Chapter 992: Live a Good Life (5)

Hyung Taejak’s heart dropped into his boots.

A Harmonization aura and a Transformation aura didn’t just feel different—right from the impact in your hands, it was a whole other world. The guy looked ridiculous, but the opponent was still a Transformation master.

And, on top of that, it was infuriating. Absurd.

Why the hell is someone at Transformation doing this kind of crap?!

But even so, nothing changed.

The iron mace was a weapon Qing’s homeland also called a “two-handed iron club”—a long handle with a huge lump of metal fixed to the end. It was devastating in the hands of a porter who didn’t know martial arts, or some low-level hack with a bit of strength—but that was all.

Real martial artists were people who could run internal energy and pack a thousand-pound force into even a thin little short sword.

An iron mace was heavy, so it exhausted you quickly, and its path was big and long—so distance, ironically, became its weakness. That was exactly why, among the countless martial arts of the rivers-and-lakes, it was rare to find any style that primarily used an iron mace.

Even among “offbeat” weapons, it wasn’t like a whip or iron claws—things you’d naturally have less experience against, and whose trajectories were harder to predict.

So from the moment this self-proclaimed “Li Kui”—this “Li Kui claimant”—showed up holding an iron mace, Hyung Taejak had naturally assumed, Yeah, some lunatic who doesn’t know what he’s doing is charging in.

*****

An iron mace’s reach went much farther than other weapons, but up close, you couldn’t swing it.

Once an enemy closed in and crushed the distance tight, the iron mace became nothing but a heavy iron bar—lopsided weight distribution, balance completely ruined.

That was why Li Kui was being driven back again and again.

CLANGCLANGCLANGCLANG—Li Kui’s hands, spread wide on the long shaft beneath the mace head, shot left and right, arms stretching out as he blocked the blade. His footwork was a constant backward retreat, frantic to bleed off the force traveling through the mace into his arms.

Hands and feet busy, truly busy.

Hyung Taejak poured his rage into it and kept thrusting his great blade forward.

A sharpness that didn’t suit the wolf-fang blade at all.

Trajectories that kept slashing in from diagonal left and right.

A dozen, twenty, thirty exchanges—collision sounds exploding like a row of blacksmiths hammering iron.

Then, in that instant—

Red killing light burst from Li Kui’s eyes.

Not literally. An illusion that felt real—an instant, spiritual afterimage born from the intense killing intent he unleashed.

Hyung Taejak flinched.

He forcibly yanked his blade back and stamped down hard, retreating two steps in a blink and opening the distance wide.

And then—

WHOOOOM!

The iron mace’s vicious metal head skimmed past his nose and rocketed up into the sky.

While blocking the blade strikes, he’d subtly lowered the mace head, lying in wait—then snapped it up in one savage rising blow.

The wind that scraped his face was murderous. If that had landed clean, it wouldn’t have ended with just a bone or two broken.

But he couldn’t restrain his killing intent and just blasted it out in the open—so no matter how powerful the strike was, Hyung Taejak could only notice it in advance.

Hah. Just a brat with high cultivation.

Hyung Taejak curled his lips into a satisfied smile.

Why did so many martial arts favor techniques that cut down straight—or diagonally—and thrust, and sweep left and right?

A rising strike from below... once it missed, your arm shot up, your torso leaned back, and at the same time your whole body opened wide.

A posture practically begging to get cut.

Especially if you hauled that heavy iron mace up with brute force—what, you wanted to treasure it as the last move of your life?

Hyung Taejak stamped down again.

His martial art was the Paejon Blade—footwork that could advance and retreat freely, fused with a fiercely aggressive, swift blade.

The moment he created distance and the rising iron mace grazed past him, he surged back in—

THUD!

The stomp rang out, and in a heartbeat he’d closed again. His blade tip drove toward Li Kui’s protruding belly fat—

The wolf-fang blade’s sharp point dug in—

And in that instant, a thick hand grabbed the blade.

Hyung Taejak’s smile deepened.

People said a weapon was a martial artist’s life, sure—but it wasn’t their actual life.

Dropping the iron mace in that split second and choosing to grab the blade instead... he could give that judgment a decent score.

But even if you wrapped your hands in aura—hand aura—there was no grabbing a blade from someone at the same realm with your bare hand.

That was only natural.

If you could stop sword aura or blade aura with hand aura—if you could block a blade with your hand—who would bother learning swordsmanship or blade arts and swinging steel around?

You might endure it for a brief moment, but in the end your fingers would be chopped clean off.

Even if you poured out internal energy and wrapped your hands in aura, the efficiency was completely different.

People usually said: if you wanted to catch sword aura or blade aura with bare hands, you needed to pour in more than five times the true energy.

But the amount a martial artist could output at once had limits. So a contest between hand aura and weapon aura couldn’t even become a proper test of strength.

That was why Hyung Taejak’s smile turned even more oily.

Any moment now, he’d slice off every one of that fatty’s swollen fingers, then spear that generous belly and check what was inside.

Check what was inside...

What should be inside...

...Huh?

The bluish-cold blade aura didn’t pierce the belly fat at all—instead, under the force of those two thick hands, the blade was being pushed back, slowly.

Because Li Kui—

Because Qing was the Minor Water Witch.

Was the Minor Water Demonic Art famous for nothing—one of the most infamous demonic arts in the world?

Since ancient times, countless martial artists had feared those pale, delicate hands. The way they snatched blades barehanded—GRAB, GRAB—and shattered them... those beautiful hands were the nightmare of everyone who held a sword.

But would Qing, after disguising herself as a fat man, really forget to add flesh to her hands?

She’d even planted coarse hair across the back of her hands and fingers, too. It was grotesque—and because the hands were fat as well, no one could look at them and think “Minor Water Demonic Art.”

“Eek! W-what sorcery is this?!”

“I’m Black Whirlwind Li Kui!”

“L-let go! Let go!”

“I’M BLACK WHIRLWIND!!”

Hyung Taejak shoved forward, pumping more and more aura into his blade with desperate effort.

But what the hell kind of strength was this? He’d guessed the raw power already when the iron mace had been whipping around—but now those trembling, fleshy hands were pushing the wolf-fang blade back.

And then—

SQUEEEEAK—his shoes slid and dragged across the dirt.

Hyung Taejak’s body was being forced backward.

“Damn it! GOLDEN HAWK DETACHMENT! What are you doing?! Kill this bastard—kill him!! Now!! Hurry!!”

Face beet-red, veins bulging, Hyung Taejak screamed for his subordinates.

“GOLDEN HAWK DETACHMENT! Chu-hyung! Jak-ya! Jo-jing! You bastards, what are you doing?! While I’ve got him pinned—hurry—”

CLANG!!

A chunk of metal suddenly came down and smashed into Hyung Taejak’s head with a thunderous impact.

So the shout that had been spilling out—calling out subordinate names one after another—ended as a single, strangled scream.

Because if a falling iron mace hit you square in the skull with a metal head the size of a man’s head, anyone would let out a short but powerful—

“AGH!”

Well, yeah.

If you throw something into the sky, it always comes down in the end.

Would Qing—sensitive to innocent bystanders getting hurt—really toss around something as heavy and dangerous as an iron mace without thinking?

*****

Still, Hyung Taejak was a Transformation master.

A Transformation master didn’t just drop dead in one hit because a lump of metal fell from dozens of zhang up and cracked the crown of his head.

He just... hurt. Extremely. Very. Really. Truly.

And he was so dazed he couldn’t get his head straight.

And if you can’t get your head straight in the middle of a fight?

Then you get hit. That’s all.

CLINK—Qing wrenched the great blade away and flung it to the ground, then drove a fist deep into Hyung Taejak’s abdomen—up to the depth of a whole fist.

Hyung Taejak folded like a bow.

His mouth gaped with a “Guh-wegh—” and stomach acid surged up in revolt, but it didn’t accomplish anything. It just spilled onto the ground.

Even so, the attempt itself was unforgivable.

You puking bastard—how dare you try to get your puke on me?

“Dirty bastard! Take this! Twin-Wings Palm! One-hundred-and-eight consecutive strikes! I’ll separate bone from flesh! One! Two! Three!”

In an instant, Qing’s palm multiplied into countless afterimages, her palm-shadows covering the entire space.

PABABABABAK—meat-pounding sounds crashed without pause.

And in the middle of this, among the spectators who had already gathered, the so-called “knowledgeable” ones lit up with excitement and started shouting!

“Twin-Wings Palm?! Are you talking about palm-shadows that stretch across the air?! Today I’ve seen another supreme divine art!”

“Truly bold and superb—what a magnificent ultimate technique!”

“Separating bone and flesh... could it be the principle of striking over a mountain to smash a cow—an internal-striking heavy-hand method?! Terrifying!”

In truth, Qing was just flinging her hands out however she wanted and slapping whatever she hit.

But once you were a martial artist at Transformation, even nonsense could look convincing. And those “knowledgeable” guys were mostly just pretending to know, anyway.

“Twenty-one! Twenty-four! Twenty-eight! How is it?! It’ll hurt down to your bones! This is the power of me—Black Whirlwind Wagyu!”

It wasn’t “Black Whirlwind Blade,” it was “Black Whirlwind Bandit.” And it wasn’t “Wagyu,” it was “Li Kui.” And in the first place, Li Kui’s epithet—Mount Liang’s Heavenly Kill Star—wasn’t the “Black Whirlwind Bandit” she’d been yelling either.

It was Black Whirlwind Li Kui.

But who cared if it was Li Kui or Wagyu?

What mattered was that the Golden Hawk Detachment was getting completely wrecked.

In this entire riot, the only one talking was Qing.

Shi Qian of the Earth-Quick Star—Choi Ri-ong—was swinging his hands around in silence, face clamped shut with self-loathing and humiliation, thinking, Did I really give up demonic arts and come out into the world for this?

The Golden Hawk Detachment was, in its own way, an elite battle unit of the Evil Path Alliance—a chosen force made up of peak and Harmonization martial artists under a Transformation unit commander.

But wasn’t Choi Ri-ong a Transformation martial artist himself?

The lower dantian he’d “emptied” when he abandoned the Purple-Spin Demonic Art—years had passed since then. And the Priestess Order’s highest dignity—the Priestess Supreme—had sent support to restore the martial arts of her closest aide. So the old talk about him “lacking internal energy” was nothing but the past.

And besides—

Was it only Choi Ri-ong?

Mu Hong of the Heavenly Dog Star—Yeom Hwiyoung—had a great humiliation with the Golden Hawk Detachment (more precisely, with the Golden Hawk Unit Commander): his name had been mocked.

How some idiot in this world could insult a Mystical Realm martial artist without any profit or interest at stake was beyond comprehension, but—

Yeom Hwiyoung’s—Mu Hong’s—fight existed in a realm spectators couldn’t understand at all.

One: Mu Hong walked forward and lazily tossed out a fist or a kick, however.

Two: The Golden Hawk Detachment charged in and threw themselves at him with everything they had.

Three: The Golden Hawk members who had “paid their taxes voluntarily” screamed and collapsed.

In practice, he was the one who made the atmosphere safe enough for the crowd to keep watching.

If blood had been spraying, guts spilling, heads bursting, the spectators would’ve panicked and fled. But people were just flopping over and shrieking like some sloppy, badly rehearsed routine—so the tension was kind of... gone.

That was why even the “knowledgeable” ones just pretended not to see Mu Hong’s fight.

If they tried to explain it, they had nothing to say. And it was too ridiculous to be the kind of scene where you could show off your insight.

Instead—

Right beside that, the fight that was actually worth watching was Lu Zhishen’s.

Heavenly Lonely Star Lu Zhishen—Heema—no matter what she did, she couldn’t hide that distinctive nasal voice, that voice dripping with cuteness and sexiness. So Qing had told her to just keep her mouth shut, and she’d kept it shut.

But—

WHUMP! WHOOOM!

She swung the enormous iron mace like she was whipping around a broom, and the sound of air being carved apart was brutally sharp.

The costume work was lazy as hell for “Lu Zhishen,” but the sheer boldness was truly Lu Zhishen itself.

“Look at that! That is the strength to uproot mountains and awe the world! It’s Lu Zhishen reborn—he swings an iron mace that must weigh twenty jin like it’s a twig!”

“Did you see just now? He struck with the shaft-end and smashed two enemies into each other—simple at a glance, but that must be the principle of grafting flowers onto a tree! A master who has grasped profound martial truth on top of monstrous strength—without question!”

As those commentators roared, each trying to brag that they were more insightful than the other—

Golden Hawk members kept pouring out, groaning and rolling on the ground.

“...One hundred and one! One hundred and four! One hundred—eight!!”

She’d skipped numbers here and there, but Qing finally forced the finish of the “Twin-Wings Palm one-hundred-and-eight consecutive strikes.”

CRACK!

With a painfully crisp sound, Hyung Taejak flew—

WHOOOM—

and then CRASHBANG, slammed into the transport carriage and tumbled hard.

Now the only ones left standing in the middle were the four of “New Greenwood,” the authentic bandits.

And even then, aside from Heema—panting, out of breath—none of them looked particularly tired.

Dragging the iron mace along the ground, Qing walked to the carriage—toward Hyung Taejak, who’d barely managed to sit up with his back against a wheel.

“Kgh... you... Even so, you dare... touch the Evil Path Thug—kgh—the Grand Coalition and think you’ll get away with it...?”

Hyung Taejak could still talk because Qing had hit him gently.

Amazingly, fists—unlike swords or blades—hurt less if you get hit gently! Shocking fact!

Though the way he insisted on calling the Evil Path Alliance by its full long name did make Qing think, I should’ve hit him harder.

Now Qing finally put on a serious face.

Given everything she’d said and done so far, you might wonder if “serious” could even stick to her.

But the fight had settled into a lull, and every eye was already fixed on the “New Greenwood” chief.

“...Get some rest.”

With a strangely pleasant, deep bass voice, Black Whirlwind Wagyu of New Greenwood—Qing—lifted the iron mace up in one hand.