Myeonggyeol
“Myeonggyeol! Can you feel it?”
To that, the wooden puppet Seop Myeong-gyeol, who had been chattering away so eagerly about dual cultivation, blurted out something completely off the mark.
“Yes. So even you are stirred by hearing talk of dual cultivation after such a long time, aren’t you? I felt it as well. For some reason, my body feels strangely heated.”
“That’s not it. A formidable foe is coming.”
“Another one is on the way? How odd. I don’t feel a thing.”
She had once been a powerhouse at the Nascent Soul stage, but she had been severed from her true body for so long, and now she was trapped in a wooden puppet with no more than Qi Refining level power. Perhaps for that reason, Seop Myeong-gyeol still had no real sense of the enemy’s presence.
“A late-stage Golden Core cultivator at minimum, perhaps even a Nascent Soul cultivator! I cannot stand by and watch the Neung family’s refuge be dyed red with blood again. We will cut off his attack before he reaches this place!”
As I spoke, I took out the flying treasure, the wooden horse, and Seop Myeong-gyeol hurriedly climbed aboard it.
Unlike her body, which had obediently followed my command without a second thought, she protested in a grave tone.
“Neung So! No matter how much Cheondo Chukgi may grant you power rivaling the Golden Core realm, with your current strength you cannot win against a Nascent Soul cultivator, let alone a late-stage Golden Core cultivator! Regardless of your cultivation level, the immortal art you’ve learned is only at the Qi Refining level. For now, why don’t you flee and plan for the future?”
Of course, I could not accept such words. If I abandoned this place, then the same thing that had happened before would repeat itself all over again.
So I climbed onto the wooden horse she was riding and continued.
“Myeonggyeol! If you cannot cut down fear, you cannot move forward. Just because the other side is stronger than you, just because they stand above you, if you only lower your head and retreat, then in the end all that waits for you is the edge of a cliff with nowhere left to stand. If there is something you truly wish to protect, then even if you are broken, you must still press onward.”
The resolve of the Heavenly Demon Ak Bi, shattered to pieces after falling victim to Jin Myeong’s soul-binding art. That resolve, the one that had once made my past self into a great ruler, had now returned to me.
And perhaps she sensed the will contained in that resolve of mine, for Seop Myeong-gyeol, who had been urging me to flee, fell silent.
Thus, the two of us raced forward on the wooden horse to meet the enemy, who was already releasing a terrifying aura.
And perhaps because he sensed our approach as well, our opponent suddenly increased his speed.
Thanks to that, we were able to face him just as we reached the middle of the mountain, barely beyond the village.
But the moment we saw him, we were overwhelmed by his immortal art.
Far off in the distance, the giant red banner he had unleashed came to a halt in midair and began spinning. Then, as though the gates of hell had been thrown open, all manner of ghostly spirits burst from that black domain and rushed toward us.
The tide of malignant spirits charging at us, filling every visible inch of space, was the violence of sheer numbers itself—so overwhelming it felt as though we were facing an army of hundreds of thousands.
And yet, when I looked upon that crushing force, I smiled instead.
“I was just about to test a newly learned sword art anyway.”
Then I drew my sword at once and began pouring in my true energy, and the blade immediately responded with a violent cry.
Buzzzzzzz—
Even around the sword, which trembled furiously, a faint distortion of space began to form.
But instead of using it immediately, I calmly proceeded to the next step. This time, following my true energy, I began to infuse spiritual energy as well.
The crimson sword force, now carrying destructive spiritual energy, swelled larger and larger until it surpassed the size of my own body—and yet I still did not stop feeding it more.
Then, at last, I swung the colossal sword force, now more than twice my size, toward the wave of ghostly spirits that had drawn up to within arm’s reach.
Swish—!
As though a brush of immense sword light had painted the blue sky across the faded yellow heavens, space itself was cleanly severed.
Of course, everything touched by that dark, drawn line was cut apart along with it.
But my attack did not end there.
“Shatter!”
Heavenly Demon Heaven-Shattering Sword, First Style! Heavenly Demon Annihilation Flash!
The Heaven-Shattering Sword Technique left behind by some nameless warrior of this world.
It was certainly a martial art optimized for facing cultivators, but that did not mean the depth of the Heavenly Demon Three Swords I had mastered was any lesser than it.
So I fused those two arts together and created the peerless technique known as the Heavenly Demon Heaven-Shattering Sword. That was the very reason that, although the wooden puppets had not taken long to create when I first made them, I had only managed to produce three of them even now, days after starting this work.
I was no longer simply carving wood however I pleased; I was sculpting it while training my swordsmanship.
In truth, among the six forms I had envisioned, only this first style had been completed so far. And yet even this one style was enough to reveal the terrifying power of the Heavenly Demon Heaven-Shattering Sword.
The instant I cried, “Shatter,” the enormous tear in space that had formed in midair sent out branches like spiderwebs in all directions. Then the already faintly cracked expanse of the air broke apart entirely.
Whoosh!
As the vast fissure in space, which had shattered the tide of ghostly spirits in one blow, spewed out tremendous spiritual energy, the pressure in the surrounding area surged at once, and the plants that could not withstand it withered away.
Yet among them, a few seemed to wither only for a moment before becoming even more vibrant than before and reviving. Ordinary plants had adapted to the spiritual energy and transformed into spirit herbs infused with it.
Unfortunately, I could not properly observe that astonishing change.
“It looks like early Golden Core stage. Quite an impressive technique.”
At last, the opponent who had fully revealed himself was speaking to me.
But the moment I faced him, my gaze ended up turning back toward the wooden puppet instead.
“Myeonggyeol!”
Then the ghostly spirit inhabiting the wooden puppet, Seop Myeong-gyeol, answered in a trembling voice.
“That’s right... That is my true body.”
They said a Nascent Soul cultivator’s lifespan could reach several thousand years, and it was true—Seop Myeong-gyeol’s true body was still alive. Exactly as I had seen her in my spiritual world.
“It would be troublesome to fight your true body, so I’ll put her in the storage pouch.”
But just as I said that and reached toward the storage pouch, she cried out.
“I’m fighting too! I may not yet have cultivated power beyond my true body’s strength, but I still remember what you said. Didn’t you say that if you can’t cut down fear, you can’t move forward?”
In the meantime, a pale haze blocked the giant fissure in space that had formed in midair, and along with the enormous red banner still floating there, the remaining ghostly spirits began flying toward us all at once.
Seeing that, I folded my arms and continued speaking while looking at Seop Myeong-gyeol’s true body, which was gazing down at us with an arrogant expression.
“Then you stop that banner and those spirits. I’ll take care of your true body!”
The instant Myeong-gyeol heard my words, she charged straight toward the remaining ghostly spirits.
At that moment, I too was about to unleash the strongest martial art available to me once again: the Heavenly Demon Heaven-Shattering Sword.
But it seemed my opponent had found the flaw in my technique from that earlier strike.
“Indeed, if it lands properly, it’s a technique with enough power to seriously wound even me. And yet you would dare use a spell that requires such a long preparation period on me again? You are rather arrogant!”
As she said, the Heavenly Demon Heaven-Shattering Sword did require a little time to unleash. First I had to pour spiritual energy in to the limit and form the massive sword force.
But that did not mean I was completely defenseless in the meantime.
So while she took out another magical artifact—a mirror—I finished preparing to strike back at any moment.
But the mirror artifact she hurled at me grew to a size slightly larger than a human, then simply stopped in midair.
For a moment it flashed with light, and before I knew it, there were not hundreds but thousands of mirrors. The sky that had been filled with ghostly spirits was now filled with countless mirrors instead.
And the moment all those mirrors simultaneously reflected me, astonishingly, the me reflected in them stepped out of the glass exactly as I appeared there. I was confronted by as many enemies as there were mirrors, all of them drawing swords and emerging to oppose me.
This kind of attack was something I had not even imagined, and I was taken aback. But immortal arts had always been called a hundred arts of cultivation, branching in countless directions, and so I gritted my teeth and prepared for a bitter battle against them.
The problem was that the cultivation of the enemies—nearly several thousand of them—did not feel at all lower than mine.
No matter how important superior artifacts and immortal arts were in a battle between cultivators, it was almost impossible to understand how such an overwhelming gap in power had appeared.
Yet the beings who had stepped out of the mirrors seemed to have no room for complicated thoughts like mine. They immediately manifested thick sword force and attempted to unleash the Heavenly Demon Heaven-Shattering Sword just as I had done a moment earlier.
So I bit down hard on my lower lip and thrust all the power I had gathered forward.
Once again, the vast sword force swept across the air and split it apart.
But the beings who had come out of the mirrors did not yield. They unleashed the very same power in return.
Swish! Swish! Riiiip!
Fortunately, their cultivation was not as high as it felt, and the power each of them could produce fell far short of my own—hardly more than a tenth of my strike, if that. But with so many attacks, numbering in the thousands, the result was a force greater than what I had sent out, hurtling back toward me.
As a result, the fissure in space that had already been created by my attack stretched even longer toward my side.
Of course, I had quickly widened the distance to deal with their attacks, but even so I could not block all the aftershocks of the Heavenly Demon Annihilation Flash, which caused space itself to explode.
Crack!
Not only did the protective barrier around me shatter in an instant, but spiderweb-like wounds spread across my entire body.
Fortunately, I had desperately wrapped my body in spiritual energy, which kept me from being blown to pieces—but the injury was by no means small.
And yet the enemies that had burst from the mirrors had only lost the fraction caught in my attack’s range; more than half of them still remained.
When I considered that I had not even crossed blades with a Nascent Soul cultivator yet, the disparity in strength was absurd.
But I was not about to give up just because my opponent was stronger. So I clenched my teeth and hurled myself at them. If wide-area attacks were unfavorable to me, then I would meet them instead with the depth of the martial arts I possessed.
True to form, those copied from my appearance rushed toward me head-on as well, and at that moment a sinister sound rang out.
Crack!
“Neung So... I’m sorry...”
Seop Myeong-gyeol had summoned the courage to say she would not lose to her true body, but in the end she was overcome by the ghostly spirits before she could surpass the limits of the wooden puppet containing her.
By then, both of her arms and legs had been severed, leaving only a wooden stump of a torso behind.
At the tragic sight of her, with whom I had come to share a fair amount of attachment, my voice rose on its own.
“I promise you this! I will wipe out the Tian Family without leaving so much as a single blade of grass behind!”
At the death of the one who had spent so much time by my side, this was all I could say.
Of course, it did not seem the opponent cared much for my words...
Crack!
A ghostly spirit shaped like a three-tailed tiger shattered the wooden puppet’s torso as if to mock me. I fixed the hideous creature, its mouth split all the way up to its ears in a grinning leer, firmly in my mind.
And as rage flared at that sight, I slashed viciously through the enemies bursting from the mirrors that were charging at me—and then I began to sense something strange.
Unlike the fierce momentum with which they had rushed me, they could not even properly respond to my attacks. They were swept away as though they were fallen leaves carried off by an autumn wind.
In an instant I had swept away several dozen foes, and I turned to look at the Nascent Soul cultivator, who had become strangely silent.
To my astonishment, the woman who met my eyes hurriedly produced a fan-shaped artifact and hid her face with it.
Then she said something entirely unexpected.
“Your luck today is extremely good. But next time, it will never be the same as today.”
She looked as though she were trying to flee a battle she had already won.
As I questioned such nonsensical behavior, one possibility suddenly crossed my mind.
And so I shouted at her without hesitation.
“Myeonggyeol!”