Chapter 68. Heavenly Demon (3)
Chapter 68. Heavenly Demon (3)
3
"I'm sorry."
The Pharmacist spoke.
"In his current state, I can't treat him."
She had been examining the Murim Alliance Master. Throughout the examination, the Pharmacist's expression was subdued. She was like a doctor who already knew the patient was beyond hope, yet examined him only to deliver the words "beyond hope."
"......."
The Heavenly Demon silently looked down at the Murim Alliance Master. Perhaps she had never expected treatment in the first place. But with an expressionless face, the Heavenly Demon spoke.
"Get up."
"I'm sorry."
"I am not here to listen to your apologies. Get up, Murim Alliance Master Bu Wol-seon."
A dark cave.
The Heavenly Demon's breathing quieted.
From her lips, a poisonous fragrance seemed to flow.
"Did you not make a pact with me? Did you not boast that you would challenge the Demonic Dominion and raise the banner of the orthodox murim? Did you not strive to unite the Nine Great Sects and One Gang and the Five Great Clans for a decisive battle? A man like you cannot die in a sickbed. That cannot be allowed."
"I'm sorry."
"Get up."
The scent of poison thickened slightly.
"Get up and take hold of a weapon. You need not even grip that tasteless axe of yours. Pick up a wooden sword. A switch, a whip, a wooden stick—anything will do. Grip it. Grip it and stand against me in battle."
"I'm sorry."
"I told you to get up."
"Demon."
The Murim Alliance Master drew breath.
He had aged further in a single night.
"I'm sorry that I was weaker than you."
"......."
"I tried to hold on even one more day, but it's too hard now. You must have felt it too. I was already drawing on my innate true qi. My internal energy is spent. My true qi is worn away. You might endure another year, but... this is as far as I go."
Silence.
"I was weaker than you."
The old man murmured as he lay there.
"Kill me."
"......."
The Heavenly Demon's face twisted.
"I do not wish to become like the Shaolin Abbot. Kill me before my body rots and festers. If I become a jiangshi, seeing what is before my eyes is not seeing, and living is not living. So......."
"So you ask me to kill you as you lie in bed?"
The poisonous fragrance reached its peak.
"Is that what you are saying now?"
The Heavenly Demon's body was small. From that small body, black fire bloomed. Her internal energy took form, and it burned.
Killing intent.
As her internal energy blazed, it gave off the smell of soot. It was the smell of the life this woman had lived, the smell of a life she had endured. The Heavenly Demon's scent was acrid, like weeds crushed and ground to pulp.
"Is this the conclusion of the great battle you promised? This?"
"......."
"Better to have perished together from the start. What glory have you endured for all this time? Better to have gathered every child of my cult and the orthodox sects and ordered them all to kill themselves. What radiance have you clung to so stubbornly until now?"
The Murim Alliance Master could not answer. The tears the old man had shed left tracks that hardened on his cheeks.
"I......."
"Namgung Un. From your days as a young noble, you monopolized the praise and envy of martial artists throughout the jianghu for being born with the Heaven-Martial Body (天武之體). You reached the peak realm at the age of twenty. Before you even turned thirty, you became the head of the Namgung Clan. When the Demonic Dominion rose to power, you were elevated to Alliance Master. The essence of every orthodox sect rests upon you, and the grudges of every righteous faction are entwined around you. And yet, knowing all this, you would meekly offer your neck to my demonic hand?"
"......."
"Very well. I will kill you."
The Heavenly Demon rose to her feet.
"But you will not die gently."
She turned and walked somewhere. Even after the woman vanished, the burnt smell of soot lingered. It was suffocating. The Pharmacist and the Medicine King, who had no mastery of Aura, wore particularly pained expressions.
A moment later, the Heavenly Demon returned.
In her hand was an axe.
"Old relic of the Namgung Clan. This is the Jade Axe you treasured so dearly. Surely you have not already forgotten it."
"So Baek-hyang......."
"Say it."
The Heavenly Demon raised the axe high.
"Martial arts have forgotten chivalry, and chivalry has lost martial arts."
"......."
"Say those words. Say them, and I will kill you as you wish."
Martial arts had forgotten chivalry.
Chivalry had lost martial arts.
It meant the end of the orthodox murim.
The master of the Demonic Cult was telling the Murim Alliance Leader himself to acknowledge the destruction of the orthodox faction. Only if he acknowledged it would she take his life. And she would sever his neck with his own beloved weapon.
"Say it."
"......."
"Hurry up and say it!"
The old man's lips twitched. His mouth opened, his teeth parted. But what lay beyond could not be seen. What came next would not come. The old man seemed to have lost his tongue. His mouth opened several times, and each time his tongue lost its way.
"I can't."
The old man expelled a breath.
"I can't... I cannot say it......."
Fresh tears flowed over the hardened tracks. Upon the wrinkles, the tears layered like strata.
The tears piled layer upon layer, until they were hard to distinguish from the old man's aged skin. It seemed as though the old man's flesh had been made of his tears from the beginning, and as though the tears flowed not from his eyes but from his flesh.
"I cannot say it......."
"......."
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Baek-hyang......."
The Heavenly Demon swung the axe.
The axe blade did not cut the Murim Alliance Master's neck.
It merely struck the bare ground.
Right beside the Murim Alliance Master's face. There, the axe struck. The hard bedrock of the cave floor split as easily as tofu. How much internal energy the Heavenly Demon—who had struggled even to lift a switch—had expended to cleave that rock, I could scarcely imagine.
"You said that if you became a jiangshi, living would not be living."
The Heavenly Demon murmured.
"It matters not. Right now, your dying is not dying. What difference is there between a life that is not life and a death that is not death? I cannot tell the difference. It is meaningless. Meaningless......."
She turned her back.
"The whole world has become emptiness."
The next day.
The Murim Alliance Master Namgung Un died at dawn.
It was death by illness.
4
The tenth day since falling into the Apocalypse.
The day this world would be destroyed had arrived.
"...We obtained a valuable sample."
The Pharmacist spoke.
"There's a limit to analyzing the virus using only infected people who turned into zombies two or three years ago. Thanks to this sample, we observed the infection's progression in real time. It's a major breakthrough."
Before the Pharmacist lay the Murim Alliance Master.
A corpse that did not so much as twitch.
The old man's body was bound tightly with iron chains.
"It seems that death doesn't lead immediately to becoming a zombie... there's a slight time lag before awakening. I suspect it takes time for the infectious agent to spread fully through the brain."
"I've organized the research findings."
The Medicine King handed over a sheaf of documents.
He clicked his tongue.
"She may have skill in making medicine, but she has no talent for explaining it to others. None at all. Tch, this is why people who live off their own brilliance are......."
"I gave the research everything I had."
Ignoring the criticism directed at her, the Pharmacist spoke.
"But developing a cure was impossible after all."
"Was there simply not enough time?"
"Yes. At least ninety days. If possible, ideally a full hundred and twenty......."
Clank!
-Grooo.
The iron chains clashed with a grating noise. We all turned our heads at once. The Murim Alliance Master's corpse was trembling violently.
-Grooo... uuh, uwo......!
For a while, we silently stared at the Murim Alliance Master.
No—at what had been the Murim Alliance Master.
It thrashed about, jaws gaping.
"......."
It was then that the Heavenly Demon walked over.
Step.
The woman approached with quiet footsteps. A woman in black. With black hair, black martial robes, and black eyes, the Heavenly Demon held a black sword. The woman's sword was darker than her own shadow.
"...How pitiful."
The Heavenly Demon looked down at the Murim Alliance Master's corpse.
"Decades of life, futile and futile again."
We instinctively drew back from the Heavenly Demon.
Her venomous aura was incomparably more intense than yesterday.
Her internal energy blazed up and wrapped around her entire body.
"In the end, strip away one layer and this is what a person is. What difference from a beast? Eat, and eat, and eat until the flesh can move no more, and then vanish. Martial arts have forgotten chivalry, and chivalry has lost martial arts."
The Heavenly Demon extended her left hand.
"Eat."
The zombie opened its mouth and bit down on her hand. Crunch! Blood sprayed. Flesh tore and bone shattered. The Heavenly Demon watched with indifferent eyes as the Murim Alliance Master gnawed on the Heavenly Demon's own left hand like a dog.
"H-hey."
Viper, stunned, took a step forward.
"Look here. Wh-what are you doing? What if you end up becoming a jiangshi too......!"
"Don't go near her."
I grabbed Viper's shoulder and stopped him.
"Huh?"
"It's already over."
"Over? What is......."
The sound of flesh bursting rang out. Splat! At the gruesome sound, every member of our party flinched.
When I slowly turned my gaze, there stood the Heavenly Demon, her left hand mangled and shredded.
And there lay the Murim Alliance Master, his head gone.
The Heavenly Demon had detonated her internal energy inside the Murim Alliance Master's mouth, blowing his head apart.
"Heh."
While all of us were at a loss for words.
"Heh-heh, haha... uhahaha."
The Heavenly Demon laughed.
"Uhahahaha! Ha! Ha, ahahahaha!"
It was, in the truest sense, mad laughter.
Above the cave ceiling, a blizzard still raged. But devoured by the Heavenly Demon's laughter, the sound of the snow was reduced to mere background noise. The laughter filled the cave, rang through the sky, and gnawed at the world.
-Zombie, be careful.
The guardian spirit spoke in a low voice.
-She's undergoing qi deviation.
At that moment.
The Heavenly Demon turned her head and stared quietly in our direction. Softly, the woman smiled a bewitching smile. From the gap between her parted lips, a strange voice flowed out.
"Oh-ho."
Goosebumps rose on the back of my neck.
"Are you the righteous warriors who came to assassinate me?"
Her eyes were no longer seeing us.
"Very well. Come at me. Let us exchange blades."
"Everyone run!"
The moment I shouted, the Heavenly Demon swung her sword. Shaaak! A fountain of blood sprayed. It was the Medicine King's blood. The Medicine King's throat was cut precisely, and without even a scream, his knees buckled.
Instant death.
Seeing his comrade die right before his eyes, Viper belatedly drew his sword.
"You fucking......!"
I couldn't read the sword path with my eyes. No—I couldn't even see the movement. It was simply that [the Heavenly Demon swung her sword] and at exactly the same instant [the Medicine King's throat was cut]. There was not even a hair's breadth of a gap.
-She's insane.
The guardian spirit groaned.
-She's surpassed the realm of Demonic Transcendence. It's probably because she poured out everything—not just her internal energy but even her true qi... but right now, she's temporarily entered the Life-and-Death Realm. Even if I came back alive at my prime, I'd lose four out of ten bouts against her.
That was the Heavenly Demon.
This was what she had been like before the jiangshi bite weakened her.
The foremost martial artist under heaven who had reigned over this world.
"How absurd."
The Heavenly Demon hummed.
"Shaolin Abbot. Do you think such tricks can stop me? You horse-faced Taoist of Wudang. Do you dare imagine you can bear the karma of my cult?"
The Heavenly Demon approached us, one step at a time.
"Sorrow overflows across the world and Mount Song is submerged. Resentment blazes between heaven and earth and Mount Wudang burns. The Demonic Cult is the heaven of the murim, and I am the heaven of the Demonic Cult. Do you have the right to speak of a heaven beyond heaven?"
"Damn it!"
Viper raised his sword and charged.
"Death King! Take the Pharmacist and run!"
I was already doing exactly that.
I scooped up the Pharmacist and ran. Escape was surely impossible, but I ran anyway. To struggle until the very end. To refuse to accept this ending and this death as inevitable.
"You are not enough! You lackeys of the righteous sects!"
From behind, the Heavenly Demon's laughter pursued us.
"Namgung Un!"
Once, twice, three times.
There was the sound of blade clashing against blade.
"Where is Namgung Un!"
And then the sound of blades came no more.
Viper had endured three exchanges before dying.
"Bring me the Retired Clan Head of the Namgung Clan! Have the Murim Alliance Master attend me! No matter how dense the forests of the murim or how vast the sky, in all of heaven and earth there is but one talent who can receive my sword! Four Demon Lords! Drag Namgung Un before me at once!"
The laughter was relentless.
Even as I fled one step, the laughter pursued ten. It was no contest. When the laughter finally pressed right against my back, the Pharmacist spoke from my arms.
"Death King."
The Pharmacist looked up at me.
"I still believe in you."
And then.
Something cut through both of us.
It pierced through.
"......."
The sky tilted. The ground tilted. I lost my legs—everything below the waist—and collapsed into the snow with only my upper body left.
Yes.
It was a white snowfield.
We had escaped the cave.
"......."
A short distance away, the Pharmacist lay fallen. The snowfield where she had fallen was especially red. Like shaved ice drizzled with strawberry syrup, I thought with a dazed mind.
"Ahaha. Heh-heh, hahaha!"
Snow was falling.
"Uhahahahaha! Ha, ahahaha......."
While the snow fell, sky and earth could not be distinguished. A dark whiteness. Only a chill, pale shadow was visible.
Someone was walking away across the snowfield, leaving footprints.
Where the footprints fell, sky and earth seemed to separate, if only barely. But the blizzard raged without pause, and even the last remaining footprints were buried.
Without a sound.
Without a trace.
Without any scent at all.
So that the world that had scorched people, and the people scorched by the world, and the pitch-black soot of it all would be buried and buried until only the white snowfield remained. So that only the colorless, odorless, soundless blizzard would fall forever.
The world was destroyed.
[You have died.]
But that was all.
To me, destruction did not mean the end.
[Regressing 24 hours into the past.]
Now.
Let us save your world.