V9-B C30

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18-2 Behind the scenes, the village manager of Tetsui reached out for help. The request was passed along to Gyousou when he arrived at the village of Shikyuu.

p. 344

Tetsui was home to the shire castle. It also enclosed the village of Tetsui. The manager of that village was the one seeking assistance. He claimed that something strange was going on with the people in the shire castle.

The village manager was driven out by the shire. Along with several of his friends and relatives, he fled to Kan’you Mountain. But there they were cornered. They really needed his assistance. If that wasn’t possible, then he at least wished to get a fair hearing, or so said the messenger sent in their place.

Feels like a trap, Gyousou thought.

He leaned back against a rock wall and let out a long breath. Given that the village manager had dispatched the messenger, Gyousou could bring him along on the return trip. He had reportedly loaded up with food and provisions and was heading back on his own. If the land gangs helped themselves to those provisions along the way, the whole thing would be for naught.

As long as they were going to see the village manager, it only made sense for Gyousou and the messenger to make the journey together.

It had to be a trap. There were no two ways about it. So why take him up on the offer?

Contempt probably had something to do with it. Reports about a company of Asen’s men led by man named Ukou had reached his ears. Ukou first came to his attention on the punitive expedition to Bun Province, when they were attached to the army as sentries. Though Gyousou had never spoken to the man, he remembered his name and face.

During the reign of Emperor Kyou, he’d served in the Army of the Center. Gyousou recalled that no one had anything good to say about him or his martial skills. That being the case, if he was walking into a trap, he was more than confident he’d have no problem fighting his way out of it.

p. 345

His pride came into play in no small way as well. Once Tetsui was mentioned, there was no backing down. No one was going to accuse him of leaving the village manager in the lurch.

But of course, even as emperor, he was willing to face any danger for the good of Tetsui.

If this was a trap, those were exactly the kinds of rumors he’d expect to hear. The whole situation had been shaped in such a manner that he had no choice but to meet those rumors head on and once again rush in where angels feared to tread.

And so it was from the beginning, Gyousou thought.

The same thoughts crossed his mind when he heard that Tetsui was in danger. The mere mention of Tetsui roused him to action. He had two choices. He could mobilize a division of the Palace Guard Army to save Tetsui or go there himself.

The Palace Guard was his to do with as he saw fit. If he dispatched the Army of the Left, and an entire division at that, then any sense of obligation would surely be satisfied. But rumors were bound to arise that now that he was emperor, he was simply playing it safe. He’d have to venture to Bun Province in person.

At the same time, he understood perfectly well his hand was being forced, and by going to Bun Province he was heedlessly putting himself in harm’s way.

Given the exigencies of the situation, Asen undoubtedly expected Gyousou to lead Ganchou’s division to Bun Province. If that’s what he expected, then Gyousou would instead divide Asen’s forces. Ganchou, Gashin, and Risai remained in Kouki along with three regiments of Asen’s army. That should curtail Asen’s range of options.

p. 346

These thoughts on his mind as they approached Bun Province, Gyousou couldn’t shake the feeling that Asen had already factored his countermeasures into his plan. Perhaps Asen wasn’t as interested in Gyousou going to Bun Province as he was in separating him from the capital while in the company of Asen’s retainers.

He’d considered bringing Ganchou along. Even accompanied by Ganchou and his army, Gashin and Risai would remain behind in the capital. Two divisions of the Imperial Army against Asen’s one. If an insurrection actually broke out, they could quickly muster reinforcements from the provinces. There was no chance of the Imperial Palace falling during his absence.

The problem was Taiki.

Bringing Taiki with him to Bun Province was out of the question. Nor could he just send Taiki to a more secure location. He shouldn’t have any reasons for doing so in the first place. If he did, he’d be all but announcing he was wary of assassins lurking in Kouki. He had to avoid giving Asen grounds for believing that Gyousou harbored any doubts about him before he made his move.

So Taiki remained in the Imperial Palace.

Even though Asen couldn’t possibly take the palace with a single division, he could kill Taiki. That was why he had to divide Asen’s army. The odds were good that doing so would heighten Asen’s wariness, but it was the only compromise he could come up with at the last minute.

And the only choice left to him, which only made his suspect Asen’s motives all the more. He had to wonder if he’d been led in that direction all along.

p. 347

I’ve known so from the start, Gyousou reminded himself with a wry smile. Even if he figured it all out in advance, all he could do now was dance to Asen’s tune.

He was at a distinct disadvantage. Asen could either go forward or call the whole thing off. The one or the other was always up to him. Gyousou didn’t have those options at his disposal. He would have to pick up whatever gauntlet Asen threw down. But he couldn’t attack Asen before he acted.

Much better if he could have laid his hands on hard evidence of a brewing rebellion before it happened. Asen was too smart to let that happen and Gyousou couldn’t have him killed without any evidence. He wasn’t the kind of man who would fabricate crimes in order to justify taking out a feared foe.

Gyousou was certain that that Asen would rise up at some point. He couldn’t predict when and what the inciting factor would be. In public, at least, Asen showed Gyousou all the respect and deference he was due. He got along well with Gyousou’s retainers and appeared to be on good terms with Taiki. There were no reasons to doubt him. That was just as true now as then.

If Gyousou had to sum up his feelings in a word, it was the atmosphere Asen carried about him. He felt a chill whenever they met, like the touch of cold steel at the back of his neck. Gyousou sensed nothing in Asen’s speech and conduct to justify this reaction, but at some point he’d come to believe that Asen had every intent to stage a coup d'état.

Gyousou didn’t know why. Perhaps Asen desperately desired the throne and could not stomach the fact that it belonged to Gyousou.

p. 348

Strangely enough, he was pretty sure that wasn’t the case here. Asen’s motivations were that transparent.

“What has taken possession of you?”

He turned the question over and over in his mind and came up with nothing, except that whatever the answer was, it must have left Asen infuriated.

With no other avenues left open to him, he departed for Bun Province with Asen’s retainers under his command. Knowing he was walking into a trap, he let Ukou take point. Ukou detoured down a side road with twenty-five mounted soldiers. Gyousou thought so little of them he was confident he could take on that many if push came to shove.

And if they did attack him, that would provide proof positive of Asen’s conspiracy.

Which was why he borrowed a small number of Sougen’s men and ordered them to tail him at a safe distance. Gyousou didn’t know what happened to them. He doubted they were still alive. They wouldn’t have been any match for Ukou and his crew, but then Ukou’s actual strength far exceeded the capabilities Gyousou expected from him too.

Thinking about it now sent a shiver down his spine. Ukou wasn’t the only one. All of his men possessed a chilling set of martial skills. Ukou was a more talented fighter that Gyousou thought. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that Asen had a whole company of soldiers just like him at his disposal.

Despite being listed on the Registry of the Gods, it was a miracle he was still alive. Sure, he could have handily handled one or two of them. But he was no match for that many and ultimately had no chance of prevailing in the fight. He’d never experienced such a crushing sense of despair since the day he was born.

p. 349

“My pride got the better of me.”

That’s what he wanted to believe. Having taken his enemy for granted, he was caught off guard by the overwhelming force of an attack that exceeded his expectations. These unexpected developments caused him to lose his composure, making his opponents appear stronger than they really were.

Because if that wasn’t the case, he would be forced to admit the existence of soldiers with skills nothing short of the supernatural. For entirely different reasons, that was something Gyousou did not wish to accept.

Because that would mean Asen had resorted to using youma.

In any case, Gyousou was attacked on Kan’you Mountain. Resigned to his own death, he lost consciousness. When he came to, he was engulfed in darkness. For a while, he couldn’t move. Though not in any great pain, he could not feel his limbs. Surrounded by the pitch black, he wasn’t sure whether he still had his arms and legs

The sensation eventually returned to his extremities. He had no idea how much time it took, but after what seemed forever, his nerves slowly came back to life, accompanied by a flood of pain. When the agony subsided, he was finally able to move, except he had no idea where he was or what sort of situation he was in. He could not see beyond the darkness, a darkness so pervasive that at first he thought he’d lost his sight.

He managed to move around, his hand and feet almost numb from the pain. He slowly searched his surroundings relying on touch alone. He detected hard stone and narrow fissures and water. He eventually concluded he’d ended up on a bed of gravel between craggy outcropping of rock, next to several shallow pools of water.

p. 350

The presence of water was a stroke of good luck, as was the minimum rations of medicine and food he’d been carrying on his person during the march to Bun Province. At the same time, the bracelet wrapped around his wrist was undamaged. The silver bracelet was one of Tai’s Imperial Regalia. It provided a kind of life support. Every kingdom had at least one such piece of jewelry. That the one belonging to the Kingdom of Tai was a personal accessory not easily separated from his person saved Gyousou’s life.

As best he could tell, both of his legs were broken. Though his arms were intact, several of his fingers had been fractured as well. Despite his body being covered with wounds, he could still move around. Fortunately, he was able to gather a fair amount of dry wood, which he used first used to make splints and then light a fire.

The flickering illumination at last allowed him to comprehended the nature of his surroundings. He was at the bottom of a deep vertical shaft.

The top of the shaft was so far above him the light from the fire disappeared into the gloom. The floor of the shaft formed a misshapen bowl like an earthenware mortar, piled with boulders and gravel, perhaps from the nearby landslides. Mixed among the boulders were the remains of the timbers that likely once held up the mine roof.

Several of the timbers looked relatively new and may have collapsed at the same time that Gyousou fell down the shaft. The almost vertical stone walls left after the ceiling collapsed clearly showed the chisel marks left by human hands. Here and there he could make out glittering bands in the striated gravel beds

He was at the bottom of a mine shaft on Kan’you Mountain.

p. 351

Believing Gyousou was dead, Ukou must have thrown him down the mine shaft, intending to consign his body to oblivion. This mine shaft was deep. Not only deep, but the tunnels accessing the shaft were sealed off by cave-ins. Otherwise, when the White Pheasant did not fall from its perch and Asen realized that Gyousou was not dead, Ukou should have returned to finish him off.

No matter how badly they blundered, now they couldn’t easily get anywhere near him. That was why no assassin had paid Gyousou a visit while he was incapacitated.

Though they were bound to show up someday.

The fall had broken his legs at odd angles. He pounded on them with his hands and set them in place. He had a compound fracture in his left leg. He retracted the flesh himself and pushed the bones back into place. He was happy enough that there was no one there to hear his cries of anguish.

When he finished treating himself and was at last able to move, Gyousou crawled around and inspected the bottom of the hole. He discovered several tunnels branching off from the main shaft, mining tunnels most likely, six in total. Two were low enough for him to reach. Water had collected in them. He concluded that when the underground water table rose, water channeled through the tunnels filled the bottom of the shaft. It was possible that when he was thrown down the shaft, the water was deep enough to break the fall.

He chose the tunnel from which he felt with the strongest draft of fresh air. It led him to a grotto alongside a subterranean river.

p. 352

The grotto was probably also what remained of previous cave-ins. Boulders littered the undulating ground, except for a room-sized space next to the river. There the cave floor was free of fallen rocks and was mostly smooth, having been hewn with human hands. The high ceiling above retained its natural form. He could imagine someone chiseling level the ground below.

The cave had originally been created by the underground stream. The risk of further rock slides should be slight. Water was close by and air flowed through the chamber. So this was where he settled down and set up house.

Gyousou could hardly begin to grasp the many months and years he had stayed there.

A long time passed before he was able to freely walk around. When he could, he explored the maze of mining tunnels and committed their particulars to memory. He hammered away at the bedrock with small boulders stones to create footholds, allowing him to move up and down through the caverns.

He knapped stones to make spears, which he used as digging bars to break up the rockslides blocking off the tunnels, which he then dug through by hand.

Strangely enough, he never wearied of his efforts. Ukou undoubtedly could have stripped everything he had from his person. He didn’t, leaving Gyousou with the bracelet. He lost his sash when he was attacked from behind. But as he carried his scabbard, short sword, and whetstone on a separate belt, he kept them all with him.

Hanging weapons from the sash was an old custom. The scabbard was fitted to a metal ring in the sash. But the sash Gyousou wore was gift from the Imperial Han, and it came with no rings attached. Fortunately, as it turned out, Gyousou chose to consign those utilitarian uses to an old-fashioned belt instead.

p. 353

The belt was woven from silk. Unraveling the strands turned them into effective tinder. On a subsequent search, he found Cold Jade. That was the name he’d given his sword. He was holding the sword when he was slashed from behind. He was certain he had dropped it, but it must have gotten tossed into the abyss with him.

Cold Jade was gift given him by Emperor Kyou. Anyone would identify it as a rare and renown weapon at a glance, which meant that no thief could sell it or use it in public. It’s existence alone was proof of the assault that took place. With that in mind, Ukou must have disposed of the sword the same way he did Gyousou’s body.

More random actions that in the long run accrued to his benefit.

With an army on the march, personal belongings had to be kept to a minimum. He fell into water, breaking his legs but not his arms. These strokes of good luck were becoming too innumerable to count.

He felt like someone had delivered orders from on high for him to live, whatever the odds.

Like the baskets carried along the river to the shallows of his narrow shore from somewhere high above him. They contained spirit money and paper garments, actual paper implements and food. He felt a new lease on life whenever he plucked these occasional gifts out of the water.

No matter what I have to endure, no matter what it takes, I will live on.

As emperor, he had one primary task before him and that was to survive. A kingdom losing its emperor upset the balance between heaven and earth and threw the elements into confusion.

Counting the time from when he awoke to when he went to bed as one working day, he carved a calendar onto the cave wall. He could only make rough estimations, but he did his best to attend to the festivals and holy days too. He had to depend on the baskets that arrived on the shore of the cave. Meager though they were, Heaven should accept the intent with which the offerings were made.

p. 354

Beyond tending to those daily tasks, he searched for a way out. He explored the tunnels as far as he could walk and found no way out. He followed the subterranean river upstream until it disappeared underground for long stretches. Diving into the pitch black and fighting the current yielded no productive results.

The only option left to him was to dig through the rock slides left from the cave-ins. He excavated the weakest parts of the slides, piled up the rocks and created a path he could crawl through. He cleared three tunnels this way and found no exits on the other side. The fourth proved so unstable that the columns of rock couldn’t stabilize the tunnel walls and he finally abandoned it.

But the fifth tunnel eventually led him to a large cavity in the rock. It was likely a natural formation, the rock walls carved away to form an almost vertical ravine. Far, far away in the inky blackness glowed a tiny dot of light, glowing like a single star in a perfectly dark sky.

In all of his explorations, Gyousou hadn’t found a way of descending deeper into the earth. He had probably ended up in the depths at the bottom of Kan’you Mountain, meaning the summit was now a vast distance above him. But there definitely was a passageway to the outside world. When it rained, a fair amount of rain water fell down the shaft

Given the great distances involved, the hole the light was shining through must be fairly large.

He chiseled footholds into the rock and built scaffolding out of wood and stone. Day in and day out, traveling back and forth from the cave where he lived, the work proceeded at a snail’s pace. He lost track of how long he’d done the same thing over and over, and yet was clearly making no progress. He hadn’t climbed the ravine walls to even ten times his own height.

At this rate, it would take him years to reach the top, surely longer than Heaven would allow the throne to remain empty. Warring with that growing sense of unease, one day as he traveled to work in the ravine, he came face to face with his final gift from the gods.

p. 355

There next to a cluster of descending fissures in the rock, Gyousou heard the first sound of a living thing besides himself.

The low-pitched growl told him this was a youma welling up from the depths of the earth.

His immediate reaction was that his luck had finally run out. He had a sword, but there was no telling whether that weapon would be any match for a youma. But all the more concerning was that the proliferation of youma meant that Heaven and Earth were out of balance and the decline and fall of the kingdom had begun.

Heaven had finally decided to cast Gyousou aside. If so, he had no defense to offer, given the years he had abandoned the throne entrusted to him.

Except this wasn’t the case. The creature that appeared in the flickering light of his makeshift lantern was not a youma but a youjuu.

A black suugu.

Heaven had bestowed one last miracle upon him. Gyousou knew how to wrangle a suugu.