Chapter 159

‘So this is the Ink Scholar.’

The man who had predicted the Heavenly Demon’s Demonization.
The man who had put his past, present, and future into three proclamations.
That man had appeared before me.
Looking strange enough to leave anyone taken aback.

‘Keep your expression under control.’

I deliberately put a smile on my face.
Right now, I was a prophet.
I needed to look perfectly at ease, as though I knew the future well.

For a while, the Ink Scholar and I faced each other in silence.
Then he lowered his head.
Looking down at the paper on the board attached to his wheelchair, he picked up his brush and began writing something.
And as he did, he spoke.

“Fifteenth day of the ninth month. Soul-Bewildering Forest. Fortune-teller riding an ox. Accompanied by two servants.”
“……?”
“Clear voice. Estimated age around thirty.”

Was he seriously recording information about me right now?
While muttering it aloud?

-He’s completely insane.

Flying Swallow had said as much.
Now that I saw him for myself, she hadn’t been wrong in the slightest.
I was pretending to be a prophet and an eccentric, but compared to the Ink Scholar, I was nothing but an ordinary man.
Like Zhou Yu standing before Zhuge Liang, perhaps.

But I couldn’t let his behavior throw me off.
If I wanted the outcome I had come for, I needed to control the conversation no matter what happened.

I asked the Ink Scholar,

“Are you the one who foresaw the Heavenly Demon’s future?”

The Ink Scholar muttered something incomprehensible under his breath as though he hadn’t heard my question.
Then, still looking down at the paper, he raised only his eyes to stare at me.

“If I were not, I would hardly have come here. Unless, of course, you sent that letter to several people.”
“I sent it only to you.”
“I thought as much.”

The Ink Scholar raised his head toward me.

“Under the full moon, a heavy fragrance spreads through Soul-Bewildering Forest. The scholar who cannot walk lives burdened by tomorrow. Seek the one who has already swum through a thousand branching labyrinths. Refuse, and the brush shall break forever.”

The Ink Scholar recited the contents of my letter without getting a single word wrong.

“Does ‘the one who has already swum through a thousand branching labyrinths’ mean someone who has seen the future?”
“It does.”
“Is that you?”
“Who else could it be but this humble one?”
“And what does it mean that the brush shall break forever?”
“Exactly what it says.”

The Ink Scholar murmured as his brush moved across the paper.

“Sang-eon, what do you think he means by ‘exactly what it says’?”

‘Sang-eon?’

Apparently, that was the name of the eerie woman pushing his wheelchair.
The Ink Scholar spoke aloud, while the strange woman seemed to answer through voice transmission.
Perhaps they didn’t want anyone else hearing her answers, or perhaps there was some reason she couldn’t speak aloud.
I couldn’t know which.
Murim was overflowing with strange people to begin with, so there was no reason to dwell on it.

“I suppose we’ll have to find out.”

The Ink Scholar nodded.
As though he had received an answer.
Then he asked me in a testing tone,

“What do you see?”
“The same thing you do. My gaze simply reaches farther.”
“I cannot believe that. False prophets are hardly rare in the mortal world.”

The Ink Scholar’s voice turned displeased.
It was the reaction I had expected.
He wasn’t foolish enough to immediately believe someone who had suddenly sent him a letter and then claimed to be better than him.

‘I’ll prove it.’

I had prepared something in advance.
An event from my previous life that would happen before long and affect quite a number of people.
I prophesied the incident that would occur because of Jin Hwa-un, whom I had saved in the No-Return Cave.

“Brothers born beneath the same moon shall turn upon each other’s throats. The radiant Moon Seal shall split in two.”

The Radiant Moon Jin Family would split apart.
In my previous life, the situation had been brought under control midway through, but not this time.
Because I intended to interfere.

The Ink Scholar tilted his head.
Deep wrinkles creased the broad forehead beneath his bald head.

“Who could that refer to? What does the Moon Seal symbolize?”

He wrote, tore up the paper, wrote again, then tore that one up as well.
After repeating this for a while, the Ink Scholar finally stopped his brush.

“Sang-eon, this is about the Radiant Moon Jin Family! Heavy karma has accumulated upon that family. Do you know what symbolizes its direct line? The Radiant Moon Seal.”

I was somewhat surprised.
The Ink Scholar’s information network was better than I had expected.
I hadn’t imagined he would know not only the Radiant Moon Jin Family’s hidden history, but even the token symbolizing its direct line.
And on top of that, he had enough insight to connect that information to the prophecy I had fabricated.

“Interesting. When the beast of the south raises its claws, the poison flower shall melt away.”

As though refusing to be outdone, the Ink Scholar suddenly spouted another cryptic line.
A prophecy.
His eyes fixed on my mouth as though challenging me to decipher it.

‘If I can’t figure it out, I’ll lose credibility.’

I turned the meaning over in my mind.
Nothing immediately came to me.
There were countless beasts in the south.
Considering the Demon Cult’s location, almost every faction in Murim was to the south of us anyway.

‘Wait. A poison flower melting away……’

A place suddenly came to mind.
The Beast Palace of Nanman.
I didn’t remember exactly when, but its Palace Lord would cause a major incident.
The Beast Palace would clash with the Sichuan Tang Clan over disputes concerning the collection of poisonous creatures within its territory.
The result would be the death of the Sichuan Tang Clan’s young master.
A brutal war would break out between the two, and astonishingly, the Palace Lord, who was only in his thirties, would even defeat the Sichuan Tang Clan Patriarch.
As a result, much of the Sichuan Tang Clan’s power and prestige would be broken.

‘That has to be it.’

The question was whether that was what the Ink Scholar had meant.
I dressed the event up in the form of another prophecy.

“Though the melted poison flower tries to bloom anew, it shall be in vain. Its roots have been broken by the claw. What flower can bloom from broken roots?”
“Sang-eon, how fascinating. This man has undoubtedly seen the same thing I have!”

Apparently, we really had been talking about the same event.
A question rose inside me.

‘How does the Ink Scholar already know about this?’

Did he actually possess foresight?
But judging by how he had worked out my prophecy just now, rather than foresight, it seemed more like-

‘Information, analysis, insight.’

Yes. That seemed closer.
Using those three things to predict a ‘future likely to occur,’ rather than truly seeing it.
To test that hypothesis, I gave him a second prophecy.

“The one who holds gold should have struck off the head of the one who offered bronze, yet the bronze pig has rolled somewhere else. The one who sought another’s blood shall see his own, and the one who wished to spare his gold shall lose his own gold.”

It was about the Bronze Seated Statue sought by the Myriad Gold Money House.
In my previous life, the man who found and returned it went to collect his reward and was sent to the underworld that very day.
Now, that statue was in my possession.
I had obtained it during my last trip to the Central Plains.

‘I wonder if Kang Myeong and Kang Cheong-woo are doing well.’

The thought suddenly occurred to me.
We had agreed to meet again half a year later, and that time was gradually approaching.

“Hmmm.”

The Ink Scholar began furiously scribbling something.
Apparently unable to make sense of it, he repeatedly wrote something down, tore it up, then started again.

‘Surely he can’t figure this one out.’

His answer to this would tell me a great deal about what the Ink Scholar truly was.
The Beast Palace and Sichuan Tang Clan were famous factions in Murim. With an excellent enough intelligence network, what happened between them might be predictable.
But this was different.
The fact that the Bronze Seated Statue was one of the things the Myriad Gold Money House was searching for wasn’t widely known, and more importantly, the future in which the person who returned it was killed hadn’t even happened yet.
If he figured even this out, then the Ink Scholar possessed something that couldn’t be explained by information alone.
If he couldn’t, then his prophecies ultimately operated within the limits of his information.
Either result would help me understand his true nature.

At last, the Ink Scholar spoke.

“The one who holds gold. A place that deals in gold… the Iron-Gold Wi Family? No. The Myriad Gold Money House, Sang-eon! I hear its owner desperately seeks a work of art cast in bronze. But has the flow been altered? Judging by the owner’s greed, the one who offered the bronze should have spilled blood. It seems the owner has finally met his match!”

That was astonishing.
He even knew that the owner of the Myriad Gold Money House was searching for the Bronze Seated Statue, despite how far the Money House was from the Demon Cult.

But he hadn’t accurately predicted the future.
Naturally.
The fact that someone would discover the Bronze Seated Statue and die because of it wasn’t something information could reveal.
That belonged to the realm of foresight.

I understood the truth behind the Ink Scholar.
The Radiant Moon Jin Family, the Beast Palace, and the Myriad Gold Money House.
Every answer he had reached was based on information.
He gathered vast amounts of information, analyzed it, applied his insight, and predicted ‘futures likely to occur.’
That was the true nature of the Ink Scholar’s ‘prophecies.’

‘……Wait.’

A thought suddenly flashed through my mind.
If the Ink Scholar’s prophecies belonged to the realm of information, could the Heavenly Demon’s Demonization be the same?
Could there be evidence somewhere that allowed him to reach that conclusion?

‘No way……’

I shook my head.
The Heavenly Demon had unquestionably become a demonic fiend.
But I couldn’t believe the Ink Scholar knew the reason why.
This was the Heavenly Demon we were talking about.
Even I, who had been tormented by him for seven years, didn’t know. How could someone with little connection to him possibly know?
And yet,

‘What if there really is a basis for it?’

I stared seriously at the Ink Scholar.
He was looking at me as well.

“You certainly seem to see something.”

His gaze was different from before.
He no longer seemed to be testing me. He looked wary of me, or perhaps even acknowledging me.

I didn’t answer.
His recognition was less important than something else right now.
I went straight to the point.

“You are wrong.”
“About what?”
“The future you foresaw for the Heavenly Demon is clearly different from the future this humble one has seen.”
“And what future did you see?”
“The Heavenly Demon will not become a demonic fiend.”

That had been my resolve immediately after regressing, and my vow that I would never allow it to happen.
Cure my severed meridians and prevent the Heavenly Demon from becoming a demonic fiend.
For those two goals, there was nothing I wouldn’t do.

“The Heavenly Demon will not become a demonic fiend?”

The Ink Scholar tilted his head and muttered to himself for quite some time.
Then he asked,

“Is that the future you saw?”
“It is.”
“The Heavenly Demon has no choice but to become a demonic fiend. That is the natural order.”
“The natural order?”
“It seems your sight does not reach that far. Sang-eon, we must revise our assessment of this man. Capable, but immature.”

After finishing his notes, he continued.

“Do you know what comes after the Heavenly Demon becomes a demonic fiend?”
“I do not.”
“As I thought. You seem to know ‘what’ happens, but not ‘why’ it happens.”

He was right.
I knew what had happened in my previous life, but that didn’t mean I knew why everything had happened.
Unlike me, this man knew how to read the underlying evidence.
The Ink Scholar possessed whatever evidence lay behind his prediction that the Heavenly Demon would become a demonic fiend.

He spoke as though giving me a lesson.

“The seed has already been planted. The Heavenly Demon will lead all of you, no, the entire Central Plains, to ruin.”

Listening to the certainty in his voice, I made up my mind.
I would uncover the reason, no matter what.
And to do that, I might have to use harsher measures than I had originally planned.