The Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit had disliked this trip to Lizhou from the start.
If not for the Cult Leader's order, he would have blown it off and done as he pleased.
He had never believed in the Sword Star's defection.
Still, he understood why the Cult Leader had no choice but to consider it.
According to Sa Pae-cheon, Captain of the Infiltration Unit at the Lizhou branch, the three siblings' mother was a woman of the demonic path.
He did not ask who she was, for he had no need to wonder. It was a fact he had never once forgotten.
He thought of his Noona, who had left the Blood Cult long ago.
What was it about the Sword Star that you liked so much?
But if that was the case, the Cult Leader would have known from the start.
The Strategy Division would have known too.
That must be why the order had fallen to the Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit, who also happened to be nearby.
At least the Cult had judged it credible.
Having deduced all of that, the Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit forgot his conjectures again.
It did not matter to the Blood Heaven Unit anyway.
Instead, he thought of something else.
‘If it is a trap, which bastards will be lying in wait?’
Since it was Sichuan, there could be the Qingcheng Divine Sword and the Tang Clan Head.
Add to that the Namgung's Sword Star.
Three against one.
The Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit did not weigh his odds.
He pondered which of them to take with him.
The weakling was the Tang Clan Head.
He was the youngest bastard, and the Tang Clan was, by its very nature, a poor matchup against the Blood Heaven Unit's Blood Flow Eight Heavens Art.
But the one who whetted his appetite right now was the Qingcheng Divine Sword.
If he tore that one to death first, he could ignore the Tang Clan Head and try his hand against the Sword Star.
What mattered was whom to offer to his god as a sacrifice.
The Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit, who had been quietly biding his time for that, soon received Sa Pae-cheon's report.
“The Qingcheng Divine Sword, is it.”
Why had he shown himself?
Perhaps this trap was not complete.
Just as he tilted his head at the thought.
A resounding lion's roar rang out.
“Chairman of Jeong Manor, hear me!”
Several questions flashed through his mind. The Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit was a clever beast.
But a beast in the end.
So he set those questions aside.
The prey had come of its own accord.
***
I scrambled to my feet.
Nothing good could come of staying here, at least.
But martial artists are fast.
So fast it was unfair.
With a CRASH, the giant in the black bamboo hat appeared.
Behind him, I saw the annex door belatedly falling over.
The ground seemed to shake.
A sudden surge of unease rose in me, as if people who should never meet had just met.
Then came the Daoist's surprise.
“The Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit!”
He recognized him.
Ah, wait a minute.
It's turned out exactly the way I was afraid it would.
Reality is solid, my ass.
Me being here at all is already absurd enough as reality goes.
I wondered if it was already too late to get away.
And it was.
The figure of the Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit seemed to flash.
The next moment, a sound close to an explosion rang out.
Even my eyes were too slow to follow.
A fist and a sword were locked against each other.
It was hard to believe a human could make such a sound, but there it was.
For some reason, I saw the eldest of the Namgung siblings, who was with the Daoist, standing flustered with his sword already drawn.
“I will take this bastard, so you go find Ran.”
I heard the Daoist say that.
First, I turned around.
Whatever this is, I don't particularly want to watch a fight between Absolute Masters.
Watch something like that, and I won't live out my natural span.
Even as I tried to run, the voices of the Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit and the Daoist overlapped, chillingly clear.
“Where did you leave the Sword Star?”
“What did you do to the Sword Star?”
Goddammit.
Then something chilling swelled enormously behind my back.
Another thunderous roar rang out, and the sound became a physical force that shoved my back.
I couldn't tell whether I was running or being pushed by the blast behind me.
Around the time I thought, seeing my feet leave the ground, that this was closer to flying, I instinctively ducked and rolled.
My whole body should have hurt, but another huge explosion went off right behind me.
And then a sound I had never heard before.
Yes, if a sound like an entire house being crushed and blown away by a tornado starts coming at you, you lose even the presence of mind to feel pain.
What's more, that roar and that chilling presence were rushing close behind me, as if chasing me.
So there was no time to feel pain.
I jumped up and ran again.
I raced between the manor's familiar halls, and even when I saw retainers poking their heads out belatedly to see what was going on, I just kept running.
With only the roaring and not yet even a scream, I barely reached the back gate and grabbed the door ring, practically collapsing.
There's no gatekeeper here.
“Huh, huff…… huh.”
At last I could look back once.
And what I saw was.
***
As Heo Saeng had thought, Namgung Ran did not dislike martial arts.
On the contrary, she likely belonged among those who loved it most, compared with anyone in the clan.
Her wound, too, began with not being recognized for what she was good at and loved, and that must have made it a deeper wound.
For her, Heo Saeng's words seeped deep into that wound.
‘My family does not recognize the next Sword Star…….’
In truth, it was the kind of sweet talk she would have heard had she ventured into the martial world even once, but for her, on her first venture, it was the first time.
She had never thought her family was bad.
Perhaps because she was born with Namgung blood.
But come to think of it, she had done nothing wrong.
She had realized that for the first time in her life, in the conversation just now.
“I am doing well, am I not?”
The first question she had ever asked herself.
In her family, she had never once had doubts. Her sword was always thick with killing intent.
She was always in the wrong.
The Namgung were the foremost of the Five Great Clans.
One of the greatest pillars of the orthodox murim.
Beyond being a model, the Namgung Clan was the standard itself.
How could one let into that pure sword's tip the murderous intent that only the wicked and heretical would harbor?
The elders always praised her achievements grudgingly.
Even as a little child, no, precisely because she was a child, she knew all too well there was no sincerity in their words.
And her father and her brothers were, in the end, all people born and raised there.
Within the clan, the Namgung were not righteous knights-errant.
The Namgung were the very standard of a knight-errant.
No one within the clan could tell her that she was all right.
“A sword is merely a weapon in a martial artist's hand…….”
Even after Heo Saeng left the forest, Namgung Ran sat alone on the rock for a while.
Then, on an impulse, she drew her sword.
What the kind Licentiate had said probably had nothing to do with martial arts.
It was probably just a story about how to live.
A story about how she should treat her sword.
But isn't a martial artist's life, after all, the story of the sword?
“However thick the killing intent, what matters is the direction it points…….”
In the small forest where only the stream babbled, she took her starting stance.
Slowly, the Heavenly Wind Sword Art began to unfold.
It was a basic sword art she had repeated countless times.
But it was also a swordsmanship she had never once performed as she wished.
Because the direction her heart went had always been the opposite of where her family wanted.
“The elders will not like it, but…….”
When had she first been corrected?
She had followed the sword path she understood naturally the moment she saw it, and had been scolded severely.
Do you mean to kill your opponent so easily? How can such vicious murderous intent dwell in a five-year-old's sword?
That had become a shackle that bound the sword of the girl named Namgung Ran even now, past the age of capping.
“The sword path that kills the enemy most effectively.”
She broke down the techniques of the Heavenly Wind Sword Art.
She reassembled them as she willed.
It was the flow she had understood the instant she first held a sword. She swung her sword according to her own will, not her family's.
The next moment, the sword dance unfolding by the small stream was no longer the Heavenly Wind Sword Art.
Dark-red murderous intent raged so fiercely that it would be better called the Blood Wind Sword Art.
Even to someone who knew nothing of martial arts, it was not a knight-errant's sword.
But if, in the end, what mattered was its direction…….
Namgung Ran had never once been in the wrong.
For even while wielding such thick murderous intent, she wanted to keep her sanity whole and carry on the spirit of the Namgung.
Even within this thick murderous intent, she was still gazing at the Namgung's Azure Heaven.
“Then the elders taught me wrong.”
Neither inner demons nor qi deviation came.
The Heavenly Wind Sword Art, which should have been clear and bright, had simply turned a little murky.
Namgung Ran stopped her sword dance and, for the first time, affirmed herself.
And she felt that she had reached the next stage before she knew it.
Once the shackles were loosened, every pathway of qi circulating within her body became more natural.
The release and draw of inner arts is a matter of the heart.
It was no grand enlightenment.
Perhaps she had merely skipped past the step she had been lingering on, clipping her own wings, when she could already have reached beyond it.
Namgung Ran reached the Peak at the age of capping.
It was something that left even her dazed with bewilderment.
The release and draw of her inner arts changed. The volume of qi she could emit outside her body was different too.
It felt natural, as though it had always been that way.
“They said there was a wall.”
She had passed through it so effortlessly that she came to doubt herself.
As her heart grew lighter, so did her body.
Even the way she saw the world seemed to have changed.
She was now a swordswoman who could be called a Peak Master.
And if so, this was…….
“He is my benefactor…….”
The Namgung Clan taught its members to be meticulous about debts of kindness and grudges. That relentless teaching was already close to brainwashing, so Namgung Ran naturally thought of Heo Saeng.
“Could there be a greater kindness than giving someone the occasion for enlightenment?”
Quietly settling the changed world into her heart, she thought.
She had to go find him and meet him again. She had to explain what the scholar had given her and convey her gratitude.
And she had to give him a Namgung Token.
One of the most famous tokens in the murim, which could prove anywhere in the martial world that one was a benefactor of the Namgung.
“Which way was Jeong Manor?”
She turned her head toward where Heo Saeng had gone.
And she became aware of the anomaly bearing down before her eyes.
A storm had begun to rage.
It could not yet be perceived visually, but Namgung Ran could see it.
The qi in the air was heaving violently.
She had seen this kind of thing occasionally.
When her father, the Sword Star Namgung Hyeon-ri, wielded his power, the whole world would shake like this.
Right after she realized it, physical phenomena followed.
A towering dragon-twister arose.
A whirlwind full of shattered debris spewed everything on the ground toward the sky, not very far away.
She realized at a glance.
“Qingcheng's Clear Wind Sword Art……?”
Right after, a deep blood color mixed into that whirlwind.
An intense, ominous force that could already be called blood qi pressed down on the whirlwind and shot up into the sky.
What she had studied in her family came to mind at once.
“The Blood Flow Eight Heavens Art.”
The martial art of the Blood Heaven Unit.
That was Jeong Manor.
And it was where Namgung Ran's benefactor was.
There was no need to think further.
As she had been taught by her family, Namgung Ran ran at once.
***
“What on earth is this…….”
What was my definition of martial arts again?
You just roughly gather up this qi or whatever inside your body and store it as inner arts.
And on that basis, you produce strength beyond human muscle power, something like that.
At higher levels, there was stuff like Sword Qi Forming Flux and other unscientific techniques that differed completely from novel to novel…….
But I think it mostly stopped at extending the reach of a slash.
That was usually how it went.
The real murim was not usual at all.
Jeong Manor, no, the things that had already been Jeong Manor, were shooting into the sky.
Three-story halls, plenty large, twisted and shot skyward.
Then they shattered into scattering debris.
Even modern explosives couldn't do that.
I couldn't even tell how high they went.
In between, I glimpsed two figures.
Trading blows at a speed I could barely see, they rose higher and higher into the sky.
As I just stood there with my mouth open, the debris of the shattered halls belatedly began to scatter in all directions.
Only then did I come to my senses.
I muttered, as if out of habit.
“Got to run. Got to live.”
I saw some martial artists and scholars who'd been on the outskirts and escaped getting caught up running toward the back gate, their faces white as sheets.
I pushed the door with all my strength.
Up until a moment ago I'd been completely out of breath, but I'd seen with my own two eyes that if I stayed around here any longer, they really wouldn't even find my bones.
Did they say the Captain of the Blood Heaven Unit was an Absolute Master?
This was literally a disaster.
I ran and ran. Jeong Manor was built at the foot of a mountain in a corner of Lizhou, so out the back gate there was nothing but small vegetable patches and woodcutters' huts.
When I came to my senses, my face was planted in the dirt.
Unable to breathe, I rolled over.
I must have run out of strength, fallen, and slid.
I could see the sky.
The shadows of the two humans were no longer even visible.
When I lowered my head a little, Jeong Manor was in a state where, if it crumbled just a little more, it'd be better called ruins.
“What the hell kind of…….”
I couldn't finish my sentence.
Because the sky had begun to turn red.
Almost instinctively, I realized it was an artificial phenomenon.
It wasn't the tranquil red of a sunset.
It was being dyed a deep blood color. A true Blood Heaven.
As if to stand against the blood-red sky spreading at terrifying speed, a blue airspace whipped by storm-like winds spread out.
The two warped as if locked in a struggle, then soon began to split the sky over Lizhou in half and claim it.
Then is that Qingcheng?
“How can a human body do something like this?”
When you're too shocked, you can't even scream.
My head, having come full circle into calm, reached a conclusion.
It seems that what this world calls an Absolute Master is closer to a heavenly god than a strong person.
A hollow laugh escaped me.