To Yi-gang.
Are you well? The sky here in Tibet is still high and clear.
Whenever I try to feel out the edge of that unobstructed sky, I realize how small and insignificant a man I am.
I also feel how futile the youthful bravado of that young warrior monk who once tried to fold the earth beneath his feet and split the sky truly was.
For what happened then, I apologize for not being of much help.
The lamas of the Potala Palace and I tried to return to the Central Plains and join you, but circumstances arose that made that impossible.
Hard as it is to believe, in this world there are…….
“Cough, cough!”
Divine Monk, the Shaolin warrior monk still called that in the Central Plains, let out a violent cough.
He looked like a withered leaf scattering before a storm.
He had grown old enough that even if he dropped dead on the spot, people would call it a good death.
So many things had happened even after the defeat of the Cardinal here that he had thought he would die soon enough.
But his life was stubborn.
A full four and a half years had passed even since that time when the world had nearly ended.
……And another four years have passed since then.
The Buddha will not let me rest. There are so many strange happenings across Tibet that even two bodies would not be enough to handle them all.
Even so, it is not bad.
At least this is better than when I was acting as the Murim Alliance Leader in the Central Plains.
My body is weary, but my head is clear. Perhaps it is because the air is cold and clean.
They say ten years is enough time for rivers and mountains to change, so four years must be enough time for them to change a little less than halfway.
That day, even at the Potala Palace, we saw the pillar of light shooting into the sky.
Only much later did I learn that it had been the great clash between the Evil Cult and all of the Central Plains, that it had been the moment the world nearly perished, and that Baek Yi-gang and his companions had stopped it.
I can only smile bitterly and be glad that the young ones saved everyone.
If one were to ask what changes fastest with the flow of time, it is the young.
While the colors of the old slowly fade, the fresh young grow from sprouts into trees.
Here in the Potala Palace, Divine Monk felt that truth keenly.
I ask after your well-being and convey the state of Tibet.
Having written out the long letter, Divine Monk added one more thing.
Do you remember that child? The child you saved.
After writing those two sentences, Divine Monk suddenly made an awkward face.
‘Do you remember the child you saved?’
As if he had saved only one or two children.
Divine Monk knew Yi-gang’s temperament well enough.
Even speaking generously, he was not a warmhearted man. He was not cruel to children, but neither was he the sort of young man children would flock to with affection.
And yet, paradoxically, he had probably saved more children than anyone else in the world.
He had likely saved even more people than the number of those children.
As one more person who had been saved himself, Divine Monk pondered.
Yes, if I put it this way, he will remember.
Tsering. That little child you saved in Rangachen Village.
The child who was always sniffling and always smiling.
When Yi-gang came to Tibet with Bodhidharma to search for a dragon.
In a village called Rangachen, he saved a child who had been offered alive as a sacrifice to a yokai imitating a dragon.
The village collapsed as though struck by heavenly punishment, and Tsering and the village chief somehow managed to make their way all the way to the Potala Palace.
Little Tsering was a girl raised in the cold winds of Tibet.
If she had been a young lady of a rich Hangzhou household, she might have gone around hugging pretty dolls, but Tsering was a child who ran while clutching little lambs.
She would run with snot hanging from her nose, then flop and tumble, ending up covered in mud.
Divine Monk raised that little girl himself, the one who smiled even then.
In Shaolin, where women were forbidden, such a thing would have been impossible.
He had never raised a little girl before, so it was no ordinary challenge even for Divine Monk.
That rascal has gone through adolescence too.
She got pimples on her face and barked at everyone for a while, but these days she seems to have matured again and grown calm.
I intend to send that child to Azure Forest.
I have already sent a separate letter to the current Forest Leader.
Tsering wishes to meet you again, so I hope you will allow it.
How nice it would have been if Yi-gang had been a warrior monk from Shaolin.
Imagining Yi-gang with a shaved head, Divine Monk snorted out a laugh.
It was then.
“Grandpa!”
Tsering came bounding up the stairs.
To think she would barge into the room without even knocking.
But Divine Monk merely turned his head with a smile.
“Did you write the letter?”
“I finished it, you little colt of a brat.”
Tsering was seven when she survived in Rangachen Village.
And now, after all that time had passed, she was a girl of sixteen.
Despite the passing years, her wind-chapped face was still rosy.
“Show me too!”
“You little rascal, where are your manners?”
Divine Monk gently pushed away the approaching Tsering.
But Tsering spun once in midair and lightly settled into stance.
It was no ordinary level of movement art.
She had learned martial arts from Divine Monk.
“Oh ho, you have trained hard.”
“That’s right.”
The hair ribbon tightly tying back her hair shone purple.
It was the ribbon she had received from Yi-gang long ago.
“Anyway, that means I can enter Azure Forest now too, right?”
“If you go there and behave well……”
“Then I’ll get ready to leave right away.”
“You little rascal, are you planning to arrive before the letter does?!”
Tsering thundered back down the stairs once more.
Divine Monk could only let out a hearty laugh.
From Tibet.
Tsering, the girl who laughed often and always had a runny nose, departs for Azure Forest.
Beijing.
And the Forbidden City.
It had not been long since the Great Ming Empire utterly collapsed.
The emperor had been assassinated by the Evil Cult.
And Great Ming became the Shang dynasty.
There is no need to say how many people died in the process, nor how much power crumbled away.
But spilled blood seeps into the earth and settles into the weeds.
And the blood of the powerful is stickier still.
Even that blasphemous cult couldn’t kill every royal of Ming.
King Gye-yeong, who had stood at the heart of power, and his family also survived.
It was a time of humiliation, but they endured with the imperial army and survived to the end.
At last the Evil Cult collapsed.
Those who had been in hiding emerged back into the world.
They slaughtered every official who had offered the people as sacrifices in profane rites, and they killed the newly established Shang emperor and all his relatives as well.
And once more, the name of Great Ming stood upon the earth.
Since most of the royals in the imperial line had been killed by the Evil Cult, the one with the strongest bloodline among those remaining ascended the imperial throne.
And by coincidence, the one closest in succession to the throne was none other than King Gye-yeong.
The man who restored Ming put on the imperial crown and ascended the throne.
A joyous occasion, a joyous occasion indeed.
Long live His Majesty the Emperor, long live, long live ten thousand years!
“Haa.”
And in the deepest place of that Forbidden City.
In the innermost depths of the layered palace halls, the loftiest emperor in the Central Plains let out a sigh.
And not only a sigh.
“Yukshireol.”
He even spat out a curse that sounded entirely natural from his mouth.
Yukshireol was a curse derived from the phrase yuksihal.
Yuksi meant desecrating a corpse.
That is, splitting open the coffin, dragging out the dead, and tearing the corpse apart.
It was a curse originating from an extreme punishment reserved for great traitors, but the problem was that the mouth uttering it belonged to none other than the emperor.
Even the powerful ministers did not know what to do in the face of the emperor’s fury.
“Do you wretches still not understand! Do you truly think I am the master of all under heaven?!”
Some cursed King Gye-yeong as a man mad for power.
They thought of him as nothing more than an ambitious usurper who dared seize the throne without knowing his place.
“After receiving a few memorials and stamping a few seals in the Forbidden City, it really starts to feel as though I am governing the world!”
“Y-your Majesty’s grace is immeasurable.”
But that was not the truth.
He had not become emperor out of lust for power.
He was no tyrant, and even less was he incompetent.
Being indulgent and delighting in luxury was an opportunity granted only to lucky emperors living in times when the world ran smoothly.
He had become emperor in the most chaotic of chaotic times.
Moreover, the current emperor, whose legitimacy was endlessly questioned, did not occupy an easy seat.
“Do you not understand that in this world, my head and all of yours can be chopped clean off at any moment?!”
The emperor’s roar resounded thunderously through the great hall.
No one dared refute him.
The old powers who could have stood there with veins bulging in their necks against the emperor were already all dead.
They had all been eliminated back when Ming first fell.
“We will send an envoy to the Western Regions. The memorial of the Minister proposing that those bastards be made to offer tribute under the rites of ruler and subject is rejected.”
“We receive your command.”
The emperor did everything in his power to stabilize the Central Plains.
But strange things were gradually increasing in the world.
On top of that, the nations of the west were showing peculiar movements.
And as countermeasures, the ministers kept spouting absurd proposals.
They said the barbarians had to be subjugated so their crafty schemes could be uncovered, or that they should be made to offer tribute and then embraced under the rites of ruler and subject.
To the emperor, the ministers seemed insane.
How futile power was before the forces that lay behind the face of the world.
Had they still not learned, even after so much blood had been spilled?
“I do not permit objections.”
The ministers bowed their heads.
At least for now, no one dared go against the emperor’s will.
So the emperor smoothly slid in the next matter as well.
“……Also, Princess Sang-ye wishes to study under the great scholars of Azure Forest’s Grand Library for three years. Let it be known.”
Princess Sang-ye.
The daughter of King Gye-yeong, once merely a county princess, became a true princess when her father became emperor.
King Gye-yeong was declaring this.
He was saying that he would send an imperial princess to Azure Forest, a Murim sect.
Since he said she would study under the scholars there, it meant he intended to have her enter the sect.
Azure Forest was fundamentally also a Taoist temple, and it was dressed up as her cultivating learning under its scholars.
But it was originally something that could never be permitted.
Imperial blood, and a woman at that, being sent into Kangho?
“Your Majesty’s grace is immeasurable!”
But now, when the emperor’s power pierced the heavens.
No voice of opposition was raised.
Among the ministers was a woman kneeling demurely.
Once, she had been a foolish girl who went around dressed exactly like her twin elder brother and teased people.
As the years passed, she reached the age for marriage.
The disorder of the times had delayed her marriage, but now it had become impossible to put it off any longer.
So Princess Sang-ye made a plea to the emperor.
It was that before marrying, she wished at least once to go out into Kangho and learn martial arts.
Because he knew the hardships his daughter had endured, the emperor could not refuse.
And so Princess Sang-ye achieved what she wanted.
From the imperial palace.
The immature imperial princess departs for Azure Forest.
And then, Yinglong’s dwelling.
The oldest dragon among dragons agreed to take Cheongho into her care for Yi-gang before the final battle with the Evil Cult.
At the time, no one could have imagined that Cheongho would remain in Yinglong’s dwelling for over four years.
But that was how things turned out.
It was when Yi-gang had gone missing and Dam Hyun was Cheongho’s only guardian.
Dam Hyun, who came to fetch Cheongho so they could search for Yi-gang together, was appalled by how much Cheongho had changed.
And astonishingly, he was the one scolded by Yinglong.
‘Is this how you raised a child? It is pitiful beyond words.’
Being lectured by a dragon on child-rearing was truly a surprising experience.
It was infuriating, but Dam Hyun could not argue back.
Yinglong proposed that she keep Cheongho with her a little longer.
Dam Hyun had no choice but to agree.
And so the cohabitation of Cheongho and Yinglong continued longer still.
Cheongho had once been fond of catching and eating small animals while flapping his ears.
The blue fox who used to splash and play in still puddles was no longer there.
Instead, there was a boy quietly observing his reflection in the puddle.
He was a striking boy, with black-blue hair and blue light flashing from both eyes.
The boy stared blankly at his reflected self.
Someone approached him.
“……Do you like it that much?”
A long-haired woman from whom not even a fragment of emotion could be glimpsed.
It was Yinglong, disguised in human form.
“Yeah, Mom.”
“I am not your mother, Cheongho.”
The boy, Cheongho, asked back without even blinking.
“Unni1?”
“Just because I am not your mother does not make me your older sister. Did you not choose the form of a boy? Call me noona[TL/N: Korean term for older/elder sister from a male’s perspective] instead.”
“Auntie?”
“Yes, older sister would indeed be absurd.”
With expressions that did not look like joking at all, the two exchanged what sounded like a joking conversation.
“You were the one who chose to become human. Do you not feel the heaviness of that body?”
“It’s very heavy.”
“It was a foolish choice.”
“Yeah.”
Cheongho sprang to his feet.
He was already dressed in clothes suited for travel.
“I’m going to see Dad.”
“…….”
Did Dad mean Yi-gang? Or did it mean Dam Hyun?
Even Yinglong, who had raised Cheongho, could not tell.
Cheongho was going to Azure Forest.
He had learned everything he could from Yinglong, so if he truly wanted to become a ‘person’ as he wished, he had to learn from people.
“I’m off.”
“Go well.”
It was a clean farewell that was not human-like in the slightest.
Cheongho headed north with light steps.
Beginning the journey from Namman to Azure Forest, one that would take dozens of days.
From Namman.
Cheongho, the fox who wishes to become human, departed for Azure Forest.
