Chapter 42

“What did you just say? Little kid?”

Something livid blue came pouring out of the girl’s eyes. The weight of it was enormous. Was this what it felt like to be wandering a wooded hill at dead of night and come face to face with a tiger?

A chill. Gooseflesh climbed my spine, my backbone went cold, and the nape of my neck stiffened.

And in that moment a maxim I’d heard somewhere came back to me.

In the gangho, beware the old, the women, and the children.

A little girl, out alone in a deserted forest at a dangerous hour of the night, moving in a way that was anything but ordinary. A danger alarm went off in my head.

A master! And one with tremendous prowess at that!

With every step she came closer, cold sweat ran down my back.

— …Gulp.

Swallowing hard, I took in what she was wearing. The nameless girl was dressed as splendidly as the daughter of some great house, and her hair, done up in a dainty little knot, had ornaments dangling all over it that swayed a little with every movement and glinted in the moonlight.

— Pat, pat—

She came right up in front of me, looked up, and asked again.

“Say it once more. I look like a little kid, do I?”
“Uh, well….”

All at once, as though embarrassed, she cupped both plump, faintly flushed cheeks in her hands.

“Oh, honestly. Sharp about all the wrong things.”
“…?”
“You have it right. This lady is an innocent young noblewoman who knows nothing at all.”

I stood there blinking in confusion. The girl made a flower-cup of her hands under her chin and gazed softly up at me, as though she wanted something.

“Do I really look like a great house’s young lady who knows nothing of the world? Hm?”

I was thoroughly bewildered, but I made myself play along. My danger-detection sensor was telling me that was the right answer.

“Haha, of course you do. Cute enough to bite, you are. So downright adorable I very nearly went and bit you for real, I did.”

“Oh, stop. I couldn’t say.”

She hid her face bashfully and shook her head, no, no.

I couldn’t stop here. Instinct told me I had to take it one step further.

Boldly. Daringly.

Holding on to the notion that you can be carried off in a tiger’s jaws and still live if you keep your wits, I put on a show of being angry.

“Do my words sound like a joke to you? This won’t do at all.”

At that the girl shrank back a step and looked up at me with a frightened face. But her eyes were shining with anticipation.

“Won’t do? What is it you mean to do?”

I made a show of clutching at my heart and went down on one knee.

“Kuh! A lethal dose of cuteness — I can’t control myself. Consider this a warning: run, right now! I really am going to bite you!”
“Oh, come now. Would you really?”
“I did warn you! Kraaah, I can’t hold back. C’meeere!”
“Kyahaha!”

The girl ran off laughing, bright and clear, and I did my bear impression and made a show of chasing her.

“Grrrrr! I said come here!”
“Kyahahaha!”

Clear laughter rang out across the clearing, moonlight pouring down into it.

After we’d chased each other around the clearing like that for a while, I scooped up the girl, who had quietly let her pace drop.

“Got you!”
“Whoa!”
“Didn’t I tell you I’d bite? Grrrrrr!”

When I made as though to give her ear a little nibble, a kyaruru— of laughter burst out of her, clear as jade beads rolling. I kept up the pretense of gnawing on the ear of the girl squirming in my arms for a while, then let her go.

“Haah. Haah.”

Was it the training pouches? It had been nothing much, and still I was out of breath.

So this is why they say playing with children wears you out.

As I stood there getting my ragged breathing back under control, the girl looked up at me with her face all flushed.

“Hoho. I came out of curiosity, hearing you were that ill-mannered wretch’s disciple. And unlike him, your manners are very fine indeed.”
“Sorry?”
“He is a fellow who hardly ever speaks of anybody else, yet he slipped your name out the way someone shows off a precious treasure. I had never seen him like that. For that one moment, a fellow without a single cute bone in him was really rather adorable.”

The girl did not wait for it to sink in.

“In any case, what were you doing out here alone?”
“Ah, I was practicing footwork.”
“Were you? I shall take a look for you. Go on, do it.”

I performed the Three Stars Step in front of her. I had only just started on it, though, so the movements weren’t natural yet. If I had to put it into words, it looked like a hodgepodge of the Divine Cascade Step and the Butterfly Step all jumbled together.

The girl watched quietly, then tipped her head— over to one side.

“Your movement is a touch sluggish, is it not? This is rather different from what that fellow told me. He has never once in his life had a good word for anybody, so when he praised you like that I had my hopes up.”
“Ah, I’ve got a bit of a situation. Normally I’m faster than this.”
“Be that as it may. Hmm. That is an unusual footwork art, one I have never seen. Did the Moyong Family have such a thing? It looks rather as though the Divine Cascade Step and the Butterfly Step had been forced together….”

She knows the Divine Cascade Step and the Butterfly Step?

Whether I was startled or not, she went on stroking her chin and muttering, watched my movement for a long while, and then gave me all sorts of advice, even demonstrating it herself. How to smooth the join where the movement turns from straight to curved, say, or how to fix my posture at the one move where she said my center came apart.

“Do it again.”

The upshot was that it helped enormously. I was learning twice as fast as I had on my own.

“Mmm. Somewhat better.”

Even I, on the learning end of it, could feel the difference plainly, which says it all.

“It is not as though a correction can simply be taken in on the spot. Your comprehension is quite something. Perhaps that ill-mannered wretch did not say what he said for nothing after all.”

She let out a small sound of admiration.

Just then a voice thick with sleep came from behind me.

“Granny. Quit tormenting the boy.”

I turned to look, and Baek Un-cheon was shambling out of the darkness, yawning as he came.

“Why, that — that ill-mannered wretch. When did I ever torment anybody? Isn’t that right?”

I am a warrior who knows nothing of falsehood, so I answered honestly.

“Of course! The advice Your Eminence gave me has become my very blood and flesh.”
“There, you see.”

Baek Un-cheon looked from me to the girl and back with a disapproving eye.

“What did you come all the way out here for?”
“You crowed about your disciple so much I got curious and came to see.”
“Disciple, my foot. I was bored and looked him over a few times, that’s all. I’ve told you, I don’t raise disciples.”

She snorted.

“Only in word, is it? From the look of what you actually do, he is a disciple in all but name.”
“I said he isn’t my disciple.”

The air went cold and the two of them started a staring match. The first to look away was the girl with the ornaments hanging all over her.

“Hmph. I did not come to see you, so put your mind at rest.”
“Do what you came for and be off.”
“He is not even your disciple. Why do you fuss over him so?”
“…”

Leaving Baek Un-cheon with nothing to say, the girl turned to me. A soft smile curved the corner of her mouth.

“I like you. And you know how to dress yourself up, besides.”

Her gaze rested for a moment on my earring.

“Let us see one another often, you and I.”

The girl smiled, kicked off the ground, shot upward, and vanished in an instant. Even I, who have the Star Eye, could not properly see the movement. To anybody else watching it would have looked as though she had evaporated.

“Whoa….”

Her movement art dragged the admiration right out of me. I’d thought Baek Un-cheon was fast; she was past that. It felt like watching an entirely new horizon of the lightness arts open before me.

So there’s a level like that as well.

I stared blankly at the place where she had vanished.

“…Who was that?”
“Who do you think?”
“Don’t tell me — somebody from the Thousand-Mile Society?”
“You’ve an uncanny nose for it, I’ll give you that.”

I turned my head and looked at Baek Un-cheon.

“Hold on, how?”

Baek Un-cheon had been stuck to my side the whole way, nagging at me nonstop. When would he have had a spare moment to send word?

“Talk sense. How would I have called anybody in that time?”
“Did you send off a carrier pigeon or something?”
“Carrier pigeon, my foot. That old geezer came looking on his own account.”

Baek Un-cheon muttered it in a low voice, as though laughing at himself.

“Hah, I must have been out of my mind. Opening my mouth for nothing.”
“So who is she? Doesn’t seem like the sort you run into every day.”
“An old monster they call the Mad Flower Divine Nun.”
“…A Divine Nun?”

So she was a Buddhist nun? No, more to the point.

“Mad Flower?”

Mad Flower. It meant a flower gone mad.

She didn’t seem all that mad to me, though?

She did like to look cute, granted, but there was something off about that being enough to get you called a mad flower.

“How did she come by such a terrifying byname?”
“That little kid. He’s a man.”
“Sorry?”

For a moment I doubted my own ears. And while I stood there like that, Baek Un-cheon drove a brutal fact into me.

“A withered old grandpa, is what.”
“A-a withered old…?”
“A revolting creature who achieved the Return to Youth and goes about imitating a little girl. Rumor has it the Return to Youth was brought off out of nothing but a fixation on becoming a woman.¹”
“…”

The shock was like being struck by lightning, and I could hardly gather my wits.

My mind went far away. Down there. It felt as though I had looked into the deepest abyss of the gangho, where no light reaches and only darkness surges.

They do say the gangho is full of eccentric masters and strange adepts!

That day, I finally felt in my bones how frightening the gangho is.

The gangho really is a terrifying place!

A man who looked like a scholar, seated at a desk working through his business, looked over a document and frowned.

“You there.”
“You called, sir?”
“Still no word from those fellows?”

He had lumped them together as “those fellows” and left it at that, but his aide understood him perfectly.

“Regrettably, that is so.”
“Honestly. Granted the distance from here in the Tianshan to the Central Plains is no short one. Even so, is this acceptable?”

The distance was one thing; the road to get there was hardly a smooth one either. Deserts where sandstorms whipped through; canyon country swarming with frontier unorthodox sects and packs of bandits; mountain ranges so steep that one slip sent a man rolling down a dizzying cliff. It was a perilous stretch of road where even someone of real skill would be taken the moment their guard dropped, and these days the northern barbarians were hanging about it as well, which put the situation beyond description.

So once they left the Cult and pushed out into the Central Plains, there was often no word at all. A few months at the shortest, a few years at the longest.

Going as far as the Central Plains made for no easy mission, and the important missions were mostly high difficulty, so for the most part he could accept that they were too busy carrying them out to spare the time for it. Getting a message through was not easy in the first place, and the cost of sending one was not a matter of a coin or two.

The trouble, though, was that the ones entrusted with the most important mission of the lot were the ones there was no word from. Men who had faithfully sent word once a month, setting down every stage of their progress in detail, had at some point simply gone silent.

“Grant the others, but the One-Eyed Dragon is not a man to skip a report.”

The mission they had been given was a campaign of division: sowing discord, collapsing trust, drawing out internal conflict, and so on, using every means available to shake the Central Plains’ orthodox coalition loose. And then, with the orthodox lot scattered every which way and picked off one by one, the Cult’s advance into the Central Plains would be easily accomplished. That was the basic frame of the plan.

The Tianshan here was barren land, nothing like the Central Plains, where seed scattered any old way came up as a crop on its own. Fighting one another over what few resources there were, the people fell into scrambles fit for starving ghosts. Unlike the Central Plains lot, who fought over pride on a full stomach, they fought to survive, and that made a great many of them vicious with it.

People turn cruel in proportion to how desperate they are.

So the martial arts that flourish here are the brutal ones, arts that plunder another’s power, that think nothing of sacrificing the weak, that leave blood everywhere. When you are going to starve to death today, is the qi deviation coming for you tomorrow really the problem? To win, they were not particular about the means. Poison and curses, corpses and blood-qi, assassination and explosives. That is how cruel martial arts are born and refined, and become the mainstream.

Only an order built on overwhelming power could bring such chaos to heel. And so the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, ruled by the overwhelmingly strong, was founded, and the law of the strong was set in place.²

But chaos beyond controlling calls for order, and rigid order calls chaos back in its turn.

Chaos was lifting its head once more. The Cult Leader’s overwhelming presence was holding it down, but that was a stopgap and nothing more. A fundamental solution was needed; unless the conditions themselves changed, this yoke would repeat itself.

This cycle of evil has to be broken.

The Cult’s advance into the Central Plains was a matter of survival. And a mission that important, with the Cult’s future hanging on it, had suddenly gone silent, so his worry was no small thing.

“Were they found out by the orthodox lot? The Jinzhou Eon Family would never turn on us. Or else… don’t tell me the Imperial Army has stepped in?”
“Do not worry so much, sir. When all is said and done, they have only missed the once, have they not? They may have mistaken the date, or been unable to raise the funds to send word.”

Every demonic warrior dispatched to the Central Plains received only the initial outlay from the Cult; the rest they had to raise themselves. Calling it a matter of survival was no exaggeration. The place was that barren.

“Perhaps we should wait a little longer….”
“You know the man the One-Eyed Dragon is, and you say a thing like that?”

At the man’s words the adjutant’s mouth clamped shut.

“Get in touch with the Hao Sect and find out what news there is.”
“Understood. I shall send somebody at once.”

And a while later, the answer that came back from the Hao Sect was rather bewildering.

“They have nothing to discuss with the Demonic Cult…?”

Unlike the Beggars’ Sect, the Hao Sect held the ground between orthodox and unorthodox, and as the occasion served the two of them had quietly cooperated before. This time was different. The reply was a plain declaration refusing all cooperation with the Cult.

“But why?”
“By what I hear, the One-Eyed Dragon appears to have attacked one of the Hao Sect’s branches.”
“The One-Eyed Dragon did?”

If it had been the Bursting Fist Demon or the Smiling Ghost he could at least have understood it to some degree, but. The One-Eyed Dragon? Why on earth would that careful man commit so violent an act?

“Has this not been investigated wrongly?”
“No, sir. It is certain. They say he ran wild in the most spectacular fashion.”

The man scratched his head.

“This is awkward.”

The adjutant cautiously offered an opinion.

“If it took enough to turn the eyes of a man as cold-headed as the One-Eyed Dragon… might he not have been trying to avenge a comrade?”
“…”

The situation was not good. Men who would have found some way out alive even after being dropped into the Murim Alliance itself had gone missing.

“They would not even say whether they were alive or dead?”
“No, sir. Though from the way they spoke, it seemed at least one or two of them are dead.”
“And no idea who did for them?”
“No, sir.”

So even their survival was uncertain.

“The Dragon and Phoenix Conference draws near. How shall we proceed?”

The man thought for a moment, then gave his order.

“Select the personnel and send two teams. They are to find out what became of the One-Eyed Dragon and the others who went before, and at the same time infiltrate the Dragon and Phoenix Conference and work at dividing them.”

The Dragon and Phoenix Conference was the symbol of the orthodox coalition’s concord, an event that hardened its cohesion through competition and cooperation. Until now they had pushed the work along beneath the surface, as quietly as they could, but this time they might have to run wild in spectacular fashion. The advance into the Central Plains could not be put off any longer.

“We may have to step out into the open. Take particular care over who is drawn for it.”
“I receive your command.”

Left alone after the adjutant withdrew, the man let out one sigh after another.

“Well, honestly. I have no face to show the Cult Leader.”