The Wheels Keep Turning -3
“Red Bamboo Hero!”
“The Ten Heirs have appeared!”
The crowd that had been itching to press closer to Ho Cheon-an and Black Cat scattered in an instant. There was not a soul in Sichuan’s martial world who did not know the fame Yeo Il-ye had recently shaken the entire region with—nor was there anyone who did not know how thoroughly she despised wandering warriors.
Watching experts clash was the finest spectacle under heaven, yet no one wished to die to a stray blade.
“[If one truly practiced such wicked sorcery, breaking their hands would scarcely be enough.]”
Benefactor, for now it would be best if you withdrew.
Six Harmonies Sound Transmission was nothing more than internal energy shaped into sound; the lips need not move. Yet Yeo Il-ye moved her mouth in time with the words, concealing the fact that she was sending a private message.
“[That is what ought to be done. Yet I cannot spill blood before the Golden Family, longtime friends of the Diancang Sect. Withdraw.]”
I cannot fathom what you are after, yet it seems you have already reaped ample reward. It would be wiser to plan for another day.
Ho Cheon-an thought, She really does see me as her benefactor, doesn’t she?
He knew Yeo Il-ye’s parents had died at the hands of wandering warriors. Beyond that, however, he could not claim to understand her circumstances well. To him, the present Yeo Il-ye remained an unreadable existence.
Tch. Probably because I just tossed her enlightenment and ran, some unknown trigger got flipped…
As a Sichuan wandering warrior he had granted her enlightenment and fled. Even for someone who had played Murim Cheonha for over a decade and seen the ending more than a thousand times, it was an action he had never once experienced—uncharted territory.
Being on good terms with her probably wouldn’t hurt…
Yeo Il-ye was the very embodiment of the variables that veteran players so hated. Yet to Ho Cheon-an those variables were desperately needed. Ten years of accumulated knowledge and know-how had done nothing to erase the Mixed Blood trait. Only the unknown situations new variables created could lead him beyond the Murim Cheonha he already knew and onto a new path.
And somewhere past that path, information and a solution for Mixed Blood would surely wait.
There are scenarios where Yeo Il-ye gets involved, but she was never a major character to begin with.
Warriors of her caliber were not common, yet that was only after she broke through her limits with enlightenment. Fundamentally she had been a Peak Realm martial artist burning with rage, making it hard for her to enter the main currents of the story.
Even after she reached Super-Peak she barely appeared in any major plotlines, so it should be fine.
There was one thing Ho Cheon-an had overlooked, however.
If, across every storyline he had experienced, Yeo Il-ye—first seat of the Ten Heirs—had never held significant weight, then the probability that she would carry major weight in the storylines he had never experienced was extremely high.
Of course Ho Cheon-an was merely a veteran player, not a god; expecting him to foresee every such detail might have been excessive. He was human, after all, and found himself in unforeseen situations often enough.
Exactly like the chemical reaction about to erupt between Black Cat and Yeo Il-ye.
Just as Ho Cheon-an finished his thoughts, nodded, and prepared to fold the table—
Black Cat stepped forward.
“Who the hell are you to order people around?”
“...What did you say?”
Yeo Il-ye’s aura exploded in an instant. The surrounding crowd recoiled in terror at the sheer ferocity of it.
Black Cat, utterly unfazed, cocked one hip in a delinquent stance.
“I said, who the hell are you to order a wandering warrior around, Miss Red Bamboo Hero.”
Black Cat looked at Yeo Il-ye, then past her to the Golden Family estate.
In the end, is she steadily closing in on the true face of her enemies?
Yeo Il-ye’s visit to Hwanggeumga stirred many thoughts in Black Cat. So did the way she was now actively stepping forward to protect Ho Cheon-an.
Sorry, but you and Senior Ho cannot leave any lingering ties.
Black Cat did not know the exact culprit who had burned the Yeo Family Mountain Villa, yet from circumstantial evidence and gut feeling she could roughly narrow the suspects. Even if only half of them were correct, a storm of blood would sweep through Sichuan—an enormous affair that would drag in not only Yeo Il-ye but everyone around her.
And yet here, in public, the Red Bamboo Hero was showing mercy and driving the wandering warriors away?
What sort of people were Yeo Il-ye’s enemies? People who had massacred an entire mountain villa and set it ablaze. When Yeo Il-ye began her vengeance, would those enemies spare any means to stop her?
The more Yeo Il-ye circled Ho Cheon-an and showed him goodwill, the more he would be exposed to the threats of her targets for revenge.
We have to fight.
Only then could the fact that Yeo Il-ye had treated Ho Cheon-an with favor be concealed. If she simply let a wandering warrior go, it would be strange and suspicious; if she clashed with one, it would be only natural.
Besides, she needed to gauge Yeo Il-ye’s skill. After receiving enlightenment from Ho Cheon-an, how far had Yeo Il-ye risen? Had that power truly reached the level needed to take revenge on her enemies? The closer the balance of power between Yeo Il-ye and her targets, the fiercer the bloodstorm that would blow through Sichuan.
If she could get a feel for Yeo Il-ye’s strength, she could roughly estimate the fallout of whatever Yeo Il-ye set in motion. Confirming that strength was essential.
Black Cat was not overflowing with confidence that her martial arts could defeat Yeo Il-ye, yet Yeo Il-ye was a swordswoman without a sword right now.
With that much, she ought to be able to see the bottom of her ability, at least a little.
“Hey, hey!”
“Senior, just stay out of this for a bit.”
“Senior?”
Yeo Il-ye’s brow twitched. The female wandering warrior whose entire body was wrapped in a peculiar internal energy.
To pierce that energy and see through it, Yeo Il-ye reinforced her eyesight.
Beautiful.
Only then did the qi art cloaking the body reveal Black Cat’s form. Even to another woman the figure drew an involuntary sigh of admiration, yet quite apart from that figure the woman was thoroughly suspicious. That even Super-Peak eyesight could not peer inside that black bamboo hat was proof she used a martial art only those who lived in darkness would learn.
Thief. Assassin. Spy.
Yeo Il-ye, who had hated Sichuan’s wandering warriors more than anyone, knew them well. The black bamboo hats they wore were not truly to prevent personal information from leaking. When conducting public business, exposing personal traits was disadvantageous to completing a commission, so they hid them.
If Whale Sword Yeo Jinsang’s First-rate status became known and he then lost to a Second-rate warrior in the capital market—how would the people of Sichuan, already sensitive to match-fixing scandals, take that news?
They wore the hats only to prevent such situations. Not because they truly feared their names and identities being exposed.
Yet here was a wandering warrior who used a qi art to hide both body and face beneath the hat as well.
That much she could still accept.
Strong.
Sichuan’s wandering warriors operated as such for money and for realm advancement. By Yeo Il-ye’s estimate the woman before her was at least late Peak Realm, or early Super-Peak. A martial artist of that level could neither advance her realm through wandering work nor needed to be a Sichuan wandering warrior to earn money freely.
That someone with no reason to be a Sichuan wandering warrior was acting as one was endlessly suspicious.
Is she connected to Benefactor?
Yeo Il-ye watched Ho Cheon-an frantically gesturing for Black Cat to back down and felt a quiet swirl of doubt.
She calls him Senior, yet her attitude is insolent.
A junior ought to follow a senior’s instructions, yet Black Cat ignored Ho Cheon-an’s intent and provoked Yeo Il-ye.
Yeo Il-ye decided she would give the woman a light slap to drive her back and circulated her internal energy.
Shwaek—!
In the blink of an eye from the tense crowd, Yeo Il-ye compressed three jang of distance and thrust her hand forward.
Hand-Sword.
It was nothing more than a hand held rigidly upright, yet when a martial artist’s mental image that treated the edge of that hand as a true sword combined with Super-Peak realm and internal energy, even the bluntest hand became as sharp as a blade.
One Step, Three Swords.
The very technique Kang Jun had claimed as his moniker unfolded from Yeo Il-ye’s hand. In a single instant she had compressed three jang, yet her hand split even that instant into three.
Pa-babak!
“Hoh.”
The One Step, Three Swords that would have stabbed Ho Cheon-an three times and killed him was lightly blocked by Black Cat’s palm technique. Watching the palm shadows being swallowed by the Shadow Image Qi Gong Black Cat employed, Yeo Il-ye thought the woman had considerable skill.
Palm techniques centered on expelling internal energy through the palm to seize space. Neither as solid as fists, as compressed as finger techniques, nor as destructive as kicking arts, palm techniques had survived until now precisely because the palm could scatter internal energy into space more freely than any other part of the body.
Thus the level of a palm technique was decided by how many palm shadows one could scatter, how efficiently and how quickly.
In that sense the palm technique Black Cat employed was thoroughly unorthodox.
False and true mixed?
Rather than meticulously raising palm shadows, the technique looked riddled with holes—yet having witnessed some of those shadows being concealed by Shadow Image Qi Gong, Yeo Il-ye could not be certain the gaps were truly empty.
As I thought, you are no ordinary wandering warrior.
Anyone who knew Diancang would never have answered so limply.
Yeo Il-ye was of the Ten Heirs.
A loosed arrow neither stops nor retreats.
It only burns its own body to pulverize the enemy.
A flimsy curtain like this could not even catch the ankle of the Ten Heirs.
A vortex of killing intent no one could believe came from mere fingers pressed together bloomed at Yeo Il-ye’s fingertips. The storm-like aura that would sweep everything away in a single stroke stabbed toward Black Cat as if the false and true of the palm shadows meant nothing at all.
Let me tear that face veil and see your face once.
Black Cat’s hands moved urgently; layered palm shadows rose to block Yeo Il-ye’s hand-sword, yet all of them fell short. The attack of a Diancang expert who possessed the sharpest body techniques and sword arts under heaven flew straight at Black Cat’s face.
And rebounded.
A throb of pain.
Pain rising from a hand thickly coated in qi made Yeo Il-ye look down at her own hand. Feeling the pain in the center of her palm, she looked that way and saw that spot alone had been pressed in by half a finger joint.
Finger technique.
On Black Cat’s rigidly raised index finger flowed an extremely dense qi. The faintly glittering form of that energy was the stage just before Gang Qi—the symbol of Super-Peak.
Did I misjudge?
Black Cat broke into a cold sweat inside and raised her index finger. The place was the front of Hwanggeumga, and Yeo Il-ye was not even carrying a weapon.
Had Yeo Il-ye truly received enlightenment from Ho Cheon-an? And if she had, to what level had she grown?
She had thought this a once-in-a-lifetime chance to satisfy her curiosity and acted on it…
Too strong. Far too strong. This was the skill of someone who had only just stepped into Super-Peak?
Guuuung.
A sound like thunder rolled out from Yeo Il-ye’s body. The vast internal energy contained within her spread through the space all at once—a phenomenon born of that. Against her will, Black Cat’s body prickled and tingled from the mighty wave.
How can someone who has never even taken a single spiritual medicine possess such internal energy…
Black Cat realized one thing with certainty.
The enlightenment Yeo Il-ye had obtained was far more tremendous than she had imagined.
I might end up showing all my cards…
Black Cat dropped into an extreme low stance. Her head sank lower than the waist height of a normal posture—literally glued to the ground, ready to spring.
Seeing that stance, Yeo Il-ye drew her hand-sword back to her chest. The opponent was one who operated a peculiar qi art that blocked vision. If she cut off line of sight for even an instant from so low a posture, it would create the illusion that she had vanished.
I should have brought a sword.
Yeo Il-ye clicked her tongue as she looked at the hand where a vortex of qi swirled. Grains of Gang Qi seemed about to form yet never quite did. With a sword she could draw out Gang Qi, yet with a hand-sword her training was still insufficient to produce it.
If only she could use Gang Qi, she could have subdued the woman in a single stroke.
No matter how abundant her internal energy, without Gang Qi she could not leverage the overwhelming gap.
In endurance Yeo Il-ye held an absolute advantage, yet the single-strike power each could produce was roughly equal. There was a non-zero chance she might be reversed in one move by Black Cat’s bizarre techniques, so Yeo Il-ye had no choice but to keep her nerves stretched taut.
Kuuung! Kwaaang!
Black Cat and Yeo Il-ye collided several times. Yeo Il-ye charged in with extreme-speed body techniques and swift hand-swords; Black Cat evaded those charges with uncanny footwork while scattering finger winds and finger energy.
Not only the commoners’ eyes but even the elite warriors of Hwanggeumga found it difficult to properly track the two figures.
“Hoooo…”
As the lightning-fast exchanges continued until even breathing grew hard, the first to pull back was Black Cat. Unlike Yeo Il-ye who possessed vast internal energy, Black Cat had only the internal energy appropriate to her realm; she had no choice but to retreat to catch her breath.
Yeo Il-ye likewise calmly regulated her breathing and prepared her next strike when—
Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.
“Splendid! Truly splendid!”
What now?
Ho Cheon-an, who had been watching the fierce battle with eyes wide open; Black Cat, catching her breath; and Yeo Il-ye, drawing her hand back to thrust again—all three thought the same thing as they turned their gazes toward the sound of applause.
There stood a man dressed in the attire of the Tang Clan.