Chapter 47 - Returnees IV

“Work? What work do you mean?”

“Hoho. I have it all planned out. Just watch, little brother.”

The Sword Marquis abruptly walked out of the rest stop.

If I, Undertaker, were the sort to stay put just because someone told me to, I would have quit being a regressor long ago. Naturally, I followed him. The old man merely glanced at me once and made no particular attempt to stop me.

He had been hopeless with directions right up until we reached Mount Hua, but now he deftly wound his way along the mountain paths, as though a navigation system had suddenly been installed in his brain, complete with the latest updates.

Just as I decided I ought to ask where on earth he was going, he squatted down.

“...?”

At first, I thought he was tired from climbing and taking a break. I was wrong.

The Sword Marquis was taking something out of his pouch. I approached and craned my neck for a discreet look. Seeds. It must have been the seed pouch he had treasured ever since we left Ulleungdo.

He was placing those seeds in the soil between the rocks.

“...?”

Another question mark appeared in my head. Seriously, what was he doing?

“Brother, what are you doing? Please explain it to your little brother.”

“Hoho. Rebuilding.”

“Rebuilding?”

“Or restoration. To lend it a poetic flavor, you could even call it regression.”

Rebuilding. Restoration. Regression.

An utterly incomprehensible string of words.

But when I questioned him, he simply chuckled and stroked his beard without giving me a proper answer. That response only annoyed me more, so I followed him every step of the way.

There was little reward for my persistence. He just repeated the same tasks: climbing the mountain paths, planting seeds, covering them with what little soil the rocky mountain offered, and tenderly patting the mounds with his wrinkled palms.

The next day. And the day after that. On and on.

No, seriously, what was he doing?

'And he can walk perfectly well!'

That was what baffled me. He had made extensive use of my back while we crossed the Central Plains, yet upon reaching Mount Hua, he suddenly seemed brimming with energy and climbed like a champion. Had this old geezer been pretending to be frail all along?

'Did he actually trick me...?'

Hauling an aged body up and down a rocky mountain couldn't possibly be easy. Yet the Sword Marquis rose at dawn and walked without rest until evening.

He didn't even complain of sore muscles. He bustled tirelessly about, as though he were a car and Mount Hua's air were gasoline.

Just in case, I sat cross-legged and tried something resembling a qi-circulation breathing exercise myself. My scientific research yielded only the conclusion that neither the air of Seoul's Gangnam nor that of Mount Hua contained any mystical ether properties.

ROOOAAAR!

“Oh dear, little brother! Help! A creature of the wicked Demonic Cult is going to kill the Mount Hua Sect's leader!”

Besides, no matter how I looked at it, he didn't seem to be pretending. The Sword Marquis was genuinely, one hundred percent a weakling. He couldn't even handle a supernatural beast the size of a wild boar and routinely fled to me for help.

His stats lay at opposite extremes, as though he'd put ninety-nine points into stamina and only ten into combat strength.

“This really is strange...”

In the end, I had no choice but to follow him around as his bodyguard.

Eventually, even that became a nuisance, so I simply wiped out every monster near Mount Hua.

While I was at it, I traveled around Chang'an and the Guanzhong region... in modern terms, the area around Shaanxi Province, hunting anomalies. People thanked me with all sorts of gifts of food and clothing.

One week. Two weeks. Three weeks.

Just as the people of Guanzhong started calling me the [Mount Hua Sect Taoist]—a nickname bordering on black comedy—sprouts emerged wherever the Sword Marquis had planted seeds. They were growing at a distinctly unusual rate. Clearly, the ability that had made him an S-rank awakened, [Plant Growing], was at work.

“What kind of sprouts are these?”

I muttered to myself. Asking him wouldn't get me a proper answer anyway.

For now, one thing was certain: they were trees, not grass or flowers. But that was where my encyclopedic knowledge ended.

With all my experience as a regressor, I could recognize most plants, but my botanical knowledge wasn't deep enough to identify a species from such tiny saplings.

“Hey. What exactly are you?”

The sprout gave no answer.

Late summer passed.

The Sword Marquis's eccentric undertaking continued through early autumn and beyond winter.

Pure white snow settled on Mount Hua's ink-dark rocks. In this ruined world, winter seemed to bury all life alive. Like any elderly undertaker, winter conducted the world's funeral with snow in a quiet, orderly fashion.

Winter's touch was cold, but gentle. Life and civilization quietly bowed their heads beneath its snowy gaze. Rumors that a million civilians in Guanzhong had been buried in the snow in just a fortnight drifted amid the flurries.

My anomaly-hunting expeditions gradually ranged farther afield, extending beyond Shaanxi into Henan Province.

“Tutorial dungeons” appeared all over the world, not just on the Korean Peninsula, and wouldn't you know it, a dungeon of unprecedented scale had appeared in a place called Yingyang Town in Henan.

Throw in terrorists from a heretical Taoist cult, and it was the end times incarnate.

What else could I do? I had to help.

... When I started my 108th run, this was definitely supposed to be a vacation. Somehow, I'd ended up working even at my vacation destination. Was this that thing they called being a workaholic?

Well, in my defense, I had business in Henan to begin with. The ancestral seat of an awakened who ran a guild called Hundred Flowers on the Korean Peninsula was nearby.

That let me obtain some useful information about them. I'll discuss that in a later episode.

Anyway.

Spring.

While all life lowered its gaze beneath winter's snowy regard, only the sprouts tended by the Sword Marquis held their heads stiffly upright. The lives his hands touched knew no seasons, cared nothing for climate or soil, and grew even through the biting winds.

By the time the snow stopped, the saplings that had once been tiny seeds had grown as high as my waist. The trees bid winter farewell a little sooner than the rest of the world and welcomed spring a little earlier.

Their etiquette toward the seasons was red: to dye the world crimson.

“Ah.”

Only upon seeing that red did I learn their name.

Plum blossoms.

“...”

The old man was planting plum trees on Mount Hua.

7

Lingering snow still lay thick enough to leave Mount Hua's rocks white.

Upon those rocks, like pure white plates, the plum blossoms arranged themselves demurely, serving up red and pink in equal halves.

The chef planting dishes in every shade of red, using this enormous mountain as his serving bowl, was a single shabby old man.

“We can start planting cuttings now.”

The old man's shadow slipped into the mountain's shadow. With every step he took deeper within it, the snowy mountain bled red into its valleys.

With practiced hands, he snapped twigs from the plum trees. Then he planted them anew between rocks, deep in the winding valleys, determined to set them in what little soil there was. Among the rugged rocks, the plum blossoms spread like moss—red moss.

“...”

After that, I curtailed my outings and spent more time with the Sword Marquis.

Mount Hua's terrain was treacherous. Even if his stamina had suddenly become limitless after arriving here, there were many gaps and empty expanses his frail legs could not cross. I gladly lent him my back.

Crossing from cliff to cliff, the Sword Marquis planted trees.

That first spring, plum blossoms bloomed near the rest stop.

The following year, masses of red flowers dyed Mount Hua's West Peak.

The giant was immense. The time it took him to die, and thus for his blood to blossom in full, was infinitely slow compared with a human life.

The Sword Marquis regulated the giant's time. He alone decreed his death and the manner of it. He would not even permit nature's law of living in spring and dying in winter.

Over three years, the giant's blood flowed past Golden Lock Pass and down to the North Peak. In the fourth year, his wound flowed sideways to the Central Peak. Then, the following year, it surged onto the East Peak. The directions in which all that death and life flowed were designated by the Sword Marquis's footprints and determined by his handprints.

Six years on the mountain.

“...”

I stood on the roof of a pavilion on Mount Hua's South Peak and looked down.

Heaven and earth were filled with plum blossoms.

Mount Hua had become a mountain of flowers.

Along every ridge slipping over the rocks, red and white flowers shyly interlaced their fingers. The plum trees' pitch-black trunks languidly rested their chins on stone. At last, the giant stilled his breath, and before that majestic death in blood, a human could only hold theirs.

And so, without any simile or metaphor, without any other interpretation or explanation:

Plum blossoms bloomed on Mount Hua.

“It is done.”

One human being could make a proposition true.

For one proposition to blossom, it had taken six years of an old man's life and hundreds of years of a regressor's.

And that proposition was beautiful.

“Now it is done.”

It was a day of spreading mist.

When mist settled over Mount Hua, the rocks vanished from sight. The mist moved as though alive. Above that opaque surface, only the scarlet flowers barely managed to raise their heads.

I, too, woke and raised my head.

The rest stop where we had eaten and slept for most of the past six years.

The Sword Marquis was not there.

“Brother?”

When that word, “Brother,” caught hold of no one, I think I already sensed something. Without even washing my face, I got up at once and followed his trail.

Far away, beyond the sea of mist, the old man had climbed to the summit of the South Peak.

And I saw something unbelievable. At first, I thought the Sword Marquis was rowing atop the rock, so thick was the mist spread beneath his feet.

But a man couldn't row on a mountaintop. Looking up more closely, I saw that what he swung was not an oar but a sword. A wooden practice sword.

The old man was performing a sword dance.

“...”

It was a sword dance, for his movements were embroidered with a sword. It was also sword mist, for each flourish of the blade sent the mountain's mist-clouds tangling and swirling. The wooden sword's blunt edge seemed to command all the mist on the mountain, just as the old man's wrinkled hands had once killed the giant in red.

He swept the world's mist about as though it were his own sleeve.

In that moment, I knew I would never forget this sight.

“...”

RUSTLE.

Somewhere, the faint sound of sliding snow arose.

Was it the Sword Marquis stepping on snow? Perhaps. The whole world was wrapped in mist, making it difficult to see ahead. Only sounds and scents touched my skin with clarity.

Within the mist, the flowers chattered, their chatter breathlessly spilling the scent of plum blossoms into the sky. No, perhaps—just perhaps—the scent was truly spreading from the tip of the old man's sword.

The wind blew. A boundless wave of mist engulfed the entire peak.

“Brother?”

With a current slower than waves, the mist rolled in and rolled back out.

White rocks and red plum blossoms revealed themselves once more.

But the Sword Marquis was no longer there.

“Brother!”

No answer came back.

Only the echo rang out: Brother, brother, brother.

Soon, even that echo was buried beneath the chatter of plum-blossom fragrance.

“...”

Suddenly, the world grew quiet.

On Mount Hua, swept by white mist, only the scent of plum blossoms flowed and flowed, suffusing ten thousand li.

8

Should I call this an epilogue?

One rather strange story remains.

After the Sword Marquis disappeared, I naturally went searching for him. In the end, I failed to find him.

If he had slipped and fallen to his death, there should at least have been a body somewhere. Even if wild animals had eaten it, traces would surely remain. Yet no matter how thoroughly I searched Mount Hua, I found no trace of him.

An utterly absurd disappearance.

'... Could he really have ascended to immortality?'

For a moment, I even entertained that suspicion.

But it was impossible. The Sword Marquis was merely an old man who had never learned martial arts. Had he truly been, as he claimed, “a master who has reached the Profound Realm,” there was no way I could have failed to recognize it. Hadn't I spent six years with him and carried him on my back for over sixty days?

Later, I returned to the Korean Peninsula and even obtained documents. The Sword Marquis was unquestionably a Korean born on Ulleungdo.

It was just that the people who had lived in his neighborhood didn't remember him in much detail.

“Oh, that old man?”

“I've seen him now and then. Sorry? Was he here decades ago, too? I couldn't really say...”

“I think he came and went. Sometimes you'd see him, sometimes you wouldn't?”

In any event, the Sword Marquis had been born on Ulleungdo. Various certificates and records proved it.

If he really had been the Mount Hua Sect's next leader and had finally become an immortal and ascended, there was far too much to explain.

First, after being born on Ulleungdo, he would have had to cross over to China no later than age fifteen. Then he would have become the sect leader's direct disciple while still a child.

Before his disappearance, the Sword Marquis had been a little past his mid-sixties. And before we crossed over to China together, he had testified that the Heavenly Demon had attacked the Mount Hua Sect forty-five years earlier.

By the time the Demonic Cult attacked the sect, he would already have had to hold the status of “the Mount Hua Sect leader's direct disciple.” In other words, by around fifteen at the latest, he would have had to shoulder all the sect disciples' expectations as their future leader... Was that possible?

What odds would he have had to overcome for such a miracle to occur?

Why, in the first place, would a Korean child born on Ulleungdo end up in China's Mount Hua Sect? How? By what route?

For that matter, in all my life as a regressor, I had never even heard that the Mount Hua Sect, something out of martial-arts fiction, existed in reality. Let alone the Heavenly Demon or the Demonic Cult.

It was an outlandish hypothesis. Nothing but an absurd story, not even worth considering. On perfectly rational grounds, I discarded the “Sword Marquis equals Mount Hua Sect leader” theory.

But much later, after my two-hundredth run, something very strange happened.

“Sir.”

“Hmm?”

“I'm sorry, but if you have anything to eat, could you spare some?”

At the time, I was walking around Incheon's Chinatown with the Sword Marquis.

The person who addressed us as “sir” and asked for food was Chinese. He probably approached us so readily because he had mistaken the Sword Marquis, with his long white beard, for a fellow Chinese man.

“Ah—”

As our journey in the 108th run had demonstrated, I was the only one of us who spoke Chinese. Wondering how to avoid embarrassing the man, I hurried to answer in Chinese before the old man beside me made things awkward.

That was when it happened.

“Of course.”

Before I could open my mouth, fluent Chinese came from beside me.

I was so startled that I whipped my head around. There was the Sword Marquis, replying to the young man in Chinese as though it were perfectly natural.

“This venerable one has little on hand, but how could I fail to grant even the modest request of a passing traveler who has spoken to me?”

“Sorry? This venerable one?”

“As it happens, I was carrying home some dumplings I bought over there. They may not be much, but take these and refresh yourself.”

“Ah... Thank you, sir! I'll never forget your kindness!”

“...”

My mouth hung wide open and showed no inclination to close.

My astonishment lasted until the young Chinese man who had received the vegetable dumplings had gone out of sight. Barely, just barely, I regained my senses and grabbed the Sword Marquis's slender shoulders.

“Wait, Lord Sword Marquis. Hold on. Just a moment.”

“Hmm?”

“You could speak Chinese?”

The Sword Marquis blinked.

“Chinese? What are you talking about?”

“What? You were speaking Chinese just now! With that young man!”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

He blinked with an expression of genuine incomprehension.

“What has gotten into you, Undertaker? I said nothing at all. I merely handed him the dumplings.”

“No. Wow. No.”

Did he think I, Undertaker, would fall for this bullshit?

I immediately dragged him through Chinatown, searching every corner.

But the young man we'd just seen was nowhere to be found, and attempts to strike up conversations with other Chinese people were useless.

Apparently unable to understand a word of Chinese, the Sword Marquis shouted in frustration.

“Good heavens! To think a young fellow of the martial way would persecute me so merely because I cannot speak Chinese! Chivalry knows no nationality. My language skills may be somewhat lacking, but my attainment surpasses anyone's!”

“...”

In the end, not a single word of Chinese came out of his mouth. Nor did he look as though he was lying.

Wasn't it enough to baffle even a ghost?

Even now, I cannot be sure whether the Sword Marquis truly became an immortal and departed this world beyond Mount Hua's mist, whether he conversed fluently with a Chinese man in Incheon's Chinatown, or whether all of it was something I had merely seen and heard in hallucinations.

I learned only one thing.

The martial world is indeed full of strange and extraordinary people.

- Returnees. End.