Episode 6. Do you want to live?

by God of Music · 2026-08-31

When I opened my eyes for the second time, the pain had been cut in half.

The knife wounds that had torn my back, and the pain that had stabbed my ribs with every breath, had receded far away. Instead, my whole body felt languid, as if it had been soaked in hot water for a long time and then taken out.

An old woman was sitting beside me.

It was that old woman whose hair was white with age, but whose face was still like that of a maiden in her twenties. A pale blue energy flowed like a thread from her fingertips and seeped into Mu-hyeon's chest. Not a single drop of medicinal decoction was used. She was simply mending broken bones and rejoining severed meridians with just her fingertips.

It was not a comfortable treatment. Every time the energy passed through a bone joint, a pain so intense that I wished I'd rather be stabbed again surged, and then, at some point, every part of my body relaxed as if frozen ground was thawing in the spring sun. I couldn't tell if days or months had passed. There was no day or night here.

The old woman withdrew her hand and spoke.

"Child."

Her voice was soft, a stark contrast to when she had been raising her voice with the immortals just moments before.

"What is your name?"

"...It's Muhyeon. Jin Muhyeon."

"Jin Muhyeon."

The old woman nodded.

"Listen. This is not the underworld. It is the outskirts of the immortal realm, a rift between the heavenly and human realms. It is not a place for humans like you, but somehow, you have drifted here."

Muhyeon stared blankly at the old woman. Immortal realm. Immortals. Rift. None of these words seemed to connect to his life. But what came to mind before those words was Jin Gon's knees, collapsing, soaked in blood.

The old woman asked.

"Do you wish to live?"

The question pierced him to an unusually deep place.

Do you wish to live?

Even when he was driven to the battlefield, beaten, starved, fleeing, and finally falling off a cliff, he wanted to live. It was a humble and shabby life, but he had never once wished to die. And now, there was one more reason to live. He had not yet fulfilled his promise to the person who died pushing him away, the promise to return alive.

He gritted his teeth and nodded.

A faint smile touched the old woman's lips. But that smile faded quickly after she glanced back at the pavilion.

"But not now. Finish recovering your body."

After those words, no one taught Muhyeon anything else.

The treatments continued many times after that. Each time the old woman's fingertips passed over him, Muhyeon groaned. He groaned so much his teeth ground together on nights when broken bones were reset, and on days when severed meridians were reconnected, he repeatedly lost and regained consciousness. Then, one day, he suddenly woke up to a morning with no pain at all. Though it was a place where there was nothing that could be called morning.

He sat up and looked around properly for the first time.

It was a boundless sea of fog. Fog mixed with white and blue light flowed beneath his feet and above his head, and large and small rocky mountains floated rootlessly within it. A waterfall surged upwards from below, and the stars hung low, seemingly within reach. In the air, countless lines of light still intertwined, forming a giant chessboard pattern.

And in the very center of it, an ancient pavilion floated.

Strange days began.

Even after his body healed, the immortals treated Muhyeon as if he didn't exist. The old man in white and the man in a do-po played baduk in the pavilion, the giant old man lay on a cloud and slept, and the old woman occasionally came over just to check his pulse. No one spoke to him.

Muhyeon found it unbearable. Not because he was bored. It was because of the cost of his meals.

He had lived his whole life that way. If he ate at Hwasan, he guarded Hwasan's gate; if he received porridge from his grandmother, he at least drew water. But here, he drank spring water from the immortal realm and slept on clouds, doing absolutely nothing. It felt like sitting on a bed of thorns.

So he looked for work.

He swept the pavilion floor. It was a floor without a speck of dust, but he swept it. He drew water from the spring and placed it next to the pavilion. He didn't know if the immortals drank it, but he drew it. He sorted the baduk stones by color into containers after a game, and he picked up the shoes the giant old man had carelessly tossed aside and arranged them neatly.

"What is that fellow doing now?"

One day, the man in the do-po asked. Muhyeon, holding a broom, replied.

"I can't just eat and play, can I?"

"There's no dust here."

"Yes. But even if I sweep, there's a swept spot."

The man in the do-po looked at Muhyeon for a moment, then silently turned his gaze back to the baduk board.

Being a gatekeeper was the same everywhere. Stand if told to stand, sweep if told to sweep, carry if told to carry. The only difference was that here, he did it on his own without being told.

It was much later that he realized it was a test.

Once, the man in the do-po left his baduk stone pouch on the floor and stepped away. An unknown energy emanated from the black silk pouch. He wasn't entirely without the desire to look inside. It was an immortal's possession. It felt like just holding one stone would change something.

Muhyeon picked up the pouch and moved it to a conspicuous spot at the base of the pavilion pillar, then stepped back. He did it in case it rained. Though he didn't know if it ever rained here.

The man in the do-po returned and looked at the pouch and Muhyeon alternately.

"Why didn't you open it?"

"Because it's not mine."

"Weren't you tempted?"

"I was."

He answered honestly. The man in the do-po's eyebrows moved slightly.

"Then why?"

"If I grab everything I'm tempted by, two hands aren't enough. My hands are slow, it takes me a long time just to grasp one thing of my own."

The man in the do-po was silent for a while, then muttered as he put the pouch into his sleeve.

"Slow hands, you say."

After that, the man in the do-po occasionally had Muhyeon sit at the edge of the pavilion floor and played baduk. He didn't teach him. He just let him watch. One day, when a game with the old man in white lasted over half a day, the man asked, without taking his eyes off the board.

"Who is winning?"

"...I don't know. I don't know how to play baduk."

"What do you see with an ignorant eye?"

Muhyeon looked down at the board for a long time. The intertwined black and white stones formed an incomprehensible picture. However.

"The white side... seems desperate."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It just feels like the white stones are gasping for breath."

The old man in white's brow twitched. The man in the do-po chuckled silently. That game eventually saw the white side resign.

The giant old man asked something different. Lying on a cloud, he called Muhyeon over with his foot as he passed by, and abruptly said this.

"Do you desire power?"

"...Excuse me?"

"If you desire it, I will teach you how to obtain it. I can even make a fellow like you smash a mountain with your fist."

Muhyeon thought for a moment. He tried to imagine himself smashing a mountain, but it didn't quite form. What formed was a different scene.

"Power... I don't really know. I just want to go back alive."

"Alive."

"Yes. There's a home I owe a debt to. In the village below Hwasan."

The giant old man looked up at Muhyeon with half-closed eyes, then grinned and closed his eyes again.

"He's a fellow who wants to carry something heavier than a mountain."

He didn't understand what that meant.

Once, he cautiously asked Okheo Nomo.

"You said this place is between heaven and the human world."

"I did."

"Then... can you see the path where the dead go from here?"

Nomo stopped checking his pulse and looked at Muhyeon.

"Is there someone you wish to see?"

"There's someone who died in my place. I wanted to at least see them off on their journey."

"This is not the path of the dead. It is merely the rift between, where neither the living nor the dead come."

"...Is that so?"

"However, child."

Nomo's voice became much softer.

"Seeing someone off isn't only done at the crossroads. To live and walk the path for them is also a way of seeing them off."

That day, Muhyeon bowed deeply towards the edge of the fog for a long time. Not knowing which way Jin Gon had gone, he did it once in each direction.

Once, while drawing water near the pavilion, he overheard the immortals raising their voices.

"When you were talking about rules and such..."

"Watching is one thing, taking him in is another."

"What's the difference? You're already feeding him and letting him sleep."

"...I haven't decided anything yet."

The last voice was that of the old man in white. It was low and icy. Muhyeon quietly lowered the bucket he was drawing and retreated. He didn't understand what they were talking about. He only vaguely guessed that they were arguing because of him, and that the old man in white's iciness wasn't directed solely at him. That was all.

Only the old man in white remained cold to the end.

He averted his gaze even when their eyes met while Muhyeon was sweeping the floor, and he didn't touch the water Muhyeon brought. A chilling aura, like frost, settled around him, making it impossible to even think of speaking to him.

Yet, every night, in this place where there was no day or night but which Muhyeon had decided to call night, that old man would draw a sword in the air alone.

It was a sword of light. An insubstantial sword bloomed in the air, scattered like plum blossoms, then bloomed again. Muhyeon didn't know what it was. But he couldn't take his eyes off it. It was like the first time he saw Wang Cheol-san's thrust. There was no excess, no hesitation.

One day, while secretly watching from afar, the old man in white spoke without sheathing his sword or turning around.

"Don't watch."

It was short and cold. Muhyeon bowed his head and retreated. After that, he only heard the sound from where he couldn't see. The sound of the sword of light cutting through the fog was somewhat similar to the sound of a waterfall.

And Muhyeon, in his own way, had one daily routine he never missed.

It was the thrust.

After finishing his work, he would go to the farthest edge of the cloud from the pavilion. He had no sword. His hands were empty, having lost it when he fell from the cliff. So he did it with bare hands. Left foot half a step. Relax the shoulder. Straighten the back. Don't bend the wrist. And forward.

After a hundred thrusts, Jin Gon's face came to mind, after two hundred, Joo Myeong-su's staff, and after three hundred, nothing came to mind. He liked that, so he kept going.

One movement to survive. Since that was all he had learned, that was all he clung to.

That day, too, as he was thrusting into the air for the hundredth time, he heard the sound of a staff behind him.

It was the old woman. And behind her, all three others were there. He didn't know how long they had been watching.

"Child. Why do you not beg to be taught?"

The old woman asked.

"If you were to cling to any one of the four of us here, you would learn something that even a kingdom in the human world couldn't buy."

Muhyeon caught his breath and searched for an answer. The reason he hadn't begged was simple.

"You never said you would teach me, so how could I beg?"

"..."

"You have taken me in, healed me, and given me shelter, which is already a debt I cannot repay. To covet even the things of immortals would be beyond human decency."

Silence fell.

The old woman spun around and shouted towards the pavilion.

"Isn't this enough?!"

No one answered. The man in the do-po tapped his palm with his fan, and the giant old man stifled a yawn. The old man in white was looking towards the other side of the fog.

"You were the ones who said to watch. I watched, and I have decided."

The old woman turned back to Muhyeon. Her sharp eyes were, for the first time, completely gentle.

"Good. Then learn."

From that day, his training began.

Okheo Nomo. That was the old woman's name. A female immortal who had once founded a branch of the Gongdong sect, attained enlightenment, and ascended to the immortal realm. It was said that her name remained only as a legend in the mortal world, but Muhyeon didn't even know much about the Gongdong sect, so he simply bowed his head. Perhaps his ignorance pleased her, as Nomo snorted and began her first lesson.

The teaching was not benevolent.

Nomo calmly explained the flow of meridians and the nature of qi, but if Muhyeon missed even a single word, her staff would strike his head.

"Qi is not to be blocked, but to flow."

Thwack.

"Breath is not to be inhaled, but to be received."

Thwack.

"The lower dantian is a place to empty, not a jar to hoard things in!"

Thwack.

At first, tears welled up every time he was hit. Then, one day, he began to realize his mistakes before the staff even fell, and eventually, just the rustle of the staff rising would automatically correct his breathing.

Nomo saw this and, for the first time, looked satisfied.

"Yes. Now you're starting to look like a proper person."

Muhyeon would long remember the day his first breath properly circulated through his lower dantian. Something entered without being inhaled, and something flowed out without being exhaled. Somewhere in between, his body felt illuminated. His foot had now stepped into that world he had once considered beyond human common sense, watching the movements of a shaman's apprentice in the marketplace.

"Thank you."

"It's too early for thanks."

Nomo pointed with the tip of her staff towards the other side of the cloud, where the giant old man was sleeping.

"Starting tomorrow, that bear-like fellow will take you."

"...Excuse me?"

"Get a good night's sleep today. For a while, sleep will probably be the thing you miss most in the world."

Muhyeon understood the meaning of those words to his bones the very next day.