A Soft Body

I had killed a god-cultivator with a broken blade and three fingers. So it was, frankly, embarrassing to be defeated by a flight of stairs.

I made it four steps down before this body's legs gave out, and I sat down hard on the cold stone of the Mun estate, wheezing like a bellows with a hole in it.

Mun Garam. Third son. Sixteen years old. Known throughout the family for two accomplishments: fainting at the sight of blood, and being so unremarkable that his own father sometimes called him by the dog's name.

I knew all this because I was him now, and because, in the life I'd just left, I had read his obituary. Mun Garam had died at seventeen, trampled in a stampede he was too slow to run from. A footnote. A nothing.

Thirty years from this morning, the Demon Cult would burn the southern provinces. I would spend my youth becoming the only man who could stop it, and I would succeed, and at the feast they threw to honour me, the seven great sects would smile and pour me wine and watch me drink it.

I remembered the taste of the poison better than I remembered my mother's face. That was the kind of man I'd let myself become.

But here. Now. Sixteen years old, in a body that fainted at blood, thirty years early, here I could do it differently. Here I knew every technique, every betrayal, every grave before it was dug.

I just had to survive being this weak first.

"Get up," said a voice.

I looked around the empty stairwell. No one.

"Down here, you sweating disaster."

I looked down. At my hip, where Mun Garam wore a plain, cheap, ancestral sword that no one in the family had bothered to take from the useless son, the blade was glowing, faintly, the way a sword glows when it is very old and very awake.

I knew that glow. I had spent a lifetime earning that glow. This was Seoljeong, the Frost Resolve, the spirit-blade that in my last life only answered me after I had bled for it on nine mountains.

"Seoljeong," I breathed, and my voice cracked, because Garam's voice cracked. "You're here. You're early."

"Who," said the sword, with enormous suspicion, "is Seoljeong?"

I stared at the hilt.

"You're Seoljeong. You're the Frost Resolve. We. I carried you for forty years. You called me Master. You wept when I died."

A long pause. The glow flickered, unimpressed.

"I," said the sword, "am a sword in a cupboard that has been bored for one hundred years, and I have just been woken up by a teenager crying on the stairs. I do not know you. I do not weep. And you are sitting in a draft with a body that has the spiritual foundation of a damp radish." The glow dimmed pointedly. "Master. Ha."

So. My legendary partner remembered nothing. My body was a damp radish. My family thought I was the dog.

And somewhere out west, thirty years from now, seven sects were already practising their smiles.

I put my hand on the cold floor and I made myself stand up, one step, then another, legs shaking, lungs screaming.

"Fine," I told the sword. "You don't remember. Then I'll make you remember the long way. Watch closely, radish-judge. I'm going to do all of it again." I climbed the next step. "And this time I'm not drinking the wine."