Not a Single Eye That Sees
The six martial artists were no mere greenhorns. They were escorts and watchers assigned to the Shandong Seven Heroes. Had they fallen short, the Hwangbo Clan never would have taken them in to begin with.
Every last one of them was a First-class martial artist. A coordinated assault by six fighters of that caliber would force even a typical Peak Realm expert to give ground.
The current situation was one even Baek-an-magun had failed to anticipate.
Only Muhwa swung his sword as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
There was no mercy in Muhwa's blade. He stabbed whatever crossed his path and carved straight through. Wrists and heads tumbled across the ground.
The two martial artists still standing stumbled backward.
Muhwa took a single step closer. They took two steps back.
Anyone watching would have seen prey that had gone limp with terror before a predator.
Behind them, Baek-an-magun clicked his tongue in a voice thick with irritation.
"You worthless idiots. Can't even land a scratch, and now you're backing off like cowards?"
Baek-an-magun's fist snapped out. A wet crunch — the retreating martial artist's head burst like a watermelon. The last man's face went deathly white.
Charge Muhwa and die, or step back and die to Baek-an-magun. It came to the same thing.
The choice was simple. He could not defy his superior's will.
He lived in an organization of merciless, absolute obedience.
The warrior bit down hard on his lip and drove his sword forward. In that moment of crisis he poured out every ounce of strength he had. Killing intent concentrated at the blade's tip tore through the air with a shriek.
Muhwa read the line of the thrust and twisted aside. The sword carved empty space. He slashed through the man's extended arm, and a fountain of blood erupted. The warrior's mouth fell open, a scream about to tear loose — and Muhwa rammed his blade down the man's throat. Instant death.
"Tch. They were actually useful, too... I suppose the Namgung Clan is the Namgung Clan after all."
Baek-an-magun clicked his tongue, hands clasped behind his back. A hint of emptiness colored his voice.
Muhwa flicked the blood from his sword and locked eyes with him.
In that deeply, chillingly settled gaze was a quiet fury.
"You people are sick."
Plenty of martial artists had violent temperaments. Belonging to the Orthodox Faction did not make a man calm. The Hebei Peng Clan, the Mount Hua Sect, even the Namgung Clan itself — none of them escaped being called extreme and brutal.
But shoving your own subordinates forward and bursting their skulls was the kind of atrocity that belonged to demonic practitioners.
There was nothing more stupid a martial faction could do than treat the lives of its own people as cheap. The only kinds of groups that acted that way were the ones that ruled by terror and drowned themselves in destruction.
Sa Hyeol-cheol-gwi. Hon-am-do... and now these ones too.
Muhwa's expression remained cold and composed, but his mind was anything but simple.
Something was happening in the martial world.
Right under the Namgung Clan's nose.
"Tch. Fine. No helping it now. I didn't want to get blood on my own hands, but..."
Baek-an-magun lunged before he had even finished speaking. A streak of white light blazed vividly through the darkness. Muhwa startled and swung his sword to meet it.
Steel screamed.
When?
The man had clearly had his hands behind his back — but the thing that had drawn that line of light was a long sword.
Muhwa hadn't even seen it. He hadn't even known the man was carrying a blade.
Kagang. Kang. Kangkang. Only after several exchanges could Muhwa enhance his vision with internal energy and confirm it. The entire sword was painted pitch black.
Muhwa bit his lip. A small detail — but in this darkness, that difference was enormous.
A meticulous one.
He calmly parried the incoming cuts and stared Baek-an-magun down.
If the opponent was meticulous, Muhwa would simply match him.
A thorough man was dangerous. He noticed and exploited even the unexpected. But he had a fatal weakness too: he focused so hard on the small things that he lost the bigger picture.
A heavy whoosh of displaced air.
"...Huh?"
Baek-an-magun's eyes twitched as he pressed his fierce assault.
I've... walked right into it.
A bitter smile touched his mouth. He had been certain he was absorbing every one of Muhwa's movements, slowly eating into his space.
Then a sudden, bone-deep chill flooded his entire body and snapped him wide awake.
It's a trap. If I keep getting drawn in like this, my strength will give out and my head will come off.
Baek-an-magun admitted it freely.
He's stronger than I am.
His whole body burned anew. He was a field commander who personally directed operations across an entire province for the organization — and he could not even beat a single hall master of the Namgung Clan.
The Namgung Clan really is the Namgung Clan.
He was beginning to understand why the organization had ordered them to avoid Anhui Province entirely.
Baek-an-magun decided it was too late to withdraw.
No — he steeled himself even further.
This one... is a Sleeper.
Baek-an-magun's eyes glowed reddish.
There was a Sleeper in the Namgung Clan? How did we not know?
Not knowing was one thing. Now that he knew, he could not leave it alone.
I have to take him.
If a fighter of this caliber was a Sleeper...
Once he receives the Great King's procedure, what kind of being will he become...!
Just imagining it made his body tremble. Baek-an-magun's breathing grew gradually more ragged. He crouched lower, like a beast. A thick, gamey stench rolled from his mouth. A bestial growl leaked out of his throat.
That was when Muhwa noticed something was wrong.
Those reddened pupils were not normal. Muhwa felt the strangeness and was about to pull back when Baek-an-magun unleashed a surge of boiling internal energy.
The locked blades shrieked under a pressure that had no bottom.
Muhwa's face went deathly pale. The bottomless internal energy transmitted through the crossed swords. He did not dare pull his blade away. The instant he did, he could already see those fatal fangs burying themselves in his throat.
Their faces were close enough that their breath mingled over the steel. Blood-red eyes. A face swollen to bursting. Blood-tears streaming from ruptured vessels. Veins standing out livid and blue.
What the hell is this?
Just moments ago, this had been an expert he could handle.
His instincts were screaming that he needed to run — right now.
Good god. My internal energy is going to...
If this became a contest of internal energy, Muhwa would lose. The realization stunned him. He raced through his options, searching for a way out.
That was when it came.
Drop the sword.
A voice ringing through his mind.
Teacher Sun?
Sun Wukong's sudden sound transmission was an unexpected command.
But there was not even time to think.
I said drop the sword. Still clinging to it?
Muhwa bit down hard on his lip. He had never once dropped his sword. Never once abandoned it.
It was a martial artist's pride, and the natural dignity of a member of the Namgung Clan, the greatest sword family under heaven.
Muhwa made his choice. For reasons he could not explain, he would follow the voice in his head.
A sharp, ringing clang.
Baek-an-magun's body pitched forward. Muhwa had released his sword and thrown himself backward. Baek-an-magun's eyes flew wide. Wukong's voice poured in without mercy, seizing the opening.
Gut. Bend at the waist halfway. Stomp the instep.
A fist drove into the abdomen. Muhwa dropped his stance, drove in, and stomped down hard on the instep.
The sequence of movements flowed as naturally as water.
Keep the stance low. Feet light.
Wukong's instructions kept coming. Before Baek-an-magun could even swing his sword, the fists that had closed the distance hammered him again and again. The situation had flipped in an instant.
A rapid-fire barrage of blows cracked through the dark.
Muhwa himself felt a chill crawl over his entire body. Every martial artist trained thoroughly in basic hand-to-hand combat. But unless your art was famous for its fist or kicking techniques, the difference in level was obvious.
Muhwa had only learned fists and kicks as a supplement.
What is this?
These were clearly his own movements — motions he had never properly trained — and yet they fit his body as if tailored to him, fluid and natural. The déjà vu was so intense he almost believed he had learned this somewhere before.
Muhwa was not the only one who found it strange. Baek-an-magun's eyes were spinning. He could not keep up with Muhwa's movements at all.
"Khuh!"
Where had this sudden change come from?
Even as he took hits and sprayed blood, true to his epithet, Baek-an-magun swept his surroundings.
A gaze that reaches the ends of the sky. A secret art that unfurls the senses and drinks in everything they touch.
As if hundreds of eyes had opened at once, his vision expanded. His gaze touched every space — front, back, left, and right.
That one...!
And there, far off, he found a figure reclining at an angle in a tree, a head of golden hair.
Sun Wukong.
That one...
The self-proclaimed Great Sage, Equal to Heaven that Gunei Nosa had spoken of. Baek-an-magun instinctively knew that Muhwa's sudden transformation originated with Sun Wukong. The suspicious figure who had inserted himself into the Namgung Clan's affairs.
Baek-an-magun's instincts told him Sun Wukong was the greater threat.
He shook off the charging Muhwa and sprang into the air. Channeling internal energy into his toes, he kicked off the ground and shot toward Sun Wukong, closing the distance in a single burst.
The night cracked open with the force of his launch.
Before the rapidly draining latent power vanished, he would kill that one. Kill that one, and Muhwa would be easy enough to subdue.
The tiny golden hair filling his vision grew larger and larger.
And as it did, Sun Wukong's face — which had been nothing but a small dot — flooded his entire field of view.
The features he had not been able to see. And the expression...
Huh?
The instant the expression snapped into focus, Baek-an-magun realized he had been played. By his own instincts.
A flash of white teeth gleamed in the darkness.
Same trick as always.
Sun Wukong clicked his tongue.
Sa Hyeol-cheol-gwi had been the same. Honse-mawang too. When they were driven into a corner, it was as if their souls awakened — and through the Fiery Golden Eyes, their past-life forms became visible.
Baek-an-magun was no different.
He had been losing ground to Muhwa, and then the situation had shifted all at once.
A face flushed burning red. Veins standing out. Eyes webbed with ruptured capillaries.
Something in him just detonated.
A man turning violently, wildly excited, and a torrent of immense internal energy pouring out like a waterfall.
By now, Wukong knew what it was.
They're awakening their past lives.
It felt as if the upper dantian suddenly flew wide open and the latent power sealed in the soul came bursting out.
If every last one of them uses the same trick, that means someone taught it to them. Someone showed them how.
Their leader, in other words.
A look of keen interest crossed Sun Wukong's face.
Someone who knows they were demons in a previous life.
Someone who had a trick of his own — something like the Fiery Golden Eyes.
Well. He'd have to, if he was going to recognize Sanzang's reincarnation.
Wukong himself had only identified Baek-an-magun around the time the man unleashed that technique.
Once he fell into that state, even Muhwa would have a hard time of it.
In the old days, this had been an upper-class demon who toyed with the seven spider spirits of Pansidong as if they sat in the palm of his hand.
However remarkable Muhwa was, facing a demon who had awakened even a fraction of his past-life power would not be easy.
Sun Wukong had been about to leap down when a thought caught him.
There was something in Muhwa's movements. Beyond the Fiery Golden Eyes, the motions of the soul had looked familiar. That was why Wukong had sent the instructions — the same way he once had with Hoga Jangju.
But there was a difference. Back then, he had watched Hoga Jangju move and dictated the optimal sequence for that body, in that moment.
What he had given Muhwa was not the optimal path for Muhwa as he was now. It was a set of movements that existed only in Sun Wukong's memory — something from a past so distant it was almost gone.
And Muhwa had followed those movements with astonishing fluidity.
More than that...
I can see it.
Beyond the Fiery Golden Eyes, a shadow so faint it was barely there.
It was coming into view, slowly. The outline was taking shape. A smile rose to Sun Wukong's lips of its own accord.
So that's it. Following my sound transmission at all means he trusts me. Means the wall came down.
They had gotten close enough, then. He had earned that much trust.
The same as it had been with Ojeong — a state where the wariness had dropped. And in that state, the outline of the soul had begun to show.
Ah. Now this is interesting.
He was certain now.