Chapter 149
I found myself recalling a conversation I had once shared with Chun-baek over cups of Jiannanchun wine at the Dancheon Clan.
"Chun-baek."
"Calling for me?"
"Do you have no interest in fame, Chun-baek?"
"Hm? Out of nowhere?"
"Not out of nowhere. It's something I've been turning over for quite a while now."
My question was a perfectly reasonable one. The reason was simple: my brother's epithet, even now, remained Vagabond Swordsman.
In plain truth, with the martial prowess Chun-baek possessed, he could have claimed the title of Vagabond King this very day and lacked nothing for it.
"Haha. What man of the murim is there, I ask you, with no care for his name?"
Chun-baek had a point. Were murim folk not, at heart, people who lived by their reputation and died by it?
Which made his conduct all the harder to understand.
"Hm."
When I swallowed my reply, plainly unconvinced, Chun-baek let out a hearty laugh.
"Hahaha. The matter of the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly—did I never explain my circumstances to you?"
True to his word, Chun-baek had once relinquished a dragon's epithet of his own accord. He had said it was because he was an heir of the Mysterious Sect.
But I hadn't raised the matter to dredge up the past. I meant to speak of the present.
"I think you could claim a far greater name than you carry, Chun-baek."
"I thank you for saying so."
With that, Chun-baek tipped the Jiannanchun past his lips and asked,
"Myeong."
"Speak."
"In your judgment, what is the surest road to fame?"
"Hm."
The answer did not come easily. Offhand, I would have said attaining mighty martial achievement—but examined closely, the roads to a name were beyond counting.
"I say it is events."
"Events?"
"Great undertakings. The Infinite Sparring Tour, say."
"I can't deny that."
Chun-baek was truly right. For proclaiming one's martial name to the world, the Infinite Sparring Tour stood as the foremost example.
The Infinite Sparring Tour. True to its name, it meant seeking out the masters of the Jianghu and challenging them to duels without rest.
Had not the Sovereign of Destruction, Yeom Gi-ha, once triumphed in an Infinite Sparring Tour against the Nine Sects, spread his name across the realm, and in the end risen to become Alliance Leader?
It was, one might say, the very distillation of the Jianghu's romance.
But there was a fact to be known. The very fact that Yeom Gi-ha, having succeeded at the tour, became Alliance Leader.
Merely to succeed was to reap every honor imaginable—which is to say, success was a feat bordering on the impossible.
By my reckoning, of every ten thousand warriors who attempted the tour, five thousand died far from home, and the remaining four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine were crippled for life.
They called it a sparring tour, but in truth it differed little from an endless string of duels to the death.
I knew well enough that the romance of the Jianghu grows by feeding on blood.
"Which is why the time is not yet ripe."
"Hm?"
At the time, I had not fully understood him. I simply took it that Chun-baek was a man of greater ambition than I had credited, and let the matter pass.
But now I understood completely.
In today's murim, two warriors had pierced those abysmal odds and completed the Infinite Sparring Tour. One was the aforementioned Sovereign of Destruction, Yeom Gi-ha; the other was the enigmatic master known as the Wind Cloud Sword Ghost.
That's right. Chun-baek's master.
Chun-baek's lofty vantage, then, was one he had inherited from his master—so it was right to conclude.
If pressed, the Mysterious Sects took many forms, but to define them narrowly, they were those who carried on a martial lineage through single-disciple transmission.
The Mysterious Sect walked a path quite unlike the great orthodox sects. Under the iron principle of teach not the unworthy, they insisted on passing their lineage down one disciple at a time.
A principle of single-disciple transmission meant they could never amass a following vast as the Nine Sects', yet if any place preserved the Grand Master's martial arts and spirit in their entirety, it was the Mysterious Sect—so it must be judged.
They had forsaken even power and influence to carry the Grand Master's arts and spirit onward unbroken. Their strength needed no explanation.
"I'm late with the introductions. I am Lee Ja-seong."
Chun-baek's master gave his name.
Even the Beggars' Gang had never learned the Wind Cloud Sword Ghost's true name—perhaps, just now, I had drawn one step closer to the murim's mysteries than anyone else alive.
Chun-baek's master was the living legend of the Jianghu, the Wind Cloud Sword Ghost himself. A truly astonishing thing—and yet, at the same time, not so astonishing after all.
It was not that I had known his identity all along. As Myeong-gae, a mere three-knot beggar, I had possessed no means of obtaining high-clearance intelligence on the Mysterious Sect—and in any case, I had never gathered much on the Vagabond King, Yi Chun-baek, to begin with.
If I scarcely knew the Vagabond King himself, how was I to know his master, veiled in mystery?
Two reasons, then, for my composure. First: a Mysterious Sect capable of raising a warrior as singular as the Vagabond King ought, by rights, to boast at least a Wind Cloud Sword Ghost. Second: I had already met more than a few absolute masters who would be spoken of as legends in their own right.
"Allow me to greet you properly. I am Dancheon Myeong, Chun-baek's friend."
Though hardly versed in etiquette, I did know that when an elder introduced himself, I was bound to answer in kind.
"And I know you well enough, I'd say. A friend of the Dancheon Divine Dragon, is it? Our Chun-baek has better connections than I gave him credit for."
This was a secluded mountain village in Jilin Province, at the very outskirts of the Central Plains—on the fringe of Ji'an City, no less.
Yet the Wind Cloud Sword Ghost was plainly no stranger to the affairs of the Central Plains.
In any case... the bearing of the absolute master who had brought the Central Plains murim to heel before Gi-ha did seemed to have slipped clean past the flow of time.
His presence would not be found wanting beside any master I had ever laid eyes on.
He had not withered with the vain passing of the years. If anything, he might have grown stronger.
Once more I understood how vast the Jianghu truly was.
"Hm."
The mysterious master gauged my bearing, then opened his mouth.
"You're the very spit of that rascal Gi-ha's temperament."
That rascal Gi-ha was a strange way to hear the man named, but I could hardly fail to recognize the Alliance Leader, the Sovereign of Destruction, Yeom Gi-ha.
"You know the Sovereign of Destruction?"
At my question, Lee Ja-seong broke into a grin. Because it so resembled Chun-baek's, the smile felt oddly dear to me.
"I took him in hand a few times, back when he was still a naked little whelp."
"Taking him in hand" could not have meant instructing him in the martial arts. As I said, the Mysterious Sect's arts passed down under the unbroken tradition of single-disciple transmission—he would never have taught anyone but Chun-baek.
The correct reading of Lee Ja-seong's words, therefore, was that he had thrashed him soundly, time and again.
"Hm."
I could not picture the Sovereign of Destruction taking a beating to save my life, yet I could hardly believe it a lie.
Not because Lee Ja-seong was the living legend of the Jianghu, nor because he was Chun-baek's master. The right thing to say was that my discerning eye caught not one sign of falsehood in him.
To put it more precisely: he seemed less proud of having once thrashed the finest under heaven than sheepish about it.
"Even a tiger by birth, as a cub, may take a mauling from a wolf."
"Ah..."
I could see how highly Lee Ja-seong rated Gi-ha. And in the same breath—in calling himself, a man who had attained the supreme martial art, no more than a wolf—I could see his magnanimity as well.
"Did you learn your arts from that rascal Gi-ha?"
My connection to the Sovereign of Destruction was not widely known even within the Central Plains murim. I knew a few gossip-mongers went about spreading word that I was the Sovereign's heir, but it was dismissed as idle rumor, never accepted as settled truth.
Neither I nor the Sovereign had ever stepped forward to confirm it.
In other words, his reading of the Sovereign's traces in me owed nothing to intelligence—it sprang from Lee Ja-seong's own discerning eye.
"We crossed paths, by chance."
In truth, Chun-baek knew of my tie to the Sovereign as well; it was hardly a matter of secrecy, so I answered honestly.
"So that's the problem."
"Pardon?"
"Learning your arts from that rascal Gi-ha. That's the problem, I say."
"Hm."
Honestly speaking, I could not accept his words at face value. Not out of pride at having learned from the Sovereign, but because I knew his teaching had been vital nourishment to my growth.
"What is the problem, exactly?"
For now, hearing him out was the right call. Even by my own senses, Lee Ja-seong stood on a plane far above the man I was now.
"Hm. Hard to put into words."
With that, Lee Ja-seong flung his frame out to the open yard before the thatched hut. Its subtlety was so supreme that he crossed five zhang—nigh on fifty feet—and stood at the yard's center more easily than drawing breath.
"Seems it will be faster to teach you with the body. Care to have a go at me?"
"Gladly."
A warrior, as ever, speaks with his blade. Clash with him directly, and perhaps something would dawn on me.
And well—if I could win, that wouldn't be a bad outcome either, I thought.
The world calls the Murim Alliance the seat of martial arts. They say all the martial arts under heaven came out of Shaolin, yet the place where the greatest number of orthodox lineages converge is the Alliance.
Every power of the righteous murim, led by the Nine Sects and One Union and the Five Great Clans, kept a foot in the Alliance. Progress, after all, lives on comparison and competition; that an alliance gathering warriors of every origin became the seat of martial arts was all but inevitable.
But when someone once asked the Sovereign of Destruction, Yeom Gi-ha, whether the Alliance was truly the seat of martial arts, Gi-ha answered thus:
From his younger days, of course.
The reason was that what Gi-ha beheld in the Alliance was not the seat of martial arts but the seat of paperwork. The same Sovereign of Destruction who would laugh heartily and hurl himself at ten thousand enemy martial artists became, before ten thousand approval documents, a mere common man gone pale as ash.
"Gija."
"What is it."
To the summons of the Murim Alliance Leader, the Sovereign of Destruction Yeom Gi-ha, Chief Strategist Singija answered gruffly.
In an Alliance of strict hierarchy, it was conduct a strategist ought never show his leader—disloyalty would not be too strong a word for it.
"You dislike it when I call for you?"
"Every time you do, you go and cause trouble. So yes."
True enough. History recorded no occasion on which Alliance Leader Yeom Gi-ha had cooed Gija at his Chief Strategist and anything good had come of it.
Singija's gruffness had been forged into him by hard experience; call it cause and effect, all things returning at last to their proper place.
Therefore the conduct of Chief Strategist Singija of the Murim Alliance shall be judged: not guilty.
Gi-ha, for his part, possessed at least a shred of shame, and knew his own guilt. Thus he, too, could not hold his strategist to account.
"Ahem."
Knowing full well that a deep debate on the hierarchy between leader and strategist would profit no one, the Sovereign of Destruction swerved at once.
"More to the point—isn't it downright outrageous?"
"What would that be?"
"That Dancheon Myeong. Why in the world does the fellow never once set foot in the Alliance?"
At the leader's grumbling, Singija's head dipped in a small nod. Anyone acquainted with the pair's usual manner of exchange would have taken it for the sun rising in the west, so rare a thing it was.
"I generally find that you whine unnecessarily, Leader, but this time your complaint is just."
"When have I ever whined?!"
"No?"
"Ahem."
Confirming the killing intent settled in Singija's eyes as he shot the question back, Gi-ha resolved to let this topic pass as well.
Had anyone witnessed such conduct from Gi-ha, they would have judged it, truly, the Number One Under Heaven's finest survival technique.
"That Dancheon Clan's Myeong—he'd serve amply as a textbook specimen of ingratitude, that one."
"Quite so."
Singija agreeing with him wholeheartedly was such a rare occurrence that Gi-ha grew animated. Word had lately reached him that Dancheon Myeong had grown close with that old man, the Sword Emperor Mugeuk, and Gi-ha carried a touch of jealous impatience—perhaps that was what made the present moment all the sweeter.
"That settles it, then. I'll go knock the boy down a peg myself."
So he said, though it was obvious he would return from meeting Myeong having handed over everything he carried. He did not know what the old Sword Emperor had given Myeong, but Gi-ha was confident he could give more.
But that, too, had to be judged a mere pipe dream.
"Shut it and finish your paperwork."
"Hm."
For he had failed to win his strategist's leave. Departing on leave while ten thousand approval documents sat pending was, it seemed, a step too far after all.