Chapter 175: Egg Heist (4)
People flee from themselves, and from humans, and from grudge and grace.
It is useless. Seeking to become an immortal, they will instead become a beast.
Rather than flying high into the sky, they crash down to the ground.
-Michel de Montaigne, <Essay>-
The backyard after the Little Heavenly Demon left.
The Lunar Society Lord sat alone, quietly sunk in thought.
“Did I end up revealing my greed…?”
He too was a Kung-Fuist who had devoted long years to training, so he couldn’t hold back.
At last, a chance had come to surpass the inner-demon that had kept him in place, unable to break through the immense wall he had faced for so long.
How could one call someone a man of the martial world if he let such an opportunity slip away. Even Darwin, who usually maintained reason as cold and hard as Cold Iron, could not withstand the temptation. It couldn’t be helped.
Telling a rising Super Junior enough to be his grandchild to leave behind his weapon. As a member of the Knights of the Turntable, it was nothing but shame.
“…No. This is surely the Trinity answering my one hundred and eight bows.”
Yet Darwin slowly shook his head.
From the start, was the timing not too perfect?
When he prayed to witness the Heavenly Demon’s martial might, the Little Heavenly Demon came to him. It had to be the spider thread of salvation God lowered into hell.
He had not fallen to temptation.
He wanted to believe that.
“My time has come as well.”
What had crept into Darwin’s heart was the same inner-demon even Queen Victoria had experienced.
At last, it was time to break free of that binding.
At first, he worried the Little Heavenly Demon would misconstrue his pure intentions.
He likely misunderstood. It was fortunate beyond measure that Gould’s secret manual had remained in his hands.
To obtain enlightenment, the three elements of heaven, earth, and man must all be present.
Even to one who denied creation, God bestowed mercy.
He had aided the Little Heavenly Demon in the attempt to save London, so later, taking a brief look at ‘that cane’ in his presence would hardly be improper.
Of course, London’s safety was not yet guaranteed, so he could not relax, but it seemed there was a secret measure to disrupt the Tsar’s plan, so he had no choice but to trust it.
“If only I can find him… the Heavenly Demon.”
Darwin himself did not realize it, but what he held in his heart now was something he could not have imagined before falling to his inner-demon.
More than worrying for London’s safety, his desire to surpass the wall had grown desperate.
The very fact that he felt no discomfort at that truth was proof of how grave his state was.
“This time, I’ll be able to overcome the demonic obstruction.”
The reason Darwin was fixated on the Heavenly Demon’s cane was simple.
Because if he only had the Heavenly Demon’s cherished weapon, he was confident he could find where the missing man was.
Needless to say, it was an idea absolutely impossible for an ordinary Kung-Fuist.
That cane had long since left its original owner’s hand, and was a weapon the disciple carried.
If one grabbed any passing duelist and claimed you could pinpoint the former owner’s exact location with only such an item, it would obviously invite ridicule.
But Darwin was a spirit-beast expert.
For a long time, he had researched the mysteries of spirit beasts that ordinary Murim people, trapped within their own country, did not know.
“The key is how deeply the Heavenly Demon’s intent still remains…”
Darwin recalled the conversation he had just had with the man who called himself the Little Heavenly Demon, Sherlock Holmes.
The various abilities of spirit beasts that shook the Kung-Fu principles accepted in the martial world still belonged to a realm beyond humanity’s understanding.
And Darwin believed one should not stop at acknowledging and accepting it, but actively use it to achieve one’s goals.
The Lunar Society, a loose gathering of outstanding Kung-Fu scholars, was a force that had long contributed to the development of Britain’s Kung-Fu.
Darwin, who led it, likewise held no resistance to actively introducing new Kung-Fu principles.
The Vermilion Phoenix and many other spirit beasts could sensitively detect the intent emitted by a young about to hatch from its egg.
And in Darwin’s case, through constant rapport and training, he had attempted to use this ability, engraved into spirit beasts’ instincts, in a way that would benefit humans.
“Now it is time to fetch ‘that child’…”
Darwin thought of a Kung-Fu noblesse house settled in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
The Wedgwood Family was both his maternal family and his wife’s family.
There, one West Highland White Terrier that Darwin had raised for a long time was living a cozy old age.
“Polly…”
The dog who once held great ambitions, left its master’s arms, and went into the martial world had now become an old dog with white fur thick upon it.
It had finished Golden Platter Paw Washing1 and removed its front paws from the grudge and grace of the martial world, but its trained tracking ability still allowed no rival’s butt sniffing to follow.
In weapons or clothing owned by a Kung-Fuist who reached a high realm, the owner’s intent, and further, spirituality, would dwell, and the West Highland White Terrier that had repeatedly consumed elixirs and trained steadily under Darwin’s guidance could detect it.
A single thread of hope that came after a long wait.
On the day the Little Heavenly Demon returned here carrying the cane, he would finally be able to reveal the whereabouts of the odd man that could not be learned no matter how widely he searched.
But before that, there was one thing that had to be finished.
“If the Vermilion Phoenix is truly flying here, there is no harm in preparing…”
Darwin returned to the estate and began packing with his wife.
Surpassing the inner-demon was certainly important.
And so was protecting London from becoming ashes.
However, the person who would protect London was already decided.
Above all, the extremely pure Yang Qi emitted by an enraged Vermilion Phoenix could flow along the earth veins and indirectly affect other regions as well.
Unfortunately, the Little Heavenly Demon seemed to have eyes for nothing but London.
“If I head north at full speed from now, I will arrive by the skin of my teeth…”
When Darwin whispered a few words of message to the Red-Faced Golden Parrot, Larry, the parrot shot off toward Scotland like an arrow.
By the time it arrived, the Northern Great Hero, already notified through Larry, would be waiting at the destination.
“To face nature instead of people at this age. One never knows a person’s fate.”
Gould, who studied the relationship between volcanoes and the Vermilion Phoenix, once predicted the regions most likely to suffer damage under the assumption that an enraged Vermilion Phoenix approached England.
Namely, the West Highland, from which his beloved Polly’s breed originated.
It was Glencoe, lined with old volcanoes.
“Then, shall we go?”
Having changed his shoes, Darwin took the posture of four-legged walking and immediately kicked off the ground.
-Kwaang!
A strange lightness skill that leapt in a parabola while keeping the crawling-on-four posture.
The Imitation Fist master, transformed into a single beast, began to sprint north, his beard fluttering.
Even while driving the carriage, Mycroft remained focused on issuing Direct Message orders to other drivers we met on the road (…Butler Agency agents in disguise).
He seemed to be working his head in a dizzying way to refine the operation’s details to reflect the newly revealed information, and thanks to that, I could keep reading the draft John Gould left while we headed to our destination.
The draft included simple sketches as well as text, and though he was not a professional painter, Elder Gould’s drawing skill was considerable.
Though I had to prevent London’s destruction, in this moment, I was relaxed beyond measure.
It was truly a comfortable reading time.
No. In truth, the relaxation and comfort lasted only until I turned a couple pages past what I had been reading.
“…So this was why Elder Gould hid the draft.”
Between the observation records, where the elder, hidden a dormant volcano’s peak, wrote in detail about the conditions needed for the chick’s hatching and about the parents, a strange sentence was mixed in.
/<Day 10.>
/<I witnessed an unknown master at the Vermilion Phoenix’s nest.>
Astonishingly, another human appeared in the elder’s record.
/<He was high above the head of the mother bird, which had fallen into long sleep after laying.>
/<That figure, not moving even as a blizzard raged, was strange and invoked fear.>
/<The man was literally standing still in midair, so I could recognize his astonishing attainment.>
/<He was deceiving the Vermilion Phoenix’s Qi Sense without leaking a single drop of Qi, as if he had achieved Social Facade.>
Elder Gould seemed to be continuing his record while hiding somewhere on the peak, using the Turtle Breathing Technique to conceal his presence.
I suspected he might have seen things because he could not take in nourishment and water after being stranded, but then I recalled that I had recently witnessed a similar scene.
“No way… No. That can’t be.”
Elder Gould published A Century of Birds in the early 1830s.
James Moriarty was born more than fifteen years after that.
In terms of Kung-Fu principles and in terms of the physical world, James Moriarty could not exist in the Himalayas as an adult at that time.
Either the elder saw things, or there was a transcendent master in the Himalayas capable of something similar to Moriarty.
“The latter seems more likely.”
It was relatively close to Midfield, the birthplace of Kung-Fu, so it would not be strange even if one or two hermits happened to be nearby enjoying birdwatching.
I did not think immortals existed in Europe, but in the far East, it might be different.
For Moriarty to exist in that time, just as I returned to the past, it would be impossible unless he too crossed into this world.
And not only that.
He would have to return to an even more distant past than when I began my journey in London Murim.
Thinking that, I turned the page.
/<He waited for an opening and attempted to kill the sleeping Vermilion Phoenix and steal the egg, but I, who was hidden, was quicker to awaken the Vermilion Phoenix.>
.
.
.
/<In the chaos, the egg cracked.>
/<The Vermilion Phoenix, rather than facing the unknown visitor, seized the chick in its beak and flew off like a shot.>
To think there existed a strong person who could make the Vermilion Phoenix tremble in fear. To be honest, it was hard to believe.
But what I read in his handwriting, having devoured Elder Gould’s books, was honesty, humility, and deep insight, not traces of falsehood.
Above all, the fact that the elder had carefully hidden this record lent it more credibility.
/<The man who lost the Vermilion Phoenix tried to kill me.>
/<To preserve my life, I threw myself into a five-hundred kilometer deep cliff.>
Fear seeped out from the manuscript written in recollection of the past.
Here and there, the paper was crumpled as if soaked by droplets formed from melting Himalayan snow, and that was taken as proof that Elder Gould, who kept the draft carefully no matter what, had faced a horrific crisis.
And then.
Waiting for me on the next page was a drawing with more effort put into it than any sketch included in the earlier part of the draft.
It was a visage-scar record, drawn as the elder, trembling in the cold and barely preserving his life beneath the cliff, forced his mind to hold together and somehow depicted the attacker’s features in detail.
“…How?”
James Moriarty.
It was a face I knew well.
- TL/N: Dog version of Golden Basin Hand Washinng? lol ️