A Hollow Death
Chu Pawol's last breath was a hollow thing. Not just his — every human being dies this way. Death is empty. All that remains in a corpse drained of its warmth is a bleak, desolate silence and a loneliness as vast as the void.
In the body that had collapsed like a discarded object, I suddenly caught a glimpse of my own face. I was a bastard living a life every bit as unhinged as Chu Pawol's. If I died, wouldn't it look just like this? Fleeting, hollow, and utterly alone.
But what did that matter? Life was carpe diem. You had to enjoy today. Just as my great senior Chu Pawol had done.
I should live with the goal of taking every woman's virginity in the world. No — maybe I didn't need a goal that grandiose.
At any rate, I pocketed the secret manual Chu Pawol had handed over and stashed his corpse in my inventory. After several experiments, I'd confirmed that living creatures the size of a person couldn't be stored. Small animals like squirrels were fine, but anything even as big as a child was impossible.
Corpses, however, were a different story. It was a strangely convenient — and strangely annoying — distinction.
For now, it was far more convenient for me if Chu Pawol had simply "escaped." Nobody knew I had the prison keys, so the odds of me landing on any list of suspects were zero.
I'd already prepared the entire scenario for what came after killing him. Tomorrow, Fairy Gate would be thrown into chaos.
Fairy Gate's dungeon lay beneath the main hall. Befitting a prison built to hold the most vicious of criminals, its security was formidable.
First, the cellar leading down to the dungeon was locked behind an iron grate. Then the dungeon door itself was sealed with an enormous padlock. And finally, each individual cell was shut behind a thick iron door. In other words, Fairy Gate's dungeon was sealed three times over.
That said, for all the physical security that left not so much as a needle's gap, they didn't post any guards. Fairy Gate was a martial sect, and they simply couldn't spare people for that kind of duty. The abundance of locks existed in the first place so that a handful of people could manage the entire dungeon.
Mo Seyeong had come to the main hall to start her work as she did every other day, only to find Seol Hwa-rin the moment she stepped inside — her face drained of all color. She truly looked like a woman whose name meant snow: every last drop of blood had fled from her cheeks.
You didn't need anyone to explain it. The girl was terrified. Mo Seyeong tilted her head and spoke.
"Junior Sister. What's going on?"
"S-Senior Sister! It's terrible. The dungeon gate... the dungeon gate is open!"
"What? What are you talking about?"
Mo Seyeong's gaze snapped toward the cellar that led down to the dungeon. Where a firmly shut iron grate should have been, she found one hanging half-open. The world swam before her eyes.
"What in the... An escape!?"
"I checked. Chu Pawol is gone. Only his cell door was open."
"Chu Pawol? That man isn't even a strong martial artist... Damn it! Come to think of it, people from Fallen Phoenix Prison were supposed to come take him into custody. And now this happens! Junior Sister! Send the disciples out, now! Cancel everything on today's schedule! Search the entire area! We have to recapture that bastard before the Murim Alliance arrives, no matter what!"
"I-I understand!"
The Murim Alliance coming to take custody of a prisoner — only to find he'd escaped? In that instant, Fairy Gate's reputation would plunge into the dirt. And not just dirt — a filthy, sewage-choked mire.
Chu Pawol was a criminal the Imperial family itself ground their teeth over. The mere fact that he was being transferred to Fallen Phoenix Prison told you how grave his crimes were.
"We have to catch him!"
Mo Seyeong ground her teeth until they creaked.
The sun had set, but Fairy Gate had not caught Chu Pawol. You couldn't exactly chase a dead man all the way to the underworld, so it wasn't really their fault. Mo Seyeong, however — who had no idea that Chu Pawol was already dead and buried on the back mountain by Jongchil — blamed herself bitterly.
The date the Murim Alliance was due to arrive was drawing close. She had never imagined something like this could happen.
"An escape... That bastard Chu Pawol, of all people, escaped..."
The one silver lining in this mess was that she had figured out how he'd gotten out. She turned a gaze thick with killing intent on the two servants trembling before her.
"You two. Care to tell me what possessed you to pull a stunt like that?"
The two servants under Mo Seyeong's stare went deathly pale, gasping as if their souls were about to leave their bodies. They were the servants who had cleaned the dungeon on the day of Chu Pawol's "escape."
"We truly don't know anything! I-in fact, we drank so much we barely remember..."
"Help Chu Pawol escape? What on earth would possess us to do something like that!? We swear we didn't do a thing!"
"You took money. Last night you went to a brothel and spent like drunken lords, didn't you? You bought liquor your wages could never afford, and you played with several courtesans. Where did that money come from?"
"Th-that... we don't really remember..."
"Someone gave it to us, I think..."
Last night had been a truly wonderful evening for the two of them. The memories were hazy, but somehow they'd come into a large sum of money and gone to a brothel to eat and drink themselves stupid. It had been ages since they'd held a courtesan they actually liked, and they'd drunk an incredibly rare, potent liquor. A bottle that cost a full tael of silver, no less.
After carousing until they were cross-eyed, they'd barely managed to stagger back to their quarters, completely wasted. They'd drunk so much they woke a full hour past their usual rising time.
That was as far as the foggy memories went. It was as if someone had painted over the inside of their skulls with black ink — the finer details simply wouldn't connect. It felt as though they'd been drugged.
"You took it from that bastard Chu Pawol. There were no signs of the cell door being forced. Someone opened it with a key. And the only people who went in or out of that place yesterday were you two, there to clean. Got any more excuses?"
"Aigoo! We swear we didn't do it! We know perfectly well we'd be the first ones suspected — why would we do something that stupid?"
"That's right! We've devoted years of our lives to Fairy Gate. We're not the kind of fools who'd pull a stunt like that!"
Mo Seyeong's brow furrowed at their words. Her face was plainly overflowing with rage. Seol Hwa-rin, who had been quietly reading the room at her side, spoke up in a voice full of concern.
"Senior Sister... what they're saying does make sense. If they were the culprits, they'd have no reason to do something like this in a situation where they'd be the obvious suspects. This might involve an outsider."
When Seol Hwa-rin laid out her reasoning, Mo Seyeong cooled a little. She always listened well to her master and to Seol Hwa-rin.
"An outsider?"
"Yes. Chu Pawol may be an erotic demon, but he's a famous figure in the Unorthodox faction. Of course, his messy relationships with women have earned him plenty of hatred even among them — but there are any number of martial artists who covet his power. It's possible the Unorthodox faction helped him escape."
"Hrm. The Unorthodox faction... Wait. Come to think of it, the Rakshasa Demoness visited here not long ago, didn't she?"
Dan Yuha's image rose unbidden in Mo Seyeong's mind.
"It's not certain yet, but she might be connected to this incident."
"Fine. Then we'll look into her first. And if the mastermind behind this is the Rakshasa Demoness..."
In that instant, Mo Seyeong's eyes went as dead and glassy as a rotting fish. The two servants, seeing those eyes, slammed their heads to the floor as if they'd run into a tiger on a mountain path.
"Eek! Spare us! This humble servant doesn't want to die yet!"
"We're sorry! We're sorry!"
Mo Seyeong spoke coldly to the two servants, who had flattened themselves like ants and were rubbing their hands together so hard they looked ready to catch fire.
"Get lost. Stay holed up in your quarters until I call for you. And if you even think about running... you know what happens."
"Yes, ma'am!!"
The two servants bolted back to their quarters. Seol Hwa-rin watched them go, her voice worried.
"If the mastermind really is the Rakshasa Demoness, this is going to get complicated."
If that were the case, her actions would amount to a show of force against the entire Orthodox faction — and beyond that, against the Imperial Palace itself. The ending of such a story would not be a pretty one.
Seol Hwa-rin, the White Snow Flower, could see with perfect clarity that there was not a shred of falsehood in those words.
I learned Chu Pawol's secret manual.
Congratulations! You have acquired the B-Rank Root Skill Yin-Yang Harmony Technique.
Congratulations! You have acquired the C-Rank Branch Skill Delicious Bodily Fluid.
The Yin-Yang Harmony Technique was a genuine legend. This alone was reason enough to have come into Supreme Sword Heavenly Immortal. In truth, the Yin-Yang Harmony Technique was an erotic art the original novel mentioned in only a few lines of text. Chu Pawol himself was only briefly mentioned to begin with, so of course his martial arts were never described.
But even those few descriptions were enough to make you feel how extraordinary the Yin-Yang Harmony Technique was. The disappointing part was that what I could learn right now was limited.
The Yin-Yang Harmony Technique is a jackpot. Shame I haven't been able to learn the rest of it yet. It's packed with all kinds of incredible stuff! Especially that Clone Technique!
The Clone Technique.
The art of dividing the body — a technique that showed up across every kind of media. In most of those stories, cloning came with a considerable penalty. The most common one was that your power split by however many clones you made. Create two of yourself, and each of you was left with half the strength. Otherwise a clone technique would just be a way of multiplying your own power.
The Yin-Yang Harmony Technique, however, had an unusually weak penalty of that kind. You could multiply your body without significantly weakening the original. And as for what you'd do with the extra bodies — well, that didn't take a genius.
This is insane. They created an erotic art this powerful just to have threesomes? You could call this a full-blown combat art.
It was a martial art almost too good to be wasted as an erotic technique. Then again, the reason it was an erotic art was perfectly clear.
To train it, you have no choice but to combine a woman's yin energy with a man's yang energy. In other words, without sex, cultivation is impossible. Unless you had monstrous stamina like mine, that would be a pretty brutal penalty.
Rumor had it that Chu Pawol's cock spent twice as much time inside a woman's pussy as it did outside one. Even after devouring that many women, Chu Pawol still hadn't fully mastered the Yin-Yang Harmony Technique. Who the hell created this monstrous erotic art in the first place? I suddenly wanted to know.
Maybe the claim that Chu Pawol took ten thousand women wasn't a lie after all. With an erotic art like this, it's entirely possible.
To hand a martial art this good over to me... Chu Pawol really was a decent guy. I should never forget his kindness, even in death. Ah — wait. That's not quite it.
Anyway, I started studying a new section of the Yin-Yang Harmony Technique.