Chapter 73: Night in Beijing (3)
Chapter 73: Night in Beijing (3)
It wasn't that the Unorthodox Faction consisted of loyal patriots who rolled up their sleeves for the sake of justice. (Then again, the Orthodox Faction weren't exactly paragons of loyalty either. At the end of the day, they were all just private military organizations.)
However, even putting that aside, the current situation was lamentable.
Why on earth did people in this version of medieval China love doing things to other humans so much?
Seeing how urban legends about making pills or dumplings out of children still persist in 21st-century China, perhaps it’s practically a racial trait of the Han people.
Murong Cheong. You were right.
I couldn't help but recall the precious words of that extreme racist, Murong Cheong.
The characteristic lewdness of the Han, their characteristic cruelty, their characteristic cunning…
In a world like this, just how incredible a man was Confucius for advocating for righteous philosophy and proper teachings?
Indeed, it is far more admirable to overcome an evil nature through great effort than to be born with a good one.
He had transcended being merely Han.
Therefore, a transmigrator holding the advanced ethics of the 21st century in one hand and the righteous philosophy of the 5th century BC in the other must surely have something called 'transmigrator’s responsibility.'
"Die!"
The blade spat lightning.
The blade that had been resting on my shoulder swept down, baring its fangs toward the old man's neck.
Like the strike of a tiger out for the hunt.
The old man, who had been muttering to himself while continuing an experiment that could never be permitted by any modern research ethics, came to a dead halt the moment I leapt from the shadows.
Just as the blade was about to reach him, a dark blue wave of energy suddenly enveloped his body.
—Whoosh!
It was a type of Protection Aura.
The trajectory of my strike was caught in the interference, causing the blade to slice through empty air.
The ambush had failed.
In that brief moment, the old man regained his stance and turned toward me.
I quickly reached into my robe with my left hand and threw whatever I could grab.
—Whizzzz!
Sharp daggers, hollow needles, and a strangely shaped square wooden box. I threw the items the Tang family man had left me at random.
There was no time to categorize them or use them for their intended purposes.
If my guess was right, this guy was a Peak Realm expert of the Five Poisons Sect.
No matter how much the Peng family's martial arts allowed a First-Rate warrior to trade blows with a Peak master, I wouldn't be able to handle the absence of a Middle Dantian if the fight dragged on.
—Fwooooosh!
The old man started to say something but clamped his mouth shut, waving his hands frantically.
Dark blue waves of energy erupted repeatedly, melting the objects that came into contact with his body.
Wait, that’s not even martial arts anymore.
Is he a mage?
Why does his shield spell have a decomposition function? That’s cheating, you Southern Barbarian.
"The Tang family must have been desperate."
The old man opened his mouth, and a sinister voice flowed out.
It carried a weight significantly different from the tone he had used when commanding his servant earlier.
As he spoke, white smoke began to drift slowly from the corners of his mouth.
"Don't try to set the mood, you bastard."
"You have a foul mouth, child of the Tang family. What do you think will happen to your Young Lord if I so much as flick a finger?"
It seemed he mistook me for a disciple of the Tang family.
Well, it made sense, considering I had been busily throwing the secret items I’d received from them.
What would happen if the Young Lord died? It would be a shame, but there’s nothing I could do.
He’s not part of my family. Honestly, if it were the Young Lord of my family who had a Gu poison implanted in him, I wouldn't even be doing this.
When I swung my blade without answering, the old man chuckled and fluttered his hands together.
"I see why you've come here. Yes, the eunuchs of the Ming Dynasty are finally trying to discard us. How do you people put it…? Boiling the hound once the hunting season is over."
"Don't insult dogs."
How dare he insult man's oldest friend.
The blade sliced through the air again.
Each strike was a considerable burden for me.
Since I didn't know the exact properties of that Protection Aura, I couldn't deactivate the Thunderbolt Blade, which made it even harder.
Hadn't I just seen the hidden weapons carefully selected by the Tang family turn into poisonous liquid and melt away?
If my blade melted here, I’d be truly screwed.
I had to constantly maintain the Thunderbolt Blade to counter his Astral Energy Skill.
—Crackle!
"Lightning energy… Has the Tang family been hiding a trump card? Hmm… this looks more like the martial arts of the Peng family."
"I see, so you've joined hands with the Peng family in Hebei. Things are getting quite interesting."
The old man continued to act all dramatic, exhaling white steam from his mouth.
Yet, seeing how he was still scanning me and my surroundings with wary eyes, I could guess what he was thinking.
He probably assumed I hadn't infiltrated this place alone.
And since I had stepped forward by myself, he was likely trying to gauge my level.
He must be confused.
I was continuing my offensive with a martial art capable of countering an Astral Energy Skill, even though I hadn't yet opened my Middle Dantian.
I could understand why he couldn't pin me down.
The Five Poisons Sect was from the Outer Martial World. No matter how much they had sneaked into Beijing, their base was in the far-off Southern Barbarians.
In Beijing, they must have been confined to a secret location within the Eunuch Bureau for years.
There was no way they could accurately grasp the current state of the Central Plains' martial world, its power dynamics, or the specific types and classifications of martial arts.
It was a classic case of information asymmetry.
He might have heard of the Thunderbolt Blade, but he had never experienced it firsthand. This was quite fortunate.
"Even the members of the Sichuan Tang family, a great Orthodox clan, join hands with the Black Path when cornered. My sect, once called a wicked sect of the Outer Lands, was invited by your Ming Imperial Court to extract Gu poisons using the bodies of Ming citizens and to poison them in turn. In this chaotic world, what use is there in distinguishing friend from foe?"
"Are you trying to persuade me right now?"
"Child, I can tell by looking at you. You are not a disciple of the Tang family. There isn't even a trace of poison cultivation on you."
"Oh?"
The old man laughed as he stepped back.
I moved to follow him but came to a sudden halt.
The back of my head throbbed with an intense, tingling sensation.
It felt as if a red line were suddenly flashing before my eyes.
A sensation of time slowing down washed over me, and I instinctively thrust my blade out, slashing through a point in the air.
—Clang!
"To block that by pure instinct without having opened your Middle Dantian… You are like a beast."
I saw the object that had been deflected by my blade.
A lump of black flesh, slightly smaller than a fist, had been sliced in half and was writhing on the floor.
It was a hideous insect, looking like a cross between a larva and a centipede.
Wait, why is there a Facehugger here?
Please stick to the tone and manner of medieval Murim.
"Do not resist. Seeing as no reinforcements have arrived after all this time, it seems the Tang family intends to use you as a stepping stone and discard you. You have been thrown to me as a sacrificial pawn. If you accept me, I shall put you to great use."
"Accepting you means accepting that?"
I gestured with my chin toward the black poisonous creature writhing on the floor. The mad scientist of the Five Poisons Sect chuckled and nodded.
"It is a Child Gu of the Heavenly Scale Twin Gu. If you accept it, it shall take the place of your Middle Dantian. You shall enjoy eternal glory within our sect."
"Now I see why the Tang family flipped out."
The Middle Dantian is the heart.
I’d have lost my mind too if a Chestburster was planted in my son's heart.
I couldn't even imagine how furious the current Poison King must be.
I nudged the black centipede—which had already flipped over like a dead spider and curled its legs—with my foot and sneered.
"Too bad. I already killed it."
"Hehe, child. It seems you do not realize where you have stepped."
At that moment.
With a feeling as if my Baiahui acupoint were being covered in crimson, my body moved backward on its own.
Around the laughing old man, who was slowly exhaling white steam, I sensed movement from the stacks of straw piled up one by one.
Twitch, twitch. I could see something budding and squirming inside the straw.
The old man laughing in the center of it all was still far too relaxed.
"Oh, shit."
—Sss-sss-sss-shhh.
Black lumps burst out from all those straw stacks like bolts of lightning.
"I've seen this before."
It’s Prometheus.
"Your resistance is futile, and your future is certain. If you kneel and accept it, I shall not even take away your reason."
Immediately after that voice echoed faintly.
Amidst the downpour of Gu insects, I quickly raised my left hand and struck the acupoint between my eyes.
—Crack!
A sound that only I could hear—the sound of internal energy flowing through my acupoints to complete a constellation—echoed within me.
I pressed the Jingming acupoint, compressing the energy inside to force its activation.
From the Touwei acupoint to the Fengchi acupoint, it shot like an arrow across the Foot Yangming Stomach Meridian and the Foot Shaoyang Gallbladder Meridian.
—Zap, crackle!
Passing through Jingming, Canshu, Chengqi, Sibai, and Tongziliao, the energy returned to Touwei, forming a circular Heavenly Bow Diagram.
The name of this constellation was none other than—
—Thump.
The Low Five Steady Judgment Method.
An eye technique personally created by the Leader of the Hao Clan, one of the Five Tyrants of the Unorthodox Path, for the survival of her direct disciples.
With a high-pitched ringing sound, the completed martial art manifested in my eyes.
In that instant, the movements of the poisonous insects falling toward my head gradually slowed down.
—Click.
My grip tightened on the hilt of my blade.
*
Wan Seok-wol, an Outer Gate Elder of the Heavenly Scale Pavilion within the External Hall of the Five Poisons Sect, found the current situation difficult to comprehend.
The White Cloud Poison Mist had been perfectly deployed.
The poisonous mist synthesized from poison pills already filled this space.
The pure white toxic fog was being torn and scattered by violent movements, only to clump together again and pressure the boy.
He seemed to have Anti-Poison Wine in his mouth, but the wine the Tang family would provide to a mere assassin like him couldn't be anything extraordinary.
Anti-Poison Wine capable of completely neutralizing this toxic mist was rare even within the Tang family, reserved only for those of Pavilion Lord rank or higher.
Furthermore, the Sichuan Tang family was a group obsessively paranoid about their sect's items leaking to the outside.
In fact, most martial sects that practiced poison arts were like that.
It was due to the nature of poison arts, which became useless the moment they were neutralized.
Therefore, that assassin had to endure the martial arts of the Five Poisons Sect with his bare body in a closed space, relying on a single low-quality dose of Anti-Poison Wine.
Poison arts were most efficient in places where the air was stagnant, and this place had been his nest for the past seven years.
—Sss… Haaa…
Though he wore a mask, the martial artist was clearly young. Into the mask of that young man, the pure white toxic mist was seeping. Following his breath.
For a martial artist, breathing is the engine of their martial arts.
The internal energy of the Dantian spreads throughout the body through the mechanism of breathing.
One cannot perform martial arts while holding their breath just because the poisonous mist is irritating.
In other words, that man should have been gradually succumbing to the poison.
—Crunch! Clang!
But what was happening?
Lightning flashed through the mist.
A swift blade that was threatening enough even to him, who had formed a Poison Dantian.
The lightning imbued within those strikes tore through the toxic mist and burned his precious Heavenly Scale Gu to death.
He is clearly First-Rate. He should only be at that level.
A martial artist of the Central Plains cannot easily hide their level of cultivation until they have opened their Upper Dantian.
Unless they have mastered a very specific assassin's martial art, a warrior who has reached the Peak Realm by opening their Middle Dantian is bound to stand out at a glance.
It is impossible to hide the waves of internal energy that spread throughout the body with every heartbeat.
Even more so in the middle of performing martial arts.
In other words, that young man was definitely not a Peak Realm warrior.
And the speed of the Heavenly Scale Gu was so fast that it was on the border of the Peak Realm. A First-Rate warrior should not have been able to handle it.
Let alone in these numbers.
Forty… no, now it’s thirty.
The number, which was initially just under fifty, had already dropped to forty.
And now it had decreased to thirty.
The poisonous insects dropping from the beams and rafters, the ones squirming in the darkness where the lamp light couldn't reach, the ones leaping through the air and crawling up his legs.
He was 'seeing' all of them, dodging them, and piercing through them.
No.
Rather, he was predicting the insects before they leapt.
He was seeing them 'before' he had to react.
And after seeing them, he was dealing with them by accurately placing his blade in the trajectory of the insects before they could reach him.
In other words, he hadn't actually surpassed the martial level of a First-Rate warrior.
He was simply responding with a speed of reaction and judgment—a level of discernment that could only be described as seasoned and mature.
As if a master of a higher generation were fighting while trapped in the body of a First-Rate warrior.
"You."
The old man's lips twisted. With anger. Or rather… with a bit more disbelief and shock mixed in.
"What is your name?"
Unable to bear any more losses, he stepped forward himself, pulling back the Gu poisons and standing face-to-face with the youth.
"Peng Hyeon-hwi."
Seeing this, the young man tore off his mask and smirked.
"I am the direct grandson of the Blade Emperor and Bloodhound Asura, Peng Ik-jin, one of the Three Venerables of the World. And my father is the Mad Blood Saber Demon, Peng Wi-cheon."
"A direct descendant of the Peng family… How dare those Tang family bastards…!"
"How dare they?"
The young man walked forward. Despite the threat of the many remaining poisonous insects, he walked straight ahead with an aura like a mountain lord commanding the lands.
"How dare you take such an attitude when you've encountered the name of the Peng family here in Hebei."
He stood at an angle, resting his blade casually on one shoulder, with the swaggering attitude of a third-rate street thug.
"How dare you, even after kidnapping the Black Path warriors under the jurisdiction of the Hebei Dragon Slaying Alliance and insulting them by desecrating their corpses?"
Even within the toxic mist, his eyes glowed blue.
His eyes, filled with an inner light, glared intensely at the old man.
The emotion felt within them was not anger or a threat, but something closer to pure arrogance.
Tiger eyes.
Veins popped on the old man's neck from the sense of insult as he shouted hoarsely.
"No matter how great the prestige of your Peng family is, it means nothing before this old man! I have received divine blood that cannot even be compared to the commoners of your Ming Dynasty. My name is—"
Before he could finish his sentence, crackle.
A bolt of lightning struck toward his throat.
"I'm not interested."
The tiger's fangs fell toward the old man. When the old man's Protection Aura deflected the blade once again—
"I'm here to collect the blood debt for the warriors of the Dragon Slaying Alliance."
The tiger eyes had already closed the distance, glaring at him from right in front of his nose.