An Old Story Without an Ending
According to Chwipung-gae, the man in the old story had lost his memory for a time, beginning on the day he lost his family.
And yet — though no one could say why — the man had gone on living.
A single month of forgetting sleep and food had not been enough to kill a man who had once been a warrior. Unlike the family who had slipped away so easily, perhaps his own thread of life had simply been too tough to sever.
The man rose again. On a body wrung hollow of strength, he raised mounds for his wife and child and buried them with his own two hands. And when his broken mind came back to him, they said, it came back with a purpose.
"...He must have sworn himself to revenge."
The story of the man who had lost his wife and children was one that could never be brought to its close.
The man had been a man of the murim. He had put down roots and become a family man, but at bottom he had always been a beast — a beast strong and fierce enough to survive the treacherous jianghu on his own strength alone.
Returning to the life of a beast, the man drew his blade. He resolved upon the road of revenge, and with the graves at his back, he set out.
But the man could not swing that blade.
"Because he didn't know."
The man did not know where his sword was supposed to point. He was nothing more than an ordinary man of the murim who had done decently well for himself. He had no analyst's eye to read the traces a savage left behind, infer his martial arts, and unmask who he was. He had no tracker's art to find a footprint and follow it to its owner. He lacked even the knack of gathering and weighing the rumors that drifted on the wind. A man who had not witnessed the village's doom had no way to put a name to the beast — and even had he named it, he had no means of finding one man in all the breadth of the Central Plains.
The man had sworn his revenge, yet his sword could not reach the place it needed to point.
"And so the man became a beggar."
Not that he had been reduced to a penniless vagrant — he had become a beggar of the Beggars' Gang. A mere murim man who could never find the beast by his own power had become a beggar, they said, to borrow the reach of the Gang.
"That's where the old story ends."
With those words, Chwipung-gae brought his long tale to a close. It was a hollow tale — an old story with none of the ending an old story is owed.
"That's the end?"
"So?"
Only after that pointless exchange did I finally recall the question I had come to ask.
"Old man, why did you become a beggar?"
That had been my question.
"And so the man became a beggar."
And that had been Chwipung-gae's answer.
Only then did I understand. The old story had never ended because it was still going on, even now.
Slurp— gulp.
"Ahh—"
Chwipung-gae began tipping the jug back again. And I saw him for what he was: a man grown old on the road of revenge, heavy with sorrow.
"Today must be the day the village was wiped out."
Chwipung-gae said it in a flat, quiet voice. He said must be, but he would not be wrong. The man had never, for a single moment, forgotten that day. He had never escaped that moment — he was still living inside it.
The day the village vanished — the day the man's wife and child died. If any day could be called a day of mourning, it was this one.
The jug of wine Chwipung-gae had brought was for the dead. Properly, the conversation should have ended right there. Chwipung-gae had merely borrowed the wine's warmth to tell one old story, nothing more — because a beggar must not pick at a wound he cannot heal, must not rake open a pain he cannot solve. That was the common sense of the Gang, observed whenever beggars shared their griefs with one another.
But...
I resolved to be brave. Because I alone knew that I would regress.
"Is that beast the Eumhyeol Divine Demon?"
I was a Three-Knot Beggar now myself — which is to say, a beggar grown reasonably adept at the handling of information. It meant I had earned the right to learn, with my own ears, what the Chwipung-gae who had once vanished had been chasing all this time.
To that brazen question of mine, Chwipung-gae returned no answer. Only, a long while later—
"...Not bad."
— having drained the jug to its last drop, that was all he said as he rose to leave.
That was the day one crucial item was added to the plans I had made for my life after regression.
Revenge is a futile thing.
Most people agree with that proposition. The jianghu is a world that turns on grace and grudge — but the jianghu, too, is a world where people live out their lives. Which is to say, most murim folk also nod along to the claim that revenge is futile. If anything, they may assent to it more fervently than the criminals do — for to most criminals, revenge is no more than an abstract notion, while to murim folk it is, more often than not, an experience with flesh and blood on it.
Every revenge begins differently. Every revenge unfolds differently. But most revenge ends the same way: either you kill your enemy and achieve it at last, or you join the ranks of those who died at his hand. That is how revenge ends.
Endings alone make the whole business sound hollow, so consider instead the lives of those who saw their revenge through. To achieve revenge is to have utterly destroyed your enemy — and to still be alive when it is done. That is no common thing, yet look back across the long history of the jianghu and you will find a fair number who managed it. And so the murim was able to watch, with its own eyes and ears, what became of those people afterward — and to reach a verdict.
The verdict was this: revenge is futile.
One could list a hundred reasons, but a single question will serve in their place.
"Has anyone, having achieved his revenge, ever become happy?"
No one has ever answered yes to that question, said to have been posed by some departed soul. No one has ever produced a counterexample. The proposition that revenge is futile may as well be truth.
I wiped away the image of the Seventh-Knot Elder Chwipung-gae I had missed so dearly. And there he was before me: Chwipung-gae, the old Sixth-Knot beggar of the present, his eyes blazing like fire.
"You said you'd capture the Eumhyeol Divine Demon for me?"
"I did."
"You say that knowing full well he's my enemy?"
"That, too, I do."
Before me stood not the Chwipung-gae who had given up his revenge and risen to Seventh-Knot Elder, but the Chwipung-gae who still endured, sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall for the day of his vengeance — the Chwipung-gae who had always stood guard at the gates of the Beggars' Gang headquarters, lest word of the beast ever reach him. He burned with vengeance the way a bone-dry leaf takes to flame.
I met Chwipung-gae's gaze. He knew, and I knew: with our eyes locked like this, neither of us could deceive the other.
"I won't ask how you know what you know."
It was not a question that mattered to him. The information broker in Chwipung-gae had abandoned even his own instincts.
"If you capture the Eumhyeol Divine Demon for me, I will give you everything I have."
Before me stood a man become the very incarnation of revenge. With the eye Chwipung-gae himself had trained in me, I sought to read the man's heart. No — there was no need to read anything at all.
"I'm begging you."
Chwipung-gae, desperate beyond all measure, had bowed his head before me. Without reading a thing, I knew what lay in his heart.
It was true. Revenge probably was a futile thing. I largely agreed with the proposition myself. Countless cases proved it; there was no denying it.
And yet. Before a man who carried his wife and child buried in his own chest, who in all the world could look him in the eye and call revenge futile?
At the very least, I could not.
"I will help you with your revenge."
I could not have stopped Chwipung-gae regardless.
"Sooner or later, your wish will come true."
Helping him toward his revenge — bringing to completion the vengeance that, in my past life, had gone forever unfulfilled — was the finest repayment I could ever offer him.
I took in the sight of him, my own eyes trembling. Once his revenge was done, perhaps he would be as unhappy as any other man who had lost his wife and children. Even so, I hoped he would find happiness when it was over. I meant that from the bottom of my heart.
That he could, once again, be simply a man who had lost his wife and child.
Divine Demon.
A title for the supreme seats — five, and only five — positioned beneath the one and only Heavenly Demon of the vast Heavenly Demon Cult. To describe the rank precisely, it was a station of standing beneath one man alone and above all others — for first came the Cult's sole sovereign, the Heavenly Demon Seol Cheon-sang, and second came his own right hand, the Cult's Chief Strategist, the Demonic Divine Conduit Wi Su.
Divine Demon was a name that marked a rank, but it was also the word for the supreme masters of the five families whose history had walked alongside the Cult's own — the Five Families of the Demonic Path.
The Gwiryeong Seol Clan. The Daeryeok Jang Clan. The Poksan No Clan. The Biyeong Ma Clan. The Eumhyeol Golu Clan.
Those five were together called the Five Families of the Demonic Path, and their supreme masters had been revered as the Five Great Divine Demons: the Gwiryeong Divine Demon, the Daeryeok Divine Demon, the Poksan Divine Demon, the Biyeong Divine Demon, and the Eumhyeol Divine Demon.
The five families stood equal in principle, but the Heavenly Demon of the present age, Seol Cheon-sang, had been born of the Gwiryeong Seol Clan — and so the prestige of the Gwiryeong Seol Clan could be called the greatest in all the Demonic Cult.
That much was the sum of what Myeong-gae had known of the Divine Demons in his early days as a beggar. Myeong-gae of the Pavilion came to know a great deal more. The Great War of Righteousness and Evil had put the orthodox murim face to face with the Demonic Cult, and the dossiers on the Five Families and the Divine Demons' true identities had grown steadily thicker ever since. Among the enemies the Alliance's members crossed blades with in person there had been more than a few warriors of the Five Families, and at their head the Divine Demons always took position like generals of the battlefield.
"Myeong-gae, of all those Five Families bastards, which do you hate most?"
"What use is there in liking or hating on a battlefield?"
"All the same, there's bound to be one you hate more than the rest?"
"If anything, it's the Blood-Drinking lot I can't stomach."
"...Figures."
To the members of the Martial Alliance, the Demonic Cult's people were objects of instinctive revulsion from the very start, and with a war underway there was no help for hating them — and yet some battlefields had been uniquely hard to endure. And those battlefields, I remembered, always had the Eumhyeol Golu bastards on them.
The reason was simple.
Blood-Drinking. True to a name that meant the drinking of blood, those madmen really and truly drank the blood of those they fought.
Head of the Eumhyeol Golu Clan. The Eumhyeol Divine Demon, Golu Gwang.
Chwipung-gae's nemesis bore that name.
The far edge of Gansu Province. A column of figures moved along the ridgeline of a rugged mountain where no human presence could ever be.
Whoosh!
Unbound by the darkness settled over the world or by the brutal mountain terrain, their movements were startlingly swift and elusive — for them, crossing an entire mountain was the work of a breath.
"Family Head."
"What is it?"
A subordinate fell in beside the man leading the column, a man with a face as hard and harsh as flint.
"Beyond that range lies Shaanxi."
"So what?"
When the man called Family Head asked, the subordinate quickened his pace, shot out ahead, and planted himself in the party's path. Then he bent deep at the waist in salute.
"Forgive my disloyalty."
At so loyal a display, the man called Family Head smiled.
"Speak."
Seemingly emboldened, the subordinate blocking the way opened his mouth.
"Beyond that range lies Shaanxi — ground where the orthodox sects' power runs strong. To set foot in Shaanxi with a force this small would not be wise. I offer this counsel out of concern for your safety, Family Head, so I beg your forgiveness for my disloyalty once more."
The Family Head's smile, fixed on so faithful a subordinate, had at some point taken on a faintly bloody edge — and the faces of the subordinates trailing behind had frozen stone-stiff.
"I know your loyalty."
"I am gratef—"
The subordinate, answering his master's praise, never finished the word.
Thuk!
"Khh—..."
The Family Head's index finger had punched through the edge of his subordinate's temple.
"I know your loyalty — so just become my meal instead."
Thud.
With the Taiyang point — one of the body's fatal gates — pierced clean through, the subordinate died without even a proper death rattle.
"Hm."
The Family Head licked the blood clinging to his finger.
"This one's blood tastes as wretched as ever."
As his gaze came to rest on the corpse of the man he had just killed, his throat heaved once, like a man swallowing down spit.
"Still — can't let good blood go to waste."
So saying, the Family Head laid his hand over the dead man's face. A crimson haze gathered in his palm — ssshhh— — and, as though yanking out the very soul itself, he wrung the last of the corpse's vital energy into himself.
Crrrack—
In the same instant, the subordinate's body — which had not even begun to stiffen with death — hardened like deadwood.
It was the signature of the Blood-Drinking Demonic Art: the clan-exclusive art of the Eumhyeol Golu Clan, holders of one of the five seats of the Demonic Path. Put another way, it was a demonic art heir to the lineage of the technique the multitudes of the jianghu named the Star-Absorbing Great Method and condemned as taboo.
"Anyone else care to object?"
So asked the man called Family Head — the Eumhyeol Divine Demon, Golu Gwang — as his eyes swept over his remaining subordinates. Naturally, not one fool remained who would throw his life away like a weed in such a moment.
"Then let us be off."
As the Eumhyeol Divine Demon Golu Gwang resumed his stride, his subordinates followed without a word. Fallen leaves whirling on the night wind drifted down and covered the corpse of the man he had left behind.