STAB!
SIZZLE—!
"...!"
After completely neutralizing Yi Gok—
CRACKLE! SNAP SNAP!
FWOOSH!
"......"
Scrape. Scrape.
SIZZLE—!
"!!!"
In the heart of the vast bamboo grove, engulfed on all sides by crimson inferno, a rather earnest session of interrogation by a top-tier assassin commenced.
It began with pressing the muting point and the paralysis point in succession, preemptively preventing any unnecessary noise or thrashing.
SPURT—!
SPLATTER! SPURT!
"!!!"
Yul Hwi's dispassionate hands were methodically dismantling the body of Yi Gok, who lay supine before him.
Utterly heedless of the roaring flames and acrid smoke all around.
At a pace so leisurely one might think there was nothing to hurry about.
He had already pried open the wounds covering Yi Gok's mangled upper body, wrenched and torn away strips of skin with raw force, and was now using the dagger in his hand to carefully separate the muscles and blood vessels thus exposed, one by one.
As if butchering a pig whose throat had already been slit.
'Why?! Why...!'
Why are you not asking me anything—!
Before the shock, the terror, and the pain too vast to put into words, the most Yi Gok could manage was to leak tears, snot, and drool in unbroken streams.
And yet his maddening, bursting curiosity only swelled in volume with every passing moment.
Even between the bitterest of mortal enemies locked in a life-and-death struggle, he had never dreamt that the loser would be brutalized this way.
This was absolutely not the way of any normal martial artist.
Beyond the Sun and Moon Gate, beyond the orthodox and the unorthodox—no, not even the infamous Heavenly Demon Divine Cult of Cheonsan, Singang, would treat a defeated foe like a slab of meat!
'Why...! Why go this far...?!'
An unbroken chain of excruciating agony that he had never once in his life imagined.
But what hurt and terrified Yi Gok even more than that was the successive loss of body parts, methodically detached one by one from his still-living, still-breathing body.
And the fact that, despite it all, his life showed not the slightest sign of ending—this vaguely, overwhelmingly terrifying situation itself.
"Curious? About why I'm doing this?"
"?!"
"If I were simply curious about something, I could have just lopped off a limb or two and asked. So why am I bothering with such a tedious and messy task? And in the middle of all this chaos, no less."
A voice drifting into his ears as serenely as if its owner were alone by a quiet lakeside, drawing ripples without a tremor.
Before he knew it, the surroundings had been stripped bare. Displaced smoke spiraled high into the sky with nowhere else to go.
Was it because of that?
The hazy, acrid smoke seemed to Yi Gok as though it were rising from the sulfurous fires of hell itself, and the terror in his heart swelled without end.
Just then—
"Does it hurt terribly?"
"...!"
A hand drenched in sticky blood reached out and carelessly wiped the tears blurring his vision.
'Aah... aaaaah!'
And this moment became the final button—the one that wrenched the last roots of reason from Yi Gok, who had been desperately, savagely clinging on.
***
The candid conversation with Yi Gok—after the man had lost not only his dignity as an accomplished pinnacle master, but his very dignity as a human being—lasted barely a quarter hour.
There was no helping it.
Nearly a full quarter of an hour had already passed since the enormous inferno had erupted in the bamboo grove.
No matter how remote a corner of the Sun and Moon Gate's grounds this was, lingering any longer would clearly sow the seeds of further unknown variables.
And so, after a mere half-quarter of torture followed by a quarter hour of conversation to extract every piece of information he needed, Yul Hwi pressed Yi Gok's Lethal Pressure Point without hesitation and hurled the body into the blaze that had spread to the grove's outskirts.
There was no need to leave the marks of his interrogation on conspicuous display.
"There! Over there!"
"Follow me, quickly! We have to contain this before the fire spreads any further!"
And just as he calmly exited the bamboo grove, a band of figures in black came pouring in from nearby.
Judging by the absence of the sun-and-moon crest on their chests, they were unmistakably warriors of the Martial Vein.
'Did they truly bank on that one man alone, without arranging any further contingencies?'
On the path back to his quarters, his presence extinguished entirely, Yul Hwi could only tilt his head again and again at the conspicuous absence of any Sun Vein warrior in the vicinity.
'They must have been absolutely certain I'd fall to him.'
He had thought that several bouts during the day had at least demonstrated a degree of skill befitting his arrogance.
And yet the Sun Vein, it seemed, still regarded him as nothing more than a greenhorn who could be killed at any time.
'Though after tonight, that assessment will be drastically revised.'
Whoosh.
Perhaps because his quarters were a fair distance from the source of the commotion, the dwelling still lay submerged in the same tranquil, hushed stillness.
Slipping inside as silently as a thief, Yul Hwi began to replay the astonishing revelations Yi Gok had shared.
"The blood flowing through your body isn't from some paltry Taewon Yul Family."
"Beyond the Great Wall...... the Frozen Lands of the north. And among those people, the purest bloodline."
"......The North Sea Ice Palace. Your true lineage descends from its direct line."
"Not crimson, not gold...... that piercingly blue light. Those blue eyes are passed down only to the direct line of the Ice Palace......"
"......We... the Sun Vein... kill you... draw out the Ice Palace's fury... the Moon Vein......"
Having lost so much blood in so short a time and having crumbled so thoroughly in spirit, pressing for more had been impossible.
But the critical information had been gleaned in sufficient measure, and filling in the remaining gaps from that foundation was no difficult task for Yul Hwi.
"The North Sea Ice Palace."
Deep down, he had harbored a vague inkling.
This body's height of six and a half cheok—a full head taller than most Central Plains natives—and its build were one thing.
But when combined with the unusually porcelain-white skin and the eyes that shone with an almost supernatural blue, it was frankly quite a stretch to believe this was the body of a pureblooded native of the Central Plains.
He had simply assumed the bloodline traced to one of the many foreign peoples who had drifted in from beyond the Great Wall. The bare truth, starkly different from that assumption, was what had shocked him in so many ways.
Because expecting, on the basis of appearance alone, that he might be a scion of the North Sea Ice Palace—and of its Palace Master's direct lineage, no less—was an extravagant leap by any measure.
Above all, considering the utterly shattered state Yi Gok had been reduced to by his interrogation, the likelihood that the man had babbled falsehoods in his final moments was slim.
"In any case, the answer will come simply by confirming whether these blue eyes are truly a legacy of the Ice Palace's direct bloodline."
The real problem was what came next.
"They planned to kill me and use the Ice Palace's fury to set them against the Moon Vein......?"
This particular claim had several dubious points that gave him pause before swallowing it whole.
To begin with, on the night the Taewon Yul Family was attacked, had the men who came to his quarters not shown behavior more consistent with capture than killing?
Furthermore, now that the situation had gone sideways and the gate had made a mortal enemy of the Martial Alliance, there was no clear benefit for the Sun Vein in destroying the Moon Vein—one of the gate's main pillars of strength.
If that came to pass and the Martial Alliance seized the opportunity to mount a counterattack for revenge, the Sun Vein would inevitably shoulder the greater share of the damage.
Above all, even granting that the North Sea Ice Palace might descend from the north, the notion that they would leave the offending Sun Vein alone and strike the innocent Moon Vein instead failed to hold together from the very first stitch.
"......I wonder if his mind was too far gone and he was rambling."
He stood rooted to the spot for some time without so much as changing his blood-soaked clothes, lost in deliberation.
"Hoo."
With a short exhalation, Yul Hwi blew away the frustration knotted inside him and neatly packed the unresolved questions into a corner of his mind.
"The proper order is to worry about what comes shortly from now."
Direct bloodline of the North Sea Ice Palace or whatever else.
What did any of that matter at this point?
If the woman had sunk so low as to travel all the way down to Sanseo just to become a concubine to the head of the Taewon Yul Family, her standing within the Ice Palace was obviously nothing impressive.
If she was a woman of direct-line blood yet had been reduced to such a fate, it was plain as day that a succession struggle had erupted, she had backed the wrong side, and been driven out.
Similar incidents could be found easily enough, anywhere under heaven.
"Unless the North Sea Ice Palace is something I can seize for myself, it's a matter that held not even a scrap of value from the start."
In all honesty, he did not remotely feel that this body's maternal kin had truly originated from his mother, either.
"So for now—recovery first."
Having shoved his discarded garments haphazardly under the bed, Yul Hwi headed for the well behind his quarters.
The most pressing task at hand was to wash away the reek of blood and get some sleep.
***
Shortly after, early the next morning.
"Young Master! Young Master Yul—!"
"......Damn it."
Baek Seol stormed his quarters at the crack of dawn as if she had been lying in wait, and Yul Hwi was forced to drag himself out of bed despite a fatigue that felt markedly worse than usual.
Throwing on fresh clothes and stepping outside, the words that met his ears were precisely what he had expected from the night before—not deviating by a single inch.
"Young Master! Did you hear the news?! Last night, in the bamboo grove on the southwest outskirts of the gate, guess what—!"
"I just stepped out of my quarters this very moment. What miraculous ability do you think I have to pick up outside news from in there?"
"Ah, oh!"
"......Hoo. Unless someone higher up has summoned me, let's rest today. The fatigue from yesterday's bouts hasn't fully—"
In another hour or two, the suspicion of those within the Sun and Moon Gate—directed at their sole outsider and the man at the center of every conversation—would come pouring down. That much was obvious without even looking.
Which was exactly why Yul Hwi wanted to conserve as much stamina and energy as possible before that happened.
That way, he would be able to respond smoothly no matter what arose.
But for him, most regrettably, the crisp words Baek Seol delivered next slammed the door shut on any further rest.
"That won't do. The Moon Master ordered at first light that you be brought to the Moon Master's Hall."
"......The Moon Master did?"
'That insane old monster, already? Last night's affair shouldn't be the kind of matter that gets escalated that quickly to that level...?'
Even Yul Hwi, who prided himself on being a rather keen judge of character thanks to his long career as an assassin, found the Moon Master to be an impossibly difficult woman to read—possessed of a temperament so maddeningly erratic it defied all prediction.
And yet it was her early summons, which he somehow felt compelled to obey no matter how desperately he scrambled, that had now become the single greatest variable and source of worry for Yul Hwi.