The Aftershock
Just as the Third Young Master's chief strategists had predicted.
The forces the Supreme Operations Committee had stationed on site intervened at once, citing insubordination as their grounds.
And so the encirclement the Third Young Master's side had formed for annihilation was replaced by a security perimeter established by the War Department troops the Supreme Operations Committee had dispatched from the Sword Family.
But.
Contrary to the Supreme Operations Committee's intentions, the Third Young Master's forces did not withdraw at once.
No.
They could not.
Yongbongjihoe Arena Construction Site.
The Third Young Master's encampment.
Day had clearly broken, and yet the clouds hung so thick across the sky that rain still fell without cease, and the sun remained unseen.
And heavier even than that sullen weather, a dense and unsettled air hung over the camp.
Case Fifteen.
A physician dispatched from the Medical Bureau:
"It was a rain of blood."
He stared into empty air as he spoke, gesturing with growing passion.
"It was holy blood beyond any doubt. The tears of blood of the most merciful Medicine Fairy herself, flowing down upon the earth."
The light in his eyes as he recalled the dawn was closer to religious fervor than anything else.
The investigator glanced briefly at the Fairy Cult prayer beads hanging around the man's neck, then asked:
"So you felt a sacred presence in that blood rain?"
The physician nodded with absolute conviction.
"Of course I did. That was the Medicine Fairy's working, without question!"
Case Twenty-Three.
A mid-ranking officer of the government troops:
"Sacred, you said?"
Smoke from the expensive tobacco of a man who commanded a hundred soldiers filled the room.
"Bullshit."
He glared at the investigator with bloodshot eyes that had not known sleep.
"It was a curse."
"...A curse?"
"That's right. Those wretched commoners performed some grotesque rite and laid a curse upon this land."
The mid-ranking officer spun a costly-looking string of prayer beads without rest in one hand.
"There must have been a mass human sacrifice, no question."
In the other hand he held his tobacco, exhaling smoke in a steady stream.
"A human sacrifice? Did you actually witness it?"
"Are you doubting my word?!"
The mid-ranking officer shot to his feet.
"They were demons!"
A slick, feverish madness glinted in his eyes.
"They were thralls of the Demonic Cult, every last one of them!"
He overturned the desk.
"What is that look?! What the hell is that look?!"
War Department martial artists standing by rushed in at once and restrained him.
"You don't know how many of my men died here at their hands! You don't know!"
Even as he was dragged out, he roared at the top of his lungs.
"I can still hear the soldiers screaming! Mother! I want to go home! Please save me! Help me! I want to live! I want to live! I want to live—"
Case Forty-Nine.
A sentry martial artist from a forward observation post:
Even wrapped in a blanket, he trembled violently.
"I saw it…"
He looked like a man who had been pulled from a river in the dead of winter.
"What did you see?"
As if the sound of rain beyond the window grated on him, the martial artist clamped his hands over his ears and spoke.
"Inside the encirclement there was a monster that had woven darkness itself. It was small, like a boy, but its nails were sharp, and its teeth were sharper still."
There had been similar testimony before. The investigator flipped through his papers and asked:
"Was that the one called Amcheonjonza?"
"And above the buildings, dragons bled as they flew."
Mumbling with his ears still covered, the martial artist seemed not to hear the question at all.
"Dead giants marched until the ground shook, and a vast bird that spat lightning flew on six pairs of wings, and shapes with hundreds of eyes crawled across the earth. The dead sang songs for their own souls, and those I had killed returned to speak of my end."
The investigator swallowed dryly—and in that instant met the martial artist's unfocused gaze.
"And they foretold not only my end, but the end of us all."
"…."
Outside, lightning struck.
The gathered investigators sat in a circle.
"…About three-tenths of them were in poor condition."
"And about half of those are severe."
It was a situation without precedent.
Every gaze turned to the investigation chief, who had kept his silence until now.
The investigation chief—the Sixth Department Chief of the Law Protection Court—scratched his forehead and spoke with clear reluctance.
"Was there anyone who claimed not to have seen that rain of blood?"
"No one. Everyone we met said they saw it."
So. Everyone claimed to have watched blood rain fall from the sky?
The Sixth Department Chief sighed and spoke again.
"Fine. Set that aside for a moment. Was there any overlap in their testimony?"
"It's ambiguous."
"The name Amcheonjonza came up often, but…"
"As for physical descriptions—if that's what you'd call them—everyone seemed to have seen something different. The appearances they described didn't match."
The Sixth Department Chief pulled out the sketch materials tucked among the reports and leafed through them.
They were drawings made by facial-reconstruction specialists based on the testimony.
"…They really are all different."
There were monsters trailed by hundreds of will-o'-the-wisps, monsters with eight arms, some tall, some small, and some rendered simply as formless black darkness.
"…These aren't facial reconstructions. You could hang them as fantasy paintings of monsters and yao-guai and no one would blink."
He scratched his forehead again, then clamped both hands over his head and turned to those seated behind the table.
"Physicians—what do you make of this situation?"
The Sword Family fielded countless forces of every kind in actual combat, and it maintained specialized personnel for their mental health. The physicians the Sixth Department Chief was addressing were those people.
"It is rare, but…"
One of the physicians who had been holding his tongue spoke carefully.
"When extreme tension continues for days on end, there have been reported cases of collective hallucination, or of people tormented by auditory phantoms."
Another physician, after long thought, nodded in agreement.
"Indeed. Such cases do exist."
A third shook his head in rebuttal.
"Even so. There has never been a case of so many people at once experiencing hallucinations this vivid and this specific."
"And what of those who had only just been dispatched? They saw it as well, did they not? How do you account for them?"
"But then nothing explains—"
"Cases that cannot be explained require new study. They are not to be forced into existing ones."
Realizing they had been silent not for lack of words but because they had far too many, the Sixth Department Chief waved a hand.
"Enough! Enough!"
The physicians shut their mouths, looking displeased.
The Sixth Department Chief pointed to one of them and asked:
"Then how does one treat those in the worst condition?"
The indicated physician shrugged.
"There is no particularly special method."
The physician beside him took up the thread.
"Good food. Sufficient rest. A peaceful environment. Meditation to avoid stimulation and settle body and mind—that sort of thing."
"Those in bad shape need to be moved at once and isolated in a stable setting."
The Sixth Department Chief sighed.
"…Understood. I will report it upward."
He had clearly come here to investigate insubordination—and yet somehow found himself investigating an inexplicable incident that had nothing to do with his original charge.
Damn it. How the hell am I even supposed to handle this?
He turned his gaze to the still-raining window and took out a smoke.
…Thank heaven there's a separate overall commander for this mess.
One of the physicians asked him:
"And the investigation of the command staff…?"
Clearly, for the sake of research, the man wanted interviews with the officers as well.
Not a chance in hell…
The Sixth Department Chief smiled bitterly.
"The command staff hold different status. Their interviews are being conducted separately by the overall commander."
The overall field commander appointed by the Supreme Operations Committee through the War Department shifted his massive frame and straightened his posture.
Watching the legs of the chair beneath him spread with a scream of wood, the old man seated opposite him said:
"Elder Yeom. That chair looks ready to break."
"…."
Sword Peak Mountain Breaker—Yeom Gwak-chu.
Elder Yeom only turned through the documents arriving in real time and made no reply.
"I don't see the martial artists of your War Advisory Corps. Where have they gone?"
Elder Yeom answered shortly.
"All of them are on leave."
The old man shrugged.
"The world has grown soft. Leave, for crushing a single assassin band."
Before the man could launch into a back in my day, Elder Yeom opened his mouth.
"Sect Leader of Zhongnan."
The man seated before Elder Yeom was the sect leader of Zhongnan, which had become a subordinate branch of the Luoyang Sword Family.
He was the one who had taken the seat of sect leader in place of his martial brothers who had gone missing during the blood purge.
"Are you prepared to acknowledge the insubordination that occurred on site at the time?"
Elder Yeom's fierce, glaring eyes poured pressure down over the documents—an attitude that paid not the slightest heed to the fact that the other man was Zhongnan's sect leader and an elder of equal standing.
"…I know nothing of it."
The sect leader of Zhongnan drew a long pipe from his robes and lit it.
"I hear some of those so-called Beheading Unit men were found among the survivors? Ask them and you'll know, won't you?"
After a moment to order his thoughts, Elder Yeom spoke with blunt honesty.
"They are all saying the exact same thing."
A temporary prison under heavy security.
A young martial artist of the Northern Stream of Hengshan—found among the other survivors—faced the wall of his solitary cell.
No one was watching him. No one had ordered him. Yet he never broke the straight-backed kneeling posture he held, like a high monk performing wall-facing meditation.
Half his face was wrapped thickly in bandages where a long vertical gash had been treated.
"…Are you going to keep saying the same thing?"
The investigator beyond the iron bars asked with a sigh, and the young martial artist of the Northern Stream of Hengshan gave the same answer as always.
"We did what no human should do."
His voice was raw and ruined.
"So we received Heaven's punishment."
And the survivors in the other cells only repeated the same words.
"We have been given a chance to atone."
"Heaven's punishment. What a joke."
The sect leader of Zhongnan exhaled smoke and chuckled.
"If killing a few people earned Heaven's punishment, we would already be burning in hell, every inch of us."
Killing intent slicked the old man's eyes as he looked at Elder Yeom—killing intent that had accumulated naturally over decades of cutting down tens, hundreds of lives.
"Isn't that so, Elder Yeom?"
Elder Yeom, who had fought beside the sect leader of Zhongnan in the northern war and carved out brilliant merit by cutting down countless enemies, answered with a different question instead.
"What became of the rest of the Beheading Unit? And the sect leader of the Northern Stream of Hengshan?"
The sect leader of Zhongnan answered with easy calm.
"I hear not even their corpses were found? Then they all deserted, no doubt. It was a situation in which they would have had to take the blame in full."
As he said, not a single corpse from the Beheading Unit had been discovered inside the encirclement.
Yet nowhere in that thick cordon of surrounding forces could any trace or testimony of their escape be found either.
There were only signs of their entry—nothing more.
"Then…"
Elder Yeom turned a page with unruffled calm and moved to the next question.
"And the rain of blood? Did the Sect Leader of Zhongnan see it as well?"
The sect leader of Zhongnan snorted.
"Did I see it too, you ask? No. I saw no such thing."
The old man let smoke drift and asked Elder Yeom:
"Was there anyone among the command staff who claimed to have seen it?"
"…."
Elder Yeom closed his mouth.
Of all the command officers he had interviewed thus far, not one had claimed to have seen the rain of blood.
"Yes. Of course not. How could they?"
The sect leader of Zhongnan nodded to himself as if this matched his expectations perfectly, then glanced sidelong at Elder Yeom.
"Elder Yeom."
"I am listening. Speak."
The old man tapped ash onto the floor, packed fresh leaf into his pipe, and spoke as if in passing.
"Elder Yeom—since you were once my comrade-in-arms, I will speak with that bond in mind."
Meeting Elder Yeom's gaze, the old man lit his pipe with a spark of Triple Flame and continued.
"Do you really think some fool in the command staff would claim he watched a blood rain fall from the sky?"
Elder Yeom made a short sound of consideration, and the old man smiled bitterly.
"If you were branded a madman who sees hallucinations and hears phantom voices, do you think you could survive the political arena of the main family?"
"…."
At those words, Elder Yeom closed the documents as they were.
In that moment he understood why the command staff's testimony diverged so completely from everyone else's below them.
"So rather than that…"
The sect leader of Zhongnan leaned forward and asked:
"I hear this Amcheonjonza is connected to the First Young Master. Is that true?"
Elder Yeom answered without the slightest change of expression.
"Idle rumor."
Even so, the sect leader of Zhongnan pressed on relentlessly.
"Come now. Every place this Amcheonjonza has appeared so far matches every place the First Young Master has taken an interest in—and you still mean to play dumb?"
The old man exhaled smoke and lowered his voice further.
"There's talk everywhere that the First Young Master stands behind the Supreme Operations Committee's intervention in this affair as well. And you, who arrange dealings with the First Young Master, claim not to know?"
"I do not."
The sect leader of Zhongnan rose from his seat with a look of deflated boredom.
"Dull."
The old man shrugged.
"In any case, if one simply watches, one will see to whom the credit falls. We'll leave the interview here."
If the credit for resolving the disturbance went to the First Young Master—and if it became clear that the First Young Master had intervened this time as well—then the connection between Amcheonjonza and the First Young Master would only grow more distinct.
"…But."
Buckling his sword back to his waist as he turned to leave the tent, the old man looked back.
"Elder Yeom. Suppose, for a moment."
What now? Elder Yeom's gaze fixed on the sect leader of Zhongnan.
"If this Amcheonjonza truly is connected to the First Young Master, that would be a great advantage for him, would it not?"
Elder Yeom answered as if he had no idea what the man meant.
"Would it not already be fortunate if he were not simply denounced for colluding with a practitioner of heretical arts?"
"You know full well, so why say such a thing…"
The old man—sect leader of Zhongnan and elder of the Luoyang Sword Family—wore a meaningful look.
"If the existence that wiped out the Beheading Unit, including the Northern Stream of Hengshan, without leaving a trace has taken the First Young Master's hand—"
Earlier he had said they deserted; now he said they had been annihilated.
Ignoring Elder Yeom's scorching stare, the old man let smoke rise until it hazed the ceiling of the tent.
"—then would not everyone who faces the First Young Master from now on have to weigh and worry over this Amcheonjonza as a variable?"
Elder Yeom answered bluntly.
"Worrying over a connection that does not exist is nothing but a waste of time."
At that answer the old man laughed low.
"Yes. That is how you must answer."
He pushed open the tent flap, and the still-raining landscape of the encampment came into view.
The camp was a wreck from the rain that had continued since the downpour—yet of the rain of blood, not a single trace could be found.
Had the blood rain that everyone claimed to have seen been nothing but a phantom? Or had it been a truth that existed only for that one moment?
"…."
Through the tent entrance the old man had left open, Elder Yeom gazed at that landscape in silence.
My lord and Amcheonjonza…
What interrupted his brief musing was a white-haired old woman in a bamboo hat.
"I saw the sect leader of Zhongnan leaving just now, so I came—have I interrupted anything?"
Entering the tent and removing her bamboo hat, she revealed herself as Elder Yu of the Fourth Young Master's faction.
"Not at all, Elder Yu."
Elder Yeom bowed his head with strict courtesy to the senior woman in gratitude.
"Thanks to Elder Yu remaining to assist, the work has been progressing far more quickly."
"I'm glad to have been of help."
After that, Elder Yu fell silent. She toyed with the bamboo hat in her hands, then spoke again.
"Is there still no word of the First Young Master?"
Elder Yeom shook his head.
"None."
He added shortly:
"The last report was that his Ironclad Fortress had returned to Wongak Pavilion."