The Demonic Art
It felt as though the world belonged to him.
Yi Won, the new patriarch of the Yi Clan.
Seated at the head of the table at the far end of the Patriarch Hall, he swept his gaze around the room.
This was a seat that had always seemed so impossibly high to him.
Now that he was actually sitting in it, it certainly was high.
Plenty of seats stood empty, but that was no matter.
He could fill them slowly, one by one, in the days to come.
His mother was there, smiling in satisfaction.
"Mother, thank you for your hard work."
"And you as well, my son."
He turned next to the middle-aged man beside her.
"Uncle, my thanks to you as well."
"Heh... what hard work have I done? It was all you, boy."
The matter of titles could be smoothed over in time.
Present in the hall were the faction of the Un Clan and a small handful of the Yi Clan's own loyalists. Yi Won might hold the seat of patriarch, but the Un Clan's aid in all of this had been considerable.
The businesses once owned by the Sang Cloud Merchant Group and the Jang Clan still had not been fully absorbed — there had been that much to swallow.
Once everything was devoured, he could scarcely imagine how much wealth would come pouring in.
By even a generous estimate, they would command all of Jangryeong Commandery within the year, and with that territory would come the need for martial strength — plenty of room, then, to invite renowned masters of the murim to serve as honored retainers.
That was when it happened.
Lady Un waved her hand.
Attendants waiting in every corner of the hall filed out at once.
Three people remained in the Patriarch Hall.
Lady Un spoke in a low voice.
"Won-ah."
The strange tension in the air drained the volume from Yi Won's voice in spite of himself.
"...Yes, Mother?"
"This is no time for us to be celebrating."
"...Suddenly?"
"Not suddenly at all. Is there not one matter that demands to be dealt with above all else, and immediately?"
Yi Won had no idea what she meant. It was his uncle, Wun Mu-jeong, who continued.
"Everything the youngest did with the Sang Cloud Merchant Group and throughout Jangryeong can be smoothed over. But what happened at the Jang Clan cannot."
That was true.
"Do you think the Imperial Sword Sect will simply stand by and do nothing?"
Yi Won swallowed hard.
He could hardly be ignorant of the Imperial Sword Sect's fearsome reputation. One of the Eight Great Sects — the finest family of swordsmen in the murim.
A sect whose claim to the name Emperor Sword no one in the world dared contest.
And such a sect had, for all practical purposes, just become the enemy of the Yi Clan.
No — not the Yi Clan.
"The enemy of the Imperial Sword Sect is that youngest brat, not us."
"...Uncle... you can't mean..."
"I do. We must draw the line."
The murim was never a beautiful place. Beyond the endless killing and dying, it was a world where pinning any crime on anyone was simply a way of life.
That was the murim.
"We must paint the affair at the Jang Clan as the youngest's doing alone. Only then do we survive."
Honestly, this was a question that required no thought at all.
If forced to choose — whether Yi Won and everyone seated here, down to the last mangy dog in the Yi Clan, would make an enemy of the Imperial Sword Sect, or abandon Yi Do — the answer was the latter, a hundred times out of a hundred. That was simply correct.
Choose wrong, and they would be slaughtered to the last soul.
Yi Do had touched the family of Jang Un-yeon, a man spoken of as the next Sect Leader of the Imperial Sword Sect — and gone beyond that, killing Won Hu, a first-generation disciple.
They had to rely on the vast mercy of the Imperial Sword Sect. They had to offer up Yi Do, plead for leniency, and buy back their lives.
Such was the thinking of Lady Un and Wun Mu-jeong.
Yi Won hesitated.
"...Tch. What is there to waver over, boy?"
His mother's words jolted him back to his senses.
"You are the patriarch. The first duty of a clan's head is the stability of his clan. Especially now, having absorbed so many rival powers, that stability matters more than at any time in our history."
"...But Mother, it was thanks to Yi Do that we took the Yi Clan at all."
"True. I don't deny it. But have you never heard the saying — discard the bow once the hunt is over?"
Lady Un's words were razor-edged.
"He is a concubine's son. Merely because a baseborn boy happened to be born with talent for the martial arts, we should trade that talent for the fate of this entire clan? Agonizing over a question that needs no agonizing — is that how I raised you?"
Yi Won could only look back at his mother, who was shouting him down, with complicated eyes.
He stood at a crossroads of choice.
He was not a man whose ears turned with every wind, but they were light enough — and from where he stood, his mother's argument carried more than enough weight.
And yet, at the very same time, an image began to form in his mind: Yi Do's face, the moment he learned the truth.
A shiver ran through his entire body.
"...Let me think on it first."
"Good heavens, this boy...!"
"Mother. I am no longer merely the second son of the Yi Clan."
"...What?"
"I am the head of the Yi Clan. Mother or no Mother, uncle or no uncle — from now on, I ask you both to mind how you address me."
To the two of them, struck speechless, Yi Won said:
"My head is a mess, so please leave. I need time to think alone."
"...How does one deliberate over a question that has already been answered..."
"Leave."
"..."
"I said get out!"
Faced with Yi Won's flushed face, even Lady Un could do nothing.
Wun Mu-jeong led her out of the hall.
Left alone in the Patriarch Hall, Yi Won clutched his head in both hands.
Just as the elder had instructed, I made my way into Yi Se-geuk's chamber.
When I shoved that enormous bed aside, a small downward-facing door appeared beneath it.
An underground entrance.
I opened the door and descended.
How long had I been walking down? Before long, I found myself standing before a massive iron gate.
Nearly seven cheok in height.
Impressive.
And it wasn't just the gate — the entire space around it was extraordinary.
So the Yi Clan had been sitting on something like this all along.
It looked for all the world like some hidden grotto.
It had certainly not been built in any short span of time; it had to have been made at least several hundred years ago.
Which puzzled me.
It was all deeply strange.
Setting aside why this cavern had been dug in the first place, and whatever Yi Se-geuk had done down here — in my previous life, when Yi Jeong and Lady Sang held every ounce of power in the clan, had they ever discovered this place?
Honestly, there was no reason they shouldn't have.
Becoming patriarch meant using this chamber as a matter of course. Yi Jeong, with luck, might have noticed something off about it. Lady Sang, sharp with numbers as she was, might have pored over the ledgers, found a discrepancy, and gone digging before the Council of Elders.
One way or another, this hidden grotto was bound to come to light.
"The Yi Clan's destruction was, what, about a year from now, give or take."
From what I'd heard, the Jang Clan and the Hyeok Clan had joined hands to wipe them out. Such an anticlimactic end, really — because right up until the day I died, nothing about this grotto ever surfaced.
The Iron-Blooded Demonic Emperor, was it? Even that name was new to me. I knew nothing.
Fine — inspect the interior first, think after.
I was just reaching to press the corner spot the elder had described when—
My hand froze.
The most useless word in the entire murim is trust.
Information handed over by men I didn't know — was I really supposed to swallow it whole?
If I'd gone through life trusting every little thing like that, I'd have quietly departed this world long before I ever became one of the Ten Supreme Masters.
I drew up my internal energy.
Wrapping my whole body in the pure, refined qi amplified through my Qi Rings, I sharpened every sense to a fine edge.
Slowly, I extended my hand and pressed down hard on the corner.
Thoom.
The sound of some mechanism turning was unmistakable.
I whipped my head aside instantly.
Something that gleamed like steel sliced through the air past my cheek.
I spun my body as I retreated.
The count — roughly five.
Five daggers whistled past me and buried themselves in the wall behind.
The rotation of the mechanism wound down. In the same breath, I lunged out my hand.
Thwack.
I turned the snatched dagger over in my fingers.
It glistened, slick and oily.
Something had been coated on the blade — and even at a glance, it was no oil or grease.
Poison, without a doubt.
I tossed it carelessly off to the side.
Ak Gwi-gwang.
If I hadn't ascended to the Four Realms of Qi Condensation, I would have died opening this grotto, exactly as the old schemer intended.
I laughed despite myself.
So thorough was the preparation laid into this place...
My curiosity refused to die down.
I turned my head. The iron gate stood half-open.
Pressing corners and whatnot had been nonsense after all. This gate was the true entrance.
I pushed it wide and stepped through — and stopped dead.
Stalactites hung thick from every direction. A stream of water ran along the floor below.
Was that even possible?
A magnificent sight, truly — but it wasn't what had stopped me in my tracks.
A fishy reek of blood soaked into my nose, sharp enough to knot my brow.
I moved forward slowly.
At the very center of the cavern stood a dais.
"Ha... that raving lunatic Yi Se-geuk."
It was the only thing that could be said.
At a glance, that enormous altar held something like fifty of them.
What, you ask?
Human hearts.
They weren't beating, of course.
And then I turned my head.
In the corner of the cavern lay seventy-odd corpses, give or take. Men and women alike. All of them naked, every chest split open where the heart had been.
I walked over slowly and examined the altar.
It was built to open and close — and when I pried it open a crack, I very nearly vomited for the first time in an age.
The things packed inside were human hearts too.
The sheer quantity was staggering.
A number that defied reason.
Nearly in the thousands.
Not quite ten thousand, surely — four thousand? Five thousand?
A dizzying mountain of hearts, stacked high.
Some kind of preservation must have been worked into them as well, for not one had rotted — and with that, how could I not be sick?
In this vast, boundless murim of ours.
If such a scene as this came to light, then a hundred times out of a hundred, it pointed to the Demonic Path.
Not the common sort, either — but a demonry devoured by extremity itself.
The true road of the demon, stripped of even the pretense of excuse.
"...Words fail me."
Yi Se-geuk had been desperate. Even poisoned by the Single-Calamity Demonic Poison, he had clung to a single obsession: to live again, by any means necessary. That was why his face, at the very edge of death, had been so full of lingering regret.
That was why his eyes had begged me so desperately to let him live.
Only now could I understand.
Yes.
Yi Se-geuk had been cultivating the Demonic Art.
It was almost comical.
Frankly, of everything I'd done in the murim, more people had called it the Path of Hegemony than the Demonic Path.
At the very least, my hand was decisive and clean — I never toyed with corpses or made games of the dead.
But this?
This was beyond any ambiguity.
If word of this ever reached the murim, I would stake everything I had on this: it wouldn't be the Imperial Sword Sect or the like that mattered — warriors from every corner of the murim would come flooding in to erase the Yi Clan from existence.
Becoming an enemy of the entire murim? Only a matter of time.
I'd nearly become just that, barely a breath after regressing.
And then a hollow laugh burst out of me.
Why this grotto was never discovered.
The reason had finally come to light.
In my previous life, Lady Sang and Yi Jeong must have found this place.
And they would have thought exactly as I just had.
They had two choices before them.
Inherit the Demonic Art Yi Se-geuk had mastered — or destroy the grotto and everything in it.
They would have chosen the latter, and in the end, rather than being branded as demons, they had simply been crushed in the power struggle of Jangryeong and wiped out.
That was when I saw it.
A small chest, sitting neatly in the corner, drifted into my view.
I stepped over without a word and opened it.
Inside lay a pill radiating light in five brilliant colors.
I'd never seen one before, but there was no mistaking it — an elixir.
It was nothing like the horrors surrounding it.
This one was utterly pure.
It seemed our esteemed father had left a parting gift for his youngest, on his final road.