The Life-Taking Ghost Sword
That man had no name.
No.
To be precise—
He once had one, but he had forgotten it.
He retained the faint memory that, as a child, his family had called him something. Yet before he could even learn to remember his own name, those family members lost their lives to pirates.
And those pirates, as far as he could recall, had sold him off as a slave to another pirate ship.
"You there! A mere oarsman, and you've already awakened inner power?!"
The one who took him in while he was growing up as a slave at the oars was the captain of that pirate ship. The pirate captain taught him the basics of a heart method and swordsmanship.
"Completely obsessed with the sword, aren't you? From this day on, you're Sword Idiot!"
From that day forward, he became Sword Idiot.
"……."
The fact that he almost never spoke was another thing the pirate captain liked. For a time, that twisted favor continued.
"Excellent! Sword Idiot, you're the next captain!"
When the pirate captain expressed his satisfaction at Sword Idiot's steadily accumulating martial skill—
"Ghk…!"
—he stabbed the pirate captain.
"Y-you crazy bastard, after all I've done for you…!"
Sword Idiot slowly drove his blade into the eyeball of the pirate captain, who was screaming with his chest split open.
"Aaaargh—!"
Sword Idiot could not remember his own name. But he had never forgotten that it was pirates who had slaughtered his entire family. That, at least, he never forgot.
"Sword Idiot's gone mad!"
"Kill him! Kill him!"
At first the pirates charged with eyes rolled back and blades drawn; later they could not even meet his gaze and wrung their hands instead.
"P-please spare us!"
"We'll make you captain!"
But Sword Idiot pursued and killed even the last man who leapt into the sea.
"……."
After detonating the gunpowder and blowing the pirate ship apart, he loaded his wounded body onto a small boat and drifted aimlessly. He had no idea of any road that might lead him home.
"Huh? This one's still alive."
"Looks like he's packing several swords, too."
The ones who hauled him up were, by coincidence, yet another band of pirates. Accepting the bare minimum of water they offered while crowing about having found a slave, he recovered his strength and waited.
"Hey, Mute. See that over there?"
In the meantime, Sword Idiot's name had become Mute.
"……."
The pirate pointed mockingly into the distance, chains still on the captive.
"That dock way off yonder is the slave market in Shanghai where you're gonna be sold."
Mute asked,
"…That place."
It had been so long since he last used his voice that it sounded grotesque even to himself.
"Wh-what?! Fuck?! You weren't a mute?!"
"Is that place called Shanghai part of Zhongyuan?"
The pirate said that it was—and those became his last words.
Having sunk yet another pirate ship, the Mute swam naked to shore. And then he hunted pirates. That was all he remembered how to do.
He did not know which pirate ship had raided his village, nor which pirate had killed his family. But he remembered with absolute certainty that pirates had killed them, and that was enough.
"I-it's the mad water ghost!"
In time his name became Mad Water Ghost, then—
"The Pirate Butcher!"
—Pirate Butcher, and sometimes—
"Young hero, you are the benefactor of our village!"
—he was called a hero, or a chivalrous wanderer.
"……."
Time flowed on. He felt no guilt about killing people. He had forgotten any fear that he himself might die. He neither assigned special meaning to life nor attached any particular value to living.
Kill the Buddha if you meet the Buddha; kill the Patriarch if you meet the Patriarch; kill father and mother if you meet them.
If you meet a ghost, cut down the ghost. If you meet a Buddha, cut down the Buddha. That was all.
And then one day, after single-handedly butchering a pirate band that had followed a river deep into the interior of Zhongyuan, he was slowly dying on the riverbank.
"Hoh…! Not a man at all—more like a single sword given human form."
The one who found him and saved his life was a young man who introduced himself as the Family Head of the Luoyang Sword House.
"Will you come with me?"
Why he accepted the offer in that moment, he could not clearly remember. Perhaps he was simply sick of pirates who reappeared without end no matter how many he killed; perhaps it was mere curiosity or a whim.
What was certain was this: in the end he offered his sword to the man who was both Family Head of the Luoyang Sword House and the greatest swordsman under heaven—and in return received a moniker.
The moniker of Life-Taking Ghost Sword.
"Do you have no need of a new name?"
He had shaken his head at his lord.
"I already have a name. I simply cannot remember it."
"Loose! Loose the arrows, damn you!"
The rebels atop the inner walls hurriedly drew their bows and loosed, but it was useless.
The black ox's hide was like black iron, flinging the arrowheads aside. The yellow ox's muscles were like steel cables, snapping the shafts and scattering them.
"Aaaargh!"
As the two spirit beasts rampaged madly and tore the battle lines apart, more allies died to their own blind arrows than to the enemy.
"Cease fire! Cease fir—!"
KRA-BOOM!
One officer frantically waving both hands upward to signal a halt was rammed by a spirit beast's head and sent flying through the air.
"……!"
The sight of a fully armored man soaring as if launched by a catapult was utterly unreal. Yet no one could afford to gape.
"Form a spear wall!"
"Trust the man beside you and never fall back!"
True to their origins in the Moyong Family, the great house of the Northern Grand Generals, they smoothly rotated the vanguard and raised a high spear wall in an instant.
But the rampage was not limited to the ironclad fortress drawn by the two spirit beasts.
"Ha…! Do you take this body for some scarecrow merely occupying the driver's seat?!"
A snort of laughter, and then—
Flash.
Sword drawn and, in the same breath, a single stroke.
If lightning itself were to strike horizontally, it would look like this.
"……!"
The keenly raised spear wall was bisected by that one stroke. The rebels felt a sudden emptiness and looked down at their severed spear shafts—
Asura's Five Aggregates Extremes
One Soul Usurps Life
KRAK-CRUNCH!
The Life-Taking Ghost Sword's blade carved the surroundings into pieces and turned the enemy's blood into a sea; the rebels who had formed the spear wall crumbled like a sandcastle before a wave.
"Sword company!"
The spear-unit leader who had lost every last subordinate in an instant screamed like a man possessed.
"What in the hell is our own sword company doi—?!"
He never finished the sentence.
The spirit beasts spun in place, and the ironclad fortress of unimaginable weight simply rolled over him.
CRUNCH!
Over the corpse that left neither proper scream nor shape, the sword company warriors he had so desperately awaited came charging in.
[Create openings with feints! Suppress the beasts first and pin them down!]
Even if the man held a sword in each hand, an opponent did not have only two hands, did he?
"These bastards?!"
Yet it did not take long for them to realize how wrong that judgment was.
"Do you dare ignore this body?!"
Asura's Five Aggregates Extremes
Asura Sword Draw
"Igi-eogeom…!"
"Watch ou—!"
Too late. The remaining three swords launched as one.
Which came first—the sword cries that shook the heavens, or the sword strikes that rocked the earth?
In an instant the entire area was shredded by the five swords in all: Rupa, Vedana, Samjna, Samskara, and Vijnana.
True to the form's name—an Asura with many arms drawing every blade at once!
"Gyaaah—!"
"Ghk!"
As arms and legs scattered and torsos flew in pieces, someone screamed the moniker like a curse.
"I-it's the Life-Taking Ghost Sword!"
"Ha…!"
A smile touched the blood-spattered face of Tal-myeong-gwi-geom.
"So you've finally recognized this body?"
Dozens of sword-company warriors vaulted over their comrades' corpses and charged like arrows.
"Don't give him range!"
"Close in and block his sight!"
Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang!
With a storm of metal, Tal-myeong-gwi-geom turned aside more than ten exchanges in a single breath from atop the cart and sneered at them.
"You're already too late."
"What…?!"
The warriors who grasped the meaning spun around on pure reflex—and saw Moyong Un-jeong's forces pouring into the space that Tal-myeong-gwi-geom and the spirit beasts had carved open.
"Charge!"
"Kill every last rebel!"
"……!"
Both forces compressed into the center of the inner courtyard and locked together in a savage, shoving melee.
"Push them back!"
A desperate last stand with their backs to the water. With the towering outer walls of the Moyong Family behind them, the rebels had nowhere to retreat and resisted with suicidal ferocity.
"Drive them in!"
Those who meant to crush the rebellion and forge a new Moyong Family pressed forward with equal desperation.
In the midst of that ferocious exchange of blows, the gaze of Guest Reception Hall Master Moyong Su-ryeon—once the leader of a sword company himself—was fixed on a single point.
So that is…!
At the very tip of the allied line—
"Hryaaaaah!"
—five swords invisible to the eye whipped in every direction. Ankles no one could spare a thought for in the crush of mass combat were sheared off in showers. Swords that erupted from the rear where allies should have been punched through the backs of skulls and flashed onward.
"Hwaaaaah!"
Every time he roared, the entire battle line advanced a step with him.
"Secure space for a sword formation!"
"Impossible!"
Even the sword companies, crushed from front, rear, left, and right, could not display their true skill in this press—yet—
"Uwaaaah!"
One step.
"Hwaah!"
And another step.
Tal-myeong-gwi-geom was shoving the front line forward alone like a tireless giant.
So that is the Life-Taking Ghost Sword…!
In the past, how often had his name been driven into their ears like nails? As martial artists of the same era, how often had they been measured against him?
Yet seeing him with their own eyes today—
Not a single one of those rumors was exaggerated…!
Paradoxically, Yeom Gwak-chu—who had risen as a hero of the Northern War under the moniker Geomak Pasan, Sword Peak Shattering Mountain—was famous for his single-combat prowess after defeating Geomgun of Huashan. Conversely, Tal-myeong-gwi-geom, who had made his name during the Southern Campaign of the Luoyang Sword House's Grand Elder, was famous for mass combat.
Everyone present was learning the reason with their own bodies.
"Hryaaaaaaaaah!"
At that moment—
Swish!
—two men struck without the slightest sound of approach while Tal-myeong-gwi-geom was once more shoving the line forward. They were the captains of two sword companies.
KRAK!
Barely a finger's breadth. Tal-myeong-gwi-geom stopped the two blades that had nearly pierced both his eyes with Igi-eogeom.
"Hey."
Through the crossed, quivering swords he bared his teeth and grinned boldly at the captains.
"No confidence unless it's an ambush?"