Chapter 429: A Past Entwined by the Four Spirits (4)

“Whew. These days I can’t even keep at it for half a day. I’ve certainly lived long enough, but watching my stamina fade still leaves a bitter taste.”

Lee Beon rose, thumping his lower back.

Haemun clicked his tongue.

“What’s so surprising about it? At our age, no one would bat an eye if we went to join the Buddha this very evening. Losing stamina is hardly a new development.”

“Come now. Going to the Buddha would be a blessing. I’d simply like to accomplish something first, so I can at least face him without shame.”

“I doubt the Buddha is particularly pleased with what we’re doing here.”

“Must you put it that way?”

“Wouldn’t he rather we spent this time contemplating the path to enlightenment? Let’s be reasonable—what secret of reincarnation could possibly lie in immortality...?”

“There you go again. Good grief. For a man whose job is deciphering texts, you’ve become awfully fond of talking.”

“If I don’t chatter, how am I supposed to endure all this labor?”

“Enough. I’m going to get some sun. Don’t overdo it. Take a break yourself.”

“No. I abandoned everything to come here. I’m not going to spend my days taking it easy like you, Brother.”

“Give it another three years. The boredom is indescribable.”

Their banter concluded, Lee Beon thumped his back again and left the cavern.

The tunnels were long—so long and winding that memorizing their layout alone would take a solid two weeks.

Of course, the people living here, all former monks, knew the interior well enough to navigate it with their eyes closed. That was hardly surprising. Even the most recent arrival, the youngest among them, had already lived here for more than eight years.

“Whew.”

Lee Beon emerged outside and drew a deep breath, his face brightening with pleasure.

“People really do need sunlight.”

The caverns were cooler than one might expect. Luminous pearls and moisture-repelling pearls kept the air reasonably dry, which made the chill even more pronounced.

Lee Beon was one hundred and seven years old that year.

In an age when ordinary people struggled even to live a full sixty-year cycle, he had survived well past a century. More remarkably still, despite being over a hundred, he remained vigorous enough to look no older than seventy.

Lee Beon closed his eyes and circulated his True Qi.

HMMMMM.

A serene current rose from his dantian and flowed through his entire body, driving out the cold and turbid energy that had seeped into him.

Lee Beon smacked his lips.

“My internal force is moving even more slowly now.”

Having practiced qi circulation and breath regulation for more than a century, his Inner Qi could arguably rank among the finest under heaven in terms of purity and depth alone.

He had refined it again and again, repeatedly bringing it to new states of perfection. Without such True Qi, he could never have remained this vigorous at his age.

That, however, applied only to his Inner Qi. It had been more than thirty years since he had left behind the blood-soaked storms of the martial world. These days, even evading the blade of an ordinary Peak master would not be easy.

Hah. Has my time finally come?

If his internal force was slowing, then his mind was slowing as well.

Internal force moved according to intent. At the ultimate heights, the moment the will arose, internal force could move fast enough to fully execute a technique at once.

Lee Beon had never reached quite that lightning-fast level, but there had been a time when even he had stood on the threshold of the Limitless Realm. Now even that True Qi moved only as quickly as his aging mind could focus its intent.

Hmm.

Lee Beon looked down at his hand, then raised his gaze toward the sky again.

A faint smile appeared.

“I have lived a long time.”

When he turned sixty, he had feared death. Though he had not been a monk, he had been a believer who followed the Dharma, yet even faith had not freed him from the primal terror of dying.

At seventy, the fear had faded, but melancholy remained. The thought that the being called Lee Beon would vanish from this world—and that the world would scarcely change after his disappearance—left a bitter taste.

Then eighty passed.

Then ninety.

Only then did Lee Beon finally accept death completely, as a natural part of the world’s flow.

No.

He had even begun to regard it as a blessing.

For every living thing, death was a promised rest.

An eternal sleep. A chance to escape the noise and turmoil of the mundane world and finally know true repose.

That was precisely why one had to work all the harder while alive. After all, once death came, there would be endless ages in which to rest. Before that, one merely had to stay busy for a few short decades.

It was perhaps not the most orthodox attitude for a Buddhist believer, but even for one ordinary human being, entrusting one’s life to the vast flow of nature was no simple thing.

Humming under his breath, Lee Beon glanced around.

“Heigh-ho, heigh-ho. When will I die? When will I die and meet the Buddha... hmm?”

Lee Beon blinked.

In the direction he was looking sat a monk whose shaggy beard contrasted strangely with a once-shaven head on which the hair had now grown to the length of a fingernail.

It was Beomo.

Beomo sat beneath a boulder, eyes half-lidded, muttering something under his breath. He seemed to have gone without food or drink for days and had grown visibly gaunt.

Lee Beon clicked his tongue.

“There’s another pitiful soul drowning in his own afflictions.”

Tamgyeong had already told him how Beomo had ended up in that state.

Hearing it, Lee Beon had thought that Yeon Hojeong was certainly no ordinary young man—but neither was that monk, who carried so much fire in his heart.

“No matter how sharp a dagger may be, it cannot pierce iron armor. If a few vicious words from that boy Yeon Hojeong were enough to shake you this badly, I suppose you’ve been living with your ears wide open after all?”

Lee Beon stared at Beomo for a moment.

Then a mischievous glint entered his eyes.

A short while later—

SPLASH!

“Gah!”

Beomo jolted upright in alarm.

Standing in front of him was Lee Beon, roaring with laughter after emptying a dipper of water over his head.

“You fool. Do you think sitting around wallowing in misery will suddenly bring you enlightenment or burn away all your accumulated afflictions?”

“E-Elder?”

“You’ve brooded enough. Go put something in your stomach. If you want to burn away your afflictions, you have to stay alive long enough to burn them—or extinguish them, for that matter. Keep this up and you’ll die from brooding before you get the chance, you idiot.”

Beomo looked utterly bewildered. He was too shocked to react, and since the man who had dumped water over him was an elder of incomparably higher seniority, he could hardly get angry either.

Lee Beon chuckled and looked behind him.

“What do you think? Do you agree with me?”

A voice filled with amusement answered.

“I do. First one must live. Only by living can one see more, hear more, and feel more.”

“Hoho. That hardly applies to you or me anymore. We’re both at an age where we could stop breathing this evening without leaving much unfinished.”

“I think I would be saddened if you went first, Brother.”

“That’s none of my concern. You should celebrate instead. Say I have finally escaped this hellish mortal world.”

“Hahaha.”

Still smiling, Lee Beon turned his attention to the young man beside Tamgyeong.

“Oh?”

His eyes swept over Yeon Hojeong from head to toe.

Then he suddenly burst into uproarious laughter.

“Bwahahahaha! Now that is one remarkable young man you’ve brought with you!”

The sudden outburst startled not only Yeon Hojeong and Beomo.

Even Tamgyeong, who had called Lee Beon brother for many long years, looked at him in surprise. Lee Beon surely knew who the young man was, so the abrupt laughter made little sense.

At last, Lee Beon stopped laughing and looked directly at Yeon Hojeong.

“Your name was Yeon Hojeong, was it?”

“......It is.”

“Ha! What an answer! But my brother was right. Rough around the edges, certainly, but not arrogant.”

Lee Beon winked.

“Of course, I imagine you’re rather different with your enemies. Am I wrong?”

Yeon Hojeong found himself unable to answer immediately.

The old man had taken one look at him, burst into laughter, and was now even winking at him like an old acquaintance. For a moment, Yeon wondered whether the man’s face was twitching.

But more than anything else, there was something peculiar about Lee Beon’s presence that made even Yeon Hojeong hesitate in dealing with him casually.

His True Qi was clear and deep. His Inner Qi was so profoundly settled that it felt almost like a single solid mass, yet when that condensed power flowed through the old man’s voice, it became a gentle dignity that naturally took command of the atmosphere.

It was astonishing.

Yeon Hojeong was the sort of man who said whatever he pleased even in the presence of the Fighting King. By temperament alone, he was not someone who could be cowed by another person’s presence.

Lee Beon asked Tamgyeong,

“So. Did you tell him who we are?”

“I told him that, and I told him what we are doing here.”

“Puhah! How could you tell him that so easily? Every Buddhist order in the Central Plains has agreed to keep silent about it.”

“As you can see, he is not a man with a loose tongue.”

“That much I can tell. But people are unpredictable. Even if that boy keeps his mouth shut, the martial world is forever eager to drag secrets into the light in the name of ‘truth.’”

In other words, even if Yeon Hojeong himself said nothing, someone could capture him and forcibly extract the information.

No matter how strong a person was, no one knew what the future held. A day would come when even Yeon Hojeong suffered defeat, and there was a good chance such a defeat might lead to death.

And the martial world possessed methods beyond the imagination of ordinary people. Who could say what might happen if he fell victim to the Soul-Seizing Art or some unknown demonic art?

Tamgyeong answered calmly.

“He is the inheritor of the Four Spirits. He would choose death before falling prey to such methods. Besides, who can say how much longer this secret, which the Buddhist orders of the Central Plains have concealed, will remain buried here in Foshan?”

Lee Beon’s eyes gleamed.

“The inheritor of the Four Spirits... Are you certain?”

“I am.”

“You’ve already crossed hands with him?”

Tamgyeong’s smile deepened.

“Not yet.”

“Of all of us, you are the only one who ever caught the Martial God’s eye. But you have grown old as well. Without testing him yourself, how can you be certain he is the disciple of that mysterious man you spoke of?”

“That is also true. But before any of that, I wanted to introduce you.”

“You really are something.”

Lee Beon turned back to Yeon Hojeong.

“So you heard everything about what we’re doing?”

“I did.”

The corner of Lee Beon’s mouth rose.

“You don’t think we’re just a gathering of senile old men wasting away in a cave, do you?”

“I cannot say whether you old men are senile, but I doubt the entire Buddhist order of the Central Plains is a collection of lunatics.”

“What? Bwahahahaha!”

Lee Beon erupted into laughter again, nodding repeatedly.

“This one really is exceptional! I like him. Hearing about you, I wondered what sort of deranged brute could possibly behave that way, but meeting you in person, you’re quite the spirited fellow!”

Yeon Hojeong frowned.

“All I heard was that you elders were investigating the secret of immortality. I was never told what that has to do with the Four Spirits.”

“Huh?”

Lee Beon turned to Tamgyeong.

“You said you told him everything.”

“I said I told him what we were doing.”

“And you didn’t tell him how it was connected to the Four Spirits?”

“No. I told you, didn’t I? Before we started finding things out from one another, I wanted to introduce him first.”

“......And this fool actually let himself be hooked by that and followed you all the way here.”

Lee Beon shook his head, then looked back at Yeon Hojeong.

“Well, since the subject is already out in the open, we may as well speak frankly. Boy, you said you don’t know how our work relates to the Four Spirits?”

“That’s right.”

“Then perhaps you know this much. The Four Spirit Martial Art you cultivated was the supreme art of the Martial Emperor of the Four Directions—the man who became the greatest legend of all time three hundred years ago.”

“I cannot say I’m certain, but I had already inferred as much.”

“Inferred it, did you... Fine. Then let me ask you one more thing.”

Lee Beon’s expression suddenly turned serious.

“Do you believe the Martial Emperor of the Four Directions, a man from three hundred years ago, died long ago?”

His gaze sharpened.

“Or do you think he may still be alive?”

“What are you...?”

“The person who taught you the Four Spirit Martial Art—who do you think he was?”

“......”

“Not a single history of the martial world records the Martial Emperor of the Four Directions as ever having taken a disciple.”

“......?!”