Not of the Demonic Cult
“What the hell are you?”
“What the hell are you?”
The bizarre man and I spoke at the exact same instant.
I wet my dry lips with my tongue.
The man’s heels never once touched the ground.
—Thump… thump…
He bounced in place with a shallow, metronomic rhythm, rising and falling. It wasn’t the ridiculous hop of a clown. It carried an alien wrongness, a creeping sense that something about him simply did not belong in a human body.
That wasn’t ordinary dagger work.
Severing tough red cloth in a single stroke with a thin, light dagger looked easy. It wasn’t. I studied the clean cut left in the scrap still clenched in my fist, then let it fall to the dirt.
My wariness toward the unknown man had climbed to its absolute peak.
Round points of light glowed behind his mask as he tilted his head.
“Why is someone from the Demonic Cult interfering in our business? Didn’t your superior brief you? The prior arrangement was already settled.”
“…?”
His incomprehensible words brushed past my ears. In the same heartbeat, thousands of thoughts flashed through my mind.
I hesitated a moment, then slowly opened my mouth.
“…Not at all. There’s no way the likes of us would be taking orders from you Blood Cult bastards.”
After careful consideration, the answer I gave was deliberately, extremely vague.
I didn’t press. I didn’t interrogate. I refused to fight the current of whatever he already believed, and instead rode it—nudging his misunderstanding further along.
What I needed right now was information.
There’s something here I don’t know. Something big.
I had learned, over and over, that this world never taught you a single lesson until the blade was already at your throat. The thirsty man had to dig his own well. If I needed answers, I had to dig them up myself. Sit still and nothing happened.
The glow behind the man’s mask narrowed at my reply.
“Skill like yours, and you’re still wandering the front lines like this… You’ve got some clear defect, don’t you? And that defect is that your head is empty.”
“….”
“You ought to thank heaven that the one who came here happens to be me—the one in the Blood Cult most skilled at sensing qi. Frankly I couldn’t care less if a few black-path dogs die, but when the hands and feet I’ve been using get smashed to pieces I come take a look, and what do I find? Some raving demonic lunatic running wild.”
He clicked his tongue and shook his head.
“If I hadn’t caught the faint demonic qi leaking off you, I would have struck first without question. I don’t know what misunderstanding made you clash with the Unwol Jiju pack, but to hide your demonic qi this precisely while still being of demonic origin… Your skill, at least, is the real article.”
So he, too, openly called himself Blood Cult. The “demonic qi” he claimed to sense from me was almost certainly the energy accumulating in my body from the internal art Asura had taught me—Patcheon-hyeol-ma-mu-geuk-gong.
What mattered was that he believed I belonged to the Heavenly Demon Cult, and that he had no immediate intention of lunging at me.
In that case…
I slowly straightened my slightly bowed torso. I raised my hands, uncurled my fists, and showed him empty palms.
It was an extremely small, almost meaningless gesture in the language of martial courtesy. Yet the man seemed to understand exactly what it signified.
—Thuk.
The ceaseless bouncing stopped. For the first time since we met, both of his feet settled fully onto the ground.
The sharp edge of his killing intent remained, but the razor-wire tension of a silk thread balanced on a blade’s edge eased, if only for a moment.
The mutual vigilance did not.
In silence we studied each other. He was wrapped head to toe in red cloth, yet I could still deduce a few things. An extremely pale face. A gaunt frame. Not a single strand of hair visible; the only skin showing was the narrow ring around the glowing eyes.
I spoke.
“As you can see, I’m bottom-rung in the Heavenly Demon Cult. Yeah. I’ll admit I’m an idiot.”
I played the part of a pure, simple martial man to the hilt—speech a little too fast, a little too rough, the tone of someone forcibly swallowing the humiliation of being looked down on.
The man tilted his head at my words.
“Oh?”
“I last made contact with my superiors a week ago. Whatever got handed down since then is none of my business. I’m the bottom. I just carry out the last order I was given. You’re not my superior—why the hell should I listen to you run your mouth? And another thing.”
I dripped a single drop of indirect, emotional truth into the lie, exactly the way Jegal Sea and the others had taught me.
“Whatever pact you made with my superiors, me and my brothers don’t even treat Blood Cult dogs like people. So stop acting like you know me and get lost. You disgusting corpse of a Blood Cult bastard.”
“….”
The light in the man’s eyes twitched.
“This maggot of a demonic cultist… I held back because of the pact, and this is what I get?”
A cold, eerie anger gathered at the edges of his gaze.
Host.
Mumyeong’s voice sounded almost worried. I already knew. The line I had just thrown was completely unnecessary, strategically wasteful provocation.
I had done it anyway, for a reason.
Want me to show you why you martial artists always lose the thread whenever you talk to me?
Jegal Sea had once given me advice on the art of conversation. She said talking between people was exactly like tossing a ball back and forth.
Watch carefully. When you throw a ball that’s hard to catch, the other person’s stance falls apart, right? Then of course the ball that comes back is going to be a mess too.
She had waved her hands, warming to the lecture.
Catch a ball that comes flying in rough and loaded with emotion, and you get pissed off. So the next one you throw is rough too. Catch a ball that comes in calm and cold, and the other person starts overthinking and tries to throw calmly and coldly in return. Depending on what kind of ball you toss, you can steer the entire mood and direction of the conversation however you want. Just running your mouth however you feel is what amateurs do.
She had clicked her tongue at me standing there with my mouth open.
Sure, your martial world is endless. But other worlds are just as endless, so keep a humble heart and keep learning. The idea that someone who’s great at martial arts is also great with words and great with women? That’s the fantasy of kids who’ve never seen the real world. Got it, Mr. Wolf?
I wet my dry lips again and pulled free of the memory. I looked at the man in front of me.
His eyes had narrowed. The look in them had shifted to open contempt. In his gaze I was nothing more and nothing less than a simple-minded, inflexible demonic martial artist—strong, but thick as a brick.
My emotional, thoughtless, premature manner of speaking had blown away whatever careful, rational conversational posture he still had left.
I swallowed dryly.
It worked.
A response that looked completely uncalculated and emotional, put another way, removed any need for the other side to stay calculated and rational. Because of that little provocation, I could feel the last thin thread of suspicion—that I might not actually be from the Demonic Cult—vanish from the corner of his eyes.
“Damned thick-skulled demonic cultists. You claim to hate the orthodox sects, but from where we stand you and the orthodox dogs are identical in how pig-headed you are.”
He watched my unyielding stare, then let out a short sigh.
“This is exactly why I hated joining hands with Heavenly Demon Cult bastards… Fine. Whatever. Being realistic and instinctive is the Blood Cult’s strength. You get what you want, we get what we want, so we put up with it. So I don’t know why you smashed the Unwol Jiju people, but just quietly back off and—”
“Where are the children?”
His brow furrowed.
“…Children?”
“Yeah. The children. You know. Only three days left.”
I spoke as if I already understood the full meaning, tossing out the single fragmentary phrase I had overheard from the black-path men. The gaps between the words I left for him to fill with his own assumptions and imagination.
He looked at me, no longer bothering to hide his deep irritation.
“We already agreed you wouldn’t interfere any further with the one hundred and eight offerings inside Unwol Jiju territory, didn’t we?”
He waved a dismissive hand.
“If you start sticking your nose into that as well, it becomes a problem. I don’t know which superior ordered you here, but go back and deliver the message clearly. There are no children to return to you.”
“That’s a problem for me.”
“It’s a problem for us too. We went to all the trouble of feeding them nothing but dew and thin gruel to purify their insides, and now three days before the rite you suddenly want them back? What are you playing at? The Great Blood Cult may be masters of the forbidden arts, but do you think artificially creating a Guardian’s jewel is some child’s game like making Blood Jiangshi? Damn ignorant demonic cultists.”
“…What?”
My eyes narrowed to slits.
“You’re sacrificing the children… to artificially create a Guardian’s jewel?”
At my reaction the man in red scowled and answered curtly.
“Yes. Why do you keep double-checking something you couldn’t possibly not know? It’s not like this is the first or second time. There’s no way you wouldn’t—”
His words cut off as cleanly as if sliced by a blade.
“….”
Our eyes met.
His blinked.
Mine blinked.
Moisture that had been gathering on the stone ceiling of the underground chamber fell drop by drop, tapping the floor. Both our breathing slowly lengthened.
“…You.”
His heels lifted off the ground.
My body dropped low.
My open palms clenched into fists.
His pupils shrank to pinpoints.
He let out a single strangled scream.
“You bastard—you were never Demonic Cult!”
—CRACKLE-ZZZAP!!!
Lightning erupted across my entire body and my form warped. I hurled myself at him with everything I had.
—Thump…!
He sprang upward at the same instant; his body twisted past any human joint range in a grotesque contortion and slipped out of my grasping hands.
“Tch!”
Red light blazed from my eyes as I chased him.
I had to catch him here. If I lost him, I lost the single fraying thread I had finally managed to seize.
Damn it. This is bigger than I thought!
At first the goal had simply been to rescue the young sister of one of the Oho-samhwa who had been sold into human trafficking. But the truth underneath was never petty trafficking for pocket change. It was organized. Systematic. Purposeful.
I had already clashed with the Demonic Cult and the Blood Cult more times than I intended. I had felt for a while now that they were steadily, methodically moving toward some larger goal. Even after the bloodbath at Emei, the Blood Cult had withdrawn in a hurry because of something happening elsewhere. So Yeomgyo had left on some errand of her own. Eun Seollyeong had gone pale at the sight of a ring and immediately changed her plans.
—Fsssssh!
—CRACK! CRASH! CLANG!
Lightning howled as my body tore through the underground space like a mad thing.
“Kh—you bastard! I knew something felt off, but that clear demonic qi made me believe…!!”
He ground his teeth and kept slipping out of my reaching hands.
Fast!
No matter how I tried to grab him, those bizarre movements made it impossible.
I can’t catch him?
It was the first time I had felt that way since mastering the out-of-spec footwork of Baekryeon-pal-ya-jong in the Fourth Secret Cave. Like trying to snatch a swaying shadow—no matter how hard I clenched my fist, there was nothing there. I swept my hands through the fluttering red cloth and caught only air.
And the man in red was just as shocked.
“Th-this can’t be! How can I—!”
The dagger, re-gripped so that it wound once around his palm, shot toward my throat like a rain of arrows.
—Gulp.
I slipped past it with the absolute minimum of motion. No matter how wildly the red-masked man swung, his dagger could not so much as graze a single hair on my head.
He howled in disbelief.
“Impossible! Impossible!”
Internal force began to pour from his body.
—Thump, th-th-thump!
His toes hammered the ground in a frantic staccato and his movements accelerated.
“Even if I’m fighting by proxy through the parasitic brain bugs, I am the Ghost Shadow Divine Thief of the Great Blood Cult—Ryu Cheong-jin! And I can’t even cut a scrap of cloth?!”
The man—Ghost Shadow Divine Thief Ryu Cheong-jin—seemed unable to accept the situation itself.
“You bastard!”
—Fwit! Fwi-fwi-fwit!
He was faster than anyone I had ever met. The power behind each attack was clearly weaker than others I had faced, but the perverse angles and grotesque trajectories were enough to make the tongue freeze. This was no ordinary martial artist. I felt it—I would have to go all out.
Something is wrong. This man’s body is not normal.
Mumyeong’s words confirmed the wrongness that had been wrapping my body the entire time.
—Grit.
I clenched my teeth.
I could not kill him. But before he could bring out more of his true ability, I had to overwhelm him with superior force and pin him down in an instant.
—Kiiiiing!
Crimson light began to blaze from both my eyes.
—Crack, crackle-ZZAP!!
Something clearly different from the lightning that had been coiling around my feet until now—vivid black thunder, Black Lightning—began to wrap my body.
“Th-this is?!”
Ghost Shadow Divine Thief Ryu Cheong-jin’s eyes flew wide at the black thunder sheathing me.
As the black lightning lengthened the crimson afterimages trailing my body, I grew faster and faster. I clenched my teeth hard enough to crack them and intoned:
Daedo-pye-eon-yu-ui-hyeop
When the great Dao collapses, righteousness and chivalry arise.
I shot three steps backward like lightning. As I voiced the first true word of the decisive secret Asura had taught me, black thunder boiled through my entire body. The instant my soles slammed into the earth I launched myself at Ryu Cheong-jin with everything I possessed and roared:
Asura’s Great Annihilation — Apex Form
—Woooooom!!
Black thunder coiled around my entire body—and I vanished.
I felt Ryu Cheong-jin’s eyes lose track of my movement.
“Good gods—that speed—!”
Ghost Shadow Divine Thief Ryu Cheong-jin reeled in shock. I snatched his throat in a single motion as he stumbled backward. It was the strike of a snake seizing a rabbit.
—KRAAAAAASH!!!!
With a thunderous boom that shattered the ground, Ryu Cheong-jin was slammed into the floor.