Chương 7: I Am Zero

The ornate doors of the main hall within the Obsidian Palace exploded inwards as Mu-cheon kicked them open. The young disciple marched across the polished marble floor, his oxblood silks damp and clinging to his chest. In his arms, the young man carried a sodden bundle of black hemp. With a grunt of exertion, he hurled it forwards. The two halves of the assassin tumbled across the ground, leaving irregular streaks of blood in their wake.

"How?" Mu-cheon demanded, his angry voice rattling the decorative braziers on the walls. He pointed at the bisected remains.

"How does an assassin scale the Blind Face, bypass the Iron Vigil, and reach the third floor of the Archives without a single bell ringing?" The conversation in the room immediately died out. Even the Sect Leader was taken aback. He had been in the middle of a discussion with two of the sect's High Elders, Gwak Mun-su of the Archives, and Noh Gwan-ho of the Disciplinary Court. Elder Noh stepped forward to look at the corpse.

The wizened man was barrel-chested despite his age, with a thick, veiny neck that made him look shorter than he really was. His head was bald except for two tufts of grey hair that stuck up on either side. He dropped to one knee as he inspected the half of the body with the head attached.

"No tongue," the Disciplinary Elder announced to the now silent room. Sect Leader Kang Hyeon-je rose from his seat, his imposing form blocking out the braziers behind him. He descended the steps of the dais, the sound of his footfalls echoing ominously until he stood over the remains. The towering man looked down at the bisected pieces of the intruder with interest.

"A hidden expert," he observed softly.

"And likely a very expensive one. Mu-cheon – you did this?"

"I did." The Sect Leader nodded approvingly, before turning to Elder Noh.

"Lock down the sect. No one goes in or out until a full investigation is completed." The Disciplinary Elder nodded gravely.

"It seems the Iron Vigil failed in its duties tonight, Sect Leader. The responsibility is mine. I will find the cause and root it out." Elder Gwak stepped forwards.

"I'll have a worker bring the corpse to the Lower Vault for inspection. Maybe there will be something we can learn from it." Mu-cheon folded his arms in front of his chest and glared at Elder Noh.

"I would hope we've already learned something from it, elder." Chae-ha tried to get some sleep in her room in the Archives' dormitories, but the adrenaline coursing through her veins made it impossible. The scene of their shared triumph over the assassin played back in her mind again and again. She kept trying to commit each moment, each movement, to memory. Her body twitched as her hands, arms, legs, and feet tried almost involuntarily to trace out the paths she imagined.

The young girl tried to calm herself by listening for the familiar sounds of the sect at night – whistling winds, chirping crickets, and hooting owls. But if they were present, they were completely drowned out by the sound of her own rapidly beating heart. The percussive rhythm seemed to grow louder and more frantic the more she tried to silence it. Nothing was working. Exasperated, she rose, unable to contain herself anymore.

Chae-ha began mimicking the motions from her memories while standing in front of her mattress. Dissatisfied with the results she was getting in her under-layers, she donned her scholar's robes again. But then she encountered another problem – the small room didn't provide enough space for the garment to flow. Giving up on sleep entirely, she ran up to her workstation in the Archives instead.

Once there, Chae-ha practiced for hours on the balcony where she and Mu-cheon had fought, trying to recreate the motions she had used and to understand why they had worked. When she eventually exhausted her stamina, she plopped herself down at her desk to rest – only to have her attention immediately drawn to the copy of The Taxonomy of Vital Pathways still serving as a makeshift paperweight.

She picked up the book and opened it, tracing the intricate diagrams of nerve clusters and arteries it contained with her finger. Years ago, after accepting she could never heal her own broken body, she had scoured the sect's acupuncture scrolls looking for a way to at least defend herself. But she had quickly learned a bitter truth: without Ki to inject into an opponent, a perfectly placed acupuncture needle caused nothing but a harmless prick.

She reached up and felt the long, steel bookbinding needle in her hair. Positioned correctly, it could do a lot more than that. What she needed to target wasn't mystical pressure points – it was biology. In a frenzy of inspiration, Chae-ha began to pull out all the discarded medical texts and scrolls she had stashed around her desk. After assembling them, the young girl pulled out a blank manual and placed it down in front of her. She picked up a brush, dipped it in the inkwell, and began to write.

The air in the Lower Vault was stale and full of hanging dust.

"There are no markings on the blades or the gauntlets, and no regional weave in the silk. Also, as Elder Noh said, his tongue is missing," High Elder Gwak reported.

"The man is a Specter – a person scrubbed of their history by a professional hand."

"The Hundred Ghost Pavilion," Sect Leader Kang Hyeon-je hypothesized from across the slab. The dark iron threads couched into his oxblood robes looked like abyssal cracks in the dim light.

"Almost certainly. Hiring him would have cost a mountain of silver. Do you have any idea who might have such a vendetta against you, Mu-cheon?"

"I think I might," the young man replied bitterly.

"The Black Ink Consortium." Stolen novel; please report.

"The moneylenders from Jining?" asked Elder Gwak.

"Why would they want you assassinated?"

"I think they may be the ones funding the expansion of the Meng-shan. I was about to start looking into it more when this bastard attacked me."

"Do you have proof?" the Sect Leader asked.

"I do not."

"Then there is little we can do immediately," Elder Gwak interjected.

"But I will pass the matter off to the Intelligence Bureau to see what they can find. If there is indeed an active contract against the Young Master, this attempt on his life will not be the last."

"There is still something I don't understand," the Sect Leader observed.

"An operative of the Hundred Ghost Pavilion. Landing a killing blow on one of their experts is not an easy feat – even for you, Mu-cheon. How did you best him?" Mu-cheon wiped a smudge of blood from his jaw, his expression darkening with the memory of how close he'd come to death.

"I didn't," the young man admitted.

"I was losing. He was faster than me, and he was pressuring me so heavily I thought I was going to suffocate. My life was saved by the archivist girl – Chae-ha." Elder Gwak's head whipped around suddenly.

"My clerk? Young Master, the girl can barely carry a heavy book…"

"She threw herself at him," Mu-cheon explained.

"I think she was trying to stab him with her hairpin. It was a suicidal move – reckless and desperate. But the assassin had to twist to stop her, and that gave me the opening I needed for the Gye-san-byeok." He looked at his hands, still feeling the vibration from the impact of the strike inside of them.

"It was a fluke. She got lucky, and I got luckier. But it's true that she was the one who stopped him. I was just the one who cut him in half." The Sect Leader looked at his disciple, and then at the bisected corpse, thinking deeply.

"Mun-su, my old friend. Please have this corpse taken to the Disciplinary Court. I would like to speak with my disciple in private."

"As you wish, Sect Leader," the Archive Elder replied. A short while later the corpse had been removed, and Elder Gwak was bowing as he exited the room. Kang Hyeon-je turned to face his son, disciple, and successor.

"You speak of this girl often, and you've spent five years wandering into the Archives to spend time with her, Mu-cheon," the Sect Leader began, his voice quiet but resonant in the now empty vault.

"I've allowed it because I understand your feelings of guilt, and because Mun-su speaks well of her work. Tonight, it seems that investment paid a dividend." Mu-cheon stood tall, though his shoulders shook slightly at his father's tone.

"She saved my life, Sect Leader."

"She provided a distraction," Hyeon-je corrected him.

"Do not confuse luck with destiny. You are my direct disciple and eventual successor. Your future belongs to the sect's restoration." The Sect Leader paused, his implacable gaze passing over the young man as if appraising him.

"I think it is time that I told you. Within the year, we will begin negotiations with the Cheok family. Their daughter is a prodigy of the spear, and your union will help bring their military might under our wing." The young disciple remained silent, his jaw set.

"If you wish to reward the archivist girl for her service tonight, do so," the Sect Leader continued, as he began to ascend the stairs.

"Ten taels of silver seems appropriate. But remember your place. You may keep her in your shadow if you must. You may even take her into your house when the time comes." Kang Hyeon-je looked briefly back over his shoulder.

"But you know as well as I do – the girl can never be anything more than a concubine. Do not let a civilian clerk interfere with your ambition." Mu-cheon watched his father disappear through the doorway, bitterly hating how the man was always right, and despising himself for not having the courage to challenge him. Later that evening, Mu-cheon stood in the shadows near Chae-ha's desk, watching her work.

His hand rested inside his robe, his thumb absently turning over several small, jagged fragments of silver hidden deep within an inner pocket.

"Little sister," the Inner Disciple said, withdrawing his hand, "we need to talk about what happened last night. And… the Sect Leader is preparing a reward for you," he offered, trying to sound cheerful about it despite his sinking stomach. The young man stood close to her workstation, trying fruitlessly to get Chae-ha's attention. Her focus was entirely dedicated to the work-in-progress manual in front of her.

Her brush flew between inkwell and page as she cross-referenced numbers with the medical volumes on her desk.

"Not now, senior brother," the young girl replied, too engrossed to even look up.

"I can't afford to lose this momentum." He caught her hand as she raised it to return her brush to the inkwell again.

"We need to talk. This is important. Please." Chae-ha started to shake his hand off, before looking up and seeing unexpected vulnerability in his eyes. She grudgingly lowered the brush, her gaze dropping down towards her lap as she sat back.

"Okay," she almost whispered.

"Little sister, we both almost died last night. And ever since then, you've been acting…crazy. Are you alright?" She considered his question.

"I haven't felt 'alright' in a very long time, senior brother. But right now is probably the closest I've come. And I've never felt more sane."

"That assassin almost killed you, and you don't even seem to care! That doesn't seem very 'sane' to me. Why don't you explain this grand revelation you've had to me, so I can understand what's going on?" Chae-ha hesitated, unsure how to put her complex thoughts into words.

"That assassin was trained to fight warriors. He was trained to sense Ki. He spent his entire life learning how to counter force." She picked up a steel needle, the light of the candle on her desk glinting off its three-sided point.

"But I have no force," she whispered.

"I am nothing. I am…zero. And that's why he couldn't counter me."

"Little sister, you're deceiving yourself if you think you can actually fight someone like that. I am deeply grateful to you for saving my life, but you need to be honest about what happened. You got lucky." Chae-ha shot him a withering glance and rose from her seat.

"It wasn't luck, Mu-cheon. Think about it this way: if someone can't use Ki-sense to detect me, then that means they have to use their eyes. But the eyes can be fooled." She stepped away, creating a little distance between them.

"Watch this." Without warning, she stepped aggressively towards her friend. Mu-cheon flinched backwards, convinced she was about to crash into him. But when he looked again, he found her inexplicably standing by his side. After a moment of surprise, he realized a steel bookbinding needle was now pinning his sleeve to the cedar support column behind him. A look of bewildered confusion crossed the young man's face. Chae-ha couldn't help but giggle at his reaction.

"I've been practicing that all day. If I step forwards just right, the momentum of these ridiculous robes makes it look like I'm continuing straight, even when I start pivoting inside of them. I call it the Hwan-yeong-bo – the Phantom step." Mu-cheon went to remove the needle, expecting it to slide out from the wood easily, but found it surprisingly well stuck. He looked more closely, only to see that it had been nestled snugly into a small crack between the grains of the wood.

He tugged harder, this time pulling it free.

"That was…incredible," he said.

"But now that I know about it, it won't work again." Chae-ha's face fell a little.

"Yes, well…I'm still working on that part." She shook her head to clear it, her eyes lighting up with excitement and determination again.

"But don't you see, senior brother? I don't need to hack someone in half with a sword to fight. The sect already has plenty of people who can do that. What it needs now is someone who can control space and create openings. It needs…a ghost."

"And your ideas for how to do that… are what you're writing in that book?" Holding her breath like she couldn't wait to show him, Chae-ha reached across her workstation and turned over the cover page, so the young man could see the characters she'd written. 參 (Cham) – 點 (Jeom) – 術 (Sul) Mu-cheon's eyes widened. He was used to associating Cham-jeom-sul with "The Art of the Sundering Edge." These characters sounded exactly the same, but the meaning was different. They read: The Art of the Penetrating Point.

Chae-ha's heart beat faster as she looked at the words. Her eyes narrowed with grim determination as she looked up.

"What I'm writing in this book, senior brother – is a new ending for my story."