Facing A Crisis

Yi Ung could not leave their son alone while he was recovering, and so stayed behind at the Jeongryong Sect. As a school belonging to the Murim Alliance, the sect made to send its elites into the field, and I stopped them.

“The masters of the Demonic Cult and the Blood Cult are all first-rate masters. The Jeongryong Sect’s martial artists would be nothing but sacrificial lambs.”

“Even so, with an enemy of the orthodox murim before us, how could we sit still?”

“The Namgung Clan and the Murim Alliance will see to that. Now is not the time to step forward.”

A hot-blooded chivalrous spirit still lived in Yi Ung, and they had worked themselves up over it; what I said only barely brought them round. The Jeongryong Sect knew it too: for all its elites, there was not a first-rate master among them.

“If it weighs on you, take up policing the surroundings rather than joining the battle. Keep the people making for the Sanghyang Estate away from it so that no harm comes to them. That alone is doing your part.”

“Very well. I shall do as you say, Master Scholar Cheon. But what do you mean to do yourself, Master Scholar Cheon?”

“With the Namgung Demon-Repelling Corps and the White Tiger Corps in the field, the Blood Cult and Demonic Cult bands will be put down. So long as they have not sent out transcendent-peak masters.¹”

Wang Cheong, the White Tiger Corps Chief, and the Corps Chief of the Demon-Repelling Corps were both peak masters, and most of their corps members were first-rate masters, so there would be no great difficulty. Nothing in it required me to step in, and even if I did, a battle on that scale left no room for me to do anything.

So I turned my steps toward the Namgung Clan.

Wang Cheong spoke with their face drawn into a frown.

“First Squad Leader, take the Young Palace Lord and go to the Namgung Clan.”

“Corps Chief.”

“There is no telling how long I can hold that old monster, so get to the Namgung Clan as fast as you can.”

The White Tiger Corps was not losing the fight. But with a transcendent-peak master on the field, and no telling how they themself would fare against her, getting the Young Palace Lord away safely had to come first.

The First Squad Leader took his squad and hurried out of the Sanghyang Estate.

“Ohohoho!”

An old woman laughed, shaking the white hair she wore in two plaits like a young girl’s. Oh Ju-hyang, the White-Haired Girl Demon, stood Fourteenth among the Demonic Cult’s Seventeen Pavilion Masters, and was known to have reached the transcendent-peak.

“You mean to say a Pavilion Master of the Demonic Cult has taken the field!”

The Cult’s Pavilion Masters were a body formed of the seventeen families that made up its foundation. She was the head of one of them, so her standing was easy enough to judge.

“You two bring her in.”

Oh Ju-hyang said it to the two old men behind her.

“By your command.”

The two old men flung themselves off toward the place where Jong So-bin had disappeared. Watching them go, Wang Cheong could do nothing but hope that the Young Palace Lord and the First Squad reached the Namgung Clan safely.

“Well now, shall we have a look at the famous White Tiger Corps Chief’s skill?”

She smacked her lips like someone about to taste a fine dish, and came toward Wang Cheong.

I shall have to stake my life.

Wang Cheong knew at once that this was the crisis of their life. Crisis or not, they could not help asking what they wanted to know.

“I cannot make out why someone who is a Pavilion Master of the Demonic Cult, of all people, should take the field. Is it the Ice Palace’s Young Palace Lord you covet?”

The Murim Alliance still did not know why the Demonic Cult and Blood Cult bands were hunting Jong So-bin.

“Kheh, kheh, kheh.”

She was missing teeth here and there, so the laugh leaked out like air escaping a leather pouch.

“By the way you ask it, the Murim Alliance knows nothing at all. I did wonder why they would send out a White Tiger Corps Chief on so small a matter — you simply do not know.”

“And what is it I do not know?”

“What you do not know cannot hurt you. Rather than wondering about that, had you not better work out how you are to survive me? Come, let me see what you can do.”

Wang Cheong let out a snort of a laugh and answered back.

“I have no confidence I can beat you, but I do not think I shall lose either. You seem to take a Corps Chief of our Murim Alliance’s Six Martial Corps for a joke.”

They resolved to think of nothing at all now, and to give their whole attention to the enemy in front of them.

Jong So-bin set out for the Namgung Clan with the ten men of the White Tiger Corps’ First Squad. Looking at the men following her, she felt troubled at heart. She had asked the Murim Alliance for help and was being hunted all over again, and it sat very ill with her.

Hwa-yeong could feel how Jong So-bin’s heart lay.

“Young Palace Lord, I think it would be best not to let your mind go elsewhere just now. This is the moment for the resolve to take our Palace back and raise it to a flourishing age. I shall serve you to the last so that it comes about.”

Jong So-bin heard Hwa-yeong out and smiled.

“Now that I think of it, if I had not had the Third Protector beside me either, it would have been very hard. Thank you for bearing with how difficult I am and staying at my side.”

“Is that not the sort of thing you ought to have said long before now?”

She stared at Hwa-yeong, who had answered a heartfelt word with a joke, and let out a snort of a laugh. Whenever she was uneasy, it had always been the Third Protector who eased her heart with one. At the time she had mostly scolded her for it, and only now did she understand what had been in the Third Protector’s heart.

All this while she has been steadying me and comforting me so that I would not waver. And I realize it only now.

Jong So-bin turned to Hwa-yeong and said,

“Thank you.”

Hwa-yeong’s eyes went round at words she had not expected.

As they came out of the alley onto the main road, two old men blocked the way ahead.

“Hmm.”

The White Tiger Corps’ First Squad Leader looked at the two old men and put himself on his guard.

“The One-Eyed Ghost and the One-Armed Ghost — the old monsters! Have a care!”

A closer look showed that one of the old men was missing an eye and the other his left arm. They were demonic fiends of the last generation, men of evil name, who had thrown in with the White-Haired Girl Demon and appointed themselves her escort. A younger man would not have known them, but the First Squad Leader was middle-aged, and had spent his life hearing that ill fame more than most, so he knew them well.

The One-Eyed Ghost grinned.

“If you know me, you know it is better to be taken quietly. Resist, and I’ll dig out one of your eyeballs so you can be like me.”

The two were famous for exactly that: the One-Eyed Ghost, a master of palm technique, taking out one eye with his fingers, and the One-Armed Ghost, a swordsman, cutting off one arm. They took their pleasure in giving pain rather than in killing.

Jong So-bin saw that the White Tiger Corps’ First Squad Leader could handle neither the One-Eyed Ghost nor the One-Armed Ghost, and drew her sword.

“We have to fight as well.”

Hwa-yeong took her place at Jong So-bin’s side. The Demonic Cult band that had come after them was fewer than ten, but with those two masters among them there was no telling how long they could hold out.

“I make no allowances for a woman.”

The One-Eyed Ghost laughed until his gums showed.

“But the eyes of a beautiful one like yourself, this old man keeps steeped in wine. Today I shall finally have my ten beauties’ eyes complete.”

The words alone raised gooseflesh. Jong So-bin wanted to curse him, but it would only have provoked him for nothing, so she did not answer at all.

Then a cold voice came out of the alley.

“Your one remaining eyeball I’ll have to feed to the cur at our house.”

A band came out after it.

“Mm?”

The One-Eyed Ghost looked at the band that had appeared and answered.

“What is this? It is the Namgung bastards. There were about five of you who lost eyes to me a while ago — have you come to give me more?”

Namgung Mu-baek had taken ten Demon-Repelling Corps men up onto the surrounding roofs to search, and seeing Jong So-bin being hunted had come after her in haste. Five of his men had died at the One-Eyed Ghost’s hands, and he burned to avenge them.

And more than that, Jong So-bin was the woman he had kept in his heart. At the boast that such a woman’s eyes would be dug out, every scrap of killing intent in his body came pouring out of him as though it had gone mad.

Namgung Mu-baek took his place beside Jong So-bin. He had come forward knowing that the Demonic Cult men’s target was the Ice Palace’s people.

“Further support from our house will be here shortly. Until then we shall hold this place.”

The Namgung Demon-Repelling Corps’ Deputy Corps Chief watched Namgung Mu-baek and smiled with satisfaction. He had expected the boy to shrink and run at the sight of a strong enemy, and it had not happened. Nor was any of it empty bluster; the aura pouring off him was solid and rough.

Yes, this is it. This is what a martial artist of the Namgung Clan looks like. They said the hellion of a youngest young master had changed and I did not believe it — but he truly has.

“This has turned tiresome. So many gnats. One-Armed Ghost, it seems there is no time for play. Let us be serious about it.”

“I have always been serious. It was you fooling about.”

The One-Armed Ghost drew his sword, and his aura changed.

“Strike!”

The Namgung Demon-Repelling Corps, the White Tiger Corps and the Ice Palace’s masters tangled together with the Demonic Cult’s masters, and the fighting began.

I was on my way to the Namgung Clan when, from three hundred feet off, I felt killing intent rising like a heat shimmer, and turned my head. Perhaps because I had absorbed Yi Mak-seong’s energy as well, my sense for qi had grown wider and finer. A moment later the sound of weapons reached me.

I started toward the place, then stopped.

Is there really any need for me to go?

This was no affair of mine to step into. The moment I made to turn away again, I flinched.

Ice-cold qi that strong is Jong So-bin — but she went to the safe house, so why is she over there? That direction is toward the Namgung Clan.

I went into an empty back alley and took to the roofs on the Nine Nether Ghost-Spirit Footwork, running for the place where the fighting was at its height.

There.

I took in the street below at a glance and frowned. A shambles was the only word for it. Already the bodies of White Tiger Corps martial artists, Namgung Clan martial artists and Demonic Cult men lay strewn across the roadway.

Among those bodies there was not one Ice Palace warrior. The White Tiger Corps’ warriors and the Demon-Repelling Corps’ were fighting desperately to shield the Ice Palace’s masters. Even now Namgung Mu-baek was beating aside the One-Armed Ghost’s blade as it went for Jong So-bin, and driving in at him.

One look at how the two were made told me they were the Demonic Cult’s One-Eyed Ghost and One-Armed Ghost. The Demonic Cult’s principal figures and masters were all catalogued in my head.

Namgung Mu-baek’s enlightenment is no small thing and the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique has a depth no one can measure, but for want of real fighting he keeps falling for their provocations.

I had not known it until now, but watching from above as Namgung Mu-baek unfolded the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, I grasped his weakness. I could see it so clearly that even his small faults stood out. Seeing a thing from above was another matter entirely. Faults invisible at the same eye level showed themselves plainly.

Why has nobody in the murim used this method until now?

In all the martial-arts teaching at the Murim Alliance I had never seen or heard of it being done this way.

I made up my mind quickly.

Jong So-bin being here and not Wang Cheong means she was making for the Namgung Clan while they held off a master they could not handle. A master it takes Wang Cheong to hold…

I went back on my decision not to step into this affair. They were people I had ties to, and I could not stand and watch them die.

Just then Namgung Mu-baek, fighting the One-Armed Ghost, took a sudden kick to the belly and was flung fifty feet, rolling as he landed. Plainly he had not expected a swordsman to use a kick technique.

I dropped down, snatched up a sword and went at the One-Armed Ghost fast.

“Ohh—!”

When I closed like a ghost and swung, the One-Armed Ghost started violently and sprang back.

“Who are you!”

For a man to have come that close without being caught by his sense for qi meant he was no ordinary sort.

I said to the Demon-Repelling Corps men,

“Take this one for a moment. I shall go and look at Young Master Namgung.”

Five Demon-Repelling Corps men moved in to block the One-Armed Ghost.

“These wretches, honestly!”

Ye-won had gone to Namgung Mu-baek’s side and was looking over his injuries. He had happened to be flung to the very spot where she stood, so she could not turn away from him. Her face was pale, as though she had still not got her strength back.

“Are you all right?”

Namgung Mu-baek snatched the handkerchief Ye-won held out and wiped the blood running from his mouth.

He sat there looking mortified, with no thought of getting up, and I said to him,

“You always wield the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique perfectly, exactly as I have told you, and yet something has been missing. Only now have I learned what it is.”

The Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique could draw its power out with nothing but strength and speed, and Namgung Mu-baek knew well enough how to use those two.

There is one thing I have been missing.

I had thought strength and speed alone would make it perfect, and now I saw the one thing I had overlooked.

Namgung Mu-baek spoke in a wretched voice.

“I know. That I have not had enough real fighting.”

I shook my head.

“The higher martial arts have power enough to make up even for that want of experience. If you have grasped the fifth move of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, you can handle the likes of the One-Armed Ghost easily. That you cannot has a reason.”

Namgung Mu-baek’s face turned from mortification to curiosity.

“What is it? What is the reason?”

“Before that, let me ask you one thing. You must answer honestly. I have not seen the Emperor’s Sword Form’s oral formula, so I cannot say, but by my guess — is the Emperor’s Sword Form not a martial art that greatly amplifies killing intent?”

Namgung Mu-baek asked back in astonishment.

“No — how could you know that? Have you seen the Emperor’s Sword Form’s oral formula?”

Namgung Mu-baek had not seen so much as a single sentence of the Emperor’s Sword Form’s oral formula. He had only caught it in passing from his father, and what he had caught was that the art was full of killing intent.

The Emperor’s Sword Form was the house’s true secret supreme art, so even that much was held in the strictest confidence. And here was a scholar inferring the whole of it from the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique.

Even in the middle of a fight with his life at stake, a shiver at the man’s genius ran through him again.