***
He sensed someone beyond the door.
"Young Master!"
The door opened along with a bright voice.
A small-framed girl stepped into the room. Plain clothes, and water still clinging to her hands.
"Have you finished your morning training? Shall I prepare lunch for you?"
She was a young maidservant called Yeon-hwa.
The Demon Empress kept no faction of her own.
The only person in this residence was this one young maidservant.
For several days now she had been pestering Dan Se-min.
Yeon-hwa was the child of ordinary cult followers and had never learned martial arts.
She had never seen the outside world.
Perhaps that was why.
There was always an unhidden curiosity in her eyes when she looked at Dan Se-min.
"I am fine."
Dan Se-min waved a hand lightly.
But unlike other days, Yeon-hwa wore a resolved expression and did not back away.
She caught her breath, then opened her mouth as if she had made up her mind about something large.
"You can't."
"......?"
"No matter how great your grief, you can't keep skipping meals like this."
Unlike a moment ago, her voice was firm.
"Today you have to eat something, whatever it is."
"......"
Dan Se-min's brows narrowed slightly.
Then Yeon-hwa carefully went on.
"I heard it from the Demon Empress."
She hesitated a moment.
"That you lost your family to those orthodox bastards...... and survived alone. It's at times like this that you have to find more strength."
'That's not entirely it, though.'
The reason Se-min skipped meals was not only grief at losing his family.
At some point he had found that he could live without eating properly, on nothing more than grain-avoidance pills.
And right now, saving the time and concentrating on training was far more efficient.
But there was no way Yeon-hwa could know that.
"I heard that out in the place called the Central Plains, those heretics called the orthodox try to kill every last person of the Divine Cult."
Yeon-hwa hid her pretty hands for no reason as she spoke.
"I, I can't fight. I can't lend a hand with your revenge. But I'm good at cleaning and running errands instead, so from now on I'll help so that you can devote yourself to training. But what's more urgent is recovering your body. So you have to eat something."
Dan Se-min drew a small smile at his lips and looked at Yeon-hwa.
An ordinary girl who looked a year or two younger than he was.
She seemed no different from any of the children of the Central Plains.
'I heard that the followers of the Demonic Cult were all utterly wicked.'
Half right, and half wrong.
The Demonic Cult did not consist only of demonic practitioners who had learned demonic arts. There were innocent children like this here too.
"Yeon-hwa, was it?"
"Yes."
Yeon-hwa nodded happily. She seemed simply glad that Dan Se-min had taken an interest in her.
"How did you come to enter the Demonic Cult? Were you abducted by demonic practitioners or something?"
"What? What do you mean? Why would I be dragged here?"
Yeon-hwa laughed loudly, as if the idea were absurd.
"My family were slash-and-burn farmers. Making a living was always hard because of the mountain bandits. We reported it to the law enforcement office, but the high officials weren't interested at all. Then one day the bandits slaughtered everyone, and the one who happened to appear and save me was the Demon Empress. That's how I came here and became a follower of the cult."
They resemble each other.
His own story and Yeon-hwa's story resembled each other.
He thought he understood why Yeon-hwa took such an interest in him.
"I'm really glad I came into the Divine Cult. Here I don't have to fear the bandits anymore."
She is not a child who gives up easily. Dan Se-min rose to his feet, resigned.
"All right......, let us go."
"Pardon?"
"Let us go and eat."
Yeon-hwa's face brightened in an instant.
"Really?!"
And without a moment's hesitation she caught his sleeve lightly.
"This way!"
***
They entered the room.
The gaze of the Demon Empress, who had been waiting, turned to the two of them.
Her eyes widened for a very brief moment.
"Hm......, this is rare."
Dan Se-min did not stop walking and took his seat.
"I came to eat."
The Demon Empress's gaze turned to Yeon-hwa.
"You managed to bring him. Well done. If not for you, he is the sort who would have lived on grain-avoidance pills like those bastards who go mad for martial arts."
Yeon-hwa smiled brightly, as if pleased.
"Demon Empress, please wait a moment. I'll make something more delicious and bring it!"
Yeon-hwa ran off toward the kitchen, and the Demon Empress's gaze moved to Dan Se-min.
"You did well to come."
Dan Se-min asked.
"Was coming to eat a meal something so deserving of praise?"
"It was."
Dan Se-min looked at the Demon Empress quietly, as if he did not understand.
"Your talent is something ordinary humans do not have."
The Demon Empress's gaze deepened.
"There have been those in the history of the murim with such talent. Men like Bodhidharma of the murim, or Zhang Sanfeng of Wudang. The same is true of the supreme ones called Heavenly Demon within the Divine Cult. But among such men, many lost their human insight precisely because their talent was too great."
At her words, Dan Se-min's eyes wavered faintly.
He had vaguely felt it since he was small.
That he was a little different from other children.
He did not mean talent.
Joy, anger, sorrow, pleasure.
The emotions any human should naturally feel were almost absent in him.
Was it because he had grown up knowing from childhood that once the severed meridian flared up he would live a numbered life of less than five years?
'Or is it because of the dragon blood?'
Somewhere along the way he had become numb not only to his own death but to the deaths of others.
It had been so when he killed the disciple of the Diancang Sect for the first time, and the same when he woke and heard that his whole family was dead.
He could understand anger and sorrow with his head, but they were not felt very strongly in his chest.
'Living and dying are beyond helping.'
His own death was one thing, and since birth, aging, sickness, and death were natural to humans, the deaths of his family were merely an extension of that.
"You in particular were born with the Heaven-Slaying Star, so you must be all the more careful. Many born with that talent became Slaughter Stars of their age."
They had met only a short while ago, and yet the Demon Empress saw straight through Dan Se-min's problem.
"You must live as a human. Martial arts are only one of the ways a human cultivates the Way. Straying from the human path is not a method for reaching the summit of the martial."
Martial arts are, in the end, a method by which a human becomes strong.
He must not stray from the human path.
"You must eat, sleep, and cry and laugh the same as everyone else."
Dan Se-min could not understand her words precisely, but he thought he vaguely grasped what she was worried about.
'Maintaining one's humanity, then.'
Now that he thought of it, it was the easiest and the hardest thing at once.
There were many killing-mad men among martial artists.
Countless numbers of them fell into qi deviation while cultivating high divine arts, or became beasts drunk on their own power.
'What happens if I go mad?'
Recalling the fight with the Diancang Sect, Dan Se-min shivered without realizing it.
'It would be no different from a natural disaster.'
He would certainly be a being more dangerous than any public enemy of the murim. Dan Se-min could not help but frown deeply.
Just then, Yeon-hwa, who had arrived with a dish of food without either of them noticing, looked back and forth between them and blinked.
A disappointed voice followed.
"What are you two doing instead of eating? ......The food will get cold."
In that instant, the tension broke.
'Yes. If I lose the duty of a human and live like a beast, what meaning would there be even if my lifespan were extended?'
Dan Se-min snorted a laugh and picked up his chopsticks.
"Yes...... I should eat."
He lifted the chopsticks.
Strangely, today the chopsticks felt heavier than a sword.
***
Dan Se-min remained at the Demon Empress's residence and continued his training to absorb the extreme yin qi.
He did not devote himself to martial training alone.
As the Demon Empress had said, he ate meals, drank tea, took walks, and often talked with her as well.
The relationship between the two was subtle.
It seemed short of affection to be called family, and they were not in a relationship of giving and receiving instruction, so it could not be called master and disciple either.
When Dan Se-min asked the Demon Empress how he might make use of the energy of the Ten-Thousand-Year Ice Crystal, she answered like this.
"Your talent far surpasses mine. Careless advice from me might only cage your limits, so however frustrating it is, realizing it yourself is the best method."
The Demon Empress was especially careful about giving hasty advice.
Several days passed in such deliberation.
"I think I have found a way to make use of the extreme yin qi."
"Already?"
Dan Se-min nodded, settled into a cross-legged seat, and slowly calmed his breathing.
When he circulated the Blazing Heaven Divine Art, a familiar heat rose from deep in his qi center.
It was faint at first, but once it passed one full circulation, extreme yang qi wrapped around his body.
It was as though invisible flames had seized and swallowed the circumference of his body.
The air trembled subtly from the heat, and dust on the floor was pushed outward in every direction.
At that moment, Dan Se-min turned his awareness and drew out the energy of the ice crystal.
As the extreme yin qi flowed along his meridians, the flame-like heat subsided in an instant.
The temperature in the room dropped sharply, and his breath beaded white.
Frost spread across the floorboards as if creeping, and thin ice crystals settled on his shoulders and the ends of his hair.
The fire qi of the Blazing Heaven Divine Art and the cold of the ice crystal pushed at each other and collided.
A red energy like burning flame and a cold that froze everything clashed within Dan Se-min's body.
Cold sweat beaded on Dan Se-min's forehead.
The two energies had not yet become one.
The balance was precarious, and one lapse of attention would set one side or the other running wild.
Even so, Dan Se-min did not stop the smile blooming at his lips.
The difficulty of fusing two dissimilar energies felt enjoyable instead.
He did not force the fire qi down, nor did he drive the yin qi out.
He felt both energies at once and continued his breathing as if searching for the fine gap between them.
The room filled with a strange contrast of energies.
Around Se-min's body it rippled like flame, while the air beyond that was as cold as a winter night.
Watching from a distance, Dan Cheon-hwa's eyes were full of interest as well.
The extreme yang qi of the Blazing Heaven Divine Art and the extreme yin qi of the Ten-Thousand-Year Ice Crystal.
Energies that would normally try to devour each other were coexisting, clumsily as yet.
Dan Cheon-hwa murmured inwardly.
'They have not yet formed a single qi. But.'
At the same time, though, a premonition close to certainty came to her.
That when those two energies were someday woven into one, it would not end at a mere harmony of yin and yang.
A new martial art created by the mixing of fire and ice.
Perhaps this was the process of creating a martial art that surpassed even the Blazing Heaven Divine Art.
Then Dan Se-min's breathing lengthened, and the energy in the room slowly subsided as well.
The flames died down, and the cold withdrew.
Dan Se-min's breathing settled completely, and he gently opened his eyes.
Only then did Dan Cheon-hwa step forward.
"......The breathing you just performed is different from the Blazing Heaven Divine Art I knew."
"Yes. Now that I have gained extreme yin qi, I am looking for a way to let it coexist with the Blazing Heaven Divine Art."
"A new method? Hmmm."
"The Blazing Heaven Divine Art is excessively fierce. That is its strength, but it is also its weakness. Perhaps I can find a way to make up for it."
"Ha!"
The harmony of yin and yang, was it.
If the people of the world heard this, they would have been scandalized.
Even Zhang Sanfeng, who founded the Wudang Sect, is said to have cultivated nothing but the Supreme Ultimate Fist in his final years.
Most likely it was because he realized that seeking the harmony of yin and yang was the ultimate of the martial, and he was searching for a thread of it.
But at the time Zhang Sanfeng was over one hundred and thirty years old.
It was a boundlessly arrogant thing for a boy not yet twenty to speak of.
Had a young disciple said such a thing in an orthodox sect of the Central Plains, he would certainly have been scolded.
But Dan Cheon-hwa was not like those close-minded people of the orthodox.
"It is a good thought. There is no completed martial art in this world. Martial artists will stake their lives for a secret manual, but in truth a martial art is nothing more than a tool. I mean that it is only a tool for reaching the ultimate of the martial. Yet martial artists treat the arts handed down from earlier generations as gold and jade precepts and will not step outside that frame. In the end they cannot help but be left behind."
Se-min raised his head and listened closely to Dan Cheon-hwa's words.
"For the most part, those who have been called Grand Patriarchs are the ones who broke past the limits of the arts handed down to them."
Dan Cheon-hwa's eyes were cold.
But within them lay a depth difficult to explain.
"Perhaps you have already begun to walk the path of a Grand Patriarch."