Why Here?

Oh Ju-hyang left the market street and made for the docks on the Xiang River. The river ran into Dongting Lake, and boats were going up into the lake in numbers. The nearer she came to the docks, the more martial artists swelled the train behind her. They came to nearly a hundred.

Just who are they gathering on that scale to take?

A hundred-odd martial artists amounted to the fighting strength of half a battle corps. They split into five squads of twenty and advanced on one landing as though to encircle it, and when I saw them ring a single large ship my interest was caught.

So it is the people aboard the ship they are after.

The ship was a sailing vessel plying the run from Changsha down into Dongting Lake, and it carried mostly sightseers. I grew more and more curious about whom Oh Ju-hyang had come for.

Someone of the Demonic Cult? Or people of the Sichuan murim?

Hunan held none of the Nine Sects and One Faction, and little besides the Mount Heng Sect, which had only lately begun building up its strength. In practice, then, the province fell within the domain the unorthodox sects held out of Jiangxi. Of its many martial halls and martial houses, half belonged to the unorthodox sects and half to the orthodox faction. The unorthodox had taken Poyang Lake in Jiangxi, and so men had gathered here saying that Dongting Lake at least could not be handed over to them; that was how any balance came to be struck at all. For a Pavilion Master of the Demonic Cult to come out to such a place in person was no ordinary matter.

Then I saw men coming up onto the deck, and I frowned. Three young men stood out among them, and two of the three I knew well.

Those fellows — why here?

More than once now, this day had surprised me with an arrival nobody expected.

“What are Paeng So-un and Jegal Do-won doing here? Surely they have not come out on a pleasure trip?”

As I muttered it, I felt someone approaching from a way off. I read the blood flow around me and felt a master coming on, but the stench of filth reached me first, sharp enough to sting the nose.

The middle-aged beggar who came to a stand in front of me looked at me and spoke.

“And who might the scholar be, that he knows Young Hero Paeng and Young Hero Jegal?”

I looked about me and saw beggars gathering, every one of them with a Dog-Beating Staff in hand¹. The Beggars’ Sect men of Hunan Province must have caught wind of the Demonic Cult’s movement and come.

“Have you come from the Beggars’ Sect branch in Hunan Province? Then you must be the Black Wolf Beggar.”

I had every branch head of the Beggars’ Sect off by heart. The Black Wolf Beggar had a black blotch covering a third of their face, and that was how the byname had been fastened on them; shabby as the byname was, they were a master who had reached peak.

“You know me?”

Here was a scholar who knew the Hunan branch head at a glance. They had every right to find it suspicious.

“I am Cheon Tae-san. I was once with the Murim Alliance’s Inspection Corps.”

“Scholar Cheon Tae-san of the Inspection Corps? The Scholar Divine Sword?”

It puzzled me that the Black Wolf Beggar should know of me.

“Well now, so this is Scholar Cheon, the Scholar Divine Sword, whose martial fame has stood high in the murim of late.”

The Black Wolf Beggar looked at me with startled eyes.

“How do you come to know me? I have been active in no more than Hefei and Nanchang.”

“There is likely nobody in Hunan who does not know the Scholar Divine Sword. They say you are the foster son of Mak Yeo-heun, the Unorthodox Supreme.”

Half of Hunan could fairly be called unorthodox, so the rumor had evidently spread that far already.

“The subject the storytellers in the eating houses have taken to of late is the Scholar Divine Sword himself.”

I had not thought the storytellers would be telling my story as far off as Hunan.

“That aside — do you know who it is surrounding that ship just now?”

“We caught sight of them only a little while ago, so we do not know well ourselves. Does Scholar Cheon know?”

“It is Oh Ju-hyang, the Demonic Cult’s Fourteenth Pavilion Master.”

“The Fourteenth Pavilion Master!”

Knowing what manner of master a Pavilion Master of the Demonic Cult was, the Black Wolf Beggar showed their shock.

I went on.

“It looks as though she has made Paeng So-un, Jegal Do-won and the Wudang Sect’s martial artists her target.”

Some ten men wore Wudang’s Daoist robes.

The Black Wolf Beggar took up the thread.

“By the look of it they mean to go up to Dongting Lake.”

Paeng So-un had ten escorts with him, Jegal Do-won as many as fifteen, and there were some ten Wudang Sect Daoists besides. Put together, they had the look of a party on its way to Sichuan to fight. In the hot blood of youth they were going to take on the Demonic Cult, and having come as far as Changsha in Hunan they could hardly pass Dongting Lake by, so they must have hired a ship to take it in. They came to some forty in all, and so Oh Ju-hyang had brought a hundred-odd Demonic Cult men of her own.

“Still, it is strange that a Pavilion Master of the Demonic Cult should turn out merely to dispose of that lot.”

The Black Wolf Beggar threw me a puzzled look.

“Those men are the pillars of the orthodox murim. They mean to cut the sprout before it grows any bigger. It is the sort of thing the Demonic Cult does well.”

In five years those men would be masters of peak and transcendent-peak, and to the Demonic Cult that made them a burden.

The Black Wolf Beggar snorted.

“There are some forty on the ship alone, and our Beggars’ Sect men come to some fifty. In numbers we are not outmatched. And with the famous Scholar Divine Sword here besides, it does not look to me as though we should lose the fight.”

As a matter of numbers, that was roughly right.

“Branch Head. There are Dang Sect masters lodging at the inn. They too come to some ten. Send for them as well.”

“I know it. I have already sent a Beggars’ Sect man. If word has reached them they will be here soon.”

With masters and numbers of that order, I thought a fight against Oh Ju-hyang’s side worth trying. Still, against whatever might come, I read the blood flow to take the measure of the Demonic Cult men.

No! That is… Surely that is the thing Wind-Listener spoke of!

The blood flow of the Demonic Cult men ran so strangely that I remembered what the storyteller Wind-Listener had said, that they had amplified innate true qi and made masters of men. Their blood flow was different, and far too different at that. In a human being the blood flow turns about the heart; in these men the left side and the right side ran in opposite directions.

And a man can live like that? Is such a thing even possible?

I stood blank a moment in astonishment, and then the shock came like a pickaxe to the back of the head. It felt so much like something I had seen somewhere, and seen often, that it came close to a sense of having been here before.

“Good heavens! Now I see it!”

The left and right blood flows running counter to each other were, strictly speaking, much the same thing as the two spirit energies turning in the Seven Stars wheel-energy.

I turn spirit energy with the Seven Stars wheel-energy, and that turns blood flow to amplify innate true qi. Only the spirit energy and the blood flow differ; the principle is much the same.

Seeing me start, the Black Wolf Beggar asked.

“What is the matter?”

“Branch Head, have you by chance heard such a rumor? The rumor that the Demonic Cult men have completed a great art that amplifies innate true qi twofold, and have grown twice as strong.”

The Black Wolf Beggar nodded.

“I have heard Hunan’s storytellers noising that about. But would there be anyone who believes it?”

“I did not believe it either, but seeing them now, those Demonic Cult men look to be exactly that. I can read a man’s aura, and those Demonic Cult men are, at the least, first-rate masters — and some of them peak masters.”

It meant that any one Demonic Cult man stood close in martial standing to the Black Wolf Beggar, the Beggars’ Sect branch head.

“Tut, tut, what a thing to say…”

The Black Wolf Beggar made it plain they could not believe it, and there was reason enough for that. They had barely climbed to peak themselves, and only once they were into their forties. Nor did they seem much inclined to believe that a man’s martial standing could be taken by aura alone, an ability open only to one who had reached transcendent-peak.

Transcendent-peak was truly a level of attainment in another domain. If getting as far as peak took the ten thousand paces they speak of, transcendent-peak was a road with no telling how much further a man had to walk before the end came in sight.

Disbelief still thick on their face, the Black Wolf Beggar spoke lightly.

“Then I shall go and take the whole net of them. What will Scholar Cheon do?”

“I must help, of course.”

To my eye the Black Wolf Beggar was making far too light of the Demonic Cult men, and that worried me, so I said it.

“Then take my rear and give me support. And do not go pushing out to the front for nothing.”

For all that, the tone was that of someone who took me for a scholar who could swing a sword after a fashion and no more.

As the Demonic Cult men closed in on the ship, the Black Wolf Beggar drove out to the front. They plainly meant to strike the Cult men from behind and win the advantage of surprise by it.

“Yeo-seol, you had best keep out of the way for a while.”

I had no wish to draw Yeo-seol into a fight.

Whether she took my meaning or not, Yeo-seol answered.

“Brother, then I’ll be up there buying rock candy.”

Yeo-seol held out her hand, and when I opened my purse she picked out a silver coin.

“Brother, be careful. Don’t go getting hit by some blind blade for nothing.”

“You rascal.”

Only now was she something like the Yeo-seol of before, and I stroked her head.

“Hehehe.”

Yeo-seol went trotting off toward the stalls spread out above the docks.

“Yaaagh!”

A scream rang out just then. I ran at once with my lightness skill toward the ship the Demonic Cult men were attacking, and drew the book out of my robes as I went.

“What is this!”

The Black Wolf Beggar had fallen on the Demonic Cult men from behind and gained nothing at all by it, and it left them hollow. Ten at the least ought to have died. Some fifty had made the assault, and yet the Demonic Cult men killed came to about three.

“Kugh!”

Then a Demonic Cult man’s counterattacking sword drove them sliding backward, and they flinched to see it. The cultist was striking back against internal power that had reached peak.

“Yaaagh!”

“Kaagh!”

Around them the Beggars’ Sect men had their hearts and their throats cut open in a few exchanges. Out of all the sect’s many men in Changsha they had picked only the most outstanding and brought them along, and watching those men go over so limply left the Black Wolf Beggar with nothing to say.

“Black Wolf Beggar, these bastards are strong! Every one of them is at peak level.”

The beggar who served as their left-hand man said it, one arm gone. For a transcendent-first-rate master to have disposed of a single Demonic Cult man and lost an arm for it, the words were right enough. The look in those eyes said that they must fall back if the rest were to live.

Is Scholar Cheon right, then? That the Demonic Cult men are every one of them at peak level. Curse it, every beggar in Hunan is going to die!

While their mind was elsewhere a moment, the beggar who had lost an arm had their neck cut through as well.

“Aaargh!”

“You sons of bitches!”

The Black Wolf Beggar barely cut one Demonic Cult man down, then struck at the one who had killed their left-hand man and was met with a counterattack instead. Just then a Demonic Cult man rushed in from the left to take their neck.

And I am in no state even to sweep aside the blade of the one in front of me.

At the moment they had no choice but to give up their neck, there came a ping, and something like a white flower petal lodged in the forehead of the Demonic Cult man who had meant to cut it.

— Whack!

“Branch Head, at this rate you will be wiped out. You must stand against them with the Dog-Beating Formation if you are to hold.”

Scholar Cheon said it as he ran forward, tearing pages from the book and throwing them. Every throw pierced a Demonic Cult man’s forehead through.

— Boom!

The finger force behind it must have been tremendous, striking with a sound like a leather drum bursting.

— Whack!

— Crack!

— Spliiit!

Only then did they learn that a head bursting sounds different depending on the angle. With that, another of Scholar Cheon’s bynames came back to them, one they had heard at the inn. The storytellers told so many tales of the Scholar Divine Sword that they knew him well enough.

The White-Leaf Scholar.

The byname had been fastened on him for killing Demonic Cult men at the Hohyeon Estate by throwing paper the way one throws the Plucked-Leaf Flying Blade. How they had laughed over their drink when they heard it. Some scrap of a scholar unfolding the Plucked-Leaf Flying Blade was a tale that did not appear even in the hero-chronicles going about the market. That was how preposterous it was.

The Black Wolf Beggar shouted.

“Gather to me! Unfold the Dog-Beating Formation!”

At that the Beggars’ Sect men, who had been going down like leaves before an autumn wind, drew together into a single formation. But the number that came in was a bare twenty or so. In a little over a quarter of an hour, thirty of them had died.

The Black Wolf Beggar bit their lip and cried out.

“From now on do not leave the Dog-Beating Formation — turn to the defensive!”

Even while they were gathering in like that, five more were killed.

Far too strong. If this is the Demonic Cult’s true strength, can the Murim Alliance bear up against it?

The Black Wolf Beggar’s flesh crawled, and skin that had not been washed in a year lifted with it.

Aboard the ship it was a shambles in the truest sense. Unlike the Beggars’ Sect men, the Paeng Clan’s escort warriors, the Jegal Clan’s escort warriors and the Wudang Sect’s martial artists gauged the enemy’s fighting strength at once and stood against them in a formation.

When Scholar Cheon, at the rear, tore pages from the book and threw them at the Demonic Cult men, a shout of alarm burst out.

“Hidden weapons! Look out!”

— Ti-ti-ti-ting!

Batting the paper away with their swords, the Demonic Cult men turned to look toward Scholar Cheon.