The Rival Who Killed Me Remembers Too novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Last Cut
I die on my rival's sword, wake ten years early on a mountain stair, and the Heretic Blade puts his palm on the place where he killed me.
The last thing Gang Woo-jin saw in his first life was Cheon Mu-yeol's face, and Mu-yeol looked like the one who was dying.
They were on the Cliff of Nine Winds, and Woo-jin was thirty-six, and the war was ten years old.
Mu-yeol cut high, the way he always did when he was tired.
Woo-jin did not raise his guard.
He had never told anyone why.
The blade went in under his ribs on the left side, and it was warmer than he had expected.
Then everything went white and quiet, and he remembered thinking that the pain was almost gentle.
He woke up on his back in the Iron Crane Sect's practice hall with sunlight on his face.
His hand was already on his chest.
There was no hole there.
There was only a heartbeat, loud and rude and his own.
"Senior brother!"
Someone was shaking his shoulder.
"Senior brother, you fell asleep on the mat again, and the Pledge starts in an hour."
Woo-jin turned his head.
Pyo Jun-seo was crouched next to him, round-faced and twenty-two, with a rice ball in each hand.
Jun-seo had died in the war when he was twenty-eight.
Woo-jin had carried him down a hillside in the rain.
"You're alive," Woo-jin said.
"Mostly," Jun-seo said. "I haven't eaten."
Woo-jin sat up very slowly and looked at his hands.
They were younger, with no scar across the left knuckles, and the sword calluses were softer than he remembered.
A bronze mirror hung on the wall by the door.
The man in it was twenty-six, with jaw-length chestnut hair and a green cord tied round his forehead.
He had the face of someone who thought he was better than everyone, and Woo-jin had been exactly that.
He straightened the cord with two fingers.
His hands were shaking, and he pretended they weren't.
"What day is it?" he asked.
"The first day of the Sword Truce, obviously. You've been awake since dawn muttering about footwork."
The Sword Truce.
Every ten years the Righteous Alliance and the Outer Paths put down their blades for twenty days on Mount Baegun.
Each side hands the other one champion to hold as a pledge that nobody will break the peace.
That year the Outer Paths were sending the Heretic Blade of the Crimson Lotus Hall.
Woo-jin was to be his host.
They had shared a house for those twenty days the first time around.
They had never touched, and Woo-jin had spent the next nine years wishing they had.
He stood up so fast that his knees complained.
"Senior brother?"
"I need to be on the gate stairs," Woo-jin said. "Now."
The stairs were already packed.
Teal and white banners ran the length of the Iron Crane gate, and nine sects stood in their colors on either side.
The morning mist was coming up off the valley.
His master gave him a look that said he was late and that they would discuss it later.
Woo-jin took his place at the top, with his sword Cold Crane at his hip, and kept his face perfectly still.
The Hall's procession climbed out of the mist.
Black banners, a red lotus on every one.
At the front a man in an open black robe walked up the stairs alone.
He was six feet four, with a shaved head and a burn scar down the right side of his neck.
Ink bands of prayer script wound round both his forearms.
He carried a heavy blade wrapped in cloth across his back.
Wooden beads swung at his left wrist, and he did not look at the crowd at all.
He looked at Woo-jin.
He looked at him from the bottom step to the top, and he did not blink.
Woo-jin's mouth went dry.
This man had killed him, as far as his body was concerned, a few minutes ago.
Every bone in Woo-jin said he should hate him.
He stood there with his heart going and thought, stupidly, that Mu-yeol had gotten better looking.
Mu-yeol stopped one step below him.
That put their eyes level.
The Chief of the Alliance said the words of the Pledge, and Woo-jin heard none of them.
"Swordsman Gang," Mu-yeol said, in the voice Woo-jin had not heard for ten years, soft and unhurried.
"Heretic Cheon," Woo-jin said, and it came out almost level.
Mu-yeol's hand came up.
It was broad and scarred, with ink to the knuckles, and he laid it flat against the left side of Woo-jin's chest.
Over his heart.
Over the place where Mu-yeol had put his sword.
In front of nine sects, Woo-jin's master and the Chief of the Alliance, he held it there.
His palm was warm through two layers of silk.
Woo-jin's pulse jumped under it, and he knew that Mu-yeol felt it too.
Nobody in the crowd made a sound, because as far as they could tell it was a very odd way to greet a host.
Mu-yeol leaned forward until his mouth was at Woo-jin's ear.
"It's warm," he said, so low that only Woo-jin could hear. "It was warm last time too."
Woo-jin's knees nearly went.
"I remember how I killed you, Swordsman Gang."
Mu-yeol's thumb moved once, slowly, along his collarbone.
"I'd like to hear what you remember."
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