I Can See the Lines
No one had entered the basement, and yet a corpse was gone.
When I first heard the story, I thought it was some kind of locked-room mystery.
But the answer to that mystery turned out to be surprisingly simple.
All the body had to do was get up and walk out on its own.
"Like hell that works!"
Shiiik!
I threw my chin back, barely ducking a knife-hand strike that came flying at my throat, and shouted just that.
It was a blow so close it raised the hair on my nape. Something must have grazed me—thin threads of blood sprayed across my vision.
"You goddamn jiangshi!"
Pak!
As if telling me to shut up, the follow-up strikes came immediately. Sharp nails punched through the air and raked across my shoulder, tearing flesh open.
More blood flew. Corpse poison flooded into my body.
Under the thing's knife-hands and claw attacks, my body was being pared away like someone peeling an apple.
Tadadak!
I swung my staff like a madman, trying to deflect the blows, but it wasn't enough. The reflection speed of something that was already a corpse seemed better than mine while I was still alive.
Death's trajectories came slashing in from every direction. I barely slipped past one crimson arc aimed at the crown of my head, then yelled to my companions.
"Help!"
But Jo Harang had no room to spare—she was busy forcing the corpse poison out of her body.
Ilhong had already burned through every small thunderbolt pellet and throwing weapon she had and was locked in a fight with the remaining ordinary jiangshi.
Which meant, for the moment, I had to hold this one alone.
"Ilhong! Help!"
"…What kind of help?! I'm busy right now too!"
She shouted back as she took the head off one of the charging jiangshi.
"This jiangshi bastard—doesn't it have some kind of weakness?!"
Tak! Taak!
Even while asking, I had to keep swinging my staff without rest and stepping through Whirlwind Steps. The blood jiangshi kept tracking me perfectly, predicting every slip of my foot even though it shouldn't have been able to see the trajectories the way I did.
"Uh, uhh…! The old texts said if you stick a talisman charged with pure yang energy on its forehead, that does it!"
In short, we needed a demon-breaking, evil-smiting talisman written by a Daoist of high attainment.
"We don't have anything like that!"
The only Daoist anywhere near me was that bluffing fraud who reeked of cheap wine.
"Then sunlight! I heard if a jiangshi is hit by strong yang sunlight, it stiffens up and can't move!"
"It's the middle of the night! And we're in a basement!"
Under my relentless stream of objections, Ilhong stamped her feet in irritation and yelled,
"Aargh! Then just take its head off!"
Apparently finished purging the poison, the greatsword-wielding woman charged in the same instant she spoke.
Teong!
Even seeing it again, it was astonishing. A blade came down on a human body and made the sound of striking stone or iron.
The blood jiangshi only took a faint scratch on its forearm. Nothing was severed.
"That's impossible! Is that really the sound a human body makes?!"
Jo Harang was aghast as the thing's ridiculous durability tanked yet another cut.
"I keep telling you they're not people! It's probably a Asura Blood Jiangshi, or a Dark Iron Jiangshi, or something even worse!"
For corpses, they sure came in a lot of flavors. Ilhong was rattling off every variety recorded in the texts.
Honestly, even hearing the names I had no idea what they meant. All I understood was that they'd been forged through some bizarre secret art and sorcery.
"Kh!"
Jo Harang caught the blood jiangshi's vicious counter with both arms, but she was still driven relentlessly backward.
She coughed, and bright red droplets sprayed out. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth—internal injuries.
Shiiik!
Next was me. A knife-hand shot out at a speed I could barely react to.
Peok!
Thanks to the red trajectory I managed to get my staff in the way, but the raw power behind the strike sent me flying nearly two jang and slamming down near Ilhong.
My staff wasn't broken, but the monstrous force sent it spinning far away.
"C-Captain! That thing's jumping this way!"
As if to finish us off, the jiangshi came charging with its eyes rolled pure white.
"Borrowing this for a second."
In that crisis, I snatched the thin sword right out of Ilhong's startled hands as she sprang back.
For the record, I had never properly learned swordsmanship. Hwang Geolgae had always told me never to pick up a blade.
Tseutseutseu—
With the sharp tip leveled at the enemy, I drew up the energy of the Seongun Simbeop. White threads of light rose and coiled around the blade.
"W-wait a second, Captain. You're going to take that monster head-on?"
Ilhong urged me to run instead, insisting the opponent was a blood jiangshi.
But that wasn't an option. If I bolted now, she—with her slower lightfoot—and Jo Harang, who could barely move, would be run down in moments.
Shiiik!
A red trajectory lanced out like foresight. Right behind it, pointed nails tore the air into five shreds.
Puuk!
Agony exploded through my side. Dodging was impossible, so I let the thing rip into my flank.
Then, just as I was about to swing the sword in counterattack while spilling blood, a single long red line drew itself across my vision.
Like the red thread of fate, a dense line stretched across the blood jiangshi's body.
What…?
It was strange and uncanny. As if it were telling me: cut here, just like this.
It was projecting the optimal path for killing something straight into my eyes.
Seogeok!
And when I cut along it, the dead flesh actually parted in a way that made my hair stand on end.
The same forearm Jo Harang had barely been able to scratch was sliced halfway through by a single stroke of the sword.
…!
Caught completely off guard, the blood jiangshi froze for a beat as it reeled its dangling arm back in.
"C-Captain. How did you just do that?"
Ilhong's eyes went round as saucers, but there was no time to answer. The jiangshi abandoned its flopping arm and came at us again with the remaining one.
Its attack was mineral and empty—no pain, no hesitation. Exactly like a certain Heavenly Killing Star that used its own body as bait.
"Keok!"
Trusting my own durability, I blocked the blow with one arm.
That arm was instantly shredded into rags, but I managed to catch a hair-thin opening.
Tseutseutseu—
All the accumulated merit I had built up, and the demon-smiting inner power cultivated from it.
It was the energy of the stars that shone in the dark and drove out the wicked.
Chwaaaak!
Sword qi, pure white and coiled around the blade, followed the red line and cut through the blood jiangshi's neck.
Skin and muscle resisted in strands. The vibration of the cut traveled into my fingertips.
Seogeok—
Then, with a fierce sense of release, the sound of steel parting flesh rang out.
The blood jiangshi's head spun through the air. Its empty pupils kept staring at me until the very end.
Degureureu, tuk.
When the severed head hit the floor and rolled, the two women stood staring at me with their mouths hanging open, silent.
I looked down without a word at the thin sword that had not a single drop of blood on it, yet had clearly cut something.
"…What the hell did I just do?"
I had done it, but even I was left blank-faced by the possessed, unnatural motion.
Lines—red lines that revealed the grain of something—had begun to enter my sight.
"Wh-what was that, Captain?! How did you do something even Miss Jo Harang couldn't?!"
"Mujin! What was that just now? What kind of technique did you use?!"
Jo Harang and Ilhong latched onto me at the same time, grabbing my body and shaking me wildly.
They kept demanding to know what that possessed movement a moment ago had been.
But even if they asked how, I had no way to answer.
"Yeah, how the hell did I do that…?"
Because I didn't really know either.
In a moment of crisis I had simply grabbed a killing weapon, run the Seongun Simbeop, and the enemy had been dead before it could even go "huh?"
"Captain, you've never even learned swordsmanship. So how could you move like that…?"
I had stolen glances when my sister practiced with Ilhong's sword, but I had never formally studied it.
And yet the first time I picked one up I could cut and kill with that kind of skill—that was what they were asking.
Well, damn. Murim killing machine. When it comes to ending something, this body really has no equal.
So that was why Hwang Geolgae had told me never to pick up a blade.
For the record, even when I held the blunt staff I could see where to hit to make it hurt the most.
But the moment I gripped a cutting edge that had been born solely to kill people, ending something became far too easy.
Of course, that jiangshi was already a corpse, so it probably wouldn't pile up any slaughter karma.
"Ilhong, let's not mention this to Master."
"If a disciple had talent like this, he'd be happy… Still, it's the Captain's request, so okay."
Happy, my ass. He'd just smash me over the head for doing the one thing he told me not to do.
Anyway, I was starting to understand a little why martial artists feared and utterly rejected the Heavenly Killing Star.
An existence that could see the unseen for the sake of killing its target.
"Captain, can't you at least give me a hint? How did you really do it?"
She took her ordinary iron sword back and asked in a tone of pure incomprehension.
"Just put your back into it and swing."
"Come on, does that even make sense? How do you cut something like that just by putting strength into it?"
"Worked for me."
"…Sometimes you really get on my nerves, Captain."
What was I supposed to do if she was annoyed? It was genuinely hard to explain in words.
I just had to accept that this body's talent was overflowing.
"My body is made of blades."
I muttered a line that sounded familiar from somewhere and looked around the aftermath of the fight.
Not even a full shichen had passed since the battle started, yet the Jinju Eon Clan basement was an absolute wreck, nothing like the way it had been at first.
"Mujin. Mujin."
Jo Harang, who had been scared stiff when we first came down here, was now looking at me with bright, curious eyes full of interest.
"Later, want to grab a sword and have a spar?"
"Forget it. I'm never holding one of those again."
The red lines that appeared when I held a sword were clearly lines for killing something.
Sparring with that? I'd be lucky if I didn't end up cutting a person.
I left the little tiger girl and her competitive fire behind and checked over the scattered jiangshi.
Coffin lids thrown open everywhere. The smashed-up basement.
How the hell were we supposed to clean this mess up? That troublesome thought was just rising when—
Suddenly a pale face floated up out of the darkness, revealing a ghostly presence.
"Hiiik."
Jo Harang and Ilhong both flinched hard and clamped onto my arms.
"…Young Hero Dan Mujin. What on earth is this?"
It turned out to be our client for this job—Eon Wol-yeong.
I had already thought running into her in a creepy place at night would be scary enough. I never expected to suddenly meet her in a basement full of corpses.
"Excuse me, but you are human, right?"
I asked the woman whose pale face alone seemed to be floating in the dark.
"…That's rude."
Fortunately she was neither jiangshi nor ghost, but a perfectly living human.
"So then, what exactly is going on here?"
Her usually blank face was colored with surprise for once.
She pointed at the traces that looked as if the dead had risen on their own and fought a battle, demanding an explanation of the current situation.
"Funny. I was expecting you to explain it to me, Eon Wol-yeong."
She had just thrown the exact question I wanted to ask right back at me.
And so for a while we simply stared at each other, sinking into a strange silence.
"That's impossible… Jiangshi? That secret art was lost even from the Eon Clan!"
The woman's voice was full of shock.
After examining and analyzing the cold, pale jiangshi, she kept showing looks of disbelief.
"And this coffin that held a master…"
She examined the coffin the blood jiangshi had come from from every angle, then couldn't close her mouth at the sight of the blood-colored talismans plastered all over the inside.
She said they were covered in wicked, ominous phrases, and she made no effort to hide her fury.
"To dare use this kind of evil art… and in the basement of our Eon Clan, no less!"
Instead of treating the dead with proper rites, someone had played an extremely nasty prank, she said.
We still didn't know who the culprit was, but she told us it wasn't even standard jiangshi arts—twisted sorcery had been mixed in on top of it.
"So in the end, what was this jiangshi? One of those blood jiangshi you mentioned?"
I gave the beheaded jiangshi that had nearly wiped out our party a light kick and asked.
After interpreting the phrases on the talismans and performing something like an autopsy on the thing we had assumed was a blood jiangshi, she carefully delivered her conclusion.
"This isn't a blood jiangshi either. A Cold Iron Jiangshi, or maybe a Demon Spirit? Blood jiangshi and so on. It's a grotesque existence with a little of everything mixed in."
Hard as cold iron, capable of using martial arts, and not easily killed—a highly threatening jiangshi of that sort, she said.
Then, upon seeing the clean cut through the neck, she looked at me strangely and whipped her head around.
"How on earth did you cut it?"
My realm was only Peak, wasn't it? She threw that question at me again.
In that case, the answers I could give were limited.
"I cut well. Very well."
"…"
At that half-hearted answer, Eon Wol-yeong's eyes narrowed skeptically.
She immediately shot a look at my companions asking if that was true, but Ilhong and Jo Harang only shrugged with the same "no idea" expression.
"Is it really that threatening a jiangshi?"
Jo Harang, who cared more about justice and the safety of the martial world than anyone, asked carefully.
Eon Wol-yeong nodded with a rigidly serious face.
"Looking at the coffin and the talismans, it was still in the middle of being made. And yet it already held this much power. If something like this were properly completed and began killing people all across the Central Plains…"
Then an ominous storm of blood would blow through the Central Plains, she said.
In particular, the Orthodox Murim could take catastrophic damage.
"But this guy cut it pretty easily, you know? With that, uh, pure white sword qi thing."
Jo Harang pointed at me with a look that asked whether it was really such a threat.
"…What exactly are you?"
What am I?
Under Eon Wol-yeong's gaze full of suspicion, I could only shrug my shoulders once more.
"A troubleshooter. Just a troubleshooter."