I finished off the last remnants of the Blood Night Gang and returned to camp.
We had turned defeat into victory, but the war wasn't over yet, so there was a great deal to do.
First, everyone exposed to White-Eye Scatter Poison was set to washing their eyes in running water......
And a rough system was in place for putting the able-bodied to work building the camp, standing watch, and preparing to bed down.
'The Kun-Becoming Thunder Formula.'
In the middle of all that, my head was filled with nothing but the Kun-Becoming Thunder Formula.
Not only the sudden regression, but even my golden eyes.
I couldn't help thinking that the Kun-Becoming Thunder Formula was the key to every one of these miracles.
Last night.
Master's sad eyes from the dream kept flickering before my own.
Told to bury me in that heart, Master had tried, and yet I had stubbornly clawed my way out......
And I had always called out twice in a child's voice, Master, Master.
And so Master had grieved twice over.
Had Master truly given up food and drink, meditated, and ascended?
If not......
There was no way to explain it other than Master's great devotion and merit.
"Brother?"
I was leaning against a tree, deep in thought, when a hand as big as a pot lid waved back and forth in front of my eyes.
"Your eyes all right?"
A giant with a Zhang Fei beard, caked with scabs of dried blood, peered at me.
"......"
I stared at Byeong-ho for a long, long time, as if to bore a hole through him. Looking embarrassed by my gaze and not knowing what to do with himself, he finally needled me for no reason.
"Why're you staring at me like that?"
"Because you're in front of me."
"I said, why're you staring holes into me?"
"Because I can see you."
How could the big lug possibly understand words holding such deep philosophy and insight?
"Forget it."
He was the bastard who shared the living and then, when it came time to die, went and died with a squawk, all on his own.
Infuriating, yet dear to the point of aching.
Because of this guy, I had sworn never again to grow attached to anyone.
I was bound to die, and so were my comrades.
Because when men who live with their lives on the line, never knowing when they'll die, trade affection with one another, all that's left in the end is regret.
"Jeez......"
Byeong-ho grumbled for no reason, as if the silence were awkward, but I paid it no mind and just looked up at the sky.
The day before.
The day was so clear and bright that you would think the hellish scene of hundreds dead and wounded had never happened.
"But, Brother."
Byeong-ho asked again.
"Your eye color keeps flipping back and forth. Are you really okay?"
He shoved his uncomfortably huge face at me and studied mine again.
"A little while ago they were gold, I'm telling you. But now they're back to black......"
He seemed worried it might be a side effect of the White-Eye Scatter Poison.
"Knock it off. Yours truly is immune to all poisons."
Byeong-ho let out a short grunt, "Huh," and asked back.
"Really?"
Inwardly, Byeong-ho thought no such thing could exist in this world, but when he considered the prowess Gu Ja-gyeong had shown yesterday, it just might be real, so he asked.
That was how overwhelming the force and power Gu Ja-gyeong had shown on the battlefield yesterday had been.
Tap!
What he got back was a hand charged with internal force.
"Total lie."
Unlike Master, I loaded quite a lot of internal force into my index finger when I rapped Byeong-ho's forehead, and he groaned.
"Ow, my head......"
In other words, this wasn't a tap full of the affection between master and disciple. It was an 'underworld-style tap.'
"The liar's the rotten one, so why are you punishing the one who got fooled?"
"That's why you croaked."
"Who's croaked, that you keep saying such jinxed things?"
He snorted and answered.
"I'm alive and kicking here."
"Good. Stay that way."
"You're the one who should stay alive, Brother."
I sprang to my feet and answered.
"It's a place where the one who lies survives."
"Huh?"
"And where the one who gets fooled ends up the moron."
Byeong-ho, still planted in his spot in the shade of the tree, squinted up at me as if the sunlight kept him from seeing my face properly.
"That's the kind of place it is."
I added, meaning it.
"That's where we're going to live."
The place where, unlike last time, I would put down real roots and live for a long, long time.
In other words......
I mean the underworld.
"Just stand guard for me."
It wasn't simply that I had come back to the past. My body had changed, too.
I had rested enough, so now it was time to look inward at my body.
Asked to stand guard, Byeong-ho answered solemnly, "Yes," and followed behind me.
Once we found a quiet spot near the campsite, I sat down cross-legged at once.
My first qi circulation since regressing.
The golden energy that had welled up endlessly last night was long gone.
Even when I recited the Kun-Becoming Thunder Formula to myself, nothing happened.
Even so, I sensed that my body was clearly different from before.
'Let's go over it from the beginning.'
In my past life, the source of my martial arts had plainly been the Wudang Sect.
Since I was never counted among its rising talents, I hadn't inherited the Wudang Sect's signature secret arts, but......
What would make Wudang Wudang, otherwise?
The inner arts mind method I had inherited from Master was Profound Unity True Energy.
It could never have fierce power, but as mind methods went, the purity and depth of its energy were truly first-rate.
I loved this mind method.
Profound Unity True Energy.
Because it resembled Master.
Maybe Profound Unity True Energy was also the secret to how I hadn't gone mad through a spy mission that had dragged on for twenty whole years.
'First, let's explore.'
I focused on gently circulating the flow through my acupoints and observing the changes.
I had just completed a full circuit and was gathering my inner arts back into my qi center.
'......Hm?'
My qi center was empty.
I was thrown.
It was obvious that my level had been shallow at this point in my life, but even allowing for that, there was so absurdly little that it threw me.
'Where did all my inner arts go?'
Only after running another full circuit did I notice something.
It wasn't that there were no inner arts in my qi center.
It was that the vessel holding them had grown far too wide and deep.
Master's formula flashed through my mind.
Master, who had told me not to define the limits of human beings, not to be caught up in numbers or units.
Just as that teaching said, its size called to mind a truly infinite sea.
Drop a head-sized ball of inner arts into that sea, and it would simply vanish into the depths without leaving a trace.
It was a sense of space that gave me chills.
An absurd sense of space: even if I wandered this endless sea for eons, I could never dare to guess where it ended or where it began.
An audacious thought followed.
What if the day came when I filled this qi center, grown so vast it felt hopeless, to the brim?
What if the day came when I finally filled this huge vessel with energy of the finest quality?
Goosebumps broke out all over me.
Because before I knew it, I had pictured myself as the number one under heaven. For a long time I was consumed with examining and measuring its size.
It was almost like gazing out at the sea at night.
Like those nights before returning from a grueling mission, under the moonlight......
The glittering ripples, lapping on carelessly, with no end in sight.
A man who lives by the sword needs moments like that if he doesn't want to go mad.
He needs time wasted for nothing, lost in useless things.
Instead of only brooding over the path of domination and swinging a blade......
'Now and then.'
You have to know how to lose yourself in gazing at useless things like this. You have to learn how to soothe and console yourself that way. That's how you survive.
Tweet, tweet—
How much time had passed?
'Done?'
I was quietly opening my eyes to the sound of birdsong.
"Brother, you didn't so much as twitch. I really thought you'd died."
"I'm fine."
"I've never seen qi circulation this quiet since the day hair first grew on my head."
"That's a contradiction."
At that, he narrowed his eyes slightly, puzzled.
"What's a contradiction?"
I gave a light shrug and answered.
"You don't have a single hair on your head, only a face full of beard, so it's a contradiction."
"Hah, I had some when I was a kid."
"That's why you croak. Because you live trapped in illusions about the past."
"I don't miss my hair one bit!"
Did he mean it? He was gently rubbing his own scalp.
"By the way, did I sit through the whole night?"
I had definitely started my qi circulation as the sun went down, yet dawn was faintly breaking. I must have lost track of time.
"I nearly died of boredom."
"Now it's your turn."
"Eh? Qi circulation, you mean?"
I nodded.
"There's still time before the muster, so get your circulation in first."
Now we would switch roles, and it was my turn to stand guard. I watched him sink into qi circulation, then stretched once.
First I spread my energy sense to check the surroundings for any threat, never letting my guard down and taking the utmost care.
Tweet, tweet, tweet.
Byeong-ho, back from the brink of death himself, seemed to have gained some insight, because his circulation was running longer than I had expected.
Leaves and branches danced in the wind.
And then someone set foot inside the energy sense I had spread out in a circle.
An enemy?
The footsteps were too light and too plodding for that.
An ally.
Of course, since I was standing guard, I couldn't let my guard down even for an ally. How long did that go on? Then a Pitch-Black League warrior emerged from the forest.
"Make a loud noise and you die."
The guy flinched at my presence for a moment, then, as if his pride were stung, shot back, "What—?" and got to his business.
"Follow me. The Branch Head's summoning you."
I answered.
"Denied."
The man, who had turned right around as if he expected me to follow at once, stopped.
"What?"
Then, since he looked back at me, I said it again.
"Denied. And a warning."
Silence fell between us.
"Make me repeat myself one more time, and I'll grab you by the corners of your mouth and rip it wide open."
I meant it.
The Pitch-Black League warrior knew at once that I meant it, too. He had seen more cracked eyeballs than he could count, but the eyes in front of him now were chillingly calm.
"The reason......?"
He added, flustered.
"I only ask because I need a reason for my report!"
"Right, you do need one."
"And if you think about it, I didn't really make you say the same thing twice."
"Good boy. You listen well."
My reason for refusing the summons.
"Standing guard."
It was extremely simple.
"I'm standing guard over a comrade."
The Pitch-Black League warrior, thoroughly crushed by my presence by now, spoke again.
"For the record, from here on I'm just talking to myself, so feel free to ignore it. This is a real problem. If it were only the Branch Head at headquarters, maybe, but the Fourth Elder himself has come to the command post......"
The Fourth Ring of the Pitch-Black League.
Head of the Roaring Ring.
Old Tyrant Roar, Noh Hong-geuk.
The Pitch-Black League, the grand coalition of the underworld, was originally seven great underworld organizations united around the League Leader.
The heads of each organization had been folded in as the seven Rings, and as Elders they held up the Pitch-Black League.
As one of the seven Rings binding the Pitch-Black League together, the Fourth Elder's authority could be called absolute.
Finished talking to himself, the warrior stared at me with hopeful eyes.
They were eyes brimming with the hope that, after all that, I would get the hint and follow along quietly.
"If someone that high up has come, he must have urgent business?"
The man nodded at that.
I asked the man again.
"And his business happens to be with me."
The man nodded again.
"Exactly!"
Then I tilted my head slightly to one side, and at what I said, despair spread across the man's face in an instant.
"If it's so urgent, why doesn't he come to me?"
That lunatic! Not just anyone, but an Elder. An Elder who could take his life as easily as a child plucks the wings or legs off an insect.
"How......"
So how could anyone refuse that Elder's summons merely to stand guard over a comrade, and summon the Elder instead?
The man's face went red as he held back the curses boiling up inside him.
"Now, get lost."
Even so, the moment the man was told to get lost, he turned on his heel. He kept what pride he could, but he went back the way he had come, and quickly. His pride was wounded, but the warning that his mouth would be ripped open if I had to say anything twice kept echoing in his ears.
"Hey, you."
Just then, the madman's voice came again, sending a chill down his spine.
"Get lost faster."
Only then did the man start sprinting back at full speed.
***
"Whooo......"
A long breath slipped out from between Byeong-ho's lips, which had been shut for a long time.
Having finally finished his qi circulation, Byeong-ho gently opened his eyes.
"What the fuck?"
Having blurted out a curse out of nowhere, he rubbed his eyes hard.
Because not only he, but Gu Ja-gyeong, who had promised to stand guard over him, was surrounded.
There were dozens of Pitch-Black League warriors.
Among them were the Fujian Branch Head, his adjutant, and the officers under him.
The Pitch-Black League's elite, as high above him as the sky, whose eyes he had never so much as met before. And every one of them bristling with wariness.
In the midst of them, an old man muttered.
"The mouth is the gate that opens onto the world. A single word thrown out can save the world or make a hell of it. And so the weight riding on a single word may well be called the weight of the world itself."
There was an irresistible power in the old man's rough voice.
His tousled, ash-gray hair set off a sunburnt face that looked as stubborn as a thousand-year-old tree.
'That's no ordinary old man.'
Byeong-ho quietly asked Gu Ja-gyeong, who stood by his side with arms crossed.
"What happened?"
"As you see."
"We're surrounded?"
"But why......?"
"That's how it turned out."
Byeong-ho whispered again.
"And who on earth is that old man?"
I answered him with voice transmission.
—"The Pitch-Black League's Fourth Elder, Old Tyrant Roar."
Hup. Byeong-ho clapped a hand hard over his own mouth.
—"Don't worry."
Gu Ja-gyeong sent another voice transmission.
—"I know that old geezer well."