The Red-Masked Jiangshi
The body of the unidentified old monk wearing the red ogre mask blurred.
What came rushing at me was a slash of sword light swung at an unbelievable speed.
It was sword qi.
“Oh crap!”
I kicked off the floor and launched my body into the air.
Crash!!
The roof shattered. With a massive cloud of dust, the roofs of the entire area—structures that had stood for hundreds of years—collapsed in a chain reaction.
“Keuk!”
My body was dropping, but there was no roof left below to land on. I plummeted straight into the temple.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Sword qi sliced through the air in continuous waves.
“Tch!”
I focused my internal energy into my hands. It was the first time since returning to Cheonsubaekryeonsa that I had properly concentrated my power. My shriveled meridians swelled as if drinking in moisture. My heart began pounding as if it would explode. My pupils contracted and dilated repeatedly as bloodshot veins rose in my eyes.
Clang! Shatter! Clang!
I deflected the sword qi.
Boom! Crash-crash-boom!
Fortunately, the sword qi of the old monk in the ogre mask was pitifully weak. The energy I shattered with my hands exploded outward with a roar, pulverizing everything around it and scattering into nothing. The shock sent me tumbling hard across the floor.
Thud!
I landed barefoot on the wooden floorboards. Without resisting the way gravity tried to snap my ankles, I sank down smoothly, like a wet towel collapsing. I planted my knees, connected my hips, curled my waist, and rolled forward. Using the rebound, I bounced back to my feet while simultaneously executing the Baekryeon-pal-ya-jong.
My body undulated; my form swayed like a dancing shadow.
A rusty cleaver swept through the space where my neck had just been.
Crash!
A massive pillar exploded into wooden splinters and collapsed in a single blow. Buddha statues shattered. Prayer beads were crushed to powder.
My form swayed again. I dodged the old ogre monk’s razor-sharp cleaver by a single strand of hair.
Rip! Tear! Rip!
My black martial robes tore, the edges fluttering. I had avoided the attacks, but I did not leap into his embrace.
This bastard is different somehow.
A strange calm radiated from him. From everything I had experienced so far, this creature—human or not—who attacked without warning while wearing a red ogre mask was almost certainly a guardian spirit of the White Lotus Demon Sect’s secret caves, just like the White Snake, the Snow-Faced Lord, and the Golden-Haired Divine Ape I had met before. Yet he felt different from all of them. It was the feeling of “Come at me if you dare.”
And that guess proved correct. In the middle of a fierce exchange where several exchanges of blows flew in a single breath, the old monk suddenly opened his arms wide toward me. He left himself completely defenseless—so open that if I wanted, I could have charged in and ripped his heart out in one go. It was a blatant provocation.
Well now.
Provocation or not, the fact that he had opened his guard remained true. The old me would have charged in without a second thought.
…I did not.
Wary, I began slowly circling the old monk. When I refused to leap in easily, he tilted his ogre-masked head. The sight was more than enough to make my blood boil. After three or four more exchanges, I made up my mind.
Fine. If that’s what you want, I’ll play along.
I shot backward like lightning. I kicked up the incense burner in front of me, snatched it out of the air, and dumped the ash powder inside. Then I clenched a handful of the ash and flung it at the old monk.
Whoosh!
“…!”
The old monk flinched in the billowing gray dust. In that instant I reached into my robes and pulled out pellets.
“Eat this!”
First I hurled two gray smoke bombs onto the floor.
Boom!
A far more acrid smoke than the ash erupted, accompanied by a thunderous roar that threatened to burst eardrums and shake heaven and earth. Immediately after, I pulled out three red flame bombs, scraped them with my nails to ignite them, and tossed them at my feet. Then I unleashed the Hyeol-yeong-mu-hwan-sin-sul at maximum speed and charged straight ahead.
Leaving crimson afterimages, my form vanished behind the smoke.
Crash!!!
“…!”
I seized the horn of the red ogre mask, twisted one of his arms, and slammed him toward the floor with my full weight. The old monk thrashed. The flame bombs, on the verge of exploding, waited on the ground below.
Boom-boom-boom!!!
We were engulfed in a massive blaze. The dilapidated temple shook as if it would collapse. Dust rained down from the rafters.
Crash!
The floor gave way all at once.
“…!”
There was another underground level below.
“What the hell kind of structure is this?!”
I kicked off the charred back of the old monk and launched myself upward, driving my fingers into the broken floorboards.
Dust and debris rained down. Below, a bottomless abyss stretched out of sight.
Clank… clank…
Unidentifiable sounds of steel echoed from the depths.
“Hah… what kind of place is this? The atmosphere is completely different from a normal secret cave.”
I shook my head as I looked down. “This one was especially weird too.”
Below, only black darkness sat as if nothing had happened. I stared downward with my palm still planted, but no movement appeared. I erased the lingering image of the red ogre from my vision and looked up to climb back out.
…
Right in front of my nose, the old monk in the red mask was looking down at me, cleaver gripped in both hands.
“…Is scaring people your hobby?”
“Pffheh…”
A phlegmy sound rattled from behind the mask.
“Are you a different one wearing the same mask? That’s impossible.”
I let out a low groan. “That bastard definitely fell down there when I used him as a foothold to climb up.”
Even as I spoke, I was certain the monk before me was the same one I had just fought. Burn marks from the flames, fragments of the smoke bombs, and black blood seeping between them were all visible. The rough breathing leaking through the mask proved we had just exchanged blows. Yellow drool dripped from beneath the mask, and the tip of the cleaver trembled violently.
“‘Enough to make a ghost cry’ is the perfect expression.”
Whoosh!
The cleaver came crashing down toward my wrist, which was still hanging from the floor. Using that wrist as a pivot, I vaulted my body upward.
Floating in midair, I looked down at the old monk far below. He was staring up at me as if waiting for me to come down. Gravity began pulling my body back under.
Since I still didn’t know his true nature, I decided to kill him in one go. I mapped the trajectory in my head, calculated how to mix hands and feet, and measured the distance—!
Crash!!!
It was the sound of a single bolt of thunder.
“What the—?!”
My eyes nearly popped out of my head. A considerable distance had opened between us. Not extremely far, but not close either. Twenty paces. Twenty full paces separated us. Yet with a sound that tore the air apart, the old monk was swinging his cleaver right in front of my face the very next instant after I blinked.
All I could do was pour every last bit of internal energy into catching the cleaver with everything I had.
“This… this is—!!”
The cleaver trembled violently. My mind boiled over like mad. I summoned every combat experience I had ever lived through. Yet none of it could explain this. Even Ilmanhyeolje, the strongest expert I had faced so far, was not this high a level. Even if Baekho pushed the Hyeol-yeong-mu-hwan-sin-sul—the pinnacle of lightness skill and the absolute best in straight-line speed—to its extreme, it would never reach this.
The next cold possibility was that some illusion art was making my senses perceive the situation slower than reality. But I had checked that countless times during the close combat; my senses were sharp enough to cut on a blade’s edge.
In other words, he opened his guard because he was confident he could dodge any attack I threw… is that it?
Crash!!
Another air-rending roar, and the old monk vanished. He reappeared exactly twenty paces away on the temple floorboards.
“What the hell?!”
The moment the clinging monk disappeared, I was left alone floating in empty air. No matter how much skill I had built up, unless I could perform the legendary Void-Stepping, there was nothing I could do in midair. Helplessly, I fell into the bottomless abyss.
[Hmm? Wh-what?! What’s going on, Host?!]
Mumyeong suddenly shouted from the depths of my consciousness. I snapped at the flustered soul fragment.
“Damn it! You were sleeping even while we were beating the hell out of each other?!”
Mumyeong muttered blankly.
[…No, I couldn’t possibly… First!]
Vmmm!
My eyes turned crimson, illuminating the dark surroundings. Belatedly, every object around me came into view. Mumyeong shouted.
[Host, below!!]
“…!”
Crash!!
The underground floor I had thought was deep was not that deep after all. With not a single ray of light, I had simply mistaken it for an abyss. Because I hadn’t prepared, this time I took the full impact with my entire body without even managing a proper breakfall.
Clank… clank… clank!
The roar of steel echoed from every direction. I looked up.
…
Above, a fist-sized hole let in a sliver of light. Through it, the old monk in the red ogre mask was looking down at me, drooling. He felt less like a living being and more like a doll.
[…That’s a jiangshi, isn’t it?]
Mumyeong said.
“What?”
[That’s a jiangshi. The flow of qi is completely different—there’s no room for doubt. Host, were you fighting that thing?]
“A jiangshi? The jiangshi I know?”
[Yes.]
I was speechless for a moment.
“That’s nonsense. That bastard used sword qi.”
[That’s nonsense. A jiangshi using sword qi?]
I was dumbfounded.
“So which one of us is talking nonsense? The Nightmare of the Demon Sect who slept soundly while I was fighting the enemy?”
[I’m not trying to make excuses, but since you asked…]
“….”
[I’ve told you repeatedly. I react to killing intent. The fact that I didn’t wake means, in other words, that the opponent had no killing intent.]
Thinking about it, that was true. The unidentified freak had swung a weapon at me, but it was literally the embodiment of no-mind, no-thought. The calm I had vaguely sensed might not have been calm at all. It was more accurate to say he simply had no emotions whatsoever.
“A jiangshi that uses sword qi should be impossible. And it used martial arts too. Completely ridiculous martial arts I’ve never seen in my life.”
[What?]
I described to Mumyeong the technique I had witnessed—the one that twisted space and leaped across it.
[That is the most ridiculous thing of all.]
Mumyeong said the same thing again.
“I never thought the day would come when I’d have to persuade the bastard sharing my body of all people.”
[From now on I’ll be more careful about when I sleep.]
After a moment of thought, Mumyeong reasoned as follows.
[A jiangshi, but one closer to a puppet. You said the sword qi was weak, after all.]
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
[Simply put, a jiangshi on a string. Somewhere, a martial artist is controlling it using insects. That would make it possible for a jiangshi to use sword qi or martial arts. Of course, the caster would have to be an extraordinary expert as a basic condition. Anyway, thanks to that jiangshi we’ve ended up in an absurd place.]
I looked around with my crimson vision and pushed myself to my feet. A vast cavern stretched out before me.
“Yeah.”
I took one step forward. My weight pressed down on a square floor plate.
Hummm.
Night-luminous pearls embedded in the ceiling began to activate. The roar of steel grew even louder. Only then did I understand what the noise was.
“Mechanisms?”
It was the sound of countless mechanical devices. Steel apparatuses I had never seen before meshed together and then separated again, producing the din.
“This… looks like…”
[The temple city above was a decoy.]
Mumyeong continued slowly.
[This is the real thing.]
Beneath the brilliantly glowing night pearls lay a massive plaza. In the center rose a tall altar bathed in light pouring down from the ceiling. What I had thought were the walls of the cavern surrounding the altar were not walls at all. They were living things composed of countless mechanical parts, constantly moving. Flanking the single staircase that led up to the light-bathed altar, every direction was filled with all kinds of weapons and glittering gold and silver treasures.
“This… is all this gold and silver? Is this real? Am I dreaming…?”
If my hands and feet weren’t trembling, it would have been a lie. My chest felt ready to burst. My heart pounded so hard it seemed about to leap out of my throat.
[No matter how you look at it, these are treasures accumulated since the days of the White Lotus Demon Sect.]
Mumyeong said.
[Be careful. Don’t touch them carelessly—. Host.]
Mumyeong sighed.
[How is it that a martial artist’s hands leave his body faster when he finds treasure than when he finds the Heavenly Hundred Ginseng? Pathetic.]
“Hey, it’s not that bad. Don’t casually frame me.”
[Anyway, don’t touch them. See those mechanisms right in front of you? They’re clearly aimed this way.]
I looked ahead.
“You’re right.”
I quietly withdrew the hand that had almost reached a gold necklace.
Clank… clank!
With the roar, what swayed and meshed in the darkness were steel pillars as tall as I was. Dozens of them stood on either side of the altar. On each pillar, two rows of saw blades were embedded, crossing and thrashing madly. They looked ready to slice anything apart—white, semi-transparent material. It looked familiar.
I tilted my head.
“I’ve definitely seen those somewhere. Why do they look so familiar? Those ice-like blades…”
[Host, look at the altar.]
I turned my head.
“That is…”
Until a moment ago the altar had been empty under the white light. Now, as if it had always been there, a massive sword with a black blade and red patterns was embedded in it. There was no way I wouldn’t recognize it. I had already seen it in Yuk-bi-dong.
“The sword of the White Lotus Demon Sect’s leader. Pacheonhyeolmu?”
In Yuk-bi-dong I had tried to grab it without caution, only for it to vanish before my eyes while wooden puppets charged me all at once in a catastrophe. Because of that experience, I had no intention of touching it now. I frowned.
“Is this another illusion?”
“To recognize even Pacheonhyeolmu… I was already surprised watching you trade blows with our child earlier while holding back, but you keep surprising me.”
I spun around like lightning. From the darkness, an old man in tattered monk’s robes was slowly walking toward me.
“Welcome. I’ve been waiting for you. You’re Moyong Bi. Moyong Bi, correct?”