I had been sickly since childhood. My impoverished family sold me for three coins when I lacked the strength even to lift a spoon.
The man who bought me was a Daoist called Immortal Master Jaheo. Perhaps he had needed someone to talk to in his old age, because he constantly bothered me over every little thing with trivial chatter.
“Pyeong-a, come here for a moment and look at this.”
“What is it?”
“Aren’t the leaves lovely?”
The old man’s home was a small Daoist temple halfway up a mountain. It was a place where flowers bloomed wherever I turned my head, and birds chirped whenever I listened.
At first, I thought the old man was talking nonsense, but before I knew it, I had begun discussing birds and flowers at his side.
Perhaps I, too, had been starved for human company. Or perhaps it was love.
The old man even read my pulse.
“The illness you suffer from is called Cold Yin Severed Meridian.”
According to the old man, it was a strange disease that only someone so unlucky they would break their nose even when falling backward could catch.
Coldness surged through my entire body, and when I reached twenty, I would ultimately become an ice flower.
That was why my hands and feet had always been cold, and why I was white from head to toe as though I had been blanketed in snow.
“Fortunately, you possess Immortal Aptitude, so I can at least teach you an art that may help.”
“What is Immortal Aptitude?”
“It means you have the talent to cultivate the Dao.”
“I have talent?”
I could not believe the old man’s words. If I had been useful for anything, I would not have been priced at three coins.
“It will be beyond anything you can imagine.”
The old man chuckled.
I did not understand the meaning of that laughter until much later.
Thus, I came to learn Daoist arts from him as well.
The Daoist arts I learned from the old man helped slow my illness’s progression, but they could not overcome it.
To overcome the illness, I had to reach the Ascension Realm. Yet it was a realm that could not be attained through human effort alone.
“This world is very old.”
The old man spoke in a voice weakened by age.
“If only you could obtain an inner core or fruit from an auspicious creature……then you could overcome your illness and become an immortal. But in a world as old and worn-out as I am, I do not know whether anything fit to use as medicine remains.”
“What is the point of living a long life? I will simply live as I am and leave when the time comes.”
I had no great attachment to life. I thought it would be my fate to keep the old man company, then breathe my last when the time came.
“Do not say such foolish things. We are alive; that is why we can see such beautiful scenery.”
The old man did not give up on me. He took me from the jungles of Yunnan to the deserts of Xinjiang, traveling to every corner under heaven.
He was my friend, my teacher, and my father. It would have been all right even if we never found medicine. I only hoped that our days together would continue for even one more day. The life he taught me was so sweet that merely tasting it was painful.
Then, one day, the old man quietly passed away in his sleep in a valley in Jilin.
I could not believe his death. It felt as though his closed eyes might open at any moment, and his shut lips might begin speaking another pointless remark as they always had.
But he never breathed again.
I built a hut there. Following his preferences in life, I chose a gravesite lush with flowering trees.
Perhaps because I had lost the only person I could lean on, my illness rapidly worsened. I chose a place beside the old man as the place where I would lie.
Exactly forty-nine days after he departed this world, I visited his grave as I always did.
“Old man, do you get to see flowers there too?”
I was in the middle of my rambling when I noticed grass by the grave that had not been there until yesterday. At the end of a stem so thin it seemed ready to snap hung a red flower bud.
A soft, warm, five-colored radiance seeped through the gaps in its still-closed petals.
Udumbara Flower.
It was the auspicious plant the old man had searched for until the day he died.
My eyes burned as though they had been scorched by fire. Once the tears began to flow, they would not stop.
I want to live.
I want to live past twenty.
My will to live swelled like a mountain.
Whether the old man’s soul had come to me, or the heavens had opened a path for me, I could not know. But one thing was certain: this was my last chance.
I set up a formation array in layer after layer around the grave. Waiting only for the flower to bloom, I let time pass endlessly.
Then three years passed.
Three days before my twentieth birthday, I woke gripped by a sense of foreboding.
When I opened the door and stepped out of the hut, I saw a middle-aged man standing in the faint dawn. He wore a black bamboo hat and black clothes, with a long sword at his waist.
“What a coincidence.”
The man muttered with his hands clasped behind his back.
“To think I would encounter a fortuitous opportunity in such a remote place.”
The flower stalk slipped from his hand and fell to the ground. I lowered my gaze along it. Where the Udumbara Flower should have been, only a severed stem remained.
“…What did you just do, you bastard?”
“You have a foul mouth for such a young child.”
“What did you do?!”
“It appears there is a story behind this grave, but treasures have rightful owners. Accept that the Udumbara Flower was not fated to be yours, and forget it as you live on.”
“You’re a thief! What did you say? Forget it and live on? What kind of crazy nonsense is that?”
I could barely breathe. For the first time in my life, the desire to kill someone boiled up within me.
“I am not a thief, but a man called Sword Saint Gong Yung. These days, I am more often called by the epithet Greatest Under Heaven.”
“So what? Does being the Greatest Under Heaven mean you can steal other people’s things?”
“It means you should know your place, you insolent thing.”
I clutched my chest tightly. My qi and blood twisted from rage. The blood that flowed backward hardened into icicles and dripped down.
“…Cold Yin Severed Meridian.”
He frowned.
“The formation array must have been installed by your deceased master. It was a lofty technique, difficult even for me to break through. Out of respect for your senior, I will overlook your insolence today, but you would do well to show proper manners next time.”
“Shut up!”
With my left hand, I gripped my right forearm. As I pointed at him with the fingertips of my right hand, enormous flames rose and wrapped around him.
“What is this ―?!”
I heard him cry out in shock. I did not stop. I rained down fire, lightning, and ice. I poured forth doubles and turned the earth and sky upside down.
He did not simply endure it. His longsword, brimming with sword qi, aimed for my throat. But a single sword could never close the distance between him and me.
The Daoist arts the old man had taught me were not techniques for killing people. They were a human body’s desperate struggle to reach the heavens.
“Huff…… Huff…… Cough, cough…!”
In the end, I burned that flower-thieving bastard black.
No, had I frozen him?
…I do not know. He was too insignificant, and the pain is too dreadful for me to hold on to consciousness any longer.
The price of expending all my strength came in the form of the Cold Yin Severed Meridian running rampant. Even if I had the Udumbara Flower now, it could no longer stop my body from freezing solid.
I staggered to the old man’s grave and leaned against it. Bowing my head, I vomited a handful of ice mixed with blood.
“……Ha.”
A ridiculous thought suddenly occurred to me.
If I was going to become an ice flower anyway, I hoped I would be a sight the old man would like.
***
For some time, I was enveloped in an endless darkness.
Could death really mean wandering through darkness forever?
As that question crossed my mind, the darkness above me lifted as though a curtain had opened, and a cold, damp, unpleasant sensation assailed me.
“Oh, what are we to do?!”
“Madam is bleeding!”
I felt pain as though thousands of blades were hacking my body to pieces.
I truly thought I had fallen into the Hell of Unending Suffering. After all, I had killed someone. The thought was plausible enough.
“Madam!”
A young woman let out a sharp scream.
“The blood—the blood is freezing!”
“Fetch a healer, quickly!”
The incomprehensible conversation continued. I could tell that things were going terribly wrong. I drew up my Dao Power to drive out the cold, but all I could feel was emptiness.