The month of the Fire Rat, the day of the Fire Tiger.
A few days ago, it was a night of steady, dreary rain.
It was a night when my body and heart had sunk as low as they could go, worn down by a mission that had dragged on for four whole days.
When body and mind are gnawed away a little at a time like that, there are moments when doubt creeps in and I suddenly wonder why I am here at all.
Forgive me. It has been twenty years now since I left your side, Master, and yet it seems this disciple's heart has still not ripened in its cultivation.
Perhaps I am unfit to be a Daoist.
That day was one of those days, too.
A downpour came crashing down as though the sky had sprung a hole. I was standing stock-still in one spot deep in a forest, with no choice but to take the rain.
There is nothing to be done on days like that. One can only grit one's teeth and endure. So there I was, enduring the cold and the loneliness, fighting a desperate battle all on my own.
That was when I saw a warm, yellow-green light among the green blades of grass.
It was fireflies.
How brightly they shone.
It was you, Master.
A rosy glow, eyes that smiled quietly.
How warm your face was, Master, rising in those tiny lights......
Each firefly had a different shape, but every one of them was you.
The moment I saw your face in all those countless firefly lights—
I was able to remember once again why I am here.
Even here, a thousand li away, you were still teaching me, as you always do.
The day I first met you comes back to me.
If you had not taken me in back then, Master, I doubt I would have lived through that winter.
You, who had lived so loftily apart from the world, went through so much hardship raising and teaching me, a child without a single talent.
Thanks to your devotion, this disciple safely came of age at twenty, so I thought it was time to repay you.
Wanting to be of use to our sect, I set out on this spy mission straightaway.
So I hope you will not grieve too much, the way you did when you saw me off that last time.
This disciple volunteered because he wished to.
Even when the promised three years of spying became five, and even when things went wrong and it became eight.
Even when, in the end, it passed twenty years.
I was all right.
It is hard. It would be a lie to say it isn't. But whenever I think that these painful days will one day come back to you as repayment for your kindness, strength wells up in me as if by some miracle.
Still, when I cannot bear it and I miss you, Master, I touch the earring you gave me the night before I left.
For that moment, it feels as if your warmth lingers at my fingertips, and my heart eases.
The end is not far off.
The Alliance's Grand Strategist has promised me that this mission is the last.
He said that this time really is the last.
Somehow, twenty years have already passed since I last beheld your face.
My looks have changed so much in that time that I worry you might not recognize this disciple.
I think I can return by the time the water thaws in the mountain lake beyond the hermitage's back garden, at the latest.
All I want is to run to you in one breath, see you with my own eyes, and offer you a full bow.
For the unfilial years I could not stay by your side, I will spend the rest of my life making amends once I am home.
This disciple will finish the last mission safely and return a member our sect can be proud of.
The days are cold.
I feel the winter nights deepening day by day.
Before this lonely season ends, I let myself imagine sitting side by side with you on the veranda, basking in the sun and sipping tea.
I imagine you scolding me for only coming now, and then, with a tap, pushing this foolish disciple's forehead with the tip of your slender index finger, lightly charged with internal force, just as you did when I was small.
Please stay in good health until then, Master.
The direct disciple of Daoist Master Heo-am of the Wudang Sect.
Respectfully yours, Jin-myeong.
"......"
The clerk who had snuck a look at the letter sat lost in thought, unable to look away from the paper.
This year made three years since the clerk had been posted to the Changgyeong Pavilion, the Wudang Sect Outer Hall's intelligence office, to decode and sort the ciphers that came by carrier pigeon.
And ever since that posting, this letter had arrived every season, three years now.
But this time, as always, the letter would never reach the one it was meant for.
......Because as far as the clerk knew, Daoist Master Heo-am had not been of this world for more than five years.
"Oh, my... What is to be done about this?"
Every letter overflowed with such heartfelt love for the master that the clerk could not simply let it be, and quietly asked around on a trip up to the main mountain.
But didn't it turn out that not a soul knew the name Jin-myeong?
The clerk went so far as to search the Wudang Sect's register, but no correspondent named Jin-myeong could be found.
Because the register recorded no disciple of Daoist Master Heo-am at all.
Then who on earth was this 'Jin-myeong'?
Who could it be, and why did this person still never forget to send a letter every season?
The questions piled up, but the clerk decided to stop there.
Because it was not the clerk's affair to meddle in. If word ever got out that a clerk had opened someone's letter, trouble was sure to fall on the clerk's own head.
After all, anyone who sticks their nose into the world of martial artists will find that no number of lives is enough.
"Haah...... I don't know who you are or where you live, but come home soon."
The clerk's brow quivered for a moment, and then the clerk added something.
"......No, don't come home. Better to go on not knowing than to have your heart torn apart."
Because the clerk had remembered the late Daoist Master Heo-am.
With a heavy sigh, the clerk took out the stamp kept in the farthest corner among all the stamps and slammed it down on the letter with a loud bang.
[Recipient Unknown]
Then the clerk got up and walked off with heavy steps.
Twenty steps away stood a cabinet whose drawers covered one whole wall. The clerk opened the drawer in the farthest corner and tossed the letter inside.
The heaped-up Recipient Unknown letters basked in the sunlight through the open drawer for a moment, then vanished from sight again.
The cloud that had stepped away seemed to have finished its errand, and that corner of the wall sank back into its usual darkness.
It was a place even light could not reach.
***
Chapter 1: Why I Chose to Die
I heard a bloodcurdling sound.
It was the sound of my left arm being cut off above the elbow in a single stroke.
Everyone called the Vice League Leader the Fastest Blade of the Underworld, and it seemed that was no exaggeration.
It didn't matter.
It had been a damaged arm anyway, with only three fingers left.
In exchange for giving up that arm, the sword in my whole right hand......
SQUELCH!
Ran straight through the bastard's chest.
I had lost an arm, but I had survived......
And he would be dead in moments.
I had swung that sword resolved to give up flesh and take bone.
I may have lost on the speed of the blade, but I was a step ahead in the speed of the heart.
That was why I lived.
But for all the relief of having survived, my heart was not at ease.
Probably......
Because I could picture Master, dumbstruck at the sight of where my arm used to be.
Blood shot high into the air.
Behind it, I glimpsed the Vice League Leader's trembling eyes.
His eyes kept asking how this could have happened.
"Gu Ja-gyeong, you've been hiding your strength all this time......"
Gu Ja-gyeong.
That was the name I had come to bear here in the underworld.
The Pitch-Black League, the grand coalition of the underworld.
Among the six fighting units under it, the Six Corps, the 'Black Scorpion Corps.'
Commander of the Black Scorpion Corps of the Pitch-Black League.
The Deathless Sword, Gu Ja-gyeong.
That was who I was here.
Shhhhh......
The rain wouldn't stop.
Maybe because I had lost too much blood in too short a time, my past suddenly flashed before my eyes like a revolving lantern.
The Deathless Sword.
An epithet meaning a sword that survives death.
There was a reason I had earned such an epithet.
I had staked my life on every mission to earn merit.
The day the life of Jin-myeong of the Wudang Sect flipped over without warning, as easily as turning a hand.
From the day I chose, out of nowhere, to live as 'Gu Ja-gyeong' of the underworld.
I had thrown myself into the jaws of death every single day, as though each were the last day of my life.
It was for Master's sake.
Master belonged to the 'Heo' generation, just one rank below the Sect Leader, and yet......
Within the Wudang Sect, it was fair to say Master had no standing at all.
Because of me.
Because Master had met me, an orphan at nine.
Because Master had taken in an orphan who amounted to nothing.
Fed me, put me to bed, taught me letters and the sword......
Because Master had shown me such grace.
Because of me, Master turned away a scion of a distinguished family who had already been promised a place as a disciple.
And to take responsibility for stirring up trouble in the sect, Master left the main mountain......
—"Myeong, what fine sunshine."
Only to end up settling in a shabby hermitage below the main mountain.
Master should have been treated as an Elder, and it felt as if it was all my fault that things had come to this.
That was why.
It was around the time the Murim Alliance was secretly passing a notice, again and again, to every one of the Nine Sects and One Gang and the Five Great Clans about 'a spy mission to infiltrate the inner workings of the Pitch-Black League.'
—"I want to do it."
Without a moment's hesitation, I shot my hand straight up.
I wasn't tough by nature, and my martial arts were nothing special, but......
—"Please, send me."
I raised my hand at once.
I didn't have a speck of desire to make a name for myself or get ahead.
I only thought that if I came back having earned merit, Wudang might look at Master differently.
I only wanted to prove to the sect that Master had not been wrong to take me in.
That was how I made my decision at twenty-three and set out on my 'spy's journey.'
Without knowing that the decision would turn my whole life upside down like this.
Without knowing it would drag on this endlessly.
"......"
I looked down indifferently at the Vice League Leader sprawled on the ground.
I had survived again.
With my final mission, assassinating the Vice League Leader of the Pitch-Black League, now done......
My spy's journey was over.
As of today, I was going back to Wudang.
"Jin-myeong."
That was when it happened.
When I turned my head, a figure emerged from the darkness.
It was a clean-featured, middle-aged man who wore a pure white robe as naturally as his own skin.
Moyong Wi, the Heart-Severing Sage, Head of the Moyong Clan.
He had been my direct handler through the long infiltration of the Pitch-Black League, and he was also my superior, who had climbed promotion after promotion until he finally reached the post of Grand Strategist of the Murim Alliance.
"—Haah."
At Moyong Wi's appearance, the tension that had been drawn taut the whole time went slack.
"You've come at just the right time."
Moyong Wi looked at the Vice League Leader's corpse and spoke in a low voice.
"......I can scarcely believe it. With your eyes in that state, you still brought down the Pitch-Black League's second-in-command."
"Heaven's luck was with me, that's all."
Moyong Wi smiled at my flat reply.
"Luck alone does not accomplish such a thing."
"......"
"So the mission is over now."
For some reason, Moyong Wi's ever-clear eyes were full of brooding.
"You and I have both grown old in that time."
"......It's been a long, long time."
"When was it that we first met?"
He was asking when we had first made contact after I came down from Wudang.
At his words, I ran a hand over my scraggly stubble and searched my memory.
I couldn't quite remember.
It was my own life, yet it had been worn down so thoroughly by the years, and stained so darkly with blood, that I had long since stopped counting the passage of time.
"Probably...... about twenty years ago."
Moyong Wi smiled bitterly, murmuring, "Dear me, that long already," and then asked again in the lowest of voices.
"Do you have no regrets, by any chance?"
"Regrets about what, exactly?"
Moyong Wi's smile thinned.
"The Vice League Leader is growing cold at your feet. At this level, becoming number one in the underworld someday would be well within your reach, so you might well feel some ambition......"
I cut him off at once.
"Not interested."
Then I snapped at him.
"If I had craved fame, I wouldn't have chosen the Black Scorpion Corps, a secret unit. I have always belonged to Wudang, and to the Murim Alliance. I haven't forgotten that for a single day, so you'd best stop there with a joke that isn't even funny."
"Is that so?" Moyong Wi asked back softly, then tilted his chin up slightly, looked down at me, and asked in a chilling voice.
"Somewhere along the way, despite what you say, I've found myself less and less sure where you belong."
"......"
"Was that truly what you meant just now?"
Silence fell between us.
On instinct, my eyes swept for my sword, which had rolled across the ground......
And Moyong Wi, too, seemed to notice how my presence had changed in an instant.
"Sharp instincts! Just what I'd expect of the Deathless Sword, the pride of the Pitch-Black League!"
I asked him back.
"Why are you doing this to me?"
This was Moyong Wi, the Heart-Severing Sage, the Murim Alliance's merciless cloud, who treated evil like a mortal enemy.
So why was he looking at me so coldly, as though I were his enemy?
"Jin-myeong, look at yourself. Who in the world could possibly take you for a Daoist of Wudang?"
His words made me flinch, and I couldn't help picturing how I looked.
Surviving in the underworld all that time, I had been wounded more times than I could count.
At some point I had given up counting the scars carved across my face.
And was that all?
Where one of my eyes should have been, there was only a hollow and a hideous stab wound. The eye I had left was slowly losing its sight to an old poison.
And today, on top of it all, I had lost an arm.
The spy mission that was supposed to last three years at first had been extended and extended again until it went past a full twenty years.
This wreck was what those years had made of me.
"The man you are now is Gu Ja-gyeong."
Moyong Wi rubbed my nose in reality again.
"The one who survived an appallingly long time in the hell of the underworld, who leaves the stench of blood everywhere his feet touch......"
He drove the point home.
"The pride of the Pitch-Black League, Commander of the Black Scorpion Corps, the Deathless Sword Gu Ja-gyeong."
All of it had been for Master.
And beyond that, for the Alliance......
And for the peace of the martial world.
"I......!"
I was just about to spit out my grievance.
"The Demonic Cult is stirring."
Moyong Wi walked slowly.
"Once those bastards start to move, the entire martial world will surely be drowned in blood."
He picked up my sword from where it had rolled on the ground and came toward me.
"And so, with a common enemy appearing, the Alliance has concluded that the Murim Alliance and the Pitch-Black League, in other words the orthodox and the unorthodox, must join forces."
"Then—"
"At a time like this, what do you suppose would happen if it came out that a spy we planted had reached all the way to the Pitch-Black League's heart? Now then, here is your final mission."
Moyong Wi pressed the sword into my hand himself and made his pronouncement.
"Kill yourself."
Just now, what had that man said?
"Die as the Pitch-Black League's Deathless Sword. It is for the greater good."
Moyong Wi's last words kept ringing in my ears.
Die for the greater good.
I let out a hollow laugh.
"I can't do that. I promised Master I would come back. So I'm going to get back alive, whatever it takes."
Moyong Wi turned his back on me.
Thump, thump......
"Get back, you say......"
A few steps away, Moyong Wi lifted his head and gazed at the pouring rain as if he were watching a show.
"Your master, Heo-am, is already gone from this world."
For an instant, the rain that filled the world seemed to fall silent.
"Ascended in the hermitage where Heo-am lived, they say. Since Heo-am was found still seated in meditation, the guess is that Heo-am gave up food and water and meditated to the end."
Moyong Wi gave the order again.
"Kill yourself. Kill yourself, and raise the honor of your ascended master even higher. That is the only way left for you to repay what you owe."
That couldn't be.
"Don't lie to me. Master would never leave me behind. Get out of my way. I'm going back to Wudang right now to find out the truth. If it's true, then killing myself, I'd do it a hundred times, no, a thousand......"
He sneered.
"And just how do you plan to do that?"
He was right.
"Listen, Jin-myeong."
There was no way to confirm it.
"No, Deathless Sword."
It had been a full twenty years since every trace of the name Jin-myeong of Wudang had been wiped away.
"Now that your precious master has ascended......"
The only person who could prove that I belonged to the Murim Alliance......
"Am I not now the only one left who can prove you were Jin-myeong of Wudang?"
He drew his sword.
"No, no, that's not quite right."
Then he elaborated.
"Every document concerning you was destroyed long ago. So no matter how loudly I might shout it now, who would ever believe that the Pitch-Black League's Deathless Sword Gu Ja-gyeong was really that simple-minded Jin-myeong of Wudang—!"
With that, it was certain. Once the hare was caught, the hound would go into the pot.
No place left to return to......
And no one left to welcome me home.
"Strategist Moyong, it's been twenty years. Twenty whole years. Twenty years, no less......"
Years I had endured to see Master again.
If I could not see Master, then I had no reason to live.
"Did Master truly ascend?"
"I'll leave that to your imagination."
"You bastard, you're begging for your death."
At the words I spat out low as I tightened my grip on my sword, Moyong Wi's tone, which had been that of a gentleman scholar all along, changed in an instant.
"Yes, I knew it. I knew you had other ideas. The filthy unorthodox bastard finally shows his true colors!"
Maybe I had already known.
When the warmth I used to feel in the replies, which came about as often as beans sprout in a drought, slowly faded away.
When even those replies gradually stopped coming and then ceased altogether.
I had, of course, wondered whether something might have happened to Master.
But I refused to think it.
Because then I would have no reason to go on living.
I had tried hard not to think it.
FLAP-FLAP-FLAP!
My ragged black robe whipped about wildly.
As life lost its meaning, tears and blood ran down mixed together.
Take Master out of my world, and not a single thing remained.
No.
I had thought not a single thing would remain, but one thing did.
Malice.
A vicious malice, the kind I felt I had never once harbored in my life, was what remained.
WHOOSH!
The moment I shot toward Moyong Wi like an arrow, his White Cloud Sword flashed like a ray of light, as if it had been waiting.
White Cloud Sword.
Moyong Wi's White Cloud Sword, never left out whenever the martial world of the day argued over its 'fastest swords,' and aptly described as a sword that roams above the clouds.
My body was already at its limit.
One eye, one arm, a body for which no word came to mind but rags. There was no way that body could handle an enemy like this.
I went back over all my experience, weighed what was about to happen, and reached a cold conclusion.
He was not an opponent I could give flesh to and take bone from.
So I meant to take his bones with my life.
SPLURT—!
Instead of dodging the bastard's sword, I offered up the shoulder of my left arm, which had long since been ruined.
Blood gushed. Using the opening I had bought with my shoulder, I drove one step in to the left.
"Oh no you don't!"
Moyong Wi's sword twitched.
Before his sword energy could come flying at me again, I struck the blood spurting from my shoulder with a force-laden blade and sent it flying.
SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAT!
Drop after drop of blood, each laden with internal force, hurtled toward Moyong Wi.
True energy, handled to its absolute limit.
It was a skill all my own: loading a sliver of internal force into each drop of blood and turning them into hidden weapons.
"Cheap tricks!"
The blood-red hidden weapons burst at point-blank range, and Moyong Wi's hands grew busy.
I seized that opening and stepped in once more.
Sword energy came flying again, but this time too I didn't dodge.
SPLURT!
My sword, honed on the knife's edge between life and death, ran on a different track from anyone else's to begin with.
It was not a sword that dodged and then struck.
It was a sword that took the hit, went in, and cut.
I flung the blood pouring from my thigh at Moyong Wi again.
He was not a man to fall for the same move twice.
Moyong Wi batted away the drops of blood I had flung with frightening force and was about to swing his sword at once, but—
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!
He lost a beat hastily fending off the force I had loaded into the raindrops.
Narrowing his frame of thinking had been my aim from the start.
Going out of my way to load force into blood on a rainy day was the trick itself.
On a day when rain falls like this......
Everything in every direction becomes my weapon.
It was too late for him to fire sword energy now.
The distance had collapsed.
Now in close quarters, the White Cloud Sword went for my body once more.
SWOOSH—
This time it cut into my left leg, but it didn't matter. I had already taken the last step.
Only then did Moyong Wi turn deathly pale.
"You're beyond vicious, you're horrifying......!"
No need for such high praise! Moyong Wi's left palm, driven by desperation, pounded my chest.
CRACK! I felt my breastbone and my backbone shatter together under that single palm strike.
I filled the blood surging up into my mouth with internal force and spat it straight out.
SPLURT! Patter, patter.
"Kraaagh! You petty—!"
My mouth smeared with blood, I snickered. Watching Moyong Wi's face turn into a ruined mess, as though he had been hit with skin-melting Soul-Paring Powder, was quite a delight.
"That's right. Being this petty is how I've kept myself alive in the underworld."
In the meantime, the White Cloud Sword he swung wildly passed through my neck, smashed my jawbone, and took my ear clean off. It was so horrifyingly fast, even now, that a hollow laugh slipped out of me.
SPLURRRT!
Blood streamed from my neck in a long arc. But I had won. Because I would be faster with the next move.
Not the sword of the righteous path, but the sword of the unorthodox one.
A real fighting sword forged in hell had, in the end, given up the whole body to complete the best possible path. As I gripped my sword hard, Moyong Wi's words buzzed in my ears.
—Jin-myeong, who would ever see you as a Daoist of the Wudang Sect? The man you are now is Gu Ja-gyeong. The one who survived so long in the hell of the underworld, who leaves the stench of blood everywhere his feet touch......
Maybe Moyong Wi had seen me clearly after all.
Because in the final moment, what I had left would be not a Daoist's face but a ghost's.
The man who had survived in the midst of death had made up his mind to die today.
"We're going together. To hell."
Pouring all of my life into the tip of my sword, I shot forward in a single line.
SWOOSH—!
Moyong Wi's eyes filled with despair. I was determined to die no matter what, but the bastard meant to live by any means necessary.
That gap was what won me the fight.
I, who had sought death, died—
And killed the bastard who had sought to live, so the victory was mine.
The moment the last sword I would ever wield in this life finally drove into his face.
The world slowed down.
Fragments of the earring, shattered and sent flying along with my ear, drifted before my eyes like afterimages.
SHHHHHH—!
The shattered fragments seemed to tremble as though resonating—
And then my consciousness cut out completely.
In the pitch-black darkness, a voice I knew better than any other rang out.
—Myeong.
I couldn't see, but I knew at once whose voice it was.
For there was only one person in this world who would call my name so tenderly.
TL Note: Jin-myeong — the characters of this Daoist name mean "true name."