Six Nights Before the Festival
Six Nights Before the Eve
We tore through the entire Second and Third Branches at a blistering pace.
So Yeomgyo's forward speed was genuinely astonishing. The surface and outer districts clearly had more ground to cover than the underground — no fixed corridors, no neat boundaries, endless things to watch for. Open space was perfect for explosive footwork, but it also meant a far higher chance of ambush, which made every stretch of it exhausting. And yet she still matched me almost stride for stride as I swept the tunnels along their set paths. Sometimes she finished the surface clean and came down after me to help finish whatever I was still chewing through underground.
I found myself freshly stunned by her.
The jianghu really is a world where you can never afford to get comfortable.
Eun Seollyeong, Guardian of Mount Hua, had publicly called me a monster — and still not a shred of vanity stirred in me.
"You're a real monster, you know that?"
We had just finished gutting one sector of the Third Branch and were sprinting side by side toward the next when So Yeomgyo suddenly said it, looking straight at me.
"Out of nowhere? Why?"
"I've seen countless people in my time. Not just the Nine Sects and One Gang — the outer forces too."
Her face was faintly flushed from the heat of her own body. Breath tearing in and out behind the red mask that covered her down past the nose — it was a human look you never saw on the cold-blooded killer she usually was.
"I won't insult you with the empty flattery that you're the greatest, Biryu."
"…?"
"But I will say this with certainty: no one has ever grown the way you have. I was already shocked during the battle at Emei, but I honestly thought that was the peak of it — that you'd plateaued. And then somehow, in so short a time, you've grown so far that those days look like a child's game…"
In a way, she had been there from the very first moment I set foot in this jianghu, whether either of us had meant it or not. No one knew the bottom of my ability better than So Yeomgyo. That was why, even as we moved in perfect tandem, she was more stunned than anyone by how far I had come.
I had no idea how to answer. I looked at her for a moment, then said:
"Thanks to you sticking a blade in my heart, I've been busting my ass every single day trying to get stronger."
"Th-that's…"
So Yeomgyo flinched. Her face went red and she whipped her head away. As a master, she had once lost the composure that was supposed to be non-negotiable — and driven a sword into my heart for it.
"Kh…"
Every time the subject came up, she looked like she was in genuine agony. The tangled mess of a killer who had spared her target, the guilt toward the man now fighting at her shoulder, the shame of a martial artist who had lost her calm — all of it knotted together.
"Hey. Biryu."
"Hm?"
She clenched a fist, smiled that sharp little smile, and shoved her face in close.
"This humble woman has told you — since Emei, until it is burned into my bones — that she is so. very. sor. ry. about that day. So why do you keep bringing it up? Do you actually want to die once?"
"Oh. Did you?"
She growled at me under her breath, seething.
"Do you have any idea how high I hold my nose out there? The woman from the North Sea Ice Palace sent her personal couriers three days straight begging me to take her commission and I didn't so much as twitch. During the Mount Hua power struggle they said it had to be me or no one. Even four years ago at the Sichuan Tang Family—"
So Yeomgyo cut herself off like a blade through silk. She looked up at the blue sky and sighed.
"Why does every word I say just make this sound more pathetic and defensive?"
I kept my mouth shut, because if I agreed that it did sound pathetic, she would hit me.
"Damn it. If it was going to be like this I should've just sent Baekho. Why did I shove past him and insist on coming myself…"
"What?"
"Shut up. Be quiet. Silence, you idiot. It's nothing."
Our mouths kept sniping, but our hands never stopped. Using the map Jegal Sea had given us and the fresh field intel we stripped out of every branch we broke, we crossed without rest into the next one and smashed every sector flat.
What had begun at dusk burned through an entire day. Around noon the following day we finished clearing every branch and finally reached the entrance to the Fourth Branch district.
We stepped into the street that, by all signs, belonged to Banwol — the Fourth Branch that handled opium and moonshine.
Whether it was because it was high noon, or because word of our unbroken rampage had already spread, I couldn't say. The street was empty of people. It felt like looking at a marketplace after the stalls had all shut down.
I scanned the surroundings.
"No need to sweep the surface."
"Figured as much. Unlike the first three, from the Fourth Branch on the product is the kind of thing you can't really run aboveground — no matter how many officials are greasing the wheels."
So Yeomgyo rolled a stiff shoulder as she answered.
"You said the Fourth Branch is opium manufacturing and moonshine. Booze I get — but can you even grow poppies underground?"
As the Munju of the strongest assassin order in the jianghu, So Yeomgyo knew far more than I did about the dark world's pipelines and ecosystems.
"Poppies need huge fields, so they'll be growing them outside the city walls — basin terrain, that kind of place — under some arrangement with the greenwood outfits. Getting the product in just takes buying a few officials. Easy enough."
"Well. If it's only the underground we need to hit, we go in together this time."
I drew a long breath. Ahead of us, a deep stone stairwell plunged into darkness, vanishing into the earth.
They were small fry, sure — but after hammering nonstop without rest, I could feel a thin edge of fatigue in my body.
"Hoo."
"Water?"
I nodded. So Yeomgyo wiped the sweat from her brow and passed me a bamboo canteen with a narrow spout. The air was warming. Not long ago it had been cold enough to see your breath.
There was even snow when I was at the Namgung Family… Time really does fly.
I took the canteen from her.
Come to think of it — I wonder how that little Namgung girl is doing.
A rough, half-formed version of my younger self flickered through my mind. Reliving the texture of those days as if they had been yesterday, I pulled my mask down, set the bamboo spout to my lips, and drank. The mouth of the canteen was still damp. Cold water ran down my burning throat and cooled me from the inside out.
"Ah."
So Yeomgyo twitched as if she meant to say something. Then she sighed, gave up on whatever it was, and turned her face away. Lost in thought, I didn't notice.
Whenever I saw something that meant something — whenever a memory rose — I tried to hold on to the touch of that moment, the smell of it, the exact shape of the recollection. It was a habit born in childhood, from the winters I had run across frozen fields holding my mother's hand. Maybe even as a child I had already understood that a memory left to drift is a candle flame you never get back.
Host is twisted.
Mumyeong had said that once.
You're really nothing like a martial artist.
So Yeomgyo had said it too. Eun Seollyeong. Jegal Sea. All of them, in their own ways: twisted. Not like a martial artist.
I… what am I, exactly?
Even when the talk was light, even when the day was ordinary, I knew it myself. I would never live the way other people lived. Some crooked thing in my chest kept driving me to the edge. It refused every compromise and forced me all the way to the end. I wondered, once or twice, if this was what the world meant by madness — not the cheap kind storytellers throw around, but the real, heavy kind. The kind where even you cannot stop walking the road, whether the end is ruin or something else.
A man must strengthen himself.
Head high, chest out — become the pillar and the hero for them all.
I quietly recalled the lines a wretched man in another life had howled as his final creed — words that had crossed the barrier of language and handed me a single, solid meaning.
Thump.
Beneath the heat of my body, a heart turning frost-cold began to beat. The eyes that had loosened under the weary noon sun slowly iced over again.
I handed the canteen back to So Yeomgyo. She looked at it for a moment, then tucked it at her waist once more.
"Except for the Fifth Branch, this is the last one. Let's hope what we want is here."
"And you said anyone who isn't a fool will have prepared."
I cinched the guards on my wrists tight. I yanked my leather boots snug, rolled my neck, and whispered:
"Mumyeong."
As if he had been waiting, Mumyeong's voice rang through my skull.
Remaining internal energy: approximately two and a half gapja. Sufficient.
Something felt off.
…Has Mumyeong's voice always been this clear? This strong?
Ordinarily it had felt like someone speaking from far beyond a bank of fog. Lately, though, his voice had weight. It was growing larger.
Physical condition is also sound. I am continuously adjusting it. Recovery will not merely hold — it will keep improving from here. Of course it will.
A beat of silence. Then Mumyeong said:
To survive, it has to be that way.
"…You. What did you just—"
I started to press him on the strangeness of the words — and in that instant So Yeomgyo strode forward and cut the exchange between Mumyeong and me clean in half.
"Let's go. I don't fully trust a map made six years ago, but this one alone shows four underground levels. If we're going to sweep the whole place, we need to move."
She took the stairs without hesitation, two at a time. I had to focus on what was in front of me. I clenched my fist, opened it, wiped every thought clean, and followed her down.
We reached the bottom and opened the doors of the Fourth Branch — the place that manufactured moonshine and opium.
In the First, Second, and Third Branches, opening a door had meant swarms of black-path thugs pouring out like bees. Anyone who wasn't a complete idiot would have heard the stories by now. Even if they couldn't prepare perfectly, they should have prepared for something.
The massive doors groaned open.
A vast plaza. The damp reek of underground air and a cool, seeping chill. The noon heat that had been clinging to us sheared off the moment we stepped inside, like a thread snipped clean.
Thousands of candles burned. Beneath their wavering light the wide plaza was lit as bright as day.
"This is…"
So Yeomgyo's eyes widened a fraction.
"What, it really was just the two of you? Not a whole company?"
"Heaven's on our side."
Instead of the nearly hundred black-path fighters we might have expected, only two men stood in the plaza. So Yeomgyo read the whole board in a breath, hiked one corner of her mouth, and let out a short laugh.
"Ah. So the small fry get shoved aside and the captains of the Cheongma Oryun step up themselves. That it?"
She pointed first at the short man gripping an axe, then at the tall one beside him.
"You're Chu Yeo-ryong, head of the Third Branch. And next to you — Muk Se-hwi of the Fourth. At least you don't hide behind your men like the other branch heads. Almost like real martial artists."
"No."
The tall man, Muk Se-hwi, shook his head and drew a long sword.
"We simply judged you enemies who must be erased with everything we have. Do not expect a martial artist's conscience from black-path men."
He raised a hand.
"All upper-ring units of the Fourth Branch and below — open ranks."
The walls of the plaza — walls that had looked like bare stone — rippled, and black-path fighters poured out in a flood. So Yeomgyo's eyes did not change. But from the set of her back I felt a thin thread of tension.
"…Would you look at that. Black-path trash, and they're laying out a formation?"
The way the fighters fanned out and locked into position felt nothing like the black-path thugs we had been dealing with — brutes who won with numbers and swagger rather than real martial skill.
A chill ran through me. I had been herded like a rat in the Blood Sect's heavenly net once before. The moment I recognized a real formation, gooseflesh rose over my whole body. Even small fry became dangerous the second they locked into a proper array.
"Our Fourth Branch handles moonshine and opium — territory that makes every black-path outfit and half the unorthodox sects salivate. If you're talking about Unwol Jiju's strongest regular force, you're talking about us. We expected a full company assault and planned to needle martial pride until the leaders stepped forward. But if it's only the two of you from the start, there's no need to mind appearances."
Muk Se-hwi's voice rang out.
"All units — deploy the Great Luo Blood Net Formation."
"…What?"
So Yeomgyo's eyes went wide.
"The Great Luo Blood Net Formation? You're joking."
"What? You know what that is?"
I shouted it at her even as I looked. The black-path silhouettes scattered and fused into one vast black cloud.
The candle flames began to thrash and stream sideways. Chu Yeo-ryong and Muk Se-hwi melted into the mass with the rest. There was not a shred of carelessness in them. From the first breath, they meant to kill the two of us with everything they had.
Horror flooded So Yeomgyo's eyes.
"How does a pack of black-path mongrels in the middle of the jianghu know a Blood Sect formation — no. It has to be a bluff. That's impossible."
She shook her head hard. A soft sword whispered free of its sheath in her hand. I settled into my stance. We put our backs together. She shouted:
"A formation isn't something any dog or cow can just throw up — you need a dedicated instructor drilled into them for half a year at minimum before it even starts to—"
The black earth-cloud came alive. Between the dark shapes, crimson afterimages began to flicker and stream like living fish.
"…So Yeomgyo — this is—!"
My eyes flew open. Other people might miss it. I could not. That ominous blood-colored afterimage boiling out of the black cloud was identical to the signature trail that appeared when I used the only Blood Sect art I had ever copied — Hyeol-yeong-mu-hwan-sin-sul.
So Yeomgyo saw it too. She whispered, stricken:
"Dear gods. It's the real Great Luo Blood Net Formation."