Chapter 83
The Heavenly Demon takes the Heavenly Demon Cult in hand again.
No—strictly speaking, she never let go of it. Gu Seong-yong's last struggle failed.
The cult is still hers, and yet they are not holding Jeonyang's funeral. More precisely, they seem to be winding the corpse in bandages and keeping it until a day fit for the rite arrives. Funeral custom is the same everywhere, it seems: this is the dead's last road, so let it fall on a favorable day. Told as much, the Heavenly Demon agreed without a word.
From her point of view, the place presiding over it is called Wolje Hall. Among the ten halls whose names carry the Ten Symbols of Longevity, it was the one that never had any presence at all. The cult's workers of sorcery and rite are gathered there.
They are my goal as well.
I am not leaning on them too heavily, though. Looking through the memories of the previous Heavenly Demon and the one who holds the seat now, the method of summoning is far too exacting. If Yasle's way is simply to offer a person up as a sacrifice and call something down, then here the sacrifice must be raised under strict keeping before any summoning can be done. It is not a method someone with no power can use merely because a special ability happened to fall into their hands.
Of course, that is only how the memory looks from the outside. Confirm the technique itself, and it might prove different.
Yasle's method—troublesome only in the search for a vessel that can hold me—looks the better one for a Harvester to use. But if a special order exists, as the Heavenly Demon Cult does, and there are people and time to spend, then the second world's method might be worth using too...
I must not settle into a single approach. I have to remember to come at this from every side. There is no telling where the chance to break through a wall will appear, and I know that if I chase only what is easy, I will be stopped someday.
Anyway. Today is the seventh day since the Heavenly Demon became a woman.
Soo and I are living well enough in a little house. When morning comes I get up, prepare the meal, wake the child, and feed her breakfast. After that I sift the memories down into something manageable and teach Soo what I know of this world. It is all drawn from what Gu Seong-yong knew, so the information may lean to one side, but it can't be helped. Add up every scrap of outside experience the others possess, and it still falls short of his. Surprisingly, even the Heavenly Demon has rarely gone far.
Mornings end with that. Afternoons are simple exercise.
From the techniques I know, I take the ones whose ceilings ran highest and have her copy them. The pity of it is that arts like those work properly only when some unknowable power is there—mana, or qi. That part Soo will have to manage herself. I don't only show her, either. I send the memories directly. People with a strong sense of self can't receive what I send.
Or they won't.
A strange memory forcing its way into the head is, looked at one way, the trampling of a person. Perhaps they shut it out on instinct. And with a commercial spliced in besides, plenty of people would cut it off the moment they could, purely out of irritation.
Honestly.
I have gained so many techniques, and set out one by one they are plainly good. Somewhere in each of them there is a flaw, though, and there is no seam where they join into a living whole. That draws a sigh out of me.
Once I have made a Harvester of someone fallen all the way to the floor of despair, wouldn't it be nice if they raised their own skill from there and summoned me themselves?
But what can I do. I took hold of them with a power that does not force the concept of me upon them. There is no profit in it right now. It would pay far better to brainwash people until they went mad, then rig them so they summoned me. Still, I have to look at the future. If I enter a world that can strip my identity bare, piece by piece—or if such a technology is invented—I can stand without shame.
I do not believe that no world will ever be able to grasp what I am. That would be arrogance.
Even without it, give them power and they will fight on their own. I believe humanity is made of such people. So I grant the power, and at the end I take the warmth. Of course, someone might appear who never kills anyone, all the way through. Most people are selfish, but it wouldn't be strange for one or two odd ones to turn up now and then, would it? Look only at that person and I take a heavy loss; look across the wider field and I still come out ahead. People like that are vanishingly rare.
How many, having lost a family and a lover they truly loved, can lower the blade when revenge is right in front of them?
The loss comes, rather, when those with no interest in others—those who shut others out—grow numerous. Let most of a society become like that, and the warmth held in the light itself thins; even after they become Harvesters their motive is so slight they may never move. I saw it with my own eyes in the second world.
Human-shaped stock, bred from the very start to be made into elixir. Become Harvesters and they did not grow stronger in body at all. They gained, instead, the ability to die more quickly. The light was small even before I made them Harvesters, and the warmth was smaller still than the light. Truly, nothing but a loss.
A world like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four would be better. The moment the oppressed cradle a hope of climbing out of resignation and despair, they begin to shine. A world like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is no good. A human with little feeling will have little warmth. Even if despair brings them to me, they will be hard-pressed to find the will to go on. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is the worst. That would be a world where a Harvester cannot be obtained at all—the way in would be shut. Desire exists there too, but pleasure is supplied in such surplus that falling into despair is difficult.
Better a world blotched with want and greed born of lack. In a world like that, people hit the bottom, and once they gain power they will climb no matter what they have to sacrifice. Of course, if they can't climb through into another world, they only thrash about and fail to get their stake back!
Still, the second world taught me something. By a technique that is neither Yasle's nor this world's, I will someday be able to go on to yet another world again. Where there is a second, a third is sure to follow. So even if I take a loss right now, I invest it in the future.
Someday.
When my Harvesters walk every world and send their warmth to me, I will sink, happy, to the bottom!
Hehe.
Then, surely, I won't be cold.
"Choseol, what are you thinking? You're smiling with a weird look on your face."
Soo, who had been working hard at her exercise, came over all of a sudden, peered at my face, and asked in that short way of hers.
"I was thinking, just for a moment, of a future full of warmth. I like warmth."
Soo tilts her head, then points toward the kitchen. At the flame in there that never goes out. That one.
"It's warm over there."
"In the middle of the day it's a little on the hot side."
If it put out nothing but a flame I might let it pass, but it is unmistakably radiating heat. That thing. I stare, wondering if something is wrong with it, and the shape itself looks like an ordinary flame. Only, it cannot be moved. Push a twig in and the twig catches, but the fire itself will not transfer, and a twig that has caught goes out the moment it is brought outside. The only thing that does not go out is that space. The words horizontal coordinate system glitter in my head. I ignore them.
I did once consider pouring water on it. If the fire died, though, I would have to fetch firewood and kindle it again. I don't really understand the structure. It is no different from using a phone—convenient enough that I will keep using it without knowing the principle.
Anyway, I look at Soo standing in front of me. She is holding a twig in one hand.
Martial arts. What am I supposed to do.
She will need martial arts to live from here on, but I can't teach them to her. Sending the memories? That is nothing more than tossing her a book and telling her to study it herself. And what if the sending cuts off before I have given her all of it? Or should I arrange some circumstance that wears her to the bone, and make her train through that?
No. Why am I fretting over this.
She can grow on her own. On her own. Live or die, I only have to receive the warmth.
Then a memory of the faded man glints.
A weak trainer.
What?
No. He's right. If my Harvester is weak, that is irritating in its own right. Even a dog you raise—you want it to go outside and stand over everyone else, don't you? And here the perfect means of raising a child is already laid out. If she's weak, that is me being told, You can't even manage this.
Mmm.
I think up a reason. If I get some practice raising someone here, it will help when I raise Harvesters later. In the first world I learned that swelling their numbers without a thought brings the world down. So, a small number. But if many people are to be killed, they have to be made into an elite.
"What are you thinking?"
"I'm wondering what to do with you, Soo."
How do I raise her so the rumor goes that I raised her well? Not that I am about to become a professional educator. It's a nuisance.
Then Soo suddenly drops her sword. I look at her face, thinking she must have lost her grip, and she comes running at me with a face on the verge of tears.
"I want to stay with you, Choseol!"
I hold her, for a start. But what is that supposed to mean? Did she hear me say I was going to throw her away?
"Soo. There will never be a day when I abandon you."
If anything, there is a chance that Soo will grow up and march out shouting that she hates me. Adolescence comes for everyone, doesn't it? From the faded man's memories a scene rises: the despair, in an RPG, of having raised one character with single-minded focus, only for them to up and leave so that he had to raise another from the start. He never had a child, so he burnishes a thing like that and calls it a shining memory. Good grief.
I pat Soo.
"Just rest easy. Soo should do whatever Soo wants to do."
After I say it, I shift my gaze to the fence, of which only a trace remains around the house. A woman with vivid blue skin is standing there, watching me with several feelings mixed on her face. Our eyes meet, and she steps over the fence and comes toward me.
"You seem almost human."
The same thing she said last time.
"This body is."
"So are the things you do."
If she knew what was inside me, she would be revolted. A person ought to be. Anyway, I know why the Heavenly Demon has come. I look at her in silence, the look meaning she should just say it, and she lets out a small sigh and speaks.
"We will hold Jeonyang's funeral. Tomorrow. Wear the clothes you are given, and attend."
There is a saying that even if you cannot attend the wedding, you attend the funeral. I nod. Then I point at Soo, still clutched in my arms and squeezing with all her strength.
"Please have clothes prepared for her as well."
"Very well. I'll see to it."
The Heavenly Demon nods, and with nothing more to say she turns at once and goes back to the cult's main hall.
A funeral...
"Tomorrow will be busy."
I tell Soo.
"A funeral?"
As if hearing the word for the first time, Soo hesitates, then lifts her head and asks.
"It is a rite the living hold, so they can set the dead down out of their hearts."
"I don't really get it."
She is still at an age when she wouldn't. I watch the Heavenly Demon's retreating back, through which I can faintly see what she is thinking, then catch hold of Soo—still clinging to me—and toss her out into the yard.
"Kya!"
"Finish your exercise."
Don't quit halfway. Looking at me like you are about to cry will not work, either. Soo.
In short, it is that. That thing.
Member. One more set.