Tang Yu-hyeon drooped like a man walking to his own death.
He had forgotten that when a child causes trouble, the parents are the first to hear of it.
'Somehow I feel like I'm about to get scolded.'
Tang Gang-heon had the makings of a sovereign, but he was also a strict father.
Particularly when it came to the Way.
"Dammit."
Tang Yu-hyeon scratched roughly at his head.
The man was his father in name and in fact, so he could hardly let it go in one ear.
Just as he decided he would nod along and leave it at that, Tang Un-yeop knocked at the door.
"Clan Head. I have brought Young Master Yu-hyeon."
"Come in."
Tang Yu-hyeon felt as though the walk to Tang Gang-heon were the walk of an offering to the altar.
Thump.
So the instant the door closed, he dropped to his knees as he had the other day.
Tang Gang-heon, seeing it a second time, and Tang Un-yeop, seeing it for the first, both blinked in surprise.
"What is this about?"
"Er...... It just felt like I ought to?"
"What wrong have you committed now?"
"I beat a boy."
"If that is all, do not worry. Thanks to you it seems we may even catch the Third Elder in his corruption."
"Oh."
He had not expected that.
You are more capable than I thought.
What an admirable descendant.
Tang Yu-hyeon laughed under his breath and eased himself back to his feet.
"Then why did you call for me?"
"Do you remember what happened at the clan meeting?"
"Yes."
"I granted you one more reward besides the manual that day."
'Ah. The throwing blades.'
"I mean to give it to you now."
"Whaaaat? Now?"
Tang Yu-hyeon's eyes went round.
Receiving a throwing blade made by a Tang Clan Artisan was no ordinary matter.
The Artisans of the Tang Clan had schedules crammed full simply forging weapons through the year, and their tempers were prickly enough that a commission was by no means always accepted.
Even he, in the days when he was known as the Poison Lord, had been turned away seven times out of ten.
"Why, do you not want it?"
"How could that be!"
Tang Yu-hyeon shook his head hard enough to whip the air.
"Thank you, Father!"
"Ha ha. This child."
At the answer that came without weighing or calculating, Tang Gang-heon and Tang Un-yeop smiled with pleasure.
Just as they thought, Tang Yu-hyeon was purely delighted.
'Do you know what it is to be turned away at the gate? What about three visits to the thatched hut? I was refused three times and clung on a fourth before I barely got my blades! And now I can have them without a single obstacle!'
The direction of his joy was a little different from theirs.
"Rise, and let us go."
"Yes!"
Tang Yu-hyeon followed him with a beaming smile.
For once his steps were light.
***
To the north of the Tang Clan lay the Artisan Village, where every sort of workshop was gathered.
The Artisans who lived there, every last one of them, poured all their strength into making their own works.
Passing the workshops that made ornaments and brassware and going deeper inside, air of a heavier weight bore down on them.
"Whoa."
Flames leapt up in unison from dozens of forges, and at the sound of enormous hammers striking lumps of iron, Tang Yu-hyeon let out a gasp before he knew it.
A space of white heat that the man he had been could not have dared set foot in.
The heart of the Artisan Village, the workshop where weapons were made.
From among Artisans so absorbed they had no idea who had come, one old man walked out.
His back bent by the years and his hair turned white stood out at once.
But the passion and the seasoned command burning in his eyes could not be hidden.
"Jin Cheol-yun of the Joined Flame Workshop greets the Clan Head."
"Rise. This is no official occasion, so there is no need to stand on such ceremony."
Tang Gang-heon did not let his distinctive affable smile fall.
"He has been in charge of the Tang Clan's throwing blades for a long time. He watched over your father's childhood as well."
A familiar face.
Recalling the face of the man who might well be this one's ancestor, Tang Yu-hyeon made a clasped-hands bow.
"It is my first time meeting you."
"I greet the Second Young Master. What brings you here today?"
"Nothing complicated. I have come to have Yu-hyeon's throwing blades made."
"The Second Young Master's blades?"
Jin Cheol-yun tilted his head.
'Hey. Was this not agreed upon in advance?'
Flustered, Tang Yu-hyeon looked up at Tang Gang-heon.
His expression had not shifted, but the corners of his mouth, higher than usual, told of his own fluster.
'What is this?! Should you not have handled the arrangements properly!'
When he whipped his head around, Jin Cheol-yun spoke with his eyes.
For that wastrel?
'The reactions really are consistent. Wonderful.'
A laugh rose in him.
How wildly must the boy have lived, for every single person he met to react this way?
And the workshop was the last place any rumor reached.
Being the final stop every rumor passed through, it was clear the news that he had recovered a secret art had not yet arrived.
Tang Yu-hyeon mocked himself, then lifted his head and looked steadily at Tang Gang-heon.
'You explain it.'
At that, Tang Gang-heon opened his mouth.
He generally preferred to wait for the person concerned to speak for himself, yet the moment he saw Tang Yu-hyeon's eyes he felt that he ought to be the one talking.
"He recently recovered a secret manual at the end of a covert investigation, so I mean to grant him throwing blades as his reward."
He wrapped it in a weighty voice, but the awkwardness on his face was not hidden.
'......Is this correct?'
'It is, so do not doubt it.'
When Tang Gang-heon's gaze turned to him, Tang Yu-hyeon signaled with his eyes to look forward.
Once again Tang Gang-heon dutifully faced front.
At a fact he could not believe, Jin Cheol-yun's voice cracked.
"A m-manual?!"
Tang Gang-heon swiftly composed his expression and nodded.
"Then the rumors all this while......."
"All part of an operation to infiltrate the depths of the pleasure house."
At that calm voice stating facts, Jin Cheol-yun's face twisted.
From disbelief to bewilderment, and from bewilderment to shock.
His wavering eyes asked a question.
Did you put him up to it?
Tang Gang-heon spoke as though excusing himself.
"He moved on his own before I could even say a word."
And you, being his father, never noticed what your child was doing?
The gaze that had asked whether he truly had to forge blades for that wastrel now rebuked Tang Gang-heon as a father.
Are the secret arts so important to you that you would sacrifice your own child for years?
Under that burning gaze, Tang Gang-heon looked at Tang Yu-hyeon like a man seeking sanctuary.
'My apologies. You bear this one.'
You explain things well, do you not?
This ancestor is not so good with words as you are.
Tang Yu-hyeon quietly turned his head away.
"Haah. Very well. The Clan Head himself piled up brilliant merits 'behind' the previous Clan Head's back, so why should the second son be any different."
"Ahem."
"No wonder things were so quiet all this time. He is the first I have seen who inherited the temperament too."
'What? It was hereditary?'
Tang Yu-hyeon looked up at Tang Gang-heon with an appalled expression.
The other siblings were all well behaved, and he had wondered why this one alone roamed about.
At least that one had achieved something. Tang Yu-hyeon, if not for him, had been nothing but a wastrel.
"Thanks to this I have heard an entertaining piece of news for the first time in years. Now and then the bellows must be worked for a fire to come alive."
Jin Cheol-yun looked steadily at Tang Yu-hyeon.
They were deep eyes, the kind that see through to what lies within a person.
When Tang Yu-hyeon did not look away, Jin Cheol-yun straightened his back and pointed inside.
"This will be a long conversation. Please come in."
When Tang Gang-heon nodded, Jin Cheol-yun led the way.
Past a long corridor leading into the depths of the workshop, throwing blades of every size, shape, and condition were displayed in ordered rows.
With a single gap left among them.
Those who had carried the Tang Clan's fame into the world, those whose martial attainment had been outstanding. Their families and their brothers as well.
Amid the personal weapons of countless people, each keeping its own place, only one place stood empty.
Only his.
As though he were unwelcome.
'It is simply not yet time for me to join them.'
Tang Yu-hyeon smiled bitterly.
With his back to that smile, Jin Cheol-yun looked over the blades filling the wall and spoke.
"On the day a throwing blade is made at the Clan Head's request, we bring its owner here with us. Only then can we truly say we have 'made' the blade."
"This place is......."
"They say an outstanding martial artist leaves his soul in his weapon as well. This is the place where the souls of those who loved the Tang Clan are recorded."
His gaze, moving slowly as though recalling old memories, came to rest on the same spot Tang Yu-hyeon's had.
"But the personal weapon of the Poison Lord, foremost of the Tang Clan and the world's greatest of his generation, remains empty."
So they never found them after all.
Several had been buried deep in the Heavenly Demon's body, and several more lost in that final battle, so in a way it was only to be expected.
"We know neither its name nor its form. Most who remembered have passed on, and even those who remain never made out the shape of a thing that flew like lightning."
His heart was heavy.
Tang Yu-hyeon regretted that he had left nothing at all to the Tang Clan.
Peace for the Central Plains?
That temporary rest had not belonged to the Tang Clan alone.
It had been the wish of the many and the goal of the Murim Alliance.
If his old garments were burned, those who remembered dead, and even the records lost or forgotten, then what he left behind was his name, his renown, and that history.
The single line of history saying that the Poison Lord Tang Hyun-cheol had stood against the Heavenly Demon with the Death Corps and gone to his eternal rest in the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains.
"But from the history he left us, we surmise his soul. He was a man the world will never see again."
The sorrowing descendant speaks.
That there is something you left behind.
That peace honors you by the name of history.
The descendant turned his body to face his young ancestor.
"So look around slowly and consider. What your blade will hold, and in what direction its soul will go."
"......."
"A martial artist of the Tang Clan will be able to feel what the ancestors meant to hand down."
His chest rang with a sharp ache.
An opportunity had been given.
An opportunity to hand down what he had failed to hand down.
An opportunity to set a mistaken history right.
Where his blade points, the road it travels, is exactly that.
"I......"
He did not look around any further.
With the souls of the past pushing at his back and that single gap drawing him on, there was no reason to hesitate.
Eyes holding a straight, true light glittered.
"I wish to illuminate souls."
Yours and mine, the souls of everyone.
To become a lantern that lights the road, and lights you as well.
So that you, shining like that, may light another, and he may light yet another.
So that no one is left hidden in the dark.
I will turn that light into history and hand it down.
This time, without fail.