Enlightenment Comes From The Wrong Place

Namgung Mu-baek stared at me with eyes that could not have been more in earnest. A thirst for enlightenment. The look carried the longing of a martial artist who has come up against a wall.

“I had thought the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique would be perfect if it had only strength and speed. But I have realized that one thing more is needed.”

That one thing was something another man needed, not something I did. I could already bring out the azure dragon with spirit energy, while the martial artists of the Namgung Clan, for all the internal force they had in abundance, could not manifest it at all.

He jerked his chin, pressing me to go on.

“One thing is missing from this perfect sword technique, and only today, watching the young master’s sword strokes, did I realize what it was.”

He was not the only one who heard me. The Ice Palace girl called Ye-won was listening too, her eyes bright and shining.

“Watching the young master’s martial art a moment ago, I realized this — what makes the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique perfect is that one who is not human may be killed.”

“Ah!”

Namgung Mu-baek let out a long breath at my words and shivered.

“One who is not human may be killed.”

One who is not human may be killed. The words mean that whatever is not a human being can be slain, and slain readily.

“The Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique is not founded on mercy. But later generations misread the Boundless Azure Sky and leaned their reading toward a merciful heart. Yet every metaphor and every figure in it is an insight into annihilation and into the reason a thing exists. At its origin this sword technique is built on a fierce will to kill — that what is not human may be killed.”

Namgung Mu-baek nodded.

“When our house was laying the foundations of a great and honored clan, the sword technique it put forward above all others was the Boundless Azure Sky. So they must have stripped out the parts heavy with killing intent, out of concern for how the world would look at us.”

He knew how the art had changed over the years, and so he took my meaning at once.

“That was it. That’s why the killing moves, the ones meant to kill a man, came up short on killing intent and turned into a weakness.”

Earlier, too, the kick he had taken from the One-Armed Ghost had landed while he was unfolding the fifth move, Azure Dragon Spiraling Ascent. That move carried a cruel technique in it, one that cut a cross into a man’s belly and spilled the entrails out. Because the technique was so brutal, the sword stroke had been built to draw the force out of exactly that part. By rights the One-Armed Ghost should have spilled his own entrails on the ground there; instead the very thing became the weakness, and it was Mu-baek who took the counterblow.

Then a young girl’s voice came. It was Ye-won, the one playing the false Ice Sacred Body.

“But when you say you have to load it with killing intent — how is that any different from internal force?”

Listening in while another school’s martial art was being explained was taboo. But she asked it so brightly that neither of us quite registered the fact, and neither Namgung Mu-baek nor I was small-minded enough to make an issue of it.

What would a girl understand?

That thought came first, and so we let it pass.

“Killing intent is will, Miss. Only when the will follows does the move carry its proper force. It cannot put out great power the way internal force does, but it is the force at the center. And killing intent is a kind of spirit force. When we feel an assassin’s killing intent from far off, that too is a sensation we register in the body, because what reaches us is a spirit force.”

Even as I explained it to Ye-won, I realized something.

They say the best learning is what you come to while teaching. So it truly is.

What I had arrived at was that killing intent might itself be spirit energy.

I have been thinking of spirit energy far too narrowly. A thing like killing intent is a force in its own right, and a spirit force besides.

I had grasped the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique well enough to bring out the azure dragon, and I had believed the reason I could not draw its power out properly was a want of internal power. What I had actually been short of, I saw now, was the spirit energy called killing intent.

And that enlightenment did not end with Namgung Mu-baek and me.

“Ah! Ah! Ah!”

Ye-won, who had been letting out one cry after another, suddenly took up her sword and flung herself at the Demonic Cult men. Jong So-bin and Hwa-yeong started violently at the sight and ran to shield her.

“Ye-won! Come to your senses!”

But a terrible cold came driving out of Ye-won’s Snow-Wind Sword Technique and swept over the Demonic Cult men. Jong So-bin, about to pull her back, stopped short and caught Hwa-yeong by the arm in astonishment.

“Third Protector! That—!”

Any martial artist of the Ice Palace could learn the Snow-Wind Sword Technique. It bore no comparison, of course, with the Ice-White Asura Sword, which only the Palace’s first-generation disciples were said to learn. And yet the technique Ye-won was unfolding threw off an ice-cold qi that overwhelmed the Ice-White Asura Sword itself.

“Yes. The power of the ice crystal alone could never do that. I have never in my life seen the Snow-Wind Sword Technique so fully ripened.”

Jong So-bin murmured.

“Third Protector — have we had the treasure of a lifetime standing beside us and failed to know it?”

She knew that Ye-won had asked the scholar something, heard his answer, and only then come into that state.

“It looks as though the scholar has given Ye-won some kind of enlightenment.”

Just then Namgung Mu-baek, who had been watching Ye-won fight, moved to her side and scattered a flurry of sword strokes. Astonishingly, before ten exchanges had passed, one of the Demonic Cult men was run through by both their swords and died. And then, without so much as a word between them, the two of them threw themselves at the One-Armed Ghost at the same moment.

“Can such a thing be?”

The two attacked in exact interlock, like people who had drilled a combined strike together for years. The One-Armed Ghost, who had been taking his ease from first to last, met them now with his face gone tight, then clutched his belly and gave ground.

A cross of blood-lines had been drawn across his belly. An instant later the right arm that had been clutching it dropped away, and by the white frost lying over the shoulder it was Ye-won’s sword that had taken it. A moment more and the belly split open along the cross and the entrails poured out.

The One-Eyed Ghost stared at the sight in shock.

Namgung Mu-baek said to Ye-won,

“Leave that one-eyed one to me. I have comrades to avenge.”

“In the Ice Palace we say that vengeance is owed to the dead, but it is the living who must carry it out. So this girl will give way to you.”

Ye-won blinked her frost-whitened eyebrows and nodded. Namgung Mu-baek gave her one smile and rushed in at the One-Eyed Ghost.

About then Jong So-bin came over to me. She had come because, the moment they felt themselves safe, there was one person left to worry about.

“Master Scholar Cheon. Corps Chief Wang is in danger. It is Corps Chief Wang who is holding off the Demonic Cult’s Pavilion Master.”

Namgung Mu-baek was driving the One-Eyed Ghost back, and it had come to the point where I no longer needed to worry. On top of that there were Jong So-bin, Hwa-yeong, Ye-won and the White Tiger Corps’ First Squad Leader, so nothing was going to go wrong here. The two transcendent-first-rate masters had been a threat, but one of them was at a level this company could deal with well enough.

“Once this place is settled, go straight to the Namgung Clan.”

“Would that be all right?”

She asked because Yeo-seol was there.

“This does not seem the moment to weigh even that. First get out of the downpour and think afterward.”

“I understand.”

“Then I leave this place in your hands and go.”

It was then.

A cry of astonishment burst out all at once among the Namgung Clan’s martial artists.

“Whoaaa! The azure dragon!”

I turned my head toward the sound. The azure dragon I had once manifested with spirit force came into my sight, faint in form, driving a heavy blow into the One-Eyed Ghost.

Namgung Mu-baek’s killing intent has become spirit energy and called the azure dragon out at last. He has reached the ultimate truth of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique.

Seeing that, I worried no further, and unfolded the Nine Nether Ghost-Spirit Footwork to its uttermost.

Watching the scholar vanish in an instant, as though by shifting form and changing place, Jong So-bin murmured.

“What in the world is that scholar, really?”

“Whatever he is, he is no ordinary man. Though he does seem to be declaring with his whole body that he is.”

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

“Now I see it, I have been looking with blind eyes. To have had a treasure like that beside me all this while and never known it.”

“It is the same for me, Young Palace Lord.”

“At that level, could you not call her a genius?”

“And there is a man who woke a child like that in a single instant and made a genius of her.”

“Hoo. Come out into the world and there are far too many geniuses in it. It is quite upsetting. When I was in the Ice Palace I took myself for the first genius under heaven.”

“Your own gifts are more than enough to have you called a genius, Young Palace Lord.”

“No. Look over there.”

Namgung Mu-baek had driven the One-Eyed Ghost back one-sidedly at last, and his sword picked out the man’s one remaining eye. Jong So-bin watched it and shook her head.

“What kind of genius falls short of Young Master Namgung and of Ye-won both? Set beside those two I do not even reach an exceptional talent — I am no more than a bright one.”

Hwa-yeong looked at the Young Palace Lord, who had come to know the ways of the world, with something proud in her eyes and something sorry in them too.

If I had had the leisure I would have wanted to set a third wheel-energy turning and gain a new power, but there was no leisure for it now.

There was certainly more strength and speed in me, and I could tell it from my pace when I unfolded the Nine Nether Ghost-Spirit Footwork. Where a roof had taken me two or three strides before, one stride was enough now. It felt twice as fast as before, and I could not adjust to the sense of speed.

I shall have to drill at this too until I am used to it.

A sense of speed is not a thing even a genius grows accustomed to without practice.

I threw myself toward the street at once, where killing intent was sending up heat shimmer in streaming ribbons.

It saddened Wang Cheong that the last means left to them was mutual destruction and nothing else. They had stopped and stuck fast at the wall of the peak long ago, and long ago folded away any hope of breaking it.

I know it. With the talent I have, the peak is my final level of attainment.

Past the peak lay a world that effort and passion could not reach. Martial artists who pressed on all their lives and never reached even first-rate were beyond counting, so the murim was a place where reaching the peak at all deserved to be called a blessing. But the gifted make their bid to see the end of the martial way, and only now did the many rare talents who fall inside that bid come into their sight.

A martial artist who had broken the wall they had so longed to break and reached the transcendent-peak. A figure of the Demonic Cult, for all that. Yet in one corner of their heart they paid her their respect.

“You have gone out of your mind with wanting to die.”

Oh Ju-hyang said it in a voice full of wariness, and drew back. That was how wholly Wang Cheong had committed to the attack, and she saw what they intended by it.

“You wretch! You mean to die together with me? Nothing of the sort!”

— Slish!

Wang Cheong took a sword stroke full in the chest and bored in deeper still, inside her guard, and in the end they managed to drive their own sword into her thigh. For an attack bought with more than ten sword wounds all over their body it was a wretched return, but they were satisfied with the result they had aimed at.

“Bwahahaha! I have no greed to die alongside you. Only — if I can trade my life for one arm of the White-Haired Girl Demon, is that not a fair enough bargain!”

Oh Ju-hyang knitted her brow. Nothing in the world was more fearful than the attack of someone who had given everything up, and when it was a peak master who had thrown their life away and made up their mind to attack, it was not a thing to be treated lightly.

“Very well! This seat rates your resolve highly. At the least I shall leave your body whole and unmarred.”

She meant to give it her utmost as well.

Wang Cheong let every scrap of their internal force burst out again and unfolded their lightness skill toward her, because even in lightness skill she pushed them back and they could scarcely reach her at all. They meant to settle the contest with their last supreme art; that way, they believed, they could cut away at least one of her four limbs. They had that much confidence in themself.

For the first time since coming to Hefei, Oh Ju-hyang the White-Haired Girl Demon drew out the whole of her internal force. Her fingernails, driven by sword qi, shot out a good foot long. She meant to tear Wang Cheong to death with those nails turned to hooks, thinking as she did so that it would be hard to keep her word about leaving the corpse whole.

It was then.

— Whoom!

A tremendous pressure came down over her from overhead. It matched the great tidal wave she had seen at the seashore as a child, and for a moment she forgot Wang Cheong and looked up. A vast azure dragon came plunging down with its claws thrown wide, gliding as an eagle glides to take a squirrel.

Oh Ju-hyang swung her hooks with force enough to tear the azure dragon’s claws out.

— Ka-ka-ga-ga-ga-aang!

A hideous noise like something scraping an iron bell dragged on and on, and when Wang Cheong’s blow landed on top of it her body was driven back a hundred feet against her own will.

“Kaff!”

Had it not been for her body-protecting qi there would have been a hole blown through her side, and had it not been for a hundred and twenty years’ worth of internal power the azure dragon would have torn her apart and killed her. Six of her ten hooks had been snapped in half.

Wang Cheong looked at Scholar Cheon, who had come down out of the air together with the azure dragon as though he had ridden it down, and murmured without meaning to,

“The Azure Dragon Scholar.”

Scholar Cheon suited the azure dragon so well that he seemed less a man astride it than a being of the heavens come down to claim it.

And then Oh Ju-hyang’s voice burst out.

“What scholar is this, working black arts!”