The Heavenly Demon Copies Martial Arts

I approached the jade stele more carefully than I ever had before.

—Squelch. Squelch.

As I waded through the stagnant water, the stench rose as high as my knees. With leachate pooled underground like this, even in winter the temperature would hold steady enough for mosquitoes and every manner of vermin to throng. And yet this black water held no living thing at all.

Bathing in the Golden-Furred Divine Ape's blood is paying off right about now. Ordinary adult skin would have come down with a vicious disease and then some.

A blessing in disguise, I decided. I remembered So Yeomgyo telling me that a spirit beast's blood was an ultra-expensive commodity—something you took one mouthful at a time for only the most urgent wounds, never something you bathed in. At the time my gut had nearly killed me, but I was grateful it was helping in a place I never would have expected.

—Clack.

Beneath my feet, human bones lay heaped so thick among the rotten water that I could not touch bare ground. The bluish light spilling from the night-luminous pearls set into the ceiling only deepened the grotesque atmosphere.

"I keep forgetting that the White Lotus Demon Sect was the mother of both the Demon Cult and the Blood Sect," I said as I pushed on through the foul water. "But every time I see something like this, I'm sure of at least one thing—they were definitely the Blood Sect's mother."

That distinctive dankness is hard to argue with.

"Does the Demon Cult have the same kind of repulsive… coloring… in its internal affairs that I just haven't seen yet? Same root, after all."

Mumyeong hesitated.

I don't like admitting it, but the Blood Sect and the Demon Cult share the same origin, so…

He let the sentence trail off.

It would be stranger if there were nothing similar.

"So the reason the Blood Sect and the Demon Cult hate each other like mortal enemies is the sibling kind of hate—same parents, always at each other's throats."

The Blood Sect and the Demon Cult would rather swear a blood alliance with the orthodox sects than join hands with each other.

Mumyeong added one more line.

Blood kin don't sincerely wish for each other's annihilation and go so far as to draw blades. That comparison is a little off.

"Mm."

I made a low sound and didn't answer.

Ah.

A beat later, Mumyeong spoke again.

That wasn't my intention. My apologies, Host.

"…Well. My family's a little different. Even Moyong Ryu admitted that much."

At the Moyong Family head's funeral, Moyong Ryu and I had looked down from a second-floor window at the courtyard packed with mourners. He had pointed at the Moyong kin and guests flooding the front yard and cursed them as a pack of wolf cubs. I had never forgotten the look on his face then—that fox-like grin he always wore, half-smothered under exhaustion, hatred, and bone-deep fatigue.

Ahem.

Having insulted my family without meaning to, Mumyeong kept making awkward little noises. I snorted a laugh and climbed out of the rotten water, ascending the hill of bones.

"Enough with the ahem-ahem. Take a look around, would you? I told you I'm fine, Master Mumyeong."

Understood.

Mumyeong's temperament was definitely changing—just as mine was. As we carved our way through this lonely, barren reality, we kept leaving marks on each other.

"You're sure the area's safe?"

In Yuk-bi-dong, a wooden puppet had been shoved aside and brushed against the Sky-Rending Blood Dance. What followed was an endless assault of wooden puppets trying to tear me apart. In the Fifth Secret Cave I had pressed my palm to the jade stele as if possessed, and my legs had burst open beneath me as I was forcibly bound to Mara Jin and the Heavenly Blood Demon. Not once had greeting a jade stele gone cleanly, without incident. So even with no presence nearby, taking extreme caution was only natural.

I am a descendant of the White Lotus Demon Sect—what remains of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. It was the same in the previous caves. Beyond simple mechanisms or terrain, some transcendent force keeps my senses from working properly inside these places. Even so.

Mumyeong paused.

I can't sense very far, but I can confirm there is nothing near the jade stele. Just in case, I'll keep my senses as open as possible while you examine it.

"Appreciate it."

I studied the characters carved into the face of the stele with care.

Every character held a force that seemed to howl off the stone. Incised into the jade, filled with ink and dusted with gold powder, they glittered. Buried this deep underground, they showed not the slightest wear despite the ages—as pristine as if carved only yesterday.

"Come to think of it, there's no spirit beast here? Every previous cave had one standing guard."

I would have felt safer if a spirit beast had come bursting out for a proper fight. But unlike Yuk-bi-dong and the Fifth Secret Cave before it, this place was dead silent. Not a trace of any living thing—darkness itself. The night-luminous pearls were ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠so dim that without my crimson eyes I wouldn't have dared to move at all.

One of two things, Mumyeong said. Either there was a spirit beast and it starved to death, or they decided from the start that one wasn't needed. Both are plausible.

He told me to look up—and to run my hand along one of the lower stretches of ceiling.

"Don't tell me."

I flinched. A chill ran through my whole body as gooseflesh rose. I remembered the old man's hallucination at the entrance to Manmyo Cheon-wabul-san. The old ghost had said he buried ten thousand people alive in this place. I had let it wash over me at the time. I had assumed he meant the graves outside.

"What I'm thinking—is that right?"

It is.

Mumyeong answered evenly. The ceiling, too, was covered in White Lotus Demon Sect characters whose meaning I could not parse. But that was not what I was looking at. Lighting my crimson eyes, I spoke in a trembling voice.

"Those are all nail marks."

Above the writing, frantic clawed gouges covered every surface. I had thought I had walked a path of carnage. I had thought I had clawed my way out of a hell of blood. But before the grudge pouring off those nail marks that filled the ceiling, I nearly sank to my knees.

"H-how do you scrape rock hard enough to leave grooves with your bare nails?"

The White Lotus Demon Sect had a custom of offering human sacrifice commensurate with the value of any powerful martial art or artifact. Even accounting for the sheer mass of corpses that have fully rotted and crumbled over centuries, looking at the bones on the floor…

Mumyeong scanned the terrain as he spoke.

They packed a good ten thousand people in here. From floor to ceiling, this place would have been filled with human bodies.

"…Lunatics."

Beyond the ritual meaning, you could not ask for better security.

"Security?"

A well mouth so narrow an adult can barely squeeze through, and inside it a cave packed with corpses to the throat. Short of absolute certainty, no one in the jianghu would drag every last corpse back out just to get in here.

By now the bodies had rotted and the bones themselves had largely broken down, their bulk reduced to almost nothing. Walking was no trouble. But if this space had once been packed with corpses all the way to the ceiling, no one would have even considered coming near.

There's one more reason. Light your crimson eyes and look at the back of the stele.

At an extremely shallow depth, characters had been carved in dense rows. Different from the Zhongyuan script on the front—these were the White Lotus Demon Sect characters I had seen so many times before.

They recorded the Baekryeon-pal-ya-jong martial art in White Lotus script. The engraving is cut as shallow as possible so it can never be read by the light of the night-luminous pearls. The single shaft of sunlight that strikes the stele only hits the front face, so that's useless too.

"You could just light a torch."

That is exactly what the White Lotus Demon Sect wanted. And it is the finishing stroke on this security that looks, at a glance, completely unguarded.

Mumyeong spoke without heat.

Host, you have already been reinforced by things like the Golden-Furred Divine Ape's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠blood. You are not quite at the level of immunity to all poisons, but you have a fair resistance. Right now the air holds a faint accumulation of the miasma released as the corpses decayed. Centuries have passed, so the toxicity has thinned—but the moment you light a flame to read the characters, there is still more than enough of it to blow this entire chamber sky-high.

"Ah."

It looked abandoned, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠yet they had layered double and triple safeguards. Everything pointed to one clear conclusion. Exactly as they had intended, they had sealed off every way to read these characters except for a "chosen one" who possessed the crimson eyes.

"Is this martial art really worth that much?"

Mumyeong clearly recognized it. Ever since Yuk-bi-dong, entering each secret cave had been jolting loose fragments of his memory at a rapid pace.

Is it worth that much, you ask?

"Yeah."

Strictly speaking, Baekryeon-pal-ya-jong is not a martial art meant for attack.

"What?"

That was not what I had expected.

To be precise, it divides the four cardinal directions into eight points, then divides those again into sixteen fine bearings, and addresses the control of bodily movement along those lines—a martial art concerned with motion and locomotion.

"What does that mean?"

Simply put, Mumyeong said flatly, it goes one step beyond mere footwork or lightness skill. It is the foundation and core of White Lotus Demon Sect demonic arts dealing with body arts—the movement of the whole frame, and the techniques of locomotion. Even in the Cheonma Dae-seogo, which holds every martial art of the jianghu, the White Lotus Demon Sect's arts had only introductory notes. There ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was no record of the individual forms and postures.

"…Now I get it."

At present, aside from a few arts including Heaven and Earth Great Shift, I had fully internalized every martial art I possessed. My fundamental body technique was the Vajra Demon Subduing Fist from Shaolin, and my footwork was the Kongtong Sect's Hwan-yeong-dae-sin-bo. Pushing those arts to their limits and applying them to myself was overwhelmingly better than fumbling with half-baked superior techniques. But as my realm rose, I was feeling the ceilings of those arts more keenly than ever. To grow further, I needed something of a higher tier—something on a different track from the Vajra Demon Subduing Fist and Hwan-yeong-dae-sin-bo that formed the root of my body work.

"Mumyeong. Decode these characters for me."

Understood.

The jade stele stood taller than I did. On its reverse, divided into eight passages, was a treatise on the body arts of Baekryeon-pal-ya-jong. While Mumyeong decoded and organized it, I folded my arms and stared hard at the stone.

I had only one worry.

Can I… actually do this?

Embarrassing as it was, at my core I was an utterly ordinary adult man. My body had been reconstructed on the frame of the first cult leader of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult—incomplete as the transformation had been—but that only raised my physical durability and gave me a foundation that could digest any martial art. It did not speed up mastery or make enlightenment come easy.

And that was where my decisive weakness showed. I still had almost no experience learning martial arts the way anyone else would—through a manual. At most, back when I was scraping by at the bottom of the capital, I had flipped through moldy books trying to pick up third-rate sword forms. Until now, nearly every art I had was something I had watched performed in person and copied through the Heavenly Demon's power.

And the Heavenly Demon's power was not mere copying. It brought everything that came with the art—the caster's enlightenment, the memories and emotions of learning it. That was why it overloaded the brain. Once copied, the caster's experience of grasping and interpreting the art's meaning came with it, so application and understanding were never a problem.

And now.

"Can I do this."

I let out a long breath under the tension. The Baekryeon-pal-ya-jong before me—the representative demonic art of the White Lotus Demon Sect—was not something I could copy from a living demonstration. It was recorded on the stele as a manual.

………….

Mumyeong muttered as he worked through the decoding. Waiting for him, my lips went dry. Every kind of anxiety ate into my mind. Could I follow it and make it mine? This was a demonic art of the White Lotus Demon Sect, the predecessor of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult and the Blood Sect—was it even at a level a mere ordinary man like me could understand? A martial art from centuries ago—what if it was full of metaphors and abstractions I couldn't parse?

Decoding complete.

"Uh, th-that's—already?! W-wait, I need to get my head ready—!"

From the first verse through the eighth, I will recite every divided passage. Listen.

In a cool voice, Mumyeong began to recite the eight decoded verses of Baekryeon-pal-ya-jong. I had been about to stop him, but my mouth wouldn't open. I snapped straight into a posture of absolute attention.

Even if I don't understand it, open your ears and try as hard as you can. I can't let this chance slip.

I squeezed my eyes shut. With everything I had, I pricked up my ears and locked onto Mumyeong's words.

"H-hey, Mu… Mumyeong. Could you go a little slower?"

…Slower?

"Yeah. And from the beginning again."

…Understood.

Mumyeong cut the verses into single sentences and recited them slowly. With a trembling heart I took them in one by one. The verses were difficult—compressed, metaphorical, and advanced on a level that made the third-rate sword manuals from the backcountry look like nothing.

Y-yeah. Of course it's too much.

I clenched my teeth. I balled my fists. Midway through I wanted to shout for him to stop, but I forced it down. Even without understanding, I wanted to hear it one more time.

And then.

"…Huh?"

Something felt off.

"Mumyeong, sorry—could you say the first through fourth verses again? Just that part."

First through fourth? Understood.

Mumyeong spoke them once more.

—Thump.

My heart started pounding. It began to race like mad. I had not misheard.

"Th-this can't be."

These were verses I was hearing for the first time. And at the same time, they matched—perfectly—verses from a martial art I had already copied, whose meaning and structure I had completely mastered. My voice shook as I cried out.

"These are verses based on Hyeol-yeong-mu-hwan-sin-sul!"