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The day before the Huashan red gate is torn down, there is a knock on it.
There stands a child, filthy and destitute, barely able to stand on his feet, with eyes full of the kind of despair that Lee Songbaek has never encountered.
This child is panting; he is almost falling, staggering as Lee Songbaek automatically supports him; the child grasps at his clothes as if his life depended on it.
The pink-plum eyes burn with an intensity of madness that a boy his age should not have; this child asks him: where is Huashan?
Lee Songbaek can't help but respond, keeping his cool, showing a gentleness that hardly anyone else in his sect would have shown when it came to Huashan.
"Huashan doesn't exist anymore", he replies, and this spreads the beginnings of horror.
(Lee Songbaek can't help but think: had he responded differently then, had he been kinder, had he been more tactful, could they have avoided it?
The answer is probably no.
Of course not.)
When they went to war, when his eldest and youngest were dying before his eyes (when Tang Bo died in his arms before all this) — he believed Huashan would stay.
Somewhere out there, so far away from this massacre, Huashan will continue to blossom. That the children they left behind would grow up, raise the sect, honor their memory, and carry on the greatness of Huashan. But he was naïve.
Their enemies came because of him; they came to finish off those who were left; the youngest, who had no one to protect them. It was his fault, he had left them, he should have come back. Did their youngest students wonder why none of them returned? Why did the carnage from which they had promised to protect them reach them? Why did they deceive them?
Their enemies came from behind; they came to betray; thieves-thieves-thieves, every one of them.
His newfound core is bursting from the way he strains it; his hands are bloody from how many names he carves into the slopes of their mountains; his body is tired and shaking — he doesn't care; it's nothing.
These mountains took him in, these are the lands he grew up in, this is the place he let down.
Cheong Myeong, Plum Blossom Sword Saint, one of the three greatest swordsmen of the century — is nothing for failing to preserve what he holds dear.
(He does not inscribe his name, among those he lost in the battle with the Heavenly Demon; he has no right to stand beside them; he cannot disgrace them all more.)
His hands are skinned and his qi is too depleted to feel the deviation, but he laughs. There is nothing in that laugh that anyone could call normal. Just him, the ruins of his sect, and the names of the dead. Cheong Myeong laughs, and laughs, and laughs.
And then he cries, silently, uncontrollably, brokenly.
Though he has no right to; he cannot feel sorry for himself; he has no time for it.
He has one thing that can keep him here among the living.
He can almost hear the voice of his sahyung asking him to reconsider, so he bangs his head against the rocks, over and over again, until the blood flows freely down his face, until the voices leave him, until they disappear without witnessing what he is about to do; which he is obliged to do because there is nothing left to do.
Huashan was destroyed: their houses were razed to the ground; their name was erased from history; their memory was trampled.
He was too late. Again. One more time.
The only thing he can do right; is to make everyone pay for it.
The Plum Blossom Sword Saint rises at the beginning of the red dawn, the petals of the plum trees rotting beneath his feet.
Later, much-much later, when because of one-man war comes; when blood becomes what you most often encounter on your path in forests and cities and homes; when the smell of plum trees is what fear, and a man without a real name, more like a dragon, a vengeful spirit, a monster who came after them instead of the Heavenly Demon, will be recognized by his laughter — the disciples of Huashan will return to their lands, not wanting to anger the monster they could not appease.
Even later, the descendants of Huashan, one of the three sects that now remain, will find rocks inscribed with names carved in stone; with blood that no rain could wash away; with the smell of rotting petals.
They will not doubt that it was done by their most dangerous and nameless ancestor, one who knew no mercy, whose grief and cruelty were unquenchable; that he destroyed too many lives, but also gave them immortal protection (because no more fool was born who dared to risk repeating that nightmare); that he met the Demon of Heaven, laughing like one monster for another.
People called him Huashan's Kanchory.
The stories of the Plum Blossom Sword Saint have faded into oblivion.