The Fox Bear
Why is a battle of many against one so difficult? The question has to be judged separately, as a prolonged war and as a short one. In a long fight, the man standing alone usually suffers for reasons of stamina, inner energy, and spirit.
When eight or more opponents close in on a single man, they inevitably settle into a rotating wheel of attacks, if only because there is a limit to how many blades can strike from usable angles at once. Those on the side of the many are granted a breath of ease the moment their turn ends, which makes dividing their strength and inner energy a simple matter. And since the odds of the enemy's blade finding them drop sharply, their tension and mental fatigue lighten accordingly.
And what of the one facing the many? Only by ceaselessly checking attacks that might come flying from anywhere, and by turning aside strike after strike arriving all at once, can he keep the misfortune of cold steel burying itself in his flesh at bay. However seasoned a swordsman may be, he cannot help but wear down, in mind and body alike.
Yet even that is a rare sight. As everyone knows, unless a man possesses overwhelming ability, dragging a many-against-one fight into a prolonged battle is difficult in itself. And so most such battles end as short ones.
In the short battle, too, the reason the lone fighter struggles most against the many is the same: angles. A combined formation facing a single opponent ordinarily assumes eight directions — the four cardinal points joined by the four corners. When attacks come hurtling in at once from east, west, south, north, northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest, blocking them all with a single weapon is no easy feat.
Worst of all are the rear lanes — south, southeast, southwest — where most martial artists are hopelessly exposed. However keen a man's senses, he is not born with eyes in the back of his head.
So how is such a formation broken? The simplest answer is for the one to add to his own number.
"Warmed up yet, Brother Chun-baek?"
"Loosened up long ago."
Yi Chun-baek and I were proving the point with our own bodies. We had plunged into the heart of the Black Water Gate disciples and were fighting back to back.
One had merely become two, yet the change it wrought was deeply meaningful. By entrusting my back wholly to a comrade I trusted, I had sealed off the most vulnerable lanes of attack — south, southeast, and southwest.
And then—
"Die!"
Clang! Thud!
"Gwaaagh!"
A Black Water disciple charging in from the east turned my blade, only to take Yi Chun-baek's sword almost in the same breath and go tumbling away.
East and west lay within the reach of both our blades, his and mine, standing back to back — dead ground, as such places are called. Once the disciples grasped that fact, they began slinking toward the neighboring angles.
The mere shift from many-against-one to many-against-two had cut the directions I had to defend from eight to three. Call it the magic of the combined formation — it is why two, and not one, is where a group begins.
"Conserve your strength."
"You're stating the obvious."
At my answer, Yi Chun-baek gave a short laugh and bent his mind back to his own sword.
Sword qi and sword aura are no cure-all trump card; they burn through inner energy and stamina at a ruinous rate. And so Chun-baek and I met our enemies with nothing but our bodies and our steel.
Of course, our martial attainment so far outstripped theirs that the enemy was already giving ground one man at a time, bleeding as they withdrew.
What was more—
Clang!
Even without a thread of sword qi in it, the blade of the Black Water disciple that met my Dancheon Sword snapped all the same. Cheon-gong's posthumous masterpiece had not been named in vain.
For all our efforts, the fighting did not slacken. However minor a sect, we were facing one in its entirety, and its numbers were far from small.
"Whew—"
Our opening assault had bent their spirit, but as expected it availed little. The disciples, utterly indifferent to their comrades falling around them, came at us again with venom in their eyes.
"The forbidden arts are authorized!"
The moment their leader's command fell, the air changed violently once more. Just as it had with Ma Yu-han, a black haze began to rise from the bodies of the Black Water disciples. Each of them had manifested the demonic art he cultivated.
That even now they spoke of forbidden arts rather than demonic arts told me something of how Black Water Gate had kept its secret and held its ground for a hundred long years. Had Ma Yu-han not been such a fool — no, had I not regressed at all — the truth that they were the Demonic Cult's sleeper agents would never have come to light.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
"Die!"
Thwack!
"Watch yourself."
Yi Chun-baek's kick knocked aside the sword of a Black Water disciple angling for the gap in my guard.
"My thanks."
In truth, the Yakseon Heart Decision had already carried this body to the realm where no blade could touch me, so it was hardly a crisis — but a secret kept has a way of becoming the life-saving herb that guards your skin one day. Even so, the fact that Yi Chun-baek had just bought my life back once would not change.
"Die!"
Clang! Clang!
The disciples who had hoarded their true strength until now were laying everything on the table, and the battle turned far fiercer for it. With its demonic arts unleashed, Black Water Gate was casually surpassing what a minor sect ought to be capable of.
But then, had I not anticipated as much?
"Managing all right?"
"For now."
Yi Chun-baek was still brimming with ease. Watching him, the tension that had been stiffening my body loosened before I knew it.
"Then let's keep at it."
"You as well, Brother Chun-baek."
Chun-baek and I answered the enemy calmly, one strike at a time. Even a journey of a thousand li begins with a single step, and I knew the way to beat superior numbers: cut down the enemy before your eyes, one after another.
Clang!
I broke yet another Black Water disciple's sword.
"Now I'm finally warming up."
Even in the thick of it, I did not forget to show a little spirit.
Clang!
"If you have breath to spare for talk, spend it on one more cut."
Crunch.
"You weren't keeping quiet just now either, Brother Chun-baek."
Thwack!
"That's different."
With a comrade I could trust beside me, that road did not feel long.
It is said that when a fully ripened martial artist arrives at no-self, or at the stillness of no-thought and no-form, enlightenment descends upon him unbidden and his martial art leaps forward.
But when does this fellow called no-self come calling? And how does one go seeking him? Two roads are widely known in the Jianghu: the long discipline of circulating one's qi, and a desperate duel fought on the edge of death and life. Tales of warriors seizing enlightenment in the midst of a death match and rising a whole realm, in other words, are no idle rumor.
Clang! Clang!
In the first true life-or-death struggle of my life, I was sinking into no-self. The subtleties of the Dancheon Sword Formula, now wholly mine, blossomed from the tip of my blade.
Clang. Shff. Pak. Thwack. Whoosh.
I turned a sword, cut down its owner, kicked when my blade fell short, and even in the midst of it all twisted aside from an enemy's steel. None of it was done by conscious thought. The martial art had become me, and I had become the martial art.
The heaving in my chest went still, and the joints that had creaked under the violence of the fighting no longer ached. My body moved exactly as I willed it, and my sword went wherever my mind reached. Perhaps only now, for the first time, had I truly touched the state where the heart itself becomes action.
An unknowable stretch of time slipped past, and when I surfaced from no-self, what met my eyes was a field of Black Water disciples sprawled across the ground.
And—
"What have you done to my son?"
There stood the Black Water Gate Master, his eyes gone bloodshot.
"I killed him."
I answered him flatly. As I have said time and again, there was no reason to trouble myself explaining anything further to such people.
"Then you can go and keep him company."
As though some latent power had ignited, the Gate Master's eyes had flooded red. The demonic art he had mastered was clearly no common thing; the densest demonic qi I had yet seen coiled and rippled across his body.
"Die!"
The Gate Master came at me like a raging torrent.
But there was something he needed to understand: raw strength, or inner energy amplified past its bounds, does not by itself make a martial art stronger.
Shff.
The Dancheon Sword passed through the Gate Master's neck.
With the last frayed edge of no-self still clinging to my fingertips, my movement in that instant could be called a cut above even Dancheon Myeong at his transcendent peak.
"Go in peace."
Thud.
The moment the words left me, the Gate Master's body crumpled.
Shing.
I sheathed the Dancheon Sword and quieted my mind. A thread of enlightenment, once offered, is not to be dropped.
My gaze settled on the Gate Master's corpse. I bear you no grudge. But a sleeper of the Demonic Cult I cannot forgive — for I will never again allow this world its Great War of Righteousness and Evil. I hoped you might accept that yours was simply poor luck, and that you were called back to heaven a little early. I swallowed the thought whole.
"Well fought."
Yi Chun-baek, looking thoroughly unburdened, clapped me on the shoulder. Not one Black Water disciple remained standing on his own two feet.
Gathering intelligence and ferreting out hidden things are, when you think on it, not so very different trades. What I mean is that I have something of an expert's eye for other people's hiding places.
"Just as I thought."
I picked through the Gate Master's hall for anywhere a hidden chamber might plausibly sit, and a secret vault answered. With qi sheathing the Dancheon Sword, I cut the vault's door away, and a chest of luxurious make emerged from the dark.
The minds of men concealing treasures are all cut from the same cloth; arm yourself with even a modest understanding of people, and the task is hardly a hard one.
Click.
When I opened the chest, a fresh, faintly sweet fragrance of fleeceflower root drifted up. It was the same as the first time I had found the Empty Blue Stone Milk. I had never once laid eyes on a Ten-Thousand-Year Fleeceflower Root, yet a fierce certainty seized me that this was one, beyond any doubt.
I closed the chest again and stowed it away inside my robe.
"What is that thing?"
Yi Chun-baek, wandering in late, asked me.
"Something valuable."
The moment the words left my mouth, an uproar broke out beyond the gates of Black Water Gate. They had arrived, right on cue.
"You bastards! Not one step!"
Jao-gae of the Beggars' Gang came crashing into Black Water Gate with the martial artists of the Murim Alliance's Shanxi Branch at his heels.
"You subdued all of these men, the two of you alone?"
The giant who asked me this carried a great saber slung across his back, a blade a full six feet long. I knew exactly who he was.
"That is so."
Chief of the Murim Alliance's Shanxi Branch — the Reckless Blade, Paeng Ga-heon. Shanxi had never been ground where great sects took root, and so neighboring Hebei had sent a man of standing to head the Alliance's branch there. Even for a matter touching the Demonic Cult's sleepers, I had not imagined a figure of this weight would simply appear.
To preside over a branch of the Murim Alliance is to be a master of renown in the Jianghu. And indeed, Paeng Ga-heon was a Harmony Realm expert in whom the Hebei Paeng Clan — one of the Five Great Families — took no small pride. His name stood openly recorded in the Thousand Roster of Jianghu Figures; there was no chance I would fail to know him.
"It is an honor, Great Hero Paeng Ga-heon. Dancheon Myeong of the Dancheon Clan, newly come to the Jianghu."
I cupped my hands in a salute and greeted him as one greets an elder of the path.
"Ho? You know me, then?"
"The Reckless Blade's name is spread wide across the Central Plains. How could I not?"
The Jianghu has always been a place where men live by honor and die by it, and no warrior alive resents a junior who knows his face.
"Heh heh. The Dancheon Clan has raised its son very well indeed. I've heard more than my share of the Lone Dragon's fame myself."
A senior master rarely offers the first greeting to a junior. The customs of the Jianghu account for some of it, but it would be dishonest to deny that pride plays its part as well. I had paid him his due first, and so he was now paying me mine.
"Thank you."
By any measure, this was the beginning of a very good relationship.
And yet—
"But tell me — why did you do it?"
"Pardon?"
"Why did you strike first, instead of waiting for us?"
Friendly as his manner was, I could not afford to relax. Paeng Ga-heon wore the Paeng Clan's trademark boldness on his sleeve, but he was precisely the sort of man one must never underestimate.
I knew better than most that the man's other name was the Fox Bear.