Against Heaven (2)
The master’s flick to my forehead didn’t hurt. If anything, it was so light it only tickled.
In the past, she would have struck me hard enough to make my head ring with a sharp crack.
Her hand was trembling. I could feel the faint vibration travel through my forehead.
It wasn’t fear.
Her inner energy had already been drained to the limit, and the life force sustaining her was being gnawed away by her own body.
I swallowed a bitter smile.
Here she was, her body hanging together by a thread, only moments ago leaving behind a solemn last will and testament, and yet at the mere pushback of her disciple she was smiling that freely. It was heartbreaking, like staring at a candle just before the wick burned down to nothing.
I stood behind the master and tightened my grip on my sword.
Sweat had soaked my palm, making the leather strap slippery.
It wasn’t because I was tense.
Just like the master, my body had already reached its limit and was screaming in protest.
The twisted dantian, warped by running my energy backward through the reverse circulation of the Gihunjin, burned as though molten iron had been poured into it, and the torn muscles felt as if they were being stabbed with needles.
My right arm, especially, had collided with Bang Chunghyun’s fist only moments ago; the sleeve was shredded, the tendons torn, and blood was slowly seeping through the gaps.
Clatter.
The hand holding my sword trembled violently.
This is madness.
Some cynical corner of my reason whispered the thought.
This was a game world. A world where I had indeed spilled blood and sweat to survive, but at its core, everything here was still fiction.
I knew this world’s history. I still didn’t understand even half the game’s setting, but five hundred hours of playtime hadn’t been for nothing.
According to the scenario the world had been written to follow, Mukjeok was supposed to leave the stage here.
She was meant to vanish into the background of legend, remembered only in later chronicles and setting notes.
I was an intruder who had possessed this body.
I wasn’t from this world.
So I could run.
As the master herself had said, I owed this world nothing.
I had no reason to throw my life away for the grand ideals of the Mo Sect, or for some family burden my master had inherited.
I was mute. I couldn’t speak.
There was a ninety-nine percent chance I’d die a meaningless death without even being able to scream.
I could just disappear quietly here, use my knowledge of the game to hide in some forgotten corner far from the storms of the jianghu, and live out the rest of my days in peace.
No—why should I even have to hide?
Like the protagonists in the possession web novels I used to devour, I could use my game knowledge to find fortuitous encounters, temper myself, and carve out a life as one of those so-called great heroes who strode through the martial world with their names thundering everywhere.
It was rational. Logical.
A perfectly natural conclusion.
And yet.
Why can’t I move?
My gaze was fixed on the master’s back.
Small. Frail.
Her bearing was so much duller than it had been when I first saw her.
Memory caught at my ankle like a hand.
Seventeen years ago, in the ashes of Gansu Province, she had found me—a lump of blood scarcely more than a newborn—and gathered me into her arms.
She had not treated me like a cripple simply because I couldn’t speak. Night after night, beneath the glow of a hanging lamp, she taught me to read with hands and gestures, with an endurance that never once faltered.
When I first stirred inner energy within my body, she had been so delighted it was as though she herself had seized the heavens and the earth, and she had ruffled my hair with that same hand.
I remembered the teachings she had given me, and the bonds that had brushed against those teachings in passing.
Old Man Jeong, forever praising the master while shaking in his boots whenever she glared at him.
Grandmother Ju, who always shared food with everyone and laughed with such easy warmth.
And Mureung—simple-hearted, pure to a fault, so full of human warmth that it spilled out of him.
This was not some immortal paradise with peach blossoms drifting through the air like the histories and poems described. If anything, in game terms it was only a small village map populated by random NPCs.
But did that make all those connections, all those people who had tied themselves to me, false and unworthy of notice?
Having sweated beside them, exchanged handwritten messages with them, and watched them from over the master’s shoulder, I could say it without hesitation.
No.
I did not think so.
She was not some disposable NPC from a setting file.
They were not some background scenery NPCs to me.
In this cold martial world, where I had no ties at all, they were the fortuitous encounters that had come to me of their own accord.
My parents, my master.
My neighbors, my homeland.
The master had spoken to me of the will of Heaven.
She said that to honor righteousness and help the common people and the weak was Heaven’s will.
That small, stubborn woman standing right before me had lived a lifetime keeping that promise.
She was my heaven.
Then as her disciple, how could I betray Heaven’s will?
I tightened my hand around the sword.
My Mind’s Eye opened clear and bright. Fear drained away, and only a cold, killing intent filled my dantian.
Only then was I able to acknowledge my own limits.
Perhaps the vague hope of saving the master had been nothing but delusion from the beginning.
Even after secretly feeding her countless medicinal herbs, her body had not improved.
And before I could even properly train in martial arts and put my will into action, the demonic cult had already come crashing down upon us.
Maybe I had been lazy. Or maybe I had simply been incompetent.
No—maybe not “maybe.” That was exactly what I was.
Lazy, and at the same time incompetent.
In the end, wasn’t I just an incapable man who knew how to save the master—or could have known how—and still failed to do it?
But.
Even if I abandoned her here and ran, living out my allotted years in comfort,
what meaning would such a life have?
And besides, who knows.
Maybe all of this was a dream. And if I died here, perhaps I’d wake up as if surfacing from sleep, blinking blearily in my tiny room.
If that was the case,
then if I was going to dream, wouldn’t it be better to dream a dream so cool it left me intoxicated?
My Mind’s Eye caught the flow of inner energy outside the stone tomb.
The sinister, writhing demonic aura was advancing this way.
[Master.]
I took her hand. Then I quietly wrote on her palm.
The master gave no reaction, only reading in silence the words I wrote across her skin.
[For my final request as your disciple, I would like to make a proposal.]
***
“Found them!”
The masked men Bang Chunghyun had sent burst forward in a cloud of dust and swarmed toward the stone tomb.
Their Heavenly Path Demon King had already shattered the formation by forcing his demonic energy through it. But whether the formation would activate again, or whether there were any traps still left behind, they had no way of knowing.
They had to move quickly.
Find Mukjeok’s traces as fast as possible, eliminate the threat, and seize the Three Strategies.
And since Bang Chunghyun had expressly ordered that neither Mukjeok nor her disciple be killed, the task was even more troublesome.
Capturing a beast alive was harder than killing it.
Even if they were allowed to cut off arms and legs, what was the point if their own heads were flying off in the meantime?
“Be careful. Mukjeok must have set traps everywhere.”
The man who seemed to be the leader gave the warning cautiously as he stepped into the tomb.
The interior was buried in thick darkness. The moment his foot touched the silent floor, one of the stone slabs beneath him sank by the tiniest fraction.
Click!
A bizarre metallic sound shattered the stillness.
“W-what is—”
Before he could even shout, with the sound of iron grinding together through the gaps in the walls,
Boom—!
“Agh!”
Several spherical objects wedged between the stone walls exploded all at once.
Shhhk! Shhk!
Thousands of daggers rained down from the walls like a storm.
Cheonmagswae.
A lethal hidden weapon packed with hundreds of gears and springs, designed to burst open and spew out countless needles the instant it was triggered.
It was a trap Wolyeon had hidden for the masked men, anticipating exactly where they would try to enter.
Driven by the force of the mechanism, the projectiles surged toward them with enough power to punch through shields.
“Aaagh!”
“Don’t panic! Surround yourselves with protective qi!”
But it was already too late.
The entrance they had come through had been sealed by a massive stone door, and the floor beneath them warped with exquisite cunning, stealing their balance.
In the midst of that chaos, two shadows appeared like ghosts.
Whiik!
Mukjeok’s sword cleaved through the pitch-black darkness.
Her style was not ornate. But it traced the most honest and heaviest of arcs, piercing straight through the enemy’s throat.
“Die, dogs of the demonic cult.”
Her voice was cold.
Even as she spat blood, her sword did not allow a single hair’s breadth of error.
Swish!
One swing cut down two masked men.
One lost his head, the other his arm. Red blood gushed out in torrents, fouling the grave of a sage.
Her sword was not flashy, but it was fatal.
With economy and precision, she slipped into the enemy’s blind spot and thrust straight through a heart.
Her complexion was pale from severe internal injury, but the aura surrounding her sword was no different from its prime.
The surviving masked men belatedly swung their weapons at her, but Mukjeok had already stepped into the next man’s embrace.
Her sword drew a broad curve.
Then, as though she were gliding through space with gentle grace, but in truth with ruthlessly calculated efficiency, she began cutting them down.
A pastoral slaughter.
That was how the demonic men saw it.
A chilling presence, similar to yet different from their king’s.
The group that had dared to invade Zhang Zifang’s tomb could not bring themselves to take another step forward, shrinking back before the broken-toothed blade of an unrivaled master.
As the situation turned against them, one seasoned masked man retreated and shouted, “Don’t approach her recklessly! Keep her pinned with poison arts and hidden weapons!”
At once, the demonic cult’s men changed tactics.
Instead of closing in on Mukjeok, they took advantage of the tomb’s cramped space, scattering poison mist and hurling hidden weapons, waiting for an opening.
Shhhk!
Hidden blades and throwing darts burst from their robes.
Daggers and poison needles flying from all sides began to cut off Mukjeok’s avenues of escape.
“Tricks.”
Without hesitation, Mukjeok loosened her sash.
Like black ink dissolving into clear water, her soft, dark inner energy flowed out, pinning it into the precise shape of a circle.
Clang, clang, clang!
Crack! Crack!
The weapons hurled by Bang Chunghyun’s men were blocked by the Muksujejin Mukjeok had unfolded.
“Tch.”
But with her dantian damaged, she could not sustain the formation forever.
Slowly, Mukjeok’s inner energy began to scatter, and with it the defensive strength of the formation weakened.
“Damn it!”
Clang!
Mukjeok deflected a dagger that had broken through the formation.
That was when it happened.
From near the ceiling of the tomb, a shadow dropped like a waterfall.
It was Wolyeon.
The disciple appeared without a sound and quickly flashed hand signs toward his master.
[Back.]
[Defend.]
Mukjeok instantly put distance between herself and her disciple.
Then, seeing the silver sphere in his hand, she snatched up her sash and spun it once.
Using the centrifugal force as power, Mukjeok hurled the sash toward Wolyeon.
At the same time, the round silver sphere in the disciple’s hand flew toward the clustered masked men.
BOOM—!
It was the Cheonmagswae the demonic men had grown sick of tasting the moment they stepped into the tomb.
Wolyeon had set it off in the middle of their formation, at the most lethal point possible.
“Ghk!”
“What in the—!”
“My eyes! My eyes!”
The rain of poisoned needles tore mercilessly into the masked men’s faces and vital points.
The solid perimeter they had built at range was shredded to pieces in an instant by Wolyeon’s sudden hidden-weapon strike.
But that also meant Wolyeon had exposed himself to the range of the weapon he had just thrown.
Flaaash!
Wolyeon moved fast.
He flooded the sash his master had thrown him with inner energy and swung it through the air as if painting with a brush.
The sash was fixed into a perfect circle.
It became a flawless Muksujejin, the very same formation his master, Mukjeok, had unfolded.
Clang, clang, clang!
The poison needles struck the Muksujejin and fell helplessly away.
At the same time, Wolyeon drew the short sword at his waist. Then, without hesitation, he rushed to Mukjeok’s side and stood back to back with her.
This brat really is something.
Mukjeok was inwardly impressed.
To think he could use the mechanisms and martial arts she had grumpily taught him so perfectly, in exactly the right place and at the right time.
Wiping the blood that had gathered at the corner of her mouth, she murmured in a low voice, “What were you thinking, if your master had not acted in time?”
Wolyeon only raised the corners of his mouth in answer.
[Of course I believed the master would do so.]
Even without speaking, his expression said as much.
Mukjeok, too, smiled with the faint lift of her lips, and thought quietly to herself, What a pity. If I had known it would come to this, I would have sent you down the mountain long ago.
A master’s heart watching her disciple’s growth was full of pride, but the situation remained dire.
The masked men kept pouring in, even after being cut down again and again, and the tomb’s mechanisms were beginning to show their limits.
Then the enormous stone door at the entrance of the tomb exploded apart in a cloud of dust.
BOOM!!
Overwhelming demonic energy seized the interior of the chamber.
Even the masked men dodging hidden weapons with screams, even Wolyeon with his sword raised, all froze on instinct.
Through the thick haze of dust, a man walked in.
Bang Chunghyun.
His red robes were torn to shreds, and it seemed he had burned through a considerable amount of inner energy smashing his way through the three formations Mukjeok had set in place.
Bloodshot eyes. A face worn by exhaustion.
And yet the presence he radiated was still as heavy as a mountain.
“So, you’ve come this far.”
Mukjeok spat out a mouthful of blood and glared at Bang Chunghyun.
The Heavenly Path Demon King’s gaze then shifted to Wolyeon standing at her side.
“Not bad, young hero. By my judgment, you would not be unworthy of being called a master who has reached the First-rate realm. Truly, a dragon’s teacher and a tiger’s younger brother.”
Bang Chunghyun’s voice was rough, but within it lay a killing intent and obsession he could not hide.
He slowly raised one hand. A dark red demonic aura writhed unsteadily above his palm.
“And indeed, this was a formation designed to bring down the reigning number one of the world, the Overlord. To force me to pour more than half my energy into breaking it...”
Bang Chunghyun took another step forward.
The dark red aura that had been flickering and dying across his body began to rise again, creeping back to life.
“But this is as far as you go. It seems there is nowhere left for you to retreat.”
Wolyeon blocked the front of the master and readjusted his sword grip.
His entire body trembled, but his eyes burned more fiercely than Bang Chunghyun’s ever could.
Mukjeok watched her disciple in silence.
Before Bang Chunghyun and his men had stormed into the tomb, her disciple had dared to make that blasphemous proposal to her.
She made up her mind at last about that proposal.
Yes, disciple. If death is truly unavoidable...
Mukjeok carefully slipped a hand inside her robe.
How could I not take the gamble?
---