Crisis Escape

“Child.”

An old woman came walking out of the bamboo grove. All at once a cold air came driving through the stalks.

Yeo-seol stared blankly at the old woman who had appeared out of nowhere. She could feel something of her own kind coming off her.

“So at last I see you. Hard it has been, to get a sight of you.”

Looking straight at the old woman, Yeo-seol spoke.

“You know me? Granny?”

“Kheh, kheh, kheh. Granny, is it. Of course, of course. I know you well. There is nobody who knows you as I do.”

Yu Yeok-rip had kept a constant watch about the Dark Heaven Sect, waiting for Yeo-seol to come outside it. Her followers and disciples were posted all round with orders to send word the moment the girl stepped out. Someone had seen her go into the bamboo grove, and the news went up in haste. Hearing that Yeo-seol had come out, the old woman came at once. At the sight of her, she was glad enough to weep.

“Child. I have been looking for you.”

“For me? Why?”

“Because you are my granddaughter.”

“Granddaughter? Then what’s my name?”

Pressed bluntly for a name, Yu Yeok-rip fastened the first one that came into her head onto the girl.

“Chun-seol, of course.”¹

“Spring snow. That’s a countrified name.”

“It is the name your grandmother gave you, all the same. Let us go home, Chun-seol. Your family is waiting.”

“I have a family?”

“Of course. Everybody has a family. Come along with your grandmother.”

Yu Yeok-rip could feel the ice crystal’s energy coming off Yeo-seol, and it drew her in.

This child is the Ice Sacred Body for certain.

“Me? Why?”

Yeo-seol asked it pertly.

“Why, because we are of one household.”

“What are you talking about? I have my Brother.”

“Ohohoho. That one is a false Brother. Your grandmother here is your true family.”

“I can’t believe that. If you were my family there ought to be something glad in me, and there isn’t.”

“That is only because you have lost your memory.”

“If Granny really is my family, I’ll come and find you when I get my memory back. Right now I like my Brother, so I’m staying with him.”

“Child. If you come at it that way, your grandmother has no choice but to take you by force.”

“Huh? Does that mean you’re going to kidnap me?”

“It is not a kidnapping. It is going home.”

“Even when I say I don’t want to?”

“Your true family is waiting for you.”

Yu Yeok-rip judged that now, with the girl alone, was her chance to take her. There was no telling when so good a chance would come again.

“I don’t want to, so just go.”

“You are my family, I tell you. I will have you with me, and no mistake.”

Yu Yeok-rip raised her energy, and Yeo-seol’s eyes turned cold. The thing looked set to come to blows, and the anger came up in Yeo-seol. But she put the anger down and thought of another way.

With the memories of the shadow in her dreams she thought she might bring this old woman to heel. Those memories had to do with the Ice Palace, and she herself was bound up deeply with the Ice Palace too. In them she had seen some thousands of the people of the Palace kneeling before the shadow. The shadow could be nobody but the Palace Lord of the Ice Palace.

“What is your post in the Palace?”

Yeo-seol put the question in vague terms. Ice qi came off her as she asked it, and her tone was cold and far away; Yu Yeok-rip looked at her with confusion in her eyes.

“Answer. What is your post? I ask because my memory is not whole.”

At that, Yu Yeok-rip bowed her head low.

“An Elder.”

Yeo-seol’s voice came out dry, as though there were no feeling in it. She spoke so because she remembered that old masters talked this way.

“What is your name?”

The energy pouring off Yeo-seol was strong, and Yu Yeok-rip flinched.

“Yu Yeok-rip.”

Pressed by the force of her, Yu Yeok-rip found herself answering in honorifics before she knew it.

“H-have you recovered your memory?”

“Only a part of it. Memory does not come back all at once; it is recovered by degrees. So a great deal of time is wanted.”

“In that case, would it not be better that you stayed with me?”

Yeo-seol knew very little about the shadow inside her consciousness, and she meant to use Elder Yu to find out more.

“Elder Yu.”

“Yes.”

“Who am I? Tell me what you know.”

Yu Yeok-rip answered in a voice that shook a little.

“You are Mae Yu-yeon, the Sixth Palace Lord, the strongest in the Ice Palace’s history, who was once acclaimed throughout the murim as the Martial Empress².”

Hearing at last who the shadow in her consciousness was, Yeo-seol flinched. Perhaps because the shadow had heard itself named, her head throbbed and ached.

“And why, then, am I shut up in this young body?”

“The Sixth Palace Lord perfected the Ice Soul Crystal, the first in our Palace’s history to do so. It is a sorcery of the Ice Palace that shuts the soul inside an ice crystal so that it may enter a new body.”

Yeo-seol did a convincing imitation of an old person. She was playing Namgung Hak, the old man who had looked the strongest of anyone she knew.

“Is that why I wanted a young body, then?”

“Yes. There is a record that the former Palace Lord desired a young body.”

“Did I? What generation is the present Palace Lord?”

“The Twelfth.”

“Has so much time passed already?”

Yeo-seol gazed into the empty air a moment, then clasped her hands behind her back and asked.

“Are there many who know of this?”

“No. Even in our Palace there is nobody but this old servant.”

“And your followers?”

“Those children would walk into a fire pit at my word; they can be trusted.”

“The Blood Cult and the Demonic Cult seem to know of it.”

Yeo-seol remembered hearing from Eun-bi that the Demonic Cult and the Blood Cult had attacked the Young Palace Lord at Hefei.

“They only covet the former Palace Lord’s Ice Sacred Body; they do not know that the former Palace Lord’s soul dwells inside it.”

“Are they hunting me now?”

Yu Yeok-rip talked on freely.

“No. The Young Palace Lord used her head cunningly and made a false Ice Sacred Body, and keeps her at her side. The Demonic Cult and the Blood Cult take that false one for the true.”

Through Eun-bi, too, Yeo-seol knew that the Ice Palace’s Young Palace Lord was staying with the Namgung Clan.

“Former Palace Lord. How would it be if you left this place and lived with us?”

“Does Elder Yu think that would be safe? Safer than being here in the Dark Heaven Sect?”

“Ah!”

Something seemed to come home to Yu Yeok-rip, and a cry of wonder escaped her.

“It would not. For safety there is no place as safe as this one.”

Yu Yeok-rip knew that her own followers could not stand against the elites of the Demonic Cult and the Blood Cult.

“That is why I am with Scholar Cheon. For now that is the safest thing.”

“This old servant had not thought so far.”

Hands still clasped behind her back, Yeo-seol clicked her tongue. Old people did that, she knew, when they had heard something pitiful.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. You have lived to that age and your head turns no better than that?”

At Yeo-seol’s rebuke, Yu Yeok-rip bent at the waist.

“I am sorry, former Palace Lord.”

“And another thing.”

“Say on.”

“If your people are here, do you think the Demonic Cult and Blood Cult fellows won’t catch wind of it?”

Yu Yeok-rip started at that.

“You were the ones hunting the Young Palace Lord — won’t they wonder what you’re staying here for?”

“…”

“How did you get to be an Elder of our Palace with a head like that? Was there nobody else in our Palace? In the old days you had to be quick as a whip to make Elder. Do they hand out an Elder’s post now just for getting old?”

Yeo-seol was repeating, word for word, the things Namgung Mu-baek said when he badgered the followers under him. For badgering, his lines were very good indeed.

Under the dressing-down Yu Yeok-rip’s face crumpled toward tears.

“This old servant thought too shallowly.”

“I say it again. On the day this woman recovers her memory, I shall come to you. Until then, so as to draw no suspicion, do not come near me.”

Yu Yeok-rip bowed her head.

“I shall obey your command. I will withdraw to the Namgung Clan. But I will leave two or three trustworthy followers here and have them keep in touch with me by carrier pigeon. Should you have need of anything, send me word by the pigeons.”

“What have you been listening to all this while? I told you. For now, not one inch of suspicion. Didn’t you understand me? My memory needs time to come back. And even when it does come back, this body must be settled into. Do you mean to wreck my great design!”

Yeo-seol’s show of temper put Yu Yeok-rip on her knees.

— Thump!

“Forgive me. This old servant was a fool.”

“How am I to trust you and get anything done!”

“I shall take care.”

“When I have it all back I shall come to you. So not one of you is to leave a trace anywhere near me. You are to watch the Young Palace Lord and help her, so that the Demonic Cult and Blood Cult fellows are deceived perfectly! That is how you help me!”

“How should this old servant go against the former Palace Lord’s will?”

Yeo-seol glared at Yu Yeok-rip and spoke.

“Why is it that Elder Yu is loyal to me?”

She spoke like someone setting a test. The words bore down on Yu Yeok-rip; the body in front of her was still a girl’s, and yet the weight of her came down all the same.

“For the sake of what!”

When Yu Yeok-rip could not answer, Yeo-seol opened her mouth.

“Do you too wish to change bodies, as I did?”

“H-how should this old servant harbor such greed?”

So she said, but her eyes were saying yes.

Yeo-seol judged that it was time to throw Yu Yeok-rip some bait.

“There is nothing to say it cannot be done. If you give me your whole loyalty.”

On her knees as she was, Yu Yeok-rip bent at the waist.

“Th-thank you.”

“Go.”

Yeo-seol clasped her hands behind her back and turned away, and Yu Yeok-rip rose, made a respectful salutation, and vanished.

“Hoo.”

She had fooled Yu Yeok-rip with a very few scraps of memory this time, but there was no telling how long it would keep working.

What if I really am taken over by Mae Yu-yeon?

That was what Yeo-seol feared.

I’ll have to talk it over with Brother when he comes.

It was not a thing she could bear alone. The only person she could trust now was her Brother, Scholar Cheon, the one who had taken her in when she had no memory at all and called her his younger cousin.

“Young Lady Yeo-seol. Master Scholar Cheon is coming back.”

To Yeo-seol, the fortnight or so she had not seen him felt like years. She had thought that if she shut herself in her room and worked at martial arts the time would go quickly. But once she had them learned, with no Brother beside her at meals to smile at her and nag, the days felt empty.

So this is family?

Whenever people had spoken of family feeling she had never quite understood what they meant. This time she knew it for certain.

The wish never to be parted again.

That was family feeling.

Yeo-seol had comprehended the whole of the Ice Palace’s martial arts, but in doing so she had come by one uneasy thing.

“The Palace Lord’s soul the old woman spoke of keeps turning up in my dreams.”

Yeo-seol had the feeling that the shadow in her dreams kept pushing her out. For several days now she had not slept properly.

In the midst of it, her Brother’s coming set her at ease.

No sooner had Cheon Tae-san come back to the Dark Heaven Sect than he was summoned by Mak Yeo-heun. Gwanryong Jin’s report had already reached Mak Yeo-heun, and he wore a well-pleased smile.

“To have secured a gold mine — this is the gladdest thing in nearly ten years.”

Mak Ji-mong sat there with dignity, and his father gazed steadily at him, as though that were the last thing he had expected.

“Ho ho ho. Looking at you now, the one who has changed most is you.”

Itching to boast, Mak Ji-mong opened his mouth.

“My blocked meridians are all opened now. From here on I mean to train in earnest. Within a few days I shall settle my affairs and go into closed-door training.”

“Oh!”

Mak Yeo-heun too was a man with a father’s heart, and there was no way the change in his son could fail to gladden him. Being the Unorthodox Supreme, he was in no position to go on watching Mak Ji-mong run off the rails forever. Now the boy had gone out on the gold-mine business and come back with his wits about him besides, and that was a real delight. So for once he played along with his son’s high spirits.

“Right. Tell me yourself what happened.”

The words were hardly out before Mak Ji-mong was laying out, at exhaustive length, what had happened at the Hohyeon Estate and all about the Cheon Tae-san who had cured him.

Ordinarily, at the first sign of a long story, Mak Yeo-heun would tell you to cut the preamble and give him the substance; but now he did not check his son’s excited chatter. He only listened with a well-pleased smile. When the story was done, he opened his mouth.

“There was a deal of talk abroad about the gift this seat made Scholar Cheon, but by this it is proved that my gift was not excessive.”

Cheon Tae-san put in an objection to that.

“Surely the Supreme does not mean to let the gift he gave before stand in place of this one?”

“Hahaha! How should that be? Did you take this seat for so small a man?”

Half in jest, Cheon Tae-san had thrown the words out, reckoning that at this point the man would offer a gift of his own accord.

“What do you want? Speak.”

“For curing the Young Sect Leader I ask no payment, having already sworn brotherhood with him.”

“Indeed? You have sworn brotherhood?”

Mak Yeo-heun looked at Mak Ji-mong with the face of a man who has stumbled on a windfall, and hid the look away quickly. This was not giving a gift; it amounted to receiving one.

“Not a few men died fighting the Demonic Cult to take the gold mine. I should like ample condolence money paid to them.”

“Ho ho ho. This seat will see to that. That too is our sect’s business — now tell me what Scholar Cheon really wants.”

So Cheon Tae-san spoke the thing he had kept in his heart, the thing he truly wanted.