Entangled Stars
The Tianshan Mountains. At the summit of Takmoki Peak stood a sacred ground: the Demon Sky Tower.
Once again today, Wi Su, the Demonic Divine Conduit and Chief Strategist of the Heavenly Demon Cult, had climbed to this place.
It was a height where ordinary lungs struggled just to draw breath, yet of late Wi Su had been returning to it again and again. There was a reason for that. More precisely, there was a reason he could do nothing else.
"It has changed... again."
He had come to check the flow of celestial secrets, which churned and shifted as restlessly as water at a rolling boil.
Ever since the Divinity had begun to shine, the currents of Heaven's secrets had changed their course at every turn, as though that divine existence were unmaking the old order of things and weaving a new one in its place.
Wi Su built his design for demonic dominion over the world upon those very secrets, so the matter could hardly have been more delicate.
Truthfully, from the standpoint of a man who had long served the singular star called the Heavenly Demon and prepared a grand enterprise across years, a mercurial flow of celestial secrets was nothing but ill wind.
And there was a further reason he had sought the tower today.
"Eumhyeol Sinma has left the Cult."
"Where to?"
"My apologies. I do not know."
"...I see."
Eumhyeol Sinma had crossed beyond the Heavenly Demon Cult's domain without leave.
It was not without precedent, but the timing was wretched.
His teeth ground together.
"Son of a bitch..."
Heaven-defying as his path was, Wi Su was the one who read the will of Heaven. Yet even what Wi Su himself could not fathom was, in the end, Heaven's will as well.
"To think..."
He was a man of refinement, and so he swallowed the curse, that bastard, down into his chest.
But a thought, once born, answered to no discipline.
Eumhyeol Sinma.
That naked thunderbolt of a bastard.
How had a worthless creature who could not even govern his own filthy appetites reached the Profound Realm, the most exalted of realms?
Why did the heavens hang so steadfast and bright a star as the one that symbolized vermin like Eumhyeol Sinma?
Wi Su could steal glances at celestial secrets themselves, yet he had no confidence of learning that answer even if he spent a lifetime searching for it.
In any case...
Sensing an ill omen in Eumhyeol Sinma's movements, Wi Su had come to the Demon Sky Tower to comb through the heavens. They said a bad premonition is never wrong, did they not?
From the shifting currents of celestial secrets, he seized upon one fact.
The star of Eumhyeol Sinma was entwining itself with the newly shining Divinity.
"At last..."
Whether this boded fortune or calamity, he could not say. He had performed no divination; he had merely read the flow of Heaven's secrets in secret, and nothing more.
Divination to track the man's movements was likewise out of the question, for the timing was poor. To defy the natural order again and again was to risk truly rousing Heaven's wrath, and if that came to pass, even Wi Su could not promise his own survival.
His teeth gnashed together, rough and graceless.
It was because one unwanted complication after another kept springing up around a man who wanted no great variables at all, and because the wellspring of them all was Eumhyeol Sinma, whom Wi Su despised beyond measure, that the feeling ran this hot.
Then.
"So you were here."
A languid voice rippled past Wi Su's ear.
Given where they stood, only one person could have spoken.
"You have come."
Wi Su answered with a bowed head, and there stood the Heavenly Demon, Seol Cheon-sang.
"Is it healed?"
So asked the Heavenly Demon, his gaze resting on Wi Su's left arm.
Wi Su understood at once. His left arm, which had withered bone-dry like an old tree, or like a corpse, had been restored to what it once was.
"It has been seen to."
The harm had not been physical but a frost-wound, which meant that with time and effort the arm could be coaxed back to its original state. That was not to say it had been easy.
"Good. Now, what is it?"
Counting the stars overhead, the Heavenly Demon asked. He could not read celestial secrets, yet whenever he ascended the tower, he would look to the sky out of habit. And so reporting what he read there was, in effect, Wi Su's calling.
"Eumhyeol has defied orders and departed the Cult without leave."
"Another village will vanish, then."
That was the whole of the Heavenly Demon's reaction. No displeasure at a defied command, no mourning for a village soon to be sacrificed. Detachment, perhaps. Or emptiness of thought. Or perhaps the absence of self altogether.
For all that Wi Su peered into celestial secrets, he could not reach the realm the Heavenly Demon walked, and so the truth of it stayed beyond him.
"When he returns, I will give him a word of caution."
Still, the Heavenly Demon would call Eumhyeol Sinma to account, because he knew his right hand wished it, no doubt.
To that Heavenly Demon, Wi Su offered up what he had read, like a confession.
"The fates have become entangled."
"Hm?"
Only then did the indifferent Heavenly Demon betray a flicker of interest.
"Eumhyeol's star has entwined itself with the Divinity's."
The two stars would collide before long, for they had been caught in a current neither could refuse. And afterward, whichever survived would devour the other and grow stronger. Was the way of stars not one with the Demonic Path?
"The Divinity? That Divinity?"
The Divinity. The being who of late had stirred Seol Cheon-sang's interest more than anything else in the world: Dancheon Myeong.
"Yes."
At Wi Su's answer, the Heavenly Demon let slip a faint smirk, a rare thing from him.
"Then there will be no chance to reprimand Eumhyeol."
Surprise crossed Wi Su's face at those murmured words, for he understood their meaning precisely. Seol Cheon-sang had just pronounced the death sentence of Eumhyeol Sinma.
"Did you not say he was still unripe?"
The celestial currents of this very moment said as much. Base as the man was, Eumhyeol's star burned vast and strong regardless of human wretchedness. Was that not precisely how he had come to claim a seat among the Divine Demons?
In a posture much like Wi Su's when he scryed the heavens, Seol Cheon-sang stared up at the sky.
"Unripe or no, a tiger's cub does not die to a dog's bite. A wolf, perhaps. But not a dog."
It was a line that laid bare how the Heavenly Demon regarded Golu Gwang. And no less, how he regarded Dancheon Myeong.
"If the two of them collide, Eumhyeol dies."
The words were prophecy itself. They came from a Heavenly Demon who could not read celestial secrets, yet Wi Su saw in them a foreknowledge of the future as good as certain.
"Will that sit well with you?"
With a mischievous look unlike himself, Seol Cheon-sang put the question to the Cult's Chief Strategist.
"Quite all right. This Cult has no need of refuse that does nothing but drain the essence of the living."
Having said his piece, Wi Su bowed his head.
"Forgive me. My true mind slipped out."
The Heavenly Demon paid it no mind.
"I share the sentiment."
For the Heavenly Demon's thoughts were no different. Wide as the Demonic Path's embrace was said to be, there was no place in it for the road Golu Gwang walked. At least, that was how Wi Su and Seol Cheon-sang both saw it. Until now there had simply been no reason to cast him out, and now that the man had set his own feet on the road to ruin, that too was fate.
"I shall prepare a Demon Lord to stand in Eumhyeol Sinma's place."
Divine Demons numbered only five, but Demon Lords were far more numerous. Which was precisely why Cheolsanmagun, a master who had roamed beyond the Transcendent Demon Realm, could be assigned to so ordinary a post.
"Handle it as you see fit."
With that, the Heavenly Demon was gone. He vanished as though a man who had been standing there had simply ceased to exist, yet Wi Su did not startle. He knew that to the Heavenly Demon, even this was an everyday occurrence.
"So it was a good omen."
His mood lightened, Wi Su murmured the words. If Eumhyeol died, it was fortune; if Eumhyeol lived and devoured the Divinity, that too was fortune. Every branch of the road led to good fortune, so there was no exaggeration in calling it greatly auspicious.
Wi Su's footsteps grew light as he descended the Demon Sky Tower.
Eumhyeol Sinma. I did not know the man well. Unlike Gwiryeong Sinma or Daeryeok Sinma, who had blazed across the front lines of the Great War of Righteousness and Evil, Eumhyeol Sinma had rarely shown his face at the front, and had rarely distinguished himself there either.
The Great War had been a slaughter. It was Gwiryeong Sinma who tore apart the Azure Heaven Corps, a formation of elite rising stars whose futures stretched bright and open before them. Countless dragons and phoenixes, pillars meant to shoulder the murim's tomorrow, met their ends at his hands.
Daeryeok Sinma came to mind as well, the one the Blue Dragon Corps had at last brought down at the cost of tremendous sacrifice. I remembered his strength as nothing short of monstrous, enough to crush the Paeng Clan, renowned across the realm for the greatest raw strength under heaven, as an afterthought. Daeryeok Sinma was the transcendent Divine Demon who had proven with his own body that highly refined external cultivation lost nothing to the internal qi arts.
While the Heavenly Demon kept to seclusion, the Divine Demons had ranged time and again at the very head of the war, sweeping all before them. One might have called them generals of the battlefield. Demon chieftains though they were, they never once stood behind their subordinates, and their towering spirit and formidable martial arts were not things to be disparaged.
Eumhyeol Sinma, however, had been a different creature entirely.
"Myeong-gae."
"What is it?"
"The beast that ambushed the Black Tortoise Corps. By every sign, it was Eumhyeol Sinma."
That was what a member of the Flying Pavilion brought me one day, long ago.
I remembered the affair: an ambush staged with common folk as bait, ending in the annihilation of the Black Tortoise Corps. I remembered the corps members too, in the end lying side by side with those very civilians on the cold earth.
Even in war, the murim's unwritten law held that the common people were not to be touched. How could anyone hold back their fury at a method so vile it could rouse Heaven itself?
And yet...
I had thought as much for a long time. It was no surprise, for many had already named Eumhyeol Sinma as the hand behind it all.
The Blood-Drinking Golu Clan. A brood of sinister, vicious creatures. Whenever a household was wiped out, whenever children died, their name was always found clinging to it. Men whose very name meant the drinking of blood were something that could no longer be called human.
And now the chieftain of that heaven-enraging refuse, Eumhyeol Sinma, stood before my very eyes, before Dancheon Myeong rather than Myeong-gae.
"My apologies, but that child belongs to me now. Won't you hand him back?"
Eumhyeol Sinma spoke with his crafty tongue flicking like a snake's, and a vile disgust coiled through me. The proper course, truth be told, was to waste no words at all on the dregs of mankind.
Ignoring him, I turned my gaze to the child. Whether his mind had been bound by some psychic art or something else entirely, the boy still could not move a muscle. I could hardly leave him as he was. The spectacle about to unfold would do no kindness to the mind of a young pillar still growing into himself.
Up he floated...
"...Huh?"
The Void-Seizing Grasp unfurled from my hand and lifted the child gently into the air.
"Hoh?"
Paying Eumhyeol Sinma's grunt of interest no heed, I sent the boy drifting softly toward the common folk who had been fretting at a distance. He settled among them with a light thump.
Perhaps because they had caught a sliver of the Ascension Realm in the technique I had unfurled, the Golu Clan warriors who had stood frozen like stone finally stepped forward.
"Shall I take those ones?"
"I leave them to you."
"For something this small?"
Brother Chunbaek had appeared at my side before I knew it and asked, and there was no one in this world I could trust more. The Golu Clan's elites were not to be taken lightly, but if I could not trust Chunbaek, whom could I trust? He would repay that trust. Of that I was certain.
The real problem lay elsewhere.
"Eumhyeol Sinma's mine."
The speaker was Chwipung-gae, his killing intent bleeding out where he could not hide it. I understood his heart well enough. And yet...
"I cannot allow it."
I had no intention of sending him. I could not, not for anything, lose Chwipung-gae, a man who was a father to me, to the likes of that thing. Eumhyeol Sinma was a vile piece of garbage of a man, but that he stood stronger than Chwipung-gae was a fact I could not deny.
"I don't mind dying."
So said Chwipung-gae.
"Well, I mind."
That was my honest heart.
Chwipung-gae fixed me with bloodshot eyes. Call it a silent protest. Fine. I admitted it freely. How could I truly understand what burned in his heart?
"But I will make certain the finishing blow is delivered by your hand, and no other."
Those words were simply the best I could do for him.
"...Very well."
In the end, that was the answer Chwipung-gae gave. It had been that way since my Myeong-gae days. Ill-tempered, stubborn, and eccentric to the bone as he was, he had always yielded one step rather than break my resolve. He had done so again this time. Which meant that this time, the turn to repay him was mine.
"Go and help Brother Chunbaek."
"I suppose I will."
Chwipung-gae answered, his expression eased by a sliver of relief. Elite as the Golu Clan's warriors were, they could not get past Chunbaek and Chwipung-gae, men of the Harmony Realm. I could breathe easy now.
For the first time, my gaze came to rest on the thing that had disgusted me from the very start: Eumhyeol Sinma.
"Come at me, trash."
At my words, Eumhyeol Sinma bared a grin.
"This really is fun."
"Yes. It will be."
Because I intended to make it so.
Eumhyeol Sinma would die here. Not for Chwipung-gae's sake alone. None of it had happened yet in this life, and still the wronged spirits of the Black Tortoise Corps remained vivid in my memory. In my past life, Myeong-gae had been able to do nothing but watch. In this life, Dancheon Myeong would offer incense before the memorial portraits of the Black Tortoise Corps, and that incense would be lit with Eumhyeol Sinma's blood.
That would be the real fun.