Chapter 199: Perilous Road (10)

As the green tea cooled, it released a deep, mellow fragrance.

Seongeung could no longer bring himself to drink the tea Soyak had poured for him.

Soyak did not urge him to drink any more, either.

“...Is that really true?”

Soyak slowly nodded.

An awkward silence settled between them.

For Soyak, however, it was no longer quite so difficult.

She had already overcome much of it.

During her closed-door training, she had learned how to calm and govern her own heart.

She no longer dreamed every night, as she had three years ago, of her father and mother burning to death.

But overcoming that crushing despair and grief did not mean her desire for revenge had disappeared.

It was like tempering steel.

A sword was completed not when it was heated, but when it was cooled.

Soyak had been heated in the furnace of grief, then quenched in the blood-water of reason.

She knew that better than anyone.

“Do you really think I would joke about something like this, Monk?”

“But... but...”

Seongeung could not understand.

If they had been killed under the Alliance Leader’s orders, then that was not murder.

It was an execution.

And execution implied...

that they had committed some crime deserving it.

But he could not bring himself to ask Soyak, Didn’t that mean your parents did something worthy of death?

It would be too cruel.

Too heartless.

Even if her parents truly had committed a crime, asking such a thing would already be dreadful enough.

But what if they had been innocent?

Every word from his mouth would drive into her like a dagger.

For all Seongeung’s lack of spiritual discipline, he was not so ignorant that he could fail to recognize the karma such cruelty would create.

Soyak understood his struggle.

She would have felt the same in his place.

He simply could not bring himself to ask.

Everyone else called his benefactor wicked.

Yet how could anyone fail to understand that Seongeung, at least, wanted to believe the man had been good?

How could anyone not sympathize?

But this was the truth.

The man who had saved your life could be the mortal enemy who had murdered someone else’s parents.

This merciless reality, seeming almost like a cruel joke of fate, was the martial world.

“Accept it.”

Soyak’s voice was gentle, but firm.

Still bowing his head, Seongeung managed a difficult nod.

“...All right.”

Just then, the bell for the evening meal rang.

*****

Monks referred to a meal as an offering.

More precisely, it was a meal taken from monastic bowls.

The bowls used for such a meal were called alms bowls.

Naturally, Shaolin also kept sets prepared for guests who had none of their own.

“...Are you certain about this?”

Gong-eop looked anxiously at the guest bowl in Soyak’s hands.

The bowl meal was sacred.

Even an outsider, once they took up a bowl and ate alongside the monks...

was expected to observe the same discipline.

Not a single grain of rice could be left behind.

The bowl had to be eaten clean enough that it hardly required separate washing.

Most importantly, there was the matter of the food itself.

An outsider was not a Shaolin monk.

The Buddhist precepts observed within Shaolin therefore did not bind them.

The prohibition against eating meat likewise did not apply to guests.

Soyak was voluntarily placing herself under those rules.

And Shaolin’s strictness regarding its bowl meals was rather famous.

Gong-eop worried that Soyak, who had come here as a valued guest, might end up being reprimanded over some small mistake.

“You understand that... I cannot make an exception for Benefactor Soyak’s bowl alone, do you not?”

“You do not need to. More importantly, there are no other guests at Shaolin right now, are there? I would feel uncomfortable making everyone go to special trouble just for me.”

Soyak, of course, had her own reasoning.

The biggest problem was...

she was not hungry.

Across the Central Plains, lavish hospitality meant loading a table until it nearly groaned beneath the food.

Even when she was hungry, Soyak did not eat much.

If someone prepared a spread like that for her...

most of it would probably be thrown away.

Just imagining it felt terribly rude.

In that case, a bowl meal where she took only as much as she intended to eat was far better.

She could simply serve herself a modest amount, then rinse the bowl clean with scorched-rice water and drink it.

No waste.

Besides, this food would likely sit more comfortably in her stomach anyway.

More than anything, she had just come from an unpleasant conversation.

Her parents’ deaths.

Her enemy.

Blood debts.

And someone else’s benefactor.

Any one of those subjects could sour a person’s stomach. She had been forced to discuss all of them at once, without warning.

She could still clearly picture Seongeung leaving with his shoulders slumped, abandoning his cold cup of tea behind.

Even if someone placed the finest delicacies in the world before her now, could she truly eat and digest them properly?

Soyak was not that shameless.

Then, a little late for the start of the meal, Seongeung appeared.

Gong-eop was about to rebuke him...

then closed his mouth.

Seongeung’s eyes were swollen.

He looked as though he had cried quite hard.

Through those puffy eyes, Seongeung glanced at Soyak standing beside Gong-eop.

Then...

he quietly slipped out of sight.

Normally, he would have hidden for fear that Gong-eop might scold him.

But Seongeung had hidden from Soyak, not from his master.

Gong-eop could hardly fail to understand what had happened.

“It seems Seongeung went to see you before the meal...”

“He did. I believe it shocked him rather badly.”

Gong-eop clicked his tongue.

Then he sighed and shook his head.

“So that is why he came so late. He was crying.”

“It would seem so.”

It hurt to see, but there was nothing to be done.

The martial world was a place where favors and grudges tangled into impossible knots.

If Seongeung was not merely a monk who recited sutras, but a Shaolin warrior monk, then this was something he had to overcome.

If he could not overcome even this, how could he call himself a martial artist?

Someday, Seongeung would face the same thing himself.

Some villain he killed would have been someone else’s benefactor.

Some evil man he killed would have been someone else’s family.

And even when faced with cries full of grief and rage, he could not allow himself to collapse.

“Benefactor Soyak.”

“Yes, Monk?”

“It is our turn.”

Gong-eop’s attitude might have seemed rather cold.

He simply stopped paying attention to Seongeung and began filling his bowl.

Soyak tilted her head at the unexpected sight.

“Is something wrong, Benefactor?”

“I thought you would either scold Monk Seongeung or comfort him.”

“Did you?”

At Soyak’s words, Gong-eop smiled faintly.

Then he glanced toward Seongeung and smiled with quiet kindness.

“Look, Benefactor Soyak.”

Soyak turned slightly and looked over.

Seongeung had lowered his head, his lips moving.

He was clearly muttering something.

What else would a monk be murmuring?

Naturally, he was reciting Buddhist teachings and sutras.

Gong-eop looked rather proud of him.

“In the end, the martial world is still the mundane world, the human world, the world of suffering. A place full of affliction.”

“That is true.”

That was the Buddhist view.

The Daoists were not so different, really.

Why else would famous Daoist sects such as Wudang and Mount Hua build their halls high in the mountains, removed from worldly society?

The reasons overlapped.

“...If he is trying to overcome the inner demon born from this by reciting sutras and teachings, placing his faith in the great compassion of the Buddha and the bodhisattvas, what could I possibly add?”

“Ah... I see.”

“If he had failed to overcome it properly and merely poured out anger and resentment that had nowhere to go, then with that child’s limited learning, there would have been no way for him to avoid an inner demon.”

Deviation.

One of the dangers that could arise during martial cultivation, also described as falling prey to an inner demon.

At its root, it occurred when one of the three—mind, energy, or body—went awry and became twisted.

And in truth, Seongeung’s mind was in such a battered state right now that falling into deviation would hardly have been strange.

Yet through the sutras, Seongeung was straightening the part of his heart that threatened to distort.

Other righteous factions could probably achieve something similar.

They too would possess teachings meant to cultivate an unwavering heart.

That was one of the very reasons the martial arts of the righteous factions were called “stable.”

Watching him, Soyak saw her own past.

Whenever nightmares plagued her during closed-door training, she had repeated the verses of the Harmonization Scripture.

So grief and anguish would not crush her.

Each time, she had been able to steady herself again.

The desire for revenge was not itself evil.

The problem came when that desire consumed a person until they became a Slaughtering Ghost who no longer cared about means or methods.

That inevitably created innocent victims.

And those victims, in turn, gave rise to yet another Slaughtering Ghost.

“...He’ll get through it, won’t he?”

“Do you know which teaching Seongeung is reciting right now?”

“I do not.”

“The Mantra of Light.”

Gong-eop began reciting the mantra in a low voice.

“Om amogha vairocana.

Mahamudra mani padma.

Jvala pravarttaya hum.”

It was a prayer that the radiance of Vairocana Buddha would illuminate the world, reach him, and wash away his afflictions.