The Red Thing
“By now they should all be dead, right?”
A man chewed on his fingernail with a habitual crunch as he stepped into the pitch-dark cellar. His eyes, sharp and predatory, swept over the coffins whose lids lay thrown open here and there, already certain that the troubleshooter party had been wiped out. He advanced slowly, tracing a path through a space still thick with the scars of battle.
“They said once that jiangshi wakes up… even the Cult’s own masters wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Immune to blade and spear, untouched by heat or cold, already dead so that poison was useless and fatigue impossible—nothing more than a vanguard of slaughter that murdered living humans without pause. The Blood Sect Leader had said as much when he passed down this forbidden art. When this jiangshi opened its eyes, hills of corpses would rise wherever it walked and the Central Plains would run red as a river of blood—like the second coming of some terrible star of calamity.
And so, inside the Blood Sect, they had given the thing a name of its own.
Sura Cheonsal Gangsi—the Asura Heavenly-Killing Jiangshi.
Expectations for it had run so high that the man himself had poured heat and soul into crafting the corpse, driven by a clear sense of purpose. And then, of all times, outsiders had been summoned and a full inspection of the cellar ordered. In the end he had been forced to wake the jiangshi mid-rite and let it do the work.
“Still, a fresh master’s corpse is about to drop. Silver lining, I suppose.”
A blood-red talisman bloomed at his fingertips—an amulet steeped in the art of commanding the souls of the dead. Even if only one half-finished Sura Cheonsal Gangsi had been born, securing the corpses of two or three masters would still leave him ahead of the game. Cheerfully promising himself that the ruined rite would be paid for in those very bodies, he hurried his steps—
And then.
“Corpses, huh… You talking about us?”
A voice floated out of the dark. A young man with cold eyes shoved his face into view.
“……!”
The man of the Jinju Eon Clan grasped the situation at once and twisted to flee.
“Where do you think you’re going, you bastard!”
A long Dog-Beating Staff smashed down onto the crown of the fleeing man’s head.
Crack!
“Ghk!”
Long ago, in an age of war when human life was cheaper than it is now and death walked everywhere, jiangshi arts were surprisingly common on the battlefield. The story went that they were a secret technique for ferrying the fallen home to distant families. But as time passed the purpose twisted, until at last the dead were being used to kill the living. The orthodox factions of the Murim would tolerate it no longer. They branded the jiangshi arts a vicious heresy that insulted the dead and set about purging them.
When even his own house stood on the brink of being cast among the unorthodox, the ancestral head of the Jinju Eon Clan burned every secret manual with his own hands and erased the art from the world. So when that long-extinguished jiangshi technique suddenly made its presence known again—
“This can’t be—a jiangshi? I was told our ancestors wiped every trace away with their own hands!”
“For such a foul art to show its face in the world again!”
The blood of the Jinju Eon Clan fell into instant chaos. A bizarre jiangshi of a kind never even recorded in their literature had appeared in their own cellar; people were half out of their minds with shock. The clan’s key figures and elders were summoned at once, and an emergency council was convened—with our party, of course, as the principal witnesses.
“The end times. Truly the end times.”
“If this gets out, the rivers and lakes will be thrown into uproar for certain…”
They poured in, every one of them fretting, every one of them talking at once, and the council chamber turned as noisy as a marketplace in short order.
“Why does this place have so many relatives?”
“Boss, it’s a clan society. The whole village is one big extended family.”
“Even so.”
Getting dragged into someone else’s family council—was this the second time, after the Sichuan Tang Family Manor? This job had been brokered by Eun Hwaran; I had expected it to pass quietly and without fuss. At this point destiny itself seemed to be mocking me. You’re never getting an easy job for the rest of your life.
“So. This is the culprit?”
An elder who had cultivated the Eon Clan’s jiangshi arts to the extreme—pale enough to rival Eon Wol-yeong—asked the question. She nodded and confirmed it.
“Yes. When I checked his pulse, I found traces of blood arts. It’s presumed he fell for some wicked temptation and converted to the Blood Sect…”
“You little—! You son of a bitch!”
Fists and boots immediately rained down on the unconscious Blood Sect agent. Elders who could no longer contain their fury joined in, lashing out with aged feet and hands.
“Kill him!”
“Do you know with what hearts our ancestors buried the jiangshi arts?!”
“Tear him apart!”
For old men, the clan’s elders ran remarkably hot. The Blood Sect’s spy was being beaten so thoroughly that dust rose even on a rainy day. Sensing that he might actually die under the assault, the man snapped back to consciousness and his eyes flew open.
“Ghk—w-what’s going on…”
He clutched the slightly concave dent in his scalp and sat bolt upright, face blank, trying to make sense of the scene. Then his gaze fell on the severed jiangshi head laid out in the center of the chamber, and his eyes bulged as if they might split.
“W-why is the Sura Cheonsal Gangsi’s head cut off…? Who in the world did this…”
Who did this, he asks. At the question, Ilhong, Jo Harang, and Eon Wol-yeong all turned their eyes on me at once. The Blood Sect spy’s gaze locked with mine, and a look of savage disbelief began to crawl across his face.
“Impossible! That jiangshi is the kind even the renowned masters of the rivers and lakes can’t handle…! You—what the hell are you?! What trick did you use on the Sura Cheonsal Gangsi…?!”
Thwack!
He kept yapping about the Heavenly Killing this and the Heavenly Killing that while digging for my identity, so I put another neat dent in his crown. With a frog-like eep he flopped face-first to the floor, out cold again.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just press his blood points?”
Jo Harang eyed me as if she couldn’t understand why I had gone to the trouble of swinging the Hell Demon-Slaying Staff.
“No hand-feel that way.”
What mattered was the electric sting of impact running through the fingertips.
“Hmm. I’m not exactly merciful toward villains myself… but you’re a special kind of weird.”
A disciple learns by watching his master. I had clearly picked up more than a little from Hwang Geolgae.
“Sura Cheonsal Gangsi… A type of jiangshi never once mentioned in any of our ancient texts.”
“It must be the Blood Sect’s handiwork. The name alone is ominous. Heavenly Killing, of all things!”
The Eon clansfolk who had overheard our exchange began to murmur. Easy for them to say—this Heavenly Killing Star of mine was sweating bullets just listening to it.
“Wol-yeong. Have you learned anything about that jiangshi?”
The question came from the Eon Clan Head, who had been watching in silence. She nodded and began sharing what she had discovered by examining the coffin, the talismans, and the jiangshi itself.
“After the autopsy and a close look at the talismans, it was clearly forged through the Blood Sect’s secret arts… The one bright spot, if you can call it that, is that it was woken before the rite was complete. There are clear signs of incompleteness.”
Our intrusion, she explained, had prevented them from finishing the final step: flooding the jiangshi’s body with fresh blood. Had that process been completed, a true catastrophe might have unfolded beneath the Eon Clan’s floors—so it was a genuine mercy that it hadn’t, she said.
“I’m not sure ‘mercy’ is the word… Either way, this nightmare was unfolding in the Eon Clan’s own cellar.”
“And a jiangshi that can handle two or three masters without breaking a sweat is incomplete?”
“They even say it only took a scratch from that greatsword woman’s strike—and she’s at the Transcendental Peak Realm. Hard to believe.”
An ancient art resurrected, fused with blood techniques by an unorthodox cult sharpening its blade of vengeance. The product of that work sat right in front of them; the people of the Eon Clan looked as if they had no idea what to do.
“You there—Dan Mujin, was it?”
I nodded at the question from the corpse-pale head of the Jinju Eon Clan.
“Yes. Dan Mujin, the Dog-Beating Dragon.”
“When my daughter said she had called a troubleshooter, I wondered what on earth she was thinking…”
His eyes had been full of doubt at first, but they shifted into something more complicated once he heard we had cut down a jiangshi this vicious.
“I’ll ask you plainly. How did you sever that jiangshi’s neck?”
He was clearly burning to know how someone of mere Peak Realm like me had managed what even Jo Harang could not.
“I just gave it a little swipe and it went snip on its own?”
“…….”
How was I supposed to explain it? I had simply drawn the blade along a red line. If I had to guess, it was the talent of the Heavenly Killing Star combined with the demon-banishing power of the Seongun Simbeop that let me cut the thing.
“You just cut it and it came off… That sword of yours isn’t some legendary peachwood blade steeped in immortal qi. Does that even make sense?”
They eyed the thin sword Ilhong had lent me as they asked. To anyone looking, it was just an ordinary iron sword Hwang Geolgae had bought at a smithy for her.
“I get a divine touch with the blade every now and then. Guess today was one of those days.”
I shrugged and blamed talent; the blood relatives clustered together and muttered about whether this was acceptable.
“Honestly, that fellow’s playing hard to get.”
“If three or four more of those jiangshi showed up, the whole Central Plains could drown in a blood wind…”
“Let it go. Martial arts are a martial artist’s capital, aren’t they?”
“Still—he’s got skill, I’ll grant that, but something about the way he shows off is just… irritating, don’t you think?”
“Ahem. Keep that kind of talk quiet.”
Listen to the family take turns roasting me. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t explain—I couldn’t. The whole thing had only been possible because of the synergy between the Heavenly Killing Star and the Seongun Simbeop. At any rate, the elders kept grumbling, clearly unhappy with how things stood.
“In any case, this cannot be ignored. That the Blood Sect was plotting something like this—we must report it to the Murim Alliance at once.”
The Eon Clan Head muttered as much with a face full of grim vigilance, as if a blood wind no one had expected—not when people thought even the Heavenly Killing Star was long gone—was about to rise. He decided then and there to assemble a team to transport the jiangshi’s remains so the Alliance’s combat corps could be informed. As the meeting to arrange that reconvened, I quietly slipped toward the back.
Ilhong looked at me with eyes that said I’d had a rough day.
“Anyway, we’re tangled up with the Blood Sect again. At this point, isn’t this some kind of cursed bond?”
“Hah. You’re telling me.”
I had approached the job thinking it was a mystery, and it had flipped into a horror-action piece where corpses stood up and came at us for blood. I still didn’t understand why every single commission I took ballooned into this kind of mess—as if fate refused to leave me alone and kept hurling me into the whirlpool.
“It’s all because those Blood Sect bastards keep cooking up schemes.”
“Boss, they’re probably thinking the exact same thing on their end. That it’s all because you keep getting in the way.”
“What did I do? I never wanted to get involved.”
“But you’re already in deep.”
Exactly. It was so absurd and so unfair I could have jumped up and down. All I had wanted was to finish the job, make some money, and rack up a few good deeds.
“So maybe they’re just as baffled as we are.”
“Whose side are you even on?”
“Hehe.”
I shook my head and returned the borrowed sword to her. The moment the keen killing tool left my hand and the dog-beating staff settled back into place, a dissatisfied energy boiled up behind me.
A red finger scrawled the character on the floor, demanding I take up a blade again. It clearly wanted another chance to exercise the Heavenly Killing Star’s instinct to cut and tear. But I was not about to dance to its tune. I scuffed the writing out with my foot as if to say, not a chance.
Salsung flared even redder, seething. For a parasite living in someone else’s body, it sure had a lot of demands. I sent the pure white energy that had been coiling around the Dog-Beating Staff racing through my entire body. The power of the Seongun Simbeop spread through me, and Salsung convulsed.
Kyaaaaaak!
I could almost hear it. A moment later, peace settled over my inner landscape.
“Should’ve done that from the start.”
One thoroughly eventful day—and its closing act, it seemed, was a staring contest with Salsung.
“I was hoping to wrap things up cleanly again today.”
Living really was never easy.
In the small hours of the morning after the visiting troubleshooter had cut down something truly ominous, a pale face drifted through the dim air. The clan council had run long, and after that she had stayed up combing through the old texts; Eon Wol-yeong wandered the night with a hollow, exhausted face. Worry had driven sleep away, so she was pacing the grounds out of habit, lost in thought, walking and walking with a vacant expression—until she stopped dead in front of one particular building.
It was the guest quarters where the outsiders were staying. The reason she halted was strange. Something had snagged on her senses.
…….
She had handled countless corpses, and in the process had cultivated the jiangshi arts until she could, to some degree, perceive the boundary between the living and the dead. The door creaked open. Inside, a handsome young man lay sprawled on his back, snoring away with his belly freely exposed—the same uncanny youth who had said he would do anything Merchant Leader Eun Hwaran ordered, and who had, in fact, done exactly that.
And at the same time, the presence of an uninvited guest.
“…….”
Something unwelcome was there. At the edge of that bed, something was quietly watching the sleeping man.
Her father had told her once: if you cannot see it and cannot touch it, yet something still brushes faintly against your awareness—that presence is surely one of the imae-mangnyang, a malevolent spirit of the wild. Anyone of the Eon Clan, who dealt always with the dead, was to be forever on guard against such things.
Hiss.
The oil lamp that had been gently lighting the room snuffed out without warning. Plenty of oil remained, yet darkness had come. Eon Wol-yeong felt a chill climb her spine. And from the emptiness beyond, she had the distinct sensation that something was looking at her—and smiling a smile that was truly, terribly cold.
……!