Half-Immortal, Half-Demon
Indeed, as befitting the Jegal Family.
True to those who made it their clan’s trade to scheme against others, seize their profits, and pile up grudges, they had prepared for every contingency. The directional explosive mechanism installed to kill whoever sat across from them—an assassin, should one appear—possessed truly astonishing power.
And yet.
“It was you.”
The voice that spilled from the armored command carriage—now alight and belching black smoke—was met by a frantic scream.
“What are you all doing?!”
Clutching his torn shoulder, Jegal Dae-gunsa shrieked in a fit.
“Kill him!”
Before that cry had even finished ringing out—
“Hup…!”
—the elite warriors of the Namgung Family stationed near the carriage were already moving, their forms gliding as if on ice.
They trod the mud, knee-deep and churned into a quagmire, as lightly as feathers. Raising the swords they had already drawn before their faces, they shattered the rain into spray and charged. Their blades struck the carriage like bolts of lightning.
Tang!
One sword scattered the flames clinging to the carriage and tore through its thick armor. The instant it buried itself—
“Haah…!”
“Heup!”
—with shouted battle cries, a continuous barrage of steel followed.
Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tang!
The warriors’ swords punched through the carriage one after another, without regard for front or back, left or right. Every direction was pierced as one, without a single separate order, as if they shared a single body. At a glance it was plain how thoroughly these elite warriors had trained together in ordinary times.
“Dogs of the Namgung Family.”
Yet the voice that answered no longer came from inside the carriage.
“You wear the martial robes of the Sword House. You devour its wealth and its grain.”
That voice alone—thick as molten metal boiling over—made the warriors feel their qi and blood reverse course.
“And yet you never once gave it your loyalty. Parasites.”
Jegal Dae-gunsa had been sealing his own pressure points to stop the bleeding from his ruined shoulder. All that effort was instantly undone.
Puh-hwak!
“Kraaah—!”
His shaken qi and blood forced a fresh torrent of scarlet from the wound.
“I-it’s Sound Arts!”
He cried out in horror.
“All of you—protect your ears and upper dantian with inner power!”
The warriors reflexively drew up their internal energy to shield themselves. It was useless.
“Pointless.”
Yeon So-hyeon had already watched more than once as warriors of considerable rank tried to defend against a demonic voice with mere inner power. He would not have left the technique unrefined.
“What you must protect is not the empty shell of flesh.”
The pure demonic qi of the Jeam Jincheon Scripture, woven into the subtle mysteries of Sound Arts, struck at once. It shook the warriors’ minds, set their dantians trembling, and sent even their finest meridians boiling.
“But the souls stuffed full of your sins.”
“Keheok—!”
“Keuk!”
From the lowest realm upward, they spat mouthfuls of black, dead blood in streams.
“The enemy is above!”
At someone’s shout they jerked their heads up—just as lightning flashed.
A dark form floating in midair became a silent black thunderbolt that split the space and drove itself into the earth.
The first victim of that black lightning never even managed a scream. It was the kind of end that might befall a man struck by an iron mace dropped from the heavens by a giant standing above the clouds.
Kwaaang!
The ground around the point of impact was blasted outward in an instant, leaving a perfect void of empty space. A body of mere flesh and blood burst into thousands—tens of thousands—of scraps of meat.
“That martial art—?!”
Even if their origins lay with the Namgung Family, men who had once belonged to the Sword House could not fail to recognize that distinctive technique.
“The Mountain-Cleaving Sword Grasp—?!”
The eyes of those who recognized it flew wide enough to tear.
Mountain-Cleaving Sword Grasp. A exclusive secret art. Super-Heavy Sword. Mountain-Breaking Force.
“Do not panic!”
Jegal Dae-gunsa’s scream-like voice rolled across the gathering.
“That man is the Eldest Young Master!”
At those words—
“You…!”
—one warrior planted his feet on the heaving, wave-like ground and steadied himself. With animal instinct he thrust his sword straight into that empty space.
“Die—!”
Namgung Family. Boundless Firmament Sword Art. First Form: Rock-Sword Shatter.
The Namgung sword that crushes boulders and pierces cliffs. In that moment the secret sword art of the Namgung Family unfolded through a blade clearly marked with the crest of the Luoyang Sword House.
“The swords of the Sword House were never permitted to the likes of you.”
In the warrior’s bulging eyes, the image burned itself clear: his own blade, racing forward like a ray of light, its qi white-hot and fully loaded—
Kadeudeudeuk!
—meeting the Sword-Admonition Finger formed by the opponent’s pale fingertips, and crumbling from the tip.
This martial art…?!
Secret Meaning. Twin Thunders of the Moving Wheel. Phoenix-Rousing Strike.
The exclusive, overwhelming secret art once displayed in the Elder Council Hall by the Head of the Elder Council—the man called the Small Giant. That was the last sight the warrior ever saw.
Taang—!
The Sword-Admonition Finger, enlarged to fill his vision, pierced his skull, exploded it, and passed through.
Before the blood could even fountain from the headless body with a wet puh-hwak—
“Hap—!”
“Heup—!”
—two warriors reversed the swords still embedded in the carriage and launched a drawing technique.
Namgung Family. Boundless Firmament Sword Art. Third Form: Bursting Draw.
Like a master calligrapher lifting his brush and sweeping a single powerful character in one breath, their pure-white blades shot from left and right, slicing through the falling raindrops and the man between them.
Ttang!
…
Just as their breathing had been one body, the sound of their swords snapping like millet stalks also came as one.
And in the hollow instant they saw those broken blades floating uselessly in the air, the Sword-Admonition Fingers taken in both of Yeon So-hyeon’s hands harvested their heads.
Qi-Dazing Ghost-Slaying. The head-collector of the Tea Horse Road. The dual chain-scythe arts of Dang Baek, Blood Wind Emissary of the Tang Family—now unfolded through the Eldest Young Master Yeon So-hyeon’s twin Sword-Admonition Fingers.
Their heads were severed with surgical precision and hung an inch from their necks when the next warriors arrived, shouting unintelligible battle cries.
Four warriors sealed the four directions—east, west, south, north—and crashed in like a whirlwind in a swastika-shaped advanced joint assault formation.
It was an attack no one short of a three-headed, six-armed demon could have answered all at once.
“Heh heh….”
A low laugh, like molten metal bubbling, rose. The two broken blades that had belonged to the warriors cut in half a moment earlier—still floating in the air—suddenly writhed along eerie trajectories and shot through the empty space like arrows.
…
Keueok!
Death-cries rang out short and sharp. Two warriors died instantly, half their bodies shorn away along with the hearts that had still been beating. With a harsh metallic kakang! the remaining two hastily reclaimed the swords that had been flicked away by Yeon So-hyeon’s twin fingers—only to topple backward with neat holes punched through their philtra and a soft pushut.
“Hahahahahaha!”
The same blades that had taken their comrades’ lives had returned and claimed theirs as well.
“Careful—!”
“Igi-eogeom—Flying Sword—!”
Shouts of horror burst from the mouths of those still charging, but Yeon So-hyeon—having already broken the enemy’s sharp vanguard—had no intention of allowing them the first move any longer.
His wild laughter cut off cold. From his lips fell the verdict.
Asura Five-Yin Apex
Secret Meaning — Five Aggregates Creation
Soft overcomes hard. One broken blade gently seized a warrior’s sword and severed all four limbs.
Hard cuts soft. The other shattered a second warrior’s blade and cleaved his body clean in two.
And the swords those men dropped with their death-cries rose once more into the air, each carrying a different martial principle, each shredding a different foe—then the next, and the next after that.
With every life extinguished, another sword was added. With every sword added, more death-cries rang out.
That was the ultimate essence of the transcendent sword art called Igi-eogeom—the Flying Sword.
“I-impossible….”
At first Jegal Dae-gunsa had believed the Eldest Young Master had come alone, luring him into an assassination. He had moved desperately to escape that place. And once he had somehow fled the carriage and his warriors had begun to move, he had judged that the scales had tipped in his favor.
“This cannot be…!”
He had been wrong.
Swaaaa—.
There was no longer even the sound of sword meeting Sword-Admonition Finger. No longer the voices of warriors screaming. Only the rain, loud and relentless, blanketing every direction.
Hot steam rose from the pieces of corpses that received the cold rain. Swords of the Sword House, every last one broken, were planted in each body like gravestones. The occasional lightning served as the chanting that offered them rest.
“Zhongyuan?!”
Jegal Dae-gunsa’s convulsed shout rang lonely across the highland.
“Is Zhongyuan not finished yet?!”
He hurled to the ground the signal flare he had bitten open and launched with one hand. The ground was already littered with the empty shells of every flare he and his subordinates had fired.
His forces had been deployed across a wide area for the ambush meant to kill the Eldest Young Master. Before they could regroup at the signal, the main camp itself had been annihilated. The right men were not in the right places. The dozens of masters Jegal Dae-gunsa had hastily summoned were all now worthless.
“Damn it…!”
Ignoring the vision blurring from blood loss, he was pulling the remaining flares from their case when—
“Is the thrashing finished?”
—that strange voice arrived. Footsteps, slow and deliberate, approached.
Thud. Thud.
“Damn it! Damn it!”
He bit another flare and fired it, but blood loss and panic made the trajectory skew. It simply slammed into the ground and glowed weakly.
Step. Step.
The phosphorus in the flare ignited and lit the approaching figure.
“Hiiik…?!”
From the yellow talismans plastered thick across a white mask, he felt an instinctive, indescribable terror.
“S-so that was it! Eldest Young Master, you…!”
Even with his reason tangled by demonic qi, he finally grasped the identity of the man before him.
“You were that monster they call Amcheonjonja—the Venerable of the Dark Heaven…!”
In that instant he understood why the Eldest Young Master had acted with such unshakable composure during their conversation—the reason for that incomprehensible leisure.
“No.”
Unexpectedly, the white mask—sealed with talismans written in mirror-vermilion cinnabar—shook its head.
“I am the Eldest Young Master, Yeon So-hyeon.”
Even as he was being chewed alive inside the demonic qi, Jegal Dae-gunsa could not grasp the meaning of those words.
They meant that the Eldest Young Master Yeon So-hyeon had begun, at last, to control even a portion of the demonic qi of the eternal monster—the Jeam Jincheon Scripture—as truly his own.
Yeon So-hyeon himself named this new state thus:
Half-Immortal, Half-Demon
When Yeon So-hyeon lifted the mask away, the talismans that had served their purpose melted and burned all at once amid ominous smoke.
“I will be there soon.”
Gazing at the sky clearing from the north, Yeon So-hyeon wiped the thin trail of blood from the corner of his mouth and spoke.
“…Un-jeong.”
His figure melted into the retreating shadows of the clouds and vanished.
“Over there…!”
All that remained for Jegal Dae-gunsa’s forces, arriving too late, was the scene of carnage left behind by one born under the destiny of the Heavenly Killing Star.