In the end, everyone picked for the infiltration team arrived at the foot of the Ruin Cliff.
"......This is enough to drive a man out of his mind."
Even for the elite of the Pitch-Black League's Fujian Branch, climbing this cliff seemed to be a brutal drain on the nerves.
A cliff that might crumble at any moment set their fingertips trembling.
And if someone slipped and fell?
Who knew for sure, but they would never find so much as a bloodstain, let alone a body. That only made the doubt stronger. What on earth was that man? Where and how had he knocked about, to be so unfazed......
"What, did you all have boiled grubs for breakfast?"
Climbing a cliff like this at the very front of the line?
His reaching hand didn't even hesitate. Even if he knew the route by heart, a single mistake was sure to cost him his life!
"Hold."
Gu Ja-gyeong's tightly shut mouth opened for the first time in a long while.
"Strong wind. Don't move for four breaths. Not three. Four."
And sure enough, a deadly wind came tearing in, wailing like ghosts.
Whoooosh—
In the chilling wind, stone crumbled and scattered toward the climbers. When they had breathed exactly four times, just as Gu Ja-gyeong had said......
"Move out."
The wind stopped, uncannily on cue.
After going through this a few times, at some point everyone's bodies had started reacting to whatever Gu Ja-gyeong said before any shred of doubt could form.
They were all keeping their wits sharp, gripping exactly the holds Gu Ja-gyeong told them to, wholly absorbed in crawling up the cliff.
THUD!
Had the gale struck somewhere above? From a dizzying height, a pile of rubble suddenly came pouring down.
Watching the rubble draw closer, one man gritted his teeth despite himself and squeezed his eyes shut.
'Damn it!'
Because the rubble was pouring down right on top of him. He tucked his head down hard and took the debris with his whole body. Thankfully, it was bearable. It wasn't enough to knock him loose, but......
Crrrumble.
The wall, it seemed, could not bear it.
'Huh—?'
The rock under his left hand and left foot suddenly split with a crack, and in an instant the man's body was in the air.
'I'm dead.'
Hanging in empty air for a moment, the man felt cold sweat trickle down his spine.
In that instant, he remembered what Gu Ja-gyeong had said before they started up the cliff.
—"Some of us are going to fall off that thing and croak on the way up. But even if you fall and croak, how about we all swear never to make a sound?"
The man clamped a hand over the scream escaping him. Eyes screwed shut, he called up, one by one, the faces and names of the comrades climbing this hell with him.
Gwan-sik, Du-sam, Cheong-mo, Uncle Dae-myeong......
Even with every ounce of their focus, this cliff was deadly dangerous.
If they knew the comrades beside them had started dying, they would surely falter.
I was just unlucky. I have to accept it and go quietly. Quietly......
"Open your eyes. It's not over yet."
Just then, a flat voice reached him. The voice his body had obeyed again and again.
Whoosh.
He looked up to see Gu Ja-gyeong leaping down toward him from above.
It was an unbelievable sight.
His unwavering eyes fixed on the man, Gu Ja-gyeong rummaged inside his robe.
Fwip.
Gu Ja-gyeong pulled out a rope he had readied in advance from the breast of his robe. It was the other end of the rope he had tied around his waist before the climb.
With uncanny handiwork, he swiftly threw the rope and hooked it around the falling man's waist.
BANG!
The moment the rope caught the man's waist, Gu Ja-gyeong drove the iron spike in his hand into the cliff face.
Screeeeech—
Under the falling weight, the sharp spike slid helplessly.
So he yanked the spike free and drove it in somewhere else.
BANG! Screeech, BANG! Screeech.
Without a moment's pause, he moved it and drove it in again, a dozen or so times.
Thunk!
The spike, which had been sliding as easily as through tofu, caught on something and stopped. In that instant, the recoil flung both of them upward with a whoosh. Gu Ja-gyeong gripped the spike with both hands.
"Got it. Don't move."
Hanging from that single spike, Gu Ja-gyeong and the man waited for the swinging to stop.
When the swinging finally died down...... Gu Ja-gyeong opened his mouth.
"Heading back up."
The rope came off the man's body and vanished back into Gu Ja-gyeong's robe. In no time he was at the front again, opening the way.
As if nothing had happened at all.
The dry, joyless work of forging the route resumed. If anything had changed, it was the look in the eyes of the twenty Fujian Branch elites following Gu Ja-gyeong's back.
They had come to know.
That no matter what happened......
If they followed that man, they would not die a dog's death.
Slap.
The moment he reached the top, someone dropped to his knees and pressed his head to the flat ground.
"......I'm alive."
Every one of them had made it up the Valley of Ruin's cliff alive, a climb they had believed impossible.
Gu Ja-gyeong made sure the last man was up, then quickly scanned the terrain at the top of the cliff.
The Fujian Branch Head came up beside him and asked.
"Was this your plan from the start?"
"Meaning what?"
"The rope tied at your waist."
Gu Ja-gyeong glanced at the Fujian Branch Head and answered.
"We're short on bodies to take a blade as it is, aren't we? Better to die by the sword than die a dog's death on a cliff."
"So you meant to bring everyone up from the start?"
"Hardly. I just did what I could. If that wasn't enough, then that's that."
The Fujian Branch Head jerked his chin at the man who had fallen earlier.
"And if that one had fallen farther, what would you have done?"
Gu Ja-gyeong answered without a moment's pause.
"I'd have left him behind."
"I see," said the Fujian Branch Head with a nod, and he added a new fact about Gu Ja-gyeong to what he knew.
That this was a man whose words and deeds often didn't match.
***
From the edge of the cliff, I looked down into the fog-choked Valley of Ruin.
Not a bad result, all things considered.
There had been a few close calls, but we had succeeded in climbing the Valley of Ruin's cliff, the hardest obstacle. Now it was time to undo the formation.
"Where's the formation?"
I gave a short answer to the Branch Head's question beside me.
"Where else? We're already in the middle of it."
"What?"
"You think we risked our lives climbing that cliff for nothing?"
I walked past the puzzled Fujian Branch Head and took a step forward.
"A place no one could ever reach. That's where you usually hide the heart of a formation. Say, somewhere blocked in front by the Blood Night Gang's main base, walled in on both sides by ravines......"
I gazed down at the fog-shrouded Valley of Ruin below the cliff, then jerked my chin at the way behind us that we had just risked our lives to climb.
"And behind it, something no one could ever climb, like this cliff of the Valley of Ruin."
With that, I put my head to the ground. I quietly closed my eyes and listened to the sounds echoing through the earth.
"Do you know about the designer of this formation, Myriad Forms?"
The Branch Head shook his head as he answered.
"Isn't he a famous eccentric whose true identity is a complete mystery? Supposedly a master of every odd art there is?"
"Freak suits him better than eccentric. Poisons, formations, the esoteric gates, secret arts...... there's nothing that freak can't handle."
I remembered the moment I had come face to face with Myriad Forms in my past life.
A freak so transparent you could see right through to his insides.
Good and evil didn't much matter to him. Only whether something piqued his curiosity or not. Whether he felt like doing it or not—
As long as a thing met those standards, he was the kind of man who would gladly become a demon.
And......
It was a way of breaking it that I had worked out while being called a "demon" by that very man.
"Do you know what he despises most?"
Whoooosh—
Listening closely to the ghostly wail of the wind coming and going, I went on.
"'Anything forced.'"
The formations of Myriad Forms don't harm you or push you away. They simply erase the path. The essence of the formation set here was simple.
"Do you hear it?"
"Hear what?"
Still pressed flat against the ground, I raised a finger and pointed at the sky.
"Every sound is flowing naturally. Without the slightest gap."
The Branch Head got down low and copied me. He listened quietly to the sounds, then his eyes went wide.
"The sounds are repeating!"
The steady sound of the wind, the burble of a stream from below......
The sound of stone grit rattling in the wind...... even the echoes those sounds made......
All these sounds were passing back and forth between one another naturally, repeating over and over.
"From here on, I'm going to shove something 'forced' into this natural flow."
A wind channel ran between the great boulders. I walked to the very middle of it and drew my blade.
"Watch closely."
Then I sent internal force into my straight blade and swept it swiftly sideways.
SKRAK!
The blade, wrapped in true energy, carved an inch-long groove into the rock face.
And the texture of the steadily blowing wind changed ever so slightly.
As the wind was bent, the angle of the sound's echo was bent.
As the sound changed, the way the fog spread changed.
As the spread went askew, the concealment of energy went askew.
As the concealment of energy went askew......
The formation could no longer tell what it was meant to hide from what it wasn't.
That was the end of it.
Like a sentence simply coming to its end, the formation quietly closed.
"......Undone."
Sssssss.
"The fog is lifting!"
As the fog that had covered the Valley of Ruin vanished like scattering clouds, the whole view below came into sight at a glance.
It was a strange landscape, as if the mountain had been folded up on itself.
The mountain's waist had been gouged out in tiers along the ravine, and inside it the Blood Night Gang's mountain fortress lay coiled like a snake.
The middle tiers held training grounds and barracks, and below them several halls stood gathered around a manor.
For a fortress built in a ravine on a remote island, it was quite imposing.
"......This is."
The Branch Head let out a low sound of wonder.
The Blood Night Gang's headquarters, which he had longed for even in his dreams, lay spread out below.
......And completely unguarded.
"People always trust their backs to the places no one can reach."
I looked down on the Blood Night Gang, the corners of my mouth lifting.
"Right now, we're standing in the one place they believed no one would ever come."
"Hah! No more pointless bloodshed, then."
I looked at the Branch Head beside me, nodding over and over.
For an underworld branch head, he had a temperament that didn't fit the part.
'More useful than I thought.'
Just as the Branch Head had been observing me, I had been watching him.
During the climb he had volunteered to take the rear. Probably meaning to save any of his men who fell, as far as his skill allowed.
You could tell just from how he had left the safe main force to the Deputy Branch Head and volunteered for the most dangerous team, the infiltration team.
Why the officers under him trusted his decisions completely.
I didn't know much about the Branch Head.
Because in my last life, he had died on Ghost Spirit Island before long.
But even now, little by little, I was learning what kind of man he was.
"Fujian Branch Head."
"What?"
"What was your name again, Branch Head?"
The Branch Head looked at me like I was a lunatic.
"......Hard to tell who's the superior here. It's Bok Geon-gil."
When I just stared at him without a word, he kept his eyes straight ahead and added, as if he had seen this coming.
"My mother gave me that name, so don't you dare make jokes about it."
"Who said anything? I wasn't going to. Fujian Branch Head Bok Geon-gil."
As the Branch Head shook his head, I spoke to him.
"If I may be so bold as to offer a word of advice: once you've staked your life, you'd do well to keep your mouth shut tight and your head empty. Stick to that alone, and I guarantee you'll land a key post within a few years."
I enjoyed the sight of the Branch Head's dumbfounded face for a moment, then called out.
"Right! We climbed all the way up here, so now we go back down. Time to enjoy the fruits of the climb."
At the word, the ranks re-formed in perfect order.
Shff-shff-shff.
The Pitch-Black League's elite rode the darkness swiftly down the mountain path.
After climbing out of hell, walking down a gentle ridge line was nothing. It was almost laughable.
After a long way down, a Blood Night Gang guard post came into view.
Shk.
The head of the Blood Night Gang sentry dropped forward. Without his ever once looking back. It showed exactly why these men were the Fujian Branch's elite.
After that, it all went off without a hitch.
The gap in strength had been wide to begin with, and struck from behind, the Blood Night Gang crumbled helplessly.
Once inside the mountain fortress we didn't stop for a moment, racing straight for the tightly shut main gate.
"Branch Head, the signal."
At Branch Head Bok Geon-gil's gesture, one of the elites pulled a thin pipe from his robe and blew it.
No sound came out that I could hear, but it was probably a pipe carrying a sound wave only the Fujian Branch used.
A moment later......
A roar went up on the far side of the main gate.
BOOM!
The main gate of the Blood Night Gang's mountain fortress shook as if it would shatter.
CRASH—!
At last wood and iron broke apart together, and red fragments scattered into the night sky.
Welcome faces appeared beyond the opened gate. It was the Fujian Branch's main force, waiting in exactly the right spot.
To them, it must have felt as though the fog had lifted and a fortress had suddenly appeared before their eyes.
"We did it!"
"Wipe them all out!"
"Waaaaah!"
Like water bursting a dam, the main force, their spirits soaring, poured into the base and swept through it in no time.
Blood Night Gang men who came rushing back one after another joined the fight to resist, but it was futile.
The fortress's layout, where its forces stood, even its defensive routes. All of it had been built on the assumption of the formation.
"Enemies!"
"How on earth?"
"Why did the formation...... kraagh!"
"Stop them! Just hold them off!"
All of it became useless in an instant. Screams and shouts tangled together. The Pitch-Black League's warriors took the mountain fortress in no time, as if unleashing all their pent-up hardship at once.
Just when it seemed that if things kept going like this, it would be over.
—Thud.
The faintest tremor.
It was small enough to be buried under the din of battle, yet strangely, a sound bored its way into Gu Ja-gyeong's ear.
Kiiing—
A sudden chill hit the back of my head, and before I knew it I had spun around. And then I saw it.
'What is that?'
Deep inside the Blood Night Gang's main base.
From a place so deep the main force hadn't reached it yet, an unidentifiable energy was seeping up into the sky. An ominous energy, visible even to the naked eye.
"Branch Head, do you see that?"
"See what?"
"That eerie red energy over there."
The Branch Head stared for a long time, then looked at me.
"What on earth are you seeing?"
I turned my head and looked again at the spot where the red energy was seeping out.
'Of all places, from there......'
I knew that place well. It was the most important place in this whole base.
My instincts warned me.
That if I left it alone, this war would never end.
"Branch Head! Follow me!"
"Where are you going?"
"This is your road to promotion!"
I broke into a run, away from the main gate and toward the deepest part of the fortress.
Toward where the Blood Night Gang Leader was.
TL Note: Bok Geon-gil — the first two syllables of his name, Bok Geon, are also the Korean reading of Fujian, the province whose branch he heads.