Tyrant Blade Dragon
While Cheonhwa remained in the Medical Hall with Yeobhwa, the main rounds of the Dragon and Phoenix Gathering pressed steadily onward.
The next match to draw every eye was the Sichuan Dang Family’s bout.
They were the hosts of this year’s gathering, and the only major sect rooted in Sichuan Province to have advanced this far. Interest was only natural. And their opponents, of all people, were two Taoists of the Zhongnan Sect.
“Young Lady Dang Sowol against Taoist Jeokhwa, and Young Master Dang Paeho against Taoist Myeonghwa. It almost looks as if the Sichuan Dang Family and the Zhongnan Sect are facing each other head-on.”
“A coincidence, of a sort. Or perhaps not—Zhongnan did put five disciples into the main bracket.”
Could the Sichuan Dang Family survive to the end and uphold the pride of their province? Or would they be swept aside by the Zhongnan Sect, whose many disciples had flooded the main tournament? Most of the crowd had their attention fixed on those matches, and as a result the other two bouts received little more than a passing glance.
“There’s still a Shaolin match before the Dang Family and Zhongnan go at it, yet no one even mentions it.”
“Well, Shaolin’s opponent is some nobody from a minor sect. Nine out of ten people figure Shaolin will win without breaking a sweat.”
The Iron Fist Dragon, Beomhye—Shaolin’s strongest contender for the championship—had already fallen in the preliminaries. Even so, no one believed the temple’s depth had simply vanished. The monk who had advanced, Beomyeon, was a First-class master at the absolute peak of that realm. Against an obscure fighter from a sect no one had ever heard of, defeat seemed unthinkable.
The result shattered every expectation.
The match between Shaolin’s monk and the fighter from the minor sect ended in the minor sect’s victory.
“W-what in the world—?!”
“Shaolin… lost?”
No one had hoped for it. No one had imagined it. The crowd reeled in disbelief. Yet no amount of staring could change what they had seen: a Shaolin monk who had achieved Blade-and-Sword Imperviousness had fallen to the scorching yang arts of a no-name from a minor school.
Beomyeon, his face drawn with the internal injuries of that searing yang energy, forced the pain down and asked his opponent,
“That martial art of yours… what is it, exactly?”
The other man answered without hesitation.
“The Zhurong Sword Art.”
“Zhurong… named for the Fire God among the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. Fitting.”
The name alone set off a stir among those who knew their history.
“The Zhurong Sword Art—that’s one of the signature arts of the Hengshan Sect, isn’t it?”
“Then he’s a genuine descendant of Hengshan?”
“To think I would live to see the lost martial studies of the old jianghu with my own eyes, after their sect was wiped from the world…”
“Does anyone know that fighter’s name and affiliation?”
“Mangya. Mangya of the Hwajeong Sect.”
The revival of a martial tradition from one of the Five Sacred Mountain Sword Sects, erased by a massacre—and its first public stroke delivered against Shaolin, currently contending for the very summit of the orthodox martial world. The crowd could scarcely contain its excitement.
Only one person felt something wrong in that dazzling display: Jeokhwa, already preparing for her own match.
That scorching yang energy… I’ve felt something like it somewhere before.
As a practitioner of flame arts herself, she had a refined sense for yang energy. Yet something about Mangya’s power grated against her instincts. Distance and the lack of direct contact made certainty impossible.
If I win my match, I’ll face him next.
If only to pin down the source of that dissonance, she had to win. When her turn came, Jeokhwa stepped up onto the stage.
Her opponent was a beautiful young woman in green silk—Dang Sowol, the treasured daughter of the Sichuan Dang Family and the First Beauty of Sichuan, whom Jeokhwa had glimpsed only briefly at the grand banquet. Expectation shone openly on Dang Sowol’s face. Compared with the blank or vicious expressions of every other Dang fighter Jeokhwa had seen in the preliminaries, the reaction was almost startlingly fresh. But letting that lively air lower her guard would be fatal. Whatever Dang Sowol’s personality, the Dang Family’s palm methods and hidden weapons were anything but gentle.
Keep your distance and the hidden weapons come. Close in and the palm arts come.
Her opponent could answer both near and far. The longer the match dragged, the worse it would go for Jeokhwa. That left only one path.
Crush her before she can move.
A short, decisive fight. Holding those four words in her heart, Jeokhwa drew her Hyeonhwang Sword. Dang Sowol settled into her opening stance as well—a peculiar posture that hid both hands inside the long sleeves of her silk robe, concealing her weapons and her intent at once and making any read nearly impossible.
Tension stretched between them like a drawn bowstring. The referee’s signal fell.
“Begin!”
A thunderous crack rolled across the entire stage.
Jeokhwa’s figure blurred like heat haze—and in the next breath she stood at Dang Sowol’s throat, the edge of her sword already leveled against the young woman’s neck.
“W-what just happened?”
“The moment the signal dropped, the Taoist girl vanished and reappeared right in front of her opponent!”
Most of the spectators could not even process what they had seen. Those who had caught Jeokhwa’s movement understood at once.
“She closed the distance in a single burst of lightfoot propulsion.”
“To think she could overwhelm Young Lady Dang before the girl could even move…”
“Cutting through the space between one breath and the next. She’s realized the ultimate of the swift sword.”
Drawn from Flame Heaven True Energy—Zhongnan’s upper-tier mind method of peerless instantaneous explosive force—and driven to its absolute limit over a short range.
What Jeokhwa had done was simple in concept and terrifying in execution. The lingering heat and shimmering haze still clinging to the stage were the afterimage of that technique. That she had not simply cut through, but stopped the blade a hair’s breadth from the throat, spoke volumes of her control.
Dang Sowol froze mid-motion, her hands still reaching for the hidden weapons in her sleeves. In a true fight her head would already have left her shoulders. Even if protective qi had somehow turned the edge, a strike to a vital point would have left her reeling and helpless.
I never thought I’d be crushed in a single exchange after making it to the main rounds.
Swift swords had never been a favorable matchup for her, but to fall so utterly without even a chance to answer… The regret was real, yet Dang Sowol wasted no breath on empty thrashing. The match was lost; she accepted it cleanly.
“I yield.”
At her surrender, Jeokhwa let out a quiet breath of relief and drew her sword back. That single stroke had been a gamble for her as well. She had needed more than mere speed—she had needed the principle of the flash, staking everything on one strike—and even then she had been forced not to ride the momentum through, but to kill her velocity at precisely the right instant. One form, and her whole body was screaming; her qi and blood seethed.
If the fight had continued, I wouldn’t have lasted ten exchanges.
She might still have forced Dang Sowol down inside that window, but it would never have been easy. That Dang Sowol was not the type to cling desperately to a tournament result was a small mercy.
All that remains is Senior Brother Myeonghwa’s match.
Myeonghwa’s opponent was Dang Paeho of the Sichuan Dang Family—by all accounts a classic Dang fighter with a deep vein of poison-hearted ruthlessness, nothing like Dang Sowol. An easy win like Jeokhwa’s was out of the question. Her worry proved well founded.
The fight between Myeonghwa and Dang Paeho was a one-sided battering from the Dang side. Myeonghwa’s mainstay, the Clear Wind Sword Art, was a soft sword style built around defense; he could answer the endless point-strikes of hidden weapons with his sword-wind, but the gap in raw strength made any real offense impossible. He managed, through the Wind-Cloud Body Technique, to weave through the storm of projectiles and close the distance—only to meet the stored jin of a palm method, released in a single throwing strike that Dang Paeho had been accumulating the entire time. The sudden blow shattered Myeonghwa’s internal barrier and dealt him a grievous wound. The referee stepped in at once, judging that further combat would be too dangerous.
“That’s enough! The winner is Dang Paeho of the Sichuan Dang Family!”
A satisfied smile touched Dang Paeho’s lips. His victory restored, in a single stroke, the dignity the Dang Family had lost when Zhongnan defeated them in the previous match.
Myeonghwa was carried to the Medical Hall on a litter. Yeonhwa and Jeokhwa went with him, and so all five of them gathered there once more.
“The aftershock of the jin release has left him with internal injuries on top of fractures. Recovery will take some time,” said Dang Baek-seon after taking Myeonghwa’s pulse, and set about his treatment. Before long Myeonghwa came around. He tried to sit up on instinct, only for his broken ribs to pin him flat again.
“This really is the Dragon and Phoenix Gathering. The preliminaries were hard enough—I never imagined the main rounds would be this brutal.”
He gave a bitter little smile, as if to say the tournament was living up to its name. Of the five who had reached the main bracket, three remained. From the original sixteen, only eight would advance to the next round. It was a fine achievement by any measure, yet the regret refused to leave entirely.
“Single-elimination is merciless. One loss and you’re done—no second chance.”
In a winner-takes-all bracket, every match offers only one opportunity. The victor climbs; the defeated end there. That was why every fighter gave everything they had. More than the hollow comfort of “you fought well,” they wanted to survive to the end and stand at the peak.
“Still, a loss is a loss. I’ll be cheering from the stands with Junior Sister Yeonhwa!”
Myeonghwa’s voice was bright and easy—but the four who had spent a decade at his side knew better. He was forcing the cheer for their sake. No one called him on it. Sometimes a person needed space to swallow their feelings alone more than they needed clumsy comfort.
“That’s enough about me. Let’s talk about the next round. Let’s see, the bracket…”
He ran through the pairings, and his expression hardened.
Cheonhwa against Paeng Mu-jin.
Yeobhwa against Namgung Myeong.
Jeokhwa against Mangya.
Two of the three remaining fighters would face favorites for the championship. They had known the possibility was real; facing it as fact still left a hollow weight in the chest.
Cheonhwa at least has a chance—but can Yeobhwa even hold his ground?
Yeobhwa had barely scraped past a First-class fighter of equal rank. Against the Heavenly Sword Dragon, where the gap in strength was unmistakable, victory seemed doubtful. Myeonghwa looked a silent question at Yeobhwa.
Got a plan?
Yeobhwa shook his head.
Of course not.
Meaning there was no path but to collide with it head-on. And Cheonhwa? When every gaze turned to him, he considered carefully.
A way to face Hero Paeng Mu-jin…
If someone asked whether he could win at his present level, he would struggle to give a clear answer. If he finished perfecting the middle forms of the Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven, perhaps. As things stood, even giving himself every benefit of the doubt, his odds did not clear three in ten.
But separate from the odds… my heart is pounding.
He knew what that pounding was. It was the competitive fire that welcomed a clash with a true master. And with it came the memory of the moment their eyes had met after Paeng Mu-jin’s last match.
That look was unmistakably the recognition of an equal.
The Tyrant Blade Dragon—who had reached the semifinals of the previous Dragon and Phoenix Gathering—had acknowledged Cheonhwa as a foe. In other words, he had acknowledged Cheonhwa’s strength.
Cheonhwa closed his fist tight.
It had begun as a wager sparked by Paeng Gun-ak’s insult. The pride of their sect was on the line as well. But right now, only one thought filled Cheonhwa’s mind.
I will win.
Feeling the competitive fire swell in his chest, Cheonhwa waited for the next match to come.