Soo's Jianghu — 18
If I take hold of it, I can touch it.
There is no need to climb up from the bottom. From this body, I can paint myself over it directly.
The light is huge.
Truly, staggeringly huge. If a person is an apple, then the one called Tongcheon is like the moon—so vast that I have to wonder whether it is even safe to touch a thing this large.
But the other way around: if it is this large, might it not be able to hold me?
If I paint all of it in myself, what becomes of it then?
I push myself into the light.
"What is this."
I have touched the light. Before, the moment I touched one I covered it at once. This takes time.
"Let go—let go! I said let go!"
He's seizing up, somehow. So I loosen my hand and take a few steps back.
"I've let go."
I have let go of the hand. I am still touching him, though.
To put it simply, it is this. Two circles are drawn on a sheet of white paper. For them to touch, the black of their outlines has to meet. Even if the circles come together and then draw apart, lay a sheet of black paper beneath them and the two remain, in substance, joined. Is that not so?
From that black paper, I send blackness upward.
When I make an object, or when I mend a wound, I climb up over the black paper that lies underneath.
The moment I touch it, the light begins to shake.
The memories come in very slowly.
No. Strictly speaking, there are far too many memories. I cannot finish them in a single stroke, the way I can with a person. It is like the time the first world fell into me.
Then, there was so much light that grasping it took a long while. Now the light itself is too large, and so it takes a long while.
A person I could blanket in an instant, so I never noticed. Covering something this large has taught me something.
Until I cover the light entirely, the warmth is difficult to tear free.
I suspect I could draw it off a little at a time, but I have a feeling he would answer that, and so I mean to cover all of him and take it in a single instant.
It is the first of its kind I have ever stolen. I will approach with care.
That is when Cult Leader Tongcheon reaches for the four twisted lines at his back. The four of them tangle together into something like a fork, and he takes it up and thrusts it at me.
Crunch.
"The Four Immortal Sword. A weapon for killing immortals. I don't know what you are, but I don't believe you can stop this."
Holes open in me. One in the head, one in the neck, and two in the chest. They are not merely holes. Something unseen rides the wounds and flows in.
It is the same as always: a river flowing, with no water to be seen. The water is not visible at all. Only the stones and the sand inside it, carried along.
That something bores inward, tearing the flesh with meticulous care.
From what I can tell, each blade destroys a different part. The two buried in my chest tear flesh—but one of them mainly crushes meat, and the other travels the blood vessels, enters the bone, and melts it.
I have no idea what the ones in my neck and head are doing.
Aside from the holes they opened at the start, they do not move at all.
So.
What, exactly, is this supposed to do?
I feel not the slightest hindrance. The flesh is being destroyed, yes, but since when have I done anything by means of flesh?
I lift my arm and seize the piece of equipment he calls a treasure.
"What? Flesh, soul, and baek alike—even your fate should be ruined! How!"
Body, and soul, and baek. Fate. Is that why there are four blades?
And yet, Tongcheon, you worry far too much over the inside of a mere glass bottle.
I keep reaching, slowly dyeing him in my color. The pure white light is turning, by degrees, a deep black-violet.
Can you not see this side of it?
Can you not feel this?
Didn't you say you were a god?
Or does something like this not matter to you at all?
My flesh is about to become dust. Before the vessel breaks completely, I bear down on reality.
Crack.
A fissure blooms with me at its center, vast beyond any comparison to the shattering of a body. It opens in every direction, like a flower come into bloom around me.
And the body returns to what it was. Where the weapon that pierced me meets the fissure, it melts, and is gone.
"Keep that up and the world will collapse, you foolish woman! You think twisting reality will let you escape this Four Treasure Sword? Your fate is already finished!"
Tongcheon shouts it.
But that is my line.
It took time. I have covered all of his light.
I have licked the light clean.
And I close my hand around the light, and the warmth—
Hehe.
Hehehe.
Hehehehe!
Ah, the world! It's warm!
Not a faint warmth. Heat, again! Heat has come back! Yes. This is it!
This! This is the heat I can obtain from now on!
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"
Oh, he's screaming?
Ah, right. Take only the warmth while they are still alive, and they become monsters. Was that how it went?
His whole body swells as if it will burst and reverts into a gigantic fish-person; then the fish-person's shape peels away, and from behind it a monster lunges out, fish spliced together with amphibian. The body twists. An eye drops free, and muscle and tentacles erupt into the place it left, while from the other side ribs and shoulder blades abandon their proper form and punch out through the flesh.
I had thought a god would be something a little more spiritual. He is not so different from any other living thing.
But no.
You don't get to run.
It's warm.
It's mine.
It is mine.
This is mine.
It's cold.
I'm cold. Cold, and cold, and cold—so cold that I am going mad again. Except I cannot go mad.
Ah. Ahh. Again. No. Is this not enough? Will this heat not do? Can I never stay warm? How long, exactly, am I meant to be cold?
Or is it that I am not to hunt insects and humans at all—that I must hunt things like you?
Hm? Cult Leader Tongcheon. Great Kun.
Or if I wring you harder, will warmth come out? More?
I drive myself into the Great Kun as he screams and twists in the water.
The light has turned black and shriveled. But it is still plenty large. Add up every light belonging to the living things nearby, and beside this shrunken light they are far too small. That is how vast the Great Kun's light is.
"Kyaaaaaaaaaaaah!"
Then harpoons made of bone, or muscle, or blood and organs lance out of the Great Kun's body in every direction.
A very small warmth enters me.
Ah. You didn't know?
Once I have taken your warmth, then no matter how you hunger for it, it comes to me. Because you are connected to me. Cold, isn't it? Chilly, isn't it? That is what I feel.
You were warm, weren't you. Isn't that so? You were happy the whole time, weren't you? So it is all right if you are unhappy now, isn't it? Yes? It is, isn't it?
I watch the Great Kun as he raves, searching for warmth. How is that cold? Hard to bear? You said you were a god. Why can't you endure it? You have to endure it. Otherwise, what does that make me?
Or are you about to say you aren't a god?
You said you were.
You.
Or you aren't a god? Which is to say, this is warmth I am allowed to take. Yes?
The Great Kun condenses a blue light in his maw.
The killing intent is not aimed at me. He means to kill living things, so that he can gain more warmth.
I know.
When the cold grows sharp enough to drive you mad, you become able to think of only one thing. Where warmth can be found. And then you can see it.
So—when living things, until now, have stolen something from other living things, what have they done?
They kill, and they eat.
They act as instinct demands, fleeing a horrific cold.
The light points below the surface. Down in the deep water, a colony of innumerable warmths. An underwater city, vast beyond any comparison with the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult—a great metropolis of the fish-folk, packed full of warmth.
And that place vanishes together with the flash the Great Kun breathes out.
Hehe.
The warmth comes in.
Yes. You don't get to have it, Great Kun.
His face is torn to rags, and still I can see the look on it: deeply troubled. At the same time an enormous shockwave, born at the heart of the blast, rolls this way.
Was this how it was done?
I extend the Great Kun's arm and spend the innards—already a ruined mash—and the materials he had prized. In return, the bubble he made a moment ago takes shape.
The shockwave he fired strikes the bubble and rebounds.
I can control the body. Knowing that, a person was far too small. Only a being this large, one crammed with the secrets of using its own power, could have let me understand.
I learned the method of control when I licked the light.
Heehee.
Shrrrrk.
Oh?
The part I used to make the bubble has burst. It is not an explosion. It is sucked inward, as if ground apart in a mixer.
I have seen something like this. When the Heavenly Demon spread his veil, and the monsters were drawn in and died.
Ah. I see. That is my body, touching reality through the Great Kun's.
Just as the Heavenly Demon said, it is the opposite of the rules that make this world. So it collides with every principle around it, and is annihilated.
I wondered if it was antimatter meeting matter and vanishing, but unlike pair annihilation, there is no particular heat. It is simply drawn in, cold, and gone.
When the Great Kun panics, arms and legs grow again from what remains of him. At the same time, the senses synchronized with him speak.
There is not enough fuel.
I cannot feel at all what that fuel is, but experience has taught me that it is qi, or mana. Which is to say I can neither alter him, nor regenerate him?
One thing occurs to me. A single black light, gone wrinkled and shrunken. If I use this, can I come out, the way I did in the first world?
I ease myself in.
Kak—kak—kak—kak—kak!
Like the art of striking plate glass so a tree of cracks will grow, a tree of fissures grows straight through the Great Kun's head.
Too heavy.
Hah.
It seems I cannot do whatever I please with this for material.
But I have gained something.
If a body has scale enough, I can push myself into it and pilot it. The price is that a great deal must be consumed. The principle is the same. There is no difference between moving Choseol's body, or Rebecca's, and moving the Great Kun's.
A vessel made, thoroughly, to contain something. A body that can hold a god. A zero-point stamped into reality.
Only that can hold all of me. Only that is not ground away when I move.
I have learned a very, very, very great deal.
And I have new prey. Not a warmth that merely takes the edge off the cold, but a warm warmth. The ones who call themselves immortals. The ones who mistake themselves for gods. The ones who can come and go between other worlds.
Kehehe.
Yes. You, who were down there at the bottom. You were so very warm.
I stroke my face. Then I turn.
Over there the Heavenly Demon stands watching me, his face drawn tight. He has not drawn his sword. He looks at me, and then he closes his eyes, with a look that says if I mean to kill him, I should kill him.
I glance at the bubble holding the water back around us. There is still a good while before the Great Kun's flesh is entirely spent. No need to hurry.
I walk slowly up to the Heavenly Demon.
"You idiot."
And I cup his cheeks in both hands. I am the taller one, after all. Startled, the Heavenly Demon opens his eyes a fraction. Black eyes, and pupils shining blue.
"Let's go home. I caught the fool."
Glad to have found those I will, from now on, have to strip of their warmth—or make into harvesters—I take hold of the Heavenly Demon and return to the house where Soo is waiting.