Chapter 48
"Hmph. So I look like I’ve just finished Elementary Learning? It’s not that bad."
With a frosty expression, Dang Yulin plucked the hairpin from the man’s throat.
Elementary Learning was an introductory primer stuffed with the basics of Confucian thought—in modern terms, an elementary school textbook.
To say she looked like she’d just finished it was basically the same as saying she looked like a grade-schooler.
The insult went beyond calling her young for her age; it scratched at something deep inside her.
"I’m just not fully grown yet. When the time comes, I’ll shoot right up."
Dang Yulin, twenty years old and still technically in the bloom of youth, lifted her head without thinking and glanced at the sky, then lowered her gaze to her chest.
The sky somehow looked higher than autumn skies ought to, and her chest was so vast that, even if nomads founded a great empire on it, there’d still be plenty of room left beneath her feet.
In fact, she’d lived her whole life without once stumbling over it.
How different from her twin sister, who couldn’t even see the ground properly and tripped over herself every other day.
She’d probably start falling around like that someday too, so she should savor this boundless expanse while she still could—
"...No. No, that’s wrong. Actually, this is better."
She changed her mind.
Why were all the greatest masters in history men?
Because none of them had useless sacks of flesh on their chests that existed for nothing except feeding babies.
With her chest free, there was nothing to interfere with upper-body movement, and nothing to leave her vulnerable to low attacks.
What a massive advantage for a martial artist!
One to zero! She’d struck first and taken the lead!
Men, of course, had the absurd weakness hanging between their legs, but that was a minor issue, so she’d let it slide.
Besides, women with large breasts were vulnerable to fire.
Flesh burned easily, which meant a broad-chested woman was actually at a disadvantage compared to one with less chest and one less weakness.
Human beings were generally weak to fire anyway, but again, a minor detail.
Two to zero! Another point for her!
By the principle of three-fall-two-victory, as laid out even in the Great Ming legal code, it was a crushing triumph—but it still wasn’t over.
Why would someone training in martial arts that moved the body around have not one but two lumps of flesh attached to them?
That could only mean they’d neglected training and lacked effort.
A female martial artist like herself, with no weaknesses and a diligent nature, was superior to those female martial artists who jiggled around like dairy cows, constantly unleashing the mystery of their swaying mass to shamelessly drag everyone’s attention away.
Three to zero! An indisputable, unassailable, total victory—daishouri, victory, a clean sweep with not even a speck of room for rebuttal.
The female martial artists of Mu-yu could do anything!
"Hah, hahh...."
Having unleashed her monstrous doctrine of No-Breast Superiority, Dang Yulin barely managed to calm the inner demon raging in her heart.
She pulled out the hairpin and tied her disheveled hair back into place.
"Still, these guys aren’t ordinary bandits."
She lowered her gaze and examined the corpses of the men.
One had died from massive blood loss after being struck in the major vessels. Another had suffocated to death from a paralytic poison.
Exsanguination. Asphyxiation.
Different deaths, but they shared one thing in common.
"...For bandits, their condition is surprisingly good."
Their overall physical state was too healthy.
Banditry was the kind of occupation that could destroy your nutrition if you did it long enough.
People needed a balanced intake of protein, carbs, and fat, but would some loser who’d rejected the life of farming and chosen banditry instead ever bother to grow crops?
Without plunder, their main diet was wild game or whatever berries they could forage from the mountains.
Add in bandits’ eternal friends—
alcohol and meat, the unbeatable combo—and their health would go to hell in a handbasket.
That was why most bandit groups with half a brain built their mountain strongholds near villages.
They needed supplies—meaning plunder—for all the things the mountain couldn’t provide on its own.
There was, in fact, a village right near Chilseongsan.
Wuhan, one of the major cities of Hubei Province.
If they tried raiding a place like that, nearby sects or government troops would come and wipe them out.
No matter how many bandits filled this world, they still knew enough to pick their targets carefully.
"So they’re not a brand-new bandit group."
Which made the location of Chilseongsan even more suspicious.
When they first saw her, they hadn’t tried to rob her—they’d told her to get lost and leave the mountain.
That wasn’t the sort of thing ordinary bandits would say.
They were controlling access to a mountain that didn’t even seem to hold any special resources...
The address of Lia-rudol that had been sent to her.
The ones stopping her from going there.
And when she’d told them she was on her way to see her grandfather, they’d asked whether that grandfather was Lia-rudol.
That meant they knew the cursed sculptor was on this mountain.
All three of those facts made her smell something, well... suspiciously connected.
Rustle, rustle—
"Mm... yeah, no sign of any affiliation markers."
She crouched and searched through the dead men’s belongings, but all she found were a pouch of coins and some dried jerky.
"...Nom. Ptui!"
She tossed a piece of jerky into her mouth, only to spit it right back out onto the ground.
"Disgusting."
It was nowhere near good enough to satisfy the palate of the Sichuan prodigy’s precious daughter.
Dang Yulin brushed off her knees and stood.
Staying here and clinging to corpses wouldn’t give her any answers.
"If I keep going, I’ll figure it out."
She didn’t know why, but if they were really holding Lia-rudol captive, then they’d surely keep blocking her path.
"Good. I don’t need to keep acting like a pitiful granddaughter who came all this way to find her grandfather."
It had been confirmed: these weren’t true bandits, but they acted no different from them.
And on top of that, they were perverts, which made it even less possible to let them live.
...Thus thought the woman with the abnormal tastes.
It was time to return to being a merciless, deadly martial artist of the Dang Clan.
From within the wide sleeves of her robe, her hand emerged.
Fwoooing—!
Between the fingers of both hands, hidden weapons were tucked in place.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
After that, Dang Yulin continued climbing the mountain.
She encountered more of the people controlling the mountain, not just the men she’d met at the entrance.
After all, Chilseongsan might not have been a massive mountain like Mount Wudang, but it wasn’t a small one either.
There was no way two people alone could control a place like this.
At least twenty people had been deployed.
She’d already eliminated two, which left eighteen.
An 18-on-1 fight would have given any martial artist below first-rate skill a cold sweat, but Dang Yulin didn’t back down.
The eighteen weren’t gathered in one place; they were spread out, each guarding their own section.
Perfect for taking them down one by one.
She didn’t know every last detail of the situation, but she was confident.
Whoosh—!
"Ghk!"
"W-what the hell—kack!?"
Flying blades shot from the brush and struck the masked sentries on watch.
After all, throwing daggers and hidden-weapon techniques were martial arts optimized for striking first.
To conceal them between the fingers or inside the sleeves, then flick them out before the enemy even noticed—that was practically the definition of a first-strike art.
And Dang Yulin was the daughter of a family that had built its reputation on exactly that kind of technique.
Which meant she, too, had quite a talent for first strikes... no, for throwing daggers and hidden weapons.
And with the battlefield tucked inside a mountain, where concealment was easy, the environment was on her side as well.
Thunk, thunk—!
The dagger that pierced straight through the space between the eyebrows ended its target’s breathing on the spot.
"So easy."
Pushing through the brush, Dang Yulin collected the daggers one by one.
The greatest weakness of throwing-dagger and hidden-weapon techniques:
reloading was manual.
This wasn’t some maple-leaf world where you could click a box in storage and your ammo magically replenished itself.
Honestly, that kind of thing always felt a little immersion-breaking to her.
"I want to know what failure feels like."
She muttered that to herself after reaching this easy, easy difficulty curve.
As the saying went, your mouth was the problem.
Sure enough, before long she saw those words come true.
Clang—!
"Who goes there!!"
Somewhere past the midpoint of her destination, she’d hidden in the brush and launched a dagger—only for the target to swing a blade and knock it away.
"Ah!"
At the sight, a startled cry escaped Dang Yulin’s lips.
This one was faster, sharper, not like the idiots she’d dealt with so far who’d been hit without even knowing what was happening.
Which, in a way, was only natural.
The people she’d fought on the way here had all been stationed far from their posts.
The farther people drifted from the place they were supposed to be, the more careless they became.
By contrast, those close to their worksite stayed on constant alert.
Dang Yulin, having been raised far too precious and never taught such a simple truth, had assumed this would be easy and made a lazy attack.
"There you are!"
Hearing her voice, the masked man immediately hacked toward her with his blade.
Shraaaack—!
"Tch!"
Dang Yulin clicked her tongue and dodged the wind of the blade’s edge.
The sword-wind split the brush where she’d been hiding.
"A kid?"
"I’m an adult."
The masked man tilted his head at the unexpected assailant’s appearance, and Dang Yulin seized the opening without hesitation.
Fwoosh—!
A dagger shot out from within her fluttering sleeve.
"Not a chance!"
The blade flew fast, but the masked man knocked it aside again.
That was another weakness of throwing-dagger technique.
It was excellent for surprise attacks, but if the surprise failed, the odds of success dropped sharply.
Once the target realized what was happening, their guard shot through the roof.
Clang-clang-clang—!
"Hahaha! I don’t know where you came from, girl, but for a woman, your attacks are pretty pathetic!"
Batting aside the daggers, the masked man sneered at Dang Yulin.
The distance between them slowly shrank.
"......"
Rather than bristling at his taunt, Dang Yulin quietly drew out the next dagger.
Some nobody rolling around out there didn’t know what he was talking about; she could shut him up with skill alone.
"Let’s see you block this too!"
Dang Yulin spread both arms wide and hurled her daggers.
Chasing Soul Flying Snake Blade
Angular Serpentine Transformation
The Dang Clan’s throwing-dagger art—Chasing Soul Flying Snake Blade—unfolded.
The six daggers she launched all at once curved through the air like snakes.
So what if the odds dropped when the first strike failed?
Then you just made forms to prepare for the next one.
The daggers aimed at different vital points all over the masked man’s body.
"Tricks!"
The masked man swung his blade in a defensive arc.
One by one, the daggers were blocked, but Dang Yulin didn’t waver.
"There’s still one left."
Before her opponent could fully reset his stance, she drew a narrow, sharp knife.
Chasing Soul Flying Snake Blade
Swift Advance Serpent
The dagger, carrying a form focused purely on speed, shot forward in a straight line.
Shraaaack—!
At the vastly different speed of this attack, the masked man sharpened his vision, concentrating qi in his eyes to heighten his sight.
It was clearly a fast attack, but...
"...Nothing I can’t block!"
As the dagger entered striking distance, the masked man swung his blade infused with qi.
Clang—!
The dagger was knocked down to the ground.
"Heh heh... is that all your tricks amount to?"
Confident of victory, the masked man asked with crescent-shaped eyes.
Now he just had to question this girl who’d come out of nowhere...
"Cough...!"
Then blood suddenly gushed from his mouth.
"Wh-what is this...!"
"Looks like the effect’s finally kicking in."
"What did you say?"
For the first time, Dang Yulin—who had been expressionless the whole time—curved the corners of her mouth.
"Janghondok. A poison that twists the blood flow of your organs."
"Poison... poison, you say..? Since when...?"
He hadn’t eaten poison, and he hadn’t even been struck by her attack.
So why was he poisoned?
"You were smashing my weapons all over the place, weren’t you?"
Dang Yulin pointed at the daggers scattered across the ground.
"Y-you mean...!?"
"That’s exactly what I mean. You should’ve dodged instead of blocking."
The masked man had thought he’d deflected Dang Yulin’s attacks, but that wasn’t true.
He hadn’t blocked them.
He’d been hit by them.
The daggers he’d knocked away were coated in poison powder, so every time he swatted one aside, he might as well have been smearing poison all over himself.
In truth, Janghondok wasn’t that lethal a poison.
It twisted the blood flow of the organs, sure, but at worst it left you with a bad stomachache for a few days.
No matter how capable she was, her clan wouldn’t casually allow her to take out something truly fatal from their stockpile.
So she’d deliberately baited him into using his inner energy.
There was nothing more dangerous than forcing qi after being poisoned.
"Y-you bitch..! Don’t tell me... Sichuan... cough...!"
The masked man clamped a hand over his mouth and cried out in shock.
There were plenty of people in the martial world with green hair who used throwing-dagger techniques.
But when those two conditions were combined with poison, there was only one answer.
Unlike the other great martial families, the Sichuan Dang Clan was renowned not for weapons alone, but for poison.
"Cough, cough! Why the hell is a filthy poison freak like you here...!"
Unlike the other Five Great Families, the Sichuan Dang Clan had a strong tendency toward isolation.
Because of that, they had the least outside activity, which was why he hadn’t immediately recognized them.
Watching him spit blood from internal injury, Dang Yulin drew out a dagger.
"Go on. Try blocking this one too."
With a mischievous smile, she flicked her wrist.
"W-wai—ghk!"
Fshhk—! Thud—!
The dagger lodged itself in the masked man’s forehead.
"Why else? I came to collect my overdue delivery."
Snorting, she looked down at the corpse that collapsed at her feet.