A Life-Debt, Doubled
An ordinary man can learn nothing from a warrior's martial arts, no matter how long he watches. No—there was hardly any need to go so far as ordinary men at all. Even a warrior below First-Rate who had never touched the Peak could learn almost nothing from a Peak master's martial arts.
It was the principle of Cannot Perform. What one sees but cannot execute can hardly be called learned. That was the gulf between a master below First-Rate and a master of the Peak. When the masters who walk the upper reaches of the murim judged the Peak Realm to be the true beginning of the martial way, it was on precisely such reasoning that their judgment stood.
For the Peak Realm was the very beginning of seeing-as-doing and mind-as-deed. But then, once a warrior reached that realm—where the mind drove the deed and sword qi took visible shape—did everything open up where learning was concerned? Regrettably, no. Even a Peak warrior could gain nothing from the martial arts of one who had touched the Harmony Realm.
It was the principle of Cannot See. Should a Harmony Realm master condescend to teach in person, the matter changed somewhat—but a Peak master watching a life-and-death duel between two Harmony masters would come away with nothing. That was why the subtleties dissolved into the martial arts of a superhuman whose divine sense had bloomed remained invisible to him, however faithfully he watched.
Then might a Harmony Realm warrior—one whose divine sense had bloomed—gain something from a Profound Realm warrior who had expanded that divine sense further still? In truth, this too was all but impossible.
It was the principle of Cannot Perceive. The essence of the martial arts wielded by those who reached the Profound Realm was the Intent—and so long as one's enlightenment fell short, one could neither perform it, nor see it, nor awaken to it. To wield, witness, and comprehend the martial arts of Intent, one had to arrive at that root oneself. Only by expanding one's divine sense and awakening one's Intent through one's own strength could a warrior be said to have taken even a single step.
Put the other way around, a warrior standing within the supreme realm called the Profound could learn a great deal from another Profound Realm warrior's martial arts—all the more so when the other party performed them deliberately, with every intention of teaching.
And so... I knew how rare a treasure the teaching Yeom Gi-ha, the Sovereign of Destruction, had bestowed upon me was.
And so... I knew what an immense grace it was that the Overlord Martial Emperor, Wiji Han, was displaying for me now.
Shreng—!
"Kgh."
Wiji Han kept up his offensive from the first breath to the last, and Ma Pyeong-sam was kept too busy parrying to breathe. Ma Pyeong-sam had driven his assassin's martial arts past their limits through the Surging Art—but pushing past an art's limits was not the same as pushing past one's grade.
"Come now. Show me a little more strength."
SHREEEING—!
"...Damn it."
"Surely you must show an arrogance befitting the realm you've attained, no?"
As if to prove that even within the Profound Realm there were grades upon grades, the Overlord Martial Emperor Wiji Han kept Ma Pyeong-sam on the run from the first exchange to the last.
KHOOOM—. I had once likened the Overlord Martial Emperor's Intent to an upright sword. His offensive—upright swords heaped rank upon rank about his body—deserved the name of a marching army, with nothing wanting in the title. The Intent that rose against it, Ma Pyeong-sam's, resembled drifting mist: a red-tinged haze cradling a sinister energy, for which Slaughter Mist seemed the aptest name. Mist, by its very nature, ought to swallow blades whole, yet it looked powerless to swallow the Emperor's upright sword.
KRAK! The Emperor's sword tore even phantoms to ribbons.
"Kgh."
Because the Emperor chased down Ma Pyeong-sam's blurring afterimages with dogged patience, laying his blade against each in turn, the assassin could never bring his full skill to bear. The Overlord Martial Emperor's martial art was, at its core, a sword pure and unadorned—and the flow of Intent that such a man deigned to display before my eyes held insights into the road I had yet to walk.
Fwoosh! With his characteristic lightness art, Ma Pyeong-sam vaulted a great distance away.
"Hm."
This was, in truth, a situation quite unlike the one in which I had run down the Blood-Drinking Demon God, Golu Gwang. At a glance, Ma Pyeong-sam's Intent resembled what the Blood-Drinker had unfurled, yet it had to be judged something else entirely: where the Blood-Drinker's had been a patchwork of borrowed rags, Ma Pyeong-sam's was a condensed quintessence of refined killing intent. The Overlord Martial Emperor could hound him again and again, but putting him down would be no simple matter.
Then...
"It seems we all die together, then."
At that flat murmur, Ma Pyeong-sam's Jinqi began to riot.
"Mm. This does not bode well."
The Overlord Martial Emperor's level voice announced the crisis.
Gang Pae could not blink. Even that instant's worth of time felt too precious to waste. He had taken the Walpae's road early in life, and the Walpae were never warriors to begin with—but he had hammered and polished himself with diligence until he stood at the Transcendent Peak, so Gang Pae, too, was a martial artist without a speck of shame.
Gang Pae had a dream from his boyhood days: to become the finest master under heaven, the kind of man whose name commands the whole of the murim. Where he differed from other men was that he had never shelved that dream as a child's passing fancy. He was still dreaming it, even now. His hunger to climb higher in the martial way, then, reached all the way down to the bedrock of who Gang Pae was.
He had saved the Lady Yeo Wol he adored, safe and sound—by his own two hands, no less. She lay unconscious still, but seemed to have been spared any great ordeal, and he had been thinking there was nothing more left in this world to wish for.
"My, I barely tapped him and off he flew. A weakling, was he?"
That was the sight that greeted Gang Pae when he first beheld the Sado League Leader—together with the sheer audacity of a man who could dismiss as a weakling an opponent who had looked to be possessed of a demon's impossible strength.
The Sado League Leader. The Overlord Martial Emperor, Wiji Han. The finest man in the Jianghu, honored by Gang Pae above all others save the eldest brother who had passed him his current seat. And now he stood breathing the same air as that man. For Gang Pae, who proudly called himself a follower of the Overlord Martial Emperor, it was an honor that three lifetimes would not have sufficed to earn.
Better still, this was no mere audience. He had been given the chance to witness the great Emperor's martial arts with his own eyes.
"Watch closely."
So saying, the Emperor strode toward the villain. Those parting words felt as though they had been meant for him.
To behold the great Sado League Leader's martial arts with his own two eyes—it was nothing less than a once-in-a-millennium stroke of fortune.
His eyes snapped wide open—and from that moment on, Gang Pae did not blink. Not once. The world called the timescale along which a warrior as great as the Overlord Martial Emperor moved a single instant; even within the sliver of time it took eyelids to meet, a scene would surely be lost. And so, though the blowing wind carried dust into his eyes, Gang Pae refused to blink. A warrior, however great, cannot outface the laws of nature, and his unblinking eyes began to redden and swim with blood. But Gang Pae was a man, and by sheer superhuman will he kept them open, determined not to miss a single step of the great warrior's footwork.
At last... Drip. A tear slid down his cheek. Whether it was the body's plain protest against the dust, or the stir of awe at witnessing the Emperor's arts, no one could have said. Either way, it was fine. A man's tears were nothing to be ashamed of.
Shreng—! The Overlord Martial Emperor's dreaded name was indeed no idle rumor, and his martial prowess deserved to be called divine skill itself.
"That's our League Leader for you!"
The nameless master had spent the whole fight driving Brother Ma Sok—a master a cut above Gang Pae himself—onto the back foot. By Gang Pae's reckoning, this was the very mastermind of the affair: the snake who had egged on a leech like Geom Bigak. Watching the Sado League Leader pass judgment on the wretch in person could not help but be exhilarating.
But then...
"It seems we all die together, then."
The moment the villain murmured those words, the situation began to turn with terrifying speed. The current of Jinqi seething within the man's body was nothing short of monstrous. And Gang Pae learned something then, for the first time in his life: that the flow of Jinqi, which he had always assumed could only be sensed, could be seen with the naked eye. The saying that the masters of the higher realms moved along a timescale of mere instants was proving true.
He had sensed that something was wrong—and before anyone could brace for anything—
FLASH—!
The Jinqi rioting within the villain's body detonated in a blaze.
In that heartbeat, Gang Pae knew.
"Danger."
This was not an attack that could be stopped. Not at Gang Pae's level, at least.
"So this is how I die."
Such was the Walpae's life: one lived always with death at one's shoulder. Just as no man fears the air he breathes or the water he drinks, Gang Pae did not fear death.
But...
"Milady."
That held true only for himself. Gang Pae did not fear his own end—but the death of the Lady Yeo Wol he adored frightened him more than anything under heaven.
His body was faster than his thought. It was, he supposed, the territory of pure instinct. Trifling though it was against such a blast, he wove the finest protective qi he could muster, gathered Yeo Wol into his arms, and turned his back on the explosion. His one and only wish was that Yeo Wol live.
KWAAAA-BOOM! A truly monstrous explosion engulfed the world.
Hoooooowwl— A violent wind came rushing in to fill the void the blast had hollowed out, whipping Gang Pae's hair into a wild, straggling mess.
"Hm?"
The puzzling thing was this: why was he still aware of anything at all on the far side of the explosion?
The wind slowly died down...
"Brother Gang Pae, are you all right?"
Only when that voice—his sworn brother's voice—reached him did Gang Pae's gaze finally move.
"...!"
There stood Dancheon Myeong, his own little brother, planted in front of him and Yeo Wol both. With Myeong's body as its point, a fan of unscarred earth spread out around them, and Gang Pae and Yeo Wol sat at the very center of that safe zone. Beyond its rim, the ground gaped with craters—silent testimony to the blast's savagery. There was no mistaking it: Dancheon Myeong had saved his life.
"...Thank you."
"Haha, isn't that what a little brother is for?"
As though he had done nothing worth a second thought, his little brother shot back off to the Emperor's side. Somehow, that retreating back looked very broad indeed. In the Walpae's world, the debt of a saved life was a debt repaid across a lifetime.
Then...
"Mm..."
Yeo Wol stirred in his arms. She seemed to be coming back to herself.
"I see." It had not been his own life alone that his brother had saved. It was Lady Yeo Wol—the woman more precious to Gang Pae than his own.
"A life-debt, doubled, then..."
Having no idea how to name a grace greater than the saving of one's life, Gang Pae settled, for the time being, on calling what his little brother Dancheon Myeong had done for him "a life-debt, doubled." A debt he could never repay in a lifetime had just been born. But Gang Pae was a man who could not live under an unpaid debt. Repay it he would—whatever it took. For a start, he added the name Dancheon Myeong to his private ranking of men he respected. It pained him to see the great Sado League Leader slip all the way down to third place, but there was no help for it.
When I—fresh from pulling Gang Pae and Yeo Wol clear of the blast—drew near the Overlord Martial Emperor, the first words to reach my ears were...
"I'm sorry."
They were not meant for me. They were for Brother Ma Sok. His standing and his dignity would not let the man bow his head, yet I could tell the Emperor's apology flowed from genuine remorse.
"No, League Leader. Please, withdraw it."
Perhaps because the sincerity in those words had reached him, it was Ma Sok who lowered his head.
By a stroke of sheer providence, not a single soul had been hurt. It was thanks to the net of swords the Emperor Wiji Han had cast in a heartbeat of Intent, which had shielded most of the devastation—and thanks to me as well, for I had saved Brother Gang Pae and Yeo Wol, who, standing on the far side, had slipped past the Emperor's sword-net.
My eyes turned to the epicenter of the blast.
"Did he escape?"
The Emperor answered with a quiet nod. The technique had worn the shape of one meant to kill its own user, yet I knew Ma Pyeong-sam had not died. It could scarcely hope to deceive the eyes of the Emperor and me.
"So it was a life-saving trump card."
They say every monstrous master standing in the murim's upper echelons keeps at least one hidden ace up his sleeve. Under cover of that ferocious blast, Ma Pyeong-sam had spirited his own body away. Not even a lingering echo of him remained to be sensed; pursuit would be hard. No—a master of his caliber would be far from this region already. That was the right way to read it, and it was why the Emperor had apologized to Ma Sok.
"Aw, it's already over."
Brother Chun-baek had shown himself. It was too early to chide him for lateness: barely a quarter of an hour had passed since the Emperor's own arrival. The road had run from Hunan to Anhui—to cover so vast a distance and arrive only a quarter of an hour behind the Emperor meant Brother Chun-baek had given it everything he had.
"You've had a hard road, Brother."
And I knew, moreover, that the Emperor had arrived far sooner than even my own prediction. I could hardly deny that having him—the man I had summoned for nothing more than the cleanup—land in the very thick of the battle had made everything easier. To my flattery, Brother Chun-baek offered nothing but a smile.