A Different World

A blue energy condensed in Yu Seong’s eyes and then vanished.

“How is it?”

Yu Seong smiled faintly at the question.

“They said that once the Black Dragon Myriad Kalpa is completed, the thunder qi fills not only the lower dantian but the middle dantian and the upper dantian as well. Before, I had thunder qi in the lower dantian alone.”

Yu Seong stretched out his hand.

— Sizzzk!

A thick bolt of lightning shot out through the window and struck a tree in the garden.

— Ka-krrrunch!

The tree burned and split wide open.

“That is the Thunderclap Palm. Before, I had only learned it and never so much as thought of unfolding it. But now that the thunder qi has taken full hold as far as the upper dantian, it has become possible.”

I knew what those words meant.

“If the thunder qi has filled you as far as the upper dantian — then the Heavenly Slaughter Star?”

“Elder brother was right. I cannot feel the Heavenly Slaughter Star’s energy. As the upper dantian filled with thunder qi, it seems the Heavenly Slaughter Star’s energy burned away.”

“That’s good. That’s very good. I’ll make time later and undo the seal for you.”

“No. Let the seal be. The Heavenly Slaughter Star’s energy is gone, but there is no telling whether it may come again. I will carry this seal all my life.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“It is elder brother, of all people, who is able to lay a seal on me. That is why I trust it.”

“That’s a relief. A real relief.”

If it had gone wrong, Yu Seong could have died. Looking back on it now, he and I had done nothing less than gamble with our own lives as the stakes on the table.

“What is it! What’s happened!”

Hohyeon Byeok’s voice came from outside.

“Tae-san! Are you all right? Has something happened? They told me you’d said nobody was to go in or out!”

The voice shouting out there was thick with worry. I went out, and as Yu Seong and I came through the door, Hohyeon Byeok let out a breath of relief.

“Lightning came down in the garden out of nowhere — you’re all right, aren’t you?”

Mak Jin-yul stood beside him, her escort at her shoulder holding an umbrella over her.

“Mm, I’m all right. Yu Seong was circulating the qi, so I was standing guard for him.”

“Standing guard? Young Hero Yu must have gained an insight, then.”

I nodded, and Mak Jin-yul spoke up.

“Seong got an insight? Really? I’ll know it if I look at him. Seong, come here.”

Yu Seong answered listlessly.

“What for?”

“What for? Did you just say what for to me?”

“Yes. What am I to do when you tell me to come with no reason given?”

“Huh? Did you get an insight, or did you get a mouth on you?”

“It is not that. I am no dog, to come when I am called and go when I am sent.”

The words were so unlike him that I stared. Until now he had refused Mak Jin-yul nothing whatever. He could have taken the sparring tournament at Mak Yeo-heun’s sixtieth-birthday feast; when she said only “Come along with me,” this was the Yu Seong who threw the victory away and followed after her.

“Do not handle me so roughly. You may be my Senior Sister, but I should like us to keep some courtesy between us.”

Did those words strike her so hard? Mak Jin-yul staggered in her astonishment.

“Miss Mak.”

Hohyeon Byeok put out a hand to steady her.

“Has this bastard gone out of his mind with wanting to die? You’re refusing me? Now?”

“I am not refusing. It is only that you tell me to come out when it is raining.”

“Would you look at this. Answering back to every word. Are you coming here or not?”

“If there is something you wish to say, say it from there. Or else come here yourself.”

Yu Seong said it and went into the room.

“Eh! Eh? Hey! You! Get over here…!”

Mak Jin-yul was on the point of flying into a fit when Hohyeon Byeok spoke.

“Miss Mak. As you know, a martial artist’s feelings are troubled once he has gained an insight, are they not?”

“Is that so? I’ve never had that happen.”

“That is because Miss Mak is a genius outright. Ordinary martial artists like us are troubled to the point of madness. Young Hero Yu is likely in that state as well.”

“Hm. Hearing Young Master Hohyeon say it, I suppose that must be so.”

Listening to the two of them talk, I took a worse shock than Yu Seong’s rebellion had given me.

Mak Jin-yul was holding a normal conversation.

“Hey, Scholar Cheon. Explain to me later what’s going on with Yu Seong.”

Hohyeon Byeok spoke as one soothes a small child.

“Miss Mak, Cheon Tae-san is my friend. If you would treat him as you treat me, I think I should be greatly moved.”

“Aha. Is that so?”

It was growing more outlandish by the moment.

“Scholar Cheon. I spoke too roughly. It seems the grudge I’ve been carrying over Scholar Cheon slapping me across the face hasn’t worked itself out after all.”

Hohyeon Byeok coaxed Mak Jin-yul gently along and disappeared with her, and as he went he waved a hand behind his back.

He works terribly hard just to get by. Well — it takes as much as that for a house to survive. Making one’s way in the world is no easy business.

For humoring Mak Jin-yul alone, Hohyeon Byeok deserved praise.

“You have done a truly useless thing. Had you but spoken a word of it to me, I would have arranged some other method.”

Gal U-heon rebuked the man in front of him.

“Even so, there was no way to work off the grudge but to buy hired killers.”

“Tsk, tsk. He is not a fellow to be killed by hired killers of that shabby sort.”

Gu Jin-ha had not known Scholar Cheon was so great a master. Half of all the money he had gathered up to now had gone into buying hired killers and sending them at Scholar Cheon, and every group he sent came back wiped out to a man. He had come all the way down to Jiangxi to see the business through, and it galled him that it had gone awry.

“As it stands, this old man and you alike have the look of men driven out of the Murim Alliance on that fellow’s account.”

Gal U-heon said it with a hollow air, and Gu Jin-ha bit his lip.

“Corps Chief Wang laid my offenses bare in his report, and there was nothing for it but to take off my robes.”

“To this old man’s eye, it looks fortunate enough that you were not shut in the prison.”

“The new Inspection Corps Chief was lenient with me, and it ended with my leaving the Alliance.”

“Had that fellow been in the Murim Alliance, you would have been shut in the prison.”

Gu Jin-ha shuddered all over at that.

“And so — what do you mean to do now?”

“What else is there? Whatever means it takes, I must have my revenge on him.”

“Revenge…”

Gal U-heon looked at him steadily and narrowed his eyes.

“Do you suppose that is possible?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Scholar Cheon is not the scholar you used to know.”

“I have heard as much. That he has the Unorthodox Supreme’s son in hand now and is schooling him.”

“That is not the whole of it. Whatever fortuitous encounter that scholar fellow Cheon may have had, he has become a peak master. A master this old man could not lightly handle.”

Gu Jin-ha shook his head.

“How is a scholar to become a master? Even when he was at the Alliance he was a fellow who dug at nothing but his books, day and night without cease. Now and then he learned some music and some medicine, but he never went near the martial arts.”

“That is precisely what is frightening. That he learned a little and became such a master. Do you know what that means?”

Gu Jin-ha only stared blankly, and Gal U-heon murmured low.

“In the murim they call such a man a martial talent such as appears once in a hundred years. This old man has looked into it, and it seems he learned his martial arts while he was at the Namgung Clan. The art he uses is the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique. That they passed the secret martial learning of the direct line to a scholar fellow is strange enough; stranger still is that the fellow carried it as far as full mastery.”

“He must have worked some black art, surely. How is a man to come to full mastery of an art he began learning past twenty? I have never so much as heard of such a marvel.”

“Whatever else may be doubted, it is certain that he fought Demonic Cult men and drove them off with overwhelming force. Which is why this old man has grown so very careful.”

“There is a way.”

Gu Jin-ha had not given up his revenge. Murder moved in his eyes, and Gal U-heon asked.

“What way?”

“I looked into it, and I hear he is taking people onto the land the Unorthodox Supreme gave him. I mean to slip hired killers in among those people. Then, if the chance comes, I mean to kill him. If that will not do, I mean to raise a murder in that place and bring his renown down.”

That was a way even Gal U-heon had not thought of.

“Hahaha. That is not a bad way at all. Is it because you are a scholar? The way you use your head is quite ingenious.”

To Gal U-heon as well the way seemed better than any other. Who would ever think that one of the men let onto Scholar Cheon’s own domain would be the one to assassinate him?

“Go ahead with it. This old man will be at your side to help.”

Taking the Flying Dantian out and looking Mak Ji-mong’s condition over, I found his blocked meridians coming loose at last.

By today the congealed energy of the spirit medicine that has been blocking the meridians will all have come loose.

I put the Flying Dantian back in and, for form’s sake, gave him the decoction and applied the needles.

“This is the last of it. You must not circulate the qi yet, and until I say it is done you must on no account try to move your true qi.”

“Of course. A thousand considerations, and still one slip, as they say. I have not let go the thread of my caution for a moment.”

Mak Ji-mong seemed to think this chance was his last. He looked desperate and in earnest.

The Flying Dantian has gathered in ten years’ worth of internal power. Which makes twenty years’ worth of internal force I have absorbed from Mak Ji-mong altogether — ten years’ worth while we were at the Dark Heaven Sect, and ten years’ worth of internal qi here at the Hohyeon Estate. And with the spirit energy of so much spirit medicine packed into him, no wonder his meridians were all blocked.

And considering that back at the Dark Heaven Sect’s pavilion he had seen my dantian and swallowed it down, taking it for a spirit medicine, the man was all but mad with wanting to die.

I was in good humor, and I grinned.

So with this, the internal power in my Flying Dantian, counting what I took from Mak Jin-yul before, will come to a little under thirty years’ worth.

Internal power of that order was near enough to what a great house’s heirs pile up from childhood.

Would it be better to take the one Dragon Blood Pill I have left and push past thirty-five years’ worth?

But I soon shook my head. I had left that last Dragon Blood Pill untouched so that my mother could take it when I met her. My own body had already undergone the soul-changing rebirth through spirit energy, so I had no great greed for internal force. Though of course, as internal force piled up in the Flying Dantian, a greed I had never had before grew in me a little at a time.

But my Flying Dantian can absorb another man’s internal force, so there is no need to go coveting spirit medicine.

The thought of my mother brought another with it. I had not managed to send her a letter in some time, and I was sorry for it. While I was at the Namgung Clan I had at least written often and asked after her.

The Namgung clan head said he would set men to bringing her to the Namgung Clan, so I must wait and see.

Still, it eased my mind that Namgung Hak was giving it his attention.

A stifled feeling came over me, and I went outside. Yu Seong was standing there, staring at nothing. He was looking at the room where the coffins with the poison men in them were kept.

Yu Seong said to me.

“Elder brother, would it not be better to burn the poison men now? I absorbed the poison qi, but poison qi remains in them still, so it is dangerous even to bury them in the ground.”

“No. If the Dang Sect of Sichuan demands them later, I’ll have to hand them over.”

“Is there any need of that?”

“They’ll know the poison men are with me. By now they’ll have heard by rumor that I took them off Gal U-heon. And if I dispose of them as I please even so, they won’t forgive me.”

“I should not think they would forgive you for handing over poison men with no poison in them either.”

“They don’t know why the poison went. I need only say there was no poison in them from the moment I took them off Gal U-heon.”

“Whoaa, elder brother. You really are a frightening man. You are throwing the whole responsibility onto Gal U-heon, are you not?”

I had told him where the poison men came from, so Yu Seong knew about Gal U-heon as well.

I grinned.

“I’m no Buddha. I’m not the sort of man who shows mercy even to the fellows who mean to kill me.”

“Hahaha! You are my elder brother after all. A man has to have some poison in him.”

In the middle of laughing, Yu Seong tilted his head and looked at me. He had the look of a man who had come upon something strange.

“What is it?”

“Elder brother! Did I — did I just laugh?”

I thought I knew why Yu Seong was so startled.

“I have always laughed along when other people laughed. Because it would be strange if I alone did not. But just now the laughter truly came of itself. This is the first time I have ever laughed alone, of my own accord.”

By this alone I could take it that much of the Heavenly Slaughter Star’s energy was gone. Even so, he wanted watching a while longer.

“So when one laughs like this, the muscles of the face move like this.”

Still astonished, by the look of him, Yu Seong laughed and felt at his face.

“Elder brother, when I laugh, the world looks as different as this.”

“Brother, as a rule, when I laugh, all creation laughs along.”