No, Stop, Don't Do It
The round of sixteen of the Dragon-Phoenix Tournament—the stage known, in so many words, as the Wall of Wailing.
The Murim Alliance itself pinned epithets bearing the words Dragon and Phoenix upon the top eight finishers, and so most of the entrants had been carving each other up half to death for precisely that prize.
But then, it wasn't called the Wall of Wailing for nothing...
"Whew... it's going to be a bloodbath today."
"The Mad Blood Ghost and the Sword Queen's disciple, huh... who's got it in your book?"
"Going by what they've shown us so far, I'd have to say the Mad Blood Ghost. The Sword Queen's disciple hasn't shown a single thing that makes you go damn, you know?"
"Fair enough, I was thinking the same... but me, I've got my money on that young heroine the Sword Queen trained with her own two hands."
"Huh?"
Hoo—
"Kindly make way. Standing about blocking the road like that makes it terribly hard to pass."
At the voice asking them to step aside, the chattering man turned—and found a woman who looked to be around thirty, smiling serenely beside a young girl.
The man rolled his eyes in their sockets, still facing backward, then came to his senses with a jolt and scrambled briskly out of the way.
"Y-yes... yes, ma'am!!!"
It had been nearly twenty years since the Sword Queen shut herself away in Potaam.
So naturally, the man had no idea whose face he was looking at—but the girl standing behind her was someone he'd watched on the sparring stage only yesterday, and the moment his thoughts slid down the correct track, his body moved before he could help it.
Only after the two had brushed past and put some distance between them did he turn to his friend.
"I... I didn't just badmouth her, did I?"
"Thankfully, no?"
"Oof... my heart nearly fell out of my chest. But this crazy bastard—changing his story just to save his own skin?"
"Well, somebody has to be alive to hold your funeral rites."
Leaving the two men to their bickering behind her, the Sword Queen walked on. Having heard the earlier remarks, she stroked the head of her disciple—who had grown rather dejected—and spoke.
"Harin, it is only that you have yet to meet an opponent worthy of your full strength. Let words like those wash right past you."
Of course, she had only arrived in Henan yesterday, and so had seen none of her disciple's bouts...
And Harin, who in yesterday's match had fought her very hardest against a martial artist of some minor sect, wore an expression grown gloomier still.
Blithely unaware of her disciple's heart, the Sword Queen kept doling out comfort that only backfired as she led the girl off somewhere.
When they reached their destination, she introduced her to an old acquaintance she had not laid eyes on in an age.
"It has been a long time, senior."
"Oh... what brings the Guardian of Potaam all the way out here?"
"I came to cheer on the disciple I took in during my twilight years. Well... circumstances being what they were, we only arrived yesterday."
"You, of all people, taking on a disciple... you do live long enough to see anything."
Unlike the bustling crowds elsewhere, the Sword Saint was sitting in a quiet spot sharing a simple meal with a girl, and the Sword Queen answered him.
"I find it stranger that you took a disciple, senior. With eyes as high as yours..."
"It took me growing this old to learn that life rarely flows as simply as we expect."
At the wistful look in his eyes and his chuckling laugh, the Sword Queen quietly took her disciple's hand and said to him...
"Harin, pay your respects."
"I am honored to meet you, Elder Sword Saint! I am Harin, my master's direct disciple."
"Yes... a pleasure to meet you. Haemu, you ought to greet her as well."
"Hello!"
At that spectacularly unfriendly greeting, the Sword Queen's brow gave a small twitch, and the Sword Saint laughed it off.
"My disciple is still a touch short on common sense here and there. There's no malice in her, so don't hold it against her. Hahahaha..."
..........
Before long, the two giants of the Orthodox factions were trading pleasantries, watching their disciples chatter away in the distance with fond expressions.
"By the way, this Harin of yours—who's the child's next opponent?"
"I hear it's the current Dang Clan Head's youngest son."
"Hehehe..."
The Sword Saint chuckled for a spell, then beckoned the two youngsters over...
"You there! Come here a moment!"
"You called?"
Then he addressed the Sword Queen's disciple, who came clattering over at a dead run.
"You're to cross blades with the Dang Clan's little one shortly, I hear?"
"Yes..."
"Then throw yourself into it with everything you have. You'll likely learn a great deal from it."
At that, the Sword Queen knitted her brows.
"Senior... the way you put it, anyone would think you expect Harin to lose?"
"Hahahaha..."
"Senior!!!"
As the Sword Saint answered her shouting with nothing but laughter...
For my master's honor, I absolutely cannot make a sorry spectacle of myself...
Harin was steeling her resolve with all her heart.
Of course, that resolve shattered the instant she stepped onto the stage and laid eyes on the hands of that bastard called the Young Clan Head of the Dang Clan.....
Flickering flames of dark crimson. Crowds crying out in startled voices around the stage. The Sword Queen, crushing the fan in her hand, eyes blown wide. The Sword Saint beside her, chuckling away. And the Sword Queen's disciple, standing before me, frozen stiff as a mouse before a cat.
With sinister dark-red hard qi wreathing both my hands, I was closing in on her, unhurried.
Thump— thump— thump— thump—
Regrettably, though, the distance between us refused to shrink...
Hoo— hoo—
For every step I took, she trembled and shuffled backward, dragging her own feet two steps at a time, and at the sight I muttered to myself.
Is it really that frightening?
It only looked a little... a teensy, tiny bit sinister, that was all. It was perfectly ordinary hard qi...
And for all the world it resembled blazing fire, but in truth it was closer to water than to flame...
Meaning to put the poor trembling thing at ease, I kept advancing on her, one slow step at a time, smile fixed in place.
"Senior! Does that make any sense!!!"
The Sword Queen was shouting at the Sword Saint, who was busy stuffing snacks into his mouth beside her.
"I didn't believe my own eyes at first either, I'll admit. But after a few more looks, certainty set in..."
He chewed down the rest of what was in his mouth before going on.
"A whelp not yet of age, already in the Transcendent Realm... isn't that a talent for the record books?"
"Hoh....."
"Well now, he's your clan's Young Clan Head. What's your take?"
"Huh? Ahahaha....."
As they say, the hopelessly unlucky break their noses even falling backward...
Dang Giyeong had come purely to root for his young master, yet somehow he'd been wedged between two Profound Realm masters, and there he stood wearing the single most uncomfortable smile in the world.
The Sword Queen pressed a hand to her head at the dizzying spectacle and groaned for a moment before finding her voice again...
"Setting aside the Transcendent Realm at his age, what on earth is that sinister energy? Anyone would take him for a man who'd rolled about a battlefield for years."
"I can't say I follow it either... If he were a man past forty, it might make some manner of sense. But how does a boy still wet behind the ears..."
Peak Realm and Transcendent Realm, sword qi and hard qi...
The difference was simpler than one might think, and vaster.
Sword qi was, in the end, nothing more than qi skillfully worked...
Depending on which mental discipline one had trained or what constitution one carried, it differed not one whit from a lightsaber playing at color swaps.
Hard qi, however, ran on a wholly different track from the start.
Merely withstanding its output demanded command of the middle dantian as the bare minimum condition...
And because the road a man had lived and the road he pursued were smelted into it as imagery, his hard qi alone told you roughly what manner of human being he was.
Which made the hard qi of that thug—threatening Harin with that wicked smile—so deeply, grotesquely wrong.
He was the treasured son of a prestigious Orthodox clan.
A boy, no less, who had been written off as utterly lacking in martial talent.
So how was that same boy wreathed in sinister hard qi of a kind you'd expect only from men who had clawed their way through blood tribulations beyond counting?
As that red-eyed fiend, whose mere look seemed engineered to crawl up a viewer's spine, advanced slowly on her disciple, the Sword Queen very nearly broke ranks and rushed out—but...
"Why would you shove yourself into a children's squabble? Just sit back and enjoy the show."
With the Sword Saint somehow already gripping her arm and holding her in place, she could only stand there chewing on her lips.
Clunk—
Before she knew it, Harin had been driven to the very edge of the stage...
Arms raised, wearing my kindest smile, I walked toward the girl who had nowhere left to retreat.
"No! Stop!! Don't do it!!!"
But whether she simply had no appreciation for my kindly heart, she went on shrieking at me with her sword clenched tight...
"F-fo..."
"You're not thinking of forfeiting, are you? And here I thought you were the direct disciple the Sword Queen trained personally... Yesterday Hwangbo Segwang came at me to the very last, half corpse that he was. Surely the Sword Queen's own disciple wouldn't dream of forfeiting."
When my sneering tone wrung a face on the verge of tears out of her, I pressed on.
"If you've no intention of smearing filth across your master's face, then come at me. A martial artist who draws a sword charges with the resolve to die... If you can't manage even that, then lay the sword down for good and never touch one again."
At that doomed bastard's mouth technique, Harin inwardly...
You... son of a bitch worse than a dog.....
...cursed him up one side and down the other, but what could she do?
It was she, after all, who stood there trembling, cowed by the momentum of that dog of a man.
Harin looked once at the grimly smiling face of that bastard, and once at her master—watching from the side, lips worrying themselves raw—then made up her mind and steadied her sword.
The sword art her master had taught her first—the one to be drawn only should she ever meet a demon—unleashed upon a man more demonic than any Demon Cultist...
Clang—
The effect was negligible...
No... it merely looked that way.....
Eyes brimming as though tears might spill at any moment, I snatched the sword she swung clean out of the air and crushed it in my bare hand...
Hmm... a demon-breaking art, is it. I had better be careful with this.....
My hand prickled as if I'd taken a static shock, and I kept up the act, thinking all the while, careful not to let the slightest flicker show.
The moment I realized the Taoists' signature demon-breaking arts worked on me rather better than expected, the curses came spilling out inside.
Ha... fuck. And here I kept telling myself surely not.....
Of course, Taoist specialty or not, the art itself carrying that power was extremely narrow in scope, so I doubted I'd be eating it all that often...
But this was, unmistakably, Dang Muyeong's body—no lower dantian to speak of, and it wasn't my original body either...
I was busy untangling the knot of my thoughts all over again.
"Hyah!!!"
Thwack—
Not, of course, before driving a straight punch into the face of one Harin, who came charging at me a second time with the sword broken down to a third of its length still clutched in her hand.
"D-Dang Muyeong, wins!!!"
The man presiding over the match, for reasons no one could fathom, declared my victory looking more stunned than he had been when I first bared my hard qi—more stunned, in fact, than at the moment my fist sank into her face.
"Wh...WHOOOAAAAH!!!!!"
Ignoring the cheers that arrived a full beat late, I came down off the stage with a perfectly blank face.
Flinch—
- My, my. Come see me in a little while, won't you.
Listening, all the while, to a transmitted voice that arrived wrapped in killing intent.