A boat carrying passengers was crossing the river.
The Fist Demon and I stood on the windy deck, looking out over the river. We were growing farther and farther from the main cult.
Some people’s deviations make you anxious. What if he causes some kind of accident? Or what if this changes his life for the worse? All because of me?
But the Fist Demon’s deviation did not make me anxious at all. Was it because of the sincerity he had shown in the way he lived? Or was it because I felt that very sincerity had been pressing down on the true nature of the man called the Fist Demon?
It was then.
Rattle, rattle.
A ball made of yarn rolled to the Fist Demon’s feet.
A little child came trotting over, then stopped short. His face showed fear at the sight of the massive Fist Demon. The Fist Demon picked up the ball and handed it to me.
“Give it to him yourself.”
“Do you want me to make the child cry?”
“He won’t cry.”
Even after the Fist Demon held out the ball, the child only hesitated and could not approach, so the Fist Demon rolled the ball to him.
Little one, today is the day you received a ball from the Fist Demon.
The child took the ball, bowed, and ran back toward his parents. Watching him, the Fist Demon suddenly asked,
“You said we were going somewhere I would enjoy?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think you know what I enjoy?”
“Shall we make a bet?”
“What kind of bet?”
“If you go there and enjoy yourself, I win. If you don’t enjoy yourself, I lose.”
“What if I enjoy myself but say I didn’t?”
“You won’t do that, will you?”
“If it’s a bet, we should wager something.”
“We should wager our pride.”
It had been the same when we jumped down the waterfall.
At that, the Fist Demon looked at me with a strange gaze.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Do you not want to wager the Third Fist?”
“I do.”
“Then why not suggest it?”
“I obtained the First Fist and the Second Fist far too easily because you were generous, Fist Demon. I do have a conscience. I can’t do that again.”
It was sincere, and also something I said to score points with him.
“Now, on a man’s pride!”
I held out my fist to him.
“What is that? Are you asking for a fight?”
“When martial artists make a promise, they clash their weapons, don’t they? We fist practitioners should clash fists.”
“I will not clash fists with a baby hand.”
I looked at the Fist Demon’s hand, then down at my own fist.
“Frustratingly, I can’t deny it.”
The Fist Demon turned toward the river.
Far away over the river, the sunset had begun to fall.
“It’s nice.”
It was the first time he had ever looked at scenery and said it was nice. The Fist Demon was gazing at the river, and I was leaning against the railing, the sunset at my back, looking at him.
Could this moment of playing hooky truly be remembered as one of the heated moments between him and me?
* * *
Two days later, Geom Mugeuk and the Fist Demon were entering a marketplace where countless people came and went. If the place where the Beast Sect had been last time was the territory of the Murim Alliance, then this place was the territory of the Sado Alliance.
As they walked, the Fist Demon’s expression changed subtly. At times it hardened, and at times it showed intense emotion.
The place the two arrived at was a shabby warehouse building on the outskirts.
Geom Mugeuk handed money to the man guarding the entrance. After receiving the money, he guided the two inside. Between piles of cargo was a passageway leading underground.
After descending the stairs for quite some time, they came upon a large iron door. The moment they opened it and went inside, a rush of hot air swept over them, accompanied by a roar of cheers.
In the center was a large martial arena, and two bare-chested men were fighting, exchanging blows with their naked fists.
“This is an underground fighting arena.”
There were many kinds of underground fighting arenas in the Central Plains. Some allowed internal energy, and some allowed weapons. And there were also pure fighting arenas like the one they had come to today, where men fought only with their fists, without internal energy or weapons.
“You can pay the entrance fee and simply watch the matches, or you can bet on who the winner will be. Most people come mainly to gamble.”
“How did you learn about this place?”
“I’m interested in all sorts of things in the martial world. Since this is a place where people fight purely with their fists, I thought you might like it, Fist Demon, so I brought you here.”
There was a tremor in the Fist Demon’s eyes.
“What is it? Do you not like it?”
Then astonishing words came from the Fist Demon’s mouth.
“When I was young, I was a fighter here too.”
“What?”
Geom Mugeuk was startled. No, he pretended to be startled. In truth, he had known that the Fist Demon came from this place.
“You mean here?”
“That’s right. I was right here.”
The Fist Demon’s life, too, had not been a smooth one.
“Then how did you come to have ties with the main cult?”
“I caught the eye of someone from the main cult here and was selected.”
That much, even Geom Mugeuk had not known. It would have been before he had properly learned martial arts, but even so, where could the skill of someone with the potential to become the Fist Demon go?
“Were you undefeated here as well?”
At Geom Mugeuk’s question, the Fist Demon asked in return,
“Am I undefeated even now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t win if I fought the Cult Leader, and the same goes for the leader of the Murim Alliance and the leader of the Sado Alliance, does it not? There’s no need to call forth the countless hidden masters scattered like grains of sand across the world. Even against you right now, I could not be certain I would win.”
“I’m just a baby hand, aren’t I?”
“The Black Demon Sword held by that baby hand is frightening.”
Geom Mugeuk suddenly thought that perhaps the Fist Demon disliked the title of undefeated.
“You never know. If it became a true life-or-death duel, who can say what the result would be? You might be able to defeat my father, Fist Demon.”
The Fist Demon’s gaze returned to the fighting arena. Looking at a martial artist being beaten half to death, he said,
“If I fought the Cult Leader, I would end up like that. Even if the Cult Leader did not draw his sword.”
Geom Mugeuk nodded.
“That’s true. He is someone who would beat even his own child like that.”
At Geom Mugeuk’s words, the Fist Demon nodded with a serious face.
In truth, even Geom Mugeuk did not know what the Fist Demon’s memories of this place were like. Perhaps they were sickening to him, and it was possible this was a place he never wanted to return to again.
But the reason he had brought him here anyway was that he had now become the Fist Demon. He had risen from the very bottom of fists to the very pinnacle of fists.
Would he not have wanted to come here at least once? Would he not have wanted to feel that scorching heat once more?
Geom Mugeuk and the Fist Demon stood among the crowd and watched the match.
The heat here was so intense that even with the fearsome-looking Fist Demon nearby, no one paid any attention.
Geom Mugeuk could tell. These people, their souls half-gone, were not lost in the fighting but in the gambling. They were shouting only in anticipation of the outcome of the fight.
After watching the fight for a while, the Fist Demon casually muttered,
“The one on the left will win.”
Whose judgment was this? How could it be wrong?
The result was the victory of the martial artist on the left.
The matches continued without pause. As soon as one match ended, three or four men came out and instantly wiped away the sweat and blood spilled on the arena floor.
Meanwhile, other men held up large boards listing the fighters in the next match, their head-to-head records, and their recent results, showing them to the crowd. People placed their bets after looking at those.
This entire process unfolded in an instant. As if time itself were money, as if they would not allow the heat of the spectators to cool, the matches continued one after another without a moment’s rest.
The Fist Demon accurately predicted the next match as well. He was, quite literally, a prophet.
“We might be able to leave this place rich.”
Despite his words, Geom Mugeuk did not bet a single coin.
“Why not wager a little for fun?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“To be honest, I’m regretting this. I brought you here so you could feel the heat of the fighting, but it seems the heat of gambling is even hotter.”
At Geom Mugeuk’s honest words, the Fist Demon smiled bitterly.
“It was the same back then. This place… has always been like that.”
At that moment, the Fist Demon fixed his gaze on one young man.
“That young fellow has good eyes.”
Geom Mugeuk could feel it. The Fist Demon was projecting his own youth onto that young man.
“Good. I’ll bet my entire fortune on him.”
At Geom Mugeuk’s joke, the Fist Demon urged him,
“Do it. He will definitely win.”
“No, thank you.”
But the young man the Fist Demon had said would win lost the match. At the result, the Fist Demon’s expression hardened slightly.
“If I had bet as you said, I would have lost my entire fortune. We almost had to sleep outdoors tonight!”
Could the Fist Demon have misjudged their abilities? Of course not. The match had been fixed.
“Shall we ask to see the owner here?”
It would have been entirely like the Fist Demon to meet the owner and give him a stern word.
“The fixing likely has nothing to do with the arena itself. On the contrary, the arena side tries to detect any fixing by any means possible. They make enormous amounts of money just by leaving things be, so they would not deliberately create problems by fixing matches.”
It meant that the fixing was being attempted from the outside.
“Memories should simply be left buried as memories. I’m sorry.”
“What do you have to be sorry for?”
“I brought you here so you could enjoy watching the fights, but I wondered if I had only made you feel worse for no reason.”
“It’s all right.”
“Times have changed a great deal. It seems there are no pure fights like there were back then anymore.”
At that, the Fist Demon smiled strangely and said to him,
“Why do you think there was no fixing back then?”
“There was?”
“Of course there was. It changed my life.”
The Fist Demon’s gaze turned toward the young man leaving the arena, and he naturally recalled the past.
“It was one day when I had been continuing a streak of consecutive victories. The head of the black path in this area came to find me at night with his subordinates. He told me to lose the next match. Since I was on a winning streak, if I lost, he would be able to make an enormous sum of money. He said he would give me money too. It was quite a large amount.”
“What did you do?”
“I refused.”
“They wouldn’t have just let that go.”
The Fist Demon nodded and closed his eyes. The moment from back then came vividly to mind, as if it had happened yesterday.
That moment when he had thrown punches at those black path bastards, dodging this way and that as he fought.
He beat down all the subordinates who had come with him, but he could not handle the leader. The man had formally learned martial arts, while he had not yet learned martial arts at all. In the end, he was subdued by him and rendered helpless.
“If you don’t listen to me, you die.”
“You black path bastard! If you’re a man, don’t use internal energy. Fight me in the arena!”
“Words won’t do, then.”
The leader tore open the Fist Demon’s clothes.
Sssshk!
With a dagger, he drew a long line across the Fist Demon’s chest. The Fist Demon gritted his teeth so he would not scream.
“You have to lose anyway, so it’s fine if it hurts a little, isn’t it?”
In the end, the Fist Demon could not endure the pain and screamed.
“I understand. I’ll lose the next match.”
“You should have done that from the start. Then you wouldn’t have been hurt. Whenever a stupid thought comes to mind, look at that scar.”
The man left that place, laughing.
After hearing the entire story, Geom Mugeuk asked,
“So what happened?”
“What do you think happened? In the next match, I won spectacularly. I made that bastard lose his entire fortune.”
Geom Mugeuk laughed out loud. Yes, this was the kind of person the Fist Demon was.
“That’s amazing!”
“It wasn’t amazing. I was just reckless and fearless then. I was far more fearless than I am now, even though I am a thousand times stronger than I was back then.”
The Fist Demon opened the front of his clothes and showed him again.
“That is how I received the scar on my body. It wasn’t a scar given to me by some grand master, but a shabby, humiliating scar left by a mere black path bastard whose name I no longer even remember. It was a wound I did not receive even when fighting an elder of the Murim Alliance.”
Geom Mugeuk thought that perhaps the Fist Demon had never told anyone about this scar. It was not a wound of the body, but a wound of the heart.
“Isn’t it a more prideworthy scar?”
“Prideworthy?”
“You must have been far more afraid then than when you fought the Murim Alliance elder, but you endured it, didn’t you?”
“You may want to dress it up in a good light, but to me, it is nothing but a shame I wish to erase.”
“Don’t say that. I like that scar even more now. From now on, whenever I see that scar, I think I’ll remember the young Fist Demon who stood proud even without a handful of internal energy. More than a blow left by the leader of the Murim Alliance, more than a wound left by the leader of the Sado Alliance, I think that is a far more magnificent scar.”
Because he had never once thought of it that way, nor had he ever heard anyone say such a thing, the Fist Demon was momentarily bewildered. Whenever he looked at the scar, he had always felt displeased, but he thought that perhaps from today onward, that displeasure might lessen a little.
Geom Mugeuk knew. What was truly necessary to heal wounds of the heart was words spoken by someone else. Rather than thinking this and that alone a hundred times, a thousand times, it was only when someone said something like this once that the wound finally began to heal.
“Please show me that scar often.”
Feeling a heat rising from deep within his heart, the Fist Demon did not know what to say and merely looked silently at Geom Mugeuk.
Whether he knew the Fist Demon’s heart or not, Geom Mugeuk asked again,
“Please tell me the next part. Then that black path bastard must have come to kill you.”
The Fist Demon nodded and recalled the day his fate had changed.
“That night, he came to find me with every subordinate under his command.”