#88: Find Her Memories — The Absolute Scholar

“I shall proceed just as you have said.”

The one who had spoken of setting up a large eating house looked well satisfied and gave me a cupped-hands salute. I had taken up their requests wholesale, so there was not one stumbling block left in the way. They went out of the teahouse, and I was on the point of rising myself.

Then a man came running down the street, covered in blood, a sword in his hand, as though he were fleeing something. It had been a long while since a martial artist with a bare blade had shown himself here, and the merchants and passersby in the street had their wits scattered to the winds.

Just as I made to leap down from the railing and stop the man with the blade, a figure stepped into the fleeing martial artist’s path.

“Mm? That is Yu Seong!”

The blood on Yu Seong’s blade said he had fallen into a quarrel with the man. Yu Seong shouted.

“This fellow dared come into Three-Without County, ate his fill without paying, and beat to death the waiter who asked him for the money. His byname is the Jade Serpent Sword, and he is one of those who live by the blade among the unorthodox sects.”

At Yu Seong’s shout the merchants and passersby round about denounced the man.

“And so, under the statutes of Three-Without County, I am carrying out his sentence.”

Yu Seong raised his internal force and cried out.

“I, Thunder Dragon Sword Yu Seong — sworn younger brother of the master of Three-Without County, the Scholar Divine Sword, Scholar Cheon Tae-san, and at the same time my elder brother’s left-hand man — do hereby execute the statutes of Three-Without County.”

“Whoaaa!”

Did the passersby and the merchants really answer him with a cheer instead? My eyes went round, and the teahouse keeper gave me a word of explanation.

“Great Hero Yu has done immense service to the public order of Three-Without County. He sends the Thunder Dragon Sect’s warriors in to catch thieves and robbers, and beats down lawless unorthodox and underworld martial artists like that one.”

“Is that so?”

I had not known Yu Seong was so zealous for the county’s public order.

“The Dark Heaven Sect’s warriors keep the peace as well, but Great Hero Yu keeps it especially far into the night. That is why we too can trade with our minds at ease.”

I was left with nothing to say. Yu Seong went on.

“My sworn elder brother, whom I, Yu Seong, revere beyond measure, said this. To leave yesterday’s crime unpunished is the same as giving courage to tomorrow’s. And he left me these words besides. Justice, to me, is that a man who has done a thing worth dying for must die. I too mean to follow my elder brother’s justice.”

“Well said!”

“That is justice!”

I covered my face with my hand. They were things I had said at some point, back when the Heavenly Slaughter Star energy ran strong in Yu Seong and I meant them to teach him a lesson.

“Now I shall speak for myself. An evil person, once born, had best die quickly, and best of all should never have been born.”

Something caught at my chest when I heard Yu Seong say it. I knew his circumstances, and to me the words were as good as words spoken to himself.

Had he not been rid of the Heavenly Slaughter Star, he might well have died by his own hand. And that is why he is so ardent about punishing the wicked here in Three-Without County.

I could feel what was in Yu Seong’s heart, and my chest went tight.

“Drag this fellow away.”

In the old days he would have killed the man on the spot and more besides. Now he set his followers to haul the fellow off instead, and it did seem true that the Heavenly Slaughter Star had been much diluted.

Then all at once Yu Seong’s eyes turned this way. He must have felt my gaze. I ducked quickly down below the railing.

If that fellow Yu Seong catches sight of me, there is no telling what he will do to me.

He looked more than capable of hauling me about the streets to show me off as the Scholar Divine Sword.

I stopped in at a nearby eating house and ordered food. There too my appearance set off a commotion. Everyone whose eyes met mine greeted me as though making a bow, and that put my order back; dishes I had never ordered came out onto the table besides, and I hardly knew what to do with myself. I ate with a sigh.

There was no knowing what turns things might take when we removed Mae Yu-yeon’s soul from Yeo-seol’s consciousness. Whatever might come of it, I meant to eat well and go into it with something solid in me.

I fingered the Flying Dantian in my pouch. That morning I had taken back the one I had left inside Mak Jin-yul, and after close on five days of drinking up her true qi, the store within it had grown a great deal.

With this much of it in her, Mak Jin-yul’s hostility toward me will have lessened too.

I had readied the Flying Dantian as well against the chance of something happening, since I might have need of internal force.

In an instant the eating house grew unsettled.

“Wind-Listener has come!”

The storyteller Wind-Listener had made a name in Three-Without County too. I had been about to leave, and sat down again. He was a man who heard the news of every quarter first and then told it, so from him I could hear the murim’s latest movements.

“I am Wind-Listener, who hears the tales the wind carries.”

Stroking his handsome beard, Wind-Listener went up onto the stage and began with how things stood of late in the Jiangxi murim. There was little in it worth taking to heart, but it was the latest word, and that was what mattered.

“Under the command of the Unorthodox Supreme, Great Hero Mak Yeo-heun, the unorthodox sects of Jiangxi have gone into training, to make up their numbers of warriors or to strengthen their forces.”

At Wind-Listener’s words somebody asked.

“What is the reason for it?”

“The murim’s peace has lasted a long time. Since the Orthodox-Demonic War fifty years ago there has been no great war in the murim, so how much force do you suppose has piled up in all that while? The season has come for that force to be let out. The trouble, mark you, is that the Murim Alliance is not preparing for the Demonic Cult’s invasion as the Unorthodox Supreme is.”

Somebody spoke from a corner of the eating house.

“Would it not be that the Murim Alliance thinks there will be no invasion by the Demonic Cult?”

Wind-Listener shook his head.

“This Wind-Listener has heard fresh news. Word reached me that the Demonic Cult in Xinjiang came over Qinghai and attacked the Kunlun Sect.”

At that I knit my brows. It was the first I had heard of it.

“It comes from men who went on a trading run into Qinghai, so it is certain. They say the Kunlun Sect was half broken and has fallen back into Sichuan. As you know, for the Demonic Cult to come into the Central Plains it must first do away with the Kunlun Sect. Which is to say that an attack on the Kunlun Sect means a move into the Central Plains.”

If what Wind-Listener said was true, the Demonic Cult’s movements had fallen out exactly as I had predicted. The Cult had laid bare its greed to move into the Central Plains in earnest.

“The Unorthodox Supreme learned of it quickly and is strengthening the unorthodox sects’ forces. A truly wise Supreme.”

Cheers and shouts went up from every part of the room, most of those present belonging to unorthodox schools themselves.

“They say the Unorthodox Supreme sent these words to every unorthodox sect. ‘Be strong if you would keep the peace. Peace is a word permitted only to the strong.’ That is how he put it.”

The audience let out cries of wonder and answered him. Then somebody on the second story threw out a question.

“But why should the Demonic Cult, quiet all this while, provoke us so suddenly?”

Perhaps to draw every eye in the room, Wind-Listener, who until then had only been holding his long-stemmed pipe, now put a live coal into it and smoked his tobacco.

But there is no way Wind-Listener knows anything so private as that.

So I thought, and I was sure he would meet the question with something wide of the mark.

“Of late this Wind-Listener has heard a strange tale.”

The tobacco smoke he blew out scattered into the air.

“They say the Demonic Cult has succeeded in developing a great art that strengthens innate qi some twofold. With that great art, they say, the martial power of the Cult’s men has been raised. Think of it. A second-rate master becomes a peak master in an instant. A first-rate master becomes transcendent-peak — would that not carry their strength to its utmost? And so they set their greed on the Central Plains.”

Even the ignorant common folk with no martial arts of their own knew what internal energy was and what innate true qi was, so a question burst out at once.

“The Demonic Cult has had the Demonic Surge Pill and the Latent Demon Pill and the like, which explode innate true qi, from long ago. I cannot think that anything special.”

A man who asked a question like that was plainly a martial artist.

“You have hit it exactly. In the Orthodox-Demonic War fifty years ago too, the orthodox murim took great losses from the Demonic Surge Pill. But between the Demonic Surge Pill of that day and this present method of amplifying innate true qi there is one decisive difference.”

Wind-Listener drew on his tobacco again and spun the moment out. The audience inside the eating house kept so silent that you could hear chopsticks touch a bowl.

“With the Demonic Surge Pill a man explodes his latent force and dies within two hours. But the amplifying of innate true qi is an improved method, and they say the span of survival runs to two or three years.”

The more I listened, the surer I grew that he was no ordinary storyteller. That the unorthodox sects were building up their forces anyone could learn, since it was there to be seen. But to know the Demonic Cult’s movements through and through was beyond any man who was not a spy.

Did the Murim Alliance know that the Cult had succeeded in developing a great art to amplify innate true qi and had strengthened its forces by it?

I shook my head. With the Alliance Leader and the Elders locked in political strife, the Murim Alliance had grown slack in its watch on the Demonic Cult and the Blood Cult. It was common enough for an inner struggle over power to leave those caught up in it blind to what outside forces were doing. Even in my own time in the Inspection Corps the strife between the Alliance Leader’s faction and the Elder Faction had been climbing toward its peak, so that when I dug up the Elders’ corruption I was even taken for a man with the Alliance Leader’s faction behind him.

I set the three spirit energies turning and read Wind-Listener’s blood flow.

Just as I thought!

Wind-Listener was no mere storyteller. He carried in him the movement of blood flow that martial artists have.

And a master, at that.

The blood flow stopped and ran again at two hundred places, over and over. It meant he had trained in a martial art that used more than two hundred meridians, and every such art was one of the higher martial arts. That was a blood flow to be seen only in martial artists of peak master rank and above.

Why should a master like that go about as a storyteller? To judge by his letting the Demonic Cult’s movements slip, his intent seems to be to stop the Demonic Cult.

I tried to make out his intent, but I had so little to go on that there was nothing I could be sure of. Nor, for all that, had I any wish to set about uncovering who he was, since what he intended seemed to me no bad thing. Had he been singing the Demonic Cult’s praises the tale would be different, but if anything he let the movements of the Demonic Cult and the Blood Cult slip a little at a time and so put people on their guard.

Wind-Listener’s last words kept ringing in my ears.

“It may be that the murim must prepare for war. For the Demonic Cult has raised a war once every fifty years. Last of all, this Wind-Listener will offer you one saying. If the past is not remembered, the past will repeat itself. I shall see you again next time.”

With that Wind-Listener came down from the stage. I went out after him and watched him turn in at another inn, no doubt to tell over again the tale he had unrolled here.

At least the Unorthodox Supreme listened to me and is strengthening his forces from now on — that much is a mercy. But the Murim Alliance worries me. They will have to come to their senses even at this hour and prepare.

I made up my mind to send Eun-bi and Namgung Cheol-ung and the rest back to the Namgung Clan the very next day. Whatever anyone else might make of it, a letter from me would tell Namgung Hak what I meant.

With a troubled mind I turned my steps toward Cheong Yo’s house.

As I stepped into Cheong Yo’s house, I saw Yeo-seol sitting on a chair set out in the yard, gazing blankly at nothing.

“Yeo-seol will not eat her rice.”

A child with an appetite like hers, not eating? I judged that some change had come over Yeo-seol’s mind.

“Yeo-seol. Haven’t you eaten?”

Yeo-seol did not answer my question. Instead, she came out with something entirely unrelated.

“Brother, if I change, will you throw me away?”

Following her eyes, I saw a cat that had been picking up filth to eat and was now nodding off where it sat. To Yeo-seol the cat must have looked like something somebody had thrown away.

“There’s no chance of that. Yeo-seol’s my little sister, and change or don’t change, you’ll always be my cousin.”

“Always?”

“Of course. Naturally.”

At that Yeo-seol flung her arms round my neck where I sat.

“Brother, I’m frightened. Strange thoughts keep coming to me. The memories I’ve had until now are going away, and only strange memories come. I can’t properly call up the memories of being happy with you. I’m frightened.”

No doubt she was feeling the disjointedness that came of Mae Yu-yeon’s memories slowly taking her mind over. As Yeo-seol’s body grew and drank in the qi of nature in abundance, Mae Yu-yeon’s consciousness must surely have been growing stronger with it.

Yeo-seol was shaking, and I spoke to her.

“Yeo-seol, who’s your Brother?”

“Mm? Cheon Tae-san.”

“And?”

“The Scholar Divine Sword?”

“And?”

“The Specialist Hellion-Reforming Scholar?”

“Not that.”

“Hmm, then… the handsome scholar?”

“Your Brother doesn’t need a single one of the things you’ve said. The one I like best is this: the Brother who always protects Yeo-seol.”

“Awww!”

Yeo-seol whined like a crying cat and hugged my neck tighter still. I could feel her unease, which had bristled up like a cat’s fur, slowly settling.