Bright full moonlight, and a mountain sanctuary sunk in silence.
An old Taoist priest stood on the moon terrace of a darkened pavilion and looked up at the sky.
"Heh heh, what a truly tranquil night."
A Taoist crown (a hat) bearing a crisp Supreme Ultimate emblem, an old white robe that spoke of frugality, a clear and refined countenance with gentle eyes, and a white beard falling to his chest. His bearing was enough to call him an immortal.
Yu Gil-cheon, the Wise Heaven Sage, Sect Leader of the Wudang Sect of this age.
Said to have attained the highest Way among all the Taoists of the Central Plains, he let himself grow drunk for once on the softly falling moonlight.
Was this not good?
The unorthodox and the demonic kept to their own dwellings, and calamity showed not even a sign, so it is a truly peaceful world.
If there is one worry.......
"The Heavenly Demon."
A thread of worry passed across his gentle face.
Heaven is indifferent indeed. If it meant to grant peace, it should have granted peace alone. Why send down a man like that along with it?
Of course, he had not thrown the world into chaos by leading the Demonic Cult's faithful on a conquest.
He had come out into murim exactly once.
Setting out from the far end of the western mountains until he reached the eastern sea, his wandering in search of the strong in every corner of the land went on for a very long time.
And along that road the sword, the blade, the spear, the fist, the palm....... every man called peerless in his own domain fell, all of them.
-Tch, there's not one bastard worth the trouble.
Grumbling as though he had lost interest, he went straight back to where he had been staying.
Revenge?
It was not that none had tried.
He had seen for himself what became of the disciples of the Unorthodox Path Alliance, who watched their Alliance Leader, the self-proclaimed sovereign of the Central Plains' unorthodox sects, die and then threw themselves at him crying revenge.
He had laughed and said he would not refuse the Alliance its revenge, and at his hand three thousand martial artists died, every last one.
They said the battlefield of that day still carried a red cast even now, twenty years later.
The Orthodox Martial Alliance looked on. No, it kept silent.
It had been a fair and open duel from the start, they said, so there were no grounds to take revenge on him.......
In truth, with the Unorthodox Path Alliance that had so troubled them all but dissolved, they had taken the fisherman's profit.
And since the man had graciously declared himself bored and gone home of his own accord, what need was there to fight?
And so he became the 'Heavenly Demon,' acknowledged not only by the Demonic Cult but by everyone under heaven.
After that, he never came out into murim again.
But it was a peace that could break at any moment.
The common view held that if he ever changed his mind and set out to conquer the Central Plains, no one could stop him.
He's dead by now, surely?
He must be, right?
He's younger than me, true, but there's no guarantee a man lives long...... and people do fall into qi deviation while training demonic arts.
"Boundless Longevity Buddha, that would be good."
Yu Gil-cheon murmured the invocation, praying with all his heart that it was so.
WHOOOOOSH.
Just then, a wind blew.
Yu Gil-cheon sent his worries off on that crisp, bracing wind that tossed the hair at his temples and spread into every corner of the sanctuary, and he looked up at the moon once m.......
"Hm?"
A single black shadow lay over the round moon like a dot.
It was a strange sight.
A night bird that had slept badly?
"Hmmm?"
But the shadow grew larger and larger, as though devouring the moon. It gathered speed, and the place it was heading for.......
"Gah!"
Startled, Yu Gil-cheon could only open his eyes wide and stagger backward.
Was the black shadow not falling straight toward him?
And the face of the shape, now clear.......
"B-Baek Gang-hwi?"
Recognizing the shadow at once, Yu Gil-cheon's eyes went as wide as lantern bowls.
But something was strange.
It had been twenty years since the man roamed the land and raised the bloody affair of the Unorthodox Path Alliance.
He had been fifty even then, so twenty years on he ought by rights to be a white-haired old man...... so why was his skin that taut, without a single wrinkle?
No, he looked far younger than he had then...... Hm?
"It's been a while, horse-nose."
"......."
"Those bones I broke back then, all healed up?"
The man greeting him with a broad smile was...... the Heavenly Demon himself.
The latent calamity of the Central Plains.
'Goddamn it! Don't tell me he's gone and achieved Return to Youth?'
Heaven was not merely indifferent. It was downright unkind.
If it meant to hand things out, it should have handed them out fairly. Why bestow a legendary realm on that monster of all people?
He should cry out at once and tell them a calamity had app...... no, he must not.
He had seen the Unorthodox Path Alliance.
This was a bastard who never dodged a fight brought to him.
He had already been the world's best then, and now he was a monster who had achieved Return to Youth.
He had just watched the man fly all the way to Wudang from far off without once setting a foot down. Fight? Fight how?
Bluster about petty justice and Wudang would be reduced to a handful of dust.......
***
"Ascension, you say?"
"Yeah."
"But what on earth......."
Yu Gil-cheon, having shown the unwelcome guest who came in the dead of night into his room, could not bring himself to speak the rest of it, the part that asked whether this was 'dogshit.'
The man before him was Baek Gang-hwi, the Heavenly Demon.
A being whose martial prowess reached the heavens, feared by all under heaven.
A transcendent such that even if every master in the world were gathered, one sweep of his hand, WHOOSH-, would lay them all out.
A powerhouse who, without ever issuing a march order to his faithful, could smash to pieces everything in his path, one place after another, and still have strength to spare.
'Fucking hell, twenty years of quiet and now this.'
The world said that Yu Gil-cheon, the Wise Heaven Sage, had attained the highest Way...... but in this moment curses surged to the back of his throat in a way that made decades of cultivation look like nothing.
Why did it have to be him?
Kunlun sat near the Demonic Cult, Kongtong was a little further south, and Qingcheng was in Sichuan....... No, the road to Hubei passed through Shaanxi, so he should have asked Zhongnan or Mount Hua.
Why he had come all the way to Wudang, deep in the mountains at the very heart of the Central Plains, to pull this bullshit, he could not fathom.
And on top of that, however little he cared about age, the younger bastard addressed him in plain speech at every turn.
But one could only push back if the odds were anywhere near even.
Standing stiff-backed before a monster who might unify all under heaven single-handed was reckless.
Was it not always best to avoid a madman?
"But why Ascension, all of a sudden......?"
"Nothing to do, so I'm bored."
"Ah......."
A reason very much like him.
To aim for Ascension out of boredom.
"Teaching kids has its limits too. I taught a few bastards hoping they'd get good enough to kill me, but the kids have no talent. No talent at all."
A dry laugh escaped him.
To teach them in order to raise someone who could kill him.
Teach them all he liked, could they kill him?
When they could not so much as scratch him.
"And it's not as if I can set out to conquer the Central Plains. Tormenting weak little bastards is nothing but a nuisance."
Thank goodness he thought them weak, and a nuisance.
Yes, thanks to you (?), the Central Plains is this peaceful.
"So I thought I'd try Ascension while I'm at it. However I look at it, that's all that's left."
"Indeed, since you have even achieved Return to Youth like this."
"Which reminds me. They say you've attained the highest Way?"
Yu Gil-cheon, who had been nodding along, started violently.
"M-me?"
"That's right."
In that instant he denied every hour he had spent proud of having attained the Way.
"Oh, it is rumor, Cult Leader, only rumor. Do you not know better than anyone that the rumors of the world are not to be trusted?"
"Hmm, is that so?"
"It is."
"Well, it doesn't matter. Still, it's true there've been bastards at Wudang who ascended."
"Ah, that is......."
It was rudeness beyond compare, but Yu Gil-cheon could only sweat.
He had to choose his words well.
It was said that the height of the Way was to transcend even good and evil and arrive at a child's heart. Martial learning was no different. Transcend any realm and you were bound to arrive at the same place.
And what in the world was a child's heart?
It was becoming a child.
The Heavenly Demon was a child.
A being who had to do whatever he wanted to do.
And he was a man strong enough to accomplish whatever he wanted, with power to spare.
Right and wrong?
What use was there in arguing it?
He did not want to admit it, but murim was a place where the strong bastard was right.
If that bastard, childish now not only in appearance but in mind, took a fit for no reason and so much as waved a hand, Wudang was finished.
Yu Gil-cheon had no wish to end up an insect with its wings torn off by a playful hand.
"That is a false rumor among false rumors."
"What?"
"Heh heh, surely you know, Cult Leader? Our lineage sets such store by appearances...... there are watching eyes and listening ears to consider, so we would put such rumors about ourselves."
Yu Gil-cheon slandered his own school.
"Rumor? Hmm...... The way I heard it, Gon-yang said he'd seen the Immortal Realm before he died?"
"......."
Gon-yang was Yu Gil-cheon's master.
The former Sect Leader of Wudang.
If all within the four seas were fellow Taoists, he stood one generation above the Heavenly Demon.
And yet, Gon-yang?
Had his master been alive, he would have thundered at this far junior, demanding to know where on earth he had shoved his manners.
"Do not even speak of it. You know the Supreme Ultimate Cave? That cave. My master spent his final years long at the wall. It shames me to say it...... but does staring at a wall bring enlightenment in the Way? It only drives a man mad."
"......."
"This is for your ears alone, Cult Leader, but in his last years he often saw things that were not there. What he said then must have been exaggerated as it spread through the world, and that is what you heard."
With an utterly earnest expression, Yu Gil-cheon badmouthed his master.
Boundless Longevity Buddha, forgive me, Master. But is deceiving one's teacher and effacing one's ancestors what matters right now? Wudang may be destroyed this very moment.
"Damn it, and I came all this way."
"Just so. The rumors of the world are what they are. Why not try Shaolin instead? Ascension or liberation, they come to the same thing."
"Hmm......."
Yu Gil-cheon went so far as to sell Shaolin out, and the Heavenly Demon frowned.
"I hate bald bastards."
"Pardon?"
"For some reason I don't want to mix with those bastards even in death. Going on about subduing demons and all that...... it's uncomfortable."
"Ah...... that is true enough."
It did not sell.
He had been refused flatly.
Damn it.......
But he must never, ever ruffle the man's mood.
Yu Gil-cheon soothed him as carefully and as warily as though he faced a mortal enemy.
"You have come a long way, so let us at least have a cup of tea first."
"No liquor?"
"Heh heh, liquor in a Taoist temple? I would gladly have offered it if we had any...... Shall I go down and buy a bottle?"
In truth, Wudang had been drinking for a good while now.
The Ten Precepts, made to keep Taoists abstinent, had been changed long ago.
He said it only because he disliked having the Heavenly Demon take up space.
"Never mind. I don't feel the drink anyway. Just give me tea."
"Yes."
Yu Gil-cheon breathed easier and hurried to warm the tea water on the brass brazier, lest the man change his mind.
"So does this Ascension really exist?"
"Well, there are such words in the Taoist tradition."
Nodding along without thinking was a mistake.
"Then go find it."
"......Pardon?"
Yu Gil-cheon barely caught the tea set he had nearly dropped.
"Go find it, I said. The method of Ascension."
"......."
"What?"
"But that is not something one can find simply by looking......."
"An expert's better at anything, right? If I move, a fight breaks out. I'll wait here."
A bolt from the blue fell on Yu Gil-cheon's ears.
This madman!
Child's heart or not, he is no brat sprawled on the market floor throwing a tantrum for candied sweets, and he just orders me to go find it? Am I your disciple? Your underling? Find it, find what!
"Heh heh, Cult Leader, really...... you are joking, yes?"
"Joking? Hmm. So you'd rather I look for it myself? How? Shall I stir things up a bit?"
"......."
"I'll give you one year."
Killing intent flashed in the eyes of the smiling Baek Gang-hwi.
In an instant the air froze solid as though winter had come into the room and the pavilion's pillars split with sharp cracks, and Yu Gil-cheon's heart shrank small at once.
This bastard...... he's serious.
Under his presence, the pavilion that had stood a thousand years nearly collapsed whole in a single moment.
A man in whom good and evil coexisted.
Good today, evil tomorrow.
No, a man who could turn evil at any moment between one breath and the next, at the whim of his mood.
A smile that held cruelty in it as well.......
At his attitude, flaunting the arrogance that befit the seat of the strongest, Yu Gil-cheon drew up his qi in one breath and let it burst out, flinging the door open hard enough to break it.
"This instant! Go and find the method of Ascension! Search all under heaven if you must, but find it without fail!"
It was a voice to rival the Buddhist Lion's Roar.
The Heavenly Demon is seeking the Ascension Method.
If Wudang cannot answer, next it is...... you, you, you, you.......
At those words echoing across the whole of the Central Plains, all of murim truly joined forces.
The orthodox sects to survive, the unorthodox sects for fear the sparks might land on them.
As for the Demonic Cult, word was they said there was no reason to refuse when their terrifying Cult Leader was graciously leaving of his own will.
So those bastards had suffered too.
And so, when all of murim set to work on making the Heavenly Demon ascend, heaven was moved.
Before a year had passed.
Beginning with the Mount Mao Sect, famed for its occult arts, the Five Great Taoist Sects joined forces to comb through the records of the fallen Quanzhen, and with the support of the Beggar's Gang and the Rogues' Guild they gathered countless accounts and records from every region, until at last the Ascension Method was completed.
It was a great treasure.
But not a soul coveted it. If anything, they volunteered to guard it so that nothing unseemly would happen.
To begin with, the Ascension Method held matters even a Taoist who clung to elixir arts his whole life would struggle to achieve, and besides, what madman would covet something of Baek Gang-hwi's?
"Cult Leader, we found it! This is the Ascension Method!"
Yu Gil-cheon cried out in a strong, proud voice and offered up the Ascension Method with both hands.
"Oho? You did it."
"Indeed."
Baek Gang-hwi looked at the booklet with joy-filled eyes and said,
"This is certain, right?"
"......."
In truth, a few characters had been changed.
A Demonic Immortal? What nonsense was that.
Did he want to be cursed at in the Immortal Realm?
But that day Yu Gil-cheon cast off a Taoist's pride.
If not I, who would walk the road of thorns?
"Indeed! It is certain!"
"Good. Then clear out the Supreme Ultimate Cave. And block the entrance with a large stone so no one can approach. Prepare plenty of fasting pills as well."
"Yes! Of course...... Yes?"
"I have to train. You said Gon-yang did it here too?"
"......."
"I won't set a foot out of the Supreme Ultimate Cave until I achieve Ascension, so bear that in mind."
Feeling a vicious murderous intent, Yu Gil-cheon swept and scrubbed the Supreme Ultimate Cave himself.
Shit! The Supreme Ultimate Cave is no isolated training ground for the Demonic Cult. If he wants to ascend he should go do it at his own house, so why is he trying to leech off Wudang!
But!
On the other hand, he thought it might actually be better this way.
At least while the man trained for Ascension, the peace would hold.
That day murim honored Wudang for bearing the hardship alone and revived the old custom of unbuckling one's weapons at the tree by the mountain gate.
The tradition of the Sword-Release Pond, which the years had left a name without substance, began again.
And so, after the Heavenly Demon entered the Supreme Ultimate Cave.
Yu Gil-cheon blocked the cave's entrance with the largest boulder on Mount Wudang. In case the man failed to ascend, turned into a ghost and came for revenge, he pasted talismans on with great care.
And then, one day, twenty years after the Heavenly Demon entered the Supreme Ultimate Cave.
His lifespan spent and met by qi dispersal (the scattering of his accumulated power), Yu Gil-cheon leaned his bent back on a cane and stood before the Supreme Ultimate Cave together with the heads of every sect.
Such were the years.
Where there is birth, there is death.
Feeling his heaven-granted span at an end, Yu Gil-cheon meant to confirm whether the Heavenly Demon still lived, like a final calling before death.
"Open it."
At his command dozens of martial artists pushed the boulder, and soon the inside of the Supreme Ultimate Cave was revealed.
Inside sat the Heavenly Demon, his back held straight.
"Cult Leader......."
He called, but there was no answer.
Not even the man's eyelids trembled.
TAP, TAP, TAP.
When Yu Gil-cheon, leaning on his cane, drew close and carefully laid a hand on him, the Heavenly Demon's body crumbled like ash and scattered on the wind that blew in.
"Aah......."
Tears of joy ran from the wrinkled eyes of Yu Gil-cheon, who had by now reached the age of looking toward a hundred (ninety-one years).
CRRRRACK!
Wringing out the last of his strength to straighten even his bent back, Yu Gil-cheon roared out to all under heaven.
"The Heavenly Demon is dead!"