Chapter 97: Soo's Jianghu — 17
I went back to the room where In Sim-won was.
The place was thick with hallucinogenic painkillers. Touch a certain mechanism, and a staircase opened, leading down. I already knew the way — I had In Sim-won's memories — but I had no intention of telling anyone. So I pretended I knew nothing, and followed him down into the earth.
Below lay a cave. Listen closely, and the machinery ran without pause. Should the device stop, the drainage would fail and the whole place would fill with water; it had been built for exactly that contingency. Caught near the middle of the passage, you would very likely drown — unless you belonged to a race that could breathe underwater.
Thinking that, I walked the length of the cave, clammy with damp.
Follow the path far enough, and you came to a place built in a style utterly unlike anything I had seen. A stone building ought to be angled blocks stood upright and stacked. This was not that. The structure was slack and wavering, as if a wave had been turned to stone mid-curl.
The moment we stepped inside, several monsters appeared — things half sea-creature, half human. Skin had sloughed away in patches, muscle laid bare. They were not in any normal state. Like the girl who had turned into a monster earlier, these ones had lost their original forms and become something else.
They fixed us with eyes filmed white, bared teeth sharp as needles, and charged.
It was a good try.
But the Heavenly Demon opened his palm and thrust it forward. A deep-violet wave rolled out ahead of him, and then there was nothing left at all.
It struck me all over again that, where martial power was concerned, he was the strongest person I had ever seen. There had been others who could put out greater force, of course. But I had never seen anyone erase only the enemy so cleanly, without so much as marking the space around them.
In Sim-won stared at him, face blank. He said nothing. He only tightened the arm that held the girl on his back, and walked on.
From there the passages tangled into knots, but In Sim-won had the whole interior memorized. Draw that structure in your mind and set it against faded memories, and you could guess why it had been made this way. It was not simply to twist the path into confusion. It had been built so that later, when the water filled in, the current would not grow too violent.
Say Tesla valve, and those who know, know. The path ran through the valve's center, and follow it inward and you soon arrived at a vast underground temple.
It was tiered like an amphitheater, every gaze drawn toward the center. Half the levels, though, lay flooded. No — strictly speaking, it was truer to say the whole of the place had been designed to sink.
Where a person could still stand, the faithful of the Blood Cult were gathered. In the water beneath them gathered those they called demonic immortals. And from the dais at the center, the Tongcheon Cult Lord preached.
"This is as far as the faithful of the Blood Cult may come. Beyond lies the domain of the Jie Cult — a place no human may dare approach."
The boundary of water and dry ground, where In Sim-won stood. A great deal had happened there. It was the place where humans who had fully turned into monsters crossed over, and the place where sacrifices were offered up.
The Tongcheon Cult Lord's sermon, surprisingly, was not so strange as one might expect. It was a carefully unfolded talk about training hard and becoming a powerful demonic immortal — and the place also tempted people with the promise that a human, too, could become an immortal.
"I suppose we can go."
"We will."
I had been wondering whether we would have to enter the water and swim, when a deep-violet veil spread outward from the Heavenly Demon.
"Oh... ohhhh..."
In Sim-won looked at the Heavenly Demon with a face given entirely over to awe, trembling all the while — the posture of a man resisting some enormous pressure pouring from the Heavenly Demon straight into him. The force was physically there.
Strange, that I felt none of it. A physical force that chose whom to touch?
I watched, turning that odd law over in my mind, while the Heavenly Demon simply stepped out onto the water.
Krrk.
Krrrrrrk.
With the grind and shudder of hard wall striking hard wall, the water — literally — vanished. It did not lift away as steam. It was not shoved off in the other direction. It was simply gone. As if a hole had opened where the Heavenly Demon stood, the water disappeared, and with it the fish, and the grotesque creatures that looked as though human arms and legs had been grafted on.
When the water was entirely gone, the Heavenly Demon turned back to us and spoke.
"Let's go."
"Yes."
I hopped down, then remembered In Sim-won and looked back. He had the girl on his back and a lost look on his face, weighing whether to follow. His eyes went to me, then to the Heavenly Demon, then down to the floor again. He wanted someone to tell him what to do.
"In Sim-won."
"Y-yes!"
He was so rattled he could barely get an answer out. It was almost funny. If you were master of a place like Wolje Hall, shouldn't you at least bluff your way back into composure?
Or perhaps things were in such chaos that even a bluff was beyond him. I couldn't say. I gave him exactly one sentence.
"What you do next is yours to choose."
Then I turned at once and followed the Heavenly Demon.
Why say that?
Nothing much to it.
Freedom was a value I had already chosen, and I meant to carry it through to the end. I had decided not to lie, so I had to move in such a way that nothing I had said so far became a lie. And I had already taken from him every piece of information there was to take. I don't wish for very much, you see. So whatever In Sim-won did now was fine.
Betrayal?
Yes. I would allow that, too.
If it brought me more warmth.
Thinking this, I went on through the place that had lain sunk beneath the water. To make the going easier, something like glowing stones had been set into the floor.
This isn't giving off radiation, is it?
Still, light is hard to bring to a place like this. I could understand it.
And so I walked, taking in the warmth of creatures dying far off, sheared apart by the Heavenly Demon's veil.
Before long a massive gate appeared, and water slammed into the veil at a tremendous speed and vanished. Then, at a certain moment, the water striking the veil was gone. Farther out than the Heavenly Demon's veil, foam hung in view. Something was keeping the water from disappearing any further.
And beyond that foam, a dark shape emerged. Behind a curtain of water stood a humanoid creature of the sea, so vast that dozens of people standing in a line would still have looked small beside it. In its chest, a light burned brilliant.
The monster burst through the current. As it came, it shrank, and became a man in a cloak of scaled hide.
"As ever, those who inherit the name of Heavenly Demon wield a power one cannot believe."
The man who had spoken swept a hand through empty air. Behind his back, fissures split open. One of those lines flew forward, touched the barrier the Heavenly Demon had raised, and the barrier collapsed without a sound.
Then he walked up before us, step by heavy step.
"Are you the Tongcheon Cult Lord?"
The man — a wide space between the brows, not a single hair on his body — looked down at me with eyes white as a clouded film.
"I am. You invade my domain, and as if that were not enough, you lay hands on what is mine. You have prepared yourself for death, I trust?"
"What is yours?"
From the way he spoke, he was talking as if this body had been his to begin with.
"From the first, that body was a vessel meant to hold our own. And yet you come unbidden, seize the vessel, and use it as you please... We were shaping it with care, through our slaves. Now that a thing like you has climbed inside, we shall have to make it all over again, shall we not?"
By slaves, he meant the organization called the Blood Cult.
One thing struck me as strange.
"Why do you need a human body? The one you have now looks larger, and stronger."
At that he laughed, a thin and nasty chuckle.
"Ah. This body, too, was shaped with care, I will grant. But vessels capable of holding a god are limited in number, and even those do not last long. One must be born again."
He reached out a hand. Not toward the head, or the body. He was pointing at my lower abdomen. I understood what he wanted.
He did not mean to be housed in flesh, the way I was. He meant to use this flesh to make his next body.
"You can't simply come as you are?"
If he needed a body, I thought I would ask, once, whether he was the same as me.
"A trifling thing of the human realm goes mad if it looks upon me directly. To keep that from happening, I must wear a body of this world. And is it not the same for you, god of a heretical faith?"
More powerful than I had imagined, then. Madness from nothing but a glance.
Yes. That is what they say of gods.
It had been the same where the faded humans lived. The one god was described as impossible to behold, and the gods of the many faiths, too — take one into your eyes, and a person burns away.
"No. I'm not a god. I'm only a monster that sank to the bottom. Even when I came down in person, people looked at me and were perfectly fine."
When I finished, the Tongcheon Cult Lord smiled as if he were in a splendid mood.
"Ah. So you understand the difference in our standing? Well. Yes. Your ability is rather amusing. To shred a person to tatters and then restore them... A most useful power. I could see that you were treated none too poorly."
He spoke as if my submission to him were only natural.
See?
"Most of the seats among the Ten Celestial Hosts stand empty. How would such a station suit you? Strive diligently beneath me, and there is no reason I could not raise your standing."
Already talking as if I were his subordinate.
"Kehehe."
The laugh broke out of me on its own.
I couldn't say why, but the Heavenly Demon's face went rigid, and he retreated at a tremendous speed.
"Now, now. Will running do you any good?"
The Tongcheon Cult Lord swung his arm. Water pierced the foam and came down like a serpent, lunging for the Heavenly Demon.
Well, he could handle that much. Sure enough, he drew the sword from his robes and cut, and the water burst apart in heavy splashes. I paid it no mind and walked toward the Tongcheon Cult Lord.
The closer I came, the worse the reek of fish and stagnant water grew.
Since I had come into this body, a smell like that had stirred nothing in me. This one, I decided, I would remember from now on as filthy and revolting.
I stepped up to him and took hold of his throat. My arms, though, had only the strength of a girl who was a little stronger than most.
"Oh? So you mean to resist?"
The Tongcheon Cult Lord looked at me as if I were amusing, and spoke. I had no intention of strangling him, either.
It had bothered me the moment I saw it. This close, I was sure.
When I had fallen beneath the surface, near the waterline, I had seen a mass of light of enormous size. One of nearly the same size was right before my eyes now.
In other words.