A Fortuitous Encounter And Enlightenment, Without Warning

I called at the Geumcheon Escort Agency’s branch in Jiangxi. When I gave my name and made to send a letter, the branch head came running out.

“Goodness me, so you are Master Scholar Cheon. As it happens, we had word specially from the Namgung Clan’s matron to attend on you with particular care. Do come inside.”

“No. Courtesy overdone is no courtesy at all. I will simply hand the letter over and go. Deliver this letter to the village headman named on it. The slash-and-burn farmers will then be moving, and when they do, I would ask you to send armed escorts so that they can move in safety. Here is the commission fee.”

“No, no. With the clan matron’s instruction on top of it, a thing of this size we would gladly…”

I shook my head.

“If you do that, I will be too uncomfortable to use the Geumcheon Escort Agency again. And it is not one or two armed escorts we are hiring; the cost will run to a fair sum.”

“As you say. I will put it toward the costs. And whatever is left over, I shall return to you.”

“So it should be.”

The note I had handed him was for a hundred taels. That was why he made the offer.

“Bring them to Hwaryeong County first, and that will do.”

“Yes. We will make ready and send our own men along shortly.”

The slash-and-burn farmers would need a month at the least to move, so until then I had my hands full. Before anything else I had to secure houses for them. Going about the neighborhood to buy up abandoned houses, or any house in decent repair, I noticed something strange.

“Why is there nobody living here?”

Finding houses for the slash-and-burn farmers was not difficult. The land I had become master of was Hwaryeong Village, in Hwaryeong County, and it had no shortage of abandoned houses. I had not counted them exactly, but there had to be more than a hundred.

Is this why they gave me land here?

Nobody hands over forty acres of land for nothing. That much came home to me now. I went into the village, where the only people left were too old to move anywhere else, and asked.

“Why are there so few people here?”

“Mm? You’re from elsewhere, then.”

“I am. It struck me as strange, nothing but abandoned houses.”

“Ah, our Hwaryeong Village has had a name for bad ground since the old days.”

“Bad ground?”

“It’s famous for it — ghosts walking, night and day alike.”

“Ghosts?”

“That’s a face that doesn’t believe me. Stay a few days and you’ll know. That’s why folk hereabouts call this place the Ghost Domain.”

“Then why have you elders not left the village?”

“We’ve lived long enough that we’re not frightened even if a ghost carries us off. But the young ones have all gone. If there’s anyone left in the village, it’ll be nobody but old folk like us. They all went off to the neighboring counties.”

Hearing the elder out, I grasped what the trouble with this place was.

Ghosts? But it does not seem this came about by anyone’s mischief. By the elder’s account it was so in their grandfather’s day as well… That piled up over a long time until it became the Ghost Domain. What is the reason for it?

I had set out to do no more than look over houses fit for the slash-and-burn farmers, and here I was, tangled in something else entirely. My plan had been to secure the houses and then go on to Nanchang, the provincial capital, where my sworn brother was; finding out how he fared was one of my purposes in coming to Jiangxi at all, since we had entered the Murim Alliance in the same intake. But he would have to keep a while longer. Settle this first, or there would be an uproar about ghosts even after the slash-and-burn farmers had moved in.

Masters and rising talents of the unorthodox sects were gathering at the Hyeoncheon Sect. The sparring tournament at the sixtieth-birthday feast was where the warriors for the Dragon Martial Grand Tournament would be chosen, so nobody was treating it lightly.

I had no taste for crowds and bustle, so I left my party at the Guest Pavilion and went out again. The three escorts made to come with me; I told them to guard the party and set out alone.

Once I had set foot on the land I had been given, I looked into the flow of the water qi. I knew that talk of a place having bad energy usually comes back to the water veins.

Riding slowly round it, I found nothing but good land. The soil was rich, and a river ran through it, so the water supply was assured; the groundwater ran deep as well, which made it hard to see how the water veins could be working on anyone.

Why do they say ghosts come out here?

Nor was there a public graveyard, the stock ingredient of every ghost story. For two days I rode about checking the water qi, and then I found a strange place. On the ground near Poyang Lake, my senses caught a strong spirit energy.

Why does the spirit energy feel so strong here?

In all the time since I had come to know spirit energy, I had never met with any that seemed to wind itself around my whole body like this.

This is nothing but an ordinary village…

The village stood lined end to end with abandoned houses now, and yet, as though to show how it had once flourished, there was no trade it did not have a shop for. I set three spirit energies turning and searched my surroundings. And then I understood.

Ah! The spirit energy here is so strong that it gathers into a mass, gives off light, wavers — and people have taken it for a ghost.

Where spirit energy is strong it rises off the ground like a heat shimmer, and that can look like the swaying shape of a person. Especially after dark. To people who know nothing of spirit energy, it would be a ghost and nothing else.

I set myself to reading the flow of the water qi, concentrating on the ground beneath the village.

“What is that?”

My sense for qi caught a passage under the earth that ran like a great waterway. It felt nothing like groundwater, and it came to me that the channel might be man-made. I put my horse along that channel toward Poyang Lake.

So it starts here.

I came to a spot on Poyang Lake thick with jagged rock and looked to see where the water went in. Where the rocks were piled up until they looked like a stone hill, I waded in half-submerged and searched, and found a cave wide enough for three grown men to enter abreast.

There was no trace of anyone having come near the place. Hardly surprising. With so much rock the water whirled in eddies, and no boat could easily reach it.

Having come this far, and with my clothes soaked through anyway, I made up my mind to go into the cave. First I came out onto dry land and gathered wood and dry water-weed to make a torch, lit it with a fire starter, took it up and went in. Luckily the water came only to about my waist, so I could walk.

The passage holds too even a width to have been made by nature.

I could feel the flow of the water qi, and so I walked without much fear. The Heavenly Martial Sacred Body is a constitution without fear in it to begin with; but in a dark cave, a man who could not see the flow of the water qi would not know where the water ran off to, and fear would rise in him.

I walked in along the channel for the better part of an hour and came upon a great cavern. When I lifted my torch to it, I could not hold back my astonishment. In the middle of the open floor, on a flat rock the water did not reach, a snake with a body as thick as a tree you could not get your arms around sat coiled.

I read its blood flow, and was reassured.

“There is no blood flow at all — so it is dead.”

Seeing the two small horns on the snake’s head, I knew what it was.

“I never thought to see a Python Dragon here, a thing I had only ever seen in books.”

A Python Dragon was the spirit creature commonly called an imugi.¹

“It never became a dragon, and died when its span ran out.”

The trouble was that the imugi’s dying here had turned the place into a graveyard for the spirit creatures of Poyang Lake.

I held the torch up and looked around, and there was a great deal to see. A tortoise you might call a Ten-Thousand-Year Golden Tortoise; a fish that gave the feel of a Ten-Thousand-Year Fire Carp. There were fish carcasses too, of a size to be called Thousand-Year Fire Carp and Hundred-Year Fire Carp.

“Every last spirit creature of Poyang Lake died in this place. And the village will be right above this cavern. So the spirit energy runs strong, and the villagers have been seeing things.”

Had more time passed and more spirit creatures gathered here to die, there was every chance the spirit energy would have thickened past strength into poison qi. Spirit energy a human being cannot endure is no different from poison qi.

I looked about a while longer, and then turned my attention to the change in my own body. The cavern was full of spirit energy at a high density, and my body was absorbing it.

The Heavenly Martial Sacred Body is by nature a constitution that can absorb spirit energy, so however much I wished to stop, I could not. A small quantity of spirit energy I could control; spirit energy swollen to a flood would not be controlled.

“Ugh!”

As the spirit energy poured into my body past the brim, a pain as though I were being torn apart came over me. I folded myself hurriedly into the lotus and worked the Ghost Immortal’s Nine Nether Dark Prison Internal Art, straining to bring the spirit energy under control.

The heart of the art was, absurdly enough, deeply bound up with the Buddhist school. The Nine Nether and the Dark Prison both meant the place where Buddhism sets King Yama. It was not for nothing that the Ghost Immortal had devised martial arts out of death qi.

In an instant the internal art filled all thirteen spirit meridians with energy, and it condensed, and condensed again, and coiled.

“Hurrgh!”

Pain like balls of fire seared thirteen places in my body, and my mind went far away. In desperation I called up the last oral formula of the Nine Nether Dark Prison Internal Art. That too was one of the Buddhist scriptures, and I began to suspect the Ghost Immortal had been a monk to begin with.

A tree must let go of its blossom before it sets fruit, and a river must let go of the river before it reaches the sea.

The line came out of a verse of the Avatamsaka Sutra.²

The tree waits upon its flower,

only when the flower falls can the fruit come.

The river’s water flows and lets the river go,

only then can it enter the sea.

As I called the formula up, I realized a change had come over my body.

Set it against my own body and it reads out like this. Let go the clinging to the dantian and you gain true internal force; let internal force let go of the meridians and it gains true power.

The Seven Stars wheel-energy uses no more than a few spirit meridians. It clings to no other meridian.

Esoteric Buddhism’s working of the power counsels you simply to let the spirit energy go where it goes. That, it says, is the road the spirit energy wishes to take.

So it means: do not go binding it to a name like “meridian,” which men laid down and made.

Perhaps that was why a man’s internal power could never pass a hundred and eighty years’ worth, and why the vessel of the dantian, however large it grew, could not hold a hundred and eighty years.

It is the same principle as shutting a bird that flies well inside a cage and rearing it there — the bird will not fly well.

Perhaps the Ghost Immortal had never been a martial artist studying anything so small as ghost qi. They must have grasped it: let go the dantian and you gain true internal force, and let go the fixed notion that internal force must pass through the meridians and you gain true power.

“Ah! The Ghost Immortal was someone who studied the qi of nature!”

I had been mistaken all this while. The byname was Ghost Immortal, and every art they devised had to do with hell, so even I had taken them for nothing more than that.

“By nature’s own force everything comes at last to extinction, and the force of that extinction comes from the netherworld. The Ghost Immortal was studying the source of life. And had grasped that the source of life is not internal force but spirit force.”

Only now did the Ghost Immortal’s arts feel clear to me.

“So that is it? No wonder the Ghost Immortal’s arts stuck to Yeo-seol like rice cake.”

Yeo-seol’s body is one that takes in the qi of nature as a matter of course, so the Ghost Immortal’s arts could not help but suit her.

“And I, knowing none of it, was worrying myself over whether Yeo-seol was being steeped in ghost qi for nothing. Mount Tai may be called high, but it is only a hill under heaven³ — that is the truth of it.”

I felt the arrogance I had been carrying all that while, half without knowing it, go out of me. I had taken it for a plain verse of the Avatamsaka Sutra, but the Ghost Immortal had quoted it because their own insight was in it.

And in that moment.

For an instant I tasted release from my own body. In that same instant the spirit energy ran out through my whole body as it pleased.

“Yes — go where you will. Let go the blossom and set the fruit; let go the river and reach the sea!”

Every cell of my body was coming apart, one by one, and the feeling of it swept me into rapture.