There's A Reason For Everything

“Sleeping rough again?”

Mak Jin-yul had prattled and grumbled the whole day long, and this time she pitched it loud enough that I was plainly meant to hear. She was answering my order to go and find a place to sleep rough.

“Didn’t I tell you? If you don’t like it, just go.”

“Junior Brother, kill that scholar fellow.”

“I am to do it?”

“Why? Are you frightened? Kill him and I’ll take all the responsibility.”

“Surely not. More than once or twice I have believed those words, gone and done the thing, and been scolded for it. And once the thing was done, Senior Sister ran away.”

“That’s all in the past. I’m not like that now.”

I took the words up.

“A person’s nature does not change. If it has changed, they are only pretending to have changed.”

“I agree with that. And—”

Yu Seong looked at me and smiled.

“I cannot beat the Master Scholar.”

“What kind of nonsense is that? He’s a scholar.”

“Do you not remember how he left Senior Sister unable to stir a finger, before we set out?”

“That was because I was off my guard and the fellow worked a black art.”

Yu Seong shook his head.

“Do you remember the hellion Senior Sister called a dangerous fellow?”

“I remember. His name was Wang something-or-other. Thoroughly vicious, sly, and a lecher. And a fellow like that was a first-rate master besides.”

“That fellow had a sparring match with that Master Scholar there and came out half a cripple. Every bone in his body broken — they say he will have to keep to a bed for some years.”

“What? Is that true?”

“I saw it with my own eyes; why would I lie? The man called Wang Sim was one who went about boasting that he was past first-rate and nearing transcendent-first-rate. And I thought so myself. He toyed with a man like that.”

“…”

Mak Jin-yul was a daughter of a martial house, and she knew far too well what that meant. If anything the words hardened her face instead, as though the spite and the grudge in her had only grown. Yu Seong watched and went on smiling faintly.

The pair of them were carrying on right beside me, so every word of it reached me clearly. I spoke to Mak Jin-yul.

“Hey! Mad Flower.”

Mak Jin-yul, her cheeks trembling wildly at my words.

“A person who plays at being unusually kind can be the greatest villain of all.”

She must have taken it for an insult to herself, because she barked back.

“Is that aimed at me?”

“Who would ever think the Mad Flower kind?”

Yu Seong’s eyes glinted at that.

“In all this time, has your junior brother ever once fought back when you hit him? Has he ever so much as frowned when you cursed him? Is your junior brother kinder than the Buddha?”

Mak Jin-yul opened her mouth to protest, then turned my words over carefully and looked at Yu Seong with doubt in her eyes.

“Now that I think about it, that’s true. He’s never once been angry with me or fought back. Even when I burned his hair off he just grinned and grinned.”

What astonished me more was that nobody had ever pointed it out before.

“Junior Brother, what are you scheming?”

“It is because Senior Sister is my Senior Sister.”

The smile still had not left Yu Seong’s face.

“You — don’t come near me for a while.”

Something uncanny in it brought Mak Jin-yul to her feet, and she went into the tent.

Yu Seong gave a faint smile.

“Are you not driving me rather hard in order to educate Senior Sister?”

“You mistake me. I drew Miss Mak away so that Young Hero Yu might have it a little easier.”

“Indeed. That is worthy of the man I have my eye on.”

Yu Seong left those weighted words behind him and went back to his own sleeping place.

By rights it was time to turn in, but Mak Ji-mong was still outside, drinking cup for cup with Gwanryong Jin. The two of them seemed to have a fair history between them and were talking a great deal, and Mak Ji-mong’s face looked bright with it.

I had expected Mak Ji-mong to raise a fuss about his internal force dropping, but for some reason not a word of it came. As I came up, he spoke first.

“Coming out really was the right call. Ever since we left our sect my body’s felt clear. Since last night there’s been a kind of vitality going round in me.”

Last night was when I had drawn the Flying Dantian out of his dantian.

He says the exact opposite of what I expected. Can it be that he does not know what it feels like for internal force to fall away sharply?

I shook my head. That could not be. He had not reached first-rate, but his skill and his internal force sat close to it.

He made no particular fuss even when I came right up beside him, so I put it to the test.

“That — such a thing can also happen when something has gone wrong with the body. I know medicine well. Shall I read your pulse?”

Not long ago he would have poured out every kind of curse the moment those words were out of my mouth. He had thought of a scholar as something like his own servant, and at the mention of a pulse-reading he would have come at me to kill me.

“Eh? Scholar Cheon is outstanding in medicine?”

“Just so. I was famous for it in the Murim Alliance and in the Namgung Clan alike.”

When I did not use plain speech but treated him courteously, Mak Ji-mong tilted his head to one side. Right up until they left the Hyeoncheon Sect the two of them had been on terms of trading words until the veins stood out in their necks.

I smiled and said,

“We are outside now, and there are a great many of the Hyeoncheon Sect’s men about. How could I use plain speech to the Young Sect Leader of the Hyeoncheon Sect?”

Mak Ji-mong shook his head.

“However I turn it over, Mak Jin-yul’s no match for Scholar Cheon. If it were anybody else I’d call it my younger sister’s win, but Scholar Cheon could steam Jin-yul and eat her and have room left over.”

His hostility toward me had certainly fallen off.

“Very well. Read my pulse.”

Gwanryong Jin was startled out of his wits at the words. He knew very well how Mak Ji-mong had treated scholars until now. And that man was handing his pulse to a scholar? On top of that, ever since that affair long ago, he had understood that the Young Sect Leader let neither scholar nor physician read his pulse.

Wine cup in hand, he stared at the two of them, still as a waiting-wife stone¹.

It settled the matter for Cheon Tae-san. Mak Ji-mong felt an affection for him, and the Flying Dantian had done its work properly.

Mak Ji-mong, for his part, was confident. He had nothing to fear, with Gwanryong Jin and his men ranged all about, ready to take the scholar’s head off on the spot if he tried anything suspicious. And though he had asked the question, his own inquiries had already told him that Scholar Cheon was outstanding in medicine.

Cheon Tae-san took Mak Ji-mong’s pulse and sent spirit energy into him. Before long he found something astonishing.

This fellow’s body is a lump of spirit medicine itself. How much can he have eaten, that the energy of the spirit medicines has stopped up every meridian in him?

To put it another way: sugar has to be stirred into water to make sugar water, and this was as though one dipperful of water had been poured into a jar full of sugar. Do that and the sugar does not dissolve. It congeals instead, hardening into a lump of stone. The very same thing had happened inside Mak Ji-mong’s body. So although the Flying Dantian had absorbed ten years’ worth of internal force, what it took was the internal force blocking his meridians, and his body felt the lighter for it.

At this rate I could absorb another ten years’ worth of internal force from Mak Ji-mong. There is still so much of the spirit medicines’ energy left that it stops up every meridian he has. No — the Flying Dantian is the only way to cure Mak Ji-mong’s body.

Still, a question remained.

But how did nobody know this? A physician of the Hyeoncheon Sect’s standing should have been able to make out this much.

Cheon Tae-san let go of the pulse and asked Mak Ji-mong.

“Young Sect Leader, you have never once had a physician read your pulse after taking a spirit medicine, have you?”

“How do you know that? Did you find that out from the pulse?”

Mak Ji-mong was startled. Even inside the sect, nobody knew this but the leadership. Gwanryong Jin had been captain of the escort guarding him at the time, so it was a fact he knew well.

“You have taken spirit medicine more than once or twice — why have you never had a physician read your pulse? With the meridians blocked to this degree it must have been painful.”

Mak Ji-mong did not answer, so Gwanryong Jin spoke in his place.

“I shall answer that for him. Long ago a physician made a show of reading his pulse and struck at him from hiding, and from that time on he has taken no physician’s pulse-reading.”

And even so he has handed me his pulse. He is far less set against me than I thought. A very good sign.

Cheon Tae-san nodded.

“Then it makes sense. Why the Young Sect Leader’s body has come to be in such a state. Every time you worked the power, the dantian and the meridians hurt as though they were tearing, did they not?”

“No! How could you know that!”

This was something he had never let out to a single soul.

“With the body hurting as though it would tear every time you worked the power, you could not help but avoid training in the martial arts.”

Mak Ji-mong shifted in close and sat right up against Cheon Tae-san.

“Ah — what we’re talking about now mustn’t leak outside.”

The state of the Hyeoncheon Sect’s Young Sect Leader’s body was not one man’s problem alone.

“Do not be concerned. I thought as much, and I put up a qi screen beforehand and shut the sound in.”

Nothing they had said could reach anyone but the three of them there. Mak Ji-mong marveled at how thoroughly Cheon Tae-san had prepared.

“Indeed! Meticulous enough to be hateful. But is there a way to treat it? I have searched the medical texts and gone to physicians to ask, and there was no solution.”

He had evidently gone hunting for a cure in his own way, but with the cause unknown to him no solution could ever come of it.

“Only now do I see why the Young Sect Leader’s level of attainment does not even reach first-rate. It is not that you are lazy by nature; you could not help but be lazy. Had you forced yourself to train, you would have fallen into qi deviation and died long ago.”

The fright had come first, then the hint that he knew something, and a light began to waver in Mak Ji-mong’s eyes. Cheon Tae-san knew that light for passion.

But for the body-tearing pain that came every time he trained, Mak Ji-mong would have been willing to train the night through. He knew well enough that he was the Unorthodox Supreme’s only heir, the one who would have to lead the unorthodox sects next. Once he grasped that with this body of his he could never become a master, though, he began to go astray. Unease and discontent, and rage at the situation he was in, all worked themselves off in the wrong places, and by the time he understood it he had set foot on a road there was no coming back from.

A vicious circle that went on however he tried to turn back.

And so Mak Ji-mong slowly became a hellion.

At the start it had been nothing much. The factions presented them as precious spirit medicines, and all he did was eat every one of them to make himself strong. Then a problem arose, and a problem like that had to be settled through a physician; because he could not trust physicians, it had come to this.

“Scholar Cheon. Can you cure me!”

“In all the world there will be no one but myself who can cure the Young Sect Leader.”

“I’m asking whether you can do it.”

“I can.”

“Haa!”

Mak Ji-mong felt as though the stone that had been weighing on his chest had finally been pulled free.

“Cure me, and I will grant Scholar Cheon everything he wants.”

Cheon Tae-san heard it and broke into a grin.

“Such words are not to be said lightly.”

“No. These are the words of the next Unorthodox Supreme.”

Cheon Tae-san could not deny that Mak Ji-mong would become the next Unorthodox Supreme once he was cured.

Mak Yeo-heun would make it so.

“I have already received an enormous gift from the Supreme. It is time I made a return for that gift.”

“That is the gift my father promised. It is not a gift from me.”

“If you insist, then what I want is simply to be on elder-brother-and-younger-brother terms with the Young Sect Leader.”

Before he knew it Mak Ji-mong had taken Cheon Tae-san’s hand, and having taken it he flinched, startled at his own act.

That was how desperate he was.

“From the moment you cure me, Scholar Cheon becomes my sworn younger brother.”

“There is no greater gift than that. The next Unorthodox Supreme under heaven becoming my sworn elder brother.”

“Bwahahaha!”

For once, Mak Ji-mong loosed a great laugh at the sky.

“Seeing it now, I cannot but be truly grateful to my father. For bringing Scholar Cheon here as my master of letters. I have borne my father a good deal of resentment until now, but after this I shall never resent him again.”

Gwanryong Jin, watching from beside them, found his chest tight for no reason he could name. He had been captain of the escort through all the years the Young Sect Leader went astray, and it pained his heart. Now it seemed the Young Sect Leader would truly become the Unorthodox Supreme’s heir, and his heart swelled full with it. He was so grateful to Scholar Cheon, who had made all of this possible, that he could have bowed to the ground before him.