#251
Ganghwan Realm (3)
“Hmm, so you’re saying there isn’t anything like a map?”
“Y-yes, yes! As you can see, a small mountain stronghold like ours couldn’t possibly have something like that, nor would we have any real need for it. We do have something that roughly marks the nearby mountain paths and village locations, but that’s less a map than a crude scribble. Yes...”
Gong Pal, the Hwangrim Stockade Chief and bandit leader who had made his base on Yanghyeongsan, kept bowing as he quietly wiped away cold sweat.
Though the handsome young man before him looked far younger than himself, there was no longer even the slightest thought in his mind of taking the other lightly.
In the murim, where it was not uncommon for a woman one had thought ordinary, or even a child not yet of jihak age (志學; fifteen), to have attained a considerable level, being a bandit was an extreme occupation as well.
Unlike the riffraff who squatted on some tiny mountain road to extort pocket change, setting up an actual mountain stronghold—even on a mountain that was not particularly large—was only possible if one had learned a fair bit of martial arts.
And was this not an age of warring states, where the dynasty that had ruled all under heaven had collapsed, and powerful families, regional warlords, and armed groups from every land were repeatedly forming and breaking alliances?
Naturally, Gong Pal himself was a martial artist who had just barely scraped into the first-rate level...
‘A monster? ...No, an immortal? Damn it, what kind of disaster is this all of a sudden!’
Yet the incomprehensible being before his eyes was someone even he dared not measure.
When his subordinates had first brought in some pale, colored-eyed scholar, he had thought they had captured the scion of some noble household for ransom.
The style of the clothes he wore was certainly similar to martial attire, but the fabric and the stitching looked far from ordinary.
‘Damn it, I should’ve realized when I saw his eyes and ears. Those damned fools! If he was that kind of monster, they should’ve told me sooner!’
His mistake had been dismissing it as some deformity common among colored-eyed foreigners.
And so, before properly hearing what his men had to say, he had immediately taken a hard line in order to show his dignity as the boss...
A chill—
Immediately after.
The moment his eyes met those star-shaped pupils filled with languor.
He tasted a fear he had never even imagined before.
‘Shit, I’m remembering it again...’
Gong Pal, who had been standing respectfully before Harris as he sank into thought, gently rubbed the goosebumps on his arms.
That dreadful sensation, as though all things under heaven, from sky and earth to every living thing, were looking upon him with hostility.
He had prided himself on having lived his whole life with nature as his companion, together with the mountains, yet at that moment, the forest that had always felt as comfortable as his own room had felt like the inside of a beast’s stomach.
And what followed was the current situation.
“Hmm... Hunan Province, Hunan Province, is it? And the war is still ongoing.”
Seated in the chair covered with beast hide that had belonged to Gong Pal, Harris muttered to himself.
It was a smooth, beautiful voice, like jade beads rolling together, befitting his appearance, but to Gong Pal, it was no different from the pronouncement of King Yama himself.
After that, he had to put his head together with his men and rack his brains for a long time in order to provide Harris with the information he wanted.
‘I should’ve moved somewhere else long ago!’
Until that being, no different from a natural disaster, was suitably satisfied and left.
***
Whoooong—
A lone figure cut across the sky as though he were a bird.
It was Harris, who had gathered the information he needed and set out once again.
‘It’s been over ten years since the last information became known, so perhaps that’s why. The situation seems worse than what I investigated beforehand.’
He had already known that the empire ruling this land had fallen and wars had begun everywhere, but now more than ten years had passed, the situation had hardened, and public order had deteriorated to a serious degree.
Not only at the province level in each region, but even down to the county level, large and small conflicts never ceased.
‘And this Hunan Province is no exception.’
At least these days, after a fair amount of time had passed, large-scale full frontal wars did not occur as often as in the beginning.
It might be said that the war situation had mostly settled into a stalemate, with each side nibbling away at the other’s territory through minor local skirmishes.
Among them, the greatest forces in Hunan Province were the warlord faction of General Won Gang, a member of the military, the water bandit alliance known as the Dongting Eighteen Stockades (洞庭十八寨) centered around Dongting Lake, and the Hengshan Sect (衡山派), the representative of the orthodox factions in the region.
‘They said various minor powers attached themselves to those three according to their own interests. I don’t know how much of a mess it must be for water bandits to occupy one of those seats, though.’
That was something he could confirm by going there himself.
...Yes, Harris was currently on his way to Dongting Lake, the base of the Dongting Eighteen Stockades.
There was no particularly grand reason why he had chosen that as his destination.
It was simply—because it was the closest.
‘I don’t have time, so how long am I supposed to keep poking around the outskirts? I’ll ram into one of the big ones first, then rip out anything I need!’
Besides, the Dongting Eighteen Stockades were a den of bandits, so there was no need for his conscience to ache.
They must have forcibly collected wealth based on their strength all this time, so even if they were robbed in return, they would have nowhere to complain.
‘Projecting the power of spirits, beings from another dimension, doesn’t suffer that much reduction in power either. As expected, it must be thanks to the five-million-point “Dimensional Barrier Mitigation.”’
On top of that, while Harris’s condition was not one hundred percent perfect, this was still far better than he had initially expected.
Perhaps because he had moved away from the World Tree, the peculiar indolence that had filled him within had also subsided considerably.
‘Oh? Found another one.’
After flying across the sky for a while like that.
Sensing a presence at the edge of his perception, Harris changed direction toward it and dropped to the ground.
Whiooo—
What entered his sight was a shallow natural cave in the crevice of a cliff.
A place split and uneven, not easily visible unless one looked carefully.
Landing there, he naturally extended his hand—
grabbed the stem of a certain plant, and pulled it straight out.
With just that, a human-shaped root came out cleanly without the slightest resistance, not a single speck of dirt clinging to it.
“This makes three. This one alone is better than the previous two combined.”
Harris nodded in satisfaction as he examined it.
This root was what one would call a spiritual medicine, a mysterious spiritual herb filled with “qi,” the energy that flowed through this world.
‘Is this the man-shaped ginseng I’ve only heard about? Fascinating. The root really does look like a person.’
Perhaps due to the nature of qi, which was fundamentally light and free, yet whose density rose without limit once it gathered around some catalyst, the Ganghwan Realm had many spiritual things in which the energy of nature had condensed beyond a certain degree.
They were things that were difficult to see in Auterica, where mana, somewhat heavy and viscous in nature, formed the basis.
This man-shaped ginseng, despite being a plant, possessed spirituality and could hide its own energy, but to Harris, a high elf who literally felt the nature of an entire area as if it were his own body, finding them was no more difficult than eating cold porridge.
There were so many that he passed over the ones that seemed somewhat mediocre, and yet even while collecting only those that seemed acceptable by his standards, he had already found three.
‘Perhaps because this isn’t a spiritual mountain, the energy within them isn’t all that impressive.’
Even so, this much had come merely from collecting what happened to lie along his path.
If he truly set his mind to it and toured the famed spiritual mountains of each region, just how many spiritual medicines would fall into his hands...
‘Mm, I’ll have to be sure to remember that and put it into practice whenever I have time.’
Everything he obtained that way would have no small influence on his growth.
After that, calling forth the wind spirit Pascal once more and wrapping a whirlwind around himself, he glanced briefly at a mountain ridge some distance away, then flew straight into the sky and shot off toward the north.
Whiiing—!
“Huh?! Wh-what is that...?”
Thud!
And right on the mountain ridge where Harris’s gaze had touched.
An herb gatherer who had happened to see him fell on his rear and gaped.
He had heard all sorts of rumors about the amazing martial artists of the murim, but even in those exaggerated tales, there had been no mention of beings who controlled the wind and roamed freely through the sky.
More than that, no matter how he looked at it, that was less a martial artist than...
“An im-immortal? No, a mountain god?”
It had vanished too quickly for him to see clearly, but since the sight had been so striking, he remembered distinctly that the being’s hair had flashed with radiant gold.
As though the sun in the sky had descended to the earth.
“...This isn’t the time!”
In great haste, the herb gatherer hurried to the place where the divine being had ascended and searched the surroundings thoroughly.
What he had just seen was surely the divine being bestowing something upon him.
“Ah!”
And there, he found several roots of spiritual herbs that had grown nearby under the influence of the energy gathered around the man-shaped ginseng, which Harris had judged to be “below standard” and left behind. He immediately prostrated himself on the spot and bowed.
“Ughh! Thank you, thank you! Spirits of heaven and earth! With this much, our Dong’s medicine costs... I can finally save that child... Khhk!”
An herb gatherer who, despite his difficult circumstances, had climbed the dangerous mountain in order to somehow save his child.
For some reason, the efficacy of the herbs gathered over the past few years had sharply declined, leaving him with a bleak future; yet, amid Harris’s indifference, he had gained a great harvest for the first time in ages.
With that, he was able to pay not only the expensive medicine costs, but even feed his family hearty meat soup.
‘We’ve arrived. So this is Dongting Lake? What kind of lake looks like the sea?’
And so, while the person in question remained unaware, tales of a divine being who roamed the sky with a golden halo around his head slowly began to spread by word of mouth.
***
When he had decided to send Harris to the Ganghwan Realm.
At first, he had fallen into worry over how to conceal that alien appearance.
‘Magic tools brought from another world might be usable on Earth, but they can’t be used in another dimension filled with energies of a different nature.’
That had become common knowledge after it was revealed that the magic tools the wealthy had gathered in preparation for transmission were utterly useless in the other world.
And it also meant that unless Harris used an ability personally, he had no way to conceal his appearance.
‘And Harris, as a spirit archer, doesn’t have that kind of ability.’
Then should he at least wear a mask?
But that alone could not conceal his extraordinary pupils, shining brightly in the shape of stars.
It was a troublesome situation in many ways.
And while agonizing over it, a question suddenly occurred to him.
‘Why? Is there any need to go through the trouble of hiding my appearance?’
Harris was a powerful being who had reached transcendence; by the standards of the Ganghwan Realm, he was a master of the Profound Realm.
According to the rough preliminary investigation, even generously counting the number of hidden hermits who might be in seclusion, there were only about ten people in the current murim who had reached such a level.
In that situation... why should he care about others’ gazes and wrap himself up tightly?
‘There’s no need! My appearance is unusual, so what are they going to do about it?’
And so, he had ended up acting openly and confidently, just as he was now.
Since martial-arts-style clothing could be obtained easily even on Earth, he had shown at least the sincerity of preparing martial attire.
Whiooo—
Rumble— Crackle!
“Aaaargh!”
“S-save me...!”
But now that he had actually come here, it was also true that he wondered if it might not have been better to find some way to hide his appearance after all.
With this distinctive appearance combined with the unusual ability known as spirit arts, it seemed...
“Aaaah—! It’s a monster! A monster has attacked!”
“St-stop it! You fools! How long are you going to keep screaming— Guhh!”
“Hieek! How are we supposed to fight something like that?! We can’t even get close!”
“N-Namo Amitabha... M-monster! Begone!”
...the reaction of those who faced this sight was far more extreme than expected.
Goooo—
Crack, crackle—!
An enormous storm coiled around the area with Harris at its center.
Dark clouds, drawn in by that force, covered the sky.
And lightning mingled within them, scattering sparks in every direction.
At this moment, his appearance was that of a great monster who summoned wind and called rain (呼風喚雨), no matter who looked at him.
‘No, is this not an appearance issue?’
Now that he thought about it, if someone who used such abilities suddenly invaded their base and smashed it apart, it seemed likely they would react like this no matter what he looked like.
‘Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now.’
Harris shrugged lightly and looked again at his target.
This was one corner of the Dongting Eighteen Stockades, the headquarters of the Eoryong Stockade.
It was the place that would become the first sacrifice of the journey he would make through the jianghu.