Chapter 99
"Why are you so late? You reek of fish!"
The moment I stepped through the door, Soo pinched her nose. Ah. Did I smell that bad?
"I met a sea creature for a little while, so I ended up like this."
Daegon lived in the sea, so he counted as a sea creature. He had not been born of this world's ocean, but of another. Born in a different world, he rose to become its greatest monster and went from world to world as an invader, until his own world burned. Among the worlds he had invaded, this was the one where his kind grew best, so he came here. He stirred things up in hopes of rising again, and he failed. After that he hid beneath the sea, waiting on a second chance, and that was when he met me.
He possessed an enormous variety of techniques. I had no idea where to begin cutting into them, but among them was even a method for summoning me. The trouble was how badly fragmented it all was. I couldn't tell which stretch ought to be put into a person, or where it should stop. It would have been nice to have someone who could interpret the whole of it and set it in order. That was the feeling of it.
A lithium mine sat right in front of me, and the age I was standing in was the Bronze Age. Pour the memories into a person, and they would grow old and die before the pouring was finished. What I needed was a condensed version a human could actually use. In Sim-won knew some of it, but not everything. It had never been a technique meant for human hands, and no single person could wield it.
Daegon had used his head. He made people memorize the summoning art piece by piece, and forced each of them to concentrate on only their piece. A piano makes it easy to picture. Assign one person to each key: press, or don't. Only those two orders. They might not be able to read the score. They might not have quick fingers. The design asked only that each of them play their own part, because some passages demanded a feat no lone human could manage—like striking twenty-five widely separated keys all at once.
He had been through plenty of trial and error himself. The problem was that Daegon knew only the original. To solve it, he set a subordinate to the work, and the subordinate produced an answer. So only that subordinate understood how the pieces had been divided.
The pity was that the one who held those divided parts was neither Daegon nor any of the people of the city Daegon had slaughtered. He had died of old age long ago, and that was a true shame. He had left organized records, but they evaporated along with the city. Had he still been alive, I would have drawn the memories out of him one way or another. Still, I had gained a great deal, so I would call it good. If it came to the worst, I could simply drive the knowledge in and accept that a few people would go mad.
More pressing than any of that, the smell must truly have been vile. Soo kept starting toward me and then backing away. Was it really that bad? I couldn't smell a thing. Or perhaps my nose had already adapted and decided this was fine. What was I supposed to do about that?
"Does it really smell that bad?"
"It's a toilet and raw fish mixed together. It reeks!"
I would have to wash. If it smelled that strongly, I had probably brought a fair load of germs home with me as well. The trouble was that washing meant going a long way north and down, and getting into the lake.
"I'll go wash and come back."
"Hurry up and get back!"
She said it while pointing behind the house. It really must have been an unbearable smell. I couldn't climb up and down the cliff back there the way Soo could, so I had to walk. The house sat high. To reach water I had to descend a long way north, and there I would meet the lake that lay beneath the cliff.
I arrived at the lake. It was already dark, so I couldn't see properly, and a problem presented itself. Hmm. No. What was I supposed to do about this?
The shore was packed with wild beasts, because the water's edge was thick with the corpses of dead aquatic creatures. Now that I thought of it, a shock wave travels better through water than through air. They must have died then and washed in. And so a feeding frenzy had broken out. Perhaps because there was so much to eat, the great carnivores weren't even driving off the mid-sized ones feeding beside them. Some of the biggest lay asleep with their swollen bellies turned up to the sky.
So it wasn't dangerous, exactly. The problem was that the water was fouled with corpses, and the line between water and land had retreated far off into the distance. A great deal of the water was gone, it was true. Nothing for it. I would go back up.
I could have overturned reality, of course, but I was wary of using that power so casually just then. The region where I had fought Daegon was already full of cracks. One wrong move, and I suspected this second world might break as well. Unless it was truly necessary, I would be careful.
I turned my steps back toward the house. Or I tried to. Something in the forest was watching me from the side. I looked that way, and at the edge of the trees I saw a living, moving lump of rotten meat. It took me a moment. It was the great beast that had bitten my throat before.
Eye-like organs were stuck all over it, so the world must have looked to it like a mosaic, and nothing on its body moved properly anymore. Human weapons were lodged in its flesh; the slightest shift set its nerves screaming. The monster that had so often sent me warmth—raiding little villages, charging into the dens of beasts—had shown itself. This was the first time I had seen a creature that lived long after its warmth was taken. Seeing it with my own eyes, rather than through its, was different from how it had felt.
Its whole body was white. Not a clean white—more as if it had grown impossibly old, every last hair a lusterless white. Its body was withered as a dead tree. Grotesquely jutting bone, and the muscle still clinging to the meat, was rotting, and the insects had gathered because of it. Decay and old age had arrived together.
It moved seventeen legs and came toward where I stood. It must once have been a four-legged cat. Now it wore the shape of a crab. The eyes driven into its body looked down at me, and it opened its mouth.
"Keh. Heh. Heh."
Not to eat. It laughed as if it were mocking me, and then it began something strange. With its legs, it tore itself apart in front of me. Blood and flesh sprayed, and along with the wholly rotten entrails, the corpses packed inside came spilling out. Having carved itself to pieces, it died. A blackened, scorched light crumbled and drifted, turned to dust, and vanished.
Ah. Of course. It had come to sneer. A splendid, cutting mockery. Somewhere along the way it had realized I could not die. Well. Yes. When the harvest comes, intelligence rises, so it wasn't strange that intelligence would rise even after one became a monster. It had understood that I would be cold forever, laughed at me for it, and taken its own life. I knew that without being told. There was no reason I should have been able to read a monster's feelings, and yet I knew it had come to spit one last curse at me and die.
I swallowed the words. You were the one who attacked me first. It couldn't have heard me anyway.
I had learned one more thing: what becomes of a living creature once I have taken its warmth. If I could help it, I wouldn't make another. It felt awful.
I dragged my body, sticky with blood and meat, back to the house.
"Kyaaaaah!"
Soo screamed. I was in such a foul mood that I started to snap at her—and failed. No. Irritation wasn't what I ought to be giving her.
"Someone took their spite out on me on the way back. Let's sleep apart tonight. And if you sleep out on the veranda, don't forget the blanket."
It had been a long time since we had decided to sleep separately. For the record, the room was no place to sleep in summer. It got far too hot. I went to the kitchen and sat before the fire.
A great deal had happened today. I had gained a great deal. There had been nothing but gain. So why did I feel this bad? I curled up in the middle of the kitchen and waited for time to pass. In front of me the fire spat and cracked. I sat staring blankly into it. Fire-gazing—was that what they called it?
Now that I thought of it, something here was strange. There were no insects. On the way up to the house they had swarmed all over me, but here there was nothing. One wall was missing entirely; a place like that having no bugs was the odd part, wasn't it? The fire was the most likely cause. A fire that kept burning with no fuel at all.
Until just yesterday I had been content to let a good thing be a good thing. After everything that had happened, this looked strange too. What I did, at root, was force what I wanted over the world. What I wanted was what mattered. In other words, what I had not thought of should not have appeared. Then what was this fire in the hearth? There was nothing inside it. In a physical sense there was heat, but no light and no warmth. Just fire.
Perhaps I ought to take it and play at being a priest rather than a god, and call the thing a fire cult. The Heavenly Demon was on my side as well. If I gathered believers little by little and raised a Cult of Fire in place of the Heavenly Demon Cult, that might be amusing.
Hmm...
I had expected the usual faded memories to surface, the way they always did, but it was strangely quiet. Almost as if there were a personality in there. There wasn't. Memory was only memory. I watched the fire that kept burning atop the sand, until the moon sank and the sky brightened to blue again.
It was midsummer, so the sun rose early. I had rested enough, so I stood and brushed away the traces scorched all over me. Then I stepped straight out of the kitchen and looked toward the distant forest.
Just now, Goo Mil-mil had suggested to Oh Myung-sung that they make for the Heavenly Demon Cult, and Oh Myung-sung had agreed. I dug through memory for a map and worked out the rough distance from where they were to the cult. By tonight, they would arrive. If I walked it, I would have to go three days and three nights without rest, but Oh Myung-sung and Goo Mil-mil were both of the Murim—gifted. Use what they called movement arts, and they could truly cross a great distance in a moment. Drifting wherever they were driven was one thing. Once they set a destination and moved toward it, it would not take long.
They were coming to the Heavenly Demon Cult meaning to learn about the Heavenly Demon Divine Art—to ask about the change in his appearance, and whether it could be undone. But there was no such thing. Out of nowhere he had been named a Demon Head, and by the opinion of men he had fallen into being one. Even knowing he could never go back, Oh Myung-sung was coming here with Goo Mil-mil. When the two of them arrived, a great change would come over the Heavenly Demon Cult.
As I always did, I turned the problem over: how to finish an automatic system for harvesting warmth. The cold was crueler than sentiment, and to escape it I had no choice but to keep working without end.
"Choseol?"
Soo's eyes cracked open, bleary. Seeing me at the entrance to the yard, she called my name.
"You're awake? Then let's wash and get breakfast ready, Soo. And there may be something this evening, so keep it in mind."
"Huh? Mm, okay."
I left her to a long, languid stretch and went into the kitchen. As usual, I composed myself and prepared breakfast. Whether this was the last of our ordinary days, or a return to them, I would know when the two of them arrived.