Chapter 41
Geom Mujin left Gangneung. At last, he really did.
Toeot-! Toeot-!
Using the technique of Supreme Step, his body skimmed lightly forward, feet tapping across tree branches as if the forest itself were just another road.
He could have walked like a normal person, or even taken a taxi, but he didn’t.
It was already late, and if he took a taxi at this hour, they’d slap on a surcharge for “life hazard pay” and “danger allowance.”
You didn’t look down on the night in this primitive era. Well, except for Geom Mujin.
Besides, nighttime was the most convenient time for him to move.
Black hair and an all-black outfit were optimized for nocturnal operations, after all.
Exactly. Black-haired people were basically born with assassin talent by default.
In that sense, Geom Mujin was a rather gifted assassin.
If he ever got serious and started swinging his sword around, he wouldn’t leave a single witness or shred of evidence behind.
If you chopped up both witnesses and evidence, wasn’t that basically assassination?
What about Taeho Sect, you ask?
Shh! Quiet!
That was a screwup that happened with a probability lower than winning the lottery.
Big things always came with a few screwups. That was just how it went.
And his screwup would disappear before long.
In a few days, she’ll arrive.
Unconsciously, I looked back.
There was Gangneung, where I’d been staying all along, and beyond it, her—racing toward me like a madwoman.
Andongshin, spread the rumors like your life depends on it.
The more he flaunted his connection with me, the higher the chance of drawing her attention.
Once she’d gone red in the eyes, she wouldn’t leave the Taeho Sect alone just because it was connected to me.
Best case, total destruction; worst case, total destruction and massacre.
Either way, annihilation was a sure thing.
Since this gave me both time and a chance to wipe out a bunch of rotten demonic bastards, I decided to back Andongshin.
It was a classic decoy-and-sneak attack, the kind Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi would’ve watched with double peace signs and an ahegao face before falling backward in admiration.
I could wipe them out myself, of course, but...
Destroying an entire sect with your own hands was the sort of thing that earned fear more easily than praise.
Even if the target was demonic.
In any age, wholesale slaughter was frightening.
And black-haired barbarians tended to take the blame along with it.
-Look at him! That black-haired bastard massacred the people of the Central Plains!
-Guess the savage blood in his veins really can’t be hidden!
-Barbarians go home! Koreans go to the peninsula!
Unlike me, she was the type who, no matter what she did, got praised through a million layers of rationalization and justification.
Honestly, I couldn’t help being jealous.
I was the one who always ended up standing in the middle of the blast radius.
-How long are you going to keep running away?
“.....”
I remembered the last words she’d once spoken to me.
How long? If possible, until the day I die—
The words I hadn’t been able to say back then—
Squirm—
“....!”
—I was about to think them when the sensation at my back stopped my thoughts.
“...You comfortable back there?”
As we crossed a mountain, Geom Mujin asked.
I was worried she might be getting motion sickness from the rapid succession of leaps, enough to make even the red-capped plumber look like an amateur.
“......”
Nod—
But the child clinging to my back like a koala nodded.
“Really?”
“...Yeah.”
Geom Mujin asked again, half suspecting the kid was only nodding because she was reading my mood, but she really was fine.
Hanging upside down from the ceiling with blood rushing to her head? Child’s play.
Being beaten while upside down, her body rocking back and forth from the impacts? Also fine.
Her sense of balance, forged through every kind of torture imaginable, was leagues beyond most people’s.
Being carried across a mountain on the back of a super expert?
For her, it was as comfortable as riding in a family car.
“Then I’ll pick up the pace.”
After confirming she really was okay, I put more strength into my legs.
Paaang-!
My figure shot forward even more forcefully.
The movement route of the Jamsungdan smuggling network that Jo Pyeongho had revealed before he died.
People sure live interestingly.
Geom Mujin snorted.
It felt a bit like going back the way he’d come, in a very “feeling-like-it” sort of way, but...
The next destination was Hubei. Or rather, not Hubei—Qingbei.
He might as well grab the tail of the Neo-Heavenly Demon Cult while he was at it and check on the aftermath of the mess he’d already stirred up.
＊ ＊ ＊
Cheonmu Academy.
It was an educational institution for the righteous sects, located on the plains of Shanxi’s capital.
During the Orthodox-Demonic War, the Orthodox side had won, but at a cost: countless martial artists were lost.
Grandmasters at the level of sect heads and elders, the middle tier that held everything together, and the lower ranks that were supposed to become the backbone of the future.
Martial artists from every sect had died, one way or another.
With the talent pool in such a disastrous state, it wasn’t exactly a situation where you could celebrate victory with your hands in the air.
Of course, the Seven Martial Stars had emerged as monstrous experts, but how could any organization be sustained by just seven people? And one of them wasn’t even clearly Orthodox.
For a group, that was a huge problem.
If you wanted to know just how huge, look at the Shu Han in the world of the big-eared guy.
Big Ears hit the accelerator hard to escape the curse of the Peach Garden Oath.
-Gah!? Commander-in-chief! Hurry and fire the volley...!
-Five-man volley.
-Commander-in-chief! Ack! You really have to use it, seriously.
-Five-man volley.
-Gyaaah!
The big-eared man, who had been ruthlessly pounding the blue-bearded rat with unstoppable momentum, was utterly crushed by the mastermind who only cared about setting up the perfect five-man volley angle.
-Now!! Ruin the Sun clan’s army!
-Ruin it!
And just like that, the talent pool was reduced to a handful of ashes by the perfectly timed five-man volley.
Because of that, even though Shu Han had a cheat-code character in Zhuge Kongming, it still failed to unify the Three Kingdoms.
No matter how broken your brain was, if your arms and legs were weak, your organization wouldn’t last long.
So the lesson was clear: rather than producing a tiny handful of top-tier experts, they needed to cultivate martial artists who could raise the overall average.
That wasn’t the responsibility of one sect alone, but of the entire Orthodox alliance.
What if they failed to recover from their weakened state and another force seized the chance to wage war?
For example, the demonic sects. Or the demonic sects. Or, you know, the demonic sects.
Then someone had put forward an idea.
-If we’re all supposed to focus on nurturing the next generation, then why don’t we just build an educational institution?
It was inefficient for each sect to hoard their own disciples and train them in isolation.
Some places raised talent through crash courses, while others took the slow-blooming, late-game route.
Rather than that, why not create a central academy, recruit disciples there, and send in instructors from each sect?
Then the instructors would share and improve teaching methods, raising the quality of education, and in turn, the disciples’ level would rise too!
Not only that, but they could also discover hidden talents from the commoners.
It was a calculation that offered nothing but profit, so the Martial Alliance launched the institution.
The place established to cultivate talent and, someday, stand against the great evil that might return was Cheonmu Academy.
In the training chamber of that very academy, a gray-haired young man was swinging twin swords.
“Haaat!”
Swishhh—!
The blades cut through the air with a sharp whistle.
As the youth tightened his wrist and twisted sideways, the straight, forceful sword path changed.
Whoom—! Woong—!
The trajectory became supple, yet still powerful.
The young man kept changing his sword path.
Calm, heavy, dazzling, slow.
Even as he swung through a variety of forms, the force of the first strike never diminished.
Not enough.
It was an astonishing feat—maintaining equal power through repeated twin-sword strikes—but the young man bit his lip.
He thought back to what had happened last time.
It had been the first memory of defeat since he’d come down from Wudang Mountain.
No—more than defeat, it had been a crushing humiliation.
Even now, thinking about it didn’t change that fact.
After being taken in by his master, he had believed he would one day reach the peak, and he had never once doubted that he himself could truly stand there.
There was no one his age in the sect who could compare to him, and that remained true even after he entered Cheonmu Academy.
The students from other sects and noble families were impressive, but still inferior to him.
That only strengthened the youth’s confidence and certainty.
And then, the confidence that had soared high enough to pierce the heavens came crashing down in no time at all.
He met him at a festival he’d attended at the urging of the young ladies.
The pinnacle of the sword, built entirely with his own strength, untouched by anyone else’s stain.
It had been an unexpected meeting, but he didn’t think for long.
Driven by the fighting spirit that surged up in his chest, he boldly challenged him.
The sword at the summit sliced through the arrogance he had mistaken for confidence.
You hadn’t even reached the mountainside, and yet you were already measuring the peak?
That man had made the youth realize just how arrogant he’d been, and just how high the summit truly was.
And even in defeat, the youth had gained a new understanding.
He closed his eyes and recalled the sword at the peak.
That sword that let all of his full-force attacks slip away as if they were nothing.
Back then he’d been so focused on breaking through the defense that he hadn’t noticed, but the sword of the peak contained the ultimate expression of softness.
It circulated sword force without wasting a single drop.
An endless cycle, turning and turning and turning.
It was as though it touched the very core of his school’s fundamental truth: Taiji.
Thanks to that, he had quickly grasped the clue, and after getting out of bed he’d devoted himself to training, determined to make that insight his own.
Still not there yet.
The sword of the peak was smoother than this, more seamless, without a single blockage.
His own wasn’t bad, but since the thing it was being compared to was that thing, it simply wasn’t satisfying.
He was so diligent that the young ladies who followed him around kept their distance so they wouldn’t get in the way, watching quietly from afar—
“Oh my, Yeon young master. Training again today, I see.”
—when a girl approached and spoke to him.
“Ah! Moyong young lady.”
The young man—Yeon Jiho—who had been staring intently at his twin swords, brightened immediately.
“Training is important, but you should hydrate, too.”
With her sky-blue hair swaying softly, Moyong Yehwa handed him a water bottle and a towel.
“Wipe off the sweat and have some ion drink.”
“Thank you.”
Yeon Jiho smiled faintly and wiped the sweat from his face.
His bangs lifted upward.
“Ah...”
As that face—so stunning it was enough to make Songok and Banan smash their faces into the dirt—came fully into view, Moyong Yehwa momentarily lost her mind.
“Come to think of it, I saw your sword qi grow stronger during our last duel. What’s your secret?”
“Y-yes? Hah... hahah, let’s see. What could it be?”
“Oh, don’t be like that. Give me a little hint.”
When Yeon Jiho asked with sparkling eyes, Moyong Yehwa was briefly flustered, then quickly recovered her composure and put on a graceful smile befitting a noble lady.
“I’m not sure I should teach you outright, but I could show you again.”
“Really!?”
“Yes, but only if you go out into the city with me this weekend.”
She spoke as casually as she could, though she had unconsciously tensed up and bitten her tongue just a little.
“What? Just that? That’s fine?”
“Yes. There’s this really atmospheric café I’ve been wanting to visit—”
As the two young people chatted quietly, there were other gazes fixed on them.
They belonged to the young ladies who had been hoping to say even a single word to Yeon Jiho.
They’d previously tried to strike up a conversation only to be rejected, and were still waiting in the back, but by then a cheetah had already sprinted in.
“Tsk.”
At that moment, a girl who was just a tiny bit shorter than the others clicked her tongue.
“Uhghghgh...”
The girl puffed out her cheeks wildly and slipped out from among the young ladies like a pop.
“He’s at it again today.”
The girl with green twin braids rubbed her stretched cheeks and shook her head.
She’d been planning to wait until that martial-arts idiot finished training, but looking at that scene, nope—absolutely not.
Staying here any longer would only sour her mouth. Better go back.
“Uh, sis...”
“Wha!? You scared me!”
As she turned to head back to the lodging, the young lady jumped in surprise.
A girl who was a head and a half taller than her, with what looked like two extra heads attached to her chest, had slipped out of the shadows.
With her long hair, she would’ve looked like a virgin ghost to anyone who saw her.
“I told you to use stealth when you walk around like that! You nearly scared me into having a miscarriage.”
“A miscarriage...? Sis, are you pregnant? If Father found out, he’d flip over backward...”
“No, that’s not what I—ugh.”
The girl shook her head, unable to figure out where even to start correcting her wide-eyed little sister.
“So what is it? You came all the way out here looking for me.”
It was unusual for her little sister, who was usually eager to lock herself in her room as soon as class ended, to come find her like this.
“A letter came for you, sis, and it seemed urgent...”
“A letter?”
The girl tilted her head and took the letter her sister handed her, then tore it open.
“....Ha.”
As the girl—Dang Yulin—rolled her eyes over the letter and read it, she clenched her fist around it.
Scritch-scritch—
The letter rapidly corroded from the poison seeping out of her palm.
“That bastard, for real.”