Their Side of the Story
"Huh...? Isn't that the Mad Blood Ghost over there?"
While the crowd waited for the matches to come — Jinmu's, Haemu's, and the duel of the Mu-generation siblings — the man of the hour appeared in the distance. A martial uniform and hair black as ink; perhaps because of that, his crimson eyes showed all the more vividly. A young man whose face had not yet fully shed its boyishness.
People began to murmur as they watched Dang Muyeong walk toward the arena alongside the Sword Saint...
"They said he withdrew from his injuries, but he looks perfectly fine to me?"
"Right... could those rumors actually be true...?"
"He might have internal injuries we can't see... best not to jump to any conclusions..."
"What nonsense are you spouting? The heirs of the great clans are protesting out in the open... anyone who's laid eyes on that must be thinking the very same thing, no?"
"Shh! Keep that up and the Shaolin monks will hear you..."
"Let them hear, if hear they must! Anyone with working eyes can see they forced him out and slapped every excuse they could find on top of it!"
"You're right... at this point I'm starting to doubt the match bracket itself."
As the chatter drifted all the way to my ears, I put on the expression of a man with a heavy story to tell. And when people glimpsed my eyes brimming with sorrow, the bitter smile clinging to the corners of my mouth, the whispering only grew louder...
"Elder... would it be all right if I sat over there as well...?"
The Sword Saint turned to stare at me as though utterly dumbfounded by the question — asked as it was with such a wistful face — and answered.
"Hah... do as you please, then."
He had probably only permitted it because the seats were right there anyway — run as I might, I would still have been caught in the palm of his hand...
At any rate, permission granted, I dragged my listless feet toward where Baekhwa sat.
"My lord..."
"It's all right. A man lives long enough, I suppose, and such things happen..."
It was the very picture of a young man exiled on a false accusation, forcing himself to reassure his fiancée — and everyone watching wore looks of pity...
"Tsk... so Shaolin's rotten to the core as well, is it... resorting to such dirty tricks just to shove that fellow Tanhyeon into the finals."
"Wh-where do you think you're going?"
"To lend a hand to that protest, of course."
"You saw it plainly enough with your own eyes yesterday! The Mad Blood Ghost unleashing that bizarre martial art..."
"Judging a martial art by its appearance... are you a bigot?"
"No, that's not what I meant..."
"What do you mean, not what you meant! Plenty of demonic arts are beautiful to behold, and plenty of the Daoists' techniques look cruel as can be... do you truly believe it makes sense to fixate on that one thing alone?"
"Even so..."
"Enough! I refuse to trade another word with a bigot. Do as you please!!!"
People gathered one by one, and the voices began to swell.
"Connections, and you're innocent! No connections, and you're guilty!!! Shaolin, come out and give us a proper explanation!!!"
It was a scene that, strangely enough, brought to mind certain people who spent every waking day crying out for one protest after another...
"Aigoo, my... how on earth am I supposed to report this to the Abbot..."
One monk groaned in anguish, hand pressed to a spot that might have been his forehead or the crown of his head.
"...Which is why it seems the Abbot himself will have to step in."
"Very well. Go on, then."
Having received the report on the chaos outside, Bulseong muttered to himself as he pressed hard at his temples.
"Sword Saint... what in the world has that madman done..."
After yesterday's... event, which could only loosely be called a duel, he had ordered the unconscious boy brought to him, meaning to ask about that utterly incomprehensible power of his...
"Abbot, they say Elder Sword Saint has already taken him away."
The damned relic of an old acquaintance had already made off with him.
And so he had hauled his heavy backside out of his seat and gone to fetch the boy himself...
"I'm sorry, but that I cannot allow. How am I to trust you people with him, not knowing what you might do?"
Even after he had come in person, that damned fellow refused him out of hand.
Truthfully, he could understand why the Sword Saint did not trust him. Irritating as the man's attitude was, he himself knew all too well what the Saint had suffered in the old days.
But this time, there was an injustice in it.
"It was all out in the open anyway, so I merely meant to have a conversation. How on earth did it come to this..."
When he had first laid eyes on Dang Muyeong, he had been unsure. It was during the duel with the Hwangbo clan's child that certainty had struck him.
And so he had resolved to begin with a 'conversation'...
"Hooh... the Transcendent Realm, no less. Tanhyeon, once your duel is over, bring that child to me."
But the boy had refused to come — going so far as to frighten Tanhyeon out of fetching him.
It was insolent behavior for a boy summoned by his elders, but he supposed Namgung Han, forever hovering at his side, must have fed him some story or other, and he had let it pass.
And then that same boy had openly drawn out his sword gangi against the Sword Queen's disciple, of all people...
In the final duel he had even wielded a strange power unlike anything he had seen in seventy-odd years of life — and as a martial artist, naturally, curiosity had burned in him. All he had wanted was a quiet talk.
So why had everything twisted into this...
He swore to Buddha that his intentions had been pure — and yet in the blink of an eye, he had become a petty scoundrel who crushed Dang Muyeong just to send Tanhyeon to the finals.
To put it bluntly, it was true that the Nine Sects and One Clan had played dirty in the recent Dragon-Phoenix Tournament. Nudging the match bracket here and there, or sweet-talking an overwhelming title favorite who wasn't one of their own into quietly giving up...
But Dang Mulin's disqualification had been nothing more than an accident born of Jinmu's endless poking and prodding — their own hands had never touched it.
No matter how badly the Five Great Clans needed keeping in check, why would anyone scheme against children barely out of the cradle? Anyone could foresee what a spectacular disgrace it would be if they were caught.
If they were going to meddle at all, they would far sooner act directly — controlling information, and the like...
At any rate, his own intentions had been pure and simple...
And the Sword Saint had insisted that Dang Muyeong had been hurt quite badly, that they could not possibly be entrusted with him...
In fairness, the boy had collapsed on the arena weeping tears of blood, bruises blooming across his entire body. The decision had been made in the belief that he could no longer compete in the Dragon-Phoenix Tournament.
"He most certainly fainted half-dead..."
So why was that boy strolling about in perfect health...
Why were the clan children planting flags and denouncing Shaolin...
And how, exactly, had he ended up as the most despicable old man in the world?
Bulseong clutched his smoothly bald head and agonized for a long while before calling for someone.
"Once Jinmu's duel is over, proceed with Tanhyeon's."
"Abbot, you mean...?"
"I mean ask the boy himself. If he says he wishes to fight, let the duel proceed."
"Understood..."
When the monk had gone, Bulseong sat alone in his chamber, heaving sigh after sigh.
Meanwhile, Jinmu had remained in meditation right up until the moment his duel was to begin.
Meditation in name only, of course — in truth, he had been grinding down the fury that kept surging up inside him...
"Whew... Dang Muyeong..."
The greatest martial talent Wudang had produced since Jang Sambong. A dazzling genius such that all of Wudang had been thrown into an uproar when the Sword Immortal Geomseon declared he would personally take the third-generation disciple as his student. When talk turned to the next Greatest Under Heaven, the sole hope of the Nine Sects and One Clan who could stand beside the Namgung clan's Mad Sword — save for a single name that no longer existed.
Every one of those words described him.
And besides — hadn't he shattered that wall a full four years earlier than even the Mad Sword, who had reached the Transcendent Realm at twenty-four?
Granted, late bloomers existed, and so did those who stagnated at the Transcendent Realm and went no further...
But Jinmu, at least, had believed himself the finest martial talent of his generation.
A "Dragon-Phoenix" epithet?
He had never had the slightest intention of accepting one in the first place. He was, after all, a man outside all bounds, same as the Mad Sword, and it went without saying that a far grander title awaited him. The Dragon-Phoenix Tournament was, to his mind, nothing more than a stage on which to unveil his sword gangi before the world for the first time.
And so he had nursed the grand ambition of soaking up every last drop of attention, of carving his name into the Central Plains...
"They say the Sword Saint's disciple has attained Diamond Indestructibility?"
"The Dang Clan's Young Clan Head supposedly broke into the Transcendent Realm before he'd even turned twenty?"
"And there's word that when a young man called Ha-il split the sky, the Sword Queen shot to her feet..."
Those damned bastards had made off with every scrap of attention that was rightfully his.
He could, at a stretch, understand how the Sword Saint's disciple — rumored to rank above even Geomseon or the Sword King where the sword was concerned — had come to brawling with fists and headbutts like some common street thug.
The tale of some unheard-of fellow splitting the sky, he had dismissed as an embellished rumor.
But the fact that a boy several years his junior had shattered the wall of the Transcendent Realm, and wielded a martial art no one had ever seen — one so terrifying that Shaolin itself had moved to restrain him...
"GRAAAAAGH!!!"
Even if the heavens played favorites, there ought to be limits! This wasn't some cheap pulp novel lying around a marketplace stall — what kind of utterly senseless situation was this?
"Right up until a few years ago, they called him the Dang Clan's shame, a worthless good-for-nothing — so how, how in the world!!!"
He himself, hailed as a genius, had lived with a sword clutched in his hand for over a decade just to barely crack that wall — so how had the fool everyone called a dimwit simply vaulted clean over it...
Just as his roar of fury crested —
"Dang Muyeong... I should have crushed that bastard with my own two hands!"
"Senior brother! The Mad Blood Ghost has a duel today too!!!"
"Huh.....?"
"More to the point, you'll be late at this rate! You need to get to the arena, now!"
At the news his junior sister came sprinting to deliver, Jinmu's mind went white.
He had, after all, been spouting all manner of nonsense about how, if they ever met, he would do far worse than scold that lunatic — a monster beyond monsters, if even half the rumors held true — but the fellow had already been knocked out of the tournament...
The realization that climbing to the finals meant facing that bastard after all froze his thoughts for a heartbeat, but he quickly gathered himself and made his resolution.
No... let me think of it as a heaven-sent chance. Perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to crush that bastard once and for all in the finals.
KA-ANG—
But that resolution, together with the sound that rang out as his blade swung down upon the head of one called Haemu, began to crumble — like a sandcastle on the shore, washed apart by the waves.