Chapter 486

“Can we talk for a moment?”

“No. Get lost.”

“I see.”

Jeok Cheongang approached without the slightest hesitation. Mungyeong’s brow twitched.

“I said no.”

“I heard you. So?”

“You really are impossible to reason with. Did all those years go straight up your ass?”

“Young punk, is that any way to speak to an elder? This old man has at least six or seven years on you.”

“Just how old are you to say some—”

“Thigh meat, you wet-behind-the-ears brat.”¹

“What a goddamn—Forget it. I shouldn’t bother talking to you.”

Mungyeong, who had felt his temper flare for a moment, shook his head over and over.

He looked like a boy—so young as to seem almost childish—but he, too, had lived for more than a century.

Yet whenever he spoke with Jeok Cheongang, he felt like a child losing his composure.

He’s mastered the art of pissing people off. Master and Disciple really are two peas in a pod.

Jeok Cheongang and Jin Taekyung could probably talk someone to death with nothing but their three-inch tongues.

Compared to them, the old Disciple tending to patients in Sichuan right now was practically the Buddha reincarnated.

I miss him. I wonder if he’s doing well.

While Mungyeong thought of his kind Disciple, Jeok Cheongang sauntered over with his splay-footed gait and sat on a rock.

“What were you looking at?”

“I have no reason to tell you.”

“Not a bad choice. Then let’s sit here until dawn. Just the two of us old men, enjoying some quality time together.”

“You understand one thing and miss the other. I can simply leave.”

“You understand two things and miss the third. Do you think this old man will only do this today?”

“…!”

“Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after that. Old age has already robbed me of sleep and left me with time to kill. This might not be so bad.”

Mungyeong, who had been about to turn away, stopped dead. His eyelids trembling, he stared at Jeok Cheongang and muttered with a sigh.

“You vicious old bastard.”

“Hm. Looks like you’re finally ready to talk.”

“…Tell me why you came.”

“This might take a while.”

“Make it as short as possible.”

“‘As short as possible,’ huh?”

Jeok Cheongang gazed at the river, its waters dyed pitch-black, and tossed out a single sentence.

“Look after that brat from now on.”

“What?”

Mungyeong frowned for a moment before speaking.

“By ‘that brat,’ you mean Jin Taekyung?”

“Yes. Who else would I mean besides that brat Jin Taekyung?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Who knows? I’m not sure myself.”

Jeok Cheongang suddenly raised his head toward the sky.

A full moon hung brilliantly overhead. Light poured from that unreachable place, unusually bright.

“I suddenly found myself wondering how long I’d be able to stay with that brat.”

A hundred years was a very long time.

Mountains and rivers had changed. Dynasties had risen and fallen. And… a young boy had become a white-haired old man.

Mungyeong gazed at Jeok Cheongang and murmured quietly.

“You’ve grown old.”

“Yes. I have.”

It was not only the body that grew old and worn with the passage of time. Unseen feelings and the heart itself were slowly weathered away.

A person realized they had grown old when death suddenly came to mind, or when they wondered how much longer they could remain beside someone.

Just as Jeok Cheongang was doing now.

And Mungyeong was the one person who understood Jeok Cheongang’s feelings better than anyone.

“Has the Heart Demon come calling?”

“The Heart Demon? That came a long time ago.”

Jeok Cheongang let out a self-deprecating laugh.

Ever since the former Disciple he had raised like a son became the Killing Ghost and left him, a dark cloud had hung over his heart.

The grief and guilt he had felt then had shackled Jeok Cheongang’s body and mind for decades.

Until a light called Jin Taekyung suddenly appeared and shone down upon him.

“It’s a painful memory now. I remember it, but it no longer hurts.”

“Then why?”

“Because I’ve grown anxious.”

The Heart Demon had no fixed form. It was any obstacle that disturbed the heart and hindered enlightenment.

The Heart Demon gripping Jeok Cheongang now was anxiety.

“I wish I’d met that boy twenty years earlier. No, even ten years earlier would have been good… But I met him too late.”

Jeok Cheongang raised a hand to cover the moon. He hated how its bright light—unaged, unlike him—shone upon his wrinkled face.

“I’m not what I used to be. Neither my body nor my heart. The only reason I’ve endured this long is because that boy was there.”

Jin Taekyung was not the only one who had grown during the year they spent on Mount Jiuhua.

Through teaching Taekyung, Jeok Cheongang had also gained a small measure of enlightenment, and thanks to that, he had managed to halt the rapid advance of his infirmities of old age.

But—

“You already knew, didn’t you? My innate qi was damaged.”

Innate qi, also called true-origin qi, was the source of everything that made up the human body. It was life force itself.

Remembering what had happened in Henan, Jeok Cheongang smiled bitterly.

“I don’t regret it. I would have done anything to save that boy.”

He meant every word. Even if he could go back ten times or a hundred, he would make the same choice. The situation had been that desperate.

Desperate enough for him to draw upon the innate qi that was practically his life force to make up for his insufficient internal energy.

The Dance of the Fire God and Demon, which had once dragged the Blood Lord to the brink of death, carried the resolve of an old Master who had burned his own life force as fuel.

“I had fully prepared myself for it. Even if I survived, I knew I wouldn’t be the same as before.”

Mungyeong watched him in silence before replying in a low voice.

“You wouldn’t have been, if not for the Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng that boy brought back.”

“Yes. It was all a stroke of heaven-sent fortune. Even the fact that he found you.”

But both men knew the truth.

Not even the Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng, an elixir seldom seen in any age, combined with the treatment of the Divine Physician, whose medical skill was said to reach the heavens, could restore Jeok Cheongang’s innate qi.

All of it was merely a stopgap.

Even if one blocked a collapsed dam with a massive boulder, the water trapped behind the dam would continue to seep through a small gap—slowly, little by little, without pause.

“Is that why you came to me? To ask me to look after him?”

“Who knows? What do you think?”

Mungyeong clicked his tongue softly.

“You’ve grown more fretful with age. It wouldn’t be too late to worry about that a few years from now.”

Every person possessed a different amount of qi and a different vessel to contain it.

If an ordinary commoner or Third Rate martial artist was a small stream, Jeok Cheongang was an endless sea.

He would slowly lose strength as his innate qi continued to drain away, but Mungyeong already understood the condition of Jeok Cheongang’s body. As far as he could tell, these concerns were premature.

“This is my body. I know it well. At least I won’t die today.”

“Then stop thinking foolish thoughts and go back. You’d be better off spending this time grabbing that brat and teaching him one more move.”

“But no one knows what might happen tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Do you think I came because I’m afraid my innate qi will slowly disappear until I suddenly drop dead one day?”

Jeok Cheongang stared at Mungyeong’s furrowed brow and continued slowly.

“I can feel it. I’m growing weaker. I’ve already survived several brushes with death unlike anything I faced even during the Great Faction War. Whether an old man like me can endure all the battles still to come… only some damned bastard watching from the heavens knows.”

“…!”

“Hong Dao once told me that the heavenly patterns were becoming distorted, and a calamity greater than the Great Faction War was approaching.”

Dharma King Hong Dao’s prediction had become reality.

Only a year later, Shaolin—the Mount Tai and Northern Dipper² of the Murim—had been covered in blood and corpses, and the wise high monk who loved alcohol and meat had met his death.

By then, the dark cloud called Dark Heaven had spread over Henan, Sichuan, and Hubei.

And Jeok Cheongang knew that before long, it would cover the entire world.

“Listen, Slaughter Saint.”

Deep regret filled Jeok Cheongang’s eyes as he looked at Mungyeong.

“Things we cannot understand are happening. Everything we knew is collapsing.”

People often compared the Murim to the Yangtze.

The waves behind on the Yangtze push the waves ahead. That was why the saying existed.

But the strange phenomena and events Dark Heaven was causing throughout the world were nothing like the Yangtze. They were an act of defying heaven itself, overturning heaven and earth.

Everything Jeok Cheongang and Mungyeong had known, every law they had understood across more than a century of life, was shattering and collapsing.

If what Jin Taekyung said is true, then even more so. No. No, that can’t be. It mustn’t be.

Jeok Cheongang forcibly brushed the thought from his mind as it flashed through it.

It was nothing more than another ridiculous piece of nonsense tossed out like a joke, just as Jin Taekyung always did.

More precisely, that was what Jeok Cheongang wanted to believe.

His body and heart had already grown old and worn. He was not yet ready to accept such a shocking story.

“Anyway, I’m only asking to put my mind at ease. Anything can happen in this goddamn Murim. It would hardly be surprising if one old man growing weaker by the day were to die.”

Mungyeong stared at Jeok Cheongang with a strange look in his eyes.

The giant known as the Fire King seemed unusually small today, and his calm voice as he spoke of a death that could come at any moment lingered in Mungyeong’s ears.

Asking. He’s asking me.

It was hard to believe that word had come from the mouth of the Fire King himself.

Mungyeong silently watched Jeok Cheongang rise to his feet.

Damn. I’ve grown old too.

Though his body had grown young, his heart was old.

That must have been why one corner of his heart, untouched by even a drop of rain for so many years, was slowly growing damp.

“…Hah.”

Just as Mungyeong let out a quiet sigh, Jeok Cheongang hauled his heavy backside off the rock and turned away with a wave.

“I’ll be going. Enjoy the moon.”

“What?”

What was he talking about?

Mungyeong’s mind briefly stopped working. He barely managed to speak.

“You’re leaving?”

“Of course. Shouldn’t you be grateful that this nuisance is leaving?”

“I haven’t answered you yet.”

“What do you mean? I believe I’ve already heard your answer.”

“Wait. What are you—”

“I heard your answer loud and clear, young friend.”

“No, what kind of crazy old bastard—”

The composure that rarely broke came crashing down all at once.

Mungyeong stared at Jeok Cheongang’s retreating back with an incredulous expression and shouted,

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Teach him a few things. The mindset he’ll need, for example. And if any of your secret martial arts might be useful, slip him a manual.”

“Secret martial arts? A manual?”

For a moment, Mungyeong doubted his own ears.

An individual’s or sect’s secret martial arts were the crystallized essence of everything they had learned. They could not be taught even for ten thousand pieces of gold and were more precious than life itself.

Yet Jeok Cheongang was telling him to teach those secret arts to someone else’s Disciple.

Mungyeong asked with complete sincerity.

“…Have you gone senile and forgotten what secret martial arts are?”

“I know exactly what they are. Unless you plan on saving them to wipe your ass with, teach him a few.”

“You lunatic.”

“You don’t have anyone else to teach them to anyway. Let your old Disciple in Sichuan keep saving lives, and teach our boy how to kill properly.”

Was that something he could say with a straight face?

Mungyeong was too dumbfounded to speak. Meanwhile, having said everything he wanted to say, Jeok Cheongang was already speeding away into the distance.

Whoosh!

“What a… fucking mess.”