Saving Jong So-bin

“Hoo. Truly, what a fool of a man. We had best make ready to fight as well. We must all be resolved to die.”

Jong So-bin forced herself upright as she said it. I turned my head toward her.

“Rest a while. I shall take charge here.”

Jong So-bin frowned, and Hwa-yeong whispered.

“Young Palace Lord, would the scholar be so sure of himself if he had no means at all? Better to watch a while and see.”

“Third Protector, do you think that makes any sense? One of the five is a peak master and the four are first-rate masters. Even if we fight at the scholar’s side the outcome is not a thing I can promise.”

One of Jong So-bin’s men brought a wooden case in from another of the clinic’s rooms. She could not hold herself upright properly, so she would throw fine needles as hidden weapons instead.

Hwa-yeong, with five Blood Cult masters ranged before her, did not shrink in the least.

“I trust Scholar Cheon.”

So that was why she stood firm even with Blood Cult masters in front of her. Because she trusted me.

“So this place is to be your burial plot. That is not so bad, either.”

The man in a head constable’s robes had stepped forward from among the constables to say it.

Jong So-bin spoke quietly.

“Why is it that the Blood Cult wants the Ice Sacred Body?”

“Do you ask because you do not know?”

“You cannot be unaware that the Ice Sacred Body is of use only within our Palace. So there is something else to it, is there?”

The head constable looked at Jong So-bin as though she were a pitiful thing.

“You know how to make an Ice Sacred Body, and yet you understand nothing of what that means.”

“Hall Master, is there any need to tell our secrets to men who will be dead shortly?”

A constable had come up to say as much, and the head constable shoved him aside.

“It will gall them more to die knowing than to die ignorant.”

He went on.

“The Ice Sacred Body is a Pure Body in the truest sense. A perfect physical body besides. There is a saying that to gain the Ice Sacred Body is to gain all under heaven. If the Ice Sacred Body were to master our Cult’s mightiest martial learning, who is there who could stop it?”

I answered him.

“And since the soul is in a clean state as well, you mean to pour the Demonic Cult’s filthy values into it and make a weapon of war out of it.”

The head constable turned on me with the face of a man seeing me only now.

“That is right. But who are you? Where does some scrap of a scholar come butting in?”

The scholar carried not so much as a trace of internal force, so they had struck him from their reckoning altogether.

“Just think of me as a scholar who came in sick for treatment. You’ll be easier in your mind that way.”

“The nerve of this one, giving himself airs. Put him on his knees in front of me.”

At the head constable’s word, two constables came at the scholar like lightning. Blood Cult elites that they were, they allowed themselves not the slightest carelessness even in handling a scholar.

But I made this my chance. A chance to cut their numbers down.

The instant the two of them took hold of a shoulder each to break it, I drew my shoulders in and slipped smoothly back out of their hands. I came free like a ghost on the Nine Nether Ghost-Spirit Footwork, and they came in after me with their swords thrusting at my chest and my throat, as though they had known exactly where I would break free to. Movements made for real fighting, sure enough, and unorthodox with it.

— Crack!

But my palm struck the backs of their hands. That one stroke left the hands gripping the swords hanging in rags, and in the moment they flinched back in shock I gave each of their foreheads a light push with my palm.

— Ba-boom!

With a sound like a leather drum bursting, the two of them floated up thirty feet into the air and came down sprawling flat on the ground.

“The Great Strength Vajra Palm!”

The head constable knew my method at once. With the forefinger folded in and then spread, there was no missing it. Most of the Shaolin Temple’s palm techniques bend the forefinger and then spread it, since they were devised in imitation of the Buddha’s hand. And of them all, the Great Strength Vajra Palm was the one that drew strength and agility to their utmost.¹

Nearly every martial art of the Nine Great Sects sat inside my head. I belonged to the Inspection Corps, which had the standing to come and go from the murim’s secret vault and its martial repository, so books of martial arts came easily to my hand. And the Murim Alliance’s martial artists thought so little of scholars that they never stopped training their moves when one walked past. Just as scholars dismissed martial artists as men who did not know one written character, the martial artists thought scholars weaklings and cowards.

“Are you a man of the Shaolin Temple?”

He looked at my hair, and his words grew weaker as they went on.

“Where do you belong?”

While the head constable kept me quietly talking, one of the others slipped behind me and came in with a thrust. As underhanded a piece of work as could be. But I took out my fan and flicked the sword away.

— Tiing!

The constable pulled back in haste, afraid of being caught by the palm force as the first two had been. I had expected that as well, and the moment I flicked the sword away I threw the fan.

— Whirrrip!

The fan flew like a flash of lightning and swept past the nape of his neck.

— Fla-la-la-lap!

I moved my hand, and the fan came back into it.

“The Kunlun Sect’s Cool Breeze Fan!”

The head constable cried it out in shock. The Cool Breeze Fan was not a famous martial learning, and still he named it at a glance.

“Seeing how well you know the orthodox murim’s martial learning, you’ve studied hard.”

I fanned myself gently a moment, then broke off and closed on him with the Nine Nether Ghost-Spirit Footwork. The head constable caught the change in me and slipped thirty feet to the side, but the one constable still left could not react.

Fail to react and you must die. That is the murim’s law.

My fan came down on the crown of his head.

— Crack!

With a sound like a boulder splitting, his skull caved in and he sat down in a heap.

To have reacted to the Nine Nether Ghost-Spirit Footwork at all, the head constable had to be a master of better than the first rate. He raised his killing intent and muttered.

“The Great Strength Vajra Palm. The Cool Breeze Fan. It seems you must be the joint successor the Murim Alliance is said to be raising in secret. To think I should see here the man we could never find, search as we might.”

“Ah, there was a rumor like that? I’m not the man in it, though.”

“It is no use denying it now. What martial artist do you suppose could hold the Shaolin Temple’s arts and the Kunlun Sect’s arts in one body?”

“Honestly. It seems you won’t believe me however I deny it.”

So in that moment I went from the Murim Alliance’s secret weapon to the Murim Alliance’s secret joint successor.

Against a master of better than the first rate I would have to use the method I was surest of, come what may, so I picked up a dead constable’s sword.

“Whose sword technique is it?”

“Hm. Now that you mention it, there’s ample room for a misunderstanding. The sword technique I’m about to unfold happens to be the Namgung Clan’s.”

“Heh heh heh. And you deny it even so.”

Four of his men were dead, and still the head constable did not shrink at all.

Jong So-bin spoke, so that the scholar should not on any account grow careless.

“That man is a peak master. He is too much to bear alone. You must join with us in a combined strike.”

“I can bear him well enough alone. Just rest where you are.”

The head constable took it up.

“An arrogant, insolent creature. Though I suppose he’s still young enough not to know how fearsome the world can be.”

Jong So-bin spoke quickly, in the moment before we fought.

“Let me ask one thing. How did you learn that the Ice Sacred Body was with us, that you came looking for it? That it is with me, no one in the Ice Palace knows but the command.”

“Kuh heh heh heh. Girl. Green as ever, are you not. Does it not strike you as strange that even the Demonic Cult’s rabble know of it? Should you not be thinking that the Ice Palace’s Elders’ Council has been selling it here and there?”

After the Palace Lord was killed in a manner never explained, the Elders’ Council took the Ice Palace in hand, and because it was the Ice Sacred Body they were after, Jong So-bin had fled the Palace in haste with it in her keeping.

The Elders’ Council is ruining the Ice Palace. Men filled with the greed of the old, in the end…

The head constable drew his saber.

“That small girl lying over there must be the Ice Sacred Body. To judge by the cold that comes flowing off her even this far.”

A chill came pouring thickly off the girl who had swallowed the ice crystal.

“I have no need of the rest of you, so I shall kill you all.”

— Voooom!

The iron saber glowed red-hot.

A saber technique whose mark is heating the blade — that is the Diancang Sect’s Eighteen Red Dragon Sabers. And a man with internal force enough to heat an iron saber scarlet?

Seeing it, one martial artist came to mind.

The Red Dragon Demon of Diancang, Wan Bok.

He was the man who had made the Diancang Sect’s saber technique known to the whole of the murim and become the sect’s disgrace in the same stroke. He had gone into the Diancang Sect as a lay disciple, killed his master, carried off the Eighteen Red Dragon Sabers and thrown himself into the Blood Cult, and the eminent seniors of the orthodox murim who had fallen to that art were more than a few. The trouble was that Wan Bok was a peak master come to full ripeness.

So that is why he was so unruffled with all his men dead. He was sure of himself even against the whole of us.

I spoke to him.

“I did not think I would meet the famous Red Dragon Demon of Diancang here.”

Hearing me answer without a trace of tension, Wan Bok tilted his head.

“You know who this seat is, and this is how you treat him?”

“‘This seat’? That’s an awfully high opinion of yourself.”

Wan Bok did not know. To be rid of him, the Diancang Sect had opened the Eighteen Red Dragon Sabers’ blade formula to the Murim Alliance, and I already knew the art’s weak points inside out.

“A greenhorn never does know fear.”

When Wan Bok shook out the red saber, it felt as though a single red dragon were falling on me. I had wholly grasped the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, and I wanted to learn the feel of real fighting through him, so I traded sword strokes with him a long while.

— Thunk!

Wan Bok’s saber met my sword, and a strange note came out of them. Ordinarily internal force against internal force comes with a roar, but because I use spirit energy the sound of the collision was not loud.

— Chunk!

— Zhoong!

As the restrained sounds of collision rang out one after another, Wan Bok’s brow creased a little. The fight was taking a shape he had not reckoned on.

When Wan Bok raised his internal force higher and attacked, I turned the wheel-energy and accelerated strength and agility.

“Aagh!”

Wan Bok was shaken by my sword strike, enough that his arm reeled.

Wan Bok’s eyes went wide. He bore down with internal force close to ninety years’ worth, and so far from the scholar’s sword breaking, it was his own saber that was thrown back.

What is this bastard? Surely his internal force cannot be a hundred and twenty years’ worth?

Had it been so, thunder should have rung when the man’s sword struck his saber. And above all, the man was wielding the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique. He himself had killed one of the Namgung Clan’s eminent seniors once, and the elder’s Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique had been nothing like this.

Is this one stronger than that Namgung Clan Elder was?

Resolved to die, Wan Bok drew out every scrap of internal force in his body. He did not care if his innate qi were destroyed and his lifespan shortened for it. He knew by instinct that this, now, was the moment of utter extremity.

“Ugh!”

The force coming down on the Eighteen Red Dragon Sabers had changed. Every time he struck back at a sword blow his wrist and his elbow felt as though they would come away from him, and each time the sword dug into a weak point he flung himself in with a mutual-destruction stroke, as if to say they should die together, so that it never came to a finish.

“This seat will teach you that real fighting is another matter.”

Ten more exchanges with Wan Bok, and I knew I had misjudged. When a martial artist of something like peak rank stakes his life, I too must be resolved to die.

I unfolded Skyflash Parting the Sea to shake him off, and turned to Jong So-bin.

“I know it has no style at all, saying this now. He is more than I can manage alone, so let us make a joint attack.”

The words were barely out before Hwa-yeong and Jong So-bin stood at either side of me, as though they had foreseen even this. Her men, who would only have been a hindrance in the fight, guarded the girl.

“We shall use hidden weapons, so attack as freely as you like.”

The two of them opened out leather pouches packed full of thick needles and fine needles. Once we brought a combined strike to bear, even Wan Bok did not dare show his teeth. Hwa-yeong and Jong So-bin loosed thick and fine needles at him, he flicked them away with his saber, and I took the opening and unfolded the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique without stinting. At that the balance of the fight came even at last.

However much of a genius I might be, I realized, I could not be a genius of real fighting.