I had the mistaken feeling that death might actually be a rather pleasant dream.
—Myeong.
It was that time twenty years ago, the last time I saw Master.
The night before I left on my spy mission to the Pitch-Black League.
In the hermitage that had been ours alone, Master woke me from a sound sleep.
Then Master took a plain, rough earring from inside the robe and recited a formula I could make nothing of.
—Have you memorized it all?
—Yes, Master.
Master nodded and spoke as though telling a tale from long, long ago.
—In the deep sea of the north there is a strange fish, and its name is 'Kun.' It is said that no one can tell how many thousands of li long the Kun is......
When it changes into a bird, its name is 'Peng,' and it too is so vast that it cannot be measured; when it rouses itself and soars, they say its wings cover the sky.
A tale of divine beasts from legend that fill the sea and cover the sky.
It was a story no Daoist of the Wudang Sect, with its roots in Daoism, could fail to know.
—It's the parable from Free and Easy Wandering, which Daoist Master Nanhua, that is, Zhuangzi, left behind, isn't it?
Master nodded and added.
—That's right, Myeong. Do you know what the Kun means here?
I straightened my posture and answered.
—I was taught that Zhuangzi likened the northern sea to the human world, and the fish 'Kun,' thousands of li long, to humankind in all its multitudes.
—Do not get caught up in units. Thousands of li simply means a size beyond counting; at its heart, it points to the 'infinite.'
Master said this while gently stroking my hair.
—It means infinite potential. The infinite possibility of human beings, Myeong.
—Infinite possibility?
—Yes. Like the thousand strands of waves that roll in from the sea.
Master's gentle voice stroked my heart, too.
—To live is to shape waves as infinite as these. Which ripple you shape is up to you alone.
I chewed over Master's words, then asked the question that had come to mind.
—But does this parable have anything to do with the formula you just recited?
Master answered.
—It is a formula that has been passed down by word of mouth in Wudang since long, long ago. So much time has passed that it is hard to know whether it is genuine, but its roots are said to reach back to the Golden-Eyed Daoist Master.
I was startled and asked.
—The Golden-Eyed Daoist Master, as in the immortal of legend who was said to have eyes of gold?
—Yes. The one who was Zhuangzi's only bodyguard in the age of the Hundred Schools of Thought.
An age of war, when heroes were born and burned out as commonly as stones get kicked underfoot.
The name that came from Master's lips was the Golden-Eyed Daoist Master, who, the stories said, had defended Daoism single-handedly in those harsh times.
—It is a formula holding a whole lifetime of insight, left by the Golden-Eyed Daoist Master at the very moment of ascension.
—How could such a precious formula......
—How does this unworthy master know it, you mean? Why, you little rascal, there's nothing you won't say!
—Hehe.
Tap. Master put the faintest trace of internal force into the tip of an index finger and gave me a light push.
Yes, that was how it had been.
Whenever I got too cheeky, I would be scolded like this. And I would rub my forehead, which didn't even hurt, for no reason at all, and laugh. It was a laugh like wild grass in early summer.
It was the same when I, who seemed to have no talent at all for martial arts, couldn't keep up with the lessons. Again, Master would say, and more often than not give my forehead a light tap with an index finger.
There had been days when I knew how to laugh.
Before he became Gu Ja-gyeong, the Deathless Sword of the Pitch-Black League, Jin-myeong of Wudang lived an ordinary life in which he could laugh this brightly.
—What is this earring?
Master answered softly, in that familiar gentle tone that hardly ever rose or fell.
—That is a keepsake of the Golden-Eyed Daoist Master, handed down along with the formula.
I raised the earring up before my eyes and quietly studied it.
It was an earring that was nothing more than a single long, thin strip of metal.
Its color was a soft gold, like brass that had grown old.
It was far too plain to be a keepsake of the legendary Golden-Eyed Daoist Master.
Master, who had been quietly watching me, spoke.
—It looks like nothing much, but there is a superstition that if you cherish it with all your heart, it will protect someone more precious than your own life.
—Then why would you pass something so precious down to me?
—Because you are hundreds of times, thousands of times more precious than that earring. Just think of it as a protective charm.
And with that, Master personally fixed the earring into my left ear.
Prick.
—Ngh.
A bead of blood welled up from my newly pierced ear.
—Does it sting badly?
—I'm fine.
—I only wish you would never be hurt.
I could feel Master's warmth in the earring. Repeating the formula I had been taught so that I wouldn't forget it, I asked.
—Does the formula have a name?
Master nodded.
—The Kun-Becoming Thunder Formula. The secret art of becoming the infinite Kun.
Afraid the happy dream might end at any moment, I pulled myself together.
Barely.
Having only just managed to steady myself, I said something no disciple should ever say.
"Master, the truth is, I am dead."
The whole world slid away behind my ears, and only Master and I were left.
"I lived in the underworld for twenty long years and finished my last mission, but......"
Thankfully, the dream went on.
"I was cast aside by the Alliance, and I died by Moyong Wi's sword."
Borrowing the shape of Jin-myeong, still untainted and not yet ripened, I went on chattering.
"This unworthy disciple cannot face you, Master. I never knew we would only meet again once we were both dead......"
That was when it happened.
—Myeong.
Sitting upright, with a gentle smile, Master said this.
—Every night I regretted it. You cannot imagine how I regretted letting you go like that. Everyone told me to bury you in my heart and go on living, but I never learned how to live my whole life with you buried there.
Even when I tried to live with you buried in my heart, at night you would push your way up through that thick, heavy soil of my heart and come looking for me again and again, and there was nothing at all I could do.
Master, Master. Myeong, you rascal, why did you always have to call me twice? If you were going to call, once would have done. Did you call me twice every night so I would grieve twice as much, repent twice over, and live out my life unable to forget, as if being punished?
At last.
—Myeong, this time, live your own life.
"Master?"
—Follow your own waves and live.
For a moment, Master and I simply looked at each other in silence.
Yet what passed between our hearts in that instant must have come close to the infinite.
I rose from where I sat and made a full bow to Master.
Why teach me how to live, live like this, live like that, only now, when your foolish disciple has come to you dead?
I forced the words back down before they could leave my mouth, and answered as I bowed.
"Yes. This disciple will do so."
I answered boldly, at that.
"I will come back safely, without fail, and show you the ripple I have found for myself."
Jin-myeong and Heo-am.
Me, and Master.
In a pitch-black darkness where only the two of us existed, the formula rose up in golden light and began to float.
Should the Heart-Sea Rejoice in Its Own Ease
If there is a sea of the heart that delights in its own ease.
The Waters of Forgetting Wash the Heart's Measure
It is the heart's measure, washed in the waters of the River of Forgetting.
It was the first verse of the Kun-Becoming Thunder Formula, which I had just memorized.
Master recited the verse.
And at last, with a smile, said.
—Now.
Just as Master always had whenever I couldn't keep up with a lesson.
Tap!
Master made as if to push me away with a fingertip lightly charged with internal force.
I was pushed away.
There wasn't the slightest pain, yet somehow my body began to be pushed away in an instant.
—Again.
Master grew distant.
Grew distant in the blink of an eye......
And became a speck, and vanished.
"Master......"
All at once, I felt the whole of time and space squeeze tight and rewind at speed.
—Yes, again.
Moyong Wi flashed past.
Then the Vice League Leader.
Time flowed backward, faster and faster.
—Live again.
Yet Master's voice still felt as close as the tip of my nose.
Soon I passed the day I took office as Commander of the Black Scorpion Corps.
—Follow your waves and live.
I went back through every brush with death I had ever crossed, one by one.
Until, before I knew it, I had arrived at the first battle of my life......
"—Hhuk!"
The air stabbing into my lungs made me feel alive.
When I raised my head, I saw a sky so blue it hurt my eyes.
"......"
On reflex, the very first thing I did was reach for my ear.
The ear that should have been gone was intact, and the earring that should have been there was gone. I could no longer feel Master's warmth, which had always seemed close enough to touch.
Tears came gushing out.
Somehow, I knew it by instinct.
......That Master was gone from this world.
"How on earth is this......"
I also realized that I had come back to the past.
It was a day from around the time I had first set out on my spy's journey.
About twenty years ago.
In the Pitch-Black League's Fujian territory, the war with the Blood Night Gang was at its height.
How had I, a dead man, been thrown onto a battlefield from so long ago?
"How......"
How could a dead man come back to the past?
I didn't know whether it was thanks to the merit Master had built up or because of the formula.
"Brother!"
Perhaps both had played a part in this strange phenomenon of regression.
"Get a grip! Brother!"
What mattered was that this was no time to keep standing there dazed.
A booming voice like thunder and lightning reached me.
A voice that felt strangely missed, welcome, and dear.
"......Byeong-ho?"
A name I had sworn never to forget suddenly burst out of me.
The first comrade I had grown attached to in my days as a wanderer......
And the first comrade I had lost. That was Byeong-ho.
"Yeah! Gu Ja-gyeong, you moron! Snap out of it, would you! You really want to die a dog's death out here?"
At his shout, my muffled ears popped open, and one by one the other noises from all around began to pour in.
"Die! Die! Just die!"
"Uwaaaaagh!"
"S-s-save me! Save me!"
Utter pandemonium.
The stench of blood hung thick over the whole area, and on top of that—
The clash of steel and the screaming rang on without rest, like instruments playing together.
"Don't rub your eyes!"
At my words, Byeong-ho tilted his head, puzzled, and asked.
"What're you talking about?"
I remembered this battle.
About twenty years ago, on Ghost Spirit Island near the Pitch-Black League's Fujian Branch, I had fought on this battlefield until I was sick of it.
Barely past twenty, I had joined the Pitch-Black League disguised as a wanderer......
And gone through a brutal initiation.
No sooner had I thrown myself into the underworld than I lost half my sight in my very first battle.
Because it wasn't treated in time, I was nearly blind by the end of my life.
"It's White-Eye Scatter Poison!"
I put inner arts into my voice and shouted.
White-Eye Scatter Poison.
A colorless, odorless mist poison.
"Unless you want to go blind, don't scratch your eyes even if they itch!"
The moment it touches the eyes, your sight goes, followed by an unbearable itch. And the moment you give in to the itch and rub your eyes.
The poison takes full effect.
Stealing your sight along with tears of blood.
Ghost Spirit Island.
Fog that never lifts all year round, and a forest that makes you lose your way.
And even the Valley of Ruin, where the voices of the dead are sometimes heard.
Was it because of the strange energy that shrouded the island itself?
Ghost Spirit Island had long been recorded as an impregnable battlefield.
Here on Ghost Spirit Island, where every chilling thing imaginable gathered, we had fought for months on end.
Now that I knew every secret of Ghost Spirit Island and everything about the Blood Night Gang, it could only seem utterly pointless.
"Tch. To think I wasted months on a fight like this."
I gripped the hilt of a broadsword that had fallen on the ground.
Live long enough, and there are bound to be moments you can never forget.
This was one of them.
Then Byeong-ho, who couldn't have fought alongside me more than a few times, put his back against mine.
That back, which felt so sturdy, would be gone forever before long.
"If we live, we live together, and if we die, we die together!"
I snorted at that.
"I know that's a load of lies."
"What?"
"I said I know it's all a lie."
Before long, Byeong-ho would die in my place.
"You're not the type to live together and die together. You're the bastard who shares the living and does the dying alone."
At that, Byeong-ho gaped and blankly asked, "Huh?"
"Not this time."
WHOOOOSH!
I shot forward like an arrow and began slaughtering the enemies on every side. If they were a flock of sheep, I was a wolf let loose in the middle of it. I swung my blade again and again, slashed, and hacked down.
Out of nowhere, Zhuangzi's butterfly dream came to mind.
Jin-myeong had become Gu Ja-gyeong, then suddenly died far from home, then become Jin-myeong again......
And now I had been thrown back to the moment I had resolved to become Gu Ja-gyeong.
Except that I had woken from a dream not of becoming a butterfly, but a ghost......
"Kkuaaaaagh!"
And I could still act like one.
We were clearly on the defensive.
Our side's screams rang out one after another in the thick fog that filled the wide shoreline.
Behind us rose a cliff easily a hundred cheok high, and the wind wailed like mourners.
It had come to this because, unlike the Blood Night Gang bastards who made their home here, we knew nothing about Ghost Spirit Island.
And—
'Back then, I......'
I had known nothing about the underworld, or about the flow of a battle.
Now it was different.
Now that I could see straight through the ways of the underworld, I shouted again.
"Watch out for White-Eye Scatter Poison!"
And since I now knew the flow of a battle well, I ran wild this way and that like a beast off its leash.
I felt eyes on me from far off.
It was the man who had hired me and all the other wanderers. A slender middle-aged man who looked more like a scholar than a martial artist.
The Pitch-Black League's Fujian Branch Head.
He was watching me closely, holding his breath, as I rampaged like a ghost and snuffed out the enemies' lives.