Chapter 20

“Good heavens….”

We stared blankly at the Three-Point Gate, open at last. Moyong Rin, frozen with her hand still clamped on my shoulder, spoke in a shaking voice.

“You… what did you do?”
“I don’t know either. I just….”

Just then the Smiling Ghost’s savage laughter carried up to us from far off. Moyong Danho snapped out of it and shoved us both in the back.

“Get inside, now!”

— Ka-boom—

We tumbled in through the Three-Point Gate before we quite knew what was happening, and the door shut behind us. A silent darkness settled over us.

“Oh my gosh! We have to be the first people ever to set foot inside a ruin site!”

Moyong Rin shook me by the shoulders like mad.

“How did you open it?”

I was the one who wanted to ask.

How did I open it?

I’d walked up to it as though under a spell, laid my hand on it, and it had cracked open all by itself. How in the world was I supposed to know why?

“I don’t know either. I just followed the voice and put my hand on it, and….”
“Voice? What voice?”

That brought me up sharp.

“That’s right — the voice!”

I sprang to my feet and shouted.

“Hey! Can you hear me?”

“…”

“You called me, didn’t you. Answer me!”

No answer came. Only the silent dark inside the ruins stared back at me.

“Gwang-seon. Who are you talking to?”
“I don’t know either….”

The hollowness of it drained the strength out of me, and I sank slowly down where I stood. Moyong Danho sighed too, long and heavy, and dropped down beside me.

“What in the world is going on….”
“Well, since we’re here, let’s rest a while. This place seems safe enough.”
“Can’t hurt.”

Once the tension went out of me, the exhaustion came flooding in. The reality of it arrived a step behind.

Just now. I nearly died.

I put a hand to my chest and found my heart still hammering away. The murderous look in the Smiling Ghost’s eyes was still vivid to me, and so was the way he swung that saber around like a ghost. A moment slower and I’d have been dead. Really dead.

“Haaah….”

Even a murim warrior couldn’t stand a life like this. Do they dance on the blade of death every single time?

— Bump.

Something tapped my shoulder. I looked over to find Moyong Danho smiling faintly.

“You saved us back there.”
“Don’t mention it.”

He must have had a hundred questions. Moyong Danho asked none of them, just stayed quiet and sat there at my side.

There’s a reason people use the word ‘comrade-in-arms.’ We’d fought together exactly once, and already having him there was a comfort.

“Anyway. Were you going easy on me at the Intra-Family Sparring Tournament? You were terrifying once you had a blade in your hand.”
“I wasn’t going easy on you. I simply didn’t take up a sword.”
“Same thing.”

We chatted quietly for a while, and then I looked around.

“Where’s Yong-rin got to now?”
“Over there.”

I followed Danho’s finger, and there was Moyong Rin, apparently tireless, hopping around inside the ruins.

“…Does she not get tired?”

Danho gave a wry smile.

“Rin’s always been rather keen on ruin sites. Anyway, why do you call Rin ‘Yong-rin’?”
“I called her Rin and she told me not to act like we’re close.”
“That’s Rin, all right.”

I sat back on my hands and looked the place over. The quiet was extraordinary. Not a sound from outside made it in; the space might have been cut off from the world entirely. Out there the sun was up, but in here there was nothing but darkness, and a cold light from no source I could name lit that darkness with a soft glow.

What is this place….

While I was still looking around, Moyong Rin, who had been happily exploring, came pattering over.

“Look at this!”
“What is it?”
“I picked it up over there.”

I took a look at what she’d brought.

“This is… a pyramid?”
“A pyramid? What’s that?”
“No, wait, it isn’t a pyramid. A pyramid’s base is a square.”
“So what IS it, I’m asking?”

The thing was made of metal, shaped like a regular tetrahedron. In other words, a quasi-pyramid, four triangles joined face to face.

“Where did you find it?”
“They’re rolling about all over the place. There are plenty of meteoric-iron scraps too.”

She held out a handful of triangular metal scraps, the same as the one I’d picked up outside.

“Huh? Don’t tell me…?”

I picked out a few of them and tried matching the faces up. Sure enough, they snapped together like magnets.

“What. How did you do that?”
“I just held them together and they stuck?”

Moyong Rin copied me and tried pressing two triangles together, but they would not join at all.

“It’s not working for me. Danho, you try.”
“It doesn’t work for me either.”
“Hey. You try it with this one.”

I took the metal scrap she’d been straining over, set face against face, and….

“It works?”
“What. Why is it only you?”

Four triangles came together, and the tetrahedron she’d brought over was whole.

“Remarkable.”
“What’s the principle behind it?”
“What’s it even for?”

We put our heads together, but beyond ‘it looks impressive’ we got nowhere.

“Give it here.”

I watched Moyong Rin play with the tetrahedron for a while, then got to my feet. We’d rested enough; it was time to move. We could hardly hole up in here for a thousand years and ten thousand more.

“I had a look around. This part is like a courtyard off the entrance, and there’s a passage over that way that leads further in.”

We set off after Moyong Rin, our scout.

At first the cold darkness hid everything, but as my eyes adjusted the outlines of things came gradually into view. The place had the look of somewhere to catch your breath before the survey proper began, a wide space, empty but for tetrahedrons like the one she’d picked up and metal scraps scattered here and there.

“It’s here.”

Standing before the passage, I braced myself.

“A monster could come leaping out at any moment. Stay sharp.”
“Got it.”
“No harm in being careful.”

We stepped into the passage, and it ran on as a triangular tunnel, winding along like a cave. Metal engraved with geometric patterns covered the walls, threaded through with wires of a kind I couldn’t place, and lamps set at intervals threw off a cold light. After a while of that, we came to a fork.

“Which way?”

After a moment’s thought we chose the right. As we started down it, Danho’s tattered sleeve caught the wall and ripped clean through.

“Whuh.”
“Careful, now.”

We pressed on, and there was another fork.

“…I don’t like this.”

And another after that. And after that. And after that as well.

By the time we came to a three-way fork, it had finally dawned on us.

“This… this is a maze, isn’t it?”

And when we reached a fork with a torn scrap of cloth hanging off it, a second fact dawned on us.

“We… I think we’re lost?”

Looks like we were well and truly screwed.

“Here, eat. It’s griddle cake.”
“When on earth did you make these?”

We sat with our backs against the wall, chewing our snacks down. Moyong Rin, working her way through a griddle cake, muttered as though she couldn’t believe it.

“…Honestly. Even a griddle cake gone stone cold tastes good.”
“Mmm! Gwang-seon, is there more?”
“No. That was the last of it.”

Bundles, provisions, everything. We’d thrown it all away as we ran, so there was no food left either.

“We’re not going to end up starving to death in here, are we?”
“Not dying gloriously in battle the way a warrior should. Starving to death trapped in a maze. No. This isn’t it. This is nothing like a warrior at all!”
“And what is like a warrior, then?”
“Avenging your master. Dying to shield people from some utterly depraved fiend. Huh? That sort of thing.”
“Either way you end up dead.”
“Everyone dies sometime. If you’re going to, you may as well die well, right?”

I shook my head. There is no keeping up with the way murim warriors think.

Moyong Rin grumbled on about dying in here for nothing without having managed a single thing, and when she finally went quiet, a black stillness came over us.

“…”

The mood turned heavy. I wanted to sweep the gloom off all of us somehow, but nothing came to mind.

Sunk in her own gloom, she pulled out the tetrahedron she’d been playing with earlier and turned it over in her hands, and then….

“Argh!”

she suddenly hurled it at the wall.

— Clank!

“What good does it do, looking impressive! It isn’t the slightest use to anyone!”
“Rin….”

With a sigh, I bent to pick up the tetrahedron she had thrown, and in that instant.

— Keeeeen—

“Huh?”

A shape rose into the air above the pyramid’s apex.

“This is…!”
“What is it?”
“You two can’t see this?”

“…?”

“There’s an arrow floating right here above it.”
“Gwang-seon….”
“Now he’s seeing things.”

I ignored them and sprang to my feet.

“Hey, where are you going?”
“Gwang-seon! Don’t get separated from us!”

Tetrahedral pyramid in hand, I planted myself in front of the two-way fork. And what do you know, the hologram arrow swung around to point down one of the two paths!

This is it!

They say even if the sky comes down there’s a hole to climb out through, and so there was!

“You two! Follow me and nobody else!”
“Hey! I said where are you going!”
“Rin, let’s just follow him!”

Guided by the hologram floating above the tetrahedron, I cut back and forth clean through the maze,

“The way out! It’s the way out!”
“We’re saved!”
“Waaaah! We get to die fighting after all!”

and in the end we pulled off the triumph of coming out the other side.

I turned to look at the two of them.

“And who am I?”

My question came back to me as a roar of acclaim.

“The treasure of the Moyong Family!”
“Moyong Gwang-seon, Breaker of Labyrinths!”

— Ka-boom!

A sudden tremor cut my supporters’ hymns of praise short.

“Wh-what is it.”

— Ka-rrrumble—

Something was rising up out of the floor. Once the shaking stopped, we edged carefully closer.

“What is this?”

A pillar stood at chest height, a translucent sphere resting on top of it. Inside, something shaped like a star glittered.

“This… isn’t this an earring?”
“An earring?”

Now that she mentioned it, it did look like an earring….

“How do we get it out, though?”
“We smash it.”

Moyong Danho brought the butt of his sword hilt down on the translucent glass. But the glass chose to throw it off rather than break.

“Whuh.”
“Oh, look at this thing.”

Moyong Rin’s stubborn streak kicked in and she piled on too, to exactly the same result.

“What kind of thing is this?”
“What in the world is it made of?”
“Step aside.”

On a hunch I couldn’t explain, I stepped up in front of it. And then I laid my hand on top of it.

— Vwoooom—

“Hmph. What makes you think you’d be any diff— what?!”

The glass around it vanished, dissolving into the air, and I reached in and picked up the star-shaped earring.

“Odd-looking thing.”

For a joke, I held it up to my ear.

“How about it? Does it su— ow!”

Ffit— no sooner had I brought it to my ear than my earlobe stung. Blood ran down.

I turned my head without thinking, and there was the drop of blood that had run off my earlobe, hanging in mid-air, stopped dead.

“What in the….”

Any other time the two of them would have been in an uproar over it, but there wasn’t a sound out of them. I looked, and they had gone colorless, frozen like statues.

“…You two?”

This voice. I knew it. It had spoken to me at the entrance of the ruins.

I looked all around, but there was no sign of whoever the voice belonged to.

“Who are you? Where are you speaking from? Show yourself.”

“It is.”

Into that colorless world where time had stopped, threads of every color came drifting down and began to weave themselves together. The sight was beautiful enough to border on rapture. And then, like a flower opening, they took the shape of a woman and settled to the ground.

She wore a dress of a kind I had never seen in my life, and on top of that an air of mystery hung about her. She did not look like a being of this world.

“…A celestial maiden?”

I muttered it in a daze.

“Who are you?”

She answered my question with a sorrowful smile.

“I asked who you are.”

The celestial maiden broke into a smile.

I frowned, and her smile deepened.

She made her obeisance in a form of ceremony I had never seen.

In that instant, a memory came flowing into my head.¹

— Tramp— tramp—

The sound of rough footfalls rang off the floor.

— You are going?
— I am.

I answered as I walked past Ishtar.

— Can you not stay?

— Dead stop.

— Ishtar.
— Yes.
— Do you think I am going to my death?

Ishtar could not answer.

— Ease that face. I am not going to die.
— Then?
— I am going to make certain that I am alive.

I set off walking again. Ishtar did not stop me.