The Fujian Branch Head, who had been staring at me in a daze, used his movement arts and was right beside me in no time.
"White-Eye Scatter Poison, you say?"
He had a scholar's air and a slender build, but his eyes were razor-sharp, as if to prove why he belonged to the underworld.
"Unless they knew ahead of time that we were going to attack, how on earth would they know to release White-Eye Scatter Poison?"
He was the one who had gathered all these fighters with the promise that, if we won this battle against the Blood Night Gang, every wanderer who took part would be taken into the Pitch-Black League.
"There must have been a spy. If all you're going to ask are questions fit for a half-witted moron, quit dragging me down and stand well back."
The man effectively in charge of this battlefield shot a question back at me, his eyes full of suspicion.
"And how are you so sure this fog is White-Eye Scatter Poison, you bastard?"
It was a poison notorious for having no color and no smell, so his doubt was fairly reasonable.
I took a look around.
Then......
I drew a deep breath through my nose.
There was a familiar smell.
The scent of the underworld. The scent of scheming, too, and the scent of a battlefield steeped in cowardice, baseness, and pettiness.
"Branch Head."
Master, who had sent me back to the past, had clearly told me to live by my own waves, so I was still Gu Ja-gyeong.
"Are you sure it isn't poison?"
So I asked him back, not like a green wanderer, but like Gu Ja-gyeong, Commander of the Black Scorpion Corps.
"Then go ahead and rub your eyes."
The Branch Head couldn't answer right away and only glared at me.
He wouldn't be able to.
Because if it really was White-Eye Scatter Poison, he would lose his sight the moment he rubbed his eyes.
"Why, you......!"
Even in the middle of all that, I was busy cutting the throats of some six or seven enemies.
"Your life is on the line in this battle, and so is your road to promotion. What are you going to do?"
"......"
"Your retreat is full of White-Eye Scatter Poison, and who knows what's waiting up ahead."
I stepped closer to him again.
"I said, what are you going to do?"
I was telling him to come up with his best plan.
"Then what on earth do you want me to do!"
This was my answer.
"Branch Head, you're a very lucky man."
"What?"
"I'll open the way for you."
The Branch Head snorted at that.
"A lowly wanderer like you......!"
I just kept saying what I had to say.
"You never know. Isn't it possible that I, a lowly wanderer, might be your superior before long?"
At that, the Branch Head narrowed his eyes for an instant, then eased them. A hunch had flashed through his mind that it might not be entirely wrong. With martial prowess and spirit like this, maybe he really......
Just as the Pitch-Black League's Fujian Branch Head was about to sink deeper into thought.
"I'll open the way, and I'll end tonight's battle in victory for you. In return, I'll set one condition to match."
Even while I kept up this comic back-and-forth with the Fujian Branch Head, the ambushes kept coming, and my irritation was slowly rising to the top of my head.
"You want more pay?"
"No."
"Then a position?"
"No."
"Then what on earth is the condition!"
I jerked my chin off to the side and answered.
"Kindly get lost over there."
Without giving the Branch Head a chance to reply, I charged forward.
I shifted my grip on the crude broadsword to both hands.
As if answering my will, energy boiled up inside me, ran through my hands, and gathered thick on the broadsword.
I gathered it, and gathered it again, and then......
I hurled the pooled golden blade energy at the deadlocked line dividing enemy from ally.
WHOOSH! SLAAASH!
The blade energy shot up a jang high and split the battle lines in one long stroke.
It was like a long golden curtain.
And beyond the golden curtain, red flowers bloomed.
SPLAAASH—!
Flowers of blood shooting up on the enemy's side, as if the field had been cut precisely in half.
Every head on the battlefield turned toward where the curtain began. Toward me.
BAM!
Gathering all my momentum, I kicked off the ground and flew up.
From where I had made my stamping step, a golden ring spread out and swept across the battlefield.
And then I savored the moment.
The uncontainable vigor of a body suddenly young again, the battlefield, the fighting, the enemy's screams, even the feel coming through my fingertips from a broadsword so dull I had to swing it like a chopper—
It was a moment that made me feel more alive than anything could.
My body soared up over the enemy.
I had surely leapt in at full speed, yet time felt as though it had slowly stretched out.
From midair, I saw Blood Night Gang men in red martial arts uniforms looking up at me. Every kind of emotion churned on their faces.
Bewilderment and confusion, rage and awe.
......And fear.
The exhilaration boiling inside me took on a form and flashed in the air.
A smile came to me on its own.
I brought the broadsword I had raised high straight down on the enemy.
BOOM!!
"......That lunatic."
The Fujian Branch Head, watching from far away, muttered under his breath.
The Branch Head simply couldn't believe it.
What was that majesty just now?
Left in an instant like a dog staring up at the roof after the chicken it chased, the Fujian Branch Head could only keep his eyes fixed on Gu Ja-gyeong, a mere wanderer.
Not that any wanderer who lives with his life on the line is sane, but that bastard was a lunatic through and through.
Wanderers usually lived off the sword because they had no other choice, but that bastard wasn't enduring the battlefield. He was enjoying it.
His years of experience told him as much.
The martial world may be a place where you can't avoid getting tangled up with the odd lunatic, but nothing good ever came of getting mixed up with one like that.
Making him an enemy, above all, was out of the question.
Privately, the Fujian Branch Head was deeply relieved that it was his own Pitch-Black League, and not the Blood Night Gang, that had hired that lunatic.
"That death-crazed lunatic is opening the way! Follow behind him and advance!"
Amazingly, every ally on the battlefield understood his order at once.
***
I cut them down, lost in a trance.
SQUELCH!
I brought my blade down once, and red blood shot up and drenched the dark night sky.
When I sensed something chilling behind me, I twisted aside on instinct.
A saw-toothed blade jutted out past my armpit, utterly vicious.
It was probably meant to hook in and rip the skin away with it.
Looking at it, I suddenly remembered a principle I had learned over twenty years of life in the underworld.
Whatever you receive, pay back double.
Whether it's a gift, or a blade.
I thrust my blade back past my other armpit, then ripped it mercilessly downward.
"Kkuaaaa......!"
I could feel the enemy's shuddering breath over my back. I hurriedly searched out my next target.
The moment I came back to the past, I had been thrown into the middle of a battlefield.
To survive, I had taken up a blade and cut down enemies, sure......
But compared with my last life, this battlefield was far too trivial to make mere survival the goal.
So as I cut down enemies, I sank into thoughts rather profound for such work.
—Live your own life.
What was my life?
I asked the enemy in front of me.
"What is your life?"
"What?"
"Of course a bastard like you wouldn't know."
Then I cut him down.
—Follow your waves and live.
And what were my waves?
I had no idea about any of it.
Why I was here.
What was good, and what was evil?
Everything was a mystery to me, and yet my eyes were endlessly clear.
Even as I moved in a frenzy, I could see every last thing with remarkable clarity.
So I stared into the pupils of each enemy I cut down, as if studying them.
In truth, I wasn't looking into the bastards' eyes. I was using them as bronze mirrors.
I was looking at my own figure reflected in their terror-struck pupils.
Golden eyes.
The figure reflected in the enemies' pupils was something unknown that seemed to be me and yet not me. How had I suddenly come to have eyes of deep gold? Those eyes were asking me.
Asking who I was.
"......Gu Ja-gyeong, Gu Ja-gyeong, Gu Ja-gyeong."
Gu Ja-gyeong was not a name made up for the mission. It was my hidden real name, the one my parents gave me before I entered the Wudang Sect and lived under the Daoist name Jin-myeong.
That's right. Gu Ja-gyeong.
My name was Gu Ja-gyeong.
Come to think of it, I had never once lived under my own name.
As a child, I was called by a childhood name, and in the Wudang Sect, Jin-myeong. And the Deathless Sword, the Murim Alliance's spy, had not been the real me either.
"......"
I decided to live one more time.
To live as the real Gu Ja-gyeong.
Of course, it would have to be different from my last life.
'I don't know what being myself means, but for now, let's just live however I feel like.'
Wherever my body leads.
Wherever my heart leads.
Without shame before myself.
Cutting one bastard down, I made a vow.
First. No more of this spying business.
My path did not lie there.
The Murim Alliance I had known was full of nothing but hypocrites. I decided I would find my path here in the underworld, which might be merciless but at least wasn't two-faced.
It was only natural.
Hadn't the Alliance made me roll around in the pit of the underworld for twenty whole years in my past life, and then boiled the hound once the hunt was done?
I remembered what Moyong Wi had said before he died. Did I mean to become number one in the underworld, he had asked? A laugh escaped me. No reason I couldn't.
Cutting down another bastard, I made another vow.
Second, I would take the Pitch-Black League for myself.
This, too, was a natural vow.
Twenty years had changed the kind of person I was down to the roots.
My temperament had long since gone to ruin, and my nature had grown much coarser.
My sword had become a vicious sword of death, and my hesitation had vanished.
The underworld may be full of wretched bastards, but I was one of those wretches too.
I had come to hate the temple, so I was leaving the Murim Alliance for a new temple, the underworld......
But truth be told, the new temple wasn't exactly to my liking either.
So I vowed to take it, tear it down, and then build it anew.
SLICE!
Cutting yet another bastard through sideways, I carved out a new vow.
Third, if anyone got in the way of what I intended......
SPLURRRT!
I thought it as blood poured over me like a fountain.
I would get rid of him as fast as I could.
Kill the bastards who rub me the wrong way, and kill the bastards who stand in my path. Kill the ones who rattle me with pointless talk, and kill the ones who play the hypocrite like Moyong Wi.
"Master."
The enemy standing before me as I muttered asked, trembling.
"Why would I be your master?"
It was a pointless question that didn't need an answer, so I kept talking to myself as I slowly closed in on him, one step at a time.
"This is a real problem. It seems this is all my life amounts to, and this is the shape of the waves I'm meant to follow."
Then the enemy lunged at me, shouting.
"Y-y-you crazy bastard!"
"Do I look like a crazy bastard to you?"
Dodging the sword he swung again and again, and stepping closer to him one step at a time......
I imitated Master's soft, gentle way of speaking as best I could and tried confessing all my secrets.
"Listen, you little rascal, one must never see the world only as it appears. The truth is, yours truly is no crazy bastard, but the disciple of the immortal Heo-am, who once lived in Wudang and then ascended, and thanks to that honored one's merit and the Golden-Eyed Daoist Master's keepsake. And thanks to the Golden-Eyed Daoist Master's formula, the Kun-Becoming Thunder Formula, I am an anomaly and a calamity like no other under heaven, come back from the distant future to the past."
At first he at least pretended to listen. But at some point he stopped trying to hear me out altogether and just kept swinging his sword, spitting "Fuck" and "Lunatic" over and over. Eventually, worn out on his own, he flung his sword to the ground, panting, and dropped to his knees.
"You lunatic, just kill me......"
"You don't believe me?"
"Would you believe that, if you were me?"
"Where did I lose you?"
"From beginning to end, all of it!"
"No backbone, but honest."
I jerked my chin at him.
"I'll let you live. Get lost."
The guy stared at me blankly, blinked, and then took off running.
I stopped rampaging like a ghost for a moment and looked up at the sky.
At a sky where, as dawn was breaking, violet first light was slowly rippling.
"Master, you saw that just now, didn't you?"
At a sky so carelessly lovely.
"I did let one go, you know."
Then, still gazing at the sky where the violet dawn rippled soft as silk, I went on.
"Granted, I sent more of them up there than I spared. But if they built up any merit, won't they all be shining as stars in the night sky? And if I hadn't killed them, our own men would have died, so isn't all of it salvation and the seeking of the Way?"
So I decided, just like the saying that the reading of a dream beats the dream itself, to interpret it however I pleased.
"Master, this disciple here. I'm living my first day very well, aren't I?"
If Master was watching me, and if the way I was living was wrong, Master would surely find some way to rap my forehead with a 'Tap!'
Day was breaking.
The night was over.
The enemy was retreating.
"Brother! You all right?"
I answered Byeong-ho's question.
"Let's go back."