While leading the entering disciples down the mountain path, they came upon two black-clad men of unfamiliar appearance.
The smell of blood coming off them, and the swords gripped in their hands. The hostility in the eyes turned this way.
His judgment made, Black Spider immediately flung Gok Hon.
SHING!
A sharp blade shot out from Gok Hon's hand and slit the throats of both black-clad men in an instant.
After putting the swords the fallen men had carried into the hands of the humanoid puppets, Black Spider continued leading the disciples down the mountain slope.
***
Fortunately there were no further mishaps until they reached Grand Heaven Village.
When they arrived in the village where crowds came and went in peace, several of the disciples, their tension released, burst into tears.
They were children of barely ten years or so. That they had held on with their wits about them this far was already commendable.
In any case, the affair was not yet over. Black Spider turned the situation over in his mind.
By all appearances, the inside of the Grand Heaven Sect had been thrown into chaos by civil war. On top of the unorthodox sects' attack, some of the elders and disciples had joined hands with them and turned traitor; it would certainly not be an easy situation to answer.
The sect members who betrayed them must also have steeled themselves in their own way before committing the act. Humans who stake their lives with no chance of success are rare.
From their side, the most threatening factors would be Vice Sect Leader So Cheon, a master of the late peak realm, and Do Hyeon-gu, the cultivator dispatched from the Azure Heaven Sect's main house.
And above all, the Azure Heaven Sect itself, the cultivation sect that stood as the Grand Heaven Sect's own backing.
If such an affair had occurred nonetheless, there was a high chance that behind this attack stood another cultivation sect hostile to the Azure Heaven Sect. Nothing else would explain it.
Had it been a simple attack by an outside force, that would be one thing; but even the Grand Heaven Sect's elders, who knew that a cultivator group called the Azure Heaven Sect existed above them, had joined in and betrayed the sect. It was a sound enough hypothesis.
If one thought of it that way, the Grand Heaven Sect's defeat was inevitable. The unorthodox forces would win in the end, and the Grand Heaven Sect's headquarters would fall into their grasp.
Once he had ordered his thoughts, Black Spider had a rough sense of how to handle what remained.
Black Spider led the children to a certain place. That place was none other than where Gwak and Gaeddong-i's trading company was staying.
“Huh?”
Gaeddong-i was startled. Black Spider, whom he had certainly parted from earlier, had come back after a few hours leading dozens of weeping children.
Since it was Black Spider's doing, he assumed there was a reason for it, and calmly called Gwak over as well to hear the situation.
“...The Grand Heaven Sect attacked by unorthodox sects, and civil war broken out there.”
Gwak's expression turned grave. This Gangryu Province region was in truth the Grand Heaven Sect's domain. If that Grand Heaven Sect had fallen into the hands of the unorthodox sects, it was bad news.
Less because of any difference between orthodox and unorthodox than because a period in which the core power is destructively replaced is always a difficult and dangerous time for trade.
Yet seen another way, the present moment, with those unorthodox forces invading the Grand Heaven Sect's home mountain, might be the most suitable time to escape.
They too would have poured all their strength into the invasion of the Grand Heaven Sect's home mountain.
So Gwak calmly and skillfully informed the company members that such an affair had occurred, promptly revised their original plan, and decided to move elsewhere.
In the course of it, the children Black Spider had rescued were entrusted to the trading company for the time being; moving with a full fifty-odd children was certainly a heavy burden, yet few voiced any complaint, thanks to Gwak being a company head who commanded a fair measure of respect from his people.
The judgment was swift and the action immediate. Ordinarily they should have traded in Grand Heaven Village for some time, but they packed at once and made ready to depart.
Black Spider, however, would not accompany them. The reason was clear.
[It is possible that my face is known as well.]
Black Spider had, after all, spent three years at the Grand Heaven Sect. And in those three years he had by no means kept quiet.
A spider cursed fiend that carried a hunchbacked old man on its back was known by rumor even to the people of Grand Heaven Village, so there was by no means no chance that the invading force — or rather, the traitors within the Grand Heaven Sect — would pursue and slaughter him.
The young disciples, on the other hand, had entered the mountain only three days ago, so there was no reason for them to be pursued and slaughtered; on the contrary, there was a high chance they would be in greater danger if Black Spider traveled with them.
So Black Spider left Grand Heaven Village in the direction opposite the one the trading company had taken, with Gok Hon on his back and two humanoid puppets bearing real swords following at his side.
***
COUGH!
So Cheon, Vice Sect Leader of the Grand Heaven Sect and a master of the late peak realm, spat out a mouthful of blood. His insides seemed churned to ruin from excessive use of qi.
But what could be done? Even the great So Cheon could hardly come through unscathed after taking the joint assault of four Grand Heaven Sect elders and a cultivator besides.
That he had held out this long was thanks to burning his primordial true energy as he fought.
The Sword Sect Leader in particular was hunting him with unusual persistence, so in truth Byeok Hun the Sword Sect Leader galled him far more than that young cultivator who was toying with him as though half at play.
Even so, So Cheon was unruffled. Not that it meant nothing to him. What had happened had happened, and in the midst of it he could see clearly what he could do and what he had to do, so he simply focused on that.
PTOO.
When he spat out the blood pooled in his mouth, a tooth popped out with it. Seeing it, So Cheon smiled bitterly.
“Goddamn. I am past forty now, and no new tooth is going to grow in. Is that not a bit much, Sword Sect Leader?”
“Heh heh. That mouth of yours is still alive, Vice Sect Leader. Then again... come to think of it, you, So Cheon, always did work that mouth well from your childhood. Ever since the days you learned beneath me, that stiff neck and noisy mouth galled me no end.”
Sword Sect Leader Byeok Hun answered so and glared this way. At that Vice Sect Leader So Cheon merely snorted a laugh and shrugged.
“Haha. Old man. Have you been nursing that sulk from those days all this while? You could have let it pass as a regrettable little matter of one ignorant child's talent surpassing an old man's.”
At this the Sword Sect Leader's face twisted like a vengeful demon's. It could hardly be otherwise.
There had been a time when Vice Sect Leader So Cheon was a disciple of the Sword Sect. And the disciple So Cheon of those days had gone so far as to defeat the Sword Sect Leader in a spar and say a single line.
‘It seems there is nothing more for me to learn from you, Master.’
That had been branded into the old man's spirit. It remained an indelible humiliation to this day.
Perhaps that was why. Why, a short while ago, he had gone out of his way to strike the head from Yeon Pung, a mere Grade 2 disciple, with his own hand.
Yeon Pung's manner — brazenly holding his head high and taking the old man to task to his face over the way of the jianghu and the ugliness of betrayal — had so resembled So Cheon's younger self that the old man had put his feelings into the stroke and beheaded that young disciple.
“You cur...!”
The old man barked. Beside him, the young cultivator of the third level of Qi Refinement snickered to himself at whatever he found funny.
“Well now. Even ordinary folk live fiercely enough. Ah, everyone works so very hard.”
Standing in the middle of a battlefield, the young cultivator showed not the slightest trace of fear. That was only natural, as he had received every sort of support from his clan when he set out on this mission.
The high-grade spell implements he currently carried numbered more than three, and even the translucent protective barrier that wrapped his body at this moment was of a kind that ordinary martial artists' swords would struggle to pierce.
Moreover, the young man was not the only cultivator of the Yeon Clan committed to this mission.
Along with the young man himself, Yeon Chung, at the third level of Qi Refinement, there were Senior Sister Yu Ran at the fifth level, and Senior Brother Yeon Ri-ja, who had reached no less than the seventh level: three Yeon Clan cultivators in all.
Just then, a woman cultivator came flying toward Yeon Chung.
“Ah, Senior Sister Yu Ran.”
A pale look about her and hollow eyes. She was a young woman who had only just come of age, yet in truth she had already reached the fifth level of Qi Refinement, a promising prodigy of the Yeon Clan.
That woman scanned her surroundings with restless eyes. From between her brows a mighty divine awareness stretched out and wrapped the whole area.
‘That divine awareness is on the order of a Qi Gathering stage cultivator's.... Then again, she is a genius born with a peculiar constitution on par with one who has a heavenly spirit root....’
As Yeon Chung was privately tasting his bitterness, Yu Ran suddenly put a question to him.
“Junior Brother Yeon Chung. Have you by any chance seen a hunchbacked old man who is said to ride about on a spider cursed fiend? I have searched everywhere over that way, but I could not find him.”
At the question Yeon Chung felt an inward irritation he could not show. For how many times was this now, the same question? That damned hunchbacked old man!
To begin with, Yeon Chung's coming on this mission at all traced back to Yu Ran's uncanny fixation on that hunchbacked old man.
The Grand Heaven Sect was by nature a subordinate power of the cultivation sect called the Azure Heaven Sect, and while the Genesis Sect, a cultivation sect hostile to the Azure Heaven Sect, had its eye on the place, it had not been waging a proper campaign of occupation.
But recently a Genesis Sect cultivator posted near this region had sent word that some spider cursed fiend, or cursed immortal, had appeared at the Grand Heaven Sect — and along with it came the detail that this spider always carried a hunchbacked old man on its back.
Having somehow heard the news, Yu Ran had begun showing signs of frantic anxiety, insisting that she absolutely had to go find that old man; and so the Yeon Clan, one of the Genesis Sect's principal clans, had pulled the mission in the Grand Heaven Sect region over to their own clan and entrusted it to Yu Ran.
Yu Ran had been prone to frequent mental instability owing to a disaster she suffered in childhood, yet even so she was an important figure to the clan because of her innate peculiar constitution.
In fact, the mere point that she had reached the fifth level of Qi Refinement in less than ten years since entering the cultivation of immortality left nothing further to explain.
And so the campaign to occupy the Grand Heaven Sect, which would ordinarily have taken place at least ten years later, had been pulled forward drastically, with the Yeon Clan's Yeon Chung, Yu Ran, and Yeon Ri-ja sent as its vanguard.
In truth this was a somewhat excessive force to commit to such a mission, but it was the Yeon Clan's judgment, meant both to ensure Yu Ran's safety on her first real mission and, having started the thing, to finish it decisively.
So for Yeon Chung, dealing with Yu Ran's fixation was, if anything, more wearying than any tension about the mission itself.
He was in no position to snap at Yu Ran as his mood took him, being of lower standing; and moreover, Yu Ran possessed her peculiar constitution, so that every last man of the Yeon Clan, without exception, was busy trying to get in her good graces.
Just then, another cultivator approached from far off. That cultivator was a man of middle years, and in his hand he held someone's severed head.
“Oh, Senior Brother Yeon Ri-ja. So you have finished off the enemy cultivator.”
“Hmph, it was nothing at all. No more than the third level of Qi Refinement. Proof enough that the Azure Heaven Sect has paid this place no great mind until now. In any case, Yu Ran. The mission is done, so it is time to return.”
“I must find the old man. The hunchbacked old man who rides about on a spider....”
But Yu Ran only worried at her lips and rolled her eyes about restlessly; she gave Yeon Ri-ja no proper answer at all and simply muttered that she had to find the hunchbacked old man.
Even so, Yeon Ri-ja showed not the least sign of complaint at Yu Ran's manner. He merely thought to himself.
‘The Clan Head said to kill the old man on the spider at once if I found him. But if Yu Ran saw that, it would only worsen her impression of me, which would be a great loss on my part. That the hunchbacked old man happened to be away has been a great help to me.’
Thinking so, Yeon Ri-ja made a show of magnanimity.
“Hm. In that case.... We are not pressed for time just yet, so Junior Sister Yu Ran, roam this region freely and look for that old man. Yeon Chung and I shall finish the remaining work here in the meantime, so put your mind at ease.”
“Ah, thank you, Senior Brother Yeon Ri-ja....”
Answering without feeling, Yu Ran poured spell power into her flight implement and rose into the sky.
Once Yu Ran had gone, Yeon Ri-ja looked at Yeon Chung at his leisure and said:
“What are you standing about for, Yeon Chung? Finish the work, and be quick.”
And then Yeon Ri-ja himself merely folded his arms — having taken all the credit with Yu Ran and dumped all the actual work on Yeon Chung.
‘Ah, well.’
What could be done? In the world of cultivators, the word of the strong is truth. Yeon Chung, at no more than the third level of Qi Refinement, was in no position to dare defy Senior Brother Yeon Ri-ja.
And as Yeon Chung grumbled sullenly to himself and made to dispose of the Grand Heaven Sect's remaining stragglers.
Suddenly.
BOOM—! A great tremor was felt from the innermost part of the Grand Heaven Sect, where a sheer cliff stood.
Inside that cliff was the isolated training chamber that only the Grand Heaven Sect Leader could use, and a tremor like this meant that the enormous rock face sealing its entrance was opening.
“...Mm.”
At this Yeon Ri-ja, who had been standing with his arms folded, gave a slight twitch of his brows, and the Sword Sect Leader and the traitor elders of the Grand Heaven Sect nearby stiffened and tensed.
“...The Grand Heaven Sect Leader.”
So Heuk — the absolute master who had reached the transcendent realm early on and had no equal in all of Gangryu Province — had at last ended his long isolated training of some seven years and shown himself.
When he entered isolation his realm had been the threshold of the transcendent realm, and he had begun his isolated training with the middle stage of the transcendent realm as his goal.
But his isolation had continued for those seven years, and since he had only now shown himself, after the sect had met with calamity, he had presumably still not escaped the threshold of the transcendent realm.
“I hear he is a martial artist of the transcendent realm. Hm. It should be entertaining enough.”
Where the elders were taut with tension, Yeon Ri-ja merely flicked his brows once and remained as unruffled as ever.
For Yeon Ri-ja too had been supported with various spell implements by his clan when he set out on this mission, and he was confident that he would not be outmatched by any cultivator within his own realm.
Much less feel fear before the Grand Heaven Sect Leader, a mere ordinary man. Absurd.
Of course, however ordinary, a martial artist who had reached the threshold of the transcendent realm was reckoned to hold combat power comparable to the third through fifth levels of Qi Refinement, taking his own weight class alone.
Still, however outstanding a martial artist might be, in the end he was a monkey-like creature that staked everything on a single weapon and charged.
To charge at a cultivator who wielded numerous spell implements through pure spell power was to come at him all but bare-handed.
And so, as the final battle within the Grand Heaven Sect arrived.
“......Grandfather?”
On some forest path at the mouth of Grand Heaven Village.
A woman who had once been a girl came face to face with a black spider.