The Blood Heaven Demon Scripture
With a Peerless Sword driven into the cliff, Hwa Baek let gravity drag him down its face, and all the while his senses never stopped sweeping the dark.
Somewhere along the middle of that wall lay Old Master Hyeongong's hidden realm, and he could not afford to miss it.
That realm was the true fortune of Serpent Sound Valley, prepared for the original protagonist, Baek Haseong. Hwa Baek meant to take that, too.
"......"
Not a thread of sunlight reached him anymore. He did not read the dark with his eyes.
Hearing. Smell. Touch. Instinct. Every sense but sight was awake, feeling out the world the way a radar sweeps a field.
It was not especially difficult. In the Cave of Tempering he had fought bloody battles against hundreds of hopping corpses with his eyeballs already burst.
After a long descent, he found a cave.
There.
A square mouth, cut as cleanly as if someone had carved it by hand. He fixed its position, stored it in a corner of his mind, and drew the Peerless Sword free of the stone.
The moment the blade left the rock, his body began to fall at a terrifying speed. Gravity took hold, and the longer he fell, the faster he went. He did not drive the sword back in. He did not reach for a handhold.
He simply waited until instinct rang the alarm of a single word: death.
Only then did he slam a Peerless Sword into the cliff and bleed the speed away.
A moment later, his foot touched damp earth. He pulled the sword free.
The instant he reached the ground, a serpent's cry rose — chilling, and far louder and clearer than it had sounded from above. He walked toward it.
Tens of minutes. No. It felt like hours.
He had no idea how time moved down here. He walked anyway, and he kept walking until something registered. After those hours, it did.
"......"
Something vast. Something long. Something that raised gooseflesh on the soul. It lay before him.
It coiled its body around him as if to take his measure. Sizing up its prey? The maw opened wide. A tongue flicked. Vertical pupils narrowed to slits, and it smacked its lips.
Watching it, Hwa Baek offered his own appraisal.
"Not as big as I thought."
Ten years in the Cave of Tempering.
Only ten.
Thousands of years, tens of thousands — set beside the eternities other fantasy heroes and murim protagonists spent in otherworldly spaces, his time was pitiful. And yet those few years had made the man called Hwa Baek into someone else entirely.
"Where does a wretched snake that never even became a dragon get off licking its chops?"
His two swords sheared the Blood Dragon's tail clean off.
The serpent screamed.
Hwa Baek took the scream for a beautiful song and swung. A single stroke. Formless sword-force born of it peeled the crimson scales away, and he stepped lightly onto the red scales hanging in the air. Matching the Blood Dragon's graceful curves at his leisure, he drove a Peerless Sword into its body.
Blood fountained from white hide harder than tempered steel. He reversed his grip and carved the torso in the shape of a cross. Scarlet sprayed up and blinded him.
In that instant the Blood Dragon tried to slip beyond his reach. Unfortunately, his reach had no limit. As it fled and opened the distance, countless cuts bloomed across its body. There was no need to explain who had left them.
At this rate it looked like an easy victory. The Blood Dragon's true strength, however, was not finished.
Every time a scale was cut. Every time blood poured from its flesh. It tried to regenerate at speed — staunching the bleeding, regrowing severed meat and skin. Over the new skin, hard scales rose again.
Then the counterattack began.
The head it had been fleeing with came around. Using a body easily dozens of feet long, it wrapped him. From its mouth poured pitch-black smoke, and the smoke was poison: not a venom of the breath, but one that seeped through the skin, rotted the blood points, settled at last in the brain, seized the nerves, and killed its victim amid every agony imaginable. A supreme toxin.
When the Blood Dragon judged the mist had spread far enough, it bared enormous, iron-hard fangs. It raised a wind to clear the smoke, meaning to chew apart the man who should already have been dying as his body rotted.
"Slow."
The Hwa Baek who emerged was perfectly intact. The skin that ought to have been rotting was nowhere to be seen. It still held a healthy apricot tone.
Realizing as much, the Blood Dragon seemed to reach some decision and split its tail into ten. Where the thick tail divided, sharp qi flared from each tip, and the ten points rushed him, each along a different curve — like ten masters unleashing ten different sword arts at once.
Counting hands and feet, Hwa Baek had only four weapons, and fine wounds began to open across his body.
The Blood Dragon was not done. It stood every scale on end and fired them all at him. If the Sichuan Tang Clan's secret art, Ten Thousand Blossoms in the Rain, were ever unleashed, perhaps it would look like this. Busy with the ten tails, he seemed to have no way to dodge.
"......"
He did not panic. He did not stop.
He simply drew one breath, and raised his speed.
The sword-force of the Peerless Sword in his right hand severed all ten tails. The sword-force of the Peerless Sword in his left split every launched scale in half and dropped them to the ground.
His movement had become so fast, so uncanny, that even a human mind could not follow it. Swift as the Blood Dragon was for a body dozens of feet long, its fangs and its tails could no longer so much as graze him.
A reversed Peerless Sword laid its maw open in a long cut. He sheared scales and flung great slabs of flesh to the floor. He went into the mouth itself and cut out every sharp, hard tooth. He repeated the process seven times.
He did not kill it.
He could have ended it by now. Instead he avoided every vital point and only carved flesh.
Because—
...all of that is money.
Scales, meat, even teeth, peeling off the Blood Dragon's body. Priceless goods welled from it without end. The scales could be worked into jewels. Flesh that had lived more than a thousand years and hoarded spiritual energy was, in itself, a superb elixir. The sharp teeth rivaled fine steel.
But even its regeneration had an end.
The scales that had risen without cease stopped growing back. The bleeding no longer stopped. The once-pointed teeth had gone flat, almost like a human's. Perhaps because it knew, its movements slowly ceased, and Hwa Baek's swords slowed with them.
When he stopped, he looked.
"...What."
The Blood Dragon had coiled its tail into a spiral and pressed its long-split maw to the ground. A strange gesture — like a soldier beaten half to death, bowing his head into the dirt. For a moment post-traumatic stress nearly took him. He muttered as he watched.
"You asking me to spare you?"
A long hiss. No language, and yet clearly yes: it would submit, if only he let it live. Hwa Baek pointed his sword at one particular place.
"That. Can you open it?"
A door. The door the Blood Dragon had guarded all its life — a door that could be opened only by the inner core within its body. Open it any other way, and the treasure vault beyond would collapse.
Would it really hand a human the inner core it held as dear as its life? Hwa Baek decided to give it one chance.
"Open that door, and I'll let you live."
The Blood Dragon nodded.
It moved at once, and he watched closely in case it tried anything else. Its throat worked — gulp, gulp — and then a sphere glowing red emerged from its mouth. The inner core. It shifted the core forward with its tongue, and Hwa Baek took it.
"Didn't you hate humans? More than that — is it really all right for you to do this for me?"
Another hiss, as if to say it was fine. It didn't matter.
He didn't know why, but the Blood Dragon was looking at him with respect in its eyes.
"...I don't remember doing anything a snake would respect me for."
Still, this was not the time to dwell on it.
Inner core in hand, he stood before the vault door and turned the sphere this way and that, trying to see how it was meant to open anything.
In the original, they just held the core up to it and the door opened on its own...
The thought had barely formed when the door groaned wide, exactly as the original had described.
Beyond it lay heaps of gold, silver, and jewels, and the precious relics of the Blood Heaven Cult scattered everywhere. Hwa Baek ignored most of them and walked past. Instead he read the title of a single book at the center of the vault.
The ancient, peerless divine art the Blood Heaven Cult had lost. To restore it, the cult had forced through experiment after experiment and produced countless victims — Yeon Ihwa among them.
Hwa Baek tucked the secret manual into his robes, then took out every sack he had brought. He had packed enough of them that the treasures themselves would all fit, if the goal was simply to bag as much as possible.
"...How am I supposed to carry all of this?"
The problem was getting the sacks up the cliff. If he also took what waited in Old Master Hyeongong's hidden realm, he would fill twenty sacks at the least. When was he supposed to deliver that much to Yeon Ihwa?
His original plan, no matter how much treasure there was, had been to haul it with his own body. A notion too crude to be called anything but stupid — and yet Hwa Baek, confident his flesh had reached the realm of the Diamond Indestructible Body, had thought it would be easy.
What he had not expected was that there would be far, far too much. Five sacks at most, he had thought. He had never imagined it would pass ten. However strong he was, there was a limit to how many sacks a pair of hands could hold.
He was just resigning himself to climbing and descending the cliff in batches when the Blood Dragon's hiss reached him.
"...Ah."
A truly inspired idea occurred to him.