Chapter 623: I Am Wronged (13)

From what she’d heard, a “visit” meant you were on your way to die.

Qing knew that wasn’t the case for her—but just going “wow, an enemy!” and trotting along would look way too suspicious... and boring.

So, something with more persuasion.

Conveniently, her homeland provided a scientific methodology for this.

One: shock and denial.

“An enemy? An enemy? Nonsense! I don’t leave behind things like enemies. I sent everyone off together as traveling companions so they wouldn’t be lonely on the road to the afterlife—where would an enemy come from? You must be mistaken. How could anyone call Molsal’s Dayeoreum—full name: Institutional Supreme King Deity Dayeoreum—an ‘enemy’? I cannot accept this!”

Molsal’s Dayeoreum—revived after roughly half a year!

She had no idea how you abbreviate “Institutional Supreme King Deity” into “Molsal,” though.

Master Danlun’s lip twitched.

Utter drivel—pitched precisely to his laughter taste.

“Snf. Do you make light of karma? Evil deeds inevitably pile up resentments. One never escapes the sins one has committed. Come quietly.”

Still, he held out—he inhaled a little through the nose, but.

His answer was aimed at the prisoners, not Qing.

Two: anger and aggression.

“Who is he? I won’t let that bastard walk. I’ll cut off his limbs and bury them in the ground. I want to check with my own eyes whether people sprout if you plant them. We’re allowed a Life-and-Death Duel, right?”

“If you wish, as much as you like. With your dantian gone and your channels severed, even a ten-year-old could beat you to death.”

Three: pleading and bargaining.

“Um, Daoist? Could you maybe just tell them Dayeoreum died? If they’re an enemy, they’d be happy to hear he’s dead already, right? If you spare me this once, I’ll behave better from now on. Uh, cooking too—um, cooking is—um. Cooking is a bit important, but I could cut one dish. No—two? Not three! Fine, I could yield today’s lunch to that enemy. But if you could send one dish my way...”

“Even in this situation, it’s cooking—krngh.”

Master Danlun’s voice trembled ever so slightly.

To Qing’s thinking, he had a blunt tone and a plain nature... and a very easy laugh.

In fact, he didn’t laugh often.

It’s just that what he found funny was unusual.

Qing’s nonsense just happened to hit his mark.

“Enough. Hff. I’d better drag you.”

Master Danlun had reached his limit.

Any more and he’d burst into roaring laughter.

He grabbed Qing by the arm and tugged.

Ah—she still had depression and acceptance left!

“Hey—let go. Why drag a person when I said I won’t see them—oh come on, Daoist? You know you’re lucky. If my dantian were intact, how could you treat the world’s greatest master, who reached the Realm of Nature, the pioneer of Institutional True-Style and the modern institution itself, Molsal’s Dayeoreum, like—”

Master Danlun took her by the wrist and headed out of the Repentance Hall.

Qing lay back and let herself be dragged, hand caught, voice chattering on in a rush.

“Hey, Daoist? True Person? Temple? Cool? Handsome? If you’re handsome, stop; if you’re ugly, keep going. Oh—you’re keeping on? Are you admitting you’re ugly? Admitting it? Ugh—let go, just try letting go once—how about we talk this out? Wait—hang on! I left something behind! Just a second—it’s really important—I left my mind behind—give me a moment to prepare—one quarter-mark, no a half quarter-mark—no, no, half of a half quarter-mark—”

Her voice moved outward with its epicenter as she was dragged and—thunk.

The iron-plated door of the Repentance Hall shut, cutting off Qing’s pleas.

Silence fell between the cells.

“Visit” sounded nice; in reality, with the dantian abolished and the limbs’ channels cut, throwing someone to their enemy was no different from execution.

Qing had been dragged off like a brat pitching a fit in the marketplace, ridiculous as it looked.

But the reaction was, in broad strokes, no different from what prisoners facing a visit usually showed.

It reminded them of the miserable end they’d strained not to think about.

“Who’s going to get us our dishes now...”

Someone tried an awkward joke, maybe not liking the mood.

Even so, once it had sunk, the feeling didn’t rise again.

Unintentionally, Qing had reminded the Repentance Hall of its misery.

She herself didn’t know—and even if she had, she would’ve shrugged it off as “serves you right.”

The moment Qing closed the inner door of the Repentance Hall, she very naturally straightened up.

The door shut, and Master Danlun sniff-sniffed, gleefully drawing in snot.

Not a strange sight; unexpectedly many people laugh like that.

Qing waited for him to settle, then asked:

“So... we’re going to eat lunch now, right?”

“Regrettably, no.”

“Gasp. That really is regrettable.”

At her comeback, Master Danlun snorted a laugh, slurping another bowlful of snot.

“The Sect Leader is calling. Eat afterward on your way back, or go in and eat.”

And so, Qing to the Sect Leader’s Hall.

Midwinter, breath smoking in the air—mountain chill to the bone.

But with the Spring Festival on, decorations and lanterns hung, fabrics trimmed the buildings in bright colors; even in the cold wave the Daoists’ faces were warm and lively.

A mood entirely unlike the Repentance Hall, which was shabby and gloomy by nature.

Which, of course, it would be.

They climbed a long hill from the Repentance Hall to the Sect Leader’s Hall.

Sect Leader Cheonbija, who had been painting orchids, greeted Qing.

“Our little junior sister has come.”

“Yes. Have you been well too, Sect Leader?”

“What would make one unwell on an auspicious Spring Festival? Well then, the Repentance Hall—was it not too cold? Shall I add another brazier?”

“No. It’s not that cold, actually, and besides—it’d be a bit much to stoke fires for demonic heads just because of me. Every last one of them is—”

Qing swallowed the words “filthy bastards” that had surged to the tip of her tongue.

“—bad people.”

“Mmm. I see. And how was a day spent in the Repentance Hall? Having seen the prisoners, do you feel anything different?”

“Mm... that they ought to die, maybe.”

Cheonbija shook his head.

“How about this: ‘Truly, they are paltry creatures. Such petty, sordid, foul things roamed about, committing every sort of evil with their paltry martial arts. Once their arts were abolished and their strength shaved away, they’re nothing but shabby, worthless riffraff.’”

“Even so, I can’t say I pity them.”

Cheonbija smiled gently.

“I am not asking you to pity them. No matter how tightly you confine them, how many among them will soberly turn back to their conduct and realize it was sin? Those who know sin and shrink from it do not, in the first place, commit sins so great as to be buried in the Repentance Hall.”

The thought Qing always turned over flowed from Cheonbija’s lips.

No matter how severe the punishment, an evildoer never truly repents and regrets their sin.

They only regret.

“If I’d known it would turn out like this, I wouldn’t have done it.”

But until now they didn’t know it would turn out like this; that’s why they kept doing it. Regret is never repentance.

It’s only the heart wishing to avoid the massive loss to oneself; lock them up not for a lifetime but for a thousand, ten thousand years—they won’t repent.

Therefore the price of sin must be pain.

Punishment cannot, in any case, make the sinner repent, reform, or confess.

So one must make them suffer as much as the evils they inflicted, the pain they shoved onto others—no, far more than that—and kill them miserably and horribly.

A seditious color flickered in Qing’s eyes.

At that instant—

Clap!

The sound of a palm striking.

A palm filled with the Great Pure inner energy of Great Pure No-Phase Great Heart Formula met itself; the clear, brisk report cleared mind and body and snapped Qing’s spirit awake.

“Ah, what to do, when my little junior sister’s killing-mind is this thick. This is precisely why we do not kill those heinous villains, but founded the Repentance Hall and confine them.”

“I’ll listen closely. For what reason?”

“‘Killing-work’—cutting off a human life—is, at the same time, the same as killing one’s own heart.”

Even if you execute the most heinous criminal, in the end you are taking on killing-work.

Grow accustomed to killing-work and you grow less and less hesitant to kill; that leads directly to rashness.

All who execute evildoers, at first, examine the before-and-after with utmost gravity.

Is this a crime whose price must be death?

Is there anything unjust in it?

Were there compulsion or desperate circumstances that call for leniency? And so on.

But as killing-work piles up, killing evildoers becomes nothing at all—because the human heart dulls to repeated acts.

So in the end one simply cuts because “they’re an evildoer,” grows lax about life and justification; at the end, one cuts merely because “he’s evil,” and doesn’t care even if the victims have forgiven him.

“I am not blaming you for hating evildoers and seeking to slay them to establish justice under Heaven.”

Especially when killing-work piles killing-mind high, people become ever more cruel.

This cruelty is a sly, sinister thing.

Even if the killing-mind soars, its might like a mountain touching the sky, before its master it rolls over like a trained dog and pretends to be docile.

When hatred of sin, hatred of the evildoer, engraves itself into the chest and sinks into the marrow, merely taking a life no longer satisfies.

Calling death too easy a punishment, one’s hand grows vicious, seeking to make the price pain.

But as I said, the human heart dulls to what it grows used to; you seek to inflict more pain with ever more vicious hands.

This is an endlessly continuing vicious cycle.

To seek to inflict pain on the evildoer is hatred.

To hate another is to entrust your heart to hatred—that is, to wound your own heart; it is the same as self-harm.

The wound in the heart becomes pain of the heart.

The pain of the heart becomes hatred, and with an ever more cruel hand you torture the evildoer to try to heal your heart.

But how would that heal the heart?

On the contrary, the wound in the heart gapes wider; the more the killing-work continues, the worse the pain becomes, and the hatred born of it only grows.

“Guard your heart, I beg you.”

So saying, Cheonbija looked at Qing.

A kindly, warm gaze—and yet one that seemed to see straight through within.

The eyes of an old Daoist’s cultivation.

Qing studied the pattern on the floor.

Because she didn’t have the face to lift her head.

Yes, one reason she slowly butchers evildoers is that such a bastard shouldn’t simply die—but is that all?

The butchery itself is fun.

Not just fun—her whole blood network blazes, her mind reels, and her body jerks and spasms on its own in rapture.

And yet she had no confidence she could stop.

That hand-feel—mm—truly, it’s incredible; there’s no way to explain it.

But it’s also true she’s growing crueler.

Whether it’s this body’s fault, or she chose badly with a destiny of Heavenly Killing and Lamentation.

Or maybe something in her heart—somewhere—broke.

Far from hurting, the heart only grows more thrilled.

But certainly, she’s growing numb.

Back then, in Luoyang, just taking a life was enough to send her into such ecstasy she couldn’t think straight or hold herself up.

Now, even if she disassembles a living person, she doesn’t feel quite that great a pleasure; she strains to find ever more novel methods.

The Sect Leader is right.

This won’t do.

If the threshold for satisfaction by slaughter keeps rising, this is no different from simply going mad.

At some point Qing’s head had bowed low; looking down on the crown of that head, Cheonbija smiled gently.

Perhaps the measure of keeping her in the Repentance Hall had been a good one; the child who had grumbled with pouting complaints before now had her head sunk low as if she had realized something and was reflecting.

Granted, it wasn’t the reflection Cheonbija thought or intended—but in effect, the conclusion was the same.

Mm. I should be less cruel. Reign it in a bit.