A Grain of Truth
The third dan-gong is called Invulnerability. It renders harmless every manner of thing that would do the body ill, and its uses might well be called inexhaustible. One thing must be understood, however: Invulnerability does not mean senselessness. To attain it is not to become a half-wit so numb that poison could invade his flesh without his ever knowing. I know full well when poison has entered my body—and by will alone I may nullify its effects, or drive it out entirely. That is Invulnerability.
Having entered the fourth dan-gong not long ago and set foot in the Harmony Realm, I could survey my own body as easily as turning over a palm, seated in lotus position or no. I felt the qi that had been slipped into my tea wheel through me as though running the Grand Circulation, then settle into hidden nooks of my blood vessels—stealthed so thoroughly that had I not attained Invulnerability, had I not reached the Harmony Realm, I would never have sensed it at all.
Grrg. Grrg. A sound that should not have been audible rang in my ears. The thing had already begun its work.
Bihyeoldok, is it. I lay claim to no expertise in poisons, but the mechanism of its action told me enough to hazard a name.
The Bihyeoldok—the Boiling Blood Poison—belonged to the family of qi-scattering venoms, no threat to life itself. But an exceedingly rare breed it was: circulate your inner energy too swiftly or too forcefully, and it sent your blood vessels seething until you could not bring forth so much as your proper strength. It would never trouble an ordinary day's living. Yet at the decisive moment of a contest for succession, it was quite enough to decide victory and defeat.
I set the Yakseon Heart Decision in motion. At the same instant, black mist bloomed above the Baihui point at my crown—just as when I had expelled the fireblood serpent's venom, I drew the Bihyeoldok lodged within me out by the roots. A qi-scattering venom, however rare, was never going to overcome Invulnerability.
For the record: that visual display had been revealed deliberately, to put pressure on the Third Elder.
"Hoo—"
As the deep breath left me, the poison's aftertaste ghosted across my tongue, and I grimaced. A viler thing than I had expected.
"Third Elder. You have just used poison on me."
"What?"
I laid out the fact in a level voice, and the Third Elder's face went rigid.
"Poison... turned against direct bloodline, from within the Dancheon Clan... That is a very grave matter, indeed..."
"So I shall have to punish you for it."
It would be no great harm if my hand proved somewhat excessive in the doing.
"Any objection?"
Helpless panic flitted across the Third Elder's face—and vanished in an instant.
"You wretch!"
So he roared. "What? Punish? You, punish me? Ha! The sheer gall of it."
The old sages said the farter rages first; I dared say this tableau proved the maxim about as well as any could.
"There's... there's nothing this brat will not say to a senior elder of the house!"
Some sliver of conscience yet remained in him, it seemed, for never once did he call himself my teacher. For that much, I commended him.
"And where, pray, is your proof that I used any poison?"
Perhaps his tantrum had bought him time to gather his wits. For the first time, the Third Elder managed something halfway logical—though how transparent a move it made.
Even the royal code demands no evidence from a culprit caught in the act; in the jianghu, where blades and blood run amok, how much less still.
"Third Elder. Do I look a fool to you?"
Perhaps I had been, once.
In the days I trained under him, I had been a frail and overcareful child, forever wary of drawing even a flicker of his displeasure.
I narrowed my eyes and took his measure. Gaunt, with a savage set to the eyes—a hard, mulish face by any honest reckoning, and his rage threw that shabby countenance into sharper relief still. Physiognomy had long since been codified into a proper discipline; perhaps this, too, was a case study in its favor. Whether the Dancheon Myeong of childhood had feared this man enough to tread softly, I could not say. The man I was now—no.
"Enough of your yapping. Come at me—or be taken quietly. As of this moment, I regard you as a suspect who sought to harm this clan's direct bloodline."
"What?"
I beckoned with my fingers—an invitation.
"Come, old man."
"Graah!"
Perhaps "old man" claimed the last of his patience. The Third Elder launched himself at me, face twisted savage.
"As a senior elder of this house, I shall teach you a lesson!"
Evidently he had not gamed his way into that elder's seat, for a fairly convincing technique of driving qi to the very tips of his limbs unfolded with his assault. Call it his utmost effort at lightness skill—yet set beside the swift, flowing Cloud-Treading Steps of my Uncle Yebaek, it was a crude, slipshod, and sluggish footwork. Which is to say, its intent and its every direction of travel lay read plain before my eye.
The Dancheon Clan counts three Harmony Realm masters. Ah—a correction: four, myself included.
Officially, the Harmony Realm masters on record are Clan Head Dancheon Gang, Escort Captain Bang Yeo-baek, and First Elder Cheon Il-san. Which means the Third Elder, whose name never graced that list, was at best a warrior of the initial Transcendent realm. I do not dismiss that realm lightly—but measured against the Harmony Realm, it cannot help but be found wanting. And that, without even bringing sword-gang into the equation.
"You wretch!"
Crack.
"Kgh."
There had been no need, either, to reach for any exalted subtlety. My swift qinna closed around the Third Elder's windpipe, and with his whole body seized, he could not so much as squirm. So utter was his helplessness that the ease of it startled me in turn.
"Old man, you've let your training slip."
A man who had withdrawn from the front lines and let both his martial practice and real combat fall by the wayside—no wonder he fell this easily. His contempt for me as a green lad barely twenty had no doubt played its part as well.
"Gghk."
The Third Elder tried to shout something, but the grip on his throat strangled the words before they could become speech.
Now, then. What to do with him.
A touch more force in my fingers and he would breathe his last—a hollow ending for an old wolf who had clawed his way through the years into the Dancheon Clan's council of elders. But to snuff him out at a stroke would be to throw away a card from my own hand, so I stayed my grip.
Then—
"Young master. That will be quite enough."
The speaker was a presence that had claimed the space behind me without a whisper of sound.
I did not startle. I had known he was there for some time.
I turned my gaze, face composed.
"Oh! If it isn't the First Elder. A pleasure."
The true mastermind had finally stepped into the light. Now that was the catch of a lifetime.
"Young master, what is the meaning of this conduct?"
The First Elder asked it of me as I still gripped the Third Elder's throat.
"Ah. I was disciplining a criminal of the clan."
"Tsk."
The First Elder's face soured.
"A great house has its law, its discipline, its procedure. The truth will be established beyond all dispute—so release him. For now."
As if.
Ignoring him, I drove a coarse surge of inner energy through the throat in my grip and into the Third Elder.
"Khekh—!"
The Third Elder shuddered violently, and fainted.
Thud.
Only then did I toss the man over to the First Elder. Even unconscious, he shivered and shook—a sorry sight to behold.
"There. Released."
The act served three purposes. First, to enrage the First Elder over the persecution of his fellow—his right hand, as it were—and cloud his judgment. Second, to show him, however obliquely, the sheer presence of a man who could pin a Transcendent-realm warrior with inner force alone. Third, to foreclose in advance any chance that, should things go awry, the Third Elder might rally to the First Elder's side for a joint assault on me.
"Ho? Young master, what realm have you reached?"
By that question, the second purpose had plainly hooked his interest most of all.
"Merely the Peak realm."
I answered with a shrug of the shoulders. I had no reason to hand him the truth.
"So. What do you intend to do now?"
Direct bloodline of the clan though I was, I had not even a minor house of my own to head—rude conduct indeed, for one addressing the head of the council of elders. But I knew there would be no trouble. Because I was certain, beyond all doubt, that this man was an agent of the demonic cult.
Now that I had touched the Harmony Realm, the hour had come at last to cut that cancer out of the clan.
As I have said time and again, smoking out a demonic cult agent is no simple task. When the man in question is a master of the Extreme Demon realm who has buried his identity for decades, it borders on the impossible. But borders on is not is—and so I had prepared a single way through.
The First Elder deliberated a moment, stroking his white beard.
"Hmm. I cannot leave you be, young master—not after harming the Third Elder. You must be subdued, if nothing else."
He spoke with a placid face, yet beneath it I felt a razor-edged killing intent seeping through—unmistakable to one whose own senses had bloomed as mine had.
"Your killing intent is no ordinary thing, Elder."
"Ha. What talk is this? However you misbehave, surely you do not imagine I would harbor murderous intent toward this clan's own blood?"
"Truly, the fabled hidden bloodlust of Ilcheonsal does not disappoint."
"Heh. Absurd talk."
The First Elder laughed my words aside—and then his expression turned strange.
"...What did you just say?"
The face that had not so much as twitched when the Third Elder fainted now sat frozen in something fearsome.
"Ilcheonsal. Second-Rank Sleeper Agent of the Heavenly Demon Cult. Well then—how goes the mission?"
"...!"
Now, then. Time to watch how he would answer. This was the way through I had prepared.
Empty bravado.
The phrase conjures little more than the big mouths of gambling-den sharks, or third-rate ruffians picking quarrels in the market. But I knew better. The true virtuosos of empty bravado are the information brokers. A bluff—a lie with a little soul breathed into it—gains its full potency only when a grain of truth is folded in, which makes we brokers the reigning grandmasters of the art.
Exactly so. At this very moment I was putting the old craft of Myeong-gae the informant to work, spreading a bluff before the First Elder—which is to say, in truth I possessed no real intelligence on the man at all.
All I genuinely knew was a single firm conviction: that the Extreme Demon master of Shandong who would one day be named Ilcheonsal and this Cheon Il-san were one and the same. Proof, naturally, there was none. But set that grain of truth in an informant's hand, and the story changes. Woven together with what I already knew, and reasoned through, that lone fragment completed the frame of the bluff.
A demonic cult agent receives his name before ever he is dispatched into the Central Plains. I knew that because the name is bestowed by the Heavenly Demon—the very object of their faith—it is never relinquished. Which meant that if Cheon Il-san truly was the Ilcheonsal yet to come, then he was Ilcheonsal already, this very day. I knew, too, that agents burrowed into great martial houses typically held the Second Rank. For reference: outfits like the Black Water Gate, steeped among the common folk, were Fourth-Rank agents, while those hidden in the plum posts of the Murim Alliance were, as a rule, First-Rank.
In short, from the single suspicion that Cheon Il-san is the future Ilcheonsal, I had assembled the whole sentence: Ilcheonsal, Second-Rank Sleeper Agent of the Heavenly Demon Cult. If that was not empty bravado, what was?
And yet one thing more had to be understood: an informant's bravado is not a gambler's bluster. A conclusion built from a fragment of truth, stretched by imagination and inference, sometimes draws infinitely close to the truth itself.
"...You. What is it that you know?"
Cheon Il-san asked.
"Oh, nothing much. Only that the First Elder of the Dancheon Clan turns out to be a tendril of the demonic cult, is all."
Then, for a moment, silence.
Krrk.
"How did you find out?"
I had no need of his words to know it. The killing intent glistening in Cheon Il-san's eyes proved as much.
"That's a secret."
The plan had landed. I favored him with a grin, brimming with satisfaction.