Chapter 93
The Heavenly Demon opened her mouth.
"What do you mean to do about Soo?"
Is she worried for the child? The two of them have grown very close. Is it simply that she doesn't want to be parted from her?
"I'm going to force freedom on Soo. A person shouldn't be bound to anyone. They ought to live doing whatever it is they want to do."
At that, the Heavenly Demon frowned.
"You're throwing her away?"
"No. Say it properly. This is independence."
There comes a moment for everyone when they must stand as a person in their own right. Miss that moment, and the light grows smaller, and the warmth dwindles with it. That is why I want people to enjoy every freedom there is — even now, the way Oh Myung-sung does, cutting down in a single stroke the ones who come charging at him while crying that he is a public enemy of Murim. His light has been dyed a black-violet, but it is vast, and there is just as much warmth in it. And the warmth he brings in is far greater than the warmth he himself possesses.
"Even if reality falls short of it, I believe a world will come in which every person can live freely. And so Soo, too, must become free."
I told the Heavenly Demon what I want.
"A person should express their feelings freely, love other people, make what they wish to make, and do everything their desires lead them to do."
That is why we climb beyond that sky. Not when one person stands above another, but when a person stands above a number. Even if people go on dying for reasons other than the span of their lives, and death amounts to nothing more than numbers rising and falling, I can obtain more warmth.
I do not believe such a world is coming. I know that it is. It becomes possible when every person pursues freedom, infringes upon the freedom of others, and strips away the power to be free. There is no right or wrong in it. There is only pure competition for survival. All anyone has to do is keep doing what they have always done out in nature.
"And what does any of that have to do with you going outside?"
She isn't taken in by words.
"There is a connection. If I share myself, people become a little freer. Tell me, Heavenly Demon. Do you like the body you have now?"
At my question, the Heavenly Demon looked down at herself.
A woman in her early to mid-twenties. The form of a man in his mid-thirties was nowhere to be found. I hadn't known that even gender came loose when the harvest arrived, but it must be the same sort of thing as an ability.
"I don't like the color of the skin. I don't look human."
"People who take a fatal wound end up like that, I've found. Be glad you lived."
The Heavenly Demon accepted that. Back then she had been little different from a corpse. Looking through the memories, all four of her limbs had been torn away, and her organs had ruptured. She truly had been on the verge of death.
"You really don't know your own power, do you."
"I don't. I told you I was human, didn't I? I'm groping through the dark, examining myself."
But the Heavenly Demon raised an arm, propped her chin on her hand, and looked at me.
"Were you really human? Listening to you talk, I get chills sometimes. It feels like something that isn't human, pretending to be."
We did talk about all sorts of things over the course of a year. Most of it centered on Soo, but it isn't as if we never made small talk at all.
"Right now, I'm just a monster."
"A monster, then."
The Heavenly Demon keeps circling her words, and she won't choose either. If she hates the thought of Soo being taken that much, she could simply say she'll take Soo herself. Or is she wondering how she ought to dispose of me?
She looked at me with senses I cannot feel, understood what I am in her own way, and spoke it aloud. Until now she has let me live because Soo was here, but she might well decide she cannot stand by and watch a dangerous monster wandering loose. The Heavenly Demon of the present runs the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult quite well, and people swing a blade to protect what they have, even when it isn't right.
Will the Heavenly Demon do the same?
She was silent for a long while. Then she spoke, very quietly.
It was a very small voice. But I was startled.
What?
No — what did the Heavenly Demon just say? Don't go? Why does it sound as if she's pleading? If it were you can't go, or then go, or do as you like, I would understand. But she's asking me?
When I studied her face, the color of her skin had faintly changed, as if she were ashamed.
Wait. So the Heavenly Demon is ashamed of the words she just spoke? She doesn't want me to disappear? She's actually grown fond of me, of all people?
No. What is this. It wasn't merely a little affection because I'm an accessory of Soo's?
A faded memory glows. In a world with nothing but gray, a man is snickering as he watches some ridiculous sight. What he is laughing at doesn't matter. Only the laughter itself shines. And slowly that memory loses its light and vanishes, sinking once more into the deep place where memories are kept.
"That's a truly foolish thing to say. Heavenly Demon. You don't even call me by name. We aren't close. I'm just the extra that came along with Soo."
Why are you saying something like that.
The Heavenly Demon opened her eyes wide. Then the corners of them narrowed.
She's smiling.
"Just seeing you flustered like that made it worth saying out loud."
She said that and looked ahead. I followed her gaze, but her eyes were only circling empty air. She wasn't looking at any place. She was looking at the past.
"I won't tell you yet. Wait four years. Four years."
All at once, the Heavenly Demon drew a line.
Four years. It's long. But it is also a short time. In the first world, I waited more than eighty years.
"Then I'll share myself with people."
At that, the Heavenly Demon chuckled.
"Do that. The Heavenly Demon Divine Cult — a place where everyone can use the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. That sounds amusing, too."
Everyone, using the Heavenly Demon Divine Art?
Ah. Right. The Heavenly Demon knows that I know the art. She seems to be mistaking it for Eunjae's technique, but I carry the memories the harvest holds.
"That's fine by me. But won't that shake your seat as Heavenly Demon?"
"There's already Gapjae, and Byeong-il. And a man named Jung Jae-woo. The energy of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art is distinctive. There's no way not to know."
Jung Jae-woo is the name of the Heavenly Palace hall master's protector. My gaze has certainly touched him before. I thought I had simply passed over him, but she remembered.
This is why gazes are inconvenient. Once a gaze has touched someone, it is hard to tell whether they clearly recognized it, or simply let it go. And if it is energy, that is a sense I do not have.
"By any chance, that energy — can you feel it from me, too?"
If I am giving the stuff off in clouds, I will have to be a little more careful from now on. I asked the Heavenly Demon so I could prepare for the danger.
"No."
She answered shortly. Then she lowered the hand that had been propping her chin and turned her eyes on me.
"I feel nothing. You aren't a power drawn out of law. You are the law itself."
Once before, the Heavenly Demon had looked at me and said I was something like annihilation. Just a monster on the far side of qi, and therefore unusable.
"Back then, you knew by putting your hand on me, didn't you?"
"Have you ever gone to pick a bit of lint off your clothes, only for a long thread to unravel and the whole garment to come apart?"
It was there in a faded memory, so I nodded.
"Yes."
"You were the hand. The moment I put in the lint called qi, the hand caught it and pulled. The qi that made me up was sucked in, just like that. If I hadn't taken my hand away then, I would have been emptied out and died."
I thought of the technique Oh Myung-sung and Gu Seong-yong use, the Star-Absorbing Great Art. But a corpse drained of qi by that art dries and twists. Isn't this subtly different?
"You shivered from the cold, didn't you?"
"I was cold. Cold enough that I never want to feel it again."
As she said it, the Heavenly Demon looked at me with a trace of fear in her eyes.
"I was like that from nothing but the chill at those fingertips. The warmth you wanted was meant to bury that cold, wasn't it? The day I first asked you your purpose, you said you could do anything for the sake of warmth. So when you say you'll share yourself, it must be in order to obtain warmth."
And then, lightly, the Heavenly Demon touched the truth.
This is why I dislike clever people. It would be better if everyone were stupid.
No. But then that would be strange.
"And even so, you're telling me not to go?"
If one is a person, shouldn't one keep frightening things at a distance?
At my question, the Heavenly Demon smiled bitterly. Then she lifted a finger and, pointing at the yard and the house, named one by one the things she and Soo and I had done.
Last winter: playing in the yard, building snowmen. This spring: playing at the water beneath the cliff, skipping stones. Not long ago: raising a sandcastle on the shore down below. And several smaller incidents besides.
They are wedges of memory that raise the odds Soo will clench her teeth, and the occasions through which the Heavenly Demon and Soo can come to feel fond of each other. Of course I was there between them. I was never in the middle of it. I told the two of them what to do, and left them to play.
"Why bring that up?"
At my question the Heavenly Demon laughed, a little chuckle — less womanly or manly than the laugh a child lets burst out.
"Whatever you are, whatever plans you lay, whatever you do — I don't care anymore."
Then she sat up straight on the wooden veranda and looked me full in the face.
She was speaking with all the courtesy one person can offer another.
"That's truly foolish. You know that, don't you?"
"I know. So what? Among all those who would blame me for being foolish, did even one of them hand me a treasure? It's already enough. No — I've been satisfied with this."
A faded memory flickers, faintly. A deep lament: was this thing they call chivalry always so foolish?
It must have been what she had wanted so badly. I don't understand why it feels like this.
I was about to say something, and instead I lifted up a heart the cold had torn to shreds until not even dust remained. It is empty there. There is nothing, and yet it whispers as if there were. Memories stretching from that faded recollection, through the first world and on into the second, point to a single word.
"A friend?"
"Yes. I like that."
The Heavenly Demon laughed like an innocent child.
And at the same moment, in a corner of memory, an old woman bowed her head.
I could not open my mouth.