The Plight of the Jongnam Sect (Part 2)
Just as Ho-yeon Chan had said, the Shaanxi Sword Pact opened two days later.
The venue was a vast sparring arena on the outskirts of Xi'an, property of the Murim Alliance's Shaanxi branch. The Alliance had erected multi-tiered temporary wooden stands along the northern, western, and eastern sides of the grounds and sold the seats at steep prices, raking in a tidy profit. Of course, a portion of that income went to the Jongnam Sect and the Mount Hua Sect as well. On the southern hill, penniless spectators packed in shoulder to shoulder — those spots were free.
With Ha-hu Bong's help, Se-ryeong, Ye-hwa, and I secured excellent seats in the northern stands.
On the arena floor, twenty-four rising talents — twelve each from Jongnam and Mount Hua — faced one another. A referee dispatched by the Murim Alliance poured internal energy into his voice and bellowed,
"The Shaanxi Sword Pact begins now!"
As the crowd roared its approval, I sent a sound transmission to Se-ryeong and Ye-hwa.
Who do you two think will win?
Hmm... Overall, Mount Hua is a cut above. I'd say nine to three in their favor.
This one agrees.
The format was straightforward: each side sent out one fighter at a time for a total of twelve one-on-one matches, and whichever side won more took the victory. As befitting a formal event between prestigious orthodox sects, no one resorted to the kind of strategy that throws a weakling against an opponent's ace simply to wear them down. Matchups were set strictly by skill rank. Anyone with an eye for martial prowess could easily predict the outcome.
And yet, for all the razor-sharp judgment of two women who stood in the Transformation Realm, the contest proved surprisingly even.
Crack!
"Guh!"
In the eleventh match, a Mount Hua disciple failed to weather his opponent's relentless assault and lost his grip on his wooden sword.
"Victor: Gong Cheong-bo of Jongnam!"
At the referee's declaration, the spectators cheering for Jongnam erupted.
"Oooooooh—!"
"Jongnam's sword-song shakes the heavens!"
The score now stood at six wins for Jongnam, five for Mount Hua. One match remained. Jongnam needed that final victory to drive the stake home; Mount Hua needed it desperately to force a draw and escape defeat.
Bearing that crushing weight, the last two combatants stepped onto the stage.
From Mount Hua came the Plum Blossom Sword Dragon, Ho-yeon Chan — a face I already knew. From Jongnam came a refined beauty in her early twenties, the Great Ultimate Sword Phoenix, Wi Ji-seol. Both had already set foot in the Transcendence Realm, a class of fighter utterly apart from everyone who had come before them. The crowd's fever climbed even higher.
"The Sword Dragon and the Sword Phoenix crossing blades!"
"A true meeting of dragon and phoenix!"
In the orthodox martial world, it was customary to bestow epithets containing "Dragon" or "Phoenix" upon the rising talents destined to lead the next generation — Dragon for men, Phoenix for women. In other words, these two ranked among the very foremost geniuses not merely in Shaanxi, but across the entire orthodox Murim. Of course, that was only after setting aside Ye-hwa, who played in a heaven beyond heavens.
"Hahaha! It's been too long, Miss Wi! You've grown even more beautiful since I last saw you!"
Ho-yeon Chan greeted her with a hearty laugh. Wi Ji-seol answered flatly.
"It has been a while, Young Hero Ho-yeon."
The referee declared the match open, and Ho-yeon Chan and Wi Ji-seol collided.
"Tahaaap! Scattering Falling Plums!"
With Ho-yeon Chan's booming cry, his sword danced as brilliantly as plum blossoms cascading from the boughs. Shouting technique names wasn't because he was starved for attention — it was a courtesy for spectators who knew little of martial arts.
Against Mount Hua's pride, the Twenty-Four Forms Plum Blossom Sword Art, Wi Ji-seol answered with Jongnam's own pride: the Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven. Where the Plum Blossom Sword Art was swift and endlessly mutable, Jongnam's Thirty-Six Swords were weighty and linear. That did not mean they were simple. Jongnam's sword linked its forms with immaculate order and shifted between offense and defense with uncanny speed. Mastered to completion, it was said, a practitioner could answer attacks pouring in from all thirty-six directions at once.
Proving that claim, Wi Ji-seol blocked or turned aside every one of Ho-yeon Chan's cascading strikes that filled her vision. And the instant his cresting momentum faltered—
"Surging Heavenly River!"
She counterattacked with a thrust so fast and dense that the flash at her blade-tip seemed to paint the Milky Way itself.
"Plum Blossom Spitting Radiance!"
Ho-yeon Chan flung sword qi of lush, vivid color like a smoke screen across her eyes and retreated. Wi Ji-seol refused to let him go, kicking off the ground and leaping after him at once.
"Cloud-Treading Flying Strike!"
Closing the gap in a heartbeat, she spun her entire body and unleashed a devastating horizontal cut. Against any ordinary opponent, that single blow would have ended it. But Ho-yeon Chan was no ordinary man.
"Hidden Fragrance Afloat!"
With astonishing reflexes he raised a defensive form, caught her strike, and shoved hard while their blades locked. The Plum Blossom Sword Art did not merely borrow the flower's splendor. It also carried the plum's tenacity — the strength to endure winter's killing winds and bloom even through the snow. Mount Hua's martial artists excelled at contests of raw force like this.
"Urgh...!"
Unable to plant her balance, Wi Ji-seol was driven helplessly backward. Ho-yeon Chan hooked her leg with his own, and she toppled to the floor.
"Victor: Ho-yeon Chan of Mount Hua!"
The moment the referee finished, Ho-yeon Chan extended a hand to the fallen Wi Ji-seol.
"Hahaha! A fine match, Miss Wi. You've improved so much I hardly recognized you. Some special secret, perhaps?"
"...I have simply ground my teeth and trained with everything I have, for the revival of my sect."
Wi Ji-seol ignored his offered hand, rose on her own, and left the arena first. The last thing I saw was Ho-yeon Chan watching her back with a thoroughly disappointed look.
I turned my gaze from the stage and resumed the sound transmission with my slaves.
What do you make of this result?
Hmph... Truly strange. Those Jongnam brats — for their level of internal energy, the unfolding of their forms is far too clean.
And throughout every match, not one Jongnam disciple showed so much as a flicker of panic. Achieving that kind of still-water composure is difficult even for Transformation Realm masters.
I nodded at their assessment.
Right. Something's definitely off. I intend to look into it starting now.
That night, I left Se-ryeong and Ye-hwa to rest in their room and went out alone into the dark streets. My destination was the Zi-o Temple tucked into a corner of Xi'an — a small Taoist shrine affiliated with the Jongnam Sect, where the Jongnam disciples who had competed in the Shaanxi Sword Pact were currently lodged.
At the rear gate, after confirming no eyes were watching, I vaulted onto the wall.
Taah—
I didn't cross immediately. Instead I sharpened my vision and surveyed the interior. Black-obsidian go stones lay scattered across the inner courtyard — a type of security formation that would set bells or chimes ringing the moment an intruder stepped wrong.
Tuk— tuk— tuk—
I loaded internal energy into three pebbles I had picked up earlier and tossed them onto the formation's Open Gate, Rest Gate, and Death Gate. The structure warped, opening a narrow path just wide enough for one person. I slipped quietly inside, then melted into the darkness with the Dark Soul Step and began searching the grounds.
A large building that looked like the main hall blazed with light. I made my way toward it. Peering through a slightly open window, I found a thoroughly bizarre scene waiting inside.
The chamber was thick with incense smoke. Where an altar should have stood, a middle-aged man with a goatee sat enthroned. Behind him, an old man with a long white beard like an immortal stood guard with a sword at his hip — Unheo Jinin, the current sect leader of Jongnam. Before the goateed man, a broad table had been laid out like an offering to a god, piled high with wine and delicacies. Beyond the table, the Jongnam disciples from the Sword Pact stood arrayed in ranks.
The male disciples knelt in the back row, knees and foreheads pressed to the floor in full prostration. The female disciples, Wi Ji-seol among them, stood naked in the front row, repeatedly performing the full five-point bow toward the goateed man while chanting a strange litany.
"O Divine Physician of Preserving Life, deliver us! Grant us new life!"
Unheo Jinin bent at the waist and addressed the goateed man in a fawning tone.
"How is it, Divine Physician? Are our disciples offering their devotion properly?"
The goateed man answered with a sly, oily chuckle.
"Keheheheh. Excellent. Truly excellent. My dao power is recovering nicely — I'll be able to produce even more Golden Elixirs before long."
To explain this gathering that reeked of a cult assembly, I first needed to recount an incident I had heard of before my regression.
Roughly two years ago, a full-scale war had erupted between the orthodox factions under the Murim Alliance and the unorthodox under the Black Path Alliance — the Great Orthodox-Unorthodox War. The main theater lay far from Shaanxi, along the lower reaches of the Yangtze, but as members of the Nine Great Sects, both Jongnam and Mount Hua had naturally joined the fight.
Until then, Jongnam's prestige had surpassed Mount Hua's. They boasted many renowned masters; Ye-hwa's own grandfather, the Immortal Sword Martial Emperor Baekri Jong-gwon, had been an outer disciple of Jongnam. And unlike Mount Hua — endlessly mocked as money-mad for peddling expensive elixirs and talismans under their famous name — Jongnam prized frugality and abstinence, and enjoyed a far better public reputation.
But the Great War reversed both sects' fortunes.
In the war's early days, when the unorthodox side's momentum was fierce and the Namgung Clan of Anhui faced catastrophe, Jongnam scraped together everyone — their then-sect leader, their core elders, even their gifted rising talents — and marched to the rescue. They walked straight into an unorthodox trap and suffered catastrophic losses. Along with the previous sect leader, every elder-rank figure except the current leader, Unheo Jinin, was killed. Several of the rising talents once hailed alongside the Great Ultimate Sword Phoenix Wi Ji-seol as Jongnam's future also lost their lives.
Mount Hua, by contrast, had dithered through internal disagreement and arrived late. By then the tide had already begun to turn toward the orthodox side, and they escaped with minimal damage.
The Murim Alliance awarded Jongnam — who had paid the heaviest price — the greatest share of honor and spoils. But a martial sect is, at its root, a body of force. Having lost so many of its core masters, Jongnam declined day by day thereafter.
Just as Unheo Jinin, newly installed as sect leader, was trembling with the fear that Jongnam might even lose its place among the Nine Great Sects, a wandering physician came calling. The man introduced himself as the reincarnation of Bian Que, the legendary physician of the mythic age, and declared that Jongnam's plight so moved him he wished to help. Cornered and desperate, Unheo Jinin clutched at the straw and brought the man into the sect.
The stranger concocted a peculiar elixir he called the Golden Pill and fed it to Jongnam's disciples. Suddenly their rate of martial progress accelerated, and in real combat they began displaying skill beyond their true level. Eyes bloodshot with hope, Unheo Jinin begged the man to become Jongnam's exclusive physician. The man set one condition.
At present I have lost the dao power of my former life and cannot exercise my true ability. If Jongnam's excellent Taoists would revere me as a god and offer me devotion, I could recover that power. Do so, and I will gladly serve as your exclusive physician.
Unheo Jinin accepted. The result was the scene before me.
Of course, the bastard currently ogling the naked bodies of Jongnam's female disciples with a slack, lecherous grin was no reincarnation of Bian Que. His real name was Gwan O-sam — a con man with a bounty of four thousand five hundred taels of silver on his head. The true nature of his "Golden Pill" was a drug of his own invention called Eight Stone Powder. It violently heightened body and mind alike, sharpening concentration and steadying the heart. But it was fiercely addictive; when the effect wore off, the withdrawal was savage, and prolonged use rotted the internal organs.
In the history before my regression, the Jongnam Sect was ultimately destroyed by that Eight Stone Powder. My wife Ye-hwa had grieved deeply over the wretched end of the ancient great sect that had once taught her grandfather. Just before I regressed, she had asked me to at least spare Jongnam from total annihilation.
So then... time to figure out exactly how I was going to wreck that bastard Gwan O-sam.