The Corpse Reclamation Battle
She was making a rather dangerous proposal.
Hand a real sword to the Heavenly Killing Star, awaken its murderous instincts, and just swing it around however it pleased?
If my master Hwang Geolgae ever heard that, he would lose his mind and jump clean out of his skin.
Of course, she had no idea. She was just suggesting it out of pure curiosity.
Clink.
I looked quietly down at the iron sword of the Jinju Eon Clan that had fallen nearby.
It was an ordinary blade hammered out in a forge, but the moment it landed in the hands of the Heavenly Killing Star, it would be reborn as a murder weapon capable of drowning the entire Central Plains in blood.
The instant I gripped the hilt, those vivid red lines would carve themselves across my vision again — the ones that, if followed, would burst arteries and send heads tumbling free.
Lines of death that would split not just Jo Harang standing before me, but the whole world along its grain.
Kill!
Kill!
Kill!
And the moment I moved to raise a sword against the Purple Micro Star, Salsung went berserk as well. A searing crimson aura flared up as if roaring its violent approval.
Kill the Purple Micro Star in front of you while you have the chance — that was what it was saying. Honestly, give that thing half an opening and it was always trying to murder someone.
"Hey. We're just sparring. Don't get heated — keep it light. One round, that's it."
Even so, I was curious about that strange power that had cleaved through a Jiangshi.
Hadn't Hwang Geolgae once mentioned the small surgical blades physicians used when cutting into flesh?
Even a blade, in a doctor's hands, became a tool that saved lives rather than ended them.
In the end, everything came down to the user.
Even a talent born solely for slaughter — if I could master the killing intent and turn it only toward the right targets…
"Spirit and star made one; pure stream parts the qi of heaven."
Embrace the stars of the firmament, and illuminate all the world.
That was the formula of the Seongun Simbeop.
Hwang Geolgae must have believed my talent could still be put to proper use — that was why he had taught me a heart method to oppose a cursed star without killing me.
So, meaning to follow that intent and bring this power under control, I clenched the sword's hilt as hard as I could.
"…Huh?"
Even with my mind set and the blade in hand, nothing in my vision changed.
Normally, red lines should already have been drawn across Jo Harang's body, telling me exactly where to cut.
"What the hell. It's not working."
All that buildup, and the moment I tried to use it, nothing. Did it need some special condition? Or was I still too much of a novice with sword arts?
Or maybe, like last time, it only answered when my life hung by a thread.
No kill…?
Salsung seemed just as baffled. For whatever reason, the juice had gone out of it.
"Tch. Next time. We'll do it next time."
I handed the sword back to the Jinju Eon martial artist with the enthusiasm drained from my face.
"Why? Didn't you have some kind of breakthrough back then?"
She was telling me to work it out by fighting her properly.
"I just… maybe the Dog-Beating Staff still suits me better for now."
I took up the crude but familiar Hell Blood-Slaying Staff again as I spoke.
Jo Harang nodded with a faintly disappointed look and stepped back.
"You made the right call, Boss."
"About what?"
Out of nowhere, Ilhong came over praising me.
"About not swinging a sword."
"And why's that?"
I tilted my head, and she hesitated a moment, as if sifting through an old memory.
"Back then, in the basement… Boss was a little… how do I put it. Not like Boss? The killing intent was so thick it was kind of scary."
She said the air had felt rough, and the murderous aura had been strong enough to make her skin prickle. It hadn't been like me at all.
One wrong move and I might have crossed some line and gone flying off somewhere — that kind of uneasy feeling, she said.
Living stuck to me for so long, she seemed to notice the slightest change in me right away.
"I was scary? Really?"
"Well… there was kind of a wild edge to it, so it was also kind of… fine? Anyway. That was how it was."
Even she seemed to realize she was talking nonsense and hurriedly cut herself off.
A power that brought profit when used well and disaster when it wasn't. Truly a double-edged blade.
Take up the sword!
The instant I abandoned the blade for the safer Dog-Beating Staff, Salsung started raising a racket again, demanding I grab a sword at once.
But one thing I had learned since coming to the Murim was this: if I simply did the opposite of whatever that thing told me, I usually came out somewhere in the middle.
Yeah. No.
My earth-imported, irritating tone sent Salsung into a fit, its aura flaring. It draped a blood-red pressure over everything around us, trying to intimidate me.
Tsssss—
But to me now, it was laughable.
Maybe I used to flinch a little — but how much merit had this body piled up since then?
Back in my detective-agency days, people even called me a slave to money. And a guy like that had still thrown business aside now and then to do good deeds.
Salsung. Sit down.
This body was a living Buddha at this point. Calling it that wouldn't even be an exaggeration.
I immediately pushed the Seongun Simbeop to full power and forcibly suppressed the crimson aura.
Shaaaa—
Pure white energy rose and coiled around my whole body, devouring the red and driving it out.
Kieeek!
Watching the thrashing crimson flicker, I could almost hear that scream at my ear.
For a thing with nothing to its name, it sure talked big.
Then, suddenly — one stunned gaze fixed on me from nearby.
"…!"
My eyes locked dead-on with Eon Wol-yeong, who had been avoiding my gaze all this time.
For some reason she had been staring this way for a while, and now her eyes were wide as if she had just witnessed something impossible.
"Young Hero Dan Mujin… what on earth are you…?"
"Pardon? What about me?"
Why did this terrifying woman keep saying things like that?
Was she about to tell me to be careful again and stir up more anxiety?
"No. It's nothing… We've rested enough. Shall we go?"
The moment our eyes met, she glanced away again and rose to her feet.
Seriously, why had she been dodging me so hard lately? She hadn't been like this when we first met through Eun Hwaran.
"Boss, I don't know what it is, but later you should definitely apologize."
"Apologize for what, you."
By now I was starting to wonder if I had somehow offended her without realizing it.
Honestly, this was absurd.
"Rest over! Move out!"
A line I had heard plenty of times back when I worked as a porter.
The Jinju Eon martial artists groaned as they got up all around us.
The short rest ended, and the party took up the coffin again and resumed the road.
At that point, we still had about six days left until the Murim Alliance.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
Tall trees blurred into smeared shadows as they whipped past on either side.
Every time two heavy feet struck the ground — thud, thud! — the earth burst apart.
A man was racing through the forest with explosive lightness skill.
"Who the hell is it…!"
The disheveled hair of Left Blood Dharma Gwang Hyeol-so whipped wildly in the headwind. Anxiety and rage took turns flashing through the savage light in his eyes.
"What kind of bastard keeps sabotaging the grand work of our Blood Sect…!"
Even as he launched from branch to branch, his mind was a tangled mess.
A Blood Sect agent watching the Jinju Eon Clan from outside had sent word one day: the head of the Sura Cheonsal Gangsi seemed to have been cut off.
And now those people were hauling it toward the Murim Alliance to announce the fact to the entire Central Plains.
Unfinished or not, that Jiangshi was not something some ordinary master should have been able to cut down.
It was a being the Blood Sect had spent long years preparing while hiding its true face.
And there had been no sign of a Transcendent Realm master in that region — and yet its head had fallen?
"Was it that Lang'a Peak bastard?! Or someone else entirely? Who keeps throwing sand in the Blood Sect's great enterprise—!"
A roar of fury rolled through the forest.
Decades of work prepared in the dark, plans he had believed perfect — from some point on, they had begun unraveling one by one.
Taah!
Gwang Hyeol-so leapt again, cutting the wind as he chased the tracks left by a heavy cart burdened with a corpse.
Even what had already happened was enough to leave him with no face to show the Blood Sect Leader.
So no further failure could be allowed.
He chased the cart with every ounce of strength he had.
And whether that effort paid off or not — two days out from the Murim Alliance, he finally spotted a wagon rolling along with a coffin aboard.
Shashashak!
Gwang Hyeol-so poured murderous intent through his whole body and closed the distance at speed.
Then the arrogant fools who had dared obstruct the Sect's path without fear entered his sight.
Boom!
A stomp that slammed the earth and blocked the front of the wagon column.
The ground shuddered as if the whole area were quaking; the horses panicked, and the wagons came to a dead stop.
"W-What the hell is this guy?!"
"What kind of killing intent is this…!"
"Battle formation, all of you!"
At his clearly hostile appearance, the Jinju Eon martial artists scrambled into combat ranks in a panic.
Gwang Hyeol-so, ready to tear them apart, was drawing his sword as well — when
"…Hm?"
A familiar face suddenly caught his eye.
That slick, handsome face. The bastard who, during the battle where they had managed to capture Moyong Cheonghye, had provoked him nonstop and clung on like a burr, sabotaging him at every turn. That kill-worthy son of a bitch.
"You… it was you…!"
Only then did Gwang Hyeol-so realize the true identity of the one who had hindered them yet again.
"Dog-Beating Dragon Dan Mujiiiin—! It was you! It's been you all along!"
From the Dragon-Phoenix Gathering, to the interference at the cliff, to this very moment when he was about to expose their second grand work —
At every single turn, that man had been there.
Even falling out of the Blood Sect Leader's favor after collapsing — if you looked closely, all of it was that bastard's fault.
Realizing that, Gwang Hyeol-so kindled a blood-red glare as if weeping tears of blood.
"Oh for fuck's sake — why is he popping out again?!"
Dan Mujin nearly leapt out of his skin at the sudden intrusion of Gwang Hyeol-so.
In this vast Central Plains, two men bound by a tenacious, cursed fate met once more.
"Just go away already! Why do you people show up everywhere I go?!"
It was time to put an end to this cursed connection.
Having decided that, Gwang Hyeol-so let out a furious bellow and charged him.
"I'll tear you to shreds—!"
A madman with blood-colored light in his eyes came crashing down on us like a tidal wave.
Kwaaang!
The combined formation the Jinju Eon experts desperately raised was shredded in an instant by a single strand of the blood-red sword qi he unleashed.
He seemed to have come alone, racing to reclaim the Jiangshi loaded with the Blood Sect's various arts before it fell into Murim Alliance hands — but looking at him now, that alone was more than enough force.
Chwaaaak!
A ray of murderous intent ripped a long scar through the ground.
Martial artists who had stepped forward to stop him went limp one after another and fell away.
"It was you, wasn't it? The one who brought down the Sura Cheonsal Gangsi!"
"Hey, Jo Harang is right next to me, and there are other masters here too! Why do you always blame only me?!"
Granted, this time it really had been me.
"Die!"
Even while dealing with multiple martial artists, Gwang Hyeol-so kept hurling sword qi at me with obsessive precision, as if to vent his rage.
The moment I so much as flinched, a killing blade of qi carved through the air, and just reading the red trails and barely dodging was already more than I could handle.
Chwaaaak—!
I threw myself aside by a hair; the sword qi skimmed past and cut a few strands of my hair.
"It has to be you! No — it is you! The only one who would do something like this—!"
This lunatic. He had clearly developed some kind of twisted fixation on me.
Maybe I had provoked him a little too hard back at the cliff.
"Mujin!"
Tung!
In the brief window I had to catch my breath, Jo Harang barely intercepted another lance of sword qi with her greatsaber.
Even she was straining; the blue blade qi coating her greatsaber flickered, thin enough that it looked ready to shatter at any second.
"The Sect clearly made a mistake! Ranking your threat level at only three?! That's complete nonsense!"
Apparently this body of mine had gotten fairly famous inside the Blood Sect as well.
Back in Beijing I had begged to get famous and all I got were weird rumors like "Academy Destroyer" — this was less a granted wish and more like a Monkey's Paw.
"I've decided. Today, no matter what it takes, I will kill you at least!"
A resolute roar.
At the same time, a storm of sword qi poured in from every direction, flooding the whole area.
"Shit!"
Chwaak! Seogeok!
I had to twist my whole body like I was dodging bullets.
Trajectories of pure killing intent carved through the air without pause. Deep wounds opened across my body; just coming out of it alive was already something to be grateful for. The assault was that lethal.
But there was a price for surviving.
Clatter.
"Ah — no! My Hell Blood-Slaying Staff…!"
The Blood-Slaying Staff I had named while swearing revenge for the previous one split cleanly in two and fell.
Weaponless, I watched him come straight at me —
"…Boss, catch!"
At the brink of death, Ilhong hurriedly flung a sword my way.
I clamped my hand around the hilt as it shot toward me like an arrow — and another field of vision dyed itself red.
"Die—!"
As if he meant to cut me down with his own hands rather than sword qi, Gwang Hyeol-so's body charged into my face — and garish lines began to etch themselves across it.
…!