Part 2 - Prologue
'...What happened to my younger sisters?'
The Scholar, who had been more than able to predict their tragic ends, asked in a self-mocking tone.
[Your eldest younger sister went about hunting down demonic overlords to restore even a little of the family's name, but she encountered a demon from the previous era and was torn apart, limb from limb, and died. Your second younger sister, after losing her twin sister like that, went mad and wandered the streets, until one day of pouring rain she froze to death.]
'Is that so...'
Yes.
It ought to have been so.
With the family split into several branches, and the situation all but equivalent to extermination, there was no way those children could have been safe.
[But your youngest younger sister is, fortunately, still alive.]
The Scholar's face brightened.
'Is that so?! You mean Nani is alive? Where is she now?'
[Your youngest is addicted to narcotics. To flee from reality, no doubt. To earn the money she needs, she is living as a prostitute in a brothel in Luoyang.]
The voice gently soothed him.
[Still, she's alive, so that's good. Good. I'm glad, too, that I can finally deliver good news.]
"Keuheuheu......"
The Scholar burst into laughter as though coughing up blood.
No, he wailed as though he were laughing.
Each time his body heaved, the chains tightly woven through his shoulder blades screamed a gloomy, metallic shriek.
The chains were so thick they were nearly the width of a strong man's forearm, and they carried a deep, inky hue.
They were, without a doubt, the metal called Ink Iron, a substance without equal in hardness.
After shedding blood-mixed tears for a long while, the Scholar made excuses to the voice.
'I, ...I had no choice.'
It was the path they chose, and the result of it.
'I long ago resolved to sever every tie with this world.'
[I already know. Your resolve. And the process that brought you to it.]
For a moment, the Scholar sank into recollection.
He revisited memories that had settled like sediment in deep darkness.
They were memories from long ago, yet to him they were as vivid as if they had happened yesterday.
[The human world is certainly filthy, and ugly. And the one who made such a world is certainly man himself. Ending the age of myth, achieving civilization, and opening the age of history, was mankind's great corruption.]
'...I wanted to become Laozi.'
[You must have wished to remain as someone who merely passes by. Like him, who founded the great thought of the Taoist school, yet left hardly any trace of himself, and in the end ascended and vanished.]
'I only wanted to live without action and without desire. I didn't want to involve myself with the mundane world.'
[So you lived as the Swordless, did you not. Though you were the eldest son of a sword clan, you never took up a sword, and shut yourself in your room, making the reading of books your only pleasure. Didn't your wife understand that, too?]
'...Then, my wife? What happened to Unjeong?'
His wife, Murong Unjeong, and he had not truly shared hearts with one another.
But that did not mean she treated him carelessly.
Even though she suffered harm because of a useless live-in son-in-law, she still showed him much consideration, so he could live in comfort.
They were a marriage in name only, never even sharing a bed, yet she was one of the few people for whom he held deep gratitude.
[In the end, she lost in the political struggle. Her entire faction was expelled.]
'...Did she lose her life?'
[It was not long ago. While attending the bed of the Dread King, she bit off his male organ and tore it to shreds. Even at the execution grounds, she laughed boldly. Truly, a remarkable woman. Had she been born in an age of chaos, she surely would have become a great ruler.]
The voice chuckled.
'...She lived without a speck of shame under heaven, yet heaven did not help her in the end.'
The voice sneered.
[Nonsense. What she needed was not heaven, but you. The one who abandoned her was you.]
'...Once, I cast my own fortune.'
The Scholar raised his unseen eyes, and looked toward the sky.
'I was born under a fate ruled by the Heavenly Slaughter Star. If someone like me involved myself in worldly affairs, many would have shed blood because of me.'
Then the voice answered.
[Do you still not understand? That fate of yours has already been fulfilled.]
'...What?!'
All at once, the Scholar realized.
Everyone he cherished had been wounded, made to suffer, and killed.
He had tried to do nothing for them, but because he tried to do nothing, they all fell into ruin.
'...In the end, am I, a mere mortal being, unable to escape the solemn yoke of fate.'
If there was any difference at all, any small and trivial difference, it was only that he had not stained his own hands with blood.
[Do you understand now?]
The Scholar lowered his head.
'...Then, from here on, there is no choice but to leave it to the will of heaven.'
[How foolish!]
It was a sound he had never heard before, a thunderous roar that felt as though it would tear his eardrums apart.
[Do you still not understand?]
Unlike before, the voice was clearly agitated, and angry.
['Heaven and earth are not benevolent'. Heaven and earth are not kind, and do not look after feeble humans!]
The voice mercilessly rebuked the Scholar.
[Then at least people should help people, yet 'even the sage is not benevolent!' Looking at you, isn't that saying a perfect fit!]
The Scholar pushed back against the voice.
'But it is also said, "Heaven's net is vast, yet it lets nothing slip". Even if I do not step forward, those who commit evil will, by the law of cause and effect, receive judgment.'
[Cause and effect, you say, cause and effect?!]
The voice repeated the words 'cause and effect' under its breath, then burst into mad laughter.
The booming laughter felt like it would split his skull, and the Scholar forgot even pain, raising the arm that had lost its fingers and wrist to cover his ears.
The Ink Iron chains, trembling with the laughter's vibration, rang down into his very bones.
[Since you speak of cause and effect, I will show you an old story.]
The world before the Scholar brightened.
All at once, an unfamiliar landscape spread out, vast and boundless.
He had lost his eyes, yet he could see everything the voice showed him.
In ancient times, in the age of myth, there were those who lost everything to humans.
Even then, humans were brutal, and selfish.
In the end, a few who turned their gaze away from that horrific human world devoted themselves only to themselves, repeating cultivation again and again.
They believed there would be cause and effect that transcended time and space, and that someday there would be a great order that would make those who committed evil pay its price.
One day, after attaining enlightenment, they became immortals.
And then they came to understand the truth of the world.
Cause and effect, the absolute order they had believed in, was nothing but an illusion.
Those whose life ended merely returned to dust.
Their hun and po, their souls and spirits, merely returned to nature.
There was no afterlife, no hell, no inescapable judgment that none could avoid.
Villains committed evil, lived in fine clothes and fine food, and died.
Sometimes, thanks to their evildoing, they died before their time.
But that was only a small part of the story.
By every measure, most good people lived in extreme suffering, then died without fulfilling their natural span.
Those who squeezed out even their blood and pus lived on, enjoying fortune and pleasure even in their place, and died.
It was unbearably unreasonable.
There was no heaven to right the tilted scales.
There is no great cause and effect.
***
[Do you understand now.]
The voice asked again.
[Have you seen the truth.]
The Scholar did not answer.
The truth he faced was far too cold, and too dispassionate.
Divine punishment, judgment, were nothing more than 'fiction' invented by those who lived without even a speck of hope.
For them, salvation did not exist.
A world where every villain, each and every one of them, paid the price for what they had done, did not come to pass.
In the end, if only people could save people, then only people could punish people, as well.
'Then, then...!'
The voice asked him.
[Do you want power? Power to judge them? Do you want to make them pay a true price?]
'Yes.'
[Do you want a chance? A chance to change everything again? Do you want to save everyone?]
'Yes.'
[Even if, as the price, your soul will suffer forever with nowhere to go?]
'Yes!'
A shriek spilled from the Scholar's throat along with blood.
'I will have power! I will seize that chance!'
When he struggled violently, the Ink Iron chains clattered, and screamed.
A howl erupted from his throat.
'I will make those who are driven by mere desire pay the price! I will bring down the iron hammer on those who make other people's pain their pleasure!'
The Scholar's howls did not cease, only growing louder, and louder.
'With every ability given to me, I will rule their fates!'
And in proportion, the presence within the voice grew greater, and greater.
[At last you understand! At last you can face what you truly are! Then look upon me!]
The voice swelled until it could shake even the Scholar's soul.
Though he felt his soul trembling like a leaf in a storm, he fixed his gaze, with eyes that were now nothing but hollow sockets, into the pitch-black.
[I— We, can give you power. We can give you a chance.]
That 'thing' was within the deepest darkness.
From the distant bottom of a darkness so deep it could only be called a bottomless pit, it looked at him.
It was a single book.
It was a single scripture.
One who bore hatred toward humans made its cover from his own skin, one who bore hatred toward heaven wrote its contents in his own blood, one who bore hatred toward earth bound it with his own tendons.
[You and we pursue different ends, yet the road is the same, so if you contract with us, we will give you a new chance!]
'I will contract!'
[You will never again be able to walk openly in the light, and you will never again be able to lift your face and look to the sky. Even so, will you contract with me!]
From the beginning, the Scholar had not considered any other answer.
'Yes. I will entrust my soul to you.'
The voice— the scripture, as if satisfied with his answer, burst into roaring laughter.
[O one of affinity. This scripture is named The Ruler Of Darkness, an anti-heaven scripture that, in place of the indifferent, slothful heaven, will devour and burn up all darkness in the Saha World!]
Darkness surged up from the scripture.
In an instant, the Scholar's soul was consumed by that darkness.
As his consciousness drifted away, the mad laughter of The Ruler Of Darkness shook beside his ears.
[From now on you will breathe in darkness, and in darkness you will bring down the sword of condemnation, becoming the dark venerable one who punishes all karma in this world!]
***
The next day, the guards discovered that the Scholar had died, his entire body having poured out blood.
And yet, strangely, the corpse was said to be so light it was hard to believe it had ever been human.
As if, everything important had already drained out of it....
Chapter 01.
Dark Heaven Venerable One, Opening.
It is better to be violent if there's violence in our hearts than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.
"When violence exists in our hearts, rather than wearing the mask of non-violence to hide our impotence, it is better to be violent."
-Mahatma Gandhi [1869.10.2-1948.1.30.]