The Silk Road, Part 1
In a distant age, there lived a man whose name inspired infamy across the world.
His martial prowess had become Demonic Arts. Mountains of corpses and the stench of blood always followed in his wake.
Only after the foremost masters of the orthodox and demonic worlds joined forces with the reigning emperor of the day was the man finally sealed away.
At last, in the mouths of the masses, he became the Heavenly Demon.
The Heavenly Demon was lonely. No one looked up at him, and no one looked down on him.
No one kept him at their side.
In his world, the only living being was himself.
After the Heavenly Demon’s whereabouts became unknown, a faction of followers rose in his name.
As their influence grew, the imagined Heavenly Demon changed with it in ever more elaborate ways. Only then did the Heavenly Demon become a god.
Time passed.
In the torrent of rise and fall, only two sects survived.
They were the orders known as the Demongod Cult and the Blood Heavenly Demonic Cult.
The Demongod Cult revered the Heavenly Demon’s overwhelming strength and exalted the tyrannical nature of demonic power itself.
The Blood Heavenly Demonic Cult sought to follow in the Heavenly Demon’s footsteps and realize the bloody world he had never lived to complete.
The collision between the two demonic sects was as inevitable as the sky falling.
The war that lasted half a century was called the Heaven-Blood Catastrophe.
After countless bloody battles, it was the Demongod Cult that remained standing.
Hatred, as foretold, surged to the surface.
Most of the Blood Cult members were slaughtered in the aftermath of that dreadful war.
Only a tiny handful, those whose worth had been recognized, were absorbed into the Demongod Cult.
That had been five hundred years ago.
And now, once again—
The stale reek of blood was beginning to boil back to life.
-
That winter was bitterly cold, and the snow fell in heavy sheets.
I took in the two men guarding the gate of Cheong-eun Tower.
“No time. Get out of the way.”
“N-no, I’m telling you, that won’t do. You need to speak with the proprietor in advance before coming to pay a visit—”
“Ugh!”
“Ghk!”
My blade flashed once, clean and without flourish. The work of Yi was neat.
Behind the gatekeeper who had crumpled beneath the ambush, the shadow that had struck him revealed itself.
“Report.”
“There’s no movement within a mile. Thirty-two of Gap’s Greenwoods are standing by.”
“You wait here for the signal. I’ll send it by blowing that gate right off its hinges.”
“Understood.”
-
“I came to see the proprietor. If you’re planning to spout nonsense, you’d better be prepared.”
The scar carved into the gatekeeper’s back split open just enough to show through the narrow gap in the door.
Before the hesitating manager, I took off my black hat and showed him my face. The men were plainly startled.
It didn’t matter. They were going to die anyway.
After a moment, the manager vanished from sight.
He returned with the proprietor. Interestingly enough, the proprietor was a woman.
In the empty room on the upper floor of the pavilion, where they led me, a gift had already been laid out.
Clang-clang-clang!
“The Ten Demons Sword Formation?”
Ten swordsmen standing in a ring, weaving a sword formation.
Not a bad present, all things considered.
“Hoho, I wonder whether the young miss will be satisfied with this…”
The proprietor sneered.
Standing at the extension of a blade’s edge, I answered her with a smile of my own.
“Some nobody with no backing thinks she can come tear this place apart without even a proper memorial tablet? Die!”
With the proprietor’s sudden change in tone as the signal, ten blades converged on a single point.
Clang!
I leaped at once and tilted my body. My feet pointed skyward while my head plunged downward.
The ten points of steel crossing beneath my eyes sharpened the thrill running through me.
At first glance, there seemed to be no opening at all.
And yet.
“Too slow.”
Bang!
I stepped onto the empty air above my head, then dropped away on a diagonal line.
The sight of me falling behind the swordsmen’s backs must have resembled a shooting star.
One of them gasped in astonishment.
“W-without-Wind Plunging Through the Void?!”
The formation’s follow-up attack came a beat too late—after I had already slipped past it.
The swords that had converged on one point soared upward, circled over my head once, and swept toward the outer rim.
Seen from above, it would have looked like a flower bud blooming.
But it was already too late.
My body had broken clear of the encirclement in a blur, and now it was heading straight for the proprietor.
So fast that even she understood what had happened only after I had struck the hulls below her knees and sealed her pressure point.
The tide of battle turned. Using her half-paralyzed body as a shield, I shattered the formation.
I knew the method behind the Ten Demons Sword Formation.
It was a rudimentary but practical formation, one that minimized footwork and suppressed an enemy through nothing more than the movement of the blade tips.
But for all its difficulty, the way to break it was equally simple.
You only had to introduce a variable.
Reducing the distance between each swordsman meant it became difficult to respond in an orderly fashion.
There were also techniques meant to neutralize an enemy who forced their way in, but I had brought a human meat shield with me.
Those bastards wouldn’t dare thrust carelessly now.
Crash!
Just as I’d expected, the hunting dogs couldn’t bite their master.
The Ten Demons Sword Formation collapsed with absurd ease.
From that point on, they were each attacking with their own individual sword styles.
Not bad improvisation. The thought flickered through my mind that they weren’t mere rabble.
But that was all.
“He’s coming! H-holy hell!”
“Lady Proprietor!!”
“Damn it, you’re in the way! I told you to stay back!”
Anything in my hand could become a weapon.
A perfect example was the proprietor bitch I was now swinging around with all my might.
Swordsmen were flung one by one through the shattered doorway.
I followed after them and stepped over the threshold as well.
The biwa music that had been ringing through the pavilion stopped. The courtesans, who had been idly singing their songs, fixed their eyes on me and did not look away.
Silence descended, suffocating and absolute.
Then—
“K-kill that bitch nowwww!!”
The proprietor, now a bloodied mess, let out a desperate shriek.
Every wandering swordsman in the pleasure house drew steel and charged.
The bartenders and cooks fled in a panic. Guests who didn’t know what to do reacted in every way imaginable. Everything dissolved into chaos.
Now it was time.
Bang!
I seized one of the wandering swordsmen by the scruff of his neck and hurled him outside.
The gate panel that went flying with him, in turn, dragged the lurking darkness in after it.
-I’ll send the signal by blowing that gate right off its hinges.
The shadows rushed in.
As the two uninvited guests charged through the air, the banquet began.
Behind them came a racket of shouting. It was the band of mountain bandits Gap had brought with him.
From here on out, it was truly—
-
I was slaughtering them all.
The swordsmen, the customers who’d come for pleasure, even the people who had only been working hard to get through the day.
I reached out to Eul.
“You brought it, right?”
Instead of answering, Eul silently tossed something to me.
Thud!
I caught it cleanly.
I felt the emptiness in my grip fill at once. The familiar texture and heavy weight felt good.
My axe, Iron Crescent.
I dragged myself forward.
The eye of a fallen man rolled across the floor. Blood seeped out and ran to the lowest places.
“Eek! Don’t! Please…”
I stopped before the bandit trying to rape a courtesan and wordlessly swung my axe.
Along the arc of the blow, the chest and waist on that line were severed apart.
The chest belonged to the man.
The waist belonged to the girl.
There was no helping it. Even if they weren’t martial artists, everyone in this place had to die.
Our existence could not be known to anyone.
Suddenly, a memory from six months ago began to claw through my mind.
Is it really right to kill people like this?
Even if you’re strong, that doesn’t mean you have the right to hurt people however you want. That has to be wrong, doesn’t it?
This is wrong. The world is fundamentally broken. In a world like this, I really… I don’t think I can keep living.
So-yeon.
It hurts.
Why did you do that?
My breathing turned ragged. I clutched at my head. My ears rang. The world had begun to waver into hallucination.
The severed waist of the courtesan. The naked body of Gong Tae-o’s wife.
The throat spilling its innards. Uncle Man-seok, Sister Hwa-yeong, Uncle Muryang.
Father. Father. My father after he became a monster.
It all melted down. This world, red and blazing, spreading out before me like a view of hell.
“Haaah… haaah…”
I drew a deep breath.
At last, I forced my mind back into place.
Right. I was, I was—
Part of this broken world.
“Begin.”
To Gap and Eul, who had finished their own work, I gave the second order I had already hinted at.
“...Understood.”
Swish—
Slash!
“W-what? Weren’t they on the same side?!”
“Hey! What the hell is going on—ghk!”
“Leave nothing behind.”
-
I looked into the woman’s eyes.
“You were all fighting the Greenwoods and died together. Understand?”
“W-why… why are you doing this?”
The proprietor of Cheong-eun Tower was a bloody wreck, gasping beneath my feet.
“I’ve never once crossed the sect, not once…”
“Do you know a man named Gong Tae-o? A Banghosa—no, was he called the Northern Route Leader of the Black Cloud Merchant Group?”
“Northern Route… leader?”
Facing death, the proprietor was obedient yet composed. I didn’t dislike her.
“Dea— I mean, Bag Proprietor. Here, take this.”
Just then, Gap handed me a wooden scroll.
He had been searching the proprietor’s chambers using the key taken from her breast pocket.
I unfurled the scroll and read the text in a low murmur.
“Cheong-eun Tower notarized record number forty-seven. May 24th of the Muin year.”
My gaze followed the print and came to a stop.
Because there, stamped into the record, was the three-character name I had been searching for so desperately.
“Gang Du-ho transfers one point of the Tiger Token to Gong Tae-o, thereby relinquishing all ownership and authority in full. With the proprietor of Cheong-eun Tower, Ma Hwayeon, serving as the notary…”
There was no way to confirm the rest.
The latter half had been overlaid so heavily that it looked grotesque.
Even when I held it up to the lantern light, I couldn’t distinguish the original marks from the overwritten ones.
“Gang Du-ho, Gong Tae-o… one Tiger Token.”
As I slowly scanned the text, a sense of wrongness crept over me.
A transaction notarized by the proprietor.
This was not something just anyone could go and do.
Cheong-eun Tower was the place where backroom dealings between officials and figures whose trust had already been secured within the sect were conducted.
And if these secret notarized records were what I thought they were…
“Bring me anything else. As long as it’s a notarized record, it doesn’t matter.”
“Here it is.”
Gap brought over another scroll. It too bore the proprietor’s seal.
“Record number thirty-eight. Seven bundles of sandalwood in exchange for one sack of Bone-Melting Powder. Jin Dokmun’s master, Wang Su-jeon, gate guardian general, Gwak Cheong-ho…”
My suspicion had been correct.
In the other notarized documents, titles such as “Jin Dokmun’s master” or “gate guardian general” clearly identified both sides of the transaction.
But on this suspicious scrap of paper, not only had the latter half been erased, the participants’ titles had not even been written in the first place.
It didn’t even reveal what Gong Tae-o, who had received some mysterious “one Tiger Token,” had paid in return.
I thrust the document up to the face of the proprietor, who was already at death’s door, and said,
“Tell me what you know. What is a Tiger Token, and who is Gang Du-ho? What did Gong Tae-o pay?”
“I, I don’t k—”
Regrettably, I never got an answer, because the proprietor’s last breath gave out before she could finish.
I shoved the document into my sleeve and started back the way I had come.
The fine snow piled along the roadside was dampening my shoulders.
It had already become a scene of slaughter so ghastly that even speaking of it felt tiresome.
At a single silent gesture meaning “mission complete,” the masked Gap and Eul disappeared without a trace.
I did not know where they were headed, who they were, or even what they looked like.
Because they were Blood Society.
The Blood Society was a secret organization dedicated to the revival of the Blood Cult.
We gathered and scattered under the missions assigned to us.
The scale and structure changed from assignment to assignment.
A man known as Socheon oversaw all of this and determined each member’s rank and mission.
The hierarchy ran from Bag Proprietor at the top, then Gap, Eul, Byeong… and so on.
But even that could change.
Depending on the difficulty and nature of the mission, the assignment shifted every time.
In other words, today’s Bag Proprietor could become tomorrow’s Gap.
Yesterday’s Eul could become today’s Bag Proprietor.
Because they understood this well, the men who went out on missions obeyed the orders of their superiors absolutely.
And I knew exactly who this man called Socheon was.
Him. The despicable bastard who had turned my father into a monster, and who had also taken me in.
The one who held the title of Left Guardian was a monster far beyond what I had expected.
Some revered him and spoke of him like this:
The third power in the Demongod Cult.
An unrivaled, untouchable existence.
Since the second power was the strategist, the military adviser, in raw combat strength he was effectively just below the Cult Leader himself.
And even so—
I would not waver.
I had never forgotten the resolve I made that day, not once in a single day, not even in my dreams.
Left Guardian Ha Jeok-yeong.
My master.
Socheon of the Blood Society and master of Red Lotus Manor.
I will kill you without fail.
---