A Stage Prepared for the Taking, Part 2
I could hardly make sense of what was happening, and my mind was in complete turmoil.
So this meant it wasn’t Jegal Hyeon after all, but the entire Jegal Clan working together to pull this off?
Or was it possible that every last bit of this was Jegal Yun’s solo crime?
While I struggled to sort out the mess in my head, Jegal Yun sneered at us with open contempt.
“You were always like this, little brother. Forever picking pointless fights and getting under my skin.”
Cheongha still seemed to be suffering from the aftereffects of the headache, leaning against me as she barely managed to keep herself upright.
Seeing the two of us grimacing and clutching our heads only made Jegal Yun’s vicious smile deepen.
“I hate variables. If not for that suspicious power of yours, there wouldn’t have been a single crack in my perfect plan. And then you had to come crawling back for no reason. What was it? Did you miss your family?”
“Brother….”
“Still, thanks to you, these last few days have been fun. I was almost careless because everything was far too easy, so I should be thanking you. Maybe you’re more capable than that big brother of yours who only knows how to flap his lips.”
Listening to him, I felt the tangled knots in my head suddenly unravel.
This bastard was the type of villain who, right as the story reached its final act, would begin spilling his entire tragic backstory in great detail.
Just from those few words, I could tell the mastermind behind everything was Jegal Yun, and, just as I had suspected, he was a loser burdened by an inferiority complex toward his older brother, Jegal Hyeon.
Personally, I had never liked villains like that, but now that I was the one caught in the middle of it, I understood something.
It was actually a relief when they babbled endlessly like this, instead of hiding everything until the very end.
In that case, the rest was easy.
Before I crushed him, I might as well ask about everything I wanted to know.
“To plot something like this… what’s your goal!”
I put a little acting into my voice and pretended to be crushed by despair.
Apparently pleased with my reaction, Jegal Yun spread his arms grandly, as though he’d been waiting for this moment, and began his speech.
“Look at the world! In a time when we should be cooperating, everyone is instead driven by different motives, checking one another and wallowing in jealousy, unable to take even a single step forward! What an inefficient and pathetic spectacle!”
He had been shouting with a furious expression, but soon enough he started laughing in delight.
His voice rang with heat and madness.
“So I! Jegal Yun! Will carry a great ambition and unite the hearts of those foolish masses to accomplish a glorious undertaking. No one else—me!”
“By yourself?”
I let my voice tremble as if I were shuddering with fear and asked back.
Judging by the way he snorted, he didn’t suspect a thing.
“Then who could possibly follow my will? Not even the Jegal Clan is enough. Bound by that useless notion of integrity, they can’t take the field and only end up cleaning up after the failures.”
“But you can’t unite everyone’s hearts on your own.”
“That’s what my plan is for, you idiot. With your pathetic brain, you couldn’t even imagine it. It’s simple. Bind people’s emotions and memories together.”
I know, you idiot.
So the source of the abnormal incidents spreading through Yangyang really was him.
Bind emotions and memories together.
Then turn people into puppets and use them to control the world.
What a flimsy plan—exactly the sort of thing a third-rate villain would come up with.
I had no idea who he thought he was calling stupid.
“Th-That kind of thing… it can’t possibly be possible!”
Cheongha, the excellent supporting character she was, shot back in disbelief after hearing Jegal Yun’s absurd plan.
As expected, Cheongha’s reactions were great.
It seemed her hopeless response pleased Jegal Yun very much.
Unable to hold it in, he burst out laughing and pulled a worn-out booklet from inside his robe.
“No, it’s possible if you have the power of this!”
Wow, a bigeup!
Just as expected, the culprit behind this whole incident involved a bigeup too.
No matter how much my past cringe had granted strange powers to these things, they always seemed to end up being used for evil unless Cheongha was involved.
I found myself thinking that the abbot’s decision to issue a wanted order for them might actually have been right.
I wanted nothing more than to snatch the booklet away from him on the spot, but for now I kept up the act and reacted with the right amount of shock, waiting for my chance.
“No! That is…!”
On the cover, written in my own handwriting, were the four characters Gangcheolyeonsung.
What kind of book had this been again?
From the title, I felt like I might be able to guess.
My confusion didn’t last long.
Jegal Yun, without even being asked, happily began explaining it himself.
“Kekeke, that’s right! Here lies the future of ingenious, efficient formations—the future the Jegal Clan’s pointless obsession with integrity prevented them from ever developing!”
No need to call it sneaky….
Hearing him talk about a book I’d written like that, I felt oddly wounded.
“Khh….”
Cheongha swallowed a pained groan.
It was an insult to the Jegal family, and a vile villain had appeared before her eyes.
She looked ready to leap up and blast him with something on the spot, but the headache must have been severe, because she could only flinch and bear it.
Jegal Yun, seemingly unconcerned with her pain, continued his praise while brandishing the booklet.
“What magnificent knowledge this is! The wisdom contained in this one book is a realm you useless martial artists could devote your entire lives to and still never reach. The author must be a sage who can even astonish a genius of the ages like me.”
Praise like that was almost embarrassingly flattering.
Even in a situation like this, my body automatically reacted to the compliment, smiling smugly and scratching my cheek.
Cheongha, still enduring her pain, snapped at him sharply.
“Didn’t you say relying on some unknown object with no clear origin was something only a weak fool would do?”
“No, little brother. You spit out the bad and swallow the good. Surely you’re not so stupid that you still don’t understand that’s the first step toward improvement.”
Jegal Yun flicked his finger dismissively at Cheongha’s rebuttal, sounding exactly like an older brother scolding an immature child.
In other words, he was a total hypocrite.
Every move he made only made him look more and more like a third-rate villain.
“And here, I saw the future!”
He widened his red-glowing eyes and thrust an arm toward the sky.
Like a fanatic in prayer, his voice filled the damp underground chamber.
“The Nationwide Alchemy Circle! I will create a grand formation that covers the entire martial world and seize control of all the Central Plains. Then, by the will of a single man, I shall control everyone’s emotions, and true peace will finally come to this corrupted land!”
“….”
“….”
Cheongha and I were both speechless.
But I was sure our inner thoughts were very different.
A drop of cold sweat slid down my forehead.
Steel Alchemy and the Nationwide Alchemy Circle?
This was plagiarism.
You sure were running wild, middle-school-me.
Cheongha shouted in disbelief.
“That’s absurd! There’s no way a formation could make something like that possible!”
“You’re someone who uses the power of bigeup, so you should know better than anyone. There is nothing impossible to this power.”
His expression turned rapt, as though he were dreaming.
“Through tonight’s banquet, I’ll make the great sect leaders from across the Central Plains my allies, and through them, I’ll establish massive formations in every region. And then….”
He began laying out his grand, long-winded plan piece by piece.
I absolutely hated how much he loved hearing himself talk.
I’d already gathered the important information, so it seemed like the time had come to put an end to this third-rate villain’s little performance.
“I get the gist.”
I cut off his monologue and took a step toward him.
A flicker of disbelief passed over Jegal Yun’s face.
“You really are thick-headed, little brother. Or maybe it’s because you’re close to that idiot—you don’t seem to understand anything.”
“I understand perfectly. In fact, it’s so obvious I can see right through it. It’s boring, so can I start beating you up now?”
“You dare think you can stop me?”
Clap.
He sneered and clapped his hands together.
With a sharp burst of applause, his hands dropped toward the floor.
No, the pose should’ve been a bit different….
The moment his hands touched down, the patterns drawn across the floor all lit up at once, and a violent tremor rolled through the entire basement.
“Aaaah!”
At the same time, Cheongha screamed and collapsed.
As if crushed by something invisible, she couldn’t move at all.
Jegal Yun approached, crouching beside her and looking down at her with contempt.
“A few days ago, I found out you’d come to Yangyang, so I prepared thoroughly for you. Aren’t you a special existence who wields the power of bigeup?”
Cheongha’s gaze, pinned to the floor beneath him, sharpened with hatred.
“Still resisting, I see. I do respect you, Cheongha. Even if you’re dull, you’re still Jegal blood. It was possible for you to get this far by making use of that bigeup power. So I set up a binding formation here specifically to suppress you. How does it feel?”
Believing everything was going exactly as he wanted, Jegal Yun wore a confident smile.
When Cheongha didn’t answer, he rose from where he’d been mocking her.
His gaze, which had been fixed on her, shifted to me.
“So now you’re finally interested in this side, are you?”
Unlike Cheongha, I was standing perfectly fine, looking straight at him.
His face was full of confusion.
“What are you? Why are you….”
I wondered that too.
No matter how little effect my own cringe should have had on me, I had at least been mildly influenced by it in the previous hypnosis incident, so it was strange that I was completely unaffected now.
Then I noticed a bright light shining from inside my robe.
For a moment I checked inside and saw a faint glow.
The bead the deer had given me, the one that had slipped out a little when I’d taken out my handkerchief for the martial artist earlier, was softly shining.
Apparently this bead was blocking the formation’s influence.
Thanks.
We hadn’t known each other for long, but I already missed the deer’s soft fur.
Pushing the thought aside, I stepped toward Jegal Yun again.
As I approached, confusion spread over his face.
“Wh-What…!? Why are you unhurt?”
“You trusted some half-baked trick and got careless? For all your talk about bloodlines and fools, that’s a pretty low level of competence.”
At my mockery, Jegal Yun’s face twisted into something ugly.
“Hmph. So your mouth is the only thing that’s got any life in it.”
Yet surprisingly, he suppressed his anger and returned to his haughty expression.
For a third-rate villain, his self-control was impressive.
“The formation has already been activated. By now, the great figures attending the banquet should all be in my grasp. No matter what trick you’re using, you won’t be able to deal with them.”
That was a problem.
Those great sect leaders were at least experts in the Transformation Realm.
If he really could control them through a formation, I wasn’t confident I could hold out alone.
Just as I was about to rush forward and finish him before that happened, Jegal Yun leaped onto some bizarre wooden device in a flash.
“We’ll see about that!”
He shouted a line worthy of a third-rate villain and activated the device. The wooden plank sprang upward, launching his body skyward in an instant.
Wow! A lifting device!
As expected of the Jegal Clan—they had actually thought to install something like that on a stage in this era.
My brain couldn’t quite keep up with the sudden situation, and I was distracted by a stupid thought before snapping back to my senses.
“No time for that.”
I needed to hurry after him.
I supported the collapsed Cheongha and rushed out through the basement stairway entrance.
The martial artists who had been standing guard were nowhere to be seen.
“Rest here. I’ll go handle this.”
“I’m sorry, unnie.”
I laid her down beneath a nearby tree in a place that looked safe and squeezed her hand tightly.
Now it really felt like I was going off to a final showdown.
Even in a situation like this, strangely enough, what I felt most wasn’t tension but a peculiar excitement.
When I hurried back toward the stage, Jegal Yun was standing on it with both arms spread wide, laughing wildly.
The important figures of the sects seated at the tables below the stage showed an unsettling lack of interest in him.
“Am I too late?”
With that question in mind, I climbed onto the stage and approached him.
He was too busy gripping his own face and suppressing his spilling laughter to notice me coming at all.
“Kekekek. Now no one can stop me. Not that pretentious older brother of mine, not even Father, who always claimed to know everything. Everyone will bow beneath my feet!”
“Wow.”
Watching him erupt with inferiority complex like a sketch come to life, an involuntary exclamation escaped my mouth.
Even after coming this far, the thing he was doing was simply exploding with inferiority.
In a way, it was almost admirable.
At the sound of my voice, Jegal Yun finally looked up.
His face was dyed with a vicious light.
“Perfect timing. You’ll be my first sacrifice.”
With a delighted expression, he reached toward me and shouted grandly,
“Subdue this woman!”
…
But even after his cry, no one in the banquet hall reacted.
They merely continued their conversations as usual, while only a few people cast puzzled glances toward the stage.
The smug smile vanished rapidly from Jegal Yun’s face.
“W-What is it? Why… why isn’t anyone reacting?”
Panicking, Jegal Yun fumbled open the bigeup and started flipping through it.
At that very moment, a familiar figure appeared behind him.
It was Jegal Hyeon.
Beside him stood Dokgo Ryeon, her red hair fluttering, expressionless as ever.
Jegal Hyeon strode confidently onto the stage and said quietly to his younger brother, who was staring at him in disbelief,
“Little brother, you’ve been deceived again.”