The Knot
Cheon Family Manor operated Cheonmulhoe, the finest textile business not only in Yeongju City but in all the surrounding region.
I already knew they were tied to the Yeoncheon Sect, but I had not expected them to step forward so boldly, so openly.
So I let my eyes roll lazily over the man desperately searching for some way to save his own skin and spoke at last.
"That's an interesting story."
The man immediately hurried on.
"After the elders we sent to negotiate lost their lives, the Yeoncheon Sect staked the fate of the entire sect on moving Cheon Family Manor. As a result, they succeeded in inviting three of Cheon Family Manor's immortals, all of whom had reached the Foundation Establishment realm."
For an ordinary martial sect to secure three Foundation Establishment cultivators for battle was no small feat. As the world understood it, that could only mean one thing: there truly had to be some hidden connection between the Yeoncheon Sect and Cheon Family Manor.
But for me, who had already walked the path of Heaven Dao Foundation Establishment and possessed power rivaling the Golden Core realm, those three foundation cultivators felt far from threatening.
"It seems the Yeoncheon Sect went to quite some trouble. It won't amount to much, though."
Hearing that, the man rushed to continue, clinging to life with frantic desperation.
"No, honored expert! Those immortals are all blood relatives of Cheon Family Manor! If you consider the manor head of Cheon Family Manor, who is said to be a Golden Core immortal, then no matter how remarkable your cultivation may be, making Cheon Family Manor your enemy is far too reckless. Let me explain to the Yeoncheon Sect how terrifyingly powerful you are. There'd be no benefit in fighting each other anyway, would there?"
Thanks to him, I gained a rather useful piece of information: the manor head of Cheon Family Manor was a Golden Core cultivator. With that in hand, I decided to give the man a chance.
"To persuade the Yeoncheon Sect, you'd have to be rather important there yourself, wouldn't you? What position do you hold in the sect?"
In truth, I had already resolved to erase everything connected to the Yeoncheon Sect. If he blurted out some grand-sounding title just to dodge immediate punishment, it would only hasten his death.
Yet the man gave an unexpectedly amusing answer.
"Honored expert! I'm nothing more than a wandering lowlife who sells his life for a few coins! But even someone as insignificant as I am can still relay the full terror of your power to the Yeoncheon Sect. Aren't you a truly fearsome master who could take someone's life merely by looking at them?"
The gap in our strength was so vast that he had apparently not even seen me flick away the drop of liquor clinging to my cup.
I let out a faint snort and spoke again.
"Do you have a family too?"
Realizing something, he swallowed hard and answered at once.
"Yes! Honored expert! My wife died of illness, and I have two children cared for by my mother. The older one is a daughter, and the younger is a son."
"Those family members would be very sad if you died, wouldn't they?"
At my words, he seemed to freeze again, fear seizing him so completely that he could not speak. But before long, I continued.
"If you roam the jianghu with skills as poor as yours, you'll only end up making those family members miserable. Leave the sword at your waist here and go home. Return to your family and live as a farmer, tilling the land, or sell goods in the marketplace if you prefer. Either way, don't look twice at the martial world."
In truth, the arrogant things he had shouted at me alone were enough reason to kill him.
But I chose not to. His honesty had won him the final chance I had given him.
"Thank you, honored expert! Thank you so much!!"
At last certain he would live, the man bowed over and over with tear-bright eyes before hurrying away, leaving behind an empty tavern, an empty wine cup, and the corpse of the man who had died with a hole drilled through his brow.
But I did not leave the tavern. Instead, I turned my gaze toward Yeoncheon Sect and began to spread the sense unique to cultivators known as divine sense.
From what I had observed since morning, no one had come or gone from Yeoncheon Sect, so I intended to kill everyone inside without missing a single one.
And so the net-like divine sense, like a heaven-spun snare, spread across the sect and captured every living soul within it.
The children had apparently been sent away in advance, because there were only seventy-two adults left. Among them were two Qi Refining cultivators and one Foundation Establishment cultivator.
Seeing two Qi Refining cultivators mixed in rather than three Foundation Establishment cultivators, I realized the man I had just spared had not been trying to deceive me after all. It seemed the rumors had simply been exaggerated from the start, inflated by the sect itself to flaunt its power.
With a derisive laugh, I moved at once toward them.
Then, with no one to hinder me, I reached the front gate of Yeoncheon Sect, where a heavy silence had already settled, and drew my sword.
I was not going to storm inside and kill them one by one. I was going to erase Yeoncheon Sect whole, manor and all.
Bzzzzzt—
As I poured in a vast surge of inner power, as though shoving a Golden Core whole into the blade, the sword in my hand began to tremble and blur with afterimages.
Then the very space around it started to distort. That was the moment the first form of the Heavenly Demon Heaven-Shattering Sword, honed over the last half year, revealed itself to the world.
But perhaps sensing the movement of that frightening power, a cultivator suddenly burst out from inside with a shout.
"Stop!!"
He was an old man with long white beard and hair, so utterly snow-white that he looked every bit the immortal sage.
Yet despite his warning, I only fed still more power into the blade. I intended to wipe out the entire manor, and nothing short of that would satisfy me.
Sensing the terrifying force gathering there, the old man's face went pale, and he hurriedly spoke again.
"Our family will withdraw from this dispute here and now. No, if you wish it, we will even deal with Yeoncheon Sect ourselves. So please, stop that dreadful attack. If that strike causes the spirit stone mine beneath this city to collapse, countless people who make Yeongju City their home will lose their lives."
At his words, I let my divine sense spread downward through the web around me. Sure enough, I could feel an enormous space deep beneath the earth. So that was why Cheonmulhoe, the textile business of Yeongju City, was so famous. It must all have been built on the spirit stones mined there.
Of course, I was confident I could survive even if the entire city came crashing down around me.
But I had no desire to kill innocent people living in Yeongju City under the banner of revenge. Slaughtering common folk for one’s own purposes was the work of trash from the demonic sects. It was not the way of Heavenly Demon, lord of the demonic path.
In the end, I dispersed the immense force writhing around the space and spoke.
"After you kill everyone in Yeoncheon Sect, have the sect master kneel before me with one eye and his tongue cut out. I will wait half an hour."
The underlings of Yeoncheon Sect did not matter to me. The sect master, however, had to die by my own hand. I had promised to cut off his head and offer it before my father's memorial tablet.
Of course, it would have been most satisfying to kill them all myself, but having them butchered by the very cultivators of Cheon Family Manor they trusted so blindly was not a bad ending either.
It would be as though they had deliberately chosen to strike on the day of my elder brother's wedding, only to be dragged into even greater despair themselves.
"Thank you! We will keep our promise!"
After the old man finished speaking and returned inside Yeoncheon Sect, there was a brief uproar, and then a series of shrill screams began ringing out one after another.
"Aaaagh!!"
"Immortal, why are you doing this to us at Yeoncheon Sect?! Ghhk!!"
The cultivators' cruel methods were relentless. The screams truly did not stop.
And before long, after the time it took to drink a cup of tea, the old man reappeared outside the sect drenched in blood from head to toe.
Behind him, the middle-aged man who seemed to be the Yeoncheon Sect master was being dragged out by two young cultivators, missing one eye and one arm. It was the miserable end of a man who had run wild under the shelter of a cultivation family.
"I will curse you even in death! Is this really the safety and protection you promised? The gods of heaven and earth will never leave you unpunished for abandoning your oath!"
I had clearly told them to cut out his tongue, but either he had failed to understand me properly or the old man had decided I still had more to say to him, because his tongue looked perfectly intact.
"A cultivator's promise to a commoner. Do you think it would carry even the weight of a sheet of paper? Rather, with the lives of dozens of you, we saved the thousands who live in Yeongju City. That is what righteous conduct looks like."
At the old man's words, the Yeoncheon Sect master burst out again in a frenzy.
"Old man Tian! Did you truly act to save thousands of lives? Not because of your own greed?"
This time, I also agreed with the sect master's words. The cultivators of Cheon Family Manor likely needed the cultivation resources earned by operating in Yeongju City more than the lives of a few thousand commoners.
But instead of siding with the words of the man who was my family's enemy, I moved my sword.
Slash!
With a clean cutting sound, one ear fell away. Only then did the Yeoncheon Sect master grimace deeply and look at me.
"If you're not ready to listen yet, then I suppose you don't need the rest of your ears either. I'll cut those off too."
Grinding his teeth, he spat out, "Fine! Then kill me already! You never intended to let me live anyway, did you?"
The wheel of his karmic retribution had begun to turn, and now it was grinding his life to pieces.
Even so, despite the utterly hollow collapse of the sect I had hated so much, and despite the miserable state of the sect master himself, I felt no joy at all.
Not because I had failed to carry out every part of my revenge with my own hands, but because none of it would bring the dead back.
So I looked at him quietly and continued.
"You said it was because of the Baekri family that our Neung family was attacked, didn't you? Then why did you hate the Baekri family so much? Enough to chase down those who tried to flee elsewhere out of fear and kill them?"
The beginning of all this—I still had not heard it properly. I had originally meant to kill him without so much as exchanging words, but since his tongue was still attached, there was no harm in hearing a few words before ending him.
And then from his mouth came a shocking answer.
"They were people who possessed treasures beyond their station! If the Baekri family had simply handed over the secret method and accepted our compensation from the start, none of this would have happened!"
The secret method possessed by the Baekri family. The moment I heard those words, only one thing came to mind.
Great Ultimate Yang Brightness Pill.
As though it were the seed of every conflict, that pill was being mentioned once again. It was as if it carried some irresistible magic for greedy men, something they could never simply walk past.
After a moment of silence on my part, the Yeoncheon Sect master's voice went on.
"You must have heard that your father knelt before me and begged to spare the lives of his household! He looked so pitiful that I couldn't help but want to save at least someone! Thanks to me, you still have one family member left. Isn't that a truly generous act?"
It seemed the man wanted to be killed as quickly as possible in order to end the torment radiating from his severed body.
It also seemed that everything he had done earlier, when he had raised his voice while talking about Baekri, had been only to provoke my anger. And despite his ties to the cultivation family Cheon Family Manor, he apparently did not know that cultivators could even strip the soul from a dead man.
"Since you wish for death so badly, I'll grant it. But that doesn't mean everything ends here. I intend to drag your soul from your corpse and make you suffer for all eternity. Yes, that will do. For now, I'll seal you inside one of the training scarecrows used by the children of the Neung family. There, trapped in that cramped darkness and unable to move a muscle, you'll watch for hundreds of years as the children of the Neung family grow stronger day by day."
The moment he heard me, the man who had been shouting for me to kill him at once shut his mouth. Then, little by little, profound fear began swallowing the frozen look on his face.
At last, after watching that wretched end for a moment longer, my hand moved.
Swish!
With one stroke I severed my enemy's head. Then, just as I had said, I retrieved his soul as well. The old Foundation Establishment cultivator, who had been keeping silent until now, looked at me and asked,
"Then there is no further problem between our family and yours, correct?"
With a surprisingly calm expression, I picked up the severed head rolling along the floor and tucked it into my waist pouch before answering.
"There is still one debt left unsettled."
My divine sense still spread like a net around the area. According to what it showed me, one survivor remained in Yeoncheon Sect.