Chapter 23
Chapter 23
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 23
Chapter Title: Finding the Way in the Darkness (1)
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Slither!
Something long wormed its way out from between the rocks. The object wriggling forward as it crawled was a snake. But it wasn’t the kind of common snake one saw every day.
Flicking out its long tongue as it slithered along the ground, the snake had neither eyes nor ears at all. And yet, it somehow navigated its path even in the pitch darkness.
It went around any stones in its way and crossed over any depressions. In that manner, the snake crawled toward its destination.
The destination was a small gap in the rocks on the opposite side. The snake shoved its head into the crevice. Next up was squeezing its long body inside.
That was when the snake tensed its body to build momentum.
Suddenly, an immense force clamped down on its body just below the head. As the startled snake lifted its head against the abrupt pressure.
Crack!
With a gruesome crunch of shattering bone, the snake’s head was torn clean off. The headless body thrashed wildly, oblivious to what had happened. But the iron grip holding its torso didn’t budge an inch.
Crunch! Crunch!
Someone in the darkness was chewing on the snake’s head.
A tangled mess of hair covered his entire face, and a beard reached down to his chest, making it impossible to make out his features.
The man was completely naked, without a single rag on. Perhaps from years without sunlight, his skin was deathly pale.
But in stark contrast to that pallid flesh, his body looked incredibly tough. Well-defined muscles twisted like coiled wires, their striations plain to see, and bones protruding like hammers of varying sizes hammered into place.
Crunch!
As the man tore into the snake again, the muscles across his body writhed of their own accord. Those muscles, moving like independent creatures, radiated raw power.
It took the man nearly half a shichen to devour the single snake. From head to tail, not a bone fragment or scale went to waste—he packed the entire thing into his gut.
The man wiped the snake fluids from his mouth with his hand and rose to his feet. In the darkness, his eyes gleamed fiercely.
Like a predator stalking prey in the gloom, his pupils dilated wide, catching even the faintest glimmer of light.
The man took a step forward.
His gait was utterly peculiar.
Thud! Slither! Thud! Slither!
His right foot would plant firmly on the ground, followed by his left dragging slightly behind. The odd rhythm and cadence made his movement seem even more unnatural.
Leaving the cramped cave behind, the man emerged into a vast underground cavern. The ceiling of the enormous space—large enough to house hundreds of people at once—held several dimly glowing luminous stones embedded in it.
The man swept back the hair shrouding his forehead and face. Beneath the faint glow of the luminous stones, his long-sun-deprived pale visage came into view.
Jet-black pupils set beneath a straight forehead and lips sealed tight, as if they’d never part easily—an impression well-suited to the man known as Damho.
More taciturn and more feral in appearance, he still clung to life within the Thousand Gold Demon Prison.
He had no idea how much time had passed. Years, perhaps, or even longer.
Damho figured at least five years had gone by. His body had stopped growing at some point, signaling the end of puberty.
The halt in growth was proof enough that he’d become a man, even if he couldn’t pin down his exact age.
Damho’s gaze shifted to one side of the cavern. Though time had marched on, a massive pile of rubble and house-sized boulders still sealed the entrance.
Damho wove past the rocks and dirt to the far side. A small tunnel had been dug out there as well.
Damho entered without a second thought.
The tunnel was terribly narrow and pitch-black. But the darkness posed no obstacle to Damho.
He’d traversed this path hundreds, even thousands of times. He knew every loose pebble on the floor and the precise position of every stalactite overhead.
The tunnel twisted and turned without end. Damho pressed on through the endless dark with patient resolve.
How long had he walked? At last, his destination came into view.
A modest space roughly two zhang across. A stone bookshelf stood within. Around twenty martial manuals were slotted into it.
Damho opened the weathered chest beside the stone shelf. A faint light seeped out. Inside lay a luminous stone the size of a child’s fist.
Clutching the luminous stone in one hand, Damho pulled a manual from the shelf with the other. Beneath the dim glow, the title emerged.
Three Strikes Cannon Shadow Fist.
So read the tattered, frayed booklet.
Damho flipped through the Three Strikes Cannon Shadow Fist manual. He’d lost count of how many times he’d pored over this old thing.
Hundreds, thousands of times at least—maybe more. What mattered was that every detail of the Three Strikes Cannon Shadow Fist was burned into his mind.
This space was known as the Myriad Demons Vault.
Long ago, it had held prisoners of the Demonic Cult. But after the Demonic Cult’s warriors entered the Thousand Gold Demon Prison, it became a storage for martial scriptures.
Before Damho’s arrival, hundreds of such manuals must have been kept here. Yet when those warriors departed, they took nearly all of them.
The leftovers were the ones they’d deemed unimportant.
The Three Strikes Cannon Shadow Fist, along with the Rebounding Demon Kick and Vast Pressing Hand, were among those discarded arts.
With plans to collapse the Thousand Gold Demon Prison anyway, there’d been no danger of them leaking out.
He could scarcely recall the joy of first stumbling upon this place.
Time crawled by so agonizingly slow here. It wasn’t truly the case, but to Damho, a single day dragged like ten.
Simply having something to read—anything to occupy his time—filled him with enough joy. From that point on, whenever he had a spare moment, he’d visit the Myriad Demons Vault and immerse himself in the books.
He read them, and read them again.
Eventually, he memorized every word perfectly. Then he reread them to uncover any hidden meanings. That was the depth of his mastery over these scriptures.
Yet now Damho began rereading the manuals here once more, starting with the Three Strikes Cannon Shadow Fist.
In the darkness, Damho’s pupils dilated wide.
A long while later, he emerged from the Myriad Demons Vault.
This time, he headed for a tunnel far more secluded than the vault. So tight and dank it was a squeeze for even one person.
Whoosh!
A wind blew in from the far end of the tunnel.
Intense and icy, like the whisper of a demon, it swept over Damho’s naked form.
Despite his bare skin, no hint of cold touched his expression. He seemed a man stripped of human emotion.
At the tunnel’s end lay shattered rock fragments strewn everywhere. These weren’t natural breaks—clear signs of deliberate force.
Damho himself had smashed those rocks.
He recalled that day, its exact date lost to memory.
After the Wall Cliff Group had all departed, amid days of starvation beyond count.
Hunger had driven him to the brink of madness. He’d thought he’d just die like that. So ravenous he’d have gnawed his own arm if he could.
He had to find something—anything.
Unable to bear the hunger, he’d scraped unknown moss from the walls and eaten it. In that way, he eked out his life while desperately hunting for sustenance.
The fruit of that grueling struggle was this place. He’d sensed wind seeping from a crack in the blocking rock. A sign of empty space beyond.
Damho shattered the rock. A new chamber appeared. And there it lay before him now.
A fairly spacious area spanning over ten zhang. Water filled the entire chamber.
Far too vast and deep to be a mere puddle from dripping stalactites. Water must flow in from somewhere—and with the level holding steady, it flowed out somewhere too.
Damho peered closely into the pool. Astonishingly, fish that glowed on their own swam within.
So transparent their bones showed through, those bones emitted an eerie light. Damho wouldn’t have believed it without seeing for himself—truly bizarre creatures.
Damho plunged straight into the pool.
The water chilled him to the marrow. The bitter cold seared his skin as if it might slough off, and his heart hammered wildly.
Yet Damho endured the agony, thrashing through the water. The strange fish scattered in panic at his intrusion but couldn’t evade his grasp.
Moments later, he resurfaced holding one.
The fish flopped in his hand. Damho tore into it right there. Nothing combustible lay around to start a fire.
Cooking was a pipe dream; just eating it raw was cause enough for gratitude.
Damho devoured the fish down to the head. For a moment, he eyed the head with regret.
He didn’t know how long these fish had dwelled here or how they’d come to. What mattered was their adaptation to this place.
Plop!
Damho tossed the head onto a bare patch by the pool’s edge. Then he waited patiently.
It wasn’t long.
Rustle!
A faint scuttling suddenly echoed through the subterranean chamber. Something crawled out from a crevice in the rock.
A glint lit Damho’s eyes.
It was an utterly strange insect. Shaped like a dung beetle...
The only difference: like the fish, it glowed with its own light.
The dung beetle latched onto the fish head and began gnawing at the flesh.
Crunch! Crunch!
In the sealed space, even tiny sounds boomed loud.
Damho squatted, watching the dung beetle. Though he was right there, it paid him no mind, wholly focused on its meal.
Once it had torn off a fair bit of flesh, something else crawled from the crevice.
Damho’s lip curled faintly.
This time, no dung beetle—a mantis. It too glowed with inner light.
Another darkness-adapted freak. At the mantis’s arrival, the dung beetle glared warily, its glow sharpening.
Damho observed the standoff between dung beetle and mantis with keen interest.
This underground realm held endless fascination.
The fish lured insects with its self-made light, and the bugs came despite knowing it meant death. That was how the fish survived here.
When a fish died now and then, it fed the subterranean bugs in turn. Food so scarce, their battles were ferocious.
Among them, the dung beetle versus mantis clash especially captivated Damho.
The mantis struck with its scythe-like forelegs. The fierce swings evoked a martial arts master.
No feints or flourishes—just a direct lunge for the neck.
In that instant, the dung beetle tilted its body ever so slightly. The mantis’s foreleg ricocheted off its armor-tough shell, deflected at an angle.
The mantis staggered from the glancing blow. The dung beetle rammed forward with its bulky frame.
The mantis beat its wings suddenly, retreating a touch.
Standoff anew, attack renewed.
The mantis’s foreleg slashed sharply once more. No simple deflection this time.
Flutter!
The dung beetle’s wings beat in a blur.
Wingbeats too swift for the naked eye flung the mantis’s foreleg aside.
Damho’s eyes gleamed in the dark.
‘The strongest shield...’