Chapter 39

“You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth, so what am I supposed to do.”
“You tamed a monster? And the Warden of the Iron Bamboo Forest, at that?”
“Don’t believe it, then.”
“Even so, surely….”

Danho let out a bewildered laugh, as if the whole thing were beyond him.

“Anyway. How’s the body holding up?”
“Fully healed now. I could sortie this minute.”

It had been a while since I’d seen him, and he looked healthy again. No more limping, no more wheezing around the place. He’d missed this exchange meet altogether, laid up recuperating from the injuries he took at the Phoenix Mountain ruins, so it was a relief to find him back on his feet.

I told Danho what had happened at the Azure Sea Bamboo Forest ruins too. Whoever else I had to keep it from, him I could trust.

“If I’d known it would turn out like this I’d have found some way to come along!”

When I told him about the fog room, Danho pounded the ground in regret.

“Forget it. In that state you’d have died nine times out of ten.”
“But still.”

Moyong Rin took over the scolding on my behalf and poured it out over the sulking Danho.

“Get a grip. If you’d insisted on tagging along to the exchange meet you’d never have recovered. You wouldn’t have had a hope of competing at the Dragon and Phoenix Conference.”
“…That’s true enough.”

After the exchange match ended, on the road back to the Moyong Family, Moyong Jin-seong called me aside.

— I alone shall know of it, so you may speak frankly.

And so, one on one with him, I got asked all sorts of questions.

Q. Did you find the ruins?
A. Nope nope. Blocked by the Iron Bamboo Forest’s maze; never got there.
Q. How did you subdue the monster?
A. I was wandering the Iron Bamboo Forest and happened to pick up an eyeball-shaped relic. I think that’s probably why.

There was no hiding the star-shaped eyeball anyway, so telling it this way was the better play.

Sure enough, Moyong Jin-seong was satisfied. The mysterious power of a ruin steeped in secrets could do anything at all without anyone finding it strange.

Q. Can anybody else use that ability?
A. Probably not. This thing’s soulbound.
Q. Where did that wolf go?
A. Back to its own den, I’d guess.
Q. Could it come back?
A. It could. No idea when, though.

I tried to answer honestly as far as I could safely speak. At the very least I didn’t lie.

I had expected him to press me relentlessly. Instead Moyong Jin-seong asked a few questions and left it there, and from how little he has said since, it looks as though he means to let the whole thing lie.

Back at the Moyong Family, we all trained hard for the Dragon and Phoenix Conference, which was right around the corner. If anything’s different from before, it’s that training together has come to feel natural, I suppose? Even right now I was out there with Danho and Moyong Rin, the three of us working through it together.

The Moyong Family’s children often came by as well. They would sit up on the wall and watch me train, and now and then they gave me advice. Sometimes they just came for the snacks.

If the purpose of the exchange meet was to strengthen the members’ bonds, then it counts as a success. Somewhere along the line I seemed to have been accepted as a full member of the Moyong Family, and it felt good.

My efforts are finally shining through!

All that scattering of snacks around had been worth it.

“Have a bite of this before you carry on.”

I turned toward the voice and found the boss coming out with a big bowl heaped full of dumplings, steam pouring off them.

“Thanks for the food!”
“Perfect. I was just getting peckish.”

We closed in on the dumplings without a second’s delay.

“How are they?”
“These are really tasty, sir.”
“Ho ho. My cooking’s not half bad, is it?”
“I’m the one who made the wrappers and the filling. All you had to do was pinch them shut and steam them. If you couldn’t manage that much you’d have to hand in your innkeeper’s post.”
“You little wretch. Think anybody can pinch and steam them, do you?”

Moyong Rin watched us squabble and giggled behind her hand, while Danho wore a here-they-go-again look and ate dumplings instead of popcorn as he took in the show.

Bickering with the boss for the first time in a long while put my mind at ease.

There’s a saying that once you leave home it’s a dog’s life. Unlike our Big Bro Un-cheon, who has the wandering itch in him, most of us ordinary small folk, myself included, are apt to miss home.

And for me, home was here.

“Pops. How’s the leg?”
“It’s much better, thanks to the physician looking at it.”
“You were still limping when you came out, though.”
“The bone was broken — how would it be right as rain? It’s a mercy it’s no worse.”
“There’s no way of getting it to heal all the way?”
“Who knows. They said it’d be difficult.”
“Do as the physician tells you. And cut back on the drink.”
“Listen to this little wretch nagging.”

I drained my water in one go. The boss’s leg kept catching at the corner of my eye.

Ugh, it really is upsetting.

Hatred for the damned black-path thugs who go around turning inns upside down surged up in me like wildfire.

Anyone who torments a waiter ought to be killed, the whole lot of them.

I was throwing water back like liquor to settle myself when I caught the boss talking with the other two. The pair of them had come by so often that somewhere along the line they’d gotten quite close to him.

“Ho ho. Hard at it from first thing in the morning.”
“We have to be. The Dragon and Phoenix Conference is right around the corner.”
“I hear the representative selection match is tomorrow. Is that right?”
“Ah, is it that time already?”

The Moyong Family had taken runner-up at the last Dragon and Phoenix Conference, which won them the right to skip the preliminary rounds and go straight through to the main draw. As advantages went, that one was overwhelming. Naturally the family would want to put forward whoever had the best chance of taking the championship, and the representative selection match was how they meant to find that person.

Moyong Danho suddenly turned to me.

“You, Gwang-seon. I hear you’re not entering the representative selection match?”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“Why d’you think. I don’t fancy wearing myself out for nothing. It’s not as though you can’t go to the Dragon and Phoenix Conference without being the representative, is it?”
“That’s true enough.”

I’ll say it again: I have no particular desire to win the Dragon and Phoenix Conference. Glory? They can give that to the dogs. Spending that time going to find the next ruins is a far better piece of business.

And anyway, it isn’t as if you get picked as representative just because you want to be.

I happened to beat Paeng Dol-hwi at the exchange meet, sure, but it came down to a hair’s breadth, and luck played its part too, to a degree. Paeng Dol-hwi isn’t playing captain because he’s outstandingly strong to begin with. He became the leader because he’s got the best head among them. As I am now, there’s no way for me to beat the big brothers and sisters.

“I’ll be rooting for you, Yong-rin. Do my share too.”
“…Hmph.”

To put it more precisely, I can’t beat Moyong Rin. She had smashed through her own limits in the fog room and come out of it a strong favorite for the win. For the thing she wants so badly, victory at the Dragon and Phoenix Conference, she has to take first place at this representative selection match without fail. I had no wish to get in her way.

“I wondered where that good smell was coming from. Mind if I join in?”
“Uncle Moyong Bi!”

Right on cue, the martial arts teacher Moyong Bi joined us.

“Boss. May I have a few myself?”
“Oh, of course. I made them to be eaten.”
“There might not be enough, though.”
“If there isn’t, I’ll just make more.”

While the boss went inside to steam another batch, Moyong Bi picked up a few of the leftovers, ate them, and then hauled me to my feet.

“Come at me, monster tamer.”
“I haven’t even digested yet.”
“A little light exercise after a meal aids the digestion.”

Grumbling, I got up and threw myself at him. He slipped my attacks one way and then the other as he talked, and his eyes had gone to my feet.

“Remarkable. The Divine Cascade Step and the Butterfly Step run along completely different meridian paths, so switching straight from one to the other shouldn’t be easy. How are you doing it?”
“I just kept at it and it started working?”
“…Insufferable brat.”

Moyong Bi thrashed me, and he put some personal feeling into it. I might have gotten a lot stronger over the trip to the Azure Sea Bamboo Forest, but to him I was still a toy.

“Khek.”

While I rolled around on the ground breathing in dirt, Moyong Bi squatted down beside me and said:

“Perhaps there’s truth in that story after all.”
“…What story?”
“There’s a theory that the first family head, who founded the Moyong Family, used two mutually opposed lightness arts at the same time.”
“Like me?”
“That’s right. More precisely, it would be truer to say the original form of the lightness art the founder used was split apart to make the two lightness arts we know.”

So the Divine Cascade Step and the Butterfly Step had been one and the same to begin with?

“Then why wasn’t it passed down as it was? Why go to the trouble of splitting it in two?”
“Because performing two mutually opposed movements at once was something only the founder could do, with the martial talent of a grandmaster. For ordinary warriors like us, learning the founder’s supreme martial learning was as near to impossible as makes no difference, so they split it in two to make it easier to learn — or so they say.”

So Moyong Bi, the man they call the star-crossed genius, counted as an ordinary warrior. That was the measure of how great the first family head must have been, I supposed.

“I’d taken it for a far-fetched legend. But with someone standing in front of me who can actually do it… I’m starting to wonder whether it’s more than merely a legend.”

Moyong Bi stroked his chin and muttered.

“Come to think of it, they say a peerless secret manual has been handed down in the Moyong Family like a legend, one that only someone who has mastered both lightness arts to the utmost may be admitted to. You’d do well to ask the family head about it sometime.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”

“If you’ve rested enough, get up.”
“What?”

And so, like any other day, Moyong Bi knocked me around any number of times and left me rolling on the ground, and at some point the boss turned up with a fresh batch of steamed dumplings.

“Good timing. Let’s eat first.”
“…You have them, Teacher.”

If I ate dumplings now I’d only bring them back up, so I stayed where I was instead of going over to the wooden platform. Sprawled out flat, I lay looking up at a sky as bruise-purple as the marks all over my body when….

— Ding!

“Hm?”

At the sudden notification chime I brought my hand up in front of my eyes. One of the battery’s three bars had filled back up. I’d poured all three of them into taming the Twin-Sword Wolf at the Azure Sea Bamboo Forest ruins, and this was the first one to come back.

The battery’s back. Shall I try out one of the star eyeball’s other powers?

Three powers lay dormant in this star-eyeball lens Herion had given me. I’d already tried the Star Eye and the Demon Wheel Eye, which left the Mirror Wheel Eye, the last of them.

The name means an eye that reflects like a mirror and copies exactly. It manifests through three stages in all: ‘absorption, storage, reproduction’.

First, absorption.

You observe some ability (which here would be a martial art). You take it apart piece by piece, analyze it, understand its principle and see through to the heart of it. The simpler the martial art the shorter this process runs, and the more complex the martial art the longer. That’s why the Mirror Wheel Eye kept firing on me while I watched Yeon Seo-ha the Plum Blossom Swordsman and Ju Jeo-ha work their Plum Blossom Sword.

Second, storage.

You store what you have understood in a slot. For now there’s only the one. Wander around other ruins and I might find a way to increase them?

— Keeen—

The star formed on my retina turned like a cartwheel, and the martial art it had absorbed was stored in that slot. It cost one bar of the battery.

Third and last, reproduction.

You reproduce what is stored in the slot in your own way.

I got up off the ground. Eyes gently closed, I drew the Pork-Slicing Demon-Cleaving Saber and slowly unfolded the opening stance.

“What’s that one up to?”
“Looks like the Pork-Slicing Demon-Cleaving Saber wants blood.”
“Gwang-seon! Eat first, then do it!”
“…”

I ignored the voices reaching me and focused my mind. In the darkness behind my closed eyes, the Plum Blossom Sword that Yeon Seo-ha and Ju Jeo-ha had shown me was dancing. Petals scattered this way and that through the pitch black.

“Hooo….”

I let out a long breath and opened my eyes.

— Keeen—

Aware of the Mirror Wheel Eye turning, I swung the blade.

— Whooosh—

There was nothing much special about the cut itself. What made it special were the silver-white petals scattering around it, the color of moonlight.

— Crash-bang!

A great racket went up behind me. I glanced back to find the whole lot of them who had been eating dumplings staring my way with astonished faces. Moyong Bi had shot to his feet, and he spoke with the face of a man who had seen a ghost.

“…You’ve stolen the Plum Blossom Sword as well?”

I shrugged.

“It just sort of happened.”

External-arts training, which works the body, matters, but internal-energy training, which governs the mind, matters just as much. You put your enlightenment in order and gather your internal energy in. They say if you don’t slack on internal-energy training, that fearsome fellow called qi deviation won’t come calling.

And so, the day’s training finished, we were all sitting together in qi circulation.

“Is Gwang-seon here?”

Moyong Pae-cheon had come by.

“Oh— Big Bro. What brings you here?”

I showed him in, and he brightened at the sight of Danho and Moyong Rin.

“Ah, this is convenient. You’re all gathered here.”
“Would you care for some dumplings? We’ve got some made up.”
“Mm. I won’t say no.”

Moyong Pae-cheon picked up dumplings and munched them nom-nom while we chatted for a while.

“Danho. Is your body all right?”
“You’d best be nervous at tomorrow’s representative selection match.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”

Then he came to the point.

“Father has given out the rewards.”
“Rewards…?”
“The rewards for winning the exchange match.”
“Ah.”

I’d clean forgotten. We won the exchange match, didn’t we?

“It seems the prizes sent by the Mount Hua Sect and the Paeng Family only arrived today. He called me in, and gave me all three.”

The family head had instructed Moyong Pae-cheon, as team leader, to hand out the prizes as he saw fit. Sharing out the credit was part of the team leader’s job as well, he said.

“However I look at it, our Moyong Family’s win at the exchange meet was largely down to the two of you.”

Moyong Pae-cheon set all three wooden cases down in front of us. Startled, I asked:

“Hold on, Big Bro. You’re giving all three to us?”
“If not for you, our Moyong Family could never have won.”
“No, even so….”
“No arguing. Take them. I’ve just come from telling the others as well. Nobody objected.”

I knew our part in the Moyong Family’s win had been a large one. If we hadn’t brought the Twin-Sword Wolf back, the Mount Hua Sect would have won and carried off the prizes.

But I had never dreamed he would give us all three, and I stared at him with a dazed look on my face. All the more so because the prizes won at this exchange meet were precious things money couldn’t buy.

You’d think he’d be tempted….

“Moyong Gwang-seon, Moyong Rin.”
“Yes.”

Moyong Pae-cheon looked at the two of us, his eyes gone serious.

“You two are the hope of our Moyong Family.”
“…!”

I know this. Moyong Pae-cheon is a man whose words and deeds carry weight, and he is not a man who ever says a thing like that lightly. And Moyong Rin knew that better still.

She bowed her head with a look of deep emotion on her face, so moved that her eyes brimmed with tears.

“…Thank you, Brother.”

She wore the face of someone who had been given something more precious than the wooden cases.

The next day, the representative selection match was held.

There was no upset.

“The winner of the representative selection match is — Moyong Rin!”

— Uwaaaaah—!!

Moyong Rin had met Moyong Pae-cheon in the final and shattered him, and now she flung a hand high in the air with one foot planted on him where he lay wretchedly sprawled in the middle of the arena.

“…She really has no blood in her and no tears either.”

Watching that, I firmly resolved all over again.

Never, ever make Moyong Rin angry.