"How long was I out?" he asked.
"Seven hours."
Remo panicked. He hadn't slept seven hours straight in more than ten years. He felt sweat trickling down his chest and back. His head throbbed with a dull pain. "What's happening to me?" he asked quietly. "What's wrong?"
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"Nothing is wrong, my son." The aged Oriental tucked his long-nailed hands into the sleeves of his kimono. "The Dream of Death is a natural process for those trained in the mysteries of Sinanju. It is a coming of age. Now is your time."
Chiun floated to the tatami mat on the floor, where he arranged himself in the elaborate folds of his robe. His face broke into a broad grin. "To cheer you, I will share with you a legend of the glory that is Sinanju," he said magnanimously. "It is known throughout Korea."
"Oh, no," Remo said, trying to blink back the pain in his head. "Not the one about how a thousand years ago the people of your village were so poor and hungry that they had to drown their children in the ocean, so the Master of Sinanju had to hire himself out as an assassin to support the village."
Chiun glared. "Not drowned. They were forced to send their babies back to the sea. That is how it is stated: 'Sent back to the sea.' And that was not the legend I was about to relate to you, hoping ever optimistically that I would not be casting my pearls before pale pieces of pigs' ears."
"Okay, okay, already. What's the legend, and what does it have to do with the fact that I slept for seven hours when I never sleep longer than ten minutes?"
"I do not share the legends of my village with Philistines," Chiun said.
Remo sighed. "I'm sorry, Little Father, but this'11 have to wait till later. I don't feel right." His own voice sounded far away to Remo, as if he were talking in a cave. He reeled to a far corner of the
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motel room where they were staying. The air from the room's one window smelled sour.
"Sit down, Remo. You are not yet well."
"I'll be fine. Just need to move around." He curled himself into a loose ball in the corner and began to breathe deeply, expanding out of himself until he lifted himself effortlessly, supported by one hand as his body remained coiled above. Then slowly he unwound first his legs, reaching high into the air with his toes, then his torso. Stretched to full length, Remo bounced once experimentally and then went into the one-and-a-half spin.
He landed clumsily, pulling a muscle in his thigh. Irritated with himself, he got to his feet, but as soon as he was upright, he felt a strange, dark sensation behind his eyes. Then the heavy, drunken sleep that had put him out for so long came back for him again. His legs shivered and buckled. "I can't stop it, Chiun," he said helplessly.
In a moment Remo felt himself being picked up off his feet and carried to the bed. Chiun lay him gently on the covers and wiped Remo's face with clean cloths. "Do not try," the old man's voice called, sounding a thousand miles away. "But you must return, Remo. Understand this. You must return."
As the old voice grew faint and disappeared, Remo found himself back in the sky, again falling through the heavens. His flesh burned. The flames were the only source of light in the vast blackness of space around him. And as he fell, he realized that the light that burned from his charring body was the light of Sinanju, the sun source of all his strength and will. And painful as it was, the light of Sinanju burning in his body was what kept him alive.
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He had not always been alive, not in the way of Sinanju. A decade before, he had been a Newark cop sentenced to die in the electric chair for a crime he did not commit. After the electrocution, Remo Williams's fingerprints were moved to the dead file, and he had ceased to exist to everyone who cared, which was no one. An orphan with no friends, no family, and no future had died and been reborn in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, under the direction of one Dr. Harold W. Smith.
Dr. Smith needed a man who didn't exist to serve as the enforcement arm of an organization that did not exist, since the function of CURE was to violate the constitution.
CURE was not conceived by thugs or corporate lawbreakers or crime syndicates: these could operate profitably within the Constitution, so they had no reason to violate it. The only group hurt by the Constitution, which had been written long ago as a set of guidelines for decent people to follow, were the decent people themselves, who had become victims of ever-widening crime in America. And so the ultra-secret agency CURE, headed by Dr. Smith, had been developed by a president of the United States just before his death by violent crime.
When Remo awoke that day in Folcroft, he was informed that he no longer existed and taken to | meet Chiun, who was to train him in the purest and most ancient method of assassination known to mankind, Sinanju. That day was the beginning of his life, the only Ufe that would matter to him in years to come. For no one, not Dr. Smith, not Chiun, not even Remo himself, had expected the man who did not exist to become anything more
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than a highly trained killer. They did not know that he would come to absorb Sinanju, to understand and be one with its difficult teachings, that he was Sinanju, and that he would become the next Master after Chiun.
On that day, a lifetime ago, Remo Williams assumed his true incarnation, foretold by the most ancient legends of Sinanju. He became Shiva, the god of destruction. Shiva, the Destroyer. Shiva, the dead white night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju.
The voice of universes rang out once more. "The legend comes to fruition. In the year of the dragon, a monumental force from the West will seek to destroy Shiva." It rang through the airless depths of space.
And then Remo heard another voice, aged and high, from within himself. That voice said, "You must return."
"I will return, Father," Remo said, and at that moment the sky was filled with light as the monster reappeared, it? deadly eyes glowing. It came nearer at blinding speed. Remo watched it come as he fell, unmindful of his burns.
/ am Shiva. I burn with my own light. There was no pain. Only readiness.
The dragon attacked, and Remo flowed into the attack, unresisting, adjusting himself to the movements of the beast until he was part of it. Then, with the most gentle of countermovements, he was in the animal's ear, where sound roared through its chambers and off its small bones. Small for a beast the size of an aircraft carrier. The smallest of the bones was as big around as a telephone pole; the largest, the size of a mature Sequoia. Still, he could work
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here. The confines of the dragon's ear at least provided surface area. Shinnying up the smallest of the ear bones, he felt the animal twitch. Then, as he descended, bringing his feet down at an angle that met with the least resistance, he broke the bone in four places. He did the same to the second and third bones.
By that time, the dragon was stumbling and careening, unable to balance in its flight. It began its drop in space, faster, end over end, and Remo knew the beast was at last dying.
"I can come back now," Remo said. And with an effort of will, he brought himself out of the blackness of space and into a gray mist, where his body felt cold. He shivered.
"Come back," Chiun's voice said. And Remo willed his body to overcome the cold and lie still.
"Awake," Chiun commanded.
Remo opened his eyes slowly. Above him, Chiun hovered, wiping Remo's sweat-drenched brow with silk cloths. "It is done," Chiun said. "You have made the passage safely." Remo tried to rise. "No. Lie still. I will tell you what has happened."