Chapter 80
On the surface of the water.
Right now, there is only one person here.
First, a corpse, dead with its back split open. When that corpse was still a person, the name was Jeonyang. The impact of the fall had torn the limbs away, so that it was truer to call the thing a lump of meat than a body. And beside it stands a girl who, only a moment before, had dropped without warning onto the water and been smashed to pieces.
It was never a height from which a living thing could fall and live. Hit the surface from so high, and the blow is the same as striking a floor of concrete. A young girl, of course, would be crushed until no shape of a body could be found. And yet, as if time had been turned back, the flesh drew itself together and returned to the form of a person.
In short, she is not a person.
Before that girl, and inside the meat, there is a person.
The one who had borne the title of Heavenly Demon was alive, barely, by the inner force in his body. The impact had burst nearly every organ, and he was dying of total organ failure. Even so.
At least, for now.
He is the only living person in this place.
Makeup and blood had ruined his face until it was no longer a human countenance. His left arm and right leg were gone, and blood ran steadily from the stumps. Blood leaked from every opening a body has. Anyone who looked would have thought it was already too late.
If a person were the one looking.
A girl with uncanny violet hair came up before Jeongha.
Innocent.
That tone turned the place into something grotesque. At the water's edge, where a corpse and a dying man lay, a voice like a child playing house dragged Jeongha barely back to his senses. Was it because he stood on the border of life and death, or because he had reached the state called the Nascent Soul?
It did not, of course, mean what it means in the xianxia novels the Outer God knows: a transcendent immortal who has stepped entirely out of reincarnation and holds an endless life. The martial arts of this world had merely passed through Taoism, and so they borrowed the name. This world is neither wuxia nor xianxia. It only happens to wear a similar face. In that, the Outer God is right — she, who trusts nothing of what she remembers from when she was human.
Still, in the sense that he has set one foot on the threshold of a transcendent who has left the mortal world behind, Nascent Soul will do.
And so, past the man who has bled too much to see or be seen, something comes into view. A sea, spread upside down across the sky. If the world was first made out of a single chaos, then that sea covering the heavens is chaos itself.
There is a formula carved into a wall that only the cult leader can see.
The Third Heavenly Demon.
The only one with a record of conquering the martial world.
The Martial God.
Fear of a being that cannot be escaped.
Despair, that nothing one does will grant a way to flee.
To the world, the Martial God is said to have ascended. What remains there is only the trace of a human who resisted something that could not be resisted, and lost.
Jeongha called it anyway.
He was confident. By the time he had mastered even the Sunflower Manual, no one remained in the world who could face him alone. True, the Manual had twisted his body, and his mind had twisted after it. Or perhaps, as the chance flowered that he might never bloom, the hunger for power itself had gone. The pride that he was first of all remained. And so, believing he could manage it somehow, he called an ominous god.
Summoning a god required a great many things, but this was the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. Among its ten halls was an office that gathered the uncanny arts of the world.
Wolga Hall.
There were the method and the materials both, everything needed to call that ominous god. Even the means to control it, once it had been called. So Jeongha took what Gu Seongyong had prepared in order to become a complete Heavenly Demon — took that, too.
The material was a descendant with violet hair, the same as Eunjae's. Counted from Gu Seongyong, Eunjae was the Heavenly Demon of two generations before. When Gu Seongyong himself rose to cult leader, he had set about slaughtering that line as a danger; mindful of the Heavenly Demon's singularity, he had not killed them all. He raised them instead, to be refined into elixir pills. Jeongha stole that, and summoned what the Martial God had feared so terribly: the Violet Radiant God, Chaos of the Four Seasons.
At first, seeing the world split open before his eyes, he braced for a savage fight. What answered was so paltry a human that his own resolve looked foolish. Not a breath of qi. No presence fit to crush the world. The movements were those of a clumsy ordinary person, and the only gift worth calling a power was the ability to give strength to someone else.
At first he suspected a deception. Then he saw the child he had sent out of spite treated as something precious, saw it with no idea what it was doing, and the suspicion came entirely undone. Come to think of it, it had said it wanted warmth. Jeongha, who knew the solitude of an absolute, understood the Outer God. So he thought.
It was, of course, a misunderstanding. And now he saw the misunderstanding for what it was.
Chaos, wearing a child's skin, was plain before his eyes. It had told him to contract, if he wanted to live. The memory rose of that child, broken and a breath from death, made whole in an instant, and Jeongha cried out in desperation.
"Not me— Jeonyang, before me— make the contract with Jeonyang!"
The Outer God refused his wretched cry.
"I can't. I told you before, but you don't seem to remember, so I'll explain. First reason. I can't make a contract again with someone I've already contracted."
The Outer God came up to Jeongha where he lay, crouched until their eyes were level, and lifted a single finger.
"And second. Jeonyang has no warmth left."
She raised a second finger.
Jeongha understood exactly as he had misunderstood everything until now, and yet the meaning, at least, he understood with perfect clarity. Jeonyang was dead.
"No, but... he's still warm. He's warm."
Expressionless, the Outer God reached out and set a hand against his cheek.
"This is a person's body heat."
Jeongha knew it too. His body was wrecked, and he burned as if the flesh itself were on fire, but the corpse in his arms had already gone cold. The water was not so cold as that. It had only taken enough warmth that a corpse could be told from the living.
While he was forced, against his will, to understand that cold fact, the Outer God asked him:
"Will you make a contract?"
His eyes were already too clouded to make out her face. But the mind's eye, brightened by dying, showed him without any doubt what was held inside the girl's body. A chaos he could not help but understand — why the Martial God had left such scars of despair underground — looked down at him now.
"Now? Jeonyang is already dead."
Jeonyang's last words, heard as they fell, still lingered at his ear.
"If you don't want to, it can't be helped. I don't force anyone. I only hope that humanity does what it wants to do."
The Outer God's hand left his cheek.
Jeongha was terribly sleepy. If I close my eyes now, can I follow Jeonyang? Thinking so, he turned his gaze from the Outer God — from the sight of her, which chilled a corner of the heart.
No. He tried to.
Splash!
The sound of someone alighting on the water struck his ear. Through blurred eyes, he looked.
Gu Seongyong.
"You stupid fool! You've broken the taboo! You called into this world the very source of the miserable end that took the Martial God! Did you think a freak like you could become the Heavenly Demon just because you had that?!"
He thrust out his sword and loosed his inner force, and the water roared up after that immense power. Jeonyang's corpse, half sunk, had no chance of holding. It was torn away on the current. To Jeongha, it looked as if the water were cutting Jeonyang off from him.
Killing intent rimed his eyes. An illogical hatred filled his chest.
Gu Seongyong took in Jeongha's state, judged him as good as dead already, and leveled his blade at the violet girl.
He knew something of what the Martial God — thought to have reached the Spirit Transformation realm — had seen at the far end of the martial path. Something that gave fear and despair enough to break a man called the Martial God. Gu Seongyong had looked upon the Martial God's dwelling with his own eyes. If the girl before him was the same being the Martial God had seen, then the greatest threat of this moment stood in front of him.
And of all faces, it was the face of Eunjae's blood, whom he had killed once before. The girl might not be chaos. Even so, he was certain that anyone wearing that face would bear him a grudge. The life he had lived made him think so without his noticing. In the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, another person was either an enemy or a subordinate.
In truth, it was the exact opposite.
Choseol, from the time she was an infant, had already begun to be worked into material. She knew nothing of the world. She did not even have a proper self. Rebecca had a personality left in the flesh, but Choseol, even if some self had remained, would have felt nothing at all to look at Gu Seongyong.
Even to the Outer God, who had been watching it all through the harvest, Gu Seongyong was only a person. No — in this moment, he was a gift.
"I'll make the contract."
Jeongha spoke with a voice full of hate, glaring at Gu Seongyong.
A faint smile touched the Outer God's mouth.
Once, the words had held no power at all. But after they had been spoken tens of times, hundreds, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, the sentence had grown a power of its own.
"Fine."
The Outer God, and the subject. The mere concept of a contract between only two warped the world, and Gu Seongyong had no strength great enough to break a law and interfere.
Crack.
The skin went hard as porcelain. The whole body had become porcelain. Then, through the center of the chest, an arm of vivid blue — nothing like a person's — burst upward.
Crrk.
As a bird breaks the shell of its egg, a woman with vivid blue skin tore out through Jeongha's body, a body whose size could never have held her. And she opened her eyes.
The whites were dyed black. The pupils shone. By any measure she was not human, and yet she was a woman so beautiful that the eye could not leave her.
Naked, she moved herself once or twice, then bent and lifted Jeonyang's sword where it stood lodged beside the corpse. The blade snapped clean through. She paid it no mind, and aimed the broken sword at Gu Seongyong.
And the next moment.
With no warning at all, a violet flash melted everything before it and pierced straight through space. Afterward, there was one lower body, and no upper half. The sword burned red-hot and ran molten.
Watching that, the Outer God asked:
"Why use a sword?"
She who had once been him answered.
"A woman can't very well hit someone with her bare hands, can she?"
The Heavenly Demon had returned.