Things at Extremes Must Reverse -1
The sword cleaved the wind, and blood sprayed. Gu Hyeon-su gasped for breath as he raised his blade. Blood streamed from Yeo Il-ye’s eye. Even so, she remained on her knees.
Clang.
“Ugh… uhhk… uhhhk!!”
Gu Hyeon-su released his sword and… collapsed heavily to the ground.
Even as a Super-Peak expert, watching Yeo Il-ye calmly accept his blade left him utterly unable to swing it. He still could not submit to her words. She had driven his father to his death, and she had to pay for it with her life.
Otherwise—
If he let go of even his grudge and hatred toward Yeo Il-ye, he would not know how to fill this hollow heart.
Yet Gu Hyeon-su could not lift his sword.
Unlike Yeo Il-ye, who had given her eye to a mere boy who would spit blood and drop after a single exchange, accepting her choice without the slightest waver, Gu Hyeon-su could find no conviction. He could not even muster the courage to surrender himself to hatred and rage.
And so Gu Hyeon-su lay prostrate and wept aloud.
Whether that cry was grief for the father he had lost, guilt for taking Yeo Il-ye’s eye, a scream blaming his own weakness, or tears of repentance for the foolishness of having been used by Hwanggeum-seon—only he himself could know.
Drip.
“It’s raining.”
Yeo Il-ye ignored the throbbing pain in her face and looked up at the sky. The raindrops that had begun to fall one by one became a torrential downpour in an instant, lashing down fiercely.
Yeo Il-ye draped her bloodstained cloak over Gu Hyeon-su, who was still wailing. Whether he noticed or not, he simply kept his head bowed and wept.
Footsteps.
“I don’t know if you remember, but you once ambushed me. It was when I was partnered with a senior who has since retired.”
Yeong Ji-huyeol spoke as he picked up Yeo Il-ye’s sword. Even with her beloved blade passing into another’s hands, Yeo Il-ye only looked up at him in silence.
“Injuries are nothing more than common fare for a nangin. But that twisted smile you wore as you attacked us and beat us down sank deep into my mind. I was truly furious and resentful.”
“What had I done? What had my senior done to deserve ending up like that? Someone with no enemies in Sichuan—what harm had he done us that you would treat us so viciously? Does being a martial artist of the Jeomchang Sect mean you can trample nangin for no reason at all? That was what I thought as I harbored my grudge.”
Yeong Ji-huyeol drew Yeo Il-ye’s sword as he continued.
“So I came to this place today. I saw clearly enough what intention Hwanggeum-seon had in calling me, but your relationship with him was none of my concern. I simply regarded it as my last chance to settle the grudge before you returned to the fold of the Jeomchang Sect.”
Yeo Il-ye listened to Yeong Ji-huyeol’s words in silence. Rain poured as if a hole had been punched in the sky, and considerable blood loss continued from the gash on her face, yet both Yeo Il-ye and Yeong Ji-huyeol acted as though the wound to her eye did not exist.
“But after seeing you today… a question arises in me. Am I truly upright enough to harbor a grudge against you?”
“I became a Sichuan nangin of my own will and committed evil deeds for money. I never crossed the line, yet in the end I threatened people who had not even learned martial arts, committed outrages, deceived them, and launched ambushes.”
Yeong Ji-huyeol let out a long sigh.
“Does not crossing the line make an outrage cease to be an outrage? Can I truly stand before you and claim injustice with a clear conscience? I no longer know. Haha. Now the only matter left about which I can proudly declare myself wronged is the day you came to deliver the grudge token to Ho Cheon-an and cut my sword clean through.”
Yeong Ji-huyeol drew his own sword and let it hang. Watching Yeo Il-ye’s remaining eye track the joints of the blade, he raised it.
“Therefore I will settle the grudge between us by taking your sword.”
Clanggg!!
Yeong Ji-huyeol’s sword and Yeo Il-ye’s sword collided. When two Peak Realm experts swung with all their strength, both blades snapped at once.
Yeong Ji-huyeol gazed at his broken sword with a look of relief. He tossed aside the hilt that was all that remained without a shred of regret, sheathed Yeo Il-ye’s broken sword, and held it out to her.
“Sorry for breaking the sword. I’ll gift you a fine new one.”
“…I will be waiting.”
To break a sword only to promise a new gift was irrational, yet Yeo Il-ye understood Yeong Ji-huyeol. Here and now he had settled the karmic debt between them. The reason he had broken his own sword as well was something only Yeong Ji-huyeol would know.
Yeong Ji-huyeol stepped aside, and Yeo Il-ye rose to her feet.
Whooosh!!
The rain battered her body fiercely. Blood continued to stream from her left eye, but Yeo Il-ye paid it no mind and took a step toward the clan head’s hall.
The broken sword and the lost eye were the price of the apology Yeo Il-ye had chosen. They were also the karma of having harmed others while surrendering herself to rage.
It might have been a foolish choice, yet Yeo Il-ye simply thought she wanted to do it. It was not some shallow calculation that if she bled here and fought with a broken sword she might earn forgiveness.
She merely wished to face the karma she herself had piled up, without denying it.
Yeo Il-ye entered the clan head’s hall, where not a single window stood open.
Even at midday the hall was utterly dark.
Yeo Il-ye gripped the sword in her right hand and the scabbard in her left. Only three inches of blade remained, but if she extended its length with Sword Gang she could still make use of it somehow.
Papapak!
Swish!
Warriors who had been hiding in the darkness of the hall launched ambushes one after another. Yeo Il-ye parried their attacks while checking her own condition. The wound on her face was not shallow, and with no hemostasis the blood loss continued. A throbbing pain seemed to pierce straight through her face into her brain, and with one eye gone her sense of depth would not settle properly.
Her internal energy was not at its peak either. Had she cut them down one by one with the sword it might have been different, but she had blasted the warriors away with force, consuming no small amount.
Yet her heart was calmer than it had ever been.
I see…
Things reverse at their extremes; fire-refined, cold-cast.
Yeo Il-ye gazed at the steel framework that had taken shape within her inner self. At a glance it looked sturdy, yet the lower portion was hollow and empty.
She had melted her inner self with flame and reshaped its form. In that way she had changed, and she had believed the flame had died away.
But it had not.
The flame was gone, yet Yeo Il-ye’s inner self had not cooled. Only then did she look upon her true inner nature. Newly molded though it was, that inner self was far from cold—it was hot. Heat had simply filled the place where the flame had been.
How crude.
Yeo Il-ye looked at her inner self and let out a short laugh. Because the mountain villa had burned, had she tried to erect a new building? It was truly an absurd act.
The flame within had died, yet it was nothing more than a change of form through heat. She had thought everything finished, when in truth she had not even properly completed the fire-refinement.
She had never cooled her inner self—why, then, had she regarded it as complete? She had merely assumed, of her own accord, that because the form had changed the heat must have cooled and grown cold.
So let me set it right.
Yeo Il-ye’s mental image reshaped itself anew. Its form was not a building.
It was people.
Mother. Father. The maid who had secretly pressed candy into her hand. The servant who swept the courtyard every day. The gardener. The warriors who had guarded the villa…
The junior disciples and sisters of the Jeomchang Sect. Cheongheo Jinin and the other elders of the school. Her cute senior disciple Hyeok Gi-rin.
And even a certain nangin who wore a bamboo hat pulled low.
In place of the empty, bizarre structure, human forms filled Yeo Il-ye’s inner self to the brim.
Drip. Drop.
And only then—
Pitter-patter… whooosh.
Rain began to fall within Yeo Il-ye’s inner self. Rain fell upon the hot metal and cooled her mental image to chill.
The control of her internal energy, which until now she had only been able to radiate roughly, settled into her hands.
“I see.”
Her internal energy had been so vast that she had been satisfied merely with handling it. But was that the proper state of affairs? No matter how abundant the energy, the normal way was to be able to send and receive it freely at will.
The elite warriors of the Hwanggeumga were hiding in the darkness of the clan head’s hall, blatantly waging a delaying battle. She was an opponent they could not defeat head-on, and with Yeo Il-ye’s facial injury so severe they must have judged that dragging out time would work in their favor.
I can feel it.
A wind of internal energy spread gently through every corner of the hall. For an ordinary martial artist, deliberately scattering internal energy that would be insufficient even if conserved, just to use it for detection, would have been unimaginable—yet for Yeo Il-ye it was possible.
“Ugh!”
“Gah!”
One by one the elite warriors who had been concealed throughout the hall began to be hunted down. From the start they had been relying on darkness and familiar terrain to face Yeo Il-ye.
Once their positions were exposed, the warriors were no match for her.
Thud!
“Kuk!”
Yeo Il-ye glanced briefly down at the warriors she had felled, then moved her feet. Now the only intact human presence remaining in this clan head’s hall was one.
“Hwanggeum-seon.”
“In the end, the country girl from a rural mountain villa… has managed to make a mess all the way here.”
Yeo Il-ye walked in silence.
“The ones I gathered in front of the hall failed to stop you after all! Heh heh, you’re the same kind of creature as me! Aren’t you the son of the man who died because of you? What’s the difference between you, who trampled over him to get here, and me!”
“…There is one thing I am curious about.”
Yeo Il-ye asked quietly. The number of Sichuan nangin was fewer than thirty at most. Yet how was it that every time she visited Sichuan province she encountered Sichuan nangin with such high frequency?
And how had he been able to pinpoint and summon precisely those nangin and their families who harbored grudges against Yeo Il-ye? With Hwanggeum-seon’s power it would not have been impossible to pierce the anonymity of the Sichuan nangin and gather information on their personal affairs, but still…
“Did you put out commissions to the nangin every time I visited Sichuan province?”
Somehow Yeo Il-ye felt that he had known that information because he himself had been the client.
“Hahahaha! And what if I did? Why do you suddenly want to blame me now? Great Hero Hongjuk Gunhyeop! Weren’t you yourself the one who charged like an enraged bull whenever you met a nangin!”
“Yes. You would never have left me alone…”
“Hehehe… I should have finished it for certain back then. I’m curious how you managed to cook those stiff Taoists of Jeomchang. What’s the secret that let you remain in the sect even after causing enough uproar for expulsion several times over! Hahahaha!”
Hwanggeum-seon could open his mouth no longer. Yeo Il-ye had raised her full internal energy and crushed him beneath it.
“In the end, you disrupted my entire life. Not content with burning the villa, you constantly schemed to snatch away Jeomchang—my second guardian and home.”
“Guh… guhk..!”
Even though more refined means such as pressure-point sealing existed to silence him, Yeo Il-ye crushed Hwanggeum-seon with internal energy.
Yeo Il-ye gazed into Hwanggeum-seon’s eyes, where veins were rising under the pressure of her energy. His expression seemed filled only with poison and malice, yet within those eyes sat an unconcealable terror of death.
“You know full well you’ve done enough to be torn into a thousand, ten thousand pieces.”
Yeo Il-ye put force into her right hand. The sword had been broken by Yeong Ji-huyeol, yet three inches of blade still remained. That was more than enough to kill a man.
“Kerk!… Ugh!”
Watching Hwanggeum-seon thrash his head desperately to live despite the crushing internal energy, Yeo Il-ye swung her hand.
It was the left hand that held the scabbard.
Thwack!!
“Oops. Hit a bit hard.”
Yeo Il-ye muttered as she looked at Hwanggeum-seon, who had tumbled from his chair and was rolling across the floor, scattering teeth. This much should be fine. Thinking so, Yeo Il-ye let out a long breath.
Just the sight of him rolling on the floor was refreshing. If she cut him down here and now, the knot lodged in her heart would clear cleanly.
“But if I kill you in this place, the knots lodged in their hearts will have no way to clear.”
Hwanggeum-seon had committed truly countless sins. It was not Yeo Il-ye alone whom he had plunged into misery. Hwanggeum-seon had dragged innumerable people into misfortune.
Hwanggeum-seon was not Yeo Il-ye’s enemy alone. As many as the sins he had committed, that many people had suffered because of him. And among them, some might even now—like the young Yeo Il-ye—be burning hatred and rage against the wrong people rather than against Hwanggeum-seon.
There, every one of Hwanggeum-seon’s evil deeds had to become known. Those who had lost money. Those who had lost family. Those who had lost dreams… those who had lost what they held precious. The ones wounded by those deeds had to learn that the one who inflicted the wounds was Hwanggeum-seon.
What they had cherished would not return. Yet at the very least it might become a single ray of comfort to soothe the sense of loss they felt.
“Spit everything out down to the very bottom in the government dungeon.”
Yeo Il-ye muttered as she seized the nape of the unconscious Hwanggeum-seon.
Rumble! Whooosh!
On a summer day when rain poured so hard it seemed a hole had been torn in the sky—
the revenge play that had unfolded at the Hwanggeumga drew to its close.