Soo's Jianghu — 16
For the record, there was nothing left in his body now. And yet, with the blue soaked through him from head to toe, his life must truly have been hanging by a thread. When the worms inside a person run wild, it is difficult to stay alive. They had planted those worms in people for exactly that purpose: control.
"No—no! I would never have betrayed him!"
In Sim-won denied what he had done. Then he lurched to his feet and rushed at me.
"You! What did you do to me?!"
The Heavenly Demon moved to cut him down, so I lifted a hand and calmed him. In Sim-won seized me by the collar and shouted. He could not seem to bear the thing he himself had done.
I had already drawn plenty of information from him. It would have been fine if he died. Still, one ought to spend such things sparingly.
I laid my hand on the shoulder of the man gripping my collar.
"It left you to die. Didn't it abandon you? That is why I decided to save you."
In truth, it probably had not meant to throw him away. It had forced power into him, clinging with everything it had to the light. He was the one who gave that up, so that he might live. The one who did the abandoning was none other than In Sim-won.
"No! Put me back the way I was! I'll return to his embrace—put me back, please! I can't. If I'm any later I'll be punished, I know I will. Before that happens, I have to go back!"
He screamed as if in a fit. Terror filled his face; the thought that he would be punished if he failed to return like this had pitched him into panic.
Well, of course. The people of the Heavenly Demon Cult carry parasites in their bodies, and through those parasites they are controlled. Torture a person from childhood, and the heart is left with a wound that never heals. There is an experiment along the same lines. Shut a dog in a place with nowhere to run and torture it with electric shocks, and later, even when you open a door through which it could escape the shocks, it does not flee. It simply stays where it is and suffers. Learned helplessness, I believe they call it.
This was only a slight variation. Withhold your loyalty and you are given pain; a few are killed as examples. Let that continue long enough, and even if you have the strength to break free, you can no longer conceive of resisting at all. The certainty that escape is impossible has already been driven into the mind.
So I told him one fact.
"There is nothing left in your body to torment you. From now on, you can live freely."
He stared at me as if the words were impossible. Even so, the strength was slowly leaving his hands. He knew it too—that nothing remained in him anymore.
"In Sim-won."
I spoke to him.
"Is there anyone you want to save?"
Yes. He had someone precious as well. Someone I had no way of knowing. People who climb high usually come to treasure something, and by good fortune, what this one treasured was a person. Then again, this was a place where a person was the only thing one could possibly hold dear. The dress code forbade draping oneself in wealth. There was no private property to begin with. The only thing to be gained was rank, and even that demanded a horrific procedure. Endure the procedure, rise as high as one could, and still there was nothing but a name. A person was the only object left worth clinging to. Perhaps that was why the Heavenly Demon had fixated on Jeonyang.
In any case.
When I asked, In Sim-won clutched his head, his face twisted with pain. After the briefest hesitation, instead of opening his mouth, he lifted his face and covered his lips with a finger. Then he pointed—at the ceiling, at the wall. Three particular places. There were people hidden there, watching.
"Clear them away."
"Right."
The Heavenly Demon stamped his foot down, and from every direction came the sound of things being crushed.
What?
I had expected him to swing a blade, or to use something that made use of me, the way he had a moment ago. Wait—strictly speaking, had he used me at all? Blood was seeping from several places besides the ones In Sim-won had indicated. Curiosity got the better of me. I went to where the blood was flowing and opened a door, and a corpse smashed to pieces was there to greet me.
It had a human shape, but the body was riddled with foreign matter: arms warped into strange forms, organs mottled as if they were rotting, a many-legged worm stretched along the spine, and more besides. Whether a single stamp of the Heavenly Demon's foot had killed them all, nothing was left alive. I had gained a great deal of warmth, so I knew well enough that quite a number had died.
"The worm is the true body."
The Heavenly Demon, who had followed, looked down without a flicker of interest.
"In the Heavenly Demon Cult, that's just how it is. Even so, I didn't know they'd been eaten this far."
I turned back to In Sim-won. I caught his hand, drew it up close to his face, and smiled.
"The person you want can live."
Said after an ordinary killing, the words might have sounded like a promise not to kill. But one look at that vivid blue skin, and he would understand what I meant. Only I could save someone. I only needed it to look that way.
He nodded obediently. Then, still sounding afraid, he asked me in a small voice.
"What is it you want?"
I answered just as softly.
"Take me to your master."
He bit his lip for a moment, then looked me straight in the eye and spoke. There was a grim resolve in it.
"Save them first."
"All right."
He stared at me in surprise, as if he had not expected so ready an answer. The look was strange enough that I asked.
"Why so surprised? Isn't it only right to go first to someone who can still be saved, rather than to an enemy?"
Behind me, the Heavenly Demon was laughing. I knew, of course, that my words could sound as if I were thinking of people. But among those who already knew what I was, surely that meant nothing. In Sim-won knew what I was, too.
There had been a reason he shouted at the Heavenly Demon earlier. Every attempt to harm me somehow, through strange sorcery, had ended in nothing. I had not felt any of it, but he had tried to test me—laying curses, turning the secret arts of an esoteric cult against me. All of it failed. It was not that the arts had failed to activate. In Sim-won remembered them vanishing without meaning, like eggs thrown at a wall. Had they been attacks, I would at least have felt them. A curse worked through my harvester, it seemed, did not register as an attack at all.
A shame.
In any case, if he misunderstood me, so much the better. I took him with me, and together with the Heavenly Demon I walked through Wolje Hall. No one interfered along the way. Before long he found the person he wanted.
A girl. Not a lover. Not a daughter, either. Only someone he had happened to meet, with whom he had traded a few meaningless words. They are all so achingly soft. How is it that the mere gaining of a friend is enough for them to open their hearts and act as if they would give everything away?
But we were one step too late.
"I shall make you pay the price of betraying me."
This time, something like a moray tore out through her face. In the same instant her body swelled, the space between her eyes widened, and scales thrust through the skin. Her flesh could not endure it. Parts of her tore open until the muscle showed, raw and ragged. Unable to bear the transformation, her body was collapsing.
"You, wearing a human mask."
The thing fixed atop the monster's head, like the lure of an anglerfish, looked at me and spoke.
"I do not know what you are. But do not imagine that, having entered the domain of the Haedo Sect, you will ever return unharmed."
The Haedo Sect?
Aha. So this time it was the Investiture of the Gods? Truly, a bit of everything had been stirred in. Or perhaps some fragment of this place had drifted into the world I once knew. It hardly mattered.
"Are you the one at the very top?"
At my question, it laughed.
"I am. I am the cult leader of the Jie Cult. Tongtian. Have you grown afraid, now that it has come to this?"
So that really was the title. Cult Leader Tongtian—this one had been close to a god, hadn't he?
"If you were a god, I might be afraid."
It burst into booming laughter. The one fixed beneath it let out a groan of pain, and the contrast only sharpened the laugh.
Kehehe.
"Yes. I understand."
So that was it. A god. I could take that to mean the god who had given me this cold without restraint, couldn't I? I could understand it as the god who bestowed this chill, cold enough to freeze a mind into madness? Even if not, that was fine. I only needed someone to take it out on.
"Heavenly Demon. You only have to stay alive."
The Heavenly Demon stepped forward. The moray atop the head looked at him and spoke.
"You are like a corpse. Did you use the Heaven-Reversing Art, which raises the dead? And yet if you are the Heavenly Demon, there ought to be a pact with the Jie Cult. Break it, and I may take it that from this day the bond is severed. Do not regret it, even should I strip away everything you enjoy upon this land."
But the Heavenly Demon looked at that moray and swung his blade. In an instant, the limbs of the girl who had become a monster turned to dust and vanished. Not cut—scattering black dust, they became dust.
In Sim-won stared at the Heavenly Demon, utterly shocked. A gaze brimming with awe. It was incredibly funny.
The Heavenly Demon approached the fish speaking from atop the monster's head.
"I know that old pact. So this is the last piece of advice from the side that's breaking it, immortal."
The fish writhed as if amused.
"Advice? From nothing more than a corpse, patched back to life with life smeared all over it? Try, then."
At words that insisted, to the very last, upon his own superiority, the Heavenly Demon laughed—strangely.
And with a dry rustle, the fish turned black and was gone.
The Heavenly Demon turned, looked at me, and pointed to the monster that had lost its limbs. I went to her and made the contract.
She cannot understand words? Her brain is destroyed, so she cannot think? Do you imagine a contract cannot be made for that? It can. Touch the light directly, and even a body ruined past saving will do. How else do you think I have spoken, until now, to the ones above the water?
I recited the words of the contract. Her flesh shattered like porcelain, and from within came a naked girl with skin of vivid blue.
I stepped up to In Sim-won, who was weeping.
"Now, let's go meet a god."
I said it while stopping him from driving his head into the ground.