Hell
Among the countless martial clans and sects under heaven, how many possessed an internal cultivation manual?
The Nine Great Sects, the Five Great Clans... beyond that, I wasn’t sure.
That was how precious and rare internal energy was.
It made sense that its circulation beyond the sect was strictly forbidden.
Bok Ha-gyu had poured a fortune into getting his hands on this. The Blood Corpse Gang leader had drooled over it so hard he’d brought ruin down on himself, and Choe Sa-deuk had even hired Hoyeongeom to snatch it out from under everyone else.
It was the sort of thing that should never even be known to exist, yet Bok Ha-gyu had handed it to me without hesitation.
After reading it, I understood why.
“Taixu, yin-yang, taiji, five elements, eight trigrams...”
I couldn’t make head or tail of a single line of the thing. I skimmed it, page after page, but even after staring long enough to make myself dizzy, I still couldn’t tell which sect’s internal art it belonged to.
Nowhere in the booklet was the sect’s name written, and not even the name of the internal art itself appeared. It looked like a manual left behind for descendants of the line, not for outsiders.
When I reached the part dealing with the method of circulating internal energy, I couldn’t keep reading at all.
“From the perineum point through the rib-pursuing mist into the mysterious pivot point, following the wind mansion point to cleanse the filth-clear path, using the foot lesser yang and the yang linking meridians as the court...”
It was packed wall to wall with acupoints and meridians I had never even heard of. And it was all text, not a single diagram.
There were plenty of characters in it I was seeing for the first time, too.
I finally understood why Do Goeng-il had said internal manuals were passed down through true qi guidance.
If you tried to learn this by staring at it alone, you’d probably end up with the sort of qi deviation you never had in the first place.
I sighed and handed the book back. When Bok Ha-gyu saw the sour look on my face, he snorted with a crooked smile.
“Can you make sense of it?”
“No. Had any success yourself, Great Leader?”
“None. And I don’t care to.”
As if he were sick to death of the thing, Bok Ha-gyu shook his head.
“I’m looking for a physician who knows acupoints and meridians. Leave it with him for a few days, and he should be able to draw the circulation route onto a body chart. If we send it to one of the sects under the Martial Alliance that the Black Night Gang has ties with, someone there ought to recognize it.”
“So it’s one of the Nine Great Sects?”
Bok Ha-gyu gave no answer either way.
Which sect had Jeok Chu-yeong’s connections reached into?
Shaolin, Wudang, Huashan, Zhongnan, Kongtong, Emei...
Every one of them was a towering great sect packed with high-level experts.
“Is this really the internal manual of the absolute master who used Hidden Force?”
“It is.”
“How can you be so certain?”
Bok Ha-gyu folded his arms and looked straight at me.
“The upper ranks confirmed who the culprit was. I can’t lay out the whole process, but... this is the internal art of the sect that bastard belonged to.”
Why was he so sure? I tilted my head, then clicked my tongue a beat later.
“Don’t tell me you bought this from the Black Spots?”
If it was the Black Spots, the specialists in hunting martial experts, they’d be the sort to have an internal manual. Chances were high they’d stolen it, or learned what they needed after kidnapping or torturing someone.
From the look on his face, I’d hit the mark.
“You ready to deal with the aftermath?”
Bok Ha-gyu gave a cold, mocking snort.
“Hah. It was already over the moment that bastard used Hidden Force on the chief.”
I looked down again at the unknown manual with renewed interest.
Could Do Goeng-il get something out of this?
If he were nearby, I’d go ask him, but I had no idea where he was now. He wouldn’t be back until next spring at the earliest.
Then I remembered something I’d nearly forgotten.
Before the year ended, Won Seo-gang and I were supposed to climb over the Black Night Gang’s wall together.
“Has the Chief gotten any better?”
“No real change.”
“I’d like to see him once.”
“Not possible right now.”
“Let me at least see his face. I want to know he’s really still alive.”
Bok Ha-gyu’s eyes sharpened.
“You don’t trust me?”
“You can’t deny I’ve already been useful to you, Great Leader. Now it’s your turn. Make it so I can trust you.”
I couldn’t just keep trusting Bok Ha-gyu blind. If he kept putting me off indefinitely, there’d be no choice but to climb over the wall with Won Seo-gang and see Jeok Chu-yeong’s face for myself.
Bok Ha-gyu considered it for a long while before finally giving in.
“Fine. I’ll make a chance for you soon enough. But do you actually have the nerve to walk into the Black Night Gang?”
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
I said it lightly, but I’d still need to prepare properly.
Luckily, there was Jin Seok-man, one of the brewery laborers, who knew the Black Night Gang’s interior layout well.
If I met him again and secured an escape route in advance, I’d at least be able to get out in the worst-case scenario.
Just thinking about entering the Black Night Gang made me remember one face I really did not want to run into inside.
“There’s a martial artist named Pan Ho-yang in the Black Night Gang, isn’t there?”
“Pan Ho-yang?”
After I roughly described him, Bok Ha-gyu nodded.
“I think I’ve seen him once or twice. That bastard isn’t my guest.”
“Then?”
“He’s a hanger-on that Im Ja-gyeon brought in.”
“The Mad Destruction Leader?”
“You know him?”
“Only by name.”
He was one of the three men closest to Jeok Chu-yeong.
The other was Seon Do-mu, the Five Phoenixes Leader.
Both of them were, like Bok Ha-gyu, black-path men who had risen far under Jeok Chu-yeong after coming here from Hunan.
They must have gone through life and death together, but Bok Ha-gyu still looked unconvinced.
“You’re not close with the other leaders?”
“What’s the point of being close? Sooner or later, we’re all going to hell together.”
“Hell, huh...”
If the moral code of the afterlife was anything like the one on earth, martial artists who’d killed plenty of people weren’t likely to be permitted paradise.
They’d almost certainly be cast down into hell or something like it, though what sort of hell it would be, I couldn’t say.
Bok Ha-gyu spoke with complete certainty, which made me curious.
“What kind of hell do you think martial artists fall into when they die?”
After a long silence, Bok Ha-gyu answered in a dull, husky voice.
“Probably each into their own nightmare. Or maybe nothing happens at all. You don’t know until you die. Anyway, it’s a blessing we didn’t have to borrow the Blood Corpse Gang’s strength and could still swallow them whole. Men like that would’ve been no use at all.”
I stared at him, stunned by the unexpected information.
“Don’t tell me you took on the Blood Corpse Gang by yourself, only with the Solitary Ripping Leader?”
Bok Ha-gyu gave a calm little laugh, as if there was nothing surprising about it.
“The Blood Corpse Gang? That’s nothing. Me and my boys were enough. I don’t need men who can’t keep step. They’re nothing but trouble.”
Even if the Blood Corpse Gang had been weakened, they were still a black-path gang with real standing in the area.
The fact that the Black Night Gang had crushed them with only one combat unit said plenty about how much hidden strength they possessed.
If the time came for me to climb that wall with Won Seo-gang, I’d need to keep that in mind.
After talking with Bok Ha-gyu a little longer, I got up to leave.
*
“...Stop. Cough, cough.”
But the Blood Corpse Gang’s junior leader, Ha Jong-geon, did not stop.
The fierce pounding of hooves against the dirt and the creak of the wagon were loud enough on their own, but that wasn’t all.
In a single night, he had lost both his family and his gang.
He was fleeing in a cart, yet he had no idea where he was even supposed to go.
Only after Ha Eul-san struck the side of the wagon with the last of his strength did he finally come to his senses.
He jerked on the reins and brought the horse to a stop, then climbed down into the cargo bed.
“Uncle...”
Kneeling to check Ha Eul-san’s condition, his face twisted with grim despair.
The bandage wrapped around his left arm, cut off at the shoulder, had begun bleeding again, and dark red drops were falling steadily to the floor. Blood was still seeping from his lower abdomen, which had been coated in wound medicine so thickly it looked smeared on.
It was the kind of injury that should have killed him already. The fact that he was still alive at all felt like a miracle.
Ha Eul-san himself knew well that his life was almost gone.
With a face so pale there was no blood left in it, he spoke.
“That Bok Ha-gyu bastard... he had just enough skill to make a decent cook at an inn... The black path’s front knife got taken by the back knife. Cough, cough. We should have finished the Black Night Gang off long ago. I was too careless... cough, cough. Water.”
His nephew lifted the water flask to his lips and tipped it gently.
After taking a few slow sips, Ha Eul-san let out a heavy sigh full of regret.
“I was born a man and lived my life without regrets. Only... if I leave my brother’s killer alone, I don’t think I’ll be able to close my eyes even in death.”
With one trembling hand, Ha Eul-san pulled out a rusted iron badge.
“Take this to Wiseong-ri. Go there and...”
He laboriously told him, in fits and starts, what needed to be done there.
Ha Jong-geon, listening with his breath held, furrowed his brow in obvious disapproval.
“You expect them to take an assassination contract in a place like that?”
“You’ll understand once you go.”
“Even so, they’re just some country martial artists, aren’t they? Better to buy blade hands from the rogue market and...”
Ha Eul-san forced his blurred eyes wide open.
“Don’t underestimate them just because their signboard looks shabby. That place is an assassination unit run by a killer from the Assassin Society.”
Only then did his nephew’s eyes go wide.
As the son expected to inherit the Blood Corpse Gang after his father, Ha Jong-geon had walked the brutal black-path road from a young age. He could not possibly have been ignorant of the Assassin Society’s reputation.
The reason the Assassin Society was famous for contract killings wasn’t because they killed so secretly that not even the birds knew.
It was because they never failed to kill their target by any means necessary, no matter what it cost.
If it was a branch faction spun off from such a group, then at the very least, the money wouldn’t be wasted.
“The Blood Corpse Gang is collapsing. Will they even accept the contract?”
“If the condition is handing over Eunbyeongru, they’d take the contract gladly even if the other side were the Black Night Gang. Greedy bastard that he is...”
“Isn’t that too much for payment?”
“If we leave it alone, it’ll all end up in the Black Night Gang’s hands anyway. It has to be that much if even the Five Evils bastard is going to throw himself in for real. Cough, cough... I’m tired. Lay me down...”
Supported by his nephew, Ha Eul-san lay down on the inconvenient wooden floor of the wagon.
With no roof overhead, the cold that drifted down from the pale autumn sky seeped straight into his bones.
To think he would meet death, shivering in a filthy old cargo wagon like this, he was bitter enough to grind his teeth.
Back when he had been enjoying the martial contest at Eunbyeongru, he had never imagined he would not survive that night.
Watching martial artists die or get maimed on the dueling stage, he had only calculated the betting stakes. He had never once imagined his own death could be this close...
So this was life. No one could see even one step ahead...
His body went limp, and the pain dulled into a dim ache. The sky before his eyes faded, and the brightness vanished.
From within the hazy darkness, a face began to drift into view.
Was it his parents, dead decades ago? A child he had lost years earlier?
Just as the face come to greet him became clear, his mind snapped awake.
A suspicious middle-aged man with a cheap, begrudging face.
The leader of Hunan’s Giant Deer Gang, whom he and his younger brother had once ambushed from behind and hacked to death in their youth. So Si-gang.
That had been more than forty years ago.
He had never felt guilt to begin with, and long ago he had forgotten the man’s face.
Then why was he showing up now, just when death was near, to keep him from passing on in peace?
White brain matter ran from the half-split skull of So Si-gang, mixing with blood as it slid down onto his face.
Even with such a hideous ruin for a head, So Si-gang was smiling. As if he were glad to see him again. As if he had known they’d meet again like this.
That son of a bitch...
He groped at the floor with his hand, driven by the urge to stab that grinning face full of holes, but there was nothing to grab.
More faces flickered over So Si-gang’s shoulder. They were all men he had beaten to death himself.
Every one of them seemed to have been waiting for this day, nerves pulled tight like strings.
So Si-gang flicked out a snake-long tongue and wrapped it around Ha Eul-san’s neck. Somewhere along the way, he had taken on the look of a prison executioner in hell, wearing a horn-shaped cap.
The others had adopted the same sort of appearance, clinging to his body and limbs.
Struggling, he looked toward some distant place one of them was pointing at.
A vast, glittering mountain that pierced through the clouds, magnificent and shining.
It was a sword mountain, the whole thing from base to summit covered densely in long, dreadful blades.
If they dragged him there, he would have to climb that terrifying mountain while being whipped.
No matter how much he was stabbed or sliced, he would not be allowed to die, nor would the pain ever dull, and so he would climb endlessly...
It was the perfect hell for a martial artist who had spent a lifetime harming others with blades and swords.
After suffering for the span of eternity, he would be reborn as a worm or some beast.
Get lost! I’m not going to be dragged around by the idiot bastards I sent to the grave with my own hands! Let go! Let go of me!!
Ha Eul-san thrashed with everything he had and looked wildly around.
There was no family anywhere to help him. Even his younger brother, who had gone ahead by only a few hours, was nowhere to be seen here, whether he had already been taken or not.
His floating body was helplessly dragged away from the world of the living and toward the sword mountain.
“Let go...”
With his eyes bulging and his face grotesquely twisted, Ha Eul-san’s breathing finally stopped.
Ha Jong-geon closed his uncle’s staring eyes, full of indignation, and gathered his weapons and luggage.
He detached the horse from the wagon and placed a saddle on its back.
“Uncle, I’m sorry I couldn’t send you to a better place. Please wait a little longer until I come back with your revenge.”
Leaving Ha Eul-san’s body behind in the cargo wagon, Ha Jong-geon turned and mounted the horse.
He kicked it into a run toward Wiseong-ri, heading nonstop for the assassination unit reportedly run by a killer from the Assassin Society.