The Promise Toward Salvation
“Huu—”
The Luoyang Underground Great Waterway.
Somewhere in its deepest strata.
“Huu—”
In a space where not even a single speck of light could be found, a nameless robe dyed in darkness denser still than the surrounding black fluttered in the foul, rotting wind that swept along the aqueduct.
“Huu—”
Yeon So-hyeon—Amcheonjonza—slowly mastered the breath that threatened to grow ragged, and took one step. Then another.
“Huu—”
Downward. Ever downward. The long passage stretched on without end in sight, yet nothing could halt Amcheonjonza’s strides.
“Grrraaah—”
Hands thrust out from the walls of the passage and seized the hem of Amcheonjonza’s robe. Hands from the walls. In this place, however, that was nothing especially strange.
From the start, everything around him had already become something far too grotesque to be called a sewer system built by human hands.
The passage Amcheonjonza walked was formed of corpses tangled together and rotting away. That long corridor was no different from a visceral organ wrought of the dead.
Grab. Grab.
Hands of corpses rising from the filthy water that ran down the slope latched onto Amcheonjonza’s feet. Then those hands, pus streaming from their rotting flesh, seemed to climb his body.
“Huu—”
Even so, nothing could stop Amcheonjonza’s steps.
“Huu—”
Just as at the beginning, he advanced slowly—yet with absolute firmness.
“Kkuaaagh—!”
Instead, the corpses that had clung to his robe and body came sliding free in a long chain.
“Huu—”
Corpse clung to corpse. Other corpses seized those that held Amcheonjonza. And even as the dead stretched out endlessly, linked tail to tail, Amcheonjonza continued forward, one step at a time.
“Is it not difficult?”
A voice reached his ear. Among the corpses being dragged along while clutching Amcheonjonza, one that still retained some semblance of form spoke.
“How could it not be difficult?”
The corpse, its face crushed flat above the nose, worked its elongated tongue and lower jaw to address Amcheonjonza.
“Even I could not help but be astonished that you shattered the cult’s barrier in a single stroke.”
It even began to snicker.
“But for that very reason, your strength must have been drained.”
“Silence, Geum-jil.”
Amcheonjonza’s hand flashed.
With a wet crack—the sound of hide and flesh twisting and tearing—the snickering corpse burst apart.
Yet—
“Come to think of it.”
At once a newly hanging corpse began to work its snout.
“Does your body not feel heavy?”
Amcheonjonza answered by taking the next step instead.
“Huu—”
At that heavy stride, the dangling corpses came sliding up once more in a long train.
“Well, of course it is heavy.”
Amcheonjonza’s hand flashed again.
Thud—
The corpse puppet of Geum-jil that had been wagging its mouth was smashed, yet this time a child’s corpse, reduced to little more than a head, and the mother’s corpse cradling that head opened their mouths and continued.
“Because every one of these corpses is not the product of delusion or phantom dream.”
“They are real corpses that possess substance.”
Amcheonjonza, who could vividly feel the weight of those corpses, the texture of their rotting flesh, and the slime that flowed from them, gave no answer.
“Huu—”
One step. Another step.
Now, with every footfall Amcheonjonza took, the entire passage heaved. The corridor was made of corpses, and those corpses clung to him in unbroken chains; it was only natural that the whole tunnel undulated whenever he moved.
“Then, the next question.”
Though Amcheonjonza offered not a single reply, Geum-jil chattered on undeterred, as if delighted.
“Where, exactly, did all these countless corpses come from?”
Amcheonjonza’s steps seemed to hesitate for an instant at the question, then slowly resumed.
“In this deep underground waterway, I mean. Just how, and from where, could so many corpses possibly have come?”
Geum-jil knew full well that Amcheonjonza would not answer even if he already knew. He worked the mother-and-child corpses and answered himself.
“The underground people!”
“Yes! These are the underground people of Luoyang.”
At those words, Amcheonjonza’s sharp teeth ground together with a spark of fire.
“Even under such harsh conditions of labor, Luoyang’s poor cannot rest from work.”
“But when their bodies finally break and they must rest, they can no longer fill their bellies.”
“What becomes of those whose bodies have been ruined beyond any capacity for labor?”
If they had responsible family or warm-hearted neighbors, they might somehow lean on those kin or neighbors, scrape by with a bit of gruel in the slums, and eke out their lives a little longer. Yet that was merely postponing the problem. It was no solution.
“As the number of mouths to feed increases, so does the burden on the providers.”
“Those providers must endure even harsher labor, and soon they realize they have no choice left.”
They suffer injury amid still more brutal toil and likewise become nothing but extra mouths in the neighborhood—or else…
“These are the ones abandoned while still alive.”
Geum-jil snickered.
“Cast away and discarded into the Underground Great Waterway by their own families and neighbors.”
The same held true for the dead. These were people who, in winter, could not even afford firewood to warm themselves and had to cling together for heat. How could such people ever obtain enough fuel to cremate a corpse? Those who could not bring themselves to put their mouths to the flesh of family or neighbor simply set the bodies adrift into the sewers, praying only for their rebirth in paradise.
Here and there the Houses of Mercy operated free crematoria to prevent epidemics and to offer the dead a minimum of dignity. But too many were dying. Far too many.
“And so they wandered this Underground Great Waterway as they perished, until they found our cult and took refuge in it!”
As if answering his words—
“Grraaaah—!”
“Uuwaaaagh—!”
—the corpses howled and coiled still more tightly around Amcheonjonza’s body.
“So…”
For the first time Amcheonjonza spoke of his own accord. The mother-and-child corpses controlled by Geum-jil made a show of pricking up their ears.
“So you approached those who were dying, those who had lost every hope…”
Amid the screams of the dead, Amcheonjonza’s voice—like boiling metal—rang out with perfect clarity.
“And made them a false promise of salvation?”
Even as he asked, even though so many corpses now clung to him that it was as if the entire passage were being torn free—
“You beguiled those most powerless in the world? Those who needed help more desperately than anyone?”
—Amcheonjonza kept advancing.
“Beguiled? False?”
The end of the passage was drawing near.
“A false promise, you say?”
Geum-jil’s corpse puppets stiffened with indignation.
“Do not take the resolve of our cultists lightly, Amcheonjonza.”
The puppets clawed at Amcheonjonza’s body with their remaining nails and bit into him with their remaining teeth.
“Our cultists chose of their own will to become the foundation stones for a new world.”
“We chose of our own will to become the sacrifices.”
Every corpse that could still produce anything resembling a voice filled Amcheonjonza’s ears with sound.
“Unlike the cheap promises of the afterlife and salvation peddled by Buddhism, Daoism, or any of the common religions of the surface—”
“—we have never made such promises, nor have we ever received them.”
It was Geum-jil’s voice, and at the same time the voices of all those who had offered their own bodies as sacrifices and taken refuge in the Demonic Cult.
“I know the truth!”
“We know the truth!”
The cultists—or the corpses of cultists—shouted.
“That there is no such thing as an afterlife…!”
“That there is no such thing as the law of cause and effect…!”
Amcheonjonza’s eyes narrowed.
“Those who wear human skin yet are more vicious than demons!”
“That even in death they are never punished by Heaven!”
“We know it!”
The cosmic truth once sought by the immortals who had long ago transcended the mundane world and ascended to sagehood—the very immortals who had created the Jeam Jincheon Scripture—fragments of that truth were now spilling from the mouths of the Demonic Cult.
“What I desire is…!”
“What we desire is only one thing!”
The passage woven from their corpses filled with the howls of those steeped in resentment and rage. Their bodies thrashed violently, shaking the entire tunnel as if it were alive.
“To destroy the entire world and purify it back to its primordial form!”
“To take revenge upon those who made me—made us—die this way…!”
“To take revenge upon this world!”
Standing at the end of the corpse-wrought passage, Yeon So-hyeon understood their doctrine.
And he realized.
The Demonic Cult and the Jeam Jincheon Scripture. The demonic people and Amcheonjonza. They were like opposite faces of the same mirror.
“Huu—”
Even so—even understanding that terrible grudge and that bottomless suffering—his steps did not stop. Rather, still greater force gathered into the final stride.
Crunch—
The corpses that formed the end of the passage, gripped in Amcheonjonza’s outstretched hands, screamed as they were crushed.
Crrrunch—
Under the boundless demonic power generated by the Jeam Jincheon Scripture, even the bricks that had originally formed the wall beneath those pulverized corpses shattered. Amcheonjonza broke free of the passage.
There was not a shred of hesitation.
“Huu—”
His body plummeted toward the lowermost stratum that yawned open, blacker still, like a vast maw.
Then, with the sound of wind being split, Amcheonjonza landed on the floor.
It was an enormous space—the deepest layer, veiled until now by the demonic energy of the Demonic Cult so that no one had ever been able to observe it.
“Kkuaaaah—!”
“Uuwaaaagh—!”
The corpses that had clung to him to the very end tumbled down behind him in a clattering rain.
Crack!
Those that struck first were smashed beyond recognition.
Crack, crrrack!
Still more corpses fell atop them, thrashing arms and legs. Corpses poured down like rain. Every corpse that had formed the passage had been clinging to Amcheonjonza; every last one of them had been stripped free by him and torn from the walls.
“Huu—, huu—”
“Amcheonjonza.”
The voice that called to him as he steadied his breath came from dead ahead. In darkness so deep that even Amcheonjonza’s eyes saw it only as a blur, a colossal form was moving.
“You and we are the same.”
Within that fog of pitch-black demonic energy, hundreds of legs shifted. Hundreds of hands stirred. A shape the size of a house gazed at Amcheonjonza with hundreds of eyes.
“You and we are those who despaired of reality.”
Should that thing even be called Geum-jil? The vast, grotesque being formed of hundreds of fused corpses spoke with dozens of voices at once.
“You and we are those who borrowed power from beings of the outer cosmos in order to overcome this world’s cruel truth.”
The abomination extended dozens of rotting hands simultaneously.
“There is no reason for you and us to shed blood against each other here and now.”
“Nonsense.”
Amcheonjonza—Yeon So-hyeon’s reply was instantaneous, without the slightest hesitation.
“I fight to carve out my own destiny.”
Even amid his ragged breathing, Yeon So-hyeon kept his back straight.
“I fight to change the fates of those who are alive now, and to protect the lives of those who will live hereafter.”
The man who had been exhaling harsh breaths bared his sharp teeth in a smile.
“Unable to change even your own destinies, unable to change the world, blinded by nothing but grudge and hatred, you dare claim to be the same as me with that childish ideology that merely wishes for the world’s destruction?”
In the instant the abomination was struck speechless, Yeon So-hyeon roared.
“How pitiful you look. You unfinished vermin.”
“...How dare you!”
Rumble—!
“Blasphemy against the sacred!”
“An insult to the doctrine!”
As the abomination violently heaved its enormous body, the entire Underground Great Waterway shook.
“You whose strength is so spent you can barely steady your breath—how dare you refuse the cult’s goodwill?!”
“My strength is spent…?”
Having long since forgotten the chills a mere human might feel, the abomination briefly struggled to understand the sensation it had just experienced.
“How amusing.”
From the white mask, two streams of blue ghost-fire rose and then soared as if they would reach the distant ceiling. Yeon So-hyeon’s—no, Amcheonjonza’s—body began to tremble, and it started devouring the demonic energy the abomination was releasing.
“I was not steadying my breath because my strength was lacking.”
A demon that eats demons. The eternal demonic being created to annihilate demons. The Jeam Jincheon Scripture.
“Until you revealed yourself before me with your own body—”
The moment Yeon So-hyeon released the yang-energy heart method he had barely been maintaining, the purest demonic energy erupted beyond all control.
“—I was holding it in check.”