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“It is the truth. And so they say a great many people are flocking to Hwaryeong Village. But as for the terms of settling there, three things must be kept without fail.”
“And what are they?”
“The first — commit murder, and your head is cut off without fail and you are cast out.”
“That is not casting a man out, that is killing him, is it not?”
“It means murder is repaid with murder.”
“And the second?”
“The second — one who thieves or robs has an arm cut off and is cast out.”
When no answer came from the room, Wind-Listener went on.
“The third — one who torments the weak has a foot cut off and is cast out.”
At the third term a voice full of complaint came out of the room at once.
“The first and the second I understand, but the third term is far too exacting. Tormenting the weak — is that not far too broad a thing? And besides, Jiangxi is unorthodox-sect ground. Does that not run against the order of the unorthodox sects, where the strong endure?”
Who in the world had thought up a thing like that? There was no chance the village headman had laid down terms so violent. What on earth had happened in Hwaryeong Village while I was away?
“That is why these days they call Hwaryeong County the Three-Without County. Murder; thieving and robbery; the tormenting of the weak. The one who proclaimed a village without these three is the Supreme Mak Yeo-heun, the Unorthodox King, True Lord.”
Hearing that, I lifted my eyes.
“How is it that the Unorthodox Supreme speaks words you’d expect from the Alliance Leader of the Murim Alliance?”
“Come now, our listener is a sorry case indeed. He handed down that proclamation precisely out of respect for Scholar Cheon. And is he not treating Hwaryeong County — the Three-Without County, as they call it now — as a buffer zone for the unorthodox sects? Which is to say he means Scholar Cheon to govern it.”
Another man let out a cry of wonder.
“Indeed! Truly he is the Unorthodox King, True Lord! What chivalrous hero could ever make a village so ideal a real thing! I shall run to the Three-Without County this instant and ask for a piece of land to live on myself.”
“As for the tax there, Scholar Cheon has said a tenth is enough, as funds for the running of the village.”
“If that is true, the Three-Without County may fairly be called an immortals’ realm in the world of men! The taxes low, and a man able to live with an easy mind.”
“If a man goes even now, can he get land?”
“Since Scholar Cheon is not there, I understand the Dark Heaven Sect is handling it in his stead at present. Go even now and you can receive land.”
At the next table some men were talking loudly.
“It is the Unorthodox Supreme who promises it, so it will be no empty promise.”
“If the Three-Without County is real, it may be the best village to live in in the whole country. They say the land Scholar Cheon was given as a gift runs to eighty acres, so I have a mind to get a strip of it and try living there myself.”
“Come then, let us eat and go straight there.”
“But I have a question. The state will take its tax off the top — how does that stand?”
“Paying the state its tax goes without saying; the interest on the loan of the land is the tenth.”
“If that is true it is a fine place to make a living. In a place like that the magistrate will not dare take much in tax.”
“Just so.”
As I ate, I felt as though the food would stick in my throat. All I had done, plainly, was parcel out farmland because I pitied the slash-and-burn farmers. And this was how the story of it got about?
And a proclamation of that kind from Mak Yeo-heun meant that in its wake a great many people had gone looking for Hwaryeong Village. As the place grew unruly he would have ended by laying down the three terms himself, to put a fright into them, since there was no chance unorthodox-sect people would keep them easily.
“If there were more men like Scholar Cheon, the world would not be in such disorder.”
Somebody’s sigh set it off, and from there they were bandying my name about and trumpeting every kind of praise. Listening to it, my very skin shrank.
Mak Yeo-heun is a shrewd one indeed. With Hwaryeong County’s people dwindling and the place turning into a dead village, this is how he draws them in. Numbers of people come to the same thing as martial power.
Mak Yeo-heun’s intent was all too plain to my eye. Even so, it came near enough to good will, however you took it, that it was hard to fault him for it. His byname had not earned the word “gentleman” for nothing.1 Had he not been the Unorthodox Supreme, he was a man well able to have been the Alliance Leader.
After that Wind-Listener held forth on Mak Yeo-heun’s sixtieth-birthday feast. I did not know the tale myself, so I listened a good while.
“While the subject is up, tell us about the winners of the sparring tournament at the sixtieth-birthday feast.”
“That will run to a long tale, and my throat is dry.”
When somebody stood him wine and good dishes with it, Wind-Listener began to hold forth again.
Black clouds settled down as far as the rooftops and then let loose rain in strands as thick as noodles.
— Shwaaak!
The shower showed no sign of stopping, so I went out of the eating house as I was. Afraid the herbs would get wet, I tucked them inside my robe. I had not walked in the rain for a long while, and it felt as though all the vexations of the world’s business that had worn on me were being washed away.
I came to the bridge over the Gan River, took my fill of the sight of the river under the rain, and crossed.
It was then.
From both ends of the bridge a band of people in broad-brimmed hats came on.
— Ruh-rumble! Whump!
With the thunder, lightning drove down into the trees round about. Even so, the people coming on showed not a flicker of a flinch.
By the stance and the aura of them — hired killers.
Their weapons did not match, and that alone was enough to tell.
The people who would send hired killers after me are few.
— Ku-roooom! Bang!
Lightning struck again. With hired killers in front of me, I let out a cry of wonder.
“Ah! Yes! That will do it! There is a way to cure Yu Seong’s madness! Why did I never think of it?”
Madness was the word I used, but what the lightning had handed me was a way to remove the Heavenly Slaughter Star, and so I paid the men coming on no attention. No, it was not inattention. I had no interest in them. Not even when they drew their blue-steel swords.
— Whirrip.
All at once a figure sprang up from under the bridge and came down on the bridge rail.
It was Yu Seong.
“Elder brother, did you call me?”
Yu Seong had a fishing rod slung over his shoulder. At the sight of him fishing on a day of rain, I snorted out a laugh.
Not a normal fellow, just as I thought.
“Elder brother. I have a request.”
“What is it?”
“I am sorry to ask, but might I not kill these fellows?”
The apologetic look vanished on the instant, and in its place came the eyes of a man who wanted to play with a new toy.
“Whew. We had better at least ask.”
We had to ask who they had come to kill.
“I shall ask them.”
Yu Seong drew his sword and, looking at the men coming on from both sides, asked.
“Hey. You want to be fish food? Or wolf food?”
“Madman! At him!”
At his words the men holding weapons on both sides threw themselves forward.
“That is not it. I meant whether they have truly come to kill me.”
“Let us kill them first and look for the evidence after.”
A hungry man eats first and thinks later; that was his way. He grinned at the fellows rushing him.
“Hope they’re a bit strong.”
But it did not go as Yu Seong wished. They lasted no time at all against his sword strokes and died one after another. It was not that the martial artists in the broad-brimmed hats were weak; his sword was so fast that two heads fell at every stroke.
“H-he is not one we can face. Run!”
Yu Seong chased the fleeing martial artists down and drove his sword into their hearts, every one.
“You come as you please when you come to kill, but you don’t go as you please. That’s no merchant’s honor at all.”
He put a question to a man who was all but dead.
“Hey. This isn’t all of you, is it? There’s more, isn’t there? If there are, tell them to get here quick.”
Yu Seong’s eyes glistened, and the energy of the Heavenly Slaughter Star came flowing out through them.
The martial artist was already dead, his eyes open.
“They’ve got to be a bit strong for the cutting to taste of anything.”
He spat out the grisly words without a moment’s hesitation.
“Young Hero Yu.”
“Yes?”
“I know a way to cure Young Hero Yu’s madness. Have you any mind to be treated?”
“Truly?”
His face lit up, and then his look turned gloomy.
“But if the madness is cured, I do not think it will be much fun.”
The pleasure he took in killing was great enough that giving it up would come hard.
“You would do well to cure it. Otherwise you will become a public enemy of the murim.”
Yu Seong took my meaning and asked with a grave face.
“If I am treated, can I become normal?”
“That is a matter to think about once we have tried the treatment. Even if the madness is not wholly cured, would half of it not be enough?”
“What is the method?”
I asked him.
“In the Thunder Dragon Sect, are you practicing the internal art in which the Thunderbolt Qi runs strongest?”
Yu Seong nodded.
“Yes.”
“And your degree of mastery?”
“Around the seventh degree.”
“What is the internal art called?”
“The Black Dragon Myriad Kalpa Internal Art2.”
“It will be a long time, I imagine, since you last got past the seventh degree.”
“Eh? How does elder brother know that?”
“There are ways of knowing these things.”
“Indeed — they call elder brother the Myriad-Learned Scholar, and it was true. To know even our house’s internal art.”
There was an artless streak in Yu Seong. He was the sort to marvel rather than to doubt. A man who found that I knew the Thunder Dragon Sect’s secret supreme art ought to have asked first of all how I came by it. Then again, he had been born with a Heavenly Slaughter Star and had still lived under Mak Jin-yul’s bullying all the same; his nature, in itself, was not a bad one.
I said to Yu Seong.
“Does Young Hero Yu know the cause of the madness?”
“…”
Silence is assent.
“Do you know of a thing called the Heavenly Slaughter Star?”
Yu Seong looked at me steadily, then opened his mouth.
“That is a thing nobody has known. How does elder brother know it so well?”
“I am a scholar who specializes in the schooling of hellions. Do you know how many hellions have passed through my hands? Treat enough people with that kind of madness and you come to know.”
Yu Seong could not know what lay behind it. To find out my mother’s constitution and my own I had studied every constitution that exists in the world, and that study was what had made me a physician able to treat any constitution at all.
“If the Heavenly Slaughter Star’s energy is removed, can I become a good man?”
I said it flatly.
“That a man born with a Heavenly Slaughter Star has not become a murdering fiend up to now is remarkable in itself. It is a thing only possible if the nature underneath is good to begin with.”
So I told him, though in truth the likelihood was that his internal art had been holding the Heavenly Slaughter Star down all along. Practicing an internal art strong in the Thunderbolt Qi, he would have burned its energy away a little at a time and suppressed it without ever knowing. Watching the lightning, I had thought as much: that the Thunderbolt Qi had blocked it, and that was why it had never shown itself until now.
Now, though, the internal art had stopped advancing, and the Heavenly Slaughter Star’s energy had grown strong enough that he could no longer hold the urge to kill down. And I thought I saw, dimly, why the Black Dragon Myriad Kalpa Internal Art would go no further either.
Yu Seong said.
“It has always been my dream to become a good man. Our house may be of the unorthodox sects, but I have always liked the sight of people being happy.”
Yu Seong made a grotesque sight, confessing that among the corpses, soaked through with rain and his blade still in his hand.
“The reason I like elder brother, too, is that elder brother makes other people happy. The people of Hwaryeong Village, elder brother’s companions — look at them and they always wear happy faces. And it looks good to me, and then the urge to destroy comes over me, the wish to break that happiness, and that torments me.”
His nature was kind, and the Heavenly Slaughter Star laid the urge to kill and to destroy on him at once; that was where the agony came from.
“I do not want to become a monster who takes pleasure in killing people either.”
He said it to me with something running down his face that might have been tears and might have been rain. To me that rainwater felt like Yu Seong’s tears.
“Then will you try it as I have said?”
Yu Seong nodded.
“The method is that you must grasp the ultimate truth of the Black Dragon Myriad Kalpa Internal Art. Only then does a chance of removing the Heavenly Slaughter Star arise. It has to burn your innate true qi, you see.”
“Not even in our house has anyone grasped the Black Dragon Myriad Kalpa Internal Art beyond the tenth degree. How then am I to grasp it?”
“I can make you grasp it.”
“Truly?”
“But I must know the Black Dragon Myriad Kalpa Internal Art’s oral formula. Could you open it to me?”
Yu Seong could not go on for a moment, and then spoke as though he had made up his mind.
“You are my elder brother, so I can tell it to you.”
“On no more than that?”
“You do not understand at all. Master Scholar Cheon is the first man I have ever called elder brother.”
That much meant it was no glib talk, but a heart truly given. What Yu Seong saw in me I did not know, but with a heart like that it was worth trying.
“Very well. They say an ox’s horn is best pulled while the heat is still in it. Let us try tonight.”
“Can it be done as soon as that?”
“It can. Try trusting me.”
Yu Seong nodded.
“I trust you. You are the man this Yu Seong calls elder brother.”
There was something earnest about the fellow, though I could not say what. I watched him go off delighted as an excited child, and thought.
A man’s good fortune lies less in meeting many good people than in meeting few bad ones. Good people are thin on the ground in the real world, after all. But if I make a good man and then meet him — is that not making my own fortune with my own hands?
And besides, in helping Yu Seong I was perhaps doing the thing in its true sense: hoe out one evil, and ten goods grow.
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