Chapter 244
Chapter 244: Yeop Bi-hwa (4)
"……Haa."
A single intake of breath was not enough.
"Haa, haa."
Yeop Bi-hwa continued to steady her breathing, and her hands still gripped Falling Flower Leaf Needle firmly. The place where Rigid Energy should have been coating was of course empty. Over that empty space, the remnants of the light from moments ago flickered like a mirage.
Yeop Bi-hwa's eyes rose cautiously.
Kim Rae-won was still in the same posture, holding the pitch-black sword.
Beyond him, everyone who had come swarming out near the main gate had gone still. Jin Ha-gyeong still had not been able to lower his outstretched arms, and the Vast Heaven warriors lined up behind him were the same. The disciples crowded inside Hero Gate, all the way to the direction of the training grounds beyond the wall. Not a single person was moving. Faces that had drawn breath in and could not yet let it out were standing in several layers on both sides before the main gate.
Her eyes returned to Kim Rae-won again.
Over his shoulder, where the Sphere of Light had been, morning sunlight had already descended, and within that sunlight only a few specks of dust were drifting about.
'Was it an illusion?'
To write it off as such, the sensation that appeared to be the remnant of the light—still sitting squarely in the center of her chest—was far too vivid.
Her gaze dropped. It was a look whose direction Yeop Bi-hwa herself had not consciously chosen. It seemed as though she had tried to look at her chest, or perhaps at the ground. But there was a place where her gaze came to rest.
Her own hand.
The hand gripping the hilt of Falling Flower Leaf Needle. The hand that had walked alongside her throughout her entire life.
Her fingers were trembling.
It was not a large tremor. The five fingers wrapped around the leather of the hilt were simply each quivering in their own small way. She put strength into her fingers in an attempt to stop the trembling, yet it would not stop.
This time she gripped even harder, with a force that could have snapped the hilt. Yet the trembling continued beneath that grip, as though a single thin membrane had been slipped between her hand and the hilt. It was not something that could be suppressed by force.
Never in her entire life had she trembled like this……
A single drop of sweat trickled down from her brow.
Yet the sensation of that single drop passing over her own body had never felt this strange before.
The sword's tip was going down.
She was not lowering it. Her wrist was unchanged, her elbow was unchanged, her shoulder was unchanged. The sword, of its own accord, was slowly tilting downward. Even as she put strength into the hand gripping the hilt, the sword kept going down.
The tip of Falling Flower Leaf Needle came to point at the ground at last.
Her head remained raised. Her chin was unchanged and her gaze was forward. But the sword had bowed first. In the hierarchy of sword masters, that is heavier than bowing one's head…… She had lost. A complete and utter defeat.
She could not know what exactly it was, but that person is someone who, even in the realm of enlightenment as a sword master, has already crossed multiple walls that she cannot surmount.
"……You."
Though she felt she should say something, her half-open mouth could neither close nor open further, and remained frozen where it was.
A single gust of wind swept past the main gate.
From some roof tile on the wall, a small clump of earth fell to the ground. From some far part of the sky, a bird cried briefly and passed. Even throughout all of that, not a single person moved.
Then, Kim Rae-won's head turned toward the sky.
What he was looking at, where in that sky his gaze was resting—Yeop Bi-hwa could not tell.
That was all.
With no great change in expression, his head returned to level again. Then, smiling ever so slightly, he spoke.
"Thank you."
"Thank you……what do you mean by that?"
"Thanks to you, I broke down a small wall."
"Is that so?"
"Yeah. I hope the same was true for you."
"……"
Only then did Yeop Bi-hwa's gaze turn back toward herself.
The chest area of her martial attire had been split open in a long tear. It seemed that at the very moment she had pushed the One-Point Paring Rigidity to its limit and the condensation had extended beyond the sword itself—in that one instant, the front of her clothing had been grazed and swept away along the sword's trajectory. A single thin layer of undershirt was exposed directly to the outside air.
Her hand passed slowly over that spot once.
She did not particularly make any move to cover it.
Kim Rae-won lowered his sword lightly.
"Shall we walk a bit then."
It was more of an utterance dropped somewhere off to his side than something directed at Yeop Bi-hwa.
"……Where to."
Yeop Bi-hwa's voice slipped out quietly.
Kim Rae-won shrugged once.
"Anywhere."
That phrase felt familiar somehow. Somewhere deep inside her, a point that had long been settled there was gently nudged.
Kim Rae-won began walking first.
One step, then another, heading out through Hero Gate's main gate. Nothing exceptional about his stride, nothing exceptional about his pace. Only, he never turned back to call Yeop Bi-hwa, nor did he glance back to see if she was following.
Yeop Bi-hwa began walking after him, one step behind.
A gap of two or three paces. That man's stride was wider than hers, and the weight of his body was different, and yet somehow the walking pace was strangely the same. A pace where it was impossible to tell which side was matching whom—or perhaps neither side was matching anyone.
Yeop Bi-hwa turned her head once.
The pillar of Hero Gate was there. The disciples lined up inside the main gate, Jin Ha-gyeong, the Vast Heaven warriors. Dozens of pairs of eyes watching her retreating figure in silence. Her gaze did not come to rest on any of those eyes. It was closer to a single sweep of the scene.
She turned to face forward again.
A gust of wind blew.
A single leaf fell from some tree before the main gate and settled lightly onto Yeop Bi-hwa's shoulder. An ordinary leaf from some ordinary tree of this season, having nothing to do with those leaves that had just been woven into a green sword and erased from the world.
She did not remove the leaf.
The backs of two people drew slowly further away beyond the main gate.
***
Whirrrrrrrrrrrrr—
From some distant direction, a single strange gust of wind arrived at this mountain path. It was less a wind and more a case where the grain of the wind bent once toward the south and then returned to its original place. A single horse at the rear of the group gave a short snort, and a few blades of grass by the roadside bent once toward the south before standing upright again.
And a faint thread of energy riding the tail of that wind swept through the bodies of some forty shadows, one by one.
The old man—Sword Master Elder Unseok of the Vast Heaven Limitless Sword Sect—stopped walking.
He had taken one step but did not take the second. The middle-aged man beside him, Outer Court First Squad Leader Chang Mun-jin, stopped alongside him. As the group behind them came to a halt one by one following the stop ahead, Unseok was still gazing at some point in the sky to the south.
"Strange."
It was a voice that had barely slipped out. Chang Mun-jin dared not ask and simply waited.
Unseok placed his hand once near his own left chest. The place that only those who have long handled a sword possess. A single grain grazed that spot and passed through. Too faint to be a tremor, too thin to be a vibration. But it had unmistakably been there. Something had unmistakably passed through.
The energy of the sword, or the grain of the sword.
"Did you feel it?"
"Yes."
Chang Mun-jin had also just felt something graze a single thread of his energy channels and pass through. The sensation of a massive single point of condensation that had exploded from afar, sucking in the surrounding energy for a moment and then releasing it as it passed. And after that, yet another thread of sword grain that had flowed through.
Unseok's hand could not leave the area near his chest.
"It resembles the energy of the Immortal Clan……what do you think?"
Chang Mun-jin turned to look at Unseok.
"Unpleasant as it is to admit, from where I stand as well…… I see no other possibility."
Neither of the two could continue after that. There was still nothing visible at the southern edge of the horizon, and the grain that had just grazed through was already erased from the air. Only the hands gripping their respective swords closed and then opened once, each in their own way.
It was quite a while after that before the group began walking again toward the south.
Only, from the moment they started moving again, Unseok's stride was considerably faster than it had been before.
***
Shhhhhhhhhhhht—
A gust of air that had come rushing from the west crossed the grassy ridge and flowed east. A few drops of dew fell in a line, and the tips of the grass all bent toward the east in unison before standing upright again. The morning sunlight was thinly slicing through the edge of the mountain ridge.
Beyond the ridge, three figures lay stretched low.
"Just now……that, did you all feel it?"
Myo Jin-heo, who had been holding his folded fan against his chin, asked without turning his head. One body-width to his side, Eom Bi-ryeong, who had lowered herself even further, was the first to speak.
"Felt it. But that came from the west, didn't it? That's the opposite of our scouting direction."
"Since what just passed came from the west, that's how it would be."
Myo Jin-heo pulled out his fan and opened it about half a span. It was his habit when reading the grain of the air. But this time it stopped at half a span. The ribs of the fan that had not fully opened trembled faintly along Myo Jin-heo's left fingers.
"……What's this?"
The end of Myo Jin-heo's words, unlike usual, had come untethered.
Dong Mu-toe, who had been lying low on the opposite side and staring east, only then turned his head this way. One of his eyebrows had risen slightly.
"West is right. The distance is…… Huh? This looks like it came from where Hero Gate is."
Dong Mu-toe trailed off as if talking to himself and pressed one palm to the ground. It was the posture for reading the vibrations traveling up through the earth.
But he soon lifted his hand.
"Not carried through the ground. Came only through the air. This……is interesting."
Despite using the word interesting, this time Dong Mu-toe's tone lacked his usual mix of curiosity. The lightness at the end of his words was thinner than usual.
"Hey hey, you said Hero Gate, right? Does 'interesting' fit the current situation, huh?"
Eom Bi-ryeong shot back in a lowered voice. She too had turned around once to look west. Beyond the ridge, only a thin gray mist lay spread, and nothing else was visible.
"There are two strange energies……no, three?"
Myo Jin-heo spoke as he opened his fan the rest of the way. It was the signal of moving from observation to judgment. But this time he had stopped at half a span. Then:
"Two are sword grains. Not the ordinary kind we know either…… but as for the third thread that came riding in after them, it's in a form I cannot even begin to guess at."
Dong Mu-toe let out a low whistle.
"That person again, probably. Again."
"Hm?"
Eom Bi-ryeong looked back halfway.
Dong Mu-toe was still staring west.
"Hero Gate's Guild Master, I mean. The two sword grains at the front, I can't say. But that energy that came riding in behind them—that. Something that poured down from the sky in a type of grain we've never encountered before, and who else could it be but the Hero Gate Guild Master."
"……Aah, that guy again?"
Eom Bi-ryeong let out a low, disbelieving exhale.
"He is human, right……?"
Unlike her, who gave a wry smile and seemed somewhat deflated, Myo Jin-heo's fan had stopped moving and was frozen in the air.
"But you know. Our original matter is to the east, isn't it?"
At that, Eom Bi-ryeong immediately corrected her posture.
Myo Jin-heo's fan also opened once on its own and then closed again.
With Dong Mu-toe joining them, the three people's gazes fell simultaneously to the bottom of the ridge to the east.
And froze there.
The 'scene' they had been observing until just now had grown considerably more serious.
Far ahead, some three li below the yellow clay hill, the marching column moving in ordered lines had already been growing larger and larger while their attention had briefly turned west for a moment.
"Are those……definitely the Dark Net Rakshasa Path?"
Myo Jin-heo's voice had dropped. The opening of his fan had also completely stopped.
"Probably."
Eom Bi-ryeong's reply was equally quiet. Her eyes were tracing the far edge of the eastern horizon.
From behind the enemy's advance guard, a low line of earth-dust was rising long. The width of the dust was several times wider than that of the advance guard in front.
"Is that……the main force?"
There was almost no time gap. The advance guard and the main force were moving south as practically one mass, and that mass was now gradually pressing into the direction of Gangdo.
"Just how many of them came, those things?"
Dong Mu-toe muttered without taking his eyes off that direction. His fingers had begun absent-mindedly tapping against his own knees.
"Two hundred? No, looking over there it seems to exceed five hundred? Not quite eight hundred……no. Insane!"
It was his habit that came out when laying out a formation.
"There's a hell of a lot more in the rear? At minimum……fifteen hundred!"
Meaning the count could even exceed two thousand.
But the real reason the three Trigram Leaders' faces had gone rigid was not simply because of the numbers.
At the center of the main force, a single mass of energy was embedded. The kind of energy being sensed was of an entirely different tier—as though the rest of the entire force combined could not surpass the weight of that single mass.
Myo Jin-heo folded his fan.
"That……is."
It was the gesture Myo Jin-heo always made when moving from observation to judgment. But this time, even after having judged, his voice would not emerge.
Instead.
"That isn't at the level of the Eight Rakshasas, is it?"
Eom Bi-ryeong carried the words forward. Her usual sharp tone had completely abandoned her.
"Is it one of the Four Rakshasas……? No, it seems to surpass even that?"
"No, the Four Rakshasas are definitely there. I can't tell how many, but it's not just one. It's just that there's more. Beyond the Four Rakshasas, damn it."
Even Dong Mu-toe spoke without his usual scholarly playfulness.
Indeed, as his words suggested, further inside than the Four Rakshasas, at the very rear, there was an energy of a kind he had no means of gauging. Next to energies of the Four Rakshasas' caliber, there was something standing a level……no, several levels above even that.
Dong Mu-toe immediately pulled a Thousand-Mile Telescope from his pouch and confirmed the banner. A single deep crimson flag standing at the very far end of the main force.
"What does it say?"
"……Blood."
"Blood?"
Blood.
Myo Jin-heo's folded fan made a single sharp crack in his hand.
"Scarlet Rakshasa……!?"
Left Guardian. The position directly below the Dark Net Great Venerable—that is, the seventeenth cult leader of the Dark Net Rakshasa Path.
The one who commands all twelve of the cult's Twelve Rakshasas under him, the one occupying the seat from which a single word of his changes the direction of every blade of the thousands in the Rakshasa Warrior Monk Unit. Even across the entirety of the Seven Evil Grand Cults, it is difficult to count three individuals placed at the same tier as him.
In the past ten-odd years, that Left Guardian had never moved his body beyond Nirvana Mountain.
Such a person had come on an expedition to this place—a mere frontier city of Gangdo—bringing multiple members of the Four Rakshasas no less.
An energy that presses down the air for dozens of meters in every direction simply by appearing. The air around that single person was completely different from the air of the rest of the forces, so that even to the senses of the three Trigram Leaders right now, the main force appeared divided into two layers.
One layer woven from the energy of the troops, and another single layer carried by the Left Guardian alone at the center.
The days that had passed since the Rakshasa Warrior Monk Unit's annihilation.
What Nirvana Mountain had decided in those ten days, the three members of the scouting party were at last confirming with their own eyes.
The near-two-thousand-strong force was sheer mass. The multiple Four Rakshasas were variables.
And……
The Scarlet Rakshasa himself was the final answer to what Nirvana Mountain had determined Hero Gate to be.
A Calamity.
The Dark Net Rakshasa Path had decided to cleanly dispose of the calamity they had brought upon themselves.