The Legacy of Zhang Sanfeng
I knew at once that the beast before my eyes—shaped for all the world like a squirrel—was no ordinary creature. Setting aside how I could only make out its form in full when I focused my mind, the very elements composing its being did not appear to belong to the material world. If I had to put it into words with my shallow knowledge, I would say the beast wore the aspect of a coalesced mass of spirituality. The reason I hesitated to call it a ghost, however, was that even amid all this, I could sense from the little creature a serene and wholesome life-force.
Slowly—before I knew it, my hand had drifted out toward the squirrel.
Kweet!
Perhaps it had caught a scent it found familiar, for the squirrel came trotting over on its short legs and climbed onto my fingertips. My conduct must have looked strange, for everyone studied me with puzzled expressions.
Kweet?
The creature perched on my fingertips tilted its head in exactly the same way.
"A spirit beast."
One person alone—Mugeuk-jinin—seemed to see what I saw. The words had barely left his mouth—
"Gah!"
My brother Dancheon Hak jolted in alarm; Cheon-su-jinin readied his stance; and Brother Chun-baek's hand came to rest on his sword hilt. Their reactions varied, but they shared one thing in common: every gaze had turned to my fingertips. It seemed they had only just now caught sight of Sinseon-hon.
"Heh. What a remarkable little fellow."
It appeared the spirit beast had materialized of its own accord, so rather than saying they had caught sight of it, it would be more accurate to say the beast had chosen to reveal itself.
"It is Sinseon-hon."
The creature that had been perched on my finger had, at some point, moved house to Mugeuk-jinin's shoulder. If I had to guess, it had sensed a fragrance of spirituality more to its liking in Mugeuk-jinin, heir to Wudang's lineage.
"Did you say... Sinseon-hon?"
Astonishment crept across Cheon-su-jinin's face. From a man with such a fierce brow and such a firmly set mouth, it was an expression I would never have imagined possible.
"...Surely not Zhang Sanfeng's?"
"That it is."
Brother Chun-baek murmured the first, and Mugeuk-jinin confirmed it.
Sinseon-hon...
Even I knew that name well. It was no famous tale, but according to the unofficial histories, Zhang Sanfeng had kept a spiritual creature, and its name had been Sinseon-hon. That Brother Chun-baek knew information even Myeong-gae the informer had only barely gotten hold of reminded me, once again, how wide his experience ran. In truth, the more astonishing fact was that this tiny creature had likely existed for over a thousand years. The jianghu was a place where even spiritual creatures were exceedingly rare to come by—and this was a full spirit beast beyond them. We had witnessed a being next door to an immortal.
Kweet!
Trotting down from Mugeuk-jinin's shoulder to the ground on its short legs, Sinseon-hon let out a chirp. Call it the speech of the heart or what you will—the beast's meaning came through unmistakably: follow me. With a nimble bound, Sinseon-hon darted off and slipped clean into the rocky crag.
"Hmm?"
Sinseon-hon was now a solid presence anyone could see, and that alone was enough to startle the whole company. And at the very spot it had passed, the mouth of a grotto bloomed into being as if out of a mirage.
"Heh. So it was a barrier."
Mugeuk-jinin had it right. It was not that an entrance had appeared out of illusion, but that the illusory barrier veiling the entrance had been lifted.
"What would you have us do?"
Mugeuk-jinin asked me. Quite naturally, the deciding voice of this company had come to rest with me.
"We have only to go in."
Judging by the spirituality Sinseon-hon carried, there was not a shred of taint about it; it could be trusted. I exchanged a look with Brother Chun-baek.
"Please wait here a moment."
"We will."
"Hmph."
Brother Chun-baek and my brother Dancheon Hak would stand guard at the entrance.
"Let us go."
"Let us."
"I shall follow."
I entered the grotto alongside the two Daoists of Wudang.
"Heavens."
The awe Cheon-su-jinin could not hold back echoed through the grotto. I understood his state of mind. The grotto we had stepped into was, quite literally, a heaven unto itself—the phrase felt anything but hollow there. Stalactites of every hue lit the cavern from within, so that even without the night-sight arts of a supreme master, we could take in the interior without the least trouble. It was mysterious enough to recall a fairyland, and yet traces of human handiwork remained; clearly, we were not the first people ever to find this place.
Kweet!
Sinseon-hon urged us onward again and again. The grotto we had taken for a mere rocky hill ran deeper than any of us had guessed, and so we walked on, ever inward, ever deeper. At last we arrived at a certain spot tucked into a corner of the cavern.
Pit-a-pat—Sinseon-hon ran ahead on nimble feet and planted itself atop a mound that swelled up like a burial barrow.
Kwee-eet!
The creature rose onto its hind legs like a little man and smartly set its front paws at its hips. However you looked at it, the pose said one thing: behold my achievements. And beneath that pose of Sinseon-hon's, a spirituality every bit as intense as the creature itself was radiating light. If I had to liken it to anything, it was as though the natural spirituality I had witnessed in the Garden of Delight had been fused with the Heart Sword's spirituality I had felt from the Sword Emperor.
"...Four hundred."
"Yes."
Mugeuk-jinin and Cheon-am-jinin exchanged a glance.
"So that is the Taecheong-dan."
What rested at the very top of the mound could only be the Taecheong-dan, the Supreme Clarity Elixir itself. It was not that I knew the pill by sight; it was that the pill radiating the most intense spirituality of all imprinted itself far too vividly upon my eyes. One look at the spirituality wreathing that unremarkable brown pill, and I understood why such a treasure lost nothing in being called the peerless treasure of the ages.
"They say Sinseon-hon was ever a collector of spiritual things by nature."
It was Mugeuk-jinin's quiet addition. For all I knew, to a creature compelled to gather whatever held spirituality, the Taecheong-dan had simply been prey it could not pass by.
Kweet!
Delighted, it seemed, to show off its spoils, Sinseon-hon scampered briskly over and perched tall upon the Sword Emperor's shoulder once more.
"So you were the Shadowless Divine Thief."
The Sword Emperor had it right. This was a being whose tracks even seasoned martial artists could not run to ground; it had lacked nothing in the way of credentials for king of all thieves.
Slipping into the spot Sinseon-hon had vacated, Cheon-su-jinin examined the mound.
"There is a Socheong-dan here as well."
"Was there a theft of a Socheong-dan of late?"
"If this humble one may venture a guess, it appears to be a Socheong-dan several hundred years old at the least."
"Perhaps this is the very pill that was stolen from the great clans once upon a time."
Sinseon-hon's spoils were not to be glanced over lightly. Every element that made up the mound harbored spirituality of its own—in other words, the whole of it was a congregation of natural elixirs and refined pills.
"That one there looks to be a Yin-Yang Immortal Fruit."
"...Extraordinary."
When I offered my observation—elixirs being something of a specialty of mine—astonishment spread across Cheon-su-jinin's face. The Yin-Yang Immortal Fruit was a spiritual fruit that embodied the very principle of the Supreme Ultimate, a treasure known to be one of the core ingredients of the Taecheong-dan.
Kweet!
There was no mistaking it: right now, Sinseon-hon was saying, Ahem. And? What do you make of my abilities? As the creature—blissfully ignorant of its own crime—preened away, gravity returned to Cheon-su-jinin's face.
"Are we to place it under arrest?"
Within the Daoist order of Wudang, the authority of apprehension—the power to seize and bind, even spirits and sacred relics—belonged to the Disciplinary Pavilion alone, and thus the judgment fell to none other than its head, Cheon-su-jinin. Yet faced with so extraordinary a situation, he had sought counsel, and naturally the one he turned to was Mugeuk-jinin.
"It is right to hold that the laws of the mortal world govern humankind alone."
"Even so, the crime remains."
Cheon-su-jinin pushed back against his grand-uncle's view. That stubbornness—a refusal to bow easily to authority or rank—and that devotion to principle might well be the true strength of Wudang's Disciplinary Pavilion.
"Enough of that, child. As I see it, that spirit beast was the companion of the Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng himself. From where we stand, it would be no stretch to call the creature our own grand-patriarch. Surely you do not mean to apprehend a being of that standing over a mere Taecheong-dan?"
"...Understood."
Only when the unfathomable seniority the creature carried had been laid out did Cheon-su-jinin at last stand down. The phrase "a mere Taecheong-dan" struck me as a contradiction in terms, and yet, considering the standing Zhang Sanfeng held within Wudang, I could understand it. In truth, perhaps what Cheon-su-jinin had needed all along was a justification he could accept.
"Let us gather those and be on our way."
"Yes."
Cheon-su-jinin gathered up the Taecheong-dan and the Socheong-dan from among Sinseon-hon's spoils. They had been Wudang's to begin with, and so it was Wudang that would carry them home.
"The rest—the spirit herbs and spirit fruits—we ought not touch. Did not that Sinseon-hon gather them with its own diligent care?"
"Yes."
And faced with countless natural elixirs, neither man had indulged a whit of reckless greed—it was only right to call them true Daoists.
Kweet?
Fortunately, Sinseon-hon—for all its habit of hoarding spirit pills—seemed free of greed where they were concerned, and made no move to stand in the way.
"Let us return."
"Yes."
With the Taecheong-dan—the very object of their mission—safely recovered, the steps of Mugeuk-jinin and Cheon-su-jinin had turned noticeably light.
"Hmm."
One could call it a mysterious phenomenon, and a mysterious experience. We had beheld a spirit beast with ties to Zhang Sanfeng, explored a fairyland grotto hidden behind an illusory barrier, and recovered the Taecheong-dan without incident. And yet...
"There is somewhere further in I must see."
"That place, you mean?"
"Yes."
I intended to press a little deeper. The reason was simple: from that place shone a spirituality more resplendent than anything in Sinseon-hon's hoard.
"This is the place?"
"Yes."
The place we finally reached was a grotto within the grotto. To put it more plainly, it would be right to say it looked like a human dwelling.
Step.
I moved with care, and Mugeuk-jinin and Cheon-su-jinin followed just as carefully behind me.
Step.
Unlike the outer cavern with its stalactites of every color, this place was far plainer—but not to my senses. The pressure born of that spirituality kept prodding at my mind's eye. Only after pushing through that wall of spirituality to the innermost reaches of the grotto did my view open up in full.
"This is..."
An ancient sword etched with pine-grain patterns stood slanted where it had been driven into the earth, so old that the years it had swallowed were beyond guessing. Within that worn-old blade, faint fragments of spirituality lay sleeping. Beside it lay a set of clothing, folded with care—terribly old, and differing somewhat from the Wudang garb of today, but the character of the dress marked it unmistakably as Wudang's. And beside that, arranged just as neatly, sat a single book: one that stirred in my memory the fragrance of the Yakseon Heart Decision. The radiance of a spirituality that left even elixirs far behind was soaked into that very book.
Gently—afraid the book might be damaged, I brushed the dust from its cover with the most careful of touches. And at last, the book revealed its true name.
"...Hmm."
I had mentioned once before that Wudang's origins traced back to the old maxim: None but Zhenwu is worthy to bear it. There, Zhenwu referred to the Great Emperor Zhenwu himself—in other words, the Supreme Emperor of the Dark Heaven—and so I knew that the Dark Heaven, Hyeoncheon, reached all the way down to Wudang's roots. Divining whence the Hyeoncheon Jingyeol took its name, then, was no difficult task.
"...It would seem."
Unable to hold himself back, Mugeuk-jinin opened his mouth at last, his voice heavy.
"It seems this is the legacy of Zhang Sanfeng."
Zhang Sanfeng. Considering the reverence the Daoists of Wudang held for that name, it was inevitable that he could not stay silent.
"..."
Cheon-su-jinin, whose jaw was always set firm as stone, stood with his mouth hanging open wide enough to fit a fist.
"So it would seem."
The Hyeoncheon Jingyeol. It was said to be the final realization Zhang Sanfeng had pursued in his last years. That realization—thought never to have been set in order, because the Patriarch had ascended to the ranks of the immortals so long ago—was sitting there before us as a finished book. For a work to be compiled into a book meant, quite simply, that it had been completed. Zhang Sanfeng had not ascended with the Hyeoncheon Jingyeol still half-formed; he had ascended only after bringing it to completion.
"...So the legend truly existed."
The very essence of Wudang—never passed down within Wudang itself—had just been found.
Kwee-eet!
Sinseon-hon planted both paws on its hips and preened. As for why the little wretch had to act so smug about it—I had no idea.