The Wrong Man Attains Enlightenment

Mountains rise high, yet stand beneath heaven; waters run deep, yet flow upon the earth

“Listen well. Prune away every useless branch of the formula and it all converges upon one thing. Put into plain words, it means that the mountain is high, yet stands beneath heaven, and the water is deep, yet flows over the earth. The Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique runs along that very same vein.”

Namgung Mu-baek went stock-still at that and sank into thought.

He has the martial talent, no question, to go straight in and find the mental image at a line like that.

A quarter of an hour later he opened his eyes, and for an instant an azure light seemed to ripple in them.

“Ah! Only now do I feel I understand a little of it. Only now. And it had been so blank to me that I could not see an inch ahead.”

Namgung Mu-baek performed the move again and again and fell into a trance. I spoke to him as he worked.

“There is nothing greater than heaven. Heaven takes everything into itself. That is precisely the azure sky. And that azure sky goes forward without limit and stretches without end. That is what boundless means.”

He heard me out and let out a cry of admiration.

“Good. Good! Teach me more, I beg you! Grant me enlightenment! Master Scholar Cheon! Enlightenment, for me!”

The shout came packed with a desperate longing. He performed the moves, took his enlightenment from them, and was filled with joy.

“A bird flying the sky has no prescribed beat of the wings. If you wish to fly the sky freely, you have only to spread them. You have only to give your body to the wind and leave it there. The Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique can be completed only when you let yourself go free, without limit and without end.”

He listened, and a shiver ran through him from head to foot. I laughed with real relish.

“Bwahahaha! Perhaps of all the brothers it will be Young Master Namgung Mu-baek who comes to the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique first. He has lived freer than any man alive; he has lived free as a hellion, so would he not know the feel of it?”

Namgung Mu-baek nodded. The words would have gone straight into his ears and lodged there. He had lived in true freedom, after all, like a wild dog.

“Ah, my life as a hellion is leading me to enlightenment! I have not lived in vain. It was not the life I meant to have, but as it turns out I have not lived in vain!”

So he could not, after all, stand behind the hellion’s life he had lived. Watching Namgung Mu-baek blurt out so wrong-headed an enlightenment, I laughed with real relish.

Beyond the moon gate, a man past his prime stood trembling.

Ah! I prided myself that I had grasped the ultimate truth of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, and I had not. My enlightenment fell short. To be shaken like this… Sunk in the responsibility of being head of the family, with my sight narrowed by it, I could never have grasped the ultimate truth of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique. Because I was not free.

Namgung Hak quietly closed his eyes. He could look back now over a formula he had believed he understood to perfection. Then he slipped away at once, to gather in the enlightenment somewhere quiet.

Tears came to Namgung Mu-baek’s eyes of their own accord. Through the formula his martial learning had deepened by a stage, and his spirit had answered. In all his life, in all his training, he had never once shed a tear from being moved.

What on earth is this feeling?

Namgung Mu-baek wiped his tears, at a loss.

This feeling, as though something that had me bound were peeling away from my neck a layer at a time… Is this what true freedom is?

Part of the reason I had lived like a hellion all this time was to feel free. Everything that surrounded me, I refused and denied. In my heart I knew I should not, and I played the hellion anyway, the way a man gives in to thirst. Recklessly I spoke, recklessly I acted, and just as recklessly I gave up on myself.

Watching Namgung Mu-baek, I was quietly pleased.

He is running in the same wheel-ruts as Paeng So-un. A little faster than he was, perhaps?

Paeng So-un had taken a year, as I recalled, to come this far. By then the energy of the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper in him had reached its peak. Of the Dipper’s seven stars, Tanlang, Wenqu, Jumen, Lucun, Lianzhen, Wuqu and Pojun, he had been born with the energy of Lucun.¹

By nature the Heavenly Martial Sacred Body runs strong on the Pojun Star’s energy, and so it tends to destroy itself; gaining Lucun’s energy was what had let it lengthen its life. But not much of that was left either. Only by activating and absorbing Namgung Mu-baek’s Wuqu energy could I lengthen my span again.

When I first found the method for extending the Heavenly Martial Sacred Body’s life in a book of Esoteric Buddhist doctrine, I took it for an idle legend and nothing more. But I had watched the pain lift and the lifespan lengthen through Paeng So-un, and after that I had no choice but to believe. The Pojun Star’s energy of the Heavenly Martial Sacred Body was in me. That energy stood out far too strongly in me, and I had no choice but to admit what it meant: it was what had become the body’s Severed Meridians.

That was why I had to raise Namgung Mu-baek’s level of attainment. The Wuqu Star’s energy would not activate until that attainment had been raised.

Namgung Mu-baek was shaking with the force of his feeling. I looked at him and spoke.

“Let us leave it there for today. With the higher martial arts, enlightenment has to seep in the way water seeps in. To come to it all at once, in a rush, is no good thing.”

“And how would Scholar Cheon know that? You are no martial artist.”

“Well, that is…”

I had been through it once already with Paeng So-un, but that was not a thing I could spill.

“Scholar Cheon is right. Rice bolted down is rice that gives you indigestion.”

Hoh. So he could say a right thing now and again. Something had shifted in him. What mattered more was that speaking to me respectfully no longer struck him as strange or distasteful.

“Rest today and I shall see you tomorrow. Young Master Jegal Do-won comes tomorrow, so it would be as well to turn in early.”

“Hmph. Jegal Do-won can come or he can stay away.”

Namgung Mu-baek had quietly nursed a sense of inferiority about Jegal Do-won, and now he looked as though he hardly cared about the man at all. A single moment’s enlightenment had set him a stage higher.

“No visitors today unless I give the word.”

I smiled as Namgung Mu-baek gave the order to the maidservants and menservants around him and went into his room.

In the old days a small triumph like this would have had him off to a wine house or a courtesan house to squander it in revelry. He has grown up a little.

Passing through the moon gate on my way to my own quarters, I caught a scent I was not used to. Since the Heavenly Martial Sacred Body manifested, my sense of smell had outstripped a dog’s.

Hm!

I remembered the scent exactly.

The clan head has been here.

I came sharply alert. If the clan head had come and stood watching all of that, it was no small matter.

He may well send for me shortly. I had better make ready.

I washed my face and set my dress and cap in order.

“Scholar, why are you setting your dress and cap in order at this hour of the evening?”

Eun-bi asked, puzzled, as she laid out the wash water and my clothes.

“Someone’s going to come looking for me, I think.”

“Then what will you do about supper? Shall I bring it out now?”

“Let’s wait a little.”

Just then.

“Scholar!”

One of the warriors on guard at Namgung Mu-baek’s quarters had come.

“What is it?”

“The clan head has sent word asking you to take supper with him.”

“Very well. I shall come now.”

“Will you go just as you are?”

“My preparations are already made.”

“Ah. Then let us go.”

Eun-bi watched Scholar Cheon walk away and tilted her head.

“Does the Scholar have the gift of foresight? How did he know the clan head would send for him? Do clever people know that sort of thing too?”

She promptly put the whole of it down to cleverness and brushed aside a question that was giving her a headache.

Supper with the head of the Namgung Clan and the clan matron, then.

I had sat in private audience with the great Murim Alliance Leader himself and eaten with him a good many times. The Alliance’s Strategist, its Elders, its Grand Elders: men who had reached the very summit of the martial world, men a scholar could not presume to look up at. All of them had had me at their tables often enough. Every one of those gatherings was arranged, in essence, to smooth over or bury some corruption an inspection had turned up. Perhaps because I had kept company with personages of that rank, taking supper at the Namgung Clan head’s table did not make me particularly nervous.

“Come in, come in.”

I entered the clan head’s hall to find him and the clan matron already seated at the table.

“Good evening.”

She was a woman of middle years who fully deserved to be called a beauty.

I had finished my inquiries into the principal figures of the house before I was ever posted to the Namgung Clan. Her name was Jeon I-an, a daughter of the Geumcheon Escort Agency, one of the three great escort agencies of Wuhan in Hubei.² Namgung Hak had hidden his standing and worked there for a time while he was out roaming the gangho³, and she was the woman he met and fell in love with. He had married her after refusing matches with the other Five Great Clans, and it was much talked of at the time. Some even said she had bought him with money.

“My wife.”

“It is an honor to meet you, Madam.”

“My lord, why did you lie to me?”

“I? In what way?”

“You told me Scholar Cheon was handsome.”

“Eh? Is he not handsome?”

Namgung Hak was thrown by his wife’s words. He had no idea how to field her wit. I understood what she meant and simply smiled.

“Surely he does not look ill-favored to you?”

“Hohoho. That is not it at all. He is not handsome, he is very handsome. It has been a long while since I last saw a man as fine-looking as this.”

“Ah, so that is what you meant. You gave me a start.”

Namgung Hak laughed sheepishly.

“In any case, I am sorry to have taken your evening from you.”

“Not at all, Clan Head. It is an honor to be called here like this.”

I made my greeting properly, and the two of them smiled, well pleased.

“I hear that Scholar Cheon was famous even at the Murim Alliance?”

Jeon I-an’s question drew a wry laugh out of me.

“Notorious, rather.”

“Notoriety, for rooting out graft and corruption? It is a thing to be respected, surely. If a man is pointed at for doing what is right, who will ever try to bring justice to light? I shall be cheering for you, Scholar Cheon.”

“Thank you, Madam.”

We finished the meal in easy conversation. Over the food I talked with Jeon I-an of poetry, calligraphy and painting, and of the art of music, and the talk carried on over our tea. Her learning ran deeper than I had expected. She was better than a scholar of provincial-graduate standing.

“A scholar may know poetry and calligraphy and still know little of painting or music, but Scholar Cheon is learned right across the range.”

“Not at all. I have only taken an interest in them as a pastime.”

Namgung Hak caught the gap when our talk broke off for a moment and put in a question of his own.

“Well? Is our youngest worth teaching?”

He had got to the real business at last, and I laughed inwardly.

“Certainly. Of late he even studies letters with me every other day.”

“Oh! That is truly encouraging. Thank you, Scholar Cheon. I shall not forget what you have done. The truth is that I have worn myself out with worry that my youngest would go wrong past mending.”

As Namgung Hak poured out what he honestly felt, Jeon I-an suddenly dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

“Oh—oh, I am his mother, and all this while I have been racked with guilt, seeing plainly that my child was going the wrong way and never able to set him right.”

Namgung Hak soothed his wife.

“Do I not know how hard you tried to set our youngest straight? Do not speak so. The boy was simply a stone with more corners on it than most.”

However much they had disciplined him, nothing could have mended Namgung Mu-baek. The trouble was less his nature than his birth: he had been born with the Wuqu Star’s energy out of the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper, and the madness in it had flared up. If I absorbed that madness, he could come back to normal.

But the Wuqu Star’s energy was a fruit you could pick only once it had properly ripened. Take it before it had fully matured and there would be trouble.

“There is no need to worry. A year or so of studying with me and he will surely set out to find the right road.”

I slipped in a little self-praise and quietly implied that the credit would be mine.

“Just so! My eye was excellent! I took every kind of abuse from the Inspection Corps Chief to bring Scholar Cheon here. Had I given up, our youngest would have gone down a road there is no coming back from. It is nothing short of a mercy.”

“My lord’s eye saved our Mu-baek. I truly thought Mu-baek was going to be lost.” A sob broke from her throat.

Jeon I-an suddenly caught hold of my hand where I sat across from her.

“It is unbecoming of me, I know, but I am simply so grateful. It is as though you were my own son. May I think of you so?”

Her gratitude carried across to me and warmed my own heart. Nothing in me resisted. Had I too been missing a mother’s affection all this long while? The warmth in Jeon I-an’s palm called up my mother’s arms, forgotten all these years.

She did not speak of it, but she must have eaten her heart out over this. Otherwise she would never have shown her feelings like that before a man she was meeting for the first time.

“The moment our Mu-baek is out from under the name of hellion, I shall repay Scholar Cheon handsomely.”

“My lord, would our Mun-seol and Scholar Cheon suit each other?”

That gave me a jolt.

Namgung Mun-seol was Namgung Mu-baek’s elder sister by a year, and her name ran much the same as his. She was making her way in one of the Murim Alliance’s armed bodies, where she was famous for being fierce. A woman of great spirit, she would fasten on a man the instant she judged him strong and hang from him until she had her sparring match, and she gave the strong boundless respect and the weak not a particle of her interest. Men who approached her hoping to marry into the clan’s power mostly fled with their wits scattered to the winds.

This Namgung Mun-seol was one of the people to be avoided in the Namgung Clan. I had run up against her several times when I was at the Murim Alliance, and it was a mercy that she had paid me no attention, perhaps because I was a scholar.

“Hm. Mun-seol has a man she has taken an interest in of late. Let us wait and see.”

Which meant that the man was strong and she was trailing after him, pestering him for a sparring match.

“Oh, is that so? Then shall I look about the main house for a gifted girl? He is a scholar I should truly like to bring into our family.”

Winning Jeon I-an’s favor was all very well, but her interest was excessive. Women of a mother’s age never could leave a presentable man in peace.

Perhaps noticing that I was uncomfortable, Namgung Hak spoke to his wife in a roundabout way.

“My dear, there is something I must discuss with Scholar Cheon alone. Would you leave us for a while?”

Jeon I-an stole a glance at my eyes and then spoke in a firm voice.

“Is it about our youngest?”

“It is a matter that bears on him.”

“My lord, I shall hear it with you. If it has anything at all to do with our youngest. Grant me that.”

As a rule Jeon I-an seemed to grant her husband whatever he asked wherever she could. But this time she dug in.

“I have no wish to stand by as I once did and regret it after. Whatever the matter may be, your humble wife will bear it.”

Faced with that much resolve, Namgung Hak did not ask her again to leave.

“…Very well.”

As Jeon I-an straightened in her seat, Namgung Hak’s voice sank low.

“Enough of private matters. Let us speak of official ones, Scholar Cheon.”

The air had changed in a stroke, and I answered evenly.

“Please speak.”

I looked straight back at Namgung Hak as the cold came off him.

“What did you mean by accepting the oral formula of this house’s secret supreme art? Do you truly not know that it is a matter that ends in death?”

For an instant killing intent hung in the air. The warmth that had filled the room until then was snuffed out by it and vanished without a trace.