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to him through that hum of life that somehow always connects one to the place
he first called home. His uncle had changed his own name, as well as that of
his father. All who had shared the name throughout the history of the House of
Sinanju would no longer be called the name of the hated traitor.
The sound of the name was reversed. Henceforth his uncle and the others would
be called Chiun, leaving the betrayer as sole possessor of a despised name.
He reveled in the news. He had given them shame. And that shame resonated back
through the ages. Since leaving the village he had gone by many names. He was
Inchu, Sun Yee, Uinch, Chuni. These days he was Mr. Winch. But those were just
temporary changes as need dictated. When he formed the word of his name in his
secret heart, it was always and would forevermore be Nuihc. The first true
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Master of Sinanju of the great new order.
In fact the aliases probably weren't even necessary. There was only one man on
Earth he need fear, and his uncle had not made a move to follow him. He heard
from sources within the village that the old fool sat looking out at the bay
as if he actually expected Nuihc to come back to him. He had enjoyed many a
laugh at the withered old idiot's expense.
Nuihc traveled the world. He found work in Russia and China, India and Italy
and a dozen African nations. Wherever there was money to be made from dealing
death, he was there.
The last Nuihc had heard, his uncle was still in Sinanju. No longer sitting on
the shore, he spent most of his time hidden away from the villagers. An old
man now, he sat in the Master's House, awaiting the end.
For Nuihc the world was just beginning. In spite of what his uncle thought in
his senile old heart, all that had ended was the type of Sinanju that had been
practiced for centuries in a muddy little village on the West Korean Bay.
Nuihc was inheritor of the true tradition of Sinanju.
It was the most terrible secret in the history of Sinanju, never spoken of in
public. The present-day art of Sinanju was founded on a lie.
The Great Wang-the Master who was the first of the current line of Masters-was
an impostor. All who came after him were frauds. Oh, they all claimed to be of
the pure bloodline. But they were of a bloodline, not the bloodline. Through
Nuihc's veins flowed the blood of the true Masters of Sinanju. He had it on
the best authority.
Nuihc's mother had married into the family of the descendants of Wang. Her
blood was pure. His father had merely been a tool. The foolish brother of the
Reigning Master, he was an unwitting pawn. The means by which she would get
her only offspring trained in the most ancient martial art-the art that had
been stolen from her family by the so-called Great Wang himself.
As a boy, Nuihc listened to her by the firelight of their tiny home. When she
spoke of the great theft of their family's birthright, her voice grew cold
with ancient fury.
She spoke often of that terrible day the Great Wang stole the village out from
under Nuihc's family.
In that day, while there was only one Reigning Master, there were many lesser
Masters of Sinanju, called night tigers. When the time came for the Reigning
Master to retire, he would choose his successor from the ranks of the night
tigers. But at this time the Master died unexpectedly, never having made a
choice. The night tigers were fighting among themselves when Wang-Wang the
Thief, Wang the Liar-stepped into their midst, claiming to have had a vision
of the future of Sinanju. Using trickery, he killed the night tigers and
established himself as Reigning Master. From that point on, there was only one
Master and pupil per generation.
Nuihc's ancestor had been one of the night tigers slain, and a rival of
Wang's. Had he not been murdered, he would have ascended to the position of
Reigning Master.
Nuihc's family never forgot. The hatred burned bright down through the
generations. A thousand years after, it still blazed in the eyes of Nuihc's
mother as she told her son the truth of his heritage. Nuihc liked the story.
His oldest memory was of his mother telling it to him. In childhood he even
shared her resentment. By then he was already being trained by his uncle. She
had told her son never to repeat the story to the current false Master. As he
grew older, he realized that he was only being told part of the story at home.
During training, his uncle often shared another version with his pupil. In
Chiun's tale, Wang was nothing but heroic.
While Nuihc doubted both versions were completely accurate, he knew that his
uncle was enchanted by fables. He was blind to anything that did not show the
history of his ancient discipline in the most ideal terms.
Nuihc knew his mother for what she was. A hunched old crone driven by
bitterness and envy. But it was her version of the tale that he found easier
to believe. The theft of his birthright made the hate so much easier.
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Nuihc hated his uncle. He hated his uncle's father, and his father before him.
He hated their direct lineage to Wang, the original Master of Sinanju of the
modern age.
The truth was, even without his family's secret history or his mother's
inspiration, it was always very easy for him to hate. Hate was such a pure
thing. The hate sent him from the village and the hate kept him from going
back.
It was hate that was his companion that day when fate put him on that train in
Kentucky.
A chance encounter had dropped him in the path of a most remarkable boy.
Somehow this child was able to use his mind to plant seeds of thought in the
minds of others. When he witnessed one of the boy's mass hallucinations
first-hand, Nuihc knew he had made the discovery of a lifetime.
The boy became Nuihc's pupil. He had no choice. It had only been a few years,
but he was making great strides.
The pattern was established early on. Nuihc would give the boy a few lessons
and then go off on business, leaving his pupil to study. If upon his return a
few months later the boy had not mastered the skills he'd been taught to
Nuihc's satisfaction, he would be punished severely.
It was a system that had worked magnificently. There was only a slight problem
at a Swiss boarding school where Nuihc had left the boy for a brief period two
years before. The child had not yet mastered the physical abilities to deal
with the problem. When he learned that they had quarantined the boy after an
incident at school, Nuihc had demonstrated his displeasure by killing the
entire faculty and burning the four-century-old institution to the ground.
After that he took a more active interest in the education of his young
charge.
The boy's physical training was coming along nicely. But it was his other
power-the power of his mind-for which Nuihc had the highest hopes.
A mere thought and the boy could make a man believe he was on fire. Or
freezing. Or drowning. If he convinced a man in his mind that he was suffering
the ravages of some terrible disease, the victim would believe it so
completely that he would actually manifest symptoms. His thoughts killed.
The potential uses of such a power were limitless.
The boy was a resource that needed to be controlled so that it could be
properly harnessed. And so Nuihc taught the physical, all the while breeding
fear and reverence in the boy so that when the time came the awesome power of
his mental abilities could be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]