A Matter of Pretext
In the conduct of any affair, it is said that justification is the thing that matters most.
As I said before, the conduct I maintained to conceal my regression required the scaffolding of plausibility, and this was precisely why.
Perhaps nitpicking plausibility with Chun-baek, of all people, at this late stage was no better than pulling wool over one's own eyes — but surely a man owes at least a token measure of sincerity to those around him.
At any rate, I could hardly say, 'In a few days, on the first of the first month, your master's sect will be reduced to rubble, so let us go there now and stop it.' A proper pretext was needed.
And naturally, I had long since arranged one.
"Chun-baek. You've been keeping that well, I trust?"
"That?"
"The Five-Leaf Immortal Orchid."
"Ah."
When we had discovered the Garden of Delight, Chun-baek had set aside a Five-Leaf Immortal Orchid as a gift for his master.
Chun-baek rummaged through his breast pocket and drew out the orchid with careful hands.
"Still in fine shape, I see."
Perhaps the claims of it being a superior-grade spiritual elixir were no exaggeration — half a year after we had gathered it, the Five-Leaf Immortal Orchid still held its vitality.
"When do you plan to deliver it?"
"When the time comes, I suppose."
Chun-baek answered absently. I understood well enough that he, like the Dancheon Myeong of my previous life, was not the sort to wear his affection for parents or teachers openly.
But I also knew that, at the same time, he kept that preciousness buried deep in his chest.
I knew it because I knew that the sorrowful eyes of the future King of Vagabonds had been born from exactly that.
"Shouldn't you deliver it sooner rather than later?"
"Everything has its time. The moment will find me."
Ordinarily I would have agreed with him, but this once I could not.
Because I had regressed, I knew what the coming future held.
I knew that if this moment passed, Chun-baek would lose forever his one chance to place the Five-Leaf Immortal Orchid in his master's hands.
"Good things are not meant to be put off."
"You're not wrong, but……"
"Let us go now."
Cutting off his half-spoken objection, I pressed on like a man digging in his heels.
"The first of the first month is nearly upon us, and there could be no better occasion to pay your master our New Year's respects."
"And when you say 'come along,' you mean to your sect, I take it?"
"That's right."
I answered boldly enough, though inwardly my nerves were taut.
His sect was a hidden mystic sect, and I knew how sensitive it was to the approach of outsiders.
But my worry, it turned out, had been for nothing.
"Very well. If it's you, I suppose that's fine."
That was all Chun-baek said, with a faint, amused smile.
"Let's go, then."
"Now?"
"Now."
"We'll need to make some preparations if we're traveling that far."
"What preparations could you possibly need? We'll stop by my place, but beyond that just bring yourself. The gift is already in your pocket, isn't it?"
Declaring in advance that I would brook no rebuttal, I strode off.
Truth be told, the most essential thing in setting out on any journey is money — and my breast pocket still held the generous remainder of what I'd earned selling the Empty Blue Stone Milk to Yeo Wol, so there was no problem there either.
"Myeong."
"We're headed to your sect. I won't hear any argument."
"No, not that way. That way."
"……"
I wheeled around at once.
"Follow me, then."
As though conceding the point, Chun-baek took the lead.
I watched his retreating figure for a quiet moment.
Unlike the Dancheon Myeong who lost everything and became Myeong-gae, the people around me now were many, and precious.
By the same measure, Chun-baek too deserved to protect what was precious to him.
That, too, was a reason I had regressed.
The moment Chun-baek and I set out from the Dancheon Clan was a little past the Minor Cold, when the bitter north wind had begun to blow.
To put it precisely, it was about twenty days before the first of the first month.
Yes — it was early. Somewhat too early, in fact.
However much future knowledge my regression granted me, there was much I still did not know about the incident that would annihilate the King of Vagabonds' sect and his hometown, and so I judged it right to arrive ahead of time and prepare.
Now that I think back on it, so it was.
I must call that early departure a true stroke of genius.
— Chun-baek.
— What is it?
— Where is your sect, exactly?
— In Jilin Province.
The first reason my early departure proved wise was that Chun-baek's sect lay far farther away than I had imagined.
Jilin Province sat at the far northeastern edge of the Central Plains, a frontier so remote that, alongside Heilongjiang, it could justly be called the true hinterlands.
Walk endlessly toward the setting sun and you arrive at Kunlun's seat in Qinghai; walk endlessly toward the rising sun and you arrive, at last, in Jilin. It even bordered the Eastern Lands, regarded as a realm of mystery itself.
Setting out from Anhui, one had to pass through Henan, Hebei, and Liaoning merely to reach it — calling it a crossing of half the Central Plains would be no stretch at all.
Yet in truth this was no great problem.
Chun-baek and I both stood close to the very pinnacle of martial cultivation, so a matter of four provinces was nothing — extending our Lightfoot Art, we could traverse the distance in under seven days and nights without strain.
Which meant the real problem lay somewhere else entirely.
"This is the right way, isn't it?"
"……Why are you asking me? Aren't you the guide?"
"Haha."
Because my answer was, in fact, entirely correct, Chun-baek gave an awkward laugh.
The keen eyes of the warrior who would one day become the King of Vagabonds took in the surrounding scenery with perfect clarity.
And then Chun-baek said…
"I have no idea where this is."
Right. Chun-baek was hopeless with directions.
"How did you even get this far?"
"I just ran toward the sunrise."
"……"
The directionally doomed vagabond, Yi Chun-baek.
Following his guidance, the two of us had become lost souls adrift in Jilin Province.
I consider it my own blunder.
The reason being — I had known full well that Chun-baek was hopeless with directions, and yet entrusted the route to him anyway.
Well, Chun-baek wasn't wrong, strictly speaking.
Jilin Province is, indeed, a place you reach by simply walking east without end.
Because he had guided me there so ably, the fault, I suppose, lies with me for believing he could find his own house.
"Where in Jilin Province?"
"Near Ji'an City."
"……Follow me."
"Haha."
And so a rare spectacle unfolded: the guest guiding the host home.
The former Myeong-gae had roamed every corner of the Central Plains and steeped himself in their geography, but the terrain of Jilin Province was unknown even to me.
As I said before — I had always regarded Qinghai at the far west and Jilin and Heilongjiang at the far east as being no different from lands beyond the pale.
Even so, I took the lead for one simple reason: I judged that I would find the road better than that hopeless vagabond.
"You even know the layout of Ji'an City?"
My steps carried not a hint of hesitation, and Chun-baek asked in wonder.
"Of course I don't."
"Then how do you plan to find it?"
"There are always ways."
"You truly are a mysterious one."
"……"
It seemed that to Chun-baek, my ability to find a road was a greater marvel than the realm of Five Energies Converged at the Origin I had attained.
"Just keep following me."
"All right."
I was tracking the footprints of passersby. Follow the trail to wherever it converged, and people would appear — so I reasoned.
And if the way was unknown, couldn't one simply ask along the way?
Just then, a woman passing by caught my eye.
"Might I ask for directions?"
"Go ahead, young master."
Perhaps because the Vermilion Fruit had blessed me with such a mild, trustworthy face, the woman answered my questions without a trace of wariness.
"Which way to Ji'an City?"
"Where did you come from, young man?"
"From the Central Plains."
"Then you've already passed Ji'an City, dear. This is the Wangqing area of Jilin Province."
"……"
I held my silence, and…
"Haha. Now that you mention it, the terrain did seem awfully familiar on the way here?"
Chun-baek roared with laughter.
It was, I would later judge, the precise moment I resolved never to use him as a guide again.
"Thank you."
"No trouble at all."
We left the kind woman behind and turned our steps back.
Another half day of Lightfoot Art.
Then another half day of stopping every traveler we saw to ask the way and correct our heading.
"Ah — here it is."
At last we arrived at what we took to be Ji'an City.
"You're certain?"
"Certain."
Chun-baek might be hopeless with directions, but with that much confidence I supposed I ought to believe him. This did seem to be Ji'an City.
After all, even he could hardly fail to recognize the village where he'd grown up.
"Now follow me."
Leaving the town proper of Ji'an behind, Chun-baek's steps turned toward a mountain hamlet.
As though his long bout of lostness had been some elaborate deception, he pushed through the trackless mountain paths without the slightest hesitation.
And then, at last…
"This is the village where I grew up. Sinhaenggol."
I took in the village that had raised Chun-baek with my own eyes.
— Total annihilation. Not an exaggeration — the literal meaning.
The voice of the Bureau of Secrets seemed to echo in my mind.
It was a lonely, peaceful mountain village — far too serene for so gruesome a future.
The sages of old said that human life rests in Heaven.
That is to say, whether a man lives or dies is decided above.
The martial artists of this age take those words to mean that matters of life and death belong to a realm beyond human power — a force majeure. Live with good fortune, die with bad. That is the accepted reading.
But I read the maxim somewhat differently.
That human life rests in Heaven cannot be a mere lament denying human possibility. Had it been, it would never have earned its place among the teachings of the sages, handed down unbroken through the generations.
My thinking is this: the maxim exists to express the sanctity of life itself.
Human life is a thing even beings as exalted as Heaven concern themselves with — and so it is a teaching that no man may treat another's life as his private property.
And yet, in the jianghu and the murim alike, the recognition that killing is a crime is, in most cases, conspicuously absent.
A small clarification: even the beggars of the Beggars' Gang occasionally do something called work.
'Labor' would be a stretch, perhaps — but since wages were paid, calling it work could hardly be wrong.
That work was none other than what we called environmental sanitation.
To put it in terms anyone could understand: it meant disposing of the corpses of martial artists who had met their ends in the back alleys. The magistrate's office paid, incidentally.
"So why did this one die?"
In my days as Myeong-gae of the Second Knot, having picked up my share of scraps, I once put that question to a junior of the First Knot.
"He got into a row in a tavern."
"A row? A love triangle?"
"No. They just made eye contact, apparently."
"Hm."
"Well, he made eye contact and didn't look away. Practically begging to be killed."
Smack!
"Ow! Why'd you hit me?"
The First Knot beggar, having failed to dodge the alms bowl I swung at him, asked sullenly.
"You fool. Since when does meeting someone's eyes justify killing them?"
Unable to hide his resentment, the junior narrowed his eyes into slits and added:
"Then he bumped the guy's shoulder afterward and didn't even apologize."
"Hm."
This time even I had to concede the point.
Looking across the long and storied history of the jianghu, the so-called shoulder bump had never once lacked for justification as grounds for a duel to the death.
But I had already clobbered the junior with the alms bowl, hadn't I.
To admit it now would cost the Second Knot's Myeong-gae a measure of his dignity, and so I reached for a different justification.
"Killing is, properly speaking, a crime, you fool. Doesn't the law of the royal court say so?"
"What would I know about the court's laws?"
Truly, beggars have no front and no back, no up and no down — he showed not the slightest sign of conceding defeat.
"Good grief. Ignorant wretch."
"Hehe."
I had, after all, been a man of learning who knew even the statutes of the court by heart, and so I found the matter troubling — but I knew full well that most people did not.
Quite literally: that was simply the culture of the jianghu murim.
So it was.
The sages said human life rests in Heaven, but in the world of the murim, human life rested in strength. Those with power lived; those without it could die.
If even the orthodox Beggars' Gang thought this way, I hardly needed to investigate how the demonic paths saw things.
And so I understood.
The fact that the annihilation of Chun-baek's sect and hometown had never reached my ears was nothing out of the ordinary.
The reason being: in the jianghu murim, the wholesale slaughter of a single village rarely became an incident talked of across provinces.
To be honest with myself, having lived my whole life absorbing the culture of the murim, I was no different from the rest of them. That, too, is the truth.
But still.
Was this not the village where my friend Chun-baek's precious people lived?
Was it not those people who had been trampled beneath the demonic savagery of the Cult?
It was more than enough to halt the steps I had been hurrying along the sixth and final stage of the Yakseon Heart Decision — the stage of Pyeongcheonha, of Integrating All Under Heaven.
"So peaceful."
"A fine village, isn't it."
"You grew up here your whole life?"
"Pretty much, yes."
"I see."
I would protect this village.
It would be best to shake the sorrowful eyes of the King of Vagabonds from my memory entirely, and leave there only the Chun-baek whose laughter was simple and free.