"I sensed someone here."
"Could he have gone deeper in the meantime?"
"Hard to say. But it's so hot--wouldn't it be too difficult to go further?"
"No. Judging by everything that man's done so far, he's not the type to back away just because something's difficult."
"That may be true, but I can't believe a spirit creature would live in this kind of heat."
The two of them were a sorry sight.
Sweat poured from them incessantly, and their clothes were scorched through in patches where embers had struck.
The woman's veil had melted against the flames and looked pitiful.
"Let's go deeper."
Fortunately--or perhaps not--a narrow passage wide enough for two or three people opened up. Rounding its bend, the tunnel suddenly widened, revealing several fire pits spewing red magma.
"Ha, this is insane. Did he actually pass through here?"
The searing heat, enough to cook a body, left their throats bone-dry.
CRACKLE, POP-POP.
"Ugh!"
Fighters who had approached the fire pits flinched and stumbled backward.
Embers leapt wildly in every direction, as if oil had been poured onto the flames.
"Watch out!"
Was that cry the signal?
The flames sheared apart like shrapnel, splattering like beans frying in oil.
"Aaagh, grrghh."
"Fall back!"
Tang So-pyeong shouted at the top of his voice, but the cave suddenly shook violently as if struck by an earthquake.
The fire pits overturned like upended basins, vomiting enormous torrents of magma.
"Kraagh! Someone help!"
The desperate screams of several people rang out with piercing clarity, even amid the thunderous roar of the collapsing cave.
'Where am I?'
Hyeol-u regained his senses in a space sealed on all sides.
A faint cluster of light made it possible to discern his surroundings, and that light was emanating from a figure seated in the center.
Sensing danger from the seemingly living figure, Hyeol-u raised his cane at the ready and shouted.
"Who's there!"
Who, who, who...... there.
His voice reverberated off the walls in all directions, clamoring loudly.
"Tch! Looks like a corpse that died in seated meditation."
He had been rattled for nothing.
Clicking his tongue, Hyeol-u scrutinized the glossy, light-reflecting face of the figure--and started.
A face he had seen somewhere many times before.
It was the face of the Black-Face Blood Buddha, founder of the Black Dragon Temple.
His body may have changed, but he was still the Black Dragon Temple's senior disciple.
The moment that thought struck, Hyeol-u dropped flat to the ground.
"I am the Hell Reaper, Hyeol-u--tenth-generation disciple of the Black Dragon Temple. It is truly an honor to stand before the founding patriarch."
It was the utmost respect he could offer--
HISS-HISS-HISSK!
From behind the meditating corpse came the sound of air twisting in a bizarre fashion.
'What's that?'
It resembled a devotional scroll painting--its distinguishing feature being a black great serpent coiled tight upon it.
A triangular head with red hatchet-eyes, gaping maw stretched wide, and a two-pronged tongue.
It was nearly identical to the charred black shape on the cave wall.
"So that's it. That great serpent was the black dragon our Black Dragon Temple worshipped all along."
The painting was vivid enough to seem alive.
Even as he thought so, Hyeol-u could not shake the alarm that had risen within him.
He had the distinct sensation that the great serpent's red eyeballs were rolling.
"Strike!"
The great serpent lashing out like a whip and Hyeol-u swinging his cane happened almost simultaneously.
CRACK--!
The serpent's head was smashed to pulp.
Crimson blood splattered outward--and in the next instant, the cane absorbed the blood.
NEEHEEHEE!
An eerie sound rang out.
It was the same noise the cane had made when absorbing the blood of the Lingering Soul Four Ghosts that Huizhou Merchant Guild's Wang Gyeong-jong had brought.
Only far more amplified, and thrumming through his very soul.
Examining the Lone Soul Ink Cane as it exuded an ink-dark hue laced with an eerie red glow, Hyeol-u let out a sudden gasp.
The meditating corpse of the Black-Face Blood Buddha had crumbled like a sandcastle swept by waves.
Feeling as though he had committed a grave sin, Hyeol-u stared blankly at the remains--then widened his eyes at a strange phenomenon.
The remnants of the corpse drifted silently over the Lone Soul Ink Cane, coating it, and a flash of light pierced the pitch-black ceiling.
KRUMMBLE.
The surroundings shuddered with terrifying force and began to collapse.
And then a voice, hammering against his eardrums with fearsome intensity, shook every nerve in his brain.
-- The Black Dragon Force has been passed to a successor; the Black Dragon shall reign over the eighteen hundred thousand li of the continent.
***
A strange synchronization, one might call it.
He felt as though he and the ink cane--which had absorbed the Black Dragon Force--had become one.
As if the cane's energy and his body's energy flowed through a single vein.
From now on, he would stop calling it by random names like the Lone Soul Ink Cane or the Tae-seok Ink Cane and settle on one.
The Black Dragon Ink Cane.
"The Black Dragon Force, huh."
His heart swelled, yet a heavy burden pressed down upon his shoulders.
No Black Dragon Temple disciple in history had ever attained the Black Dragon Force.
His master, Zen Master Mucho, had spent his entire life in contemplation and effort toward achieving the Black Dragon Force--and failed.
Of course, Hyeol-u himself was still only halfway there.
The ink cane had absorbed the Black Dragon Force, nothing more.
And to absorb a power as immense as the Black Dragon's Force directly into himself--with Namgung Seong's frail meridians and body, it would be impossible.
"Oh!"
Lost in thought, Hyeol-u cried out in alarm.
The Black Dragon Force and the Black Dragon Temple!
Had he just shouldered the burden of rebuilding the Black Dragon Temple as well?
A sigh escaped him.
He had no idea what to do about that.
In any case.
The true nature of the ink cane--which he had carried around simply because it was easy to hold--now piqued his curiosity anew.
'Someday, when the time comes, I'll find out.'
No point racking his brain over a problem he could not solve right now.
Hyeol-u became conscious of being trapped and looked up above his head.
The punctured ceiling was dizzyingly high--at least several dozen jang.
That much? In a single leap!
He could not make it.
His body shot up roughly ten-odd jang before falling back down.
However, by kicking off both walls and using the rebound, he could climb.
Even that was an enormous improvement, but the confidence that he could do anything turned out to be overreach.
'Huh?'
Something felt spongy underfoot. He looked down to find forearm-sized larvae blanketing the floor, squirming in a dense mass.
It was muggy, but the intense heat was gone, and he had just caught his breath when--
SHREEE, SHREE-SHREE-SHREE!
A spine-chilling sound, like something gnawing at his very soul, rang out in rapid succession.
And then.
CRASH-CLATTER.
A man and a woman stumbled into view a few paces ahead, followed by a fighter gripping a whip who staggered and barely kept his footing.
Several other fighters crawled along the ground, their blood-soaked bodies in tatters.
A gruesome sight.
"Ugh, these filthy vermin......"
The slitted-eyed, gaunt young man ground his teeth, the hand clutching his throwing stars trembling.
They all shared the same look: their martial arts uniforms shredded like rags, scarlet blood running down their bodies, bloodshot eyes, topknots shorn away and hair tangled like a wasteland.
It showed just how fiercely they had fought.
In the brief lull that felt like a respite--
SHRIEEEEK!
From the ceiling, the walls, and the floor of the cave, a swarm of black spiders let out an unearthly shriek and descended along their webs in a nightmarish spectacle.
"Kch!"
Several fighters crawling on the ground were swarmed so thickly by pitch-black spiders that they vanished from sight.
The whip-wielding fighter, still on his feet, had no time to react before it happened.
"Ghkk. Kgaah."
The feeble sounds faded to silence like the death of a mouse.
The writhing bodies stilled and went rigid.
"Out of my way!"
The veiled woman, her face covered up to just below the nose, let out a furious scream and whirled her sleeves like a gale.
Hundreds of granules the size of beans spiraled outward from her sleeves.
"Young Lady!"
"Ga-ryeong!"
The two men cried out in alarm, then squeezed their eyes shut.
'That's Soul-Severing Sand deployed with the Whirling Wind Flowing Willows technique.'
Soul-Severing Sand was one of the Tang Clan's Eight Great Hidden Weapons--sand laced with the supreme poison of Five Poisons Water.
No medicine could cure it, and its victims were said to ooze blood and pus for the rest of their lives. An absolutely vicious hidden weapon.
That was why, in his days as the Hell Reaper, the most troublesome faction to face had been the Sichuan Tang Clan, with its specialization in poisons and hidden weapons.
'Using Soul-Severing Sand means she's a direct descendant of the Tang Clan head.'
He had learned that when he fought Tang Clan head Tang Mu-gi before the Orthodox-Unorthodox Alliance was formed.
As he briefly studied her technique, the Soul-Severing Sand penetrated the bodies of the fallen Tang Clan fighters through every pore.
Then, from the utterly pulverized corpses, the mingled stench of oozing blood-pus and spider ichor saturated the air on all sides.
With that, at least several thousand venomous spiders had been annihilated, and the surroundings fell silent.
"Ha, that was far too brutal."
Corpses or not--to unleash such a lethal poison on the bodies of comrades she had eaten from the same pot with.
"Shut the fuck up! Who are you to butt in?"
Ha, not a moment's gap and she was already hurling abuse.
"And who are you?"
The veiled woman's gaze stabbed at him like a wasp's sting.
"Heh, a little brat with a liver bigger than his belly. You got a death wish or something?"
'Ha, give me a break. Do those words actually come out of a woman's mouth?'
A well-bred scion raised under the strict discipline of an orthodox house might have been cowed by that alone, but unfortunately for her, he was the Hell Reaper.
Hyeol-u replied with lazy disinterest.
"What a charming mouth on that girl. No wonder you melt the corpses of comrades you ate with."
"Heh heh. Just because you've got a hole in your face, you think you can say whatever you want? You don't know who I am, is that why you're running your mouth?"
"Ha ha, now that is truly elegant language from a lady's lips. Aren't you Tang Ga-ryeong, the Thousand-Hands Rakshasa who treats people like pigs and dogs?"
She had been on the verge of erupting, but she flinched, then fixed him with a savage glare.
Like the sting of a hornet.
"Heh heh heh. They say a mad fish thrashes in a house that's falling apart. So you're the good-for-nothing Namgung Seong?"
She had fired back defiantly, but the bluster in her bearing visibly softened at his next words.
"Ha. The beanpole behind you is Tang So-pyeong, the Poison Gentleman, famous for being timid. And oh, who do we have here? If it isn't the Absolute Valor Captain Yeo Bul-wi, Mister Horse-Face."
All three stared at him with slack-jawed faces.
They could not fathom how the Namgung Clan's ne'er-do-well--who, by all accounts, had never learned so much as a half-technique of the clan's martial arts--had recognized them.
"Ga-ryeong, have you ever seen this kid before?"
"No. With a face that slippery, he'd be hard to forget once you'd seen him."
"Neither have I. First time."
All first encounters. And yet this brat knew them--how?
One learned through seeing and hearing, so had he ever visited the Tang estate?
But that was only a momentary reprieve.
SHREEEE--
A piercing wail, like an awl boring into the ear canal, was encroaching on all sides.
And swirling gusts of wind encircled them.
Everyone's eyes went wide.
What kind of spiders were that massive and threatening?
Eight of them.
After facing a numberless swarm, now there were only a handful.
Almost laughable--yet every face had gone rigid, every pair of eyes trembling with tension.
At first they might have been mistaken for bats, but the eight hairy legs confirmed them unmistakably as spiders.
As everyone watched, a thick, fog-like miasma spread rapidly from the creatures' hideous maws.
Tang So-pyeong's nostrils flared at the ominous feeling, and his expression changed sharply.
"Watch out! Poison fog!"
Poison fog.
Even for the Tang Clan, whose specialty was poison, the so-called Myriad Poison Immunity--the supreme pinnacle of poison resistance--was an uncharted realm that no one had ever achieved.
Tang Clan members were said to be born with an innate tolerance to poison from the moment they were conceived in the womb, but poison was still poison.
Toxic drugs, poisonous herbs, venomous creatures, antidotes--they consumed a great many of them, but every poison had its own distinct nature, and an unfamiliar poison was dangerous to anyone.
"Take the antidote first."
Alarmed, Tang So-pyeong pulled a pouch from his robes and distributed cherry-sized pills one by one.
By their blue color and the crisp fragrance they gave off, they appeared to be the Green Fragrance Life-Restoring Pill--one of the Tang Clan's Three Great Elixirs.
As Hyeol-u stood there awkwardly, Tang Ga-ryeong, who had been glancing at him, pursed her lips and spoke.
"Brother, give him one too."
"What......?"
"Hurry!"
"Fine."
Tang So-pyeong shot Hyeol-u a glare, then tossed the pill at him like slinging a rock.
Refusing a gift would be unreasonable.
When he accepted the pill with a somewhat reluctant air, Tang Ga-ryeong barked:
"Swallow it. That's not a freebie, so don't bother being grateful."
What an utterly graceless way to talk.
And if it was not free, what exactly did she plan to demand in return?
But he had no intention of taking the pill.
The more he inhaled the poison fog, the more he could feel the inner elixir of the Yin-Yang Twin-Headed Serpent--clenched tight as a walnut beside his qi center--slowly dissolving.
"Don't worry about me."
"Hmph! Don't come crying to me when you're dead."
Tang Ga-ryeong turned her icy gaze away.
HISSSSS.
From that moment on.
The eight spiders rode the webs strung across the ceiling, swooping back and forth as they flung semi-translucent threads as thick as straw rope.
Like casting a net, eight strands of silk descended upon Yeo Bul-wi, who stood at the front.
"Strike!"
Captain Yeo Bul-wi's whip writhed like a serpent, slicing through the threads shooting from all directions and spinning in a full arc.
The webs, cleanly severed as if cut by a cleaver, drew a satisfied smile to the corners of his mouth.
At that very instant--
"Captain Yeo, dodge!"
Tang Ga-ryeong's urgent cry split the air, and the severed threads merged into one mass--like the Tang Clan's own Soul-Severing Net--and draped over Yeo Bul-wi's head.
"Th-that......?"
Tang Ga-ryeong and Tang So-pyeong could only gape, mouths wide.
Who could have predicted that severed webs would transform into a casting net?
Yeo Bul-wi's face went blue as he failed to move a single finger.
The web was not merely falling over him like a net--a strange odor was paralyzing his senses.
The moment of life and death!
FWAAAH--!
A sound like space itself splitting struck every ear.
Hyeol-u had hurled the Black Dragon Ink Cane with the technique of Eight Winds and Rains.
As though gales and downpours were bearing down from all eight directions at once, the net-like mass of webbing was torn to a thousand shreds.
The ink cane did not stop there. It smashed the heads of all eight spiders to pulp before returning to his hand.
THUMP.
The spiders' bodies toppled, twitching briefly before going still.
"Phew...... th-thank you."
Yeo Bul-wi stood dazed for a moment, then realized it was Hyeol-u who had saved him and offered a deep clasped-hands greeting.
"What's there to be thankful for? You owe me your life now, so just repay it later."
Brushing past the dumbfounded Yeo Bul-wi, Hyeol-u looked at Tang Ga-ryeong and gave her a wink.
"Shall we?"