Soo's Jianghu — 2
Step out of the Heavenly Demon Cult's main hall facing north, and a cliff sheers away to the right, so far down it makes the stomach drop. Northward, a long road descends in a slow, gentle grade. The height doesn't feel like much from where I stand, but the forest far to the north lies spread open below the eye, which means the main hall itself sits considerably above the land around it. About halfway between that forest and the hall's entrance, there is a house.
I follow the path where nothing grows now but weeds. Stones turn under my feet, so once a great many people must have walked this way.
A little farther north of the house where I live, the ruins of a village still stand. People were living there only a few years ago. Then the Heavenly Demon and Gu Seong-yong fought nearby, and the place was smashed to pieces. The survivors moved into the commoners' houses to the west, and the village was left as it was — abandoned, slowly disappearing under the green.
There are so few people here that it leaves me a little uneasy. If it were only me, that would be one thing. It isn't good for a child to live like this. To live as a person, you have to meet people, don't you? Not yet, though. For the time being, staying here is better. The Heavenly Demon Cult is very likely to shake itself apart before long.
From Gu Seong-yong's memories, half the cult betrayed the Heavenly Demon. Perhaps not half. Perhaps all of it. Looking through the talk he held in secret with one of the hall masters, I can see the reason well enough. The Heavenly Demon had handed the cult's power out to Jeon Yang without restraint, and Jeon Yang swung it however he pleased. Resentment piled on resentment until it finally burst. That seems the fair reading.
Of course, the result was that Gu Seong-yong died, and the Heavenly Demon became an entirely different person. The sex changed. The skin changed a great deal. Who is going to believe the Heavenly Demon is the Heavenly Demon? This is a world that cannot even conceive of a person's sex changing.
I can't say what future waits for the Heavenly Demon now, weeping before Jeon Yang's corpse. I've tried to guess.
The first person likely to learn the truth is Gi Ja-cheon. He is something like the steward of the main hall — the first to hear if the Heavenly Demon gives an order, and the first in a position to choose, quickly, what comes next. More than that, Gu Seong-yong never knew that he made the Harvester. He never spoke of the man at all. Safe to call that ambition, isn't it? Betrayal, from the person standing right beside her.
I'm curious how the Heavenly Demon will react. If it goes well, warmth ought to come pouring in by the heap. Picturing that pleasant future, I went into the house.
"Were you all right?"
"Choseol!"
At my greeting Soo came running, her face split in a grin. I caught her, and she was terribly pleased about it. To look at us, you'd think adult and child. In truth there are barely five years between us.
"You didn't sleep?"
Soo nodded. I had left in the middle of the night and come back still in the night, and dawn was nearly on us. Staying up all night is bad for the body.
"Let's sleep first."
There was a chance Gi Ja-cheon would come at dawn, but lower than usual. He would have to put out the fire clinging to the main hall, and he would have to look at an unknown woman playing the Heavenly Demon. Believe her or not, he would be busy.
I took Soo over to the wall nearest the kitchen. It was still warm there. Where the actual heat was coming from, I couldn't say. Anyway, the two of us lay down together, and the moment she was in my arms she was dead asleep.
Well. I don't really feel it myself, but Soo must have been badly unsettled. Her guardian had walked off into a burning building and left her alone in the house. It was a poor situation. That much is certain.
On another note, the living things that had been in this house were quietly topping up my warmth. I had only snatched it, and yet I was massacring the small creatures all around.
Oh?
If I take their warmth, couldn't I make something like a swarm of monsters? Early on I didn't, even though I could. I couldn't afford to look like a god who summons dangerous monsters. But the primeval forest visible to the north shows no trace of people. Wouldn't that be all right?
Hmm.
I'll have to think about it a little more.
The monsters I've robbed of warmth don't kill one another. Once the warmth is gone they seem to gain the ability to see it, and they go after creatures that still have some. Those already stripped have none, so as long as warmth isn't scarce, they shouldn't fight each other. Even so, they're pathetic little things. I don't particularly want to make a great many of them. All they seem to possess is the faintest sense of cold, and I can't see what they think is so cold — though of course any warmth they kill for and steal, I take away again, so they will never be warm until they die.
And how long will they live, I wonder? My sense of them is still connected, so I'll simply have to watch.
I was sorting the surroundings in my head when light came in through the window. The long night had passed, and morning was here at last. Gi Ja-cheon most likely wouldn't come today.
It was time we ought to have been eating, but Soo had only just fallen asleep, so I let her sleep a little longer. My body needed rest as well. Jumping down in such a hurry, insisting I would follow, had been a mistake. I hadn't expected my abdomen to be crushed completely flat. I regenerated, somehow. A thought brushed past — maybe that was why I had caught the Heavenly Demon's eye. It had ended well, and what ends well is well enough.
Noon.
Soo and I ate a late breakfast that doubled as lunch. We were peaceful enough. The Heavenly Demon Cult, right now, is anything but.
The Heavenly Demon is insisting that she is the Heavenly Demon, and the people are calling her a monster and leveling swords at her. To be fair, to the people of this place a blue-skinned woman can hardly look like anything else. Byeong-il and Gap-jae are both there, and both seem to know that the person in front of them is the Heavenly Demon. Gap-jae is getting ready to run. Byeong-il is going from one person to the next, trying to tell them that the one before their eyes is the Heavenly Demon. They ignore him.
Yes. The hall masters are ignoring him too.
But I know. They know perfectly well who is standing in front of them, and they ignore her anyway. Killing intent flickers through them — the sense that they could end her here — so they must believe the Heavenly Demon has grown weak.
Then Hall Master Jukgan spoke to Byeong-il. The Heavenly Demon had clearly fallen into demonic deviation, he said. Twisted into a shape like that, this was no longer someone who could be called the Heavenly Demon, and he ordered Byeong-il to raise his sword. That purple hair shouldn't make it hard to notice that I made her with the Harvester. No one says a word about it. Instead the hall masters, as if this were an opportunity, order their subordinates to attack.
The subordinates swallow some strange elixir, veins bulging all over their bodies, and charge her. Pill-fiends, the lot of them. They never even get close. Through Byeong-il's eyes there is no stance for a sword swing at all — a violet trajectory simply appears in empty air, and along that line a crushed corpse goes flying in the direction opposite the Heavenly Demon.
The name tears out of throats on every side.
The Heavenly Demon looks at their faces one by one. Remembering them, most likely.
Then Hall Master Jigwan shouted. Wasn't it common knowledge that the current Heavenly Demon could not use the Heavenly Demon Divine Art? Kill the Heavenly Demon, claim the title, and did they think that made them the real one?
Aha.
So that's how they forge it. Then no matter how she insists she is the Heavenly Demon, she becomes an impersonator. Hearing it, the cultists take up blades, saying the grudge must be repaid, and come forward one after another. A few, here and there, are visibly running.
Within the Heavenly Demon Cult, the Heavenly Demon seems to be a larger presence than I expected. Eun-chun was the same — longing, more than anything, to rise, and still walking into death as one who served the Heavenly Demon. Whether that's a feeling peculiar to these people, or the power of religion, I couldn't say.
The Heavenly Demon against the Heavenly Demon Cult. A very funny situation. And then she opened her mouth.
Ah.
Her voice reaches all the way here. It was quite a quiet thing to say, and yet it arrived. Soo, helping me with the dishes, startled and clung to me. I soothed her and stepped outside.
The moment we were out, Soo let out a short scream and wrapped herself around me. All I can see is the cult's main hall.
"What's wrong?"
"Ch-Choseol, y-you don't see it? Over there... there's something scary."
Soo pointed exactly toward where the Heavenly Demon stood. So there really is something I alone can't see. Not something Choseol can't see — something I can't. The sense that feels qi, or demonic power. Thinking back, I haven't felt anything of the kind since the first world.
Something like a shockwave detonated. Since when does a person put out a blast of pressure like that? And it isn't a simple impact. Soo grabbed hold of me and sank to the ground. We are nowhere near where the Heavenly Demon stands, and still this.
This time a violet flash split the air, and the main hall was left with five enormous scars, as if a beast's claws had raked it open. Then the torn wall and roof came down — a stutter of impacts, crash after crash.
And after it, a deep, keen sound of cutting. From the main hall all the way to the forest, the land simply split.
The moment the words ended, people bowed their heads and began, one after another, to prostrate themselves before her.
Before the Heavenly Demon the cry goes up like a low scream, voices wrung out of the gut.
Then, in voices grown a little easier, they shout. Almost no one is silent now.
At the last, everyone the Heavenly Demon's gaze could reach pressed their heads to the ground and roared it, loudly enough that the roar reached where I stood. It ended very simply.
"Come on. Let's go in, clean up, and get some training in. Soo."
Soo looks up at me, trembling all over.
"Choseol... you're not scared?"
I looked at the Heavenly Demon, looking down on the people repeating their praise over and over. I had wanted a somewhat more ruinous result.
Dull.
I turned back to Soo.
"Maybe because I don't feel anything."
It was plainly the truth, so I went back to the kitchen and took up the dishes where I had left off.
I want a civilization where the water comes pouring out.