The Realm of the Sword
In the Cave of Tempering, I never knew exactly how many times I had swung a sword.
Millions? Tens of millions?
Hundreds of millions, perhaps. I had never counted, so there was no way I could have known. In those days I had no mind to spare for numbers. I was too busy fighting wooden mannequins as if I meant to die at it.
In truth, though, it never mattered how many times the sword had fallen. Nor how much effort I had spent, nor how great a talent I possessed, nor how original the thought had been. Once a man climbs to a certain height in the sword, the abstract definitions people like to hang on being human are of no use to him, and no help at all.
I came to understand that in the Cave of Tempering, in the thick of my decisive battle with the dragon.
A human being has a limit fixed in the flesh. Temper the body to its extreme. Hone technique until it brushes a divine art. Borrow even that uncanny power called internal energy. A human still cannot help but come to a clear end.
Then what must one do to transcend that end? What does it take for a human body to cut down a dragon—to cut the natural order, to cut against heaven itself?
Simply this. Somewhere in the endless training, an understanding grazed my mind. I followed it and found myself standing on something I could not define. I refined it, tempered it, and before I knew it a dragon's head had fallen before my eyes.
How had I reached that realm—the one that took the dragon's head?
Too heavy to call it chance. Too light to call it fate. The only honest name for it was miracle: something I had simply, somehow, achieved. The realm I reached was dreamlike.
One thing, though, was certain. Whatever that realm may be, it is an opportunity given equally to everyone. To an ordinary, mediocre man. To a genius of the ages whose talent scrapes the sky. Even to a mere beast that is not human at all. For every existence under heaven, there is a realm of the sword granted on equal terms. It is called the Sword Vista.
The odds of reaching it might be one in a few, or one in billions. Those who dare to stand in the Sword Vista—a height that numbers and sentences cannot explain—become able to cut what cannot be cut.
They do not know why. Only a hard belief is carved into the heart: that it can be cut. Swing the sword, and it has already been severed.
But one must not be mistaken. The Sword Vista is not some godlike height that can sever even the world. To arrive there is only a beginning. It can never be called the ultimate of the sword.
Blood welled. From the hole in his chest, Dohwa coughed it up.
"...You tell me this because you pity me."
"No."
Hwa Baek answered without hesitation.
"Because you have the right to hear it."
Under the moon, Dohwa's blood had dyed the ground a deep crimson. He had already bled past any hope of return, and that loss was leading him toward death.
Dohwa smiled, pleased.
"...Now that is an answer to my liking."
Minutes earlier, after pouring out every last killing stroke he possessed, Dohwa had despaired. He had been forced to admit the gap between himself and an opponent he could not even raise his eyes to meet. And still he had staked everything he had, one more time. Despair, if you must. Do not surrender. That was how Dohwa lived—a man who had given his life to the sword.
"We were never of equal skill to begin with. I have no excuse worth offering."
Before a man who could invent, in an instant, the counter to every sword art and every counter-form, swordsmanship itself was useless. Dohwa had attacked with the art of the mind as well, but even that meant nothing to someone who had already grasped his sword intent. This was the result: an overwhelming defeat in which he had not opened so much as a scratch.
So there was only one thing a dying man could say now.
"...I only wished to be a swordsman. I lived this way because that was how I wished to live."
A swordsman's last testament. Hwa Baek was no swordsman in that sense, only a killer who happened to carry a blade as Dohwa did—but he listened all the same.
"I had to live. I had talent. I trained. And I survived."
His beginning, too, had been survival. He had taken up the sword in order to live, trained in order to live, and found his fortune along the way.
"Once I had survived as a wanderer, room opened up. In my purse, and in my heart."
With that room he learned the pleasure of the sword. He came to belong to an organization called Heukpaeryeon, and there he trained the sword as well. He trained, and he trained. He had only been training, and somehow he had become Heukpaeryeon's Right Dark Lord.
Even as the Hegemon Emperor's blade, he did nothing but train the sword, and his lord was satisfied with that. As men who aided one another, and as lord and vassal, Dohwa had thought no bond could be better than the one he had. He had lived by achieving what he wished to achieve. So he had no regrets about his life. That was what he had believed.
"...And yet now I find myself thinking it might have been well to live a little longer."
He had met Hwa Baek and crossed swords with him. He had learned that a supreme realm existed which he had never reached. The knowledge that he had not even glimpsed the edge of that realm brought with it a small regret.
"...I could let you live."
"A price would follow, in exchange."
"Would you pay it?"
"...Enough. I swore to serve only one lord in this life."
He had sworn it to his lord upon his sword. That no temptation would make him betray the man. That he would live out what remained of his days as that man's right hand.
"So leave me be. The sword I could not complete in this life, I can complete in the next."
"......"
Hwa Baek folded into his heart the sight of Dohwa's eyes slowly closing, and the last words he had spoken, and turned his back. Spoken like that, there was no reason left to save him, and no need. Meeting the night as it thinned and cleared, he left one final line behind.
"...I'll leave your men alive. From the start, you were the only one I came for."
A pale dawn rose in the sky. The night was ending.
The Right Dark Lord of Heukpaeryeon. The absolute master called the finest sword of the Unorthodox Faction, the Dark Heaven Sword Lord, was murdered overnight.
The city where he had been staying was swallowed by a great fire and reduced to ash, and the Dark Heaven Sword Lord's corpse burned until not a trace of its shape could be recognized. This rumor, its truth not even confirmed, spread quickly through the Apostles of the Blood Heaven Cult who moved among the common people, and through the Hao Sect.
And with the rumor went a title. A demon dyed white from head to toe, wielding a pair of swords. Word of a swordsman named the White-Faced Sword Ghost.
A conical bamboo hat on his head, a white demon mask on his face, a white robe that stood out sharply in the dark—the world gave that man the name White-Faced Sword Ghost. The one who had slain the Dark Heaven Sword Lord was praised as a great hero, in exact proportion to how infamous his victim had been. In some corners people said he was only a wanderer hungry for fame, but those corners were truly few. Nearly everyone sang his praises.
And a woman who had been waiting for that rumor heard the news as well.
"......"
Dang Seryeong looked at the man drinking tea before her eyes. It was the bare face of the White-Faced Sword Ghost, said only last night to have killed the Dark Heaven Sword Lord. A face handsome enough to be called so wherever he went. The perfect symmetry and balance of a rebirth of bone and flesh had something to do with it, but somehow one suspected the original had been handsome as well.
She swallowed. Looking at Hwa Baek's face, Dang Seryeong tried not to be nervous, and failed. The man before her was an absolute master bearing a vast renown utterly unlike yesterday's.
A soft click. Hwa Baek set down his tea. To Dang Seryeong, her eyes gone wide, he spoke.
"Please don't be so tense. It unsettles me more than it does you."
"......"
"I took measures so the rumor would travel quickly, but I never thought it would be this fast."
The reason word had reached this place in a single night was the Apostles of the Blood Heaven Cult. Competent, or rather willing to run until their feet caught fire—but either way, Hwa Baek felt a deep gratitude toward each of them. He was thinking that he ought to repay them properly someday when Dang Seryeong spoke.
"...Are you really the White-Faced Sword Ghost?"
"Do you need proof?"
"No. It isn't that. I want to hear it from your own mouth."
She needed no proof. The countless circumstances she had already lived through were telling her plainly enough: that Hwa Baek was the White-Faced Sword Ghost at the center of the rumor, and the one who had killed the Dark Heaven Sword Lord, Right Dark Lord of Heukpaeryeon.
"This is only what I think, but you don't seem like a man who would lie. So I want to hear it."
"......"
"Are you the White-Faced Sword Ghost?"
Dang Seryeong's emerald eyes shone, keen and clear. From this question she was trying to see something in him. Hwa Baek did not catch what it was—only a strange feeling—but his sincerity was already nodding.
"Yes. I killed the Dark Heaven Sword Lord."
"......."
And then his calm answer. Hearing it, Dang Seryeong's eyelids lowered, and her eyes slowly closed.
It was only a few seconds, but many words passed through her heart. Among them was a single line from her brother that called the past back up, and a cold line that dug into that past. There was the line she had spoken when she first resolved to leave her family, and the line from the day she founded Seonseon Pharmacy in order to help people.
At the end of all those words, one sentence of resolve glowed quietly in her heart. She chewed that sentence down and swallowed it, and the spectacles that had muted her beauty came off. Watching her, Hwa Baek understood that the act of casting the glasses aside spoke her true feeling.
Then the mouth of a woman who had hardened her resolve to take her family back opened.
"I'll accept your proposal. I'll cooperate. I'll kill my father, and I'll take back the Sichuan Dang Clan."