
The man at Goo Sung-yong's back drew his sword and swung it at Jeon-yang. To introduce him: he was the Left Emissary of Light, a man in the post of captain of the guard. Jeon-yang knocked the sword aside. Then he loaded his blade with the immense power fed to him through the upper dantian and swung. The Heavenly Demon Divine Art—not his own strength, but force received from something else and put to use.
Trace the matter back to its origin, and the original Heavenly Demon Divine Art was the art Goo Sung-yong himself used. But if that name belonged to the art wielded by the one who took the title of Heavenly Demon, conquered the martial world, and came to be called a Martial God, then the art Jeon-yang used was the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. In sheer volume of energy, every attacker together could not have overcome him. Each time his blade came around, sixty years' worth of internal energy tore loose like refuse and shattered whatever it touched.
A fight, however, is not made strong by strength alone. The technique of martial artists who had lived by combat for decades outstripped Jeon-yang's power: softness against force, the curve against the straight line. Martial arts were made, in the first place, for fighting the strong. Let a monster who had nothing but strength try to use them, and the technique only snared his own ankles.
Goo Sung-yong took Jeon-yang's measure, judged that he himself need not be the one to meet him, and at once handed him off to the people behind. Then he raised his sword and pointed it at Jung-ha.
"You. You have broken the taboo."
At that, Jung-ha rose from where he sat and laughed.
"Yes. That's right, Goo Sung-yong. If one knows a way to become a Martial God, shouldn't one use it? Jeon-yang will have learned by now that he isn't perfect, so we'll be taking your lives."
He lifted a hand. Between the long folds of his sleeves, that hand held a small fruit knife. The instant a sinister energy gathered in it, the knife for paring fruit became a peerless weapon for cutting men.
"Oh Myung-sung! I can't take him alone!"
At Goo Sung-yong's cry the young man drew his sword at once and came to his side.
Steel screamed. They barely turned Jung-ha's attack aside and brought their weapons to bear.
Jung-ha against Goo Sung-yong and Oh Myung-sung. Jeon-yang against Goo Sung-yong's subordinates and his daughter. The fight collapsed into a melee.
The battle between Jung-ha and the two men went forward with a terrible coldness. Each stroke was an exquisite work of art whose material was killing intent itself. Every principle a human mind could conceive had been gathered into that small fruit knife, and Goo Sung-yong and Oh Myung-sung were hard-pressed merely to keep it off them. There were two reasons they did not lose at once. One was that the weapon Jung-ha used was a small fruit knife. The other was that the art the two of them used was the Star-Absorbing Great Art.
It was an art that stole the inner power of whoever one faced. Show the slightest opening and it drank a person's internal energy and true qi like a leech and left a mummy behind—an art of a grade close to the Sunflower Manual's. So they barely held the balance. They could hold nothing more than the balance, until something out of the ordinary intervened.
At the same moment.
Jeon-yang's fight was nothing like theirs. The Heavenly Demon Divine Art, flinging without restraint the power that poured without cease from the upper dantian, was less a martial art than a gigantic monster running wild. At first the other side was driven back hard. They had the numbers, but meet his sword and you were cut down together with your own blade; block it, and you took wounds as grave as if you had collided with a boulder. They did not lose in the first instant only because Jeon-yang had rarely fought anyone who could actually use martial arts. Until his season of harvest, he had been nothing more than a guardian who happened to know his way around a blade. At best, his experience was of brawlers lining up to fight one another. He had spent a few days sparring with Jung-ha, but sparring was all it had been. Immense power, and against it an experience pitifully thin. Had he been a mighty monster from the beginning, he might at least have handled his strength properly. Instead he was trying to scoop rice with an excavator.
That was why he lost. Because he failed to kill them at the outset, the advantage reversed. Tiny mistakes accumulated, and the wounds on his body multiplied. The wounds fouled his movement and kept him from thinking clearly. He was not, besides, a genius who grew stronger in the middle of a fight. At some moment an edge opened a crucial muscle, and the sword left Jeon-yang's hand. The Heavenly Demon Divine Art was not a sword art. He raised a fist, telling himself he could still fight—
"Aaaagh—!"
Goo Mil-mil, daughter of the previous cult leader, knew that Oh Myung-sung, the man she loved, and her father, Goo Sung-yong, were being driven a step back. She had been watching their fight, and at the fatal instant she drove her blade deep into Jeon-yang. A vital point that, once pierced, tore a great scream out of the body.
"Jeon-yang!"
At the voice of someone who mattered, Jung-ha's concentration wrenched elsewhere. The balance, dead even until then, broke. Goo Sung-yong and Oh Myung-sung did not miss the opening. They took one of Jung-ha's arms and one of his legs.
Jung-ha's body slammed into the floor. His eyes, though, stayed driven into Jeon-yang and would not come away. Watching him, Goo Sung-yong clicked his tongue.
"Wearing the name of Heavenly Demon, and look at the state of you."
Blood and sweat had half washed the makeup from his face. Hideous, Jung-ha lifted his head toward Goo Sung-yong.
"Cult Leader Goo. Spare Jeon-yang. I'm the one you hate, aren't I?"
"Of course I'll let him live. I'm curious myself about how a human who has broken the taboo is put together."
Jung-ha knew exactly what that meant. Experimental material.
"Run, Jeon-yang!"
Forcing strength into the arm and the leg that remained, he flung himself toward Jeon-yang without a care for his body, the shout closer to a scream. With one arm and one leg already gone, his body would not obey him—slowly enough that Goo Sung-yong had all the time he needed to see it and answer.
Then—
"Lord Heavenly Demon! You must flee!"
Eun-chun burst into the room and unfolded the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. An art identical, in every respect, to the one Jeon-yang used. The moment they saw it, the people who had been facing Jeon-yang understood the danger and charged. Jeon-yang, soaked in blood, saw the ring around him vanish and sprinted at once for the Heavenly Demon. He seized him, pulled him into his arms, and hurled his body at the wall.
Beyond that wall, for what it was worth, was a cliff that fell as if it had been sheared away, and one had to drop a long way before reaching the water. It was high enough that it would have been strange for an ordinary person not to die. Because that was what lay there, no one went down after him.
Plunging, Jeon-yang lifted Jung-ha—who was looking at him with a bloodless face—as high as he could, so the fall would hurt him as little as possible. Then, waiting as death drew near, he asked, as if the question had only just occurred to him.
"Why did you love a thing like me?"
Jeon-yang struck the water with Jung-ha in his arms and died before there was time to hear an answer.
Far above the surface, in the room with a hole torn through it, Goo Sung-yong looked down with the face of a man who had seen something dreadful.
"Truly revolting."
A voice that had no business being heard. He looked to the side, and there stood a woman with purple hair. She was tall, but her figure belonged less to a woman than to a child. Nothing of her registered in his sense of qi, as if there had been nothing beside him from the start. To the eye she was an ordinary person who did not know a single martial art.
While Goo Sung-yong failed to find his bearings, the thing leapt straight through the hole. Unable to tell what was happening, he could only watch the girl fall. She dropped for a long time, struck the water, and shattered to pieces.
He witnessed a nightmare that had climbed up into the waking world. On the surface, the corpse that had burst apart knit itself together again, as if time were running backward.
Without meaning to, Goo Sung-yong gave voice to a name he had seen in the records the Martial God left behind.
A mad god clothed in violet. Chaos that destroys the world.
The taboo the Martial God had set lay down there.