The Grand Ritual Begins
Luoyang Yeon Family, the Third Young Master's camp.
Military Department, reception room.
"Grand Strategist. I stake my life on this."
The lamplight wavered uneasily, casting the shadows of those gathered in the reception room into shapes that writhed like dancing demons.
"They—the Demonic Cult—"
The old man's ruined voice, seated opposite Grand Strategist Sima, sounded like a curse being intoned by some sorcerer.
"Without a doubt. Beyond any question. They exist here in Luoyang."
Behind the old man, warriors murmured true words without pause.
"Om—" "Om—"
Between the low, vibrating chant of the warriors, the old man's voice rang out with a chilling strangeness.
"Their stronghold is the very heart of this Luoyang—its deepest place."
The old man's skeletal hand unfurled with a dry crackle of bone.
"They are, without fail, in the Underground Great Waterway."
"Om—" "Om—"
The sound the warriors made was unmistakably a kind of blessing-mantra, a true word of power—yet somehow the slightly mismatched pitches of their low voices resonated with one another and produced only an ominous hum.
The strategists of the Third Young Master's Military Department standing behind Grand Strategist Sima swallowed dryly under a tension they could not name.
"Haa..."
And yet the man actually listening to all this—Grand Strategist Sima—looked thoroughly unimpressed.
"...Unit Leader. I am sick to death of that story."
He let out a long sigh and scrubbed a hand over his face.
"How many years has it been since the Demonic Cult was destroyed in the Ten-Thousand Great Mountains? And still you go on and on about this?"
The strategists who had been wound tight exchanged glances and shrugged.
Decades had passed since the Demonic Cult of the Ten-Thousand Great Mountains was put down—and since the Murim Alliance, stripped of its ultimate enemy, had itself collapsed in the aftermath.
But the old man whom Grand Strategist Sima called Unit Leader shook his head with iron certainty.
"What fell was the Ten-Thousand Great Mountains. Not the Demonic Cult."
As he moved his head, the countless earrings dangling from his ears swayed and clinked. Soul jade, pure silver, platinum, ghost iron—every one of them a talisman-earring fashioned from materials said among the common folk to drive away calamity and repel demonic evil.
"Their remnants—perhaps even the core figures including the Grand High Priest—are still alive. Waiting for the hour of their resurrection. Of that there can be no doubt...!"
The Unit Leader's hoarse voice swelled.
"Om—" "Om—"
The warriors' chanting rose with it; the strategists frowned and scratched their ears, pressed their palms to their temples against the oppressive bass.
"They will surely rise from the Underground Great Waterway and set Luoyang ablaze—"
"Enough!"
For once, Grand Strategist Sima lost his temper.
"Have you forgotten that a few years ago, thanks to the Unit Leader peddling that nonsense rumor, the main house itself formed a special investigation team and finished a full inquiry?!"
Spittle flew as he slammed the documents on the table.
"This is the investigation report from that time! Of course the Unit Leader knows it! How could you not?!"
He thrust a finger at the old man called Unit Leader.
"That investigation was conducted under the thorough supervision of you people—the Demon-Exterminating Unit!"
The Unit Leader of the Demon-Exterminating Unit fell silent, but Grand Strategist Sima pressed harder.
"Look! Look at these papers properly again!"
He flung the investigation report open with rough hands.
"From the shallowest sewers all the way down to the underground aquifers the world calls the Deep Layers of the Demon...!"
Page after page turned; maps of labyrinthine complexity unfurled one after another.
"Every last one of them is right here on these newly drawn maps from that time!"
After a long silence the Unit Leader of the Demon-Exterminating Unit spoke slowly.
"...The enemy—the Demonic Cult—has masters of delusion and dream-illusion. This, too, is nothing more than a product of their bewitchment—"
"Those so-called masters are all dead! Dead, I tell you!"
Grand Strategist Sima could no longer stay seated; he surged to his feet.
"That day! The day the Demonic Cult fell!"
His face flushed dark red as he roared.
"You and I both—we were in the vanguard of the subjugation force. We saw it with our own eyes, did we not?!"
He flung a hand toward the window.
"The ones driven back to the very mouth of the Ten-Thousand Great Mountains—every last one of them, without exception—chose 'mass suicide'!"
In Grand Strategist Sima's eyes the nightmare of that day burned vivid.
Corpses. Corpses, and more corpses.
Children, the aged, women, demonic practitioners—every believer of the cult, dead.
Thousands of bodies strewn across that mad place.
"In that place choked with the dead, our vanguard personally confirmed the corpses of every core figure of the Demonic Cult, including the Cult Leader himself!"
Countless battles had been fought on the road to the Ten-Thousand Great Mountains, yet in the end the final war the orthodox sects had imagined never came.
"You and I were both there, Unit Leader!"
His cry toward an old friend and comrade-in-arms was almost pleading.
"Do you not remember?!"
Perhaps that desperation reached him.
"..."
"Yes. That is so. That is how it was."
The Unit Leader of the Demon-Exterminating Unit—now grown old and weary alongside Grand Strategist Sima—slowly nodded.
"At last you rememb—!"
The Unit Leader cut across the Grand Strategist's rising relief.
"As I said, they are masters of delusion and dream-illusion. And more than that—their hideous ritual arts twist the very souls of men—"
"Ritual arts and ceremonies...?!"
Grand Strategist Sima clawed at his own hair.
"There were plenty of such tales at the time, but every one of them was nothing more than idle rumor spread by busybodies, was it not?!"
From beginning to end, the main force of the Demonic Cult had always been demonic practitioners who cultivated the powerful yet side-effect-ridden martial arts called demonic arts.
"When they began to lose ground on the front, they brought out demonic arts still more riddled with horrific side effects and underhanded shortcuts."
Grand Strategist Sima's voice rang through the reception room.
"But they were still martial arts!"
The Unit Leader of the Demon-Exterminating Unit shook his head.
"No. Not so. The demonic aura those newly appeared demonic practitioners carried in the war's final phase—"
"And that is why you still go around setting fires everywhere in the name of purification?!"
At the Grand Strategist's words the warriors behind the Unit Leader flinched.
"Do you even know how many of Luoyang's common people your Unit Leader's warriors have burned alive?!"
"A few days ago—was it not your people who set fire to the Valley of Sin as well?!"
The Unit Leader's face remained blank, but Grand Strategist Sima's sharp eyes did not miss the warriors' telltale start.
"...As I thought. It was you."
He covered his face with both hands.
"For heaven's sake, come to your senses. How far the once-honorable Demon-Exterminating Unit has fallen..."
At the mention of honor, the Unit Leader's blank mask sharpened into something cutting.
"Honor?"
In that instant the room seemed filled with naked blades.
"Does our lord, the Third Young Master, even know what honor is?"
"What is that supposed to—"
The Unit Leader's voice turned wintry.
"I know that in order to redevelop Luoyang's neglected districts, his personal warriors have used the name of our Demon-Exterminating Unit as a pretext to set fire to the slums and slaughter the poor."
This time the strategists of the Military Department flinched.
"And that apprentice warriors, hungry for merit, brand the poor as Demonic Cultists and butcher them without mercy?"
The gazes the warriors turned on those strategists were as sharp as drawn swords.
"We of the Demon-Exterminating Unit at least purify those against whom the 'suspicion' runs deep. We do not move for private greed."
The Demonic Cult had deceived and exploited the poor for the sake of faith.
The Demon-Exterminating Unit burned the suspicious poor for the sake of conviction.
And someone else, for the sake of ambition, had borrowed both their names to butcher the poor.
"...That is enough."
Grand Strategist Sima shook his head and raised a weary hand toward the exit.
"Leave."
"...Grand Strategist. The Demonic Cult is a matter of the utmost gravity."
"Unit Leader."
He dropped heavily back into his seat.
"Do you have any idea how desperately urgent the situation is right now in Luoyang—in this Luoyang Yeon Family?"
"I will hear your 'utmost gravity' another time. Unit Leader. Go."
The Unit Leader of the Demon-Exterminating Unit slowly rose on his aged legs.
"...My thanks for granting me your precious time, Grand Strategist."
"..."
"I will not see you out. Mind your step, Unit Leader."
"Om—"
The true words spilling from the mouths of the warriors who followed the Unit Leader gradually faded into the distance.
"...Ack?!"
Military Department personnel who met them in the corridor recoiled in shock and scrambled out of the way.
Some, at the mere sight of them, fled outright down the hall.
"Om—"
To suddenly come face to face with warriors draped in every kind of cheap talisman, their bodies covered in superstitious tattoos meant to ward off demons—
"Om—"
To suddenly meet, in a corridor, the very people seized by collective madness who went about burning the poor alive—
That reaction was only natural.
They left.
Even that ominous chanting could no longer be heard.
Yet the strategists standing behind Grand Strategist Sima still could find no words and only watched their superior's face.
The Demon-Exterminating Unit.
In every battle against the Demonic Cult they had always taken the vanguard; wherever the cult seethed anywhere in the Central Plains, they had stood at the very forefront.
"..."
"How did they become a group like that..."
Once more Grand Strategist Sima released a long breath and gestured to his subordinates.
"...Next. Where had we gotten in the report?"
"Ah—yes, sir."
There was no time to lend an ear to the ravings of a fallen order that had forgotten its former glory.
It was a night far too breathless for that.
"With The Agency struck so hard, we have intelligence that the Yeon blood relatives are holding a secret assembly somewhere in the main house. And..."
And this night still had no end in sight.
Valley of Sin.
Underground Great Waterway.
Splash. Splash.
Inside the lightless sewers, the sound of running feet kicking up foul water rang and rebounded through the narrow tunnels.
"Hah—hah—"
A bald-headed cadre of the Five Dragons Faction ran through the Underground Great Waterway empty-handed, without a weapon.
His fellow cadre—One-Eye—was already gone.
One-Eye's head had been taken in a single stroke by Tang Baek while the man was clearing the midstream.
If the pirate mercenaries had arrived even a little later, he too would have had his head collected like his comrade.
"Ghk—hhah—"
But as his internal energy began to fail, the effects of the Tang Family's tactical poison weapon—Faceless Lifeless—started to show.
Breath grew tighter and tighter in his throat.
"Gaaah—ghk—"
At last the man who had been forcing his internal energy upward tangled his own feet and crashed to the floor.
With a heavy splash he drove his head into the foul water, then flailed up in panic.
It was not the filth of the sewer—where every unclean thing in the world collected—that he feared.
It was the possibility that the Tang Family poison already scattered might have dissolved into that water.
"Hahk...!"
In truth, packs of rats slaughtered by the poison were already floating past on the current.
But once the torrent of foul water caught him, he was dragged helplessly into the whirl.
He thrashed hands and feet in every direction, trying not to swallow the water—yet only the corpses of rats swept along with him snagged against his fingers.
With his internal energy already scraping bottom, all he could do was drift where the current took him.
I can't die like this... not here...!
Perhaps his desperation reached the heavens.
Just before the thin thread of his breath snapped, he felt his body go weightless—
then plunged with a heavy plunk into something like a deep pool.
Fuck, fuck...!
He barely managed to crawl out.
He wanted to pour out a stream of curses—yet because of the poison, his throat had already begun to swell and constrict.
Only a thin, whistling rasp of air forced through a narrowing gap filled the silence.
Wheeze. Wheeze.
He shook his head hard.
From the moment he dragged himself free of the foul water, an unidentifiable singing had filled his ears—murmuring, weeping, laughter—voices of men and women, old and young, thronging from every side.
What—what the fuck...!
He lifted his head and scrubbed at his eyes.
Every capillary in them had already burst; the blisters swelling around the sockets left him half-blind—yet what he saw was unmistakable:
a vast cavern, and at its center a rising pillar of crimson flame, and around that flame figures in black robes slowly circling.
Is—is the poison finally reaching my brain...?
Fully poisoned, he no longer possessed the strength—or the means—to tell illusion from reality.
"Ghk—ghk—"
He had barely dragged himself onto solid ground when he felt consciousness slipping away; he let his face fall against the floor.
That the foul water he had fallen into was bright red with blood—
that every stream of foul water pouring into the cavern was blood—
that his own body was soaked in it—
he never knew.
Then an exalted voice reached his fading ears.
It sounded at once like dozens of people speaking the same words, and like the single resonant voice of one man.
That voice commanded:
"Activate the formation of the Cult. Thereby shall the enemy's walls crumble and their gates rot away."
"The Grand Ritual has begun."
One thing alone was certain.
That voice was profoundly twisted, and terribly impure.