Chapter 952

The Double Ninth Festival¹ was one of the continent’s biggest holidays.

It came when swallows flew south to warmer lands and snakes and frogs burrowed underground to prepare for winter.

At this time of year, people climbed mountains, drank chrysanthemum wine, recited poetry, and enjoyed the scenery.

Commoners who lived from one day’s wages to the next did it. So did high officials who wanted for nothing, and martial artists who lived in the turbulent martial world.

“Do you remember?”

A voice sounded suddenly behind him.

The young man gazing at the field of bright yellow chrysanthemums showed no surprise. He had known who was there for some time.

“Remember what?”

Jin Mukyung asked without taking his eyes off the flowers. A familiar presence came to stand beside him.

“Five years ago, when the three of us climbed the hill behind the house and spent the Double Ninth Festival¹ together. We had such a wonderful time.”

“…You mean the Double Ninth Festival¹ ten years ago?”

Jin Wikyung looked hurt at his younger brother’s doubtful response.

“Goodness. You don’t even remember anymore?”

“I remember. I asked because your version sounds quite different from mine.”

“Different?”

“Taekyung, that reckless fool, got completely drunk and caused a scene. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant time.”

Jin Wikyung tilted his head.

“Really? You looked like you were enjoying yourself when you beat him with your scabbard.”

“I wasn’t smiling. I was disciplining my own flesh and blood to set him on the right path.”

“Then why were you grinning from ear to ear?”

Jin Mukyung fell silent.

Come to think of it, perhaps he had been smiling.

His youngest brother was always causing trouble, and their eldest brother doted on him. When an excuse to punish Taekyung finally presented itself, how could Mukyung not smile?

Of course, that was long ago. Only a small fragment of the day remained in his memory.

“The youngest bawled like the sky had fallen, and you didn’t touch your food. You just started training. You went off into the woods, away from everyone, and swung your sword until sunset. I can still picture you as clearly as if it were yesterday.”

“I don’t remember that, but I’m sure I did.”

Jin Mukyung’s reply was matter-of-fact.

Training was a matter of course for him. He had held a sword since childhood and practiced wherever he was, whenever he could.

Five years ago, the last time the three brothers of the Jin Family of Taiyuan had spent the Double Ninth Festival¹ together, Mukyung had already reached the Peak realm, though he was barely twenty.

“I still remember the day you left home.”

“Ah.”

Jin Mukyung smacked his lips. He remembered Wikyung coming to see him off with a swollen face, as though he had spent the previous night crying.

“Do you… do you really have to go?”

“Yes. I really do.”

“Even if your older brother begs you to stay?”

“Not a chance.”

“What’s so special about Heaven’s Gate Temple that you’d abandon your family and go all the way to a distant land?”

“Even disciples of the great sects wait years to get into that Heaven’s Gate Temple you’re dismissing.”

“All right. If that’s what you want, I’ll escort you to Henan myself.”

“…You’re serious?”

“There’s something I need to tell the Hall Master in person.”

“What on earth would you tell him?”

“Just a few important precautions he absolutely needs to know. Some foods you hate, your habits… Mukyung! Where are you going, Mukyung!”

He had run. With every last bit of strength he had.

It was the first time in his life he had put so much effort into his movement technique.

Jin Mukyung had only wanted to grow stronger at Heaven’s Gate Temple. He’d never had the slightest intention of earning the distinction of being its shortest-lived expelled cadet.

“I still remember your back as you left, covering your eyes with your sleeve to hide your sobs.”

“…”

Jin Mukyung quietly closed his mouth.

Some truths were more beautiful left untold. That he had raised his sleeve to shield his eyes from the dust, for instance. Or that he had run to escape his overzealous brother.

Before he knew it, a quiet laugh escaped him.

“Why are you laughing?”

“It’s nothing. Just…”

Jin Mukyung managed to stop laughing and turned his head.

There was the face he remembered from about two years ago, when he had left once more to enter seclusion with no end in sight. Wikyung had watched him go with worry in his eyes.

Just as he was looking at him now.

“I laughed because I’m glad to see you. You haven’t changed at all, older brother.”

“Mukyung, you…”

“I’m glad everything is still the same.”

He had spent a little over two years in pitch-black darkness.

He had kept hunger at bay with bitter, astringent fasting pills and quenched his thirst with dew and rainwater collected in the training hall deep inside the cave.

And whenever he swung his sword until he collapsed from exhaustion, sprawled on the cold ground, a thought would come to him.

Where was this place? Who was he?

If he ever left that darkness, what would be waiting for him?

“Part of me was afraid, too. Afraid that the world I knew, the people I knew, would have changed beyond recognition.”

He had been half right and half wrong.

Everything around him had changed. The people he knew had not.

Surely that included his troublemaking youngest brother, wherever he was now.

“The day that brat left the family, he came to see me and said something.”

Mukyung had turned their conversation over in his mind thousands of times. No, tens of thousands. Taekyung’s voice, unusually calm that day, still lingered in his ears.

“See you later.”

It had not been a simple farewell.

The Star-Array Grand Banquet.

Taekyung had challenged him to meet there, among the countless stars from the Nine Provinces and Eight Wastes² and the Four Seas and Five Lakes³, and test their skills alongside Cheongpung.

As brothers born of the same mother. As martial artists.

After Taekyung left, Mukyung had stood staring at the empty space he had occupied and murmured the answer he had failed to give him.

Yeah. See you later. I promise.

But that promise had never been kept.

In that place, where he could not even feel time passing, Jin Mukyung swung his sword without rest. He slashed, stabbed, and tore through what lay beyond the pitch-black darkness.

Whenever he opened his eyes to something new, another wall rose before him.

He had to get over it. Break through it.

With the unkept promise tucked away in a corner of his heart, Jin Mukyung pressed on.

Until he found a faint light in the darkness.

Until that light grew as clear as the sun.

At last, he came back into the world.

He left behind the darkness that had enveloped him for two years and emerged into a world filled with another kind.

“Hyung.”⁴

Jin Mukyung called softly and looked his own flesh and blood straight in the eyes.

There was light in his gaze, and a directness that made it impossible to lie to him.

“Now tell me what I must do.”

“…!”

“No. Give me an order, as the Lesser Family Head of the Jin Family of Taiyuan.”

For a moment, Jin Wikyung’s eyes trembled.

“You knew…?”

Jin Mukyung nodded.

The Jin Family of Taiyuan now stood at the head of Shanxi Murim. With the Family Head missing, Jin Wikyung led them all as its Alliance Leader.

Shanxi Province was already at war.

Li Feng, a lay disciple of Huashan and Shanxi Province’s Assistant Military Commissioner, had mobilized every force at the Shanxi Provincial Office to evacuate the people in the north. Some five thousand martial artists had gathered in the central region.

Every moment mattered.

Wikyung had not come looking for him solely to reunite with the brother who had emerged from seclusion after two years.

“Just as you know me well, hyung,⁴ I know you.”

“This will be a dangerous mission.”

“I don’t mind.”

Jin Mukyung went on calmly.

“I learned martial arts because I loved the sword. But I wanted to grow stronger for our family.”

Only great strength could restore a fallen martial family.

His sword had carried more than a passion for martial arts all these years.

“Jin Mukyung, Second Young Master of the Jin Family of Taiyuan. I will devote myself to carrying out the Lesser Family Head’s orders.”

His younger brother cupped his hands in a salute, his voice unwavering. Jin Wikyung slowly closed his eyes.

After a brief hesitation, he opened them again. He was no longer speaking as Mukyung’s older brother, but as the Alliance Leader of Shanxi Murim and the Lesser Family Head of the Jin Family of Taiyuan.

“From this moment on, you are neither the Second Young Master of the Jin Family of Taiyuan nor the Lesser Family Head’s younger brother.”

He released the breath he had been holding.

Then Wikyung looked calmly at his brother—no, his retainer—and continued.

“I command Jin Mukyung, Commander of the Heaven Shaking Squad.”

Jin Mukyung, the Heaven Shaking Sword.

About five years ago, a young prodigy from the frontier had reached the Peak realm at barely twenty and earned a new epithet. His only older brother had named a fighting force after it.

He had hoped Mukyung would one day return to this place.

And with the wish that, just like the two characters in Heaven Shaking, his name would one day resound beyond the world and reach the heavens.

“The enemy vanguard that invaded the north has split off some of its troops and is taking a detour to avoid Jeongyang. Take two hundred men from the Heaven Shaking Squad and blunt their vanguard.”

Jin Mukyung smiled.

“As you command.”

The next day.

The vast steppe army entered the north without resistance. What awaited it was not chrysanthemums but dark-red blood covering the mountain slopes—and one terrified survivor of its vanguard.

“K-Khan…”

Jamukha stared silently at the man trembling like a leaf.

He knew at once that the thousand-man vanguard sent into Shanxi Province half a day ahead of the main force had been wiped out. The lone surviving fool had been sent back with a warning for the invaders.

“H-he told me to give you this, Khan…”

Slide. Thump.

The cloth slipped from his trembling fingers. The head of a Keshik centurion rolled out of the blood-soaked bundle.

Jamukha looked down at it in silence.

“Is that all?”

“He left a message. A message…”

His queue⁵ had come loose, and terror filled his face.

“He said, ‘Even five years from now, my brothers and I will climb the mountain together and spend the Double Ninth Festival¹—’”

“Bullshit.”

Shhk.

Jamukha struck without a moment’s hesitation. The man’s severed head rolled into the chrysanthemum field.

As Jamukha gazed at the flowers, now so red their original color was gone, Chinggen smacked his lips.

“Why not hear the rest? We don’t even know who he was.”

“Does that matter?”

The thousand-man vanguard had been annihilated.

No. What mattered was that all hundred Keshik among them had died in a single battle.

“Either way… we’ll meet soon enough.”

Jamukha stared south, his voice low.

At that moment, a thought suddenly crossed his mind.

This war was supposed to be overwhelming and one-sided. It might not be as easy as he had imagined.