Stone-Bearing Penance

"Il Jang-ro. I find myself in need of a few explanations regarding this situation."

Dancheon Gang's frigid gaze settled upon Il Jang-ro.

"Do you think that possible?"

The words were as calm as everyday small talk, yet his voice carried a ponderous weight that pressed down on everyone assembled.

I would judge it the bearing of a man who lacked nothing as patriarch of the famed martial clan of Dancheon.

Black vapor still coiled off Il Jang-ro's body, the unmistakable manifestation of a demonic art — my father was not asking because he had failed to grasp the situation. He was showing us, here and now, the weight that a patriarch carried.

Il Jang-ro said nothing. His mouth might as well have been fitted with a clasp; it showed no sign of opening.

"Hm. For you, who have devoted long years of loyalty to this clan, I had meant to grant even the time to offer an excuse. But if you will not speak, then there is nothing to be done."

Dancheon Gang, his hands clasped behind his back until that very moment, drew out his right hand and closed it around the hilt of his sword.

It was a stance too ambiguous to call even an opening form — and yet a formless pressure of qi claimed the space, bearing down on every soul present.

"Kgh."

As though he felt something beyond even what I could feel, despair crept over Il Jang-ro's face.

I myself had judged, and not long ago at that, that Il Jang-ro stood at the proficient stage of the Harmony Realm — a realm one step beyond my own.

And I knew something more as well: that my father, Dancheon Gang, was a transcendent master who had passed beyond proficiency into the full mastery of that same realm.

I did not know how, ten years from now, Il Cheon-sal had managed to destroy an absolute master like Dancheon Gang. But with everything now laid bare beyond all dispute, I would say he has not the ghost of a chance.

"Damn it."

Il Jang-ro, too, knew this full well, it seemed. He abandoned any thought of resistance and began gathering his inner force into the Yongquan points at the soles of his feet, meaning to tear himself free of this place.

But even that was not to be granted him.

In the instant before that transcendent, fleeting footwork could so much as begin—

Shrrk. A light, clean sound of cutting, and a red line sprang into being across Il Jang-ro's neck. No blood had spilled yet, and still everyone knew that head and body were about to part. Il Jang-ro himself most of all.

Sensing his own end, he put into words at last the identity he had hidden his entire life.

"The Heavenly Demon... returns..."

With a soft thud, his head came free — and unable even to finish his last words, the demon-path master who would one day plunge Shandong into chaos simply ceased to be, his life guttering out, hollow and unremarked.

The severed head rolled across the floor, and rolled, until it came to rest at the feet of a man.

"And where might you be running off to?"

It was Bang Yeo-baek — the shadow of Dancheon Gang. Caught through his open guard by Bang Yeo-baek's blinding swiftness, Il Jang-ro had failed even to react.

"Hm. A shame, that." Dancheon Gang's flat appraisal followed.

Only then, with the last of the tension draining out of me, did I let out a long breath — and with a dull thump, my elder brother Dancheon Hak slumped to the floor, every ounce of his strength spent.

"You have endured much."

Looking back, the gaze Dancheon Gang turned on the two of us seemed to hold the warmth of a kind father. Uncle Bang Yeo-baek, without a word, gave my shoulder a pat.

Before the Patriarch's Hall.

"Please forgive me."

The woman Baek Yeo-hae was on her knees. All her usual refined grace was gone; even her hair hung undone about her face like a criminal's.

The retainers of the Dancheon Clan fidgeted at the sight of her, yet not one of them dared come forward.

"Patriarch, please — I beg you to hear me out."

So saying, she pressed herself flat against the ground once more.

Hers was a plea that had lasted a good half day. Begging forgiveness without pause in so frail a woman's body, she had worn her strength down until her voice had begun to crack.

"Please forgive me."

Even so, Baek Yeo-hae's stone-bearing penance showed no sign of ending.

And even so, from within the Patriarch's Hall, no word of any kind was passed down to her.

It was a state of affairs akin to silent violence, and it showed no sign of ending as time wore on.

The news that Il Jang-ro — the elder who had presided over the Council of Elders — was in truth a spy of the Demonic Cult was the kind bound to raise an uproar. However tightly lips were sealed, such a thing could never remain secret within the clan itself. That every member of the household would come to know of it was, quite simply, a matter of time.

More than that, they all knew one thing further: that Baek Yeo-hae, mistress of the Dancheon Clan, now pleading ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠before the Patriarch's Hall, and Il Jang-ro, the Demonic Cult's spy, had been closer to one another than to anyone else.

Baek Yeo-hae worked to place her eldest son Dancheon Hak in the patriarch's seat; Il Jang-ro kept the Escort Captain Bang Yeo-baek in check. That their interests aligned so neatly — that this partnership of shared weal and woe had endured for nearly ten years — was an open secret known to virtually everyone in the household.

The one mercy was this: Baek Yeo-hae was a daughter of the venerable ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Baek clan, and Il Jang-ro had begun as a retained guest of the Dancheon Clan before rising into the Council of Elders. Their bond had been forged within the Dancheon Clan itself, and so almost no one suspected that Baek Yeo-hae's roots, too, might reach back to the Demonic Cult.

Even so, Baek Yeo-hae knelt in penance.

Then what, in the end, was the crime of the woman Baek Yeo-hae?

Ignorance may pass for innocence in most cases, but it does not hold in all of them. For those who possess much, ignorance and incompetence can, at times, become grave sins in their own right.

She was the mistress of the clan and the guardian of its heir. Her authority within the household had been truly immense — one could say there was scarcely a retainer who did not watch for her mood. The ignorance of a woman who had enjoyed such unbounded power could not simply be waved away as innocence; the matter was far too grave for that.

What was more...

Some muttered that Baek Yeo-hae was a victim herself, poor soul. Others went on muttering that surely she must have known something. For information, so long as the truth remains undetermined, has a way of swelling of its own accord. Even those who reasoned that she could not possibly be a spy kept arising who could not quite shake their doubt.

Faced with questions that could not be so easily laid to rest, this pleading of hers was, in the end, inevitable. It meant this was the process by which she would absolve her sin and earn back the household's trust, piece by piece.

Even so, I could not deny that the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠scene before me was a cruel one.

"Please forgive me."

Through parched, cracked lips, her body trembling with spent strength, Baek Yeo-hae bowed her head to the floor yet again.

But there was one who could not bring himself to turn away from the sight.

Thump. Baek Yeo-hae felt someone kneel at her side. When she lifted her eyes, they settled on a person she would have given her own life for without a moment's regret.

"What are you doing here?!"

Baek Yeo-hae's voice, thin as autumn frost as she had pleaded, rang through the Patriarch's Hall. However clearly her strength had failed her, power came flooding back into that voice — and from that alone, one need not strain to guess what Dancheon Hak meant to her.

"Mother."

Dancheon Hak called quietly to his mother.

"This is my doing."

So saying, Dancheon Hak lowered his gaze. Then he cried out:

"I beg your forgiveness!"

The act Dancheon Hak chose was the very same as hers. Stone-bearing penance. Dancheon Hak was pleading his own guilt.

"What is the meaning of this! You have nothing to do with any of it. Go! I said go!"

Thud. Thud. Baek Yeo-hae's frail fists beat against Dancheon Hak's shoulders. It was the first time in her life she had ever raised a hand to her son. The blows were weak to the point of pitiful, and yet Dancheon Hak's face twisted terribly.

"I beg your forgiveness!"

He could have dodged her fists with ease — the woman had never learned so much as a fragment of martial arts — but he only took them without a word, bowing to the floor over and over as he begged forgiveness.

At last giving up on the blows, Baek Yeo-hae's hands seized her son by the collar.

"Hak. It is not too late. Go back at once. This must not be allowed to become a stain on you — your mother will make certain of it."

The contest for succession stood right before them. Her fear was that this very act might become the flaw that cost Dancheon Hak the patriarch's seat. Why else, from the very beginning, had Baek Yeo-hae begged forgiveness so desperately? Was it not so that she would never stand in her son's way?

"Please, just get out of here. All right?"

And before those words had even finished leaving her mouth—

the gaze of Dancheon Hak, deepened since his journey through the Jianghu, came to rest upon his mother.

"Mother."

"Go!"

Baek Yeo-hae shrieked at him to get out. But her fury could not move Dancheon Hak's heart.

"I am no longer a child to be kept sheltered in your embrace. I am the one who will carry the Dancheon Clan. My burdens must be mine alone to bear."

It was a quiet voice, but one that resonated. For the first time, the child had become a man — and he was standing against his own mother.

Tsk. Hiding away unseen, I had taken the whole of it into my own eyes. Those proceedings — which I had thought might even turn out amusing — had instead, I would say, placed a stone upon my heart.

I do not like the woman Baek Yeo-hae.

She had always regarded me with a gaze that found me wanting. One might say it was because not once had she ever spared me a mother's kind and warming look.

I understand the reasons she could not have helped being cold to me. Even so, what can be done about the sting of it? And who can stop that sting from hardening into resentment? That is what I mean.

At a tender age — is it not, in a sense, inevitable that a child denied the thing he yearned for comes to hate the thing itself?

But now, having regressed, I know another truth as well. In truth, it was information I had long since known — and long since denied, in the deepest corner of my heart.

It is this: the woman Baek Yeo-hae never wrought any great harm upon me. Not that she wrought none — only that it was never great.

Only after I had made a name among the beggars did I come to know it — how those commonly called illegitimate children actually live, and what treatment they receive.

Take Baek Jang-sam, Namgung Tan's illegitimate son — was he not a boy all but erased from his own clan? Was he not growing up as a servant of the Namgung household, his very existence denied?

And I — I who spent ten years in the beggar halls — know that even the Namgung case counted among the more decent ones. Knowing now what scorn and persecution the illegitimate sons of other great clans endure, I know, too, that I can hardly call my own life desperately wretched.

The woman Baek Yeo-hae. That she disliked me is beyond doubt. One might call it wariness. She was wary of my receiving backing; wary of my growing; wary ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of my ever standing tall within the clan on my own merits. To her, I was never the second son. I was the eldest son's rival.

But asked whether she had ever brought harm upon me... I cannot rightly say. Even the matter of my engagement to Yang Su-rin — the most aggressive maneuver of her entire career — I know her scheme there was, at its heart, utterly passive. In my previous life, were the terms of the contract between Baek Yeo-hae and Yang Su-rin not simply that I be given no support, rather than that I be harmed? The most active operation she ever personally ran against me amounted, in the end, to the ploy of marrying me off to another great clan once I had won myself a Dragon's epithet.

I cannot rightly say.

So — do I think well of the woman Baek Yeo-hae? Do I like her?

My head shook of its own accord.

No — no. I dislike her. I cannot like a woman who guarded against me and saw me as nothing more than an obstacle. And honestly, I know that even now, I could never bring myself to call her Mother and mean it.

And yet...

I do not know why, of all things, our final meeting in my past life should come to mind now.

Hah... Living in the beggar halls, and living through the Great Righteous-Demonic War, I pride myself on having seen the ugliness of people more than anyone alive. And at the same time, I cannot deny that I have also seen, more than anyone, what people are capable of becoming.

As Yi Chun-baek and I became friends. As that wretch Dancheon Hak grew into so upright a man.

Perhaps Baek Yeo-hae, too, in this life...

Before the thought had even finished taking shape, my feet had carried me — step by step — to stand at Dancheon Hak's side. I made a point of ignoring the surprise in Dancheon Hak's eyes and the look on Baek Yeo-hae's face that seemed to ask, Why are you here?

With a thump, I knelt — my posture now the very same as Baek Yeo-hae's and Dancheon Hak's.

"I beg your forgiveness!"

My voice rang out through the Patriarch's Hall.

Perhaps, in this life, I could be the first to reach out my hand.

Such, it seemed, was the vague hope I had found myself holding.