It is said that when his bellow rings out across the martial world, all under heaven holds its breath.
The saying spoke to the fearsome name of the gaunt old man before me, Old Tyrant Roar, Noh Hong-geuk.
The astonishing part of this story......
"Standing guard, you say."
Was that it was no mere figure of speech.
It was an eerie voice that kept fading away and drawing near again.
The moment Noh Hong-geuk quietly opened his mouth, my ears burned in an instant.
It felt as if someone had jammed red-hot grains of sand into them.
Drip.
In the end, blood trickled out.
Old Tyrant Roar.
A cry that shatters the world.
Because Noh Hong-geuk was, true to his epithet, a master of sound arts.
The old man's rasping voice kept scraping at my insides.
Sharp formless energy rose from his body and stabbed into me again and again.
"Truly splendid brotherly devotion."
Unlike his words, his energy was nothing but chilling.
How could anyone take that as praise?
'Here it comes.'
Half an hour after the man who came as the messenger went back......
Every officer of the Pitch-Black League's Fujian Branch had come here.
And they had even brought Old Tyrant Roar, Noh Hong-geuk, along behind them.
I raised my head and looked at Noh Hong-geuk.
His murky gray eyes were looking into me, too.
He was astonishingly unchanged from how I remembered him.
He was a man like an ancient tree that would stand in the same spot forever.
Twenty whole years apart, and not a single thing about him was different.
"Now it's time to pay the price for that grand devotion of yours. What will you do?"
He clenched his fist tight and opened it again, a few times over.
The skulls that fist had burst open must have outnumbered a swarm of flies.
Everyone knew it, so normally this was a moment to tremble.
But I knew.
That if that fist were going to strike, it would have struck already.
That it wasn't anger that had brought Noh Hong-geuk all the way here.
And beyond that......
I figured it was because he had grown curious about me, for better or for worse.
"So, what's your name?"
And everyone who had won his approval and landed a key post in the Pitch-Black League had one thing in common. They had all been tested for insight, eloquence, and nerve on a proving ground where their lives were the stakes.
"Gu Ja-gyeong."
Which made that man the rope that would haul me up in the world.
And a rope that had come looking for me on its own two feet, no less.
"Gu Ja-gyeong. As ordinary a name as they come, just right for burying in Ghost Spirit Island's yin-soaked soil. When you're called, you come at once. Why show off and stake your life over something like this?"
Every single syllable carried a domineering force. From here on, the searing pain in my ears was nothing. I couldn't breathe. As if someone were gripping the back of my neck with all their strength.
"You wanderer scum only met here on Ghost Spirit Island, joined the Pitch-Black League, and started fighting side by side ten days ago."
"That's right."
"You've known each other a mere ten days, so why on earth would you stake your life on something like standing guard, I'm asking?"
This was the moment I stepped onto his proving ground.
How had I done in my last life?
I had failed his very first test.
The reason......
Was that I couldn't even open my mouth.
—Pathetic bastard.
In my past life, Old Tyrant Roar had acted as though he couldn't wait to eat me alive. For him to slowly change and show the slightest approval, it was probably only after I took office as Commander of the Black Scorpion Corps.
"Speak. Give me an answer that doesn't satisfy me, and I'll beat you to death with one hand."
Nasty old man. What a temper, choking you so hard you can barely open your mouth and then telling you to answer. Most people wouldn't manage to open their mouths at all, so honestly, even rattling off one moronic answer after another would count as a pass.
"The weight of the bond made it so."
But my goal lay beyond that.
When I opened my mouth, shock spread across the officers' faces.
Noh Hong-geuk narrowed his eyes.
Perhaps because I had said something so cryptic, the glare in his already fierce eyes looked all the more menacing.
"What people call a bond is really just two waves overlapping. The moment you dare to hold on to it, a bond pools and rots, and a bond is something that flows to you."
By his age, old wounds are bound to pile up layer upon layer.
Not just the wounds left by swords, but the wounds left by people, too.
"Old Tyrant Roar, Noh Hong-geuk, Elder of the Pitch-Black League. From the way you've lived, does the length of time two people have known each other seem to matter that much?"
"You're questioning me back?"
"Don't people you thought you'd have for a lifetime get taken from you out of nowhere, and don't you one day, all of a sudden, meet someone you'll spend your whole life with?"
There was a famous story that went around among the Pitch-Black League's high-ranking officers.
"What would a green brat like you know!"
At Old Tyrant Roar's bellow, several warriors lost consciousness and collapsed.
"Am I wrong?"
Normally, anyone who becomes an Elder of the Pitch-Black League has an impressive background of some kind, but Old Tyrant Roar was a little different.
Wasn't it said that he was born and raised in an ordinary family, with no ties at all to the martial world?
Considering that such a man had risen to Fourth Elder, right below the League Leader, he had come up in the world tremendously.
There was pain behind his rise.
A massacre.
Old Tyrant Roar had lost his entire family.
Had he made enemies?
No.
There was no reason.
The poisoners of the Iryeong Sect, a poison school that had once made quite a name for itself around Hyangju, had dumped poison into a stream.
Because of it, not only Old Tyrant Roar but countless others lost their families, their parents, their children, their friends.
Astonishingly, the Murim Alliance wrote the incident off as a mere mistake by a few of the Iryeong Sect's poisoners and closed the matter.
It took exactly fifteen years.
That was how long it took Old Tyrant Roar, storming in alone, to beat every last member of the Iryeong Sect to death and tear down their signboard.
That made him an enemy of the Nine Sects and One Gang and the Five Great Clans, and he threw himself into the underworld......
And rose to the rank of Elder on nothing but a fiery temper and two fists hotter still.
"Do you believe in the words 'just because'?"
Old Tyrant Roar bellowed again.
"You brat, how long are you going to keep spouting riddles like those topknot Daoist bastards!"
At that bellow, loaded with fury, several warriors who had barely been clinging to consciousness went down.
Not me.
I simply stood with my hands clasped behind my back, looked into his eyes, and went on.
"I believe it halfway, and halfway I don't."
Look at those savage eyes.
"No bond is ever lost just because. Sometimes you lose one because of words spat out carelessly, and sometimes over a single thing you did without a second thought. That's how bonds are."
Old Tyrant Roar's eyes quivered.
And then he spoke.
His voice carried no sound arts.
"Some bonds are lost just because."
I knew.
And I also knew that one of the words Old Tyrant Roar hated most was 'just because.'
—"Why did you do it?"
It was the question Old Tyrant Roar had put to a poisoner he caught, one of those who had poisoned the stream, just before he smashed the man's head in with his fist.
—"Just because."
The poisoner, so the story went, had answered, "Just because."
Just because, for no reason, out of nowhere.
Because that was how Old Tyrant Roar had lost his family.
And that family had even included......
His three-year-old daughter.
"Was it really? There's no such thing as just because. Either you were poor, or you were ignorant, or, failing that, you were powerless. Bonds I wouldn't have lost if only I had been extraordinary. The bonds I've let slip away like that alone must outnumber the grains of sand on Ghost Spirit Island's shores, so how many more must there be for you?"
I said it about him.
And at the same time.
"Just as I was just weak, there are faces that come to mind from bonds I lost because the other side was just evil."
I said it about myself.
Because I, too, was just powerless......
And because the other side was just evil.
I had been used and thrown away by the Alliance.
"......"
Old Tyrant Roar said nothing and only glared into my eyes.
"But some bonds do come to you just because."
Old Tyrant Roar had a daughter. He had never remarried, so she was only an adopted daughter, but she was a bond that had come to him just because. A little child who, the story went, had been begging in the marketplace in rags and grabbed him by the trouser leg.
Old Tyrant Roar's sudden announcement of the adoption had supposedly thrown the Pitch-Black League into an uproar.
When someone asked why, Noh Hong-geuk had answered calmly, so they said.
—"Just because."
Just because.
"The kind you just want to protect."
"......"
"The kind you just want to do right by."
"......"
"The kind that makes you happy just to look at."
I went on.
"So I'm a man who believes in just because by exactly half, and distrusts it by exactly the other half."
Old Tyrant Roar looked up at the sky as if lost in deep thought, clenching his fists tight and opening them over and over.
Silence hung for a while.
Old Tyrant Roar muttered, "Good," as if an interesting idea had occurred to him.
"You summoned yours truly with a reason worth less than 'just because,' that you had to stand guard, so one of you two is going to die no matter what."
The edge in his eyes turned cold and fierce, like a blade.
Byeong-ho had long since passed out from Old Tyrant Roar's fierce bellowing.
"A comrade you just protect, just want to do right by, and just like to look at, is that it?"
"That's right."
"Then I'll wake him and order him to shove a sword down your throat."
"Go ahead."
Old Tyrant Roar's eyebrows twitched.
"Green, ignorant brat that you are, how long do you intend to keep up this calm act!"
That was his third bellow already.
"What if that comrade, the one you staked your very life on because you just want to protect him and do right by him, is the kind of bastard who'd ram a blade down your throat to save his own skin? And what would you make of it if, not long after, he turned out to be the shameless kind who eats well, shits well, and sleeps soundly with his feet up as if nothing had ever happened?"
He was talking about himself.
The adopted daughter Old Tyrant Roar had taken in and raised with such tender care was an assassin, long trained by the remnants of the Iryeong Sect.
They had picked out a child who resembled Noh Hong-geuk's three-year-old daughter and taught her to speak and act the way he liked......
Ordered her to get close to him by any means and poison him, and in the end she had slipped in as his adopted daughter and grown up there.
"I wonder if you have any real idea what just because weighs."
Noh Hong-geuk cackled.
"Speaking from experience, that bastard is more than capable of it."
"You really must have no eye for people."
"Fine. I'll wake him and tell him he lives if he kills you."
I knew.
"I have a question."
I knew this man well, this man who tried so hard to look strong and fierce.
I knew everything about Old Tyrant Roar.
That however hard he struggled, he was only a man carrying inside him faces he would never see again as long as he lived.
He had grown strong because he was lonely.
And, paradoxically—
Had grown lonely because he was strong.
That he was nothing more than a man.
And so.
Old Tyrant Roar had forgiven his daughter.
Returning from a mission, Noh Hong-geuk had noticed poison in the food he was to eat and the water he was to drink, and yet, so the story went, this was what he said instead.
—"Child, I've had enough of poison."
And then he said this to the adopted daughter who had tried to kill him.
—"Did you come to kill me? If so, then run me through with a sword instead."
It was a story known only to a very few high-ranking figures even within the Pitch-Black League. I had heard that when he was asked why he let her live, he gave this answer too.
—"I let her live just because."
So I asked him back.
"Do you really think that guy could stab a blade into my throat and still sleep soundly?"
"Yes. Can't you see it?"
"I still think your judgment is terrible, but if that truly is the case."
I nodded as if it made no difference to me at all and added in a low voice.
"Then tell him to just go on living like that. Tell him I'll forgive him, just because, so he can set that easy mind of his even more at ease and live."
Old Tyrant Roar let out a snort of laughter.
"Gu Ja-gyeong, you said?"
"That's right."
"You brat. Gu Ja-gyeong."
He narrowed his eyes further and spoke low, as if scolding.
"Cut the bullshit."
I answered his cursing like this.
"Thank you."
"Thank you?"
I shrugged.
"What you just said sounded like praise to me."
Old Tyrant Roar, I know you far better than you think. Spitting curses for no reason instead of words of praise at the people close to him was Old Tyrant Roar's long-standing habit.
"......Goddamn."
Two compliments in a row.
This time, I gave him the clasped hands greeting.
Because I had as good as passed the test.
"Tch. Lunatic."
Looked like a perfect score.