What's Your Identity?

The road to the Dark Heaven Sect ran smoothly enough on the whole, apart from Mak Jin-yul’s fits of temper now and then. That was no wonder. Mak Ji-mong, for one, had come by a good deal more ease of mind and fussed far less than before.

With the Young Sect Leader traveling in company, Gwanryong Jin, Corps Chief of the Dark Heaven Asura Corps, and his followers could hardly be at their ease. But where before Mak Ji-mong had been prickly and rude and put everyone about him out of countenance, now that side of him was gone.

“He is a changed man altogether.”

“Master Scholar Cheon must have schooled him properly.”

“They call him a scholar who specializes in schooling hellions, and so he is indeed. It was not for nothing that the Supreme asked for him.”

“And the young lady Mak Jin-yul has changed too.”

“I never so much as hoped to see those two change in my lifetime.”

Whenever the warriors got together they whispered on and on about the change in the pair of them, which was proof enough of how much weight those two carried, and of how much worry they had cost everyone.

“Thinking back on it now, in the fighting against the Demonic Cult too, if it had not been for the Scholar Divine Sword our own losses would have been heavy.”

“Of course. I was appalled, watching him stand at the head of us and butcher Demonic Cult masters with a single sword stroke.”

“A shiver went through me, seeing him throw a boulder and turn a Demonic Cult Corps Chief into dried meat.”

More often than not, the warriors of the Dark Heaven Asura Corps greeted Scholar Cheon with awe in their eyes when they came upon him. Scholar Cheon felt something there that neither the Murim Alliance nor the Namgung Clan had ever given him.

The unorthodox-sect people are certainly simple, and honest with it.

The party took a leisurely midday meal at an eating house and went on along the official road for an hour or so.

“Halt!”

Gwanryong Jin stopped and looked ahead. A single cart stood at the tail of an escort agency’s column on the road, and since it sat squarely in the middle there was no getting past unless it moved aside. A martial artist of the Dark Heaven Asura Corps went ahead to scout and came back with his report.

“The wheel of a cart loaded with escort goods has broken and they are fitting a new one. We shall have to wait a little.”

It crossed Cheon Tae-san’s mind that these might be the hired killers who had ambushed him, and he set the three spirit energies turning. The blood flow of everyone round about came through clear.

This—!

The men repairing the cartwheel were escort hands, and yet the blood flow he caught off them was the kind that shows chiefly in martial artists.

Escort guards without one escort hand among them?

Every blood flow his sense for qi picked up carried the marks of a martial artist.

Cheon Tae-san unfolded the Nine Nether Ghost-Spirit Footwork and went up into a tree nearby. From there he counted ten carts or so, twenty men dressed as escort guards, and ten or so dressed as escort hands. At the very head of the convoy another cart seemed to have broken down, and he could make out men at work repairing it.

Carts at the head and the tail of the convoy, both broken down, both under repair?

Something was off, and looking more closely he found a carriage standing about the middle of the column, a carriage that had nothing to do with the convoy. It looked for all the world like one that had set out on the road and had the ill luck to get caught in the middle of an escort convoy. The wrongness of it nagged at him, and Cheon Tae-san widened his field of view.

Out of the carriage caught in the middle stepped a man and a woman.

“Mm?”

Their faces were familiar, and when he looked with more attention he remembered who they were.

Those are the young people I saw at the eating house in Nanchang, the day I went out to buy herbs.

The four handsome young men and women had looked like orthodox-faction warriors in plain dress, as if they had come merely to tour the famous sights of Jiangxi. Reading the blood flow of the four, he judged that they were most likely the same people.

Are they after those four?

Cheon Tae-san held the thought and watched a while longer. If they had gone to the length of disguising themselves as an escort convoy to make the attack, the young warriors could hardly be of ordinary station either.

The coachman of the carriage the young people rode in chose that moment to ask one of the escort guards what the trouble ahead was.

The escort guard’s sword came out through the coachman’s back.

“Kill them!”

At somebody’s order the escort guards and escort hands swarmed in. Two men and a woman came out of the carriage and sprang up off the official road, but the escort guards cut off their line of retreat as though they had looked for exactly that.

Not knowing the whole of the business, Cheon Tae-san did not step in at once. Living as a scholar in the murim had taught him no few lessons. The weak are not good and righteous for being weak, and where the few are set upon by the many, the many may yet not be the evil ones. In the murim, where grudges tangle and knot together, to step carelessly into another man’s swordplay was to roll oneself in the mire.

The four young warriors were fine martial artists, and they held off the attacks of the escort guards and escort hands. Happily, there was no master among the attackers who looked able to overwhelm the four. Then the martial arts the attacking escort guards were unfolding caught his eye.

Look at those fellows.

The sword techniques and saber techniques they unfolded were far too familiar to Cheon Tae-san. Martial arts every martial artist of the Dark Heaven Sect knew.

The Black Blood Saber Technique.

The Twelve Revolving Wheels Sword Technique.

The Lost Track Footwork.

This martial learning and this footwork were in truth of the higher martial arts, but decades ago Mak Yeo-heun had simplified them somewhat so that anyone of the unorthodox sects could learn them, and on that account the martial standing of the unorthodox sects had been able to rise so fast. Unorthodox-sect people had always learned their martial arts each in his own way, so that they could hardly bring out their proper strength; he had unified their scattered methods into a single system, and with it drawn their martial standing up.

Cheon Tae-san too had once seen these martial arts in the Murim Alliance’s martial repository and marveled at Mak Yeo-heun’s genius. They were martial learning that used only about a hundred meridians, and yet their power stood level with martial learning that used some hundred and fifty. Which is to say, they gave back far more than they cost. And since they could be handed on to anyone at all of the unorthodox sects, they had spread widely as well.

The escort guards and escort hands attacking the four young people were using the Black Blood Saber Technique and the Twelve Revolving Wheels Sword Technique. Stranger still, the sword technique the four young people used was the Wudang Sect’s Grand Purity Sword¹.

How do men who are not even Daoists come to use the Grand Purity Sword?

Cheon Tae-san called Gwanryong Jin by voice transmission, and the Corps Chief came up onto the branch beside him.

“Are those men martial artists of the Dark Heaven Sect?”

Gwanryong Jin looked closely at the men fighting hard down on the official road.

“Why are those fellows using our sect’s martial arts? There is not one face among them that I know.”

“Might they not be warriors of some other battle corps of the Dark Heaven Sect?”

“I do not know every corps member of our sect, but it is simply not possible that not a single face among them should be familiar to me.”

Gwanryong Jin asked.

“But who are those young people, to be attacked like that?”

“I do not know either, which is why I am asking Great Hero Gwanryong.”

“Hmm…”

Just then a scream rang out. One of the women, driven onto the defensive, took a sword in the side.

“We had better find out first. Who it is that draws blades on the official road in broad daylight.”

Cheon Tae-san threw himself out and came down on the roof of the young people’s carriage.

“Stop!”

And he gathered spirit energy in his mouth and burst it out like a Lion’s Roar².

Every man absorbed in the fighting looked up at Cheon Tae-san at once. They were flustered at first; then they saw that he was alone, and their guard came down.

“Scholar. Learned a little martial arts at home, did you? Get along on your way. Do not go meddling and die far from home for nothing.”

The words came back cold. He had the look of a scholar, and the fellows made light of him for it.

“Where have you come from, that you use the Black Blood Saber Technique and the Twelve Revolving Wheels Sword Technique?”

At having their methods named outright, the escort guards and escort hands flinched. And then their true nature came straight out.

“Get rid of him!”

Two escort guards came in at Cheon Tae-san from either side, and he unfolded the Returning Dragon Ascends to Heaven to meet them. One turn of his body, and the pair were flung back faster than they had come; one was driven into the ground, the other flew into a tree trunk and stuck there. A single move of Cheon Tae-san’s had put two warriors out of the fight, and a tension settled over the place.

At that Gwanryong Jin shouted.

“Dark Heaven Asura Corps — put down the escort guards and the escort hands!”

Gwanryong Jin had meant to take them in any case; they were men he had every reason to suspect. Once the Dark Heaven Asura Corps came into the fight, the escort guards and escort hands were thrown into confusion.

“Fall back!”

The escort guards and escort hands scattered all at once in every direction. But the warriors of the Dark Heaven Asura Corps were blocking the ways out, so getting away was no easy matter either. Even so, those whose footwork was good did break clear of the ring, and each time one did, his thigh was bored through.

— Whack!

Every time Cheon Tae-san flicked a spirit creature’s inner elixir, the thigh of the man fleeing burst open.

“Khuk!”

“Aak!”

And if a man still tried to run, he put a hole through the other thigh as well.

Gwanryong Jin’s skin crawled. He knew the scholar’s skill well enough by now, and knew too that a peak master was concealed behind that scholarly guise. But watching him bring down first-rate masters with a bead, he felt as though the bead were boring through him instead.

“Shall I lend a hand?”

Mak Ji-mong had come up beside Cheon Tae-san without his noticing, and asked it.

“There is no need for elder brother to put himself forward.”

“No. Those fellows are using our sect’s martial arts. I cannot simply stand by.”

Mak Ji-mong too had seen that the escort guards and escort hands were using the Dark Heaven Sect’s martial arts.

“Question them and the answer will come out.”

With the Dark Heaven Asura Corps in it, the fight ended one-sidedly. More than half of the escort guards and escort hands who had been attacking the four young people were dead, and half were gravely wounded, so that only a few were left sound. Gwanryong Jin had them dragged off to a secluded spot and questioned them.

A little later he appeared again with his hands well covered in blood.

“Have you learned anything?”

“They are hard men. I have learned nothing. Only it came to me that they may be the Demonic Cult.”

“The Demonic Cult?”

Mak Ji-mong turned startled eyes on Gwanryong Jin, then looked over at the four young people, their clothes dyed with blood from their wounds. When Cheon Tae-san’s party all looked their way at once, the four quietly turned their eyes aside.

Cheon Tae-san went over to them.

“Do you four know why you were attacked by those men?”

“Are you not unorthodox-sect people yourselves?”

One of the young men asked it. He was the one who had grumbled that the Tengwang Pavilion was nothing much, which was why he had stuck in the memory particularly.

Cheon Tae-san nodded.

“Those martial artists are unorthodox-sect people, yes. But I am a scholar attached to the Murim Alliance.”

The young man looked at Cheon Tae-san with his eyes gone wide.

“I beg your pardon? Why does a Murim Alliance scholar keep company with unorthodox-sect people?”

That one question told Cheon Tae-san that these people were not of the murim. No one of the murim would be so ignorant of how the orthodox, the unorthodox and the demonic stand to one another. They had learned martial arts, but they were not of the murim. That left only one conclusion.

“Have you come out from the imperial palace?”

Mak Ji-mong, Yu Seong, Mak Jin-yul and Gwanryong Jin, who had been listening behind Cheon Tae-san, pricked up their ears. The word imperial palace had startled them.

But the four young people shook their heads.

“The men who attacked you Young Heroes are not unorthodox-sect people.”

The young man in the hero’s headband set with red jade thought a moment, and then opened his mouth.

“Our station is not a thing we can let out lightly.”

“I can only help you Young Heroes if I know your station.”

“And what is your honored name?”

The look that came with it talked down to the scholar a little, an instinctive contempt built into it.

People of high station, then.

That alone was enough to tell him.

“My name is Cheon Tae-san, and people call me Scholar Cheon.”

One of the women covered her mouth with her hand, a little startled.

“Eh? Are you the Scholar Cheon Tae-san who is so famous these days — the Scholar Divine Sword?”

“You know of me?”

The woman answered, the wariness in her eyes a little loosened.

“How should I not? Go into any eating house or inn and the storytellers do nothing but tell your story. Are you really the Scholar Divine Sword?”

“Those who know me do call me so.”

Owning up to it himself made the skin of Cheon Tae-san’s neck crawl, but to learn their station he had to give his own.

The young man in the hero’s headband asked.

“But how are we to believe that you are Cheon Tae-san the Scholar Divine Sword?”

Just then Mak Jin-yul, who had been listening, lost her temper.

“Just how grand is your station, that you’ve got this many objections? Scholar Cheon, let’s just go. I’m getting annoyed listening to it.”

The woman looked at Mak Jin-yul and covered her mouth again.

“That woman is the one they say Scholar Cheon is schooling harshly in decent conduct — the Snake-and-Scorpion Wicked Flower, Mak Jin-yul!”

The Snake-and-Scorpion Wicked Flower.

As a byname for a woman it was far too venomous. A flower of the unorthodox sects, like a snake and a scorpion, no less.

“What did you say? You lot want to die?”

“So it is, so it is. The Snake-and-Scorpion Wicked Flower. And it was not I who said it. It is what the storytellers say.”

If the storytellers were putting it about, the thing had already spread over the whole of Jiangxi. Mak Jin-yul’s face twisted.

“Jin-yul, the more you carry on like that, the truer that byname will become. So conduct yourself with some restraint.”

At Mak Ji-mong’s soothing, Mak Jin-yul made to shout back at him and then shut her mouth. For an instant her brother’s eyes had felt exactly like her father’s.

“How am I to prove it… Well, now.”

The young man in the hero’s headband looked at Cheon Tae-san and spoke.

“They say the Scholar Divine Sword’s other byname is the Azure Dragon Scholar. That he calls out an azure dragon with his sword qi. Call out the azure dragon and I will believe that you are Scholar Cheon.”

Cheon Tae-san looked at them and sighed, thinking them young people who knew nothing of the ways of the world.

“There is no help for it.”

Cheon Tae-san fused spirit energy with internal force and unfolded Flying Dragon Crossing the Sea toward the forest. He had chosen it because that art drew a sword path along which the azure dragon flew in a straight line. Broad daylight though it was, the sword qi shaped itself into an azure dragon and shot forward, and the sight was as though a real dragon were soaring.

— Ka-rrrroooom!

And along the line the azure dragon had passed, the trees went down as though they had been felled. Those watching from behind were all seeing an azure dragon for the first time, and could not hold back their wonder.

Yu Seong’s reaction was something apart.

“Oh! He is my elder brother indeed. I must study bringing out a thunder dragon myself, with thunder qi.”

Cheon Tae-san’s azure dragon had fired Yu Seong’s imagination, and his eyes shone.

The young man in the hero’s headband made a cupped-hands salute and spoke.

“I am sorry to have doubted the Scholar Divine Sword. But we too must be careful, and so we were discourteous.”

The young man apologized courteously, and then told them where he came from.

Everyone who heard it was so astonished that they fell silent.