The Hidden Mechanism
Five days had passed since I entered the prison.
And yet I still hadn’t found a single clue related to the sword.
“It really is hidden in here?”
The prison was exactly that: a prison. A cramped, sealed-off place with nowhere to hide and nowhere to keep anything concealed. On the surface, it seemed like a place where no secret could possibly survive.
And yet the sword was definitely here.
That wasn’t just a hunch. Someone had actually obtained that sword here once. If that was possible, then it was possible for me too.
The real question was why that first-rate martial artist had been the one to get it.
Was it really a coincidence?
“...No chance it was a coincidence.”
I sat cross-legged in the middle of the prison and steadied my breathing before slowly extending my senses outward.
I closed my eyes. Humans usually rely on their eyes to see the world.
That was why they missed so much. Most people never even noticed what they passed over.
“Hoo.”
So from here on out, I read the world not with my eyes, but with all five senses.
Once I shut out my sight and focused on the other senses, other things began to surface.
The stale, sour stench soaked into the prison, the faint iron tang hidden beneath it, shallow breathing, muttering, the occasional groan of pain. And then...
—Aaaagh!
A scream.
Ordinarily, the Martial Alliance did not torture people. That meant those cries were probably the screams of people losing their minds in the prison. At that moment, I remembered what the guard who had led me here had said before I entered.
“There’ve been some strange rumors going around lately. People say they heard scraping sounds on the wall and hair-raising screams. Supposedly, everyone who heard those screams went insane.”
When he said that, the corner of his mouth had lifted just slightly, as if to say I’d be no different.
And then another five days passed.
“Damn it. Just what the hell is supposed to be here?”
I lay flat on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, and spat out a curse.
I was certain I had missed something. So I’d blocked out my sight and searched for anything unusual in the surroundings, but instead of finding a clue, I was only wasting time.
“Should I just give up on the sword and head to the next destination?”
My thoughts grew heavier and heavier. Once I started sinking into them, drowsiness crept in as well.
“This is annoying. Maybe I should just sleep a little?”
I hadn’t been sleeping properly for days because I’d been searching.
I could feel my eyes closing. No one would blame me for taking a brief rest. Maybe I had been too impatient, trying to force everything to be resolved too quickly.
Then, at that very moment.
“How could senior brother... how could you again! How could you give up on everything so easily and come back like this? I’m ashamed that you’re my senior brother!”
I heard it. The words Baek Muheun had thrown at me when we met again in this life.
My drooping eyes flew open. All I could see was the dark prison ceiling, but before me, a clear blue sky spread wide.
Yes. The same sky I had seen on the way down from Mount Hwa and back to Baek-ga.
“I said I wouldn’t be lazy this time. I said I’d be the one to kill that bastard with my own hands. And...”
To make sure Tiger Mask could never take anything from me again.
I pushed myself upright once more and sat cross-legged. Then I closed my eyes and began to expand every sense in my body to the limit.
I didn’t know how long passed.
At some point, the prisoners’ muttering and screams began to fade away.
Was my mind automatically filtering out what it didn’t need? It didn’t matter. What mattered was...
Creak.
A small sound rang out in the silence.
It was so tiny and faint that I thought I’d imagined it at first.
But soon, a very small yet unmistakable sound came again.
Creak-creak.
As the sound repeated, I opened my eyes without realizing it. Then I slowly began moving toward the source of the noise.
It was ridiculous to say I’d moved toward a sound in this narrow prison. I hadn’t gone far, but I had reached the place where it was coming from.
The source of the sound was the wall right in front of me.
The noise was definitely coming from behind it.
I reached out and laid my hand against the wall. Because the sound was so faint, I couldn’t feel any vibration through the stone at all.
And yet I was certain of it.
“...A mechanism.”
There was a mechanism in the prison. More than that, it was hidden so carefully that a normal person would never find it.
“So this is the second one already, after the Tomb of the Divine Thief?”
The Tomb of the Divine Thief had also been built around a mechanism. This was already the second mechanism I’d found in this life.
That only made it stranger.
Of course, finding a mechanism itself wasn’t surprising. I’d seen plenty of them in my previous life too.
The problem was the mechanism itself.
It’s easy to say “mechanism.”
In reality, something like this wasn’t simple at all.
To build a mechanism, you needed vast knowledge, and in proportion to that, resources so enormous they were hard to even imagine.
And if that mechanism was hidden in the Martial Alliance’s prison, its mere existence was enough to shake the orthodox martial world to its core.
“So first I need to figure out how to make this thing move.”
Without thinking, I scratched my head. Something I would once have opened with a simple twist had become an obstacle for me now.
“Back when I was younger, I could’ve just smashed it and walked through.”
I felt a flash of irritation, but I quickly forced my focus back onto the wall.
I started tapping and inspecting every inch of it. The wall was cold and solid. But that was all. There was no special movement of any kind.
All I could still hear was the faint sound of the mechanism behind it.
“How am I supposed to move this thing?”
The usual way to activate a mechanism was to press some visible device and set it in motion.
But that wasn’t the only way.
Because mechanisms varied wildly in principle and structure, figuring out how one worked was never easy.
“Should I start with the obvious?”
I carefully ran my hand over the entire wall, looking for any seam or any place that might be the mechanism’s trigger point, pressing here and there as I searched.
But the mechanism didn’t move at all, and the faint sound coming from it didn’t change either.
“No, not that.”
Next I placed my hand against the wall. A chilly sensation seeped in from my fingertips and spread through my body.
“Hoo...”
I pushed one-tenth of my qi into the wall.
Creak-creak-creak.
The mechanism’s faint sound grew a little louder.
It was still so subtle that it was barely audible, but it was definitely changing.
Two-tenths. The sound of the mechanism’s operation became clearer.
Three-tenths. Now the movement was loud enough to be heard without focusing on it.
Four-tenths. A faint vibration traveled through the wall and into my palm.
Got it.
I was certain this was how the mechanism was activated.
If I pushed in more qi, it would definitely open.
But the problem came the instant that certainty took shape.
The moment I tried to push in five-tenths of my qi, it began to flow out against my will.
No, to be precise, the mechanism had started sucking my qi away.
At a crazed speed.
Sixty percent.
Seventy percent.
Eighty percent.
The pain hit me as if my internal energy were being ripped straight out of my dantian.
My breathing grew ragged, and a cold, numbing sensation spread through my whole body.
My vision darkened little by little, and a ringing whine filled my ears.
...At this rate, I’ll die!
The moment eighty percent had been drained, I hurried to pull my hand away.
But the mechanism clung to me like an ancient tree with roots sunk deep into the earth, drinking greedily from my qi.
I gathered the remaining twenty percent of my internal energy into my fist.
As the fist wind split the air, the wall trembled briefly and finally let go of my hand.
“Hah... hah...”
Breathing hard, I quickly sat back down cross-legged.
My internal energy had been drained away in an instant, leaving my lips dry and my body feeling as if it might collapse from exhaustion.
I focused on regulating my breathing, concentrating all my effort on restoring my emptied dantian and setting my twisted meridians right again.
“It would’ve opened if I’d pushed a little more, so why did it stop?”
While I was restoring my internal energy, I heard a voice. I wanted to turn and find the source, but if I moved carelessly in my current condition, I really might die.
“There’s something in this place that you want. So why are you stopping?”
The voice kept coming. But I shut all of it out and focused only on recovering my body.
How long did that take? Eventually my dantian filled again, and my distorted meridians returned to their places. Only then did I open my eyes.
Then I started looking all around me.
I was searching for the voice that had spoken to me.
“Who are you?”
“...”
“Where are you?”
“...”
I kept speaking to every wall around me, trying to find the source of the voice, but the answers that came back were not what I expected.
“If you’re going to go crazy, at least do it quietly. What the hell are you muttering about?”
“Another lunatic has shown up. Guard! Drag this bastard out, he’s being so loud I can’t sleep!”
The prisoners in the neighboring cells started treating me like a madman. But I listened closely to their voices and compared them to the one I’d heard while meditating.
And yet...
“Nothing. It isn’t any of them.”
No matter how carefully I listened, that voice wasn’t among theirs.
“The only people in this prison who can speak to me are prisoners... no, wait. There’s one more.”
I knocked on the prison door and called for the guard.
“Yawn... what is it this early in the morning?”
The guard’s voice came from beyond the door. It was the same guard who had first led me into the prison.
“...”
“Why aren’t you saying anything?”
When I stayed silent, the guard’s voice sharpened.
It wasn’t him. It was clearly different from that voice.
“Let me ask you one thing.”
“What is it?”
“When did you switch out with the previous guard?”
“Ha...”
At my question, the guard let out a deep sigh. And at the same time, the door opened.
Creak.
“You called me out just to ask something like that?”
“It matters to me.”
“You really don’t know your place, do you? This is the prison. You’re still in one piece only because the warden ordered it. Say one more useless word, and I’ll smash your mouth in.”
The guard glared at me with a fierce expression and killing intent, as if this were his final warning. But I didn’t stop.
“I asked when you switched with the previous guard.”
“You brought this on yourself.”
The guard gripped the club at his waist tightly. But I didn’t let him draw it.
I reached forward and caught his wrist at the same time I twisted his arm behind him.
The guard let out a short groan, then glared at me with wide eyes.
“Ghk! What the hell do you think you’re doing? You think you can survive after laying hands on a prison guard like this?”
“When did you switch?”
I twisted his wrist harder. His upper body began to buckle in the direction of my hand.
“Aaaagh!”
“Last chance. When did you switch?”
With his wrist bent at a brutal angle, the guard screamed in pain again and again. His defiant air steadily crumbled, and when I put more force into my grip, the words finally spilled from his mouth.
“Today! I’ve been on duty all day because it was my shift!”
The moment he answered, I let go of his hand. The guard clutched his wrist and hurried out of the prison to lock the door behind him.
“You’ve been here for a few days and gone completely insane. I’m reporting this to my superiors. Just you wait and see what happens to you!”
He shouted in agitation, but I didn’t care.
There was only one thing I wanted to know.
It wasn’t a prisoner, and it wasn’t a guard. Then who on earth had spoken to me? Just as that question refused to settle, the voice came again.
-I can’t understand why you’d take it out on an innocent man.
The voice reached me not through my ears, but from deep inside my mind.