As If My Heart Would Burst
At some point the sun had climbed into the sky and driven the darkness off. The rain that had been sheeting down over Nanman like the heavens themselves had gone mad had stopped without a sound, and the sky above was clear of even a single cloud—as if it had never rained at all.
Come daybreak, Dang Giyeong set off for Sichuan.
"Honestly, I'm still not sure this is the right thing to do."
Whining right up to the very end, naturally...
"I'm fine, so just go. And come back quick, if you can manage it."
"Young Master..."
"I keep telling you, I'm not going to die. Quit worrying and get moving already."
"Yes. Understood."
Only when I shoved him along by the back did he finally kick off the ground, lightfoot technique flashing, and vanish toward Sichuan.
Just how long had it been since I'd been left all alone like this...
"Whew..."
I settled onto a fallen tree and began taking slow inventory of my body.
Tracing every vessel down to the last capillary, I found myself freshly impressed by how much firmer this carcass of mine had grown over the past few months...
Could I manage it at this level? Feels like I could... and also like I couldn't...
Honestly, realms like the Transcendent Realm or the Profound Realm had never meant much to me.
It was by surmounting that wall that martial artists could wield sword qi or give their inner visions form—whereas for me, the question had always been simply how much strain this body could endure.
Though depending on how you looked at it, there was hardly any difference...
And it made sense: that one could only truly give qi solid form upon reaching the Peak Realm meant, in other words, that only a body of that caliber could survive the attempt.
Gang qi—qi honed a second time after being made solid—demanded the middle dantian just to bear its own output.
No different for the Profound Realm, where one presses one's inner vision onto the world itself...
"If I push just a little past my limit, I think it might work..."
That vile jellyfish came with physical immunity as a standard feature, and on top of that seemed immune to magic as well—which meant I, too, had to land a strike capable of punching through the both of them...
"Would one arm be enough? Should I be braced to lose a leg as well...?"
Those kinds of strikes were less techniques than authorities—powers in the truest sense—and for me as I stood now, writing off a limb was a given.
The strain had to be funneled into one side of my body as much as possible.
Not that I could carelessly burn one off and then come waltzing home later, an empty sleeve dangling at my side.
No... more than that, what would happen if yours truly, freshly one-armed, went and regenerated the arm? However brilliant one's martial potential, an arm that vanished and then—ta-da—came back was a problem of an entirely different dimension.
"Ei-yat... chyah. I'll see it through for as long as it works, and if it doesn't, well—can't be helped."
With my mind made up, I rose from the tree and headed straight for the jellyfish.
"Tch... it's growing even faster than I thought."
The sight of the thing, subtly larger than it had been a single night ago, wrung a cluck of the tongue right out of me. Just how hard had it been sucking away at its straws for its size to visibly change in so short a span...
Maybe it simply had excellent absorption efficiency—but wasn't that just a bit too unfair? Mikhail and I both seemed to need an entire age of the world to recover our strength; if this thing alone got handed a burning event, that was straight-up broken.
Before the sight of it—countless tentacle bundles plugged into the crowns of people's heads, guzzling down something pale and vast—I raised my right hand.
"About time I verified this."
Shhk— With those words as a send-off, I drew my left fingernail across my right palm, and blood came welling out in a thin, unbroken line...
A wretched sword took shape above my hand—its steel stained so deep that no one could say whether it was red to begin with, or merely rusted red.
Blade in hand, I ambled toward one of the people snared in the tentacles...
Swish— The instant I severed the tentacle, I hoisted the man over my shoulder and hurriedly fell back.
The jellyfish, which had been enjoying its meal in the kindly sunlight, seemed to take genuine offense at having it snatched away mid-bite; it instantly began lashing its bundles of tentacles in every direction.
But I have no taste for tentacle material, so I was already long gone into the distance...
BAM— BAM— KRRRKA-BOOM—
From far off, the thing hammered the ground and the trees in a full-blown tantrum, and I spat a curse at the spectacle.
"Shit, come on... If it's got physical immunity, shouldn't it be unable to use physical attacks too? That's how it's supposed to work, isn't it? God, this game's balance is absolute dogshit."
Unmoved by my glowing review, the jellyfish went right on raging, and I slapped the cheeks of the man I'd snatched away, keeping time with its booming.
Thud— smack— thud— smack— THUD— crack—
Even after working him over on and off for a good long while, the gentleman showed no intention whatsoever of waking—nothing but a slack, gaping mouth and a face emptied of everything behind it.
His dilated pupils looked to have lost their reason entirely, and he didn't so much as flinch at pain...
"He's done. Cooked through..."
At the very least, there was no way for me to bring someone back out of that state.
Turning a living person into a corpse was my field of expertise. Restoring a living corpse, however, was a subject on which I remained a rank amateur...
I laid him out on the ground and was looking back toward the jellyfish when—
"Ghhhak—!!!"
"What the..."
I had gone to all the trouble of hauling him out of there, and now he stopped breathing without warning, leaving behind nothing but a final strangled sound.
No seizure-like last thrash, nothing. Dead before I could so much as try my hand at saving him.
"Ha... I really am losing my mind."
With things turning out this way, I regretted that I wouldn't be keeping my promise to that kid...
"Well. Nothing to be done about it now, is there."
Wearing an exhausted expression, I kneaded my right hand as I spoke.
"If they're dying anyway, I might as well start by draining their batteries down to zero."
Storm clouds were a common sight in the jungles of Nanman. Bright sunshine could give way to a sudden deluge without the slightest warning.
But clouds like these—even people born and raised in Nanman, who had lived there all their lives, had never once laid eyes on them...
"Palace Lord! Outside—"
"I see it. It feels as though the day the world ends has finally come."
A blood-red storm cloud... just what on earth was that supposed to mean?
The Palace Lord spoke as he rubbed a neck still marked with vivid red handprints.
"It seems the monsters have finally come to grips with one another. Order everyone to stay inside the palace. No one leaves."
Palace it was not—it was closer to a stockaded mountain village—but a lockdown fell over the Beast Palace all the same.
From the crosswise gash in my palm, blood was spilling out like a waterfall.
Stream after stream gushing from a human hand—a sight so strange that anyone who happened upon it would have cried sorcery long before they thought of hemorrhage.
And those streams, pouring like a breached dam, bent not toward the earth but upward, into the sky...
Kwak— I clenched my fist to stop the bleeding and looked up at the heavens.
It was a sky that seemed ready to burst into a torrential downpour at any moment. Only the color of the clouds was a little wrong...
A dark-crimson dome, nothing like the red of a dying sunset, exuded pure, dripping menace...
At my quietly dropped words, red raindrops began to fall.
"Now this is the real Sky-Filling Flower Rain... and it doesn't even cost me a single needle..."
Shaaaaaaa—
Black-red raindrops fell, melting everything they touched on the way down—and in all that pouring rain, the only thing left untouched was the jellyfish.
Every captive caught beneath it had melted into those crimson streams and mingled together, and I watched the end of it all with a perfectly blank face.
The world had turned red, and drifting through it, white and alien, was the jellyfish—bobbing, aimless...
Wooooooom—
Lonely at being the only white thing left in the world, perhaps, or perhaps simply furious—the creature hummed low and dyed its body red.
It looked for all the world as though it had been slathered in chili paste, and a hollow laugh slipped out of me.
"Ha... right. Seasoned through and through—now all that's left is to carve it up."
Swinging the blade loose and easy at my side, I started toward it.
Dang Giyeong was tearing through the jungle at a speed that seemed less running than flight.
In a rough straight line, the Beast Palace to Sichuan was a good three thousand li—nearly a thousand miles.
With the thought that if he ran a thousand desperate li a day he could arrive within three days, he ran as though to burst his own heart.
He knew his young master was no longer a young master. He knew perfectly well, too, that the thing wearing that face was a monster, not a man.
No command compelling his body had even been issued.
Then why was he tearing along like this, at death's door, desperate beyond all sense?
Giyeong shoved the cluttered thoughts to the far corner of his mind and leapt on, thighs threatening to split.
"Hahh... hahh..."
Was there anyone in this world who simply did not die? Well—strictly speaking, he wasn't human anymore himself, but...
In any case, whatever incomprehensible feats of strength the young master might display, wasn't he still that frail boy who fell short of even a Profound Realm master?
And besides, even those Profound Realm warriors said to have surpassed the very limits of the human species—every last one of them met death in the end.
He had distinctly set out at dawn, watching the sun rise; somewhere in the running it slipped past the edge of the sky and night came down. Since becoming a monster himself, his night eyes had sharpened enormously, so he somehow kept the road ahead in view—and then the sun began climbing once more.
Two full days of running himself ragged, and before he knew it, he had reached Yunnan.
"Hahh..... hup..."
He broke his stride for a moment and drank a mouthful of water at a well, and the mad pounding of his heartbeat felt loud enough to be ringing in his ears.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud—
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud—
Countless bundles of tentacles were laying waste to everything around me.
No matter how many I cut, there seemed to be no end to them. Was the thing regenerating what I severed—or had I simply managed to slice away so little of it so far...
That this black-red blade, said to cleave anything in the world in two, was making good on its name—was that, if nothing else, some small mercy?
I had been swinging my arm for a long, long while and was drawing a single steadying breath when—
SHREEEEEEE—
A tentacle came flying in; out of pure habit I threw up a wall of blood, but...
"Kghh..."
That insanely cheap attack passed straight through my barrier—and then, in an entirely different sense, passed straight through my shoulder.
I slashed it off in haste, plucked out what remained, and my shoulder returned to unblemished skin, as if it had never been pierced at all.
A war of immunity against regeneration. So long as I held a means of punching through immunity, I would be the one still standing in the end...
With nothing more than that thought, I kept hacking away, my head emptied as far as it would go.
Trickle... trickle...
The trouble was, my right arm—refusing even to regenerate—was slowly being worn down into a shredded rag...
"Somebody, please, save me!!!"
"Monster... just die!!!"
Those damned voices...
"Ah... fuck."
Those damned voices from deep in my memory were scattering my mind to pieces.