Chapter 1. What the Masters Left Behind

The new axe head rang.

Jin Cheol looked up with the tongs still in his hand. The iron had not touched the quenching water yet, but it was trembling on the anvil, and not with the dull complaint of a badly placed hammer stroke. Something had begun deep inside the mountain, climbed the smithy floor, and reached the metal.

“Father. Are they blasting at the quarry again?”

His father, sorting charcoal beside the bellows, tilted his head to listen. “Nobody’s working today. And powder shakes the ground first. That’s coming down from above.”

Before he finished, every pair of tongs hanging under the eaves jangled at once.

Jin Cheol did not put the axe head back into the fire. The iron wanted water now — the edge had ripened past persimmon and was going the red of a cherry, and one breath’s delay would change its hardness for the rest of the blade’s life. He looked at the mountain, then at the trough, and shifted his grip.

“Staring the iron down again.”

Han Yeonhwa stood in the doorway with the sun behind her and a bolt of cloth in both arms, the one she had spent half a year choosing for their wedding quilt.

“I’m reading the color.”

“The axe will harden out of fright, then.”

She spread the cloth over the workbench. Jin Cheol found the single crooked weft and pinned it with a finger. “Here.”

“Eyes that good had better remember the color of my ribbon on the wedding day.”

“Red.”

“Last time you said indigo.”

His mother’s laugh came out of the inner room. Yeonhwa let herself be beaten and flicked the end of the cloth against his arm, and on any other day he would have laughed with her. But the iron on the anvil trembled again, and this time the pulses came evenly spaced, like a shuttle crossing a loom.

Thump. Three breaths. Thump. Two breaths.

The interval was closing.

He drew the axe head out and lowered it into the trough. White steam went up, and under the hiss of the quench ran the mountain’s note; where the two vibrations crossed, the surface of the water stitched itself into fine diamonds.

“Yeonhwa. Stay inside.”

“Why?”

The cheering started at the upper end of the village. Children ran toward the valley shouting that people were flying, and Jin Cheol’s father stepped over the threshold to see. A man in white stood in the middle of the blue sky with nothing beneath his feet, and across the gap from him stood a giant with a black saber laid over one shoulder. In the road an old man went down on his knees and said the name the way other people said the name of a season: the Sword Saint of Mount Hua, Wi Sohyeon.

The swordsman saluted first, fist to palm. From that distance his voice arrived as though he were speaking at their ears.

“Ten years we have argued this, Brother Namgung. The sword leads with intent, the saber with momentum. Let us find out today which of us heaven agrees with.”

Namgung Tae laughed. “If heaven has ears, it is going to get an earful.”

Neither of them carried any killing intent. They sounded like old friends settling down over a game board, and it was the ease of it that made Jin Cheol afraid.

Then the sword came out of its sheath.

No one saw the first exchange. The pines on both slopes went down in the same direction, and only afterward did the sound arrive, late and enormous; the cheering turned into screaming; at the second exchange the cliff let go of its stones, and Namgung Tae came up through the falling rock with his saber and left a white crescent hanging where the air had been.

Jin Cheol was not watching the duel. He was watching the smithy posts, the water in the well, the tongs under the eaves. Strike a hollow bar and its note swells at particular places along its length; the whole mountain was doing that now, a bell with the valley for a mouth. Each clash did not fade. Each clash was added to the last.

“We have to get away.”

He had his father by the arm.

“Where to?”

He had no answer for that. The ground rang. The air rang. The mountain rang.

He started for the valley, and Yeonhwa caught him by the belt from behind.

“Have you lost your mind? What are you going to do up there?”

“Make them stop.”

“You think your voice carries that far?”

“Iron does—”

He took the plowshare down from the smithy wall and brought it against the anvil. A clean clang went out over the roofs. He struck it again. Villagers turned; the two men in the sky did not. They had the power to move a mountain and no reason on earth to listen to iron ringing beneath it.

“Get down below the village!”

He struck a third time and waved both arms at the spectators. The miller’s wife hesitated with her child against her shoulder. The tavern keeper only laughed.

“Will we see the like of this again in our lives? The great heroes know their own business.”

“The cliff is throwing the sound back. It is going to come down.”

“And which of you knows this mountain better — you, or them?”

One old man pulled his two grandchildren against his hip and started downhill. The rest could not take their eyes off the sky. Each time the Sword Saint opened his blade, light scattered off it like petals; each time the Saber King swept the petals out of the air, the hum went in under everyone’s ribs and stayed there. It was beautiful. That made it harder to flee, and Jin Cheol stopped arguing with a spectacle and ran for the meeting hall.

Yeonhwa did not stop him this time. She sprinted down the opposite alley.

“I’ll clear the houses by the stream. You wake the upper village.”

“Don’t come back to the smithy.”

“Since when do you give me orders?” She snapped it at him and nodded in the same breath. “Stay alive and nag me later.”

The bell rope broke after the first pull. The vibration coming down off the mountain had already drawn the nails halfway out of the bell frame, so Jin Cheol put his shoulder into the bell itself, and the mass of metal tilted and gave one heavy, ugly warning. Doors opened along the lane. He pushed three children onto the stream path and turned to carry a lame old man on his back, and the old man dug in his heels and said he would not go anywhere without his ox.

“You can buy another ox.”

“Without that beast we die this winter!”

Jin Cheol broke the stable bar. The ox went into the alley at a panicked run and the old man went after it, cursing him the whole way.

Then his mother called him from the smithy.

At the tip of Wi Sohyeon’s sword the light branched open like a plum flower, and Namgung Tae took it obliquely on the saber, and one strand of white came off wrong and raked the valley wall.

The cliff split first.

Jin Cheol felt the catastrophe in the soles of his feet before his head had any part in it. All afternoon the vibration had been stacking, layer on layer; now it stopped. Heated iron goes quiet in exactly that way in the moment before it breaks.

“Down!”

Yeonhwa had come back through the alley behind the wall — of course she had, with his parents still inside — and she was already in the outer work yard where the old loom stood. He shoved her flat against the far side of it and reached for his father. His father was at the inner door with both arms around his mother. The forge stood between them.

The world went white.

Pressure came before fire. The smithy wall folded like paper, nails tore loose, roof beams went past like thrown spears. Jin Cheol was hurled behind the quenching trough, and its iron-bound sides crumpled and split the blast around him while the water it had held came over his right arm and back, boiling.

Only after sound itself had gone did the pain arrive.

He opened his mouth in the mud and took in ash instead of air. The skin of his right arm had lifted in dark red welts and the fingers would not answer. He clawed at the ground with his left hand and dragged himself out from behind the ruin of the trough.

Where the smithy had stood there was a black crater.

“Father.”

Nothing came out.

Yeonhwa lay at the edge of it with her left hand pinned under the fallen loom, still holding the cloth. Jin Cheol crawled to her and pushed at the beam and it did not move; he found a bar of iron in the wreckage, wedged it under, and heaved until she could tear her hand free with her teeth set. Her ring finger and her little finger had been crushed past recognizing.

“Your parents first.”

She got the words out in pieces. He bound her wrist with a strip of the wedding cloth instead. The bleeding would not stop, and the living had to be tended before the dead, and accepting that took an instant longer than his whole life had taken.

Below the smithy, the people who had run at the sound of his bell were coming back. The miller’s wife hauled stone with her child still on her back. The old man whose ox he had loosed smothered embers with a bloodied shovel. Jin Cheol left Yeonhwa with them and went down into the crater.

He found his mother’s hairpin where the inner room had been, the tip melted, still hot enough to stick to his palm. Half of his father’s leather apron lay pinned under a beam. He threw himself at the beam and his right arm folded and put him on the ground.

“Get the living out first!” somebody shouted.

“They’re here.”

He took hold of the beam again. Nobody could bring themselves to tell him that nothing recognizably human was left under it. Four of them lifted it together, and beneath it were fragments of blackened bone. Jin Cheol wrapped them one by one in cloth and did not ask which had been his father and which his mother. Nobody in the village could have answered.

The houses along the stream had emptied in time. The three children came back alive. When that comforted him he felt he had betrayed his parents, and when it did not comfort him he felt he had turned the choice that saved them into a lie, and unable to hold either feeling he went on sifting the ash with one hand.

Near sunset the two masters came down. Not a fold of either man’s robe was out of place. Namgung Tae looked over the crater and the bodies laid in a row and clicked his tongue.

“The valley gave back more than I allowed for.”

He untied the purse at his belt and set it on a stone, where it landed with weight.

“There is enough there to rebuild the houses and something over. The Namgung name pays what it owes.”

Wi Sohyeon crouched down in front of Jin Cheol, who was gray to the eyelashes with ash. There was real sorrow in the man’s face, and because of it Jin Cheol waited to hear what he would say.

“I am sorry for your loss.” Wi Sohyeon said it quietly. “What we understood on that ridge today will keep a great many people alive in the years ahead. Their deaths will not be wasted on the martial path.”

Jin Cheol did not let a word of it go by. It was a verdict with the crime and the sentence already entered, one the dead could not testify against and the living could not appeal.

“If I go to the magistrate, may I give him your names?”

Namgung Tae’s eyebrows went up.

“May the record say it was a contest between two great heroes?”

Wi Sohyeon was silent a moment. Then he looked at the burned arm and said, “I will not stop you recording the truth. Only do not let anger blur it. The resonance was not something either of us could have avoided.”

Jin Cheol pointed at the nails bent around the lip of the crater, at the stones shorn away on one side and untouched on the other.

“Who decides what could not be avoided?”

For the first time, Wi Sohyeon’s gaze stayed on his face. He did not take offense. If anything he answered more seriously than before.

“A man who has come far enough along the path knows what force he is able to carry.”

“Then who carries what you couldn’t?”

Namgung Tae came between them. “You talk a great deal for a man in your condition. There is gold enough there for a physician.”

Gold answered again, in place of either of them.

“See to your treatment,” Wi Sohyeon said. “Do not let resentment cost you the arm as well.”

They were gone before the sun touched the ridge. Nobody stopped them. It did not occur to anybody that they could be stopped.

Yeonhwa was carried off to the physician and the villagers began gathering their dead, and Jin Cheol sat alone in front of the purse on the stone. He drew out one piece and the evening light ran across it like oil. It was more than his mother had held in her hands in her life. It was more than his father could have saved out of hundreds of hoes and sickles.

He did not throw it into the river. He tied the mouth of the purse shut left-handed and put it inside his coat, because you do not destroy what a criminal leaves behind at the scene.

High on the mountain the sword scars and the saber scars took the last of the light and shone. Jin Cheol measured them with his eyes, from where each wound started to where it ended.

“I’ll melt your blades down with this.”

There was no one to hear him.

Chapter 2. The Price of Gold, the Price of Lives

Beside the small grave where Yeonhwa’s two fingers lay buried, the people of Cheonggye Village dug fourteen graves for their dead.

Ten adults. Three children. And two wooden tablets bearing only names, for bodies that could not be recovered in human form. Fifteen people had died in all. Jin Cheol’s parents shared one coffin and one grave because no one could tell which bone fragments recovered from the smithy had belonged to whom.

Jin Cheol took up a shovel with his right arm bound in a sling around his neck. Every movement of the cloth stuck to his burns tore at his flesh. The villagers tried to stop him, but he dug left-handed. Only after hearing the dull impact of earth against a coffin fourteen times did he set the shovel down.

Yeonhwa did not sit beside the graves. Her left hand was swaddled in thick medicinal cloth. With her right, she counted rice jars and people.

“Thirty-two mouths tonight. Seven who can’t walk and two nursing infants. We have nine measures of rice left. Made into gruel, it will last eleven days.”

“Today is the funeral,” Jin Cheol said.

“So we starve after the dead?”

Without looking at him, Yeonhwa wrote the numbers again. She lacked the strength to grind ink, so she wrote on cloth with a piece of charcoal. Blood seeped from the places where her ring finger and little finger had been, but her hand did not stop.

Jin Cheol felt the purse of gold inside his robe. Whenever he took it out, Namgung Tae’s voice came with it. There is more than enough to rebuild your homes.

“Don’t use that.”

“Then what do we buy rice with?”

“I’ll earn it.”

At last, Yeonhwa looked up.

“With one arm? Enough for thirty-two people, within eleven days?”

Jin Cheol had no answer.

The following day, fever still burning in his right arm and the blisters on his back sticking to his clothes at every step, he carried a petition bearing eight victims’ thumbprints to the district office. The judicial clerk saw the names Wi Sohyeon and Namgung Tae and shut the door.

“A contest between martial artists goes to the Murim Alliance liaison.”

“The dead were not members of the murim world.”

“Which means we cannot arrest the men who killed them. You understand that, don’t you?”

He pushed the petition back. Its edge caught on Jin Cheol’s bandage and crumpled.

The Murim Alliance liaison office stood directly across the wall from the government compound. An armed warrior guarded the entrance, and incense perfumed the rooms within. The official in charge examined Namgung’s purse of gold before he looked at the paper Jin Cheol had brought.

“Compensation has already been made.”

“Who agreed to it?”

“Hero Namgung voluntarily paid twenty taels of gold, and the Sword Saint expressed his regret. The Alliance would normally require less.”

The brush tip glided across the ledger. The official wrote: Eleven civilian homes damaged. Fifteen dead. Compensation sufficient.

“Why are fifteen people and eleven houses on the same line?”

“Because that is the space for recording losses.”

“A dead child and a collapsed cowshed go in the same space?”

The official set his brush down.

“I understand your grief. But these men are pillars of the righteous sects. If the Demonic Cult comes, they are the ones who stand between it and villages like yours. Great responsibilities leave blemishes.”

Jin Cheol wanted to wrench the ledger away. His left hand clutched the edge of the desk. But the guard moved faster, pressing the end of his scabbard onto the back of Jin Cheol’s hand. The man used little force, yet Jin Cheol felt as if the bones were grinding together.

“Leave.”

Shoved into the street, Jin Cheol stood between the government office and the liaison office while rainwater ran from both roofs into the same gutter. The signs above the doors differed. What flowed back to Cheonggye Village did not.

That night Jin Cheol carried the purse of gold to the river. He loosened its mouth and tipped it over the water.

“Will throwing it away make you feel better?”

Yeonhwa spoke from behind him. Her freshly bandaged left hand was held against her chest.

“Every time we spend this, they’ll believe they paid the right price.”

“You’re going to manage their beliefs for them too?”

“This is the price of human lives.”

“No. Gold is only worth the price of gold.”

Yeonhwa took the purse from his hand. She drew out one piece, neither biting it nor holding it up to the light. She merely weighed it in her palm.

“Two seom of rice. Twenty packets of medicine. Enough roofing straw to last through winter. That is what gold can do. It cannot buy back a single dead person.”

“That’s why—”

“Thirty-two people still have to eat tomorrow morning.”

Yeonhwa unfolded the cloth she had marked with charcoal. The names of the dead filled the first line. The next listed the survivors’ injuries. Beneath that, lost homes and fields had been recorded separately.

“I will not put lives and possessions in the same space. We won’t divide the gold as if any part of it belongs to one person. We’ll use it in common, and record where every coin goes.”

“The moment we accept that money, the matter is over.”

“If we throw it away, it ends even sooner. If you have strength enough to be angry, buy rice first. You need to fetch medicine tomorrow as well.”

Blood spread along the edge of Yeonhwa’s bandage. Jin Cheol still stood in the ruins of the smithy; Yeonhwa was already counting the next day for thirty-two survivors. He had thought of her only as someone he must protect. She was the one walking out of the wreckage first. He closed the purse, took it back from the river, and the next morning followed her list: rice first, medicine second.

Not everyone agreed to use the gold as a common fund. The tavern keeper, who had lost his son, wanted it divided into fifteen portions for the bereaved families. Those who had lost homes but no kin argued that then they would have no roofs by winter.

Yeonhwa opened a blank ledger before them.

“We will not divide death into measures of gold. Nor will we measure whose grief is greater. Instead, we will spend first on the things that will kill more people if we do not attend to them now: rice, medicine, and roofs. For the time being, let us use it only for those three.”

“And when the gold runs out?” the tavern keeper asked.

“Then we will all be poor together. At least we will not be left fighting over whose son’s price was spent first.”

Eleven people placed their thumbprints beneath the decision. The two who opposed it still received the same rice and medicine. One tael bought rice and the next paid the physician; at the top of the ledger Yeonhwa wrote: *Twenty taels left by Namgung Tae. Not settlement money. Held as the common survival fund of Cheonggye Village.*

That night she set a length of hemp on the loom. Her three remaining fingers pushed two warp threads together, and the shuttle caught halfway through. The second attempt caught in the same place. When Jin Cheol reached to help, she struck the back of his hand with the shuttle.

“My hand is short. That doesn’t mean you have one to spare.”

She studied the loom leg, then drew in charcoal on the floor: a lever worked by the foot to part the warp, a shuttle the right hand could drive alone. The first sketch leaned badly. Yeonhwa left it there and tested the line three times with her toe. “On the next loom, the feet can work.”

Jin Cheol put his foot over the drawing. She raised the shuttle. “Planning to lend me that too?”

He moved it.

Once they began spending the money, Jin Cheol began to move as well. He could not yet lift a hammer with his half-healed arm, but he sorted usable iron from the ruins: pieces softened by fire, pieces split within by impact, and pieces that could be used again if reheated.

At the place where he had found his parents’ remains, he discovered three nails. They had melted with a roof beam and fused to blackened fragments of bone. For a long while Jin Cheol sat without being able to separate them. At last he brushed away the ash with a small chisel.

Each nail had taken the fire differently. One had a flattened head, another a bent shank, and the last a melted point. Each gave a different note.

He wrapped all three in cloth and tucked them inside his robe. Burying them might have brought him peace. But he needed evidence more than peace.

Jin Cheol measured bent sickles, cauldrons, door rings and roof nails while Yeonhwa recorded them in the ledger margins. A direction appeared on the first day—too quickly. The kitchen knife they marked as blast-thrown had actually fallen from a woman’s hand while she cut a child loose.

“Iron doesn’t lie,” Jin Cheol said.

“People can lie on its behalf. You can misread it too.”

When testimonies conflicted, Yeonhwa erased neither. The miller’s wife says east. The tavern keeper says north. When Jin Cheol told her choosing one would make the picture cleaner, she set down the charcoal.

“A clean record is not the same as an accurate one.”

He copied that sentence onto the ledger’s first page. They removed the kitchen knife, retained both conflicting accounts, and only then saw the remaining iron bent away from the valley: the returning force, not the first blow from above.

Jin Cheol suspended the broken bell from a rope and struck it at several locations. At the mouth of the valley, the sound was brief. Between the cliffs where the two masters had stood, the same note returned twice, louder than before. On the third vibration, the suspension rope pulled taut against his palm.

“Could they truly not have known?” Yeonhwa asked.

Jin Cheol did not answer at once. Masters of Wi Sohyeon and Namgung Tae’s stature could not have failed to hear a resonance that even he perceived. Yet there was no sign they had chosen the place intending to kill Cheonggye Village.

“They could have known,” he said. “Not how many houses would fall. But they knew the qi waves came back stronger from those cliffs.”

“Then why do it here?”

Jin Cheol looked up at the sword scars on the cliff.

“Because their sword and saber rang louder here.”

Jin Cheol and Yeonhwa took their findings back to the government office. The judicial clerk turned them away at the door, but Bak Munsu, the young secretary who had read the original petition, came to find Jin Cheol that night. His hat was pulled low, and he kept looking over his shoulder.

“Say you never spoke to me during the day.”

The secretary led them to the archive and spread dust-coated ledgers across the floor. The covers said flood, landslide, fire. The margins said: *embankment damaged after a Cheongram Sect elder’s duel; homes burned during an Ironblood Gang pursuit; sword qi misfired by a Mount Hua lay disciple, seven dead.* It happened every year. The government rewrote causes; the Alliance checked payment. No punished name appeared.

“Why are you showing us this?” Jin Cheol asked.

The secretary’s lips trembled.

“One of the seven who died three years ago was my younger sister. Since then, all I have done is copy the records. I never dared bring them out.”

He held out one slim volume. It contained forty-three incidents spanning twelve years, recording their dates, the sects involved, and the number of victims.

Jin Cheol did not take it. The moment he put it inside his robe, he would cease to be merely a victim and become a thief of hidden records. There would be no road back to either the government office or the Murim Alliance.

Yeonhwa accepted the book first.

“Leave the original here and take only a copy. If they discover it, say you know nothing.”

“They will know from my handwriting even if I deny it.” The secretary swallowed dryly. “After tonight, I may never be able to touch these ledgers again.”

Yeonhwa tore several blank sheets from her own ledger and offered them to him.

“Then from now on, send only the dates you remember. We will confirm the names. Don’t carry everything alone.”

The secretary could not bring himself to take the paper. His hands shook. Jin Cheol folded the sheets in half and slipped them into the man’s sleeve. If he sent only dates, there would be neither sentences to expose his hand nor originals that could be called stolen.

By the secretary’s candle, Jin Cheol found the last entry, its ink still wet: *Cheonggye Village. Fifteen dead. Cause to be amended to lightning.* He pressed his left thumb beside his name. Without seal paste it left only sweat, but the choice felt no less final.

“From now on, we leave none of these cases buried as finished.”

At dawn, he and Yeonhwa left with a ledger more dangerous than gold.

Chapter 3. The Gate That Breaks Children

Over two years, Jin Cheol knocked on the gates of seventeen sects. Seventeen times, he found himself outside again.

His first offers had been respectable: a blacksmith’s labor in exchange for formal instruction. The answer was that twenty was too old to begin. After that he repaired broken weapons for almost nothing and watched the training yards while he worked, only to be told that his sense for qi was hopelessly dull. By the seventeenth gate, he was offering to sweep floors for meals and a place in the servants’ quarters. The instructor looked at the burn scars across his back and clicked his tongue.

“Too old, and damaged besides. No sect spends rice and medicine on a laborer like you.”

Jin Cheol had not expected generosity. He wanted to see who made martial artists, and how.

In the spring of his twenty-first year, that question took him inside Cheongu Hall, an affiliate of the Unmun Escort Agency—not as a disciple, but as an itinerant smith hired to mend its pots and blades. For fifteen mornings he counted breaths drifting from the training yard. The third-rate disciples took six long, shallow inhalations, then paused. Whenever Do Changsu crossed the yard, every rhythm faltered.

Do was a broad, easy man who paid an advance on a broken saber and called subordinates by name when they bowed to him. “Don’t give it too fine an edge,” he told Jin Cheol. “A cargo blade ought to frighten a man before it has to cut him.”

The repaired spine rang clear beneath his fingernail. He grinned, then nodded at the scars visible above Jin Cheol’s collar. “You know iron. What happened there, a thunderbolt?”

“The smithy collapsed.”

“Hard world. Still, you kept the useful part of yourself.”

The same man used village forges without paying and emptied the grain jars of households late on the protection levy charged in Cheongu Hall’s name. His generous advance had come out of somebody else’s winter.

That night a letter arrived from Yeonhwa. The survivors of Cheonggye Village, now settled in Mulle Valley, had finished a treadle loom for her. The pedals let her change the warp’s tension without gripping it in her injured left hand; with her right, she could still drive the shuttle.

They no longer wasted paper discussing a wedding date. Two years earlier, Yeonhwa had refused to end their betrothal, but she had also refused to remain at home as the woman Jin Cheol wandered away from. They would choose a date only after deciding what home they meant to share and what right each had to stop the other. He had agreed. Since then their letters had been about work.

Yeonhwa always closed with figures: the common fund’s balance, new reports of injuries from martial contests, the number of people who still needed treatment. This letter included a new entry.

*Three households paid initiation fees to affiliates of the Unmun Escort Agency. Three children sent away. None returned.*

Jin Cheol folded the sheet and tucked it inside his clothes. Before entering Cheongu Hall, he had visited all three homes. One family paid a yearly fee for the privilege of visiting a son they were never allowed to see. Another could not admit that anything had happened to their eldest and was preparing to send the next child after him. At the third house, the sect had returned one straw sandal.

“They said he had no talent and ran away,” the boy’s sister told him. “He was afraid of the dark. He couldn’t go to the privy alone after sunset, but they say he crossed a mountain road at night?”

The sole had scarcely been worn. A dark red stain marked the inside of the toe, as though someone had pushed the sandal back onto a foot that no longer moved.

*I will find where the children disappear,* Jin Cheol wrote.

Yeonhwa’s reply was brief. *Do not confuse finding out with rescuing them. Do not play the hero alone and lose the records too.*

He packed his lock tools separately after reading it. Knowing a structure was the first step in bringing it down, he told himself. He left out the part where, if he heard a child scream, he intended to run toward the sound.

Three days later, seven children came through Cheongu Hall’s gate. The youngest had gaps where his front teeth had yet to grow. Their parents set down silver and grain, bowed until their foreheads touched the earth, and listened while an instructor promised that talent would make their children part of the Unmun Escort Agency. There would be no more hunger, he said. No more fear of bandits.

By evening all seven had vanished.

Jin Cheol took Do Changsu’s saber, whose repair he had deliberately delayed, and headed for the inner quarters. The guard stepped aside when he heard the owner’s name. Near the rear wall, Jin Cheol passed a stone drain barred with four iron rods. Three wore the same skin of rust. The fourth had a raw, bright patch near its base, and the air held the faint, bitter smell of newly filed metal. Someone had been working from the alley side.

Farther on, an herb cart stood close to the back door. The old woman at its shafts kept drawing a cloth over the empty bed, though there was nothing to shelter from the night air. Bundles of mugwort lay beneath the seat.

Then Jin Cheol heard the crying.

It came from under the floor.

A new lock hung on the cellar door. He drew a slender chisel from the toolbox on his back, listened as its point moved the steel plates, and pressed twice. The bolt slipped free.

Below, water and blood fouled the air.

Seven large wooden tubs stood in a stone chamber. A child lay bound in each one, submerged to the face. At measured intervals, the instructors hauled them up by the hair, gave them a single breath, and forced them under again. Incense smoked against the walls while a drum hammered through the dark.

“If you want to live, open the place below your navel!”

One child came up vomiting water and calling for his mother. Another hung limp in the instructor’s fist. Old burns tightened along Jin Cheol’s right arm, remembering boiling water before his mind did. His fingers went rigid.

Then they moved.

He vaulted into the nearest tub, dragged a child’s face above the water, and sawed at the ropes with his chisel. A cudgel struck between his shoulders. White burst across his vision, but he got the child over the rim. The second blow drove him to one knee.

Do Changsu sighed from the doorway. “Blacksmith. You should have kept to your own work.”

“They’ll die.”

“Some will.” He gave the answer as calmly as a man reckoning spoiled grain. “If one of them opens a dantian, that family eats for ten years. The parents knew what they were buying. Do you imagine the world outside these walls means to raise their children gently?”

“If they knew, you won’t object to sending them home.” Jin Cheol pushed the coughing child behind him.

Do’s expression hardened. “Do you know what my initiation cost? I served this hall for three years before they taught me how to hold a blade. Don’t kick away another man’s ladder so you can stand there feeling righteous.”

“You drown children to recover your fee?”

“Who isn’t under someone’s heel?” He touched the old scar beneath his chin. “They buried me in a coffin for five days. If I cried, they covered the air hole. Three of us went into the ground; I was the one who came back out. Only then did rice reach my mother. You see a monster. She saw enough food to survive the winter.”

“So because they did it to you, you do it to them?”

“If I refuse, someone worse takes my place. At least I give them a few extra breaths.”

Beside the tubs, one of the instructors lowered his eyes.

“Then today,” Jin Cheol said, setting himself between Do and the child, “I’ll give them one more.”

Do’s thumb pressed the saber guard.

The scabbard smashed into Jin Cheol’s ribs. He caught part of it on his forearm, but the force sank through muscle to bone. The next strike arrived before he saw it and flung his shoulder against the wall. Breath deserted him. Blood flooded his mouth.

Unable to rise, he listened.

Do planted his right heel before every attack. A short breath went in; as the scabbard drove forward, it came out. The blade within answered with a low hum. Under the drum and the splashing water, the rhythm repeated.

Two, one, pause.

The third strike began at Do’s heel. Jin Cheol twisted half a beat early, and the scabbard tore his ear instead of his temple. Falling, he threw his hammer—not at Do’s feet, but at the scabbard’s tip.

Iron met iron with a crack that bit through the drumbeat. Do’s breath caught. His wrist strayed less than a finger’s width, for less than a breath, yet Jin Cheol had heard the flaw correctly.

His body was simply too slow to use it.

A kick took him in the belly and hurled him through two tubs. Staves split. Water and children spilled across the floor.

“Stop!” Do shouted as the instructors lunged after Jin Cheol. “Get the children out. Are you trying to kill all the merchandise?”

That word saved six lives for the next few moments. The instructors dragged the children clear of the water, and Jin Cheol, coughing blood onto the stones, managed to turn one small face sideways so water could run from its mouth.

Smoke curled down the stairs.

Not paper. Wet mugwort—bitter, green, and heavy enough to sting the eyes without carrying a flame far. Jin Cheol remembered the herb cart, the old woman’s hands fussing over its empty bed, and the filed bar in the rear drain.

“Fire!” someone cried above.

While the instructors looked toward the stairs, a gray-bearded man descended in the worn coat of a coroner. He carried a file dusted with iron.

“I’ve come for the Unmun Escort Agency’s inspection records.” He flashed a badge. Do narrowed his eyes, and in that moment the old man sent the three children who could stand stumbling up the steps. The herb carrier waited above. One by one, Madam Obok caught them and steered them through the rear door.

“That badge design was retired ten years ago,” Do said.

“Sharp eyes. If your nose were as good, you’d know that’s wet mugwort burning, not a ledger.”

The old man kicked the wall torch from its bracket. Darkness swallowed the room.

“Blacksmith! Toward the filed bars. Crawl!”

Three children remained below. Jin Cheol hauled one breathing child onto his back while the stranger hooked the other two beneath their arms. Do’s saber finally cleared its sheath. Its note marked him in the dark; whenever it sang, Jin Cheol pressed closer to the wall and moved away from the sound.

They reached the drain with the children between them. Three bars had been cut through. The last was only half filed, leaving too little room for a child on Jin Cheol’s back. The old man braced his file against the groove, but footsteps were already closing behind them.

“Hold it there,” Jin Cheol whispered.

He found the groove by touch and struck the file’s spine with his hammer. Once. Twice. On the third blow, the old man wrenched while Jin Cheol struck, and the bar folded outward into the alley.

They forced the children through first. By the time Jin Cheol dragged himself outside, the three sent by the stairs were already lying in the herb cart. Madam Obok stripped off their soaked clothes and wrapped the smallest in her own coat. Jin Cheol lowered the child from his back beside them; the coroner brought the last two. Fingers against lips, they counted.

Six.

Seven had entered the tubs.

“One was gone before we reached them,” the old man said. “His name was Hajin.”

Jin Cheol repeated the name under his breath. He tried to lift an arm toward the cellar, but the limb would not obey.

Madam Obok gathered the reins. Behind them, steel shrieked against the drainstone.

“Where are you taking the others?” Jin Cheol asked.

“A farm to the north. Sending them straight home might put them in the same hands again. Once they wake, we find out what waits at each house—and ask the children where they want to go.”

The cart lurched into motion. Only then did Jin Cheol understand the work that had preceded the old man’s entrance: the bars filed from outside, wet mugwort in place of a real fire, an empty cart and someone ready to receive whoever survived. He had not known whether he could open the cellar, yet he had prepared an escape for every child he might reach.

“Who are you?”

“Seo Muhan. I once priced weapons for the Imperial Bureau of Artifacts. Later, I priced the people those weapons killed.”

He cut Jin Cheol’s clothes away from his wounds. When the scars across his back came into view, Seo’s hands stopped. He pressed along their edges, counted Jin Cheol’s breathing, and bent closer with the intent attention of a man recognizing old script.

“Your dantian nearly opened.”

“I’ve never learned martial arts.”

“That’s why it closed again. No one taught you to keep the wound open.” Seo glanced back toward the alley, toward Hajin. “But you learned to hear something else—the discord a weapon makes when its owner circulates qi.”

Do Changsu had seen Jin Cheol’s face. There would be no returning to Cheongu Hall, no collecting his tools, no pretending he had only repaired a saber. He climbed into the cart among the six children.

As Madam Obok turned onto the northern road, a saber point scraped the rear axle. The sound vanished beneath the iron-rimmed wheels.

Chapter 4. The Wound Remembers Power

Jin Cheol looked at the saber before he looked at the corpse.

Half-moon cracks ran along the blade’s spine, too regular to have come from a single bad blow. Beneath the hilt, five interlocking rings had been stamped into the steel. The same mark appeared, scratched with a needle, on the corner of the dead man’s name tag.

“The saber didn’t break first,” Jin Cheol said.

Seo Muhan stopped with one sleeve rolled to the elbow. “You haven’t seen the body.”

“There’s no blood in the cracks. Someone broke it after the owner fell.”

“The Murim Alliance coroner wrote the reverse. The blade shattered, and its fragments killed him.”

Seo drew back the cloth. Pieces of the saber had been driven into the corpse’s chest, but there was little blood around the wounds. Dark red blotches spread instead across the lower abdomen. The man had already been dead when the steel entered him.

“He died while circulating qi,” Seo said. “The blade was made into an explanation afterward. The death began here.” His finger hovered below the navel.

Twelve days had passed since Cheongu Hall. Jin Cheol had spent the first four unable to stand and had not walked farther than the farmyard until he stopped coughing blood. The six surviving children recovered from their fevers and moved to two safe farms: three chose to stay with Madam Obok, while the other three asked not to be separated from one another. Hajin had been placed in a coffin.

Only after the children were moved had Seo brought Jin Cheol to the abandoned dyehouse. Three vats, their sides crusted blue, concealed an iron door in the floor. The morgue beneath smelled of medicine and lime. Weapons outnumbered bones on its walls—a notched saber, a spear broken through the middle, an iron plate burst outward from within—and every piece bore a dead person’s name and a date.

Under the examination table, one drawer was shallower than its front suggested. Tapping the bottom produced a thin metallic ring. Seo had told him to leave the lock alone until they finished with the dead.

Jin Cheol studied the stains below the corpse’s navel. “I was taught that a dantian isn’t an organ. You can’t cut one out of a body.”

“You can’t hold it in your hand,” Seo said, “but damage it and the flesh follows. I have seen the same marks too often to dismiss them.”

From a cabinet he took three initiation records. The first described a child held underwater, the second one confined in darkness, the third one told that both parents had died. Each survivor had reported pain below the navel. When a breathing method followed the ordeal at once, internal energy appeared.

“You think ambient qi enters where the mind tears.”

“I think it may.”

“Plenty of people are broken without becoming martial artists.”

“That is why the sects choose the age, the shock, and the breathing. They made a procedure out of chance.”

Seo set a shallow bowl beside the corpse and dusted the water with charcoal. At his direction, Jin Cheol straightened the dead man’s stiff fingers into a qi-circulation posture. The powder crept inward.

Seo’s eyes sharpened. Jin Cheol watched the charcoal gather, then lowered the bowl to the floor and pulled the wedge from beneath one table leg. The slab tilted. When he replaced the water, the powder drew to the same side whether the corpse’s hands were arranged or not.

“Something happened,” Jin Cheol said. “That doesn’t make your explanation true.”

Seo stared at the bowl, then crossed out *success* in his notes with a line of red ink. He drove in a fresh wedge, checked the table with a weight on a string, and began again. With the slab level, the charcoal lay still until they straightened the lower abdomen and arranged the hands. Then, much more slowly than before, it gathered toward the center.

“Heat in the body might be moving the air,” Jin Cheol said. “Or the stiffness of the joints might shift the table. It still doesn’t prove a wound is pulling anything.”

“No. It gives us a result and several reasons not to trust it.” Seo wrote them all in the margin. “Many people question another man’s certainty. Very few question an answer they need. Keep doing that.”

Jin Cheol glanced at the three initiation records. “Then discerning talent is a lie.”

“Half a lie. What they call talent is a child who tears easily and survives torn.”

Footsteps sounded on the stone stairs. Jin Cheol’s hand closed around his toolbox before the iron door opened and Yeonhwa came down carrying a bundle of books. The knot had held firm despite the two missing fingers on her left hand.

“If you summon someone and hide under three vats,” she said to Seo, “you might consider explaining which vats.”

The old coroner coughed into his fist. “A detailed address also helps the men who want to arrest me.”

Her eyes went first to Jin Cheol’s split lip and the bandage around his ribs. She came close enough to inspect both without touching either.

“The children?”

“Six are safe at the northern farms,” Seo said. “Hajin is in his coffin.”

Yeonhwa opened the field copy of the Mulle Valley common ledger and wrote, *Seven subjected to the rite. Six survived. Hajin died.* She did not let the number saved consume the name of the one they had lost.

The original ledger remained in an iron chest at the watermill, with its keys divided among three households. Every month the victims’ names and the common accounts were copied twice. Yeonhwa had brought copies and letters from the villages with her. Fire could take a book. A blade could take its keeper. Neither would take every name at once.

Seo explained what the marks on the corpse might mean. Yeonhwa listened without interrupting, then asked, “If a dantian is a wound, can it close?”

“The soul tries to heal. Training is closer to opening the same injury every day.”

“Then stop the breathing method.”

“For one newly opened, perhaps. Once too much qi has accumulated, it blocks the wound from closing on the inside. Force it shut and that trapped power drives backward through the meridians and organs.”

Her gaze moved to the body. “And kills the person.”

Seo said nothing.

Jin Cheol returned to the saber. A pale residue clung inside one crack, finer than the oil used to protect the blade. He scraped it onto a nail and smelled the bitter dust.

“A calming herb.” He looked at Seo. “Someone stopped his qi circulation.”

The old man’s shoulders lowered. He reached out and straightened the dead man’s name tag before answering.

“I did.”

The lamp flame leaned in a draft. Nothing else moved.

“He wanted to leave his sect,” Seo continued. “I believed that if he stopped the breathing method, the dantian might heal. I knew the stored qi had to be removed first. I opened his meridians with needles and channeled the power into his saber. When I judged that half was gone, I gave him medicine to quiet the wound.”

“It wasn’t half,” Jin Cheol said.

“I measured what emerged through the blade. I failed to count what had soaked into bone and organ.”

Yeonhwa’s voice stayed level. “How many people did you kill before you stopped?”

“The first. And the last.”

“Why had you begun the research?”

For a long while, Seo looked at the name tag rather than either of them. “My son entered a sect at eleven. Three days later they returned his body. They said he lacked the talent to survive the rite. I drew an imperial salary then, and I valued that position enough to keep quiet. So I opened other people’s dead and searched for the answer I had been too cowardly to demand while my son was alive. I called it work for him. Mostly, I used the dead to cover my silence.”

Jin Cheol offered no comfort. Confession did not wake a dead man or bring back an eleven-year-old boy. He did, however, examine Seo’s records. Not one line was marked as a success, and outcomes that contradicted the old man’s beliefs had not been scraped away.

“If we learn to close a dantian safely,” Jin Cheol said, “we could end the murim world.”

Yeonhwa turned to him at once. “Whose dantian?”

“Anyone who wants to put down that power, first.”

“And then?”

“Those who stand on other people’s lives.”

“Whether they agree or not?”

In his memory, Do Changsu’s scabbard passed above the children’s heads. “If he comes to buy another child tomorrow, do I need his permission before I stop him?”

Yeonhwa’s voice had gone quiet, which made every word harder. “If you close his dantian, who feeds the family the escort agency holds over him? Take his power and you may take his work. His family falls with him. The people we fought wrote the price of a person and the price of a house in the same column. Don’t make the same calculation because you prefer the answer.”

Metal struck above them.

Once. Twice. Three times.

The bar across the dyehouse entrance was being cut apart.

Seo pinched out the lamp. “Do Changsu.”

“How can you know?” Yeonhwa asked.

“When his saber scraped the cart’s axle, blue resin from Cheongu Hall’s horseshoe marks lodged in the cut. I didn’t smell it and scrape it out until we reached the farm. While the children were being moved, his men questioned the apothecary who lent me these vats. They narrowed the search to the dyehouse quarter and started checking one building at a time.” Another stroke bit into wood overhead. “And Cheongu Hall teaches its men to cut a bar in three blows when they want the records inside left intact.”

Do Changsu’s voice carried through the floor. “Old Seo! Six children are worth a fortune. Give me the records, and I’ll return the blacksmith with all four limbs attached.”

The morgue’s iron door was the only exit a standing person could use. Yeonhwa found the other route by dropping to one knee: a low passage once used to slide corpses into the alley drain, its cover red with rust. While Seo pried at it, she tested the thick hemp cord running through a pulley beside the shelves.

“Twice around that post,” she told Jin Cheol.

“What will that do?”

“Show them where the force goes when a warp thread snaps.”

A small brazier and bellows stood near the opposite wall. Jin Cheol poured in charcoal. Seo worked the bellows between blows on the passage cover, and the coals woke red. There was no time to heat the broken spears and sabers hanging nearby, so Jin Cheol arranged them by length along the brazier’s edge. He knew what note each piece of iron would make.

The iron door opened. Do Changsu descended with four Cheongu Hall martial artists behind him.

“Three people hiding underground with the dead,” he said. “You’ve found suitable company.”

His foot touched the last stair. Jin Cheol struck the longest spear shaft.

The note knifed around the cramped room. A short saber answered, then a cracked cauldron and an iron plate, each sound colliding with the next until the four men behind Do clapped hands over their ears.

Do gathered strength below his navel and charged through the noise. Jin Cheol knew the rhythm—two, one, pause—but knowing did not make an ordinary body faster. The scabbard clipped his shoulder and opened the flesh.

“Now!” Yeonhwa shouted.

Seo kicked the pulley wedge free. The cord snapped across the shelves with all the tension Yeonhwa had wound into it. Weapons cascaded onto the floor, tangling Do’s feet in a shifting bed of iron.

Jin Cheol brought his hammer down on a sack of lime above the brazier. The powder struck the hot air and bloomed white. Blinded men cursed and stumbled. Yeonhwa was already at the corpse passage; Seo tore off its loosened cover, and the three backed toward the opening.

Do’s saber came free. Internal energy rode the edge and split the brazier. Coals scattered into the record shelves.

Fire raced across old paper. Its light reached beneath the examination table, where heat warped the false bottom of the shallow drawer. The corner of a metal plate appeared, stamped with five interlocking rings. Jin Cheol drove his chisel under the board and levered it up. Beside the plate lay a thick notebook containing Seo’s wound hypothesis and the calculations behind it.

He had one hand for whatever he took.

Ahead of him, Yeonhwa secured the bundle of name tags inside her clothes. Jin Cheol closed his fingers around the metal plate and left the unverified notebook to burn.

The corpse passage allowed one person through at a time. Yeonhwa tied the field ledger beneath her clothes before entering, then dragged herself forward with her right hand. Jin Cheol followed close enough to keep her skirts from catching around her feet. Behind him, Seo tried to force a bound stack of autopsy records into the tunnel and wedged one shoulder against the stone.

“Leave it!” Yeonhwa called.

“The children’s names are in here.”

Jin Cheol crawled back, cut the binding cord, and divided the pages. They rolled a few sheets at a time and pushed them beneath their clothes. Seo abandoned the calculations and took the later leaves: names of the dead, what had been attempted, how each attempt had failed. Jin Cheol carried another share. Yeonhwa took the rest. The common ledger traveled separately against her body, while Seo’s records survived by being split among all three of them.

Flames reached the mouth of the passage. Seo twisted toward them.

“Twenty years,” he said. “There are twenty years still in that room.”

Jin Cheol caught his arm. “Go back and you die.”

“Those records—”

“If you die, only the failures remain.”

Seo’s jaw worked. Then he turned and crawled.

They emerged through the alley drain into rain. By the time Jin Cheol pulled free, flames were pushing between the dyehouse floorboards. Blood had soaked his sleeve from the fresh cut in his shoulder.

At dawn they hid in an abandoned potter’s kiln. The rescued pages were scorched at their edges, but the names remained legible. Yeonhwa opened her field ledger long enough to make certain it was dry, then helped wipe soot from the metal plate.

Its face was blank. Five rings biting into one another covered the back. Along the edge, small characters emerged beneath the grime.

*Blackwind Mountain. Archive of Forsaken Obsessions.*

Seo’s hands began to shake. The marks on the dead man’s saber and name tag had finally acquired an address.

“He was trying to reach it,” he said. “An archive for people searching for a way out of martial arts.”

They did not leave for Blackwind Mountain that morning.

The old potter who owned the kiln hid them for ten days. Seo stitched Jin Cheol’s shoulder and changed the dressing when the wound seeped; his bruised ribs had to settle before he could carry a pack. Yeonhwa sent word confirming the six children’s new refuges, then dispatched copies of the preserved autopsy records in two directions. No single courier carried every name or every account of failure.

On the eleventh morning, Jin Cheol raised his arm to shoulder height without tearing Seo’s stitches. Only then did they gather their packs. The dyehouse was gone, the morgue with it, and the research notebook had burned before its theory could be tested. What remained was smaller and more reliable: the names, the failures, and a metal seal cold from ten days in the kiln.

Jin Cheol took the seal from Yeonhwa.

“Let’s go to Blackwind Mountain,” he said. “Before they piece our trail together again.”

Chapter 5. The Archive of Forsaken Obsessions

When the black silver grass along the ridge bowed to the wind, all of Blackwind Mountain looked drenched in spilled ink.

The climb took three days. Every step woke the bruises Do Changsu had left along Jin Cheol’s ribs, while the burn scars on his right arm drew tight whenever the cold reached them. Whenever Seo Muhan lost the trail, he held the metal seal near the rocks and waited. One of its five rings would begin to tremble, so faintly that Jin Cheol had to watch the old man’s fingertips to see it, and they would follow the direction it chose.

Yeonhwa found the entrance first.

“The wind is coming from the left,” she said, “but the grass is falling to the right.”

A narrow seam divided the black stalks. Air hissed through it, drawn into the mountain. They pulled away a heavy curtain of vines and uncovered an iron door set flush into the cliff.

There was no keyhole. Five round metal plates overlapped at its center: bronze, iron, silver, tin, and a dark red alloy Jin Cheol could not name. An inscription ran beneath them.

*Those who place the strongest metal first shall gain power. Those who place the weakest first shall find the path.*

Seo Muhan reached toward the silver plate. Jin Cheol caught his sleeve.

The plates were not ornaments but sliding bolts, each fitted to one of five slots beside the door. Tin dust clung to the deepest slot. Farther out, the grooves bore progressively heavier scratches from harder metal.

“It isn’t asking us to rank them.”

“What, then?”

Jin Cheol removed the plates and flicked each rim with his thumbnail. He slid the tin into the innermost slot, followed by silver, bronze, and the unknown red metal. Iron went last, across the outside.

“The outer plate takes the blow. The softest one gives and absorbs what reaches the center.” He brushed tin dust from his thumb. “Someone else found the same answer.”

The five notes joined. Deep inside the cliff, a metal lock disengaged, and the door swung inward.

The Archive of Forsaken Obsessions did not smell of books. Thin metal sheet covered the walls and floor, returning each footfall from some impossible distance. Dust lay thick enough to hold their tracks, but not a single cobweb crossed the corners.

Worn characters on the first threshold named the room: *The Resonance Chamber That Returns Obsession.* Hundreds of names had been cut into the walls. Beneath each stood a sect, a cultivation realm, and one final wish.

*Yu Jagyeong of the White Cloud Sect. Late second-rate. I want to put down my sword before my daughter.*

*Jang Munak of the Blood Saber Brotherhood. Early first-rate. I want to stop dreaming of the faces of those I killed.*

*Jeonghae, lay disciple of Shaolin. Mid third-rate. I want to go home to my fields.*

A red stroke crossed out most of the names. In a second column, someone had recorded how each person died: executed for betrayal; accused of leaking a secret manual; murdered, then declared a victim of qi deviation. These people had not died pursuing power. They had been killed for trying to leave it behind.

Yeonhwa opened her ledger and began to copy.

“All of them?” Jin Cheol asked.

“They died because someone erased their names.”

As she finished the last entry, her iron stylus slipped into a fine groove beneath the nameplate. A loom shuttle answered her words.

No loom stood in the archive, yet the sound came again—wood slipping between warp threads, the treadle’s familiar creak, her mother’s voice scolding her for a bad knot. In the metal wall, another Yeonhwa worked the loom with five whole fingers. Without meaning to, Yeonhwa raised her left hand and laid its three remaining fingers over the reflected hand.

The shuttle flew cleanly through the shed. Too cleanly.

Her mother would have smacked her between the shoulders for weaving at that speed and making the cloth weep. Yeonhwa’s mouth hardened. She seized the phantom shuttle and snapped it across her knee. Only light broke in her hands—but when it did, she saw Jin Cheol pass beside her, walking toward a forge that was not there.

He heard a hammer.

Once. Twice. His father always struck just off the anvil’s center. From beyond the bellows came the scrape of a supper tray and his mother asking when he and Yeonhwa meant to set the wedding date. The sounds were so exact that the next door seemed certain to open onto the afternoon before the disaster.

The metal walls rippled. A forge gathered around him: his father by the bellows, his mother smiling, the hot weight of an axe head held between his tongs. No one had died yet.

This time he could hear the mountain’s warning sooner. If he ran now, he could pull his parents outside. He could send Yeonhwa ahead. Perhaps all four of them could shelter behind the quenching vat.

He took one step.

“Into the water, son. You’ll let the iron cool.”

His father’s voice stopped him more surely than a hand.

Jin Cheol could not lower the axe head into the vat. He needed to hear the iron as it had rung that day, to see what pattern the water made. One more look might show him the thing he had missed.

A palm cracked across his cheek.

Yeonhwa stood behind him, her right hand flushed from the blow. “Listen to the living, not the dead.”

For an instant, all five fingers of her left hand were whole. Light shivered over the wall, and five became three.

“I could do it again,” he said.

“No. You could watch it again.”

“This time I might save them—”

“Then go.” Her teeth showed. “Spend the rest of your life happy inside a memory you made. I’ll take my three fingers outside and count how many living people need to eat today.”

The mountain’s roar drew closer to the illusory forge. Before the metal wall stood a striking block scarred by other visitors’ hammers, and beside it a catch made to break only once. Jin Cheol turned his back on his parents. He heard them die again as he brought his hammer down.

The catch snapped. Resonance tore through the chamber; his father’s voice stretched into a thin metallic cry and vanished. The forge collapsed into cold walls, and behind them the iron door slammed shut.

Yeonhwa had already broken her own illusion. Seo Muhan had not. He knelt in a corner, apologizing to a child no one else could see, and only opened his eyes after they seized an arm each and dragged him upright.

“The price of passing was the way back,” he said hoarsely.

Beyond him, the next door stood open.

A single book rested at the center of the inner archive. Its pages were thin leaves of iron sewn together with cord. Four characters had been cut deep into the cover.

*The Sutra of Unraveling.*

Jin Cheol distrusted the title at once. A manual promising easy strength did not belong among the names in the outer room. The first iron leaf confirmed his suspicion with a warning.

*You who would unravel power: do not touch it while ignorant of power. Closed eyes cannot see the grain. A slow body cannot reach it. Empty hands cannot move it.*

The opening chapter taught only what a beginner could use. The Mind’s Eye sensed the broad movement of qi. Unraveling Qi refined ambient qi into neutral internal energy that carried no sect’s nature. The Form-Shifting Art moved the body half a step aside from a completed collision, beginning with a footwork method called Drifting Step. At the first stage, Perception, Unraveling Qi remained inside the practitioner. It could support the senses and the body’s alignment; it could not reach into anyone else.

The later iron leaves were closed beneath four headings: Analysis, Interference, Synthesis, Dissolution. Most of their contents would remain inaccessible for years, perhaps forever. Interference—the first stage capable of touching another person’s qi circulation—required at least a first-rate body. Dissolution, which claimed it could safely unravel a dantian, lay beyond the bodily transformation of the transcendent realm.

Today Jin Cheol was still slower than Do Changsu. He could take power from no one.

“Why are you smiling?” Yeonhwa asked.

Only then did he notice the pull at the corner of his mouth. “At least it isn’t lying about making me a master by nightfall.”

“This isn’t cultivation severance,” he said after another look at the closed leaves. “It is a road that might one day reach it.”

“A road you may never finish,” Seo Muhan said.

The first training passage began with an injury. To reach Perception, a practitioner had to open a small wound in a soul that had already closed. Common initiation methods used terror to rip such a wound open. This method required the practitioner to find the grain of an existing scar and part it by conscious choice, then filter the ambient qi that entered with each breath until it became Unraveling Qi.

The wound inside Jin Cheol had opened at Cheonggye Village and healed again. According to the sutra, people who retained such a trace were rare. Opening it a second time might return them to the pain that had made it.

Yeonhwa shut the book.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I do.”

“A moment ago, you condemned men who tore children open to make martial artists.”

“There is a difference between someone else tearing me open and my choosing it.”

“The wound won’t know you chose.”

He had no answer. Heat climbed his scarred back, and his body begged him to stop breathing, close the leaves, leave the mountain. His hands would not release the book.

He opened it again. “Then record it. Write down why I started and where I went wrong. If I go wrong, make me stop.”

Yeonhwa did not reach for her ledger. “If I tell you to stop, will you?”

“I’ll listen to your reasons.”

“You still intend to make the final judgment.”

“It is the most I can promise now.”

She stared at him for a long time, anger held so still it made the silence feel narrow. Then she turned to a blank page.

“I am not giving you permission. I cannot prevent you from training, so I am setting terms. I keep the original iron leaves. You may copy the first chapter and nothing more. Seo Muhan keeps the resonance implement whenever you are not training.” Her stylus touched the page but did not move. “Before you use that implement against a person, Seo Muhan and I must agree, and so must more than half of the people who were harmed. They hear what you plan to do and when you must stop before they decide.”

“And if I break the terms?”

“You lose the common fund, our lodging, and the information network. We take back the manual. If you continue after that, you continue alone.”

Seo Muhan nodded. Jin Cheol pushed the original sutra across to Yeonhwa.

“I’ll begin on those terms.”

He sat for his first cultivation session. Seo Muhan showed him where to begin, then withdrew; this art had no living master, only a book that promised nothing.

Rather than forcing his breath deeper, Jin Cheol remembered the tremor that had crossed the anvil just before the disaster and searched for an echo farther inside. His burns grew hot. Below his navel, a pain as fine as a needle point stirred.

Behind that pain waited the afternoon his parents died.

He did not turn away. The roar returned first, then boiling water, then the smell of burning flesh. He named none of it. He counted instead: breathe in for three, hold for two, release for five. The wound that had sealed inside him parted by the smallest degree.

Cold mountain qi pressed through. When he grasped for it, pain flared across his belly. He shortened the end of his inhalation and let the exhalation run longer. Heat and cold dispersed with the breath, leaving one hair-thin strand beneath his navel, neither warm nor cold and bearing no nature he knew.

His first Unraveling Qi.

Sweat soaked him from scalp to heel. He braced both hands on his knees and vomited. When he finally raised his head, no hidden current illuminated the room. No master’s presence shone through the walls. He could sense only the metal seal trembling at once against his palm and somewhere below his navel.

Seo Muhan took his pulse. “Not even the threshold of third-rate. The flow breaks after three breaths.”

Yeonhwa wrote exactly what he said. *One strand of Unraveling Qi. Three breaths. Vomited once.*

Only after Seo Muhan allowed it did Jin Cheol bring out the three nails recovered from his parents’ remains. At a small brazier in the archive, he bound them to a single ring without dulling their different notes. The crude object was no weapon. It was a training implement: while circulating Unraveling Qi inside his body, he would test which nail’s tremor reached him first.

He had nearly finished when a carrier pigeon came beating up from below the mountain. Yeonhwa untied the message from its leg. The note bore the mark of Mulle Valley’s information network.

*Do Changsu demands double the protection fee. In three days, he will take grain and one child.*

Her face hardened.

Jin Cheol tried the opening stance of Drifting Step. His years at the forge pulled his feet too wide; one attempt woke the pain in his ribs, and the thread of Unraveling Qi scattered.

“We can be down in three days,” he said.

“When will you train?” Seo Muhan asked.

“I’ll be breathing on the way.”

They left the Archive of Forsaken Obsessions before sunrise. The original iron leaves traveled in Yeonhwa’s pack, the resonance implement separately in Seo Muhan’s medicine case. Jin Cheol carried only his copy of the first chapter inside his robe. He stepped into the first half-stride of Drifting Step as the black silver grass brushed their separate burdens and bent them all in one direction.

Chapter 6. The First Crack

A broken loom leg had been driven into the ground like a stake at the entrance to Mulle Valley. From it hung the blue banner of the Unmun Escort Agency, marking a village that paid for protection.

Beneath the banner sat twelve sacks of grain and a twelve-year-old boy named Gangho.

Yeonhwa ran to him. “Who told you to sit here?”

“My mother.”

The boy did not cry. He repeated, as if he had learned the words for an examination, that the escort agency would feed him and teach him martial arts. Fresh crescents marked the inside of his wrist where his mother’s nails had dug in while she tried not to let him go.

Jin Cheol seized the banner pole. Yeonhwa caught his wrist before he could tear it from the earth.

“You pull that down, the fight starts today. Prepare first.”

“They mean to take him today.”

“And when you rush in and get beaten down first, who stops them?”

He let go.

During the three-day descent from Blackwind Mountain, he had kept his breathing matched to his steps until the thread of Unraveling Qi lasted ten breaths. That was barely enough for Seo Muhan to call him an entry-level third-rate martial artist. The sutured flesh at his shoulder had scabbed over, but he still could not twist hard through the ribs Do Changsu had battered. Every attempt at Drifting Step widened into the forge stance his body had known for years.

The Sutra of Unraveling had changed him. It had not changed the odds.

Do Changsu arrived at sunset with two subordinates, though he entered the village alone. When he saw Jin Cheol, his thumb nudged the hilt of his saber clear of the scabbard.

“So you did attach yourself to old Seo.”

“Leave the child.”

“Our agreement says that if the protection fee comes up short, we may take payment in people.”

Yeonhwa stepped forward with the ledger tucked under her arm. “Who signed that agreement?”

“The former village head.”

“He died at Cheonggye Village. You intend to take a living child under a dead man’s seal?”

Do Changsu’s eyes settled on the ledger. He did not bother pretending to smile. “I don’t enjoy this. But if I miss this month’s tribute, my sister and nephew are thrown out of the agency’s inner compound. If that is all they suffer, they will be lucky. I still owe the debt for my initiation.”

“Why should this village repay your debt?” Jin Cheol asked.

“Who else will?” Do tapped two fingers against his dantian. “Debt flows downhill. I’m being crushed from above too. You spent enough time outside sect gates to know that no one gives away martial arts. I was beaten and starved from thirteen onward to open this. If I retreat now, those years disappear, and so does my family.”

When he finished, he tightened the knot on Unmun’s banner twice. His hands had paused only while he spoke of his sister and nephew.

“Give us two days,” Yeonhwa said. “I’ll set what you collect beside what the Unmun Escort Agency actually receives.”

“And what good will that do?”

“It will separate what the village owes from what you stole.”

His face chilled. “Still quick with figures after losing two fingers.”

“I’m quicker. I can’t afford mistakes with what remains.”

Through all of it, Do Changsu watched the ledger. He granted the two days and took a room at the village inn, posting a subordinate by the window to watch anyone carrying papers in or out. He noticed Jin Cheol following at a distance, but an opponent newly admitted to the third-rate realm earned no more than a snort.

For two days, Jin Cheol studied the traces Do left rather than the man himself. Water at the well drew inward whenever Do held his breath. After someone refused him, his left hand always pressed the scabbard before his right foot moved. The body of a late third-rate martial artist was too fast to chase, so Jin Cheol stopped trying. Between the well and the weaving room, where a wall denied the saber room for a broad stroke, he marked a half-step in the dust and practiced turning on his heel. His ribs endured one attempt in twenty.

Yeonhwa covered a courtyard wall with the common ledger and Unmun’s receipts. In two years, Mulle Valley had surrendered seventy-eight seom of grain. The agency acknowledged forty-one. Twelve seom of the missing amount had been charged as interest on Do Changsu’s initiation debt; Cheongu Hall and the escort guards between Do and Unmun had divided the rest.

She sent copies down three roads. The network of nine villages harmed by the same system sent back a tally promising to release the testimony of the six rescued children. The copy addressed to Clerk Bak Munsu produced nothing. Their runner reached the magistrate’s gate and returned empty-handed. The Cheongha Escort Agency, a rival to Unmun, also stepped back from its earlier interest: unless the magistrate stamped the filing, it would not ask the three merchant companies to move their contracts.

“If we had trusted all three,” Yeonhwa said, laying the unanswered packet beside Cheongha’s hedged reply, “we would be waiting for two answers while they carried off one child.”

One route remained alive, and the figures were already in front of the villagers. People whose grain Do had seized stood beside neighbors who had once asked his subordinates to drive bandits from the road. The same protection could be real and still be used to strip them bare.

“Starting today, no household pays alone,” Yeonhwa told them. “If they draw steel, then we do not take the beating alone either.”

Seventeen households owned a hammer or a loom shuttle. They would not use the tools as weapons. At an agreed rhythm, they would strike stone and walls, drowning the breathing cadence Jin Cheol had memorized. Those same seventeen households heard the exact limits on the resonance implement: it would only help Jin Cheol find his timing; he must stop at the agreed signal; and no one had consented to using it for any other purpose. Each household pressed a handprint to Yeonhwa’s page. Only then did Seo Muhan open his medicine case and release the three-nailed ring from his custody.

Do Changsu returned at sunset on the second day with six men. The ledger on the wall stopped him before the villagers did.

“Take that down.”

One subordinate stepped forward. The villagers closed the way, sickles and hoes in hand but held low.

Yeonhwa raised a copy above her head. “This went to nine victim villages, Clerk Bak Munsu at the magistrate’s office, and the contracts office of the Cheongha Escort Agency. Bak did not answer. Cheongha wants an official stamp before it risks anything. But the paper reached them, and nine villages already hold the children’s testimony. Tear down this copy, and that fact spreads first.”

A man named Bak Seok left Do’s line and approached the wall. Beneath the name of his father, Bak Nosik, he read the same entry twice.

*Funeral expenses: three nyang of silver. Interest charged after repayment of principal: seven nyang.*

“The agency gave us one nyang for my father’s funeral.” Bak Seok looked back. “Where did the rest of this debt come from?”

Another subordinate, Yu Gap, found his sister Yu Wol’s name. Two nyang for medicine had become a nine-nyang initiation deposit. When Do ordered them to rip down the ledger, Yu Gap lowered his saber hand.

“Explain my sister’s debt first. I won’t touch this paper.”

Do bared his teeth. “Get it off the wall. I’ll forgive both initiation debts.”

Bak Seok never looked away from his father’s name. “You’ll forgive debts that never existed?”

He too stepped out of the road. The four remaining men glanced from their comrades to the villagers, and none drew a saber.

Do Changsu leveled his scabbard at Jin Cheol. “So the first thing you learned was how to hide behind others.”

“Today I don’t take the beating alone.”

Do drove off the ground.

Hammers answered from every quarter of the village. Loom shuttles cracked against walls—bang, bang, then a beat displaced, a pattern that promised order and denied it. Do’s first breath disappeared under the noise.

Jin Cheol watched the left hand pressing the scabbard and the turn of the right heel. At Perception, Unraveling Qi could do no more than brace his senses and posture from within his own belly and legs. Nothing passed from his body. Outside him, only the physical vibration of hammers, nails, stone, and steel moved through the village.

The Mind’s Eye caught the broad course of Do’s internal energy as it rose from below his navel, crossed the right side of his waist, and climbed toward the shoulder. Perception did not announce a weakness. But Jin Cheol had watched this motion more than twenty times, and just before the qi reached the shoulder, Do’s left ribs opened.

Half a step took Jin Cheol out of the completed stroke.

Not far enough. The scabbard passed before his nose and smashed into the wall, spraying stone across his cheek, but its edge clipped his shoulder and numbed the arm. Do kicked off the wall and turned faster than Jin Cheol’s body could answer. The return blow found the old bruises along his ribs. Bone cracked inside him, Unraveling Qi broke apart, and the rim of the well struck his back.

“This is the martial art you stole?”

Do drew his saber. There was no blade aura along the edge, but internal energy made the steel hum low in the hand.

Swallowing blood, Jin Cheol took out the resonance implement. Three old nails hung from one crude ring. It could neither stop a saber nor bring down a man. He pressed the ring to the well stone and flicked it once.

The bent nail rang first, answering the saber’s note.

That sound gave him his marker. Hammers and shuttles crashed louder as Do abandoned his hearing and used internal energy to steady his center. The well water puckered inward.

Two, one, pause.

Jin Cheol moved before the blade came free. He was not faster; he had chosen the shortest road. Ducking under the edge, he planted his left foot outside Do’s right. For the first time, the opening step of Drifting Step held.

An elbow crashed down across his back. Pain tore through the burns and darkened his sight, but he did not retreat. From inside his robe he drew a short chisel, set its point beneath the saber guard, and braced the blunt end against the well’s rim. Iron bridged stone, chisel, saber, and wrist.

When the bent nail trembled hardest, a heavy hammer struck the well’s foundation stone.

The shock traveled through stone and metal into the bones of Do Changsu’s wrist.

Do’s fingers opened by reflex, then closed again. That tiny correction collided with the last count of the cadence Jin Cheol had memorized—*two, one, pause*. Do sent internal energy into his arm half a beat too early. His wrist, not yet locked, received the force of his own body.

The saber fell into the well.

Do clutched his wrist. The numbness would soon pass. Neither his meridians nor his dantian had been harmed; his qi circulation was already searching for its rhythm.

Jin Cheol did not put the chisel to his throat. He kicked the fallen scabbard away instead.

“Give us the tribute ledger.”

“You won’t kill me?”

“If you die, your debts disappear with you. So do the names of the people above you.”

As Do’s qi circulation recovered, Jin Cheol’s legs gave out. His chest struck the corner of the well, and the cracked rib finally broke. Seventeen villagers filled the alley behind him. Bak Seok and Yu Gap had taken their places in front of the wall, not at Do Changsu’s side.

Even without his saber, Do could have killed Jin Cheol. He looked first toward the weapon at the bottom of the well, then at the ledger, then at the two men who had lowered their blades. His gaze lingered on the tally from the nine villages. When it reached the entries for his sister, Do Jeongran, and his nephew, Do Yun, a muscle jumped in his jaw.

The spaces reserved for the magistrate and Cheongha were still empty. But if he cut down seventeen villagers now, everyone could see what would fill them next: bodies, testimony, names carried along nine roads, and four subordinates forced to choose whether to join him before witnesses.

His foot shifted toward the well. Then it moved half an inch back.

Do Changsu pulled a small book from his robe and threw it into the dust. “Do not touch my sister or my nephew.”

Yeonhwa picked it up. “Their names go in a different column from their debts.”

Unmun’s blue banner came down. The twelve sacks returned to the common storehouse. Yeonhwa asked Gangho whether he wanted to go home with his mother or first meet the six children staying at Obok’s northern farm. Holding his mother’s hand, he chose to meet them. He would decide where he wanted to live and learn after he had seen the place for himself.

Jin Cheol had a broken rib, and the Unmun Escort Agency still stood. But from then on, Mulle Valley would no longer be stripped one household at a time.

Some villagers wanted to burn the agreement with Unmun. Yeonhwa stopped them. An unjust contract still preserved the names and seals of everyone who had enforced it; they would need those in the next fight. The paper went into an iron chest in the common storehouse, and three different households each took one key. No single person would own what the village had won.

A new rule was fixed behind the old agreement.

*No child may be surrendered for debt, protection fees, or initiation fees. A child who returns chooses where to live and where to learn.*

The six children at the northern farm sent their own decisions. Two would return to their families once those families’ false debts had been struck from the ledger. Four would remain with Obok for the time being. The village pledged grain and witnesses to enforce both choices. After meeting them, Gangho would be asked in the same way. Seven living children, seven choices no creditor would make for them.

Do and his men withdrew empty-handed. Before crossing the pass, he looked back once. There was less resentment in his face than warning: a greater creditor was coming behind him.

That night, one villager proposed pinning Do Jeongran’s and Do Yun’s whereabouts beside their entries on the wall.

“We need to know where they are if we mean to keep Do Changsu from returning.”

Yeonhwa took the paper down and folded it. “I promised their names would not be treated as debts. If the agency casts them out, Mulle Valley sends two mal of grain first. Their location stays in the inner record inside the iron chest.”

Agreement did not come easily. Someone asked whether the village would still feed an enemy’s family if another child failed to return—another child like Hajin. Gangho’s mother placed one mal from her own share on the floor. The common storehouse supplied the second. They would hide Do Changsu’s family, if hiding became necessary, without hiding what he owed or what he had done.

Later, Yeonhwa bandaged Jin Cheol’s injuries. She wound the cloth with her right hand and held the knot steady with the three fingers left on her other. When he tried to lay his hand over hers, she put the medicine bowl into it.

“If you could have destroyed Do Changsu’s dantian forever today, would you have?”

The answer rose at once and stopped behind Jin Cheol’s teeth. Do’s power crushed people below him. It was also the only livelihood holding his sister and nephew inside the agency compound. Taking it might reduce one set of victims and create another.

“I don’t know.”

Yeonhwa pulled the knot tight. When he groaned, she eased her hand a little.

“I’ll write that down. If you ever start saying you know too easily, I’ll show it to you.”

***

Hundreds of li away, Cheon Muryeong laid three reports side by side in the Murim Alliance records archive: the disturbance at Cheongu Hall, the dye-house fire, and Do Changsu’s account from Mulle Valley. Seo Muhan, a burned blacksmith, and repeated sounds of struck metal overlapped. The three nails and the failure in Do’s qi timing appeared only in Do’s statement, so Cheon marked them separately rather than turning one witness’s claim into common fact.

In the final column he wrote not a conclusion, but a hypothesis.

*An external physical stimulus produced by the same individuals may be connected to Do Changsu’s failed qi timing. These reports do not establish that Unraveling Qi—or any energy projected outside the body—was involved.*

He tied red thread around the name Mulle Valley, took up his investigator’s badge, and left for the south before dawn.