Chapter 174: Running Rampant (8)

“...Why did you do it?”

Her voice trembled.

Flame-Saber Lord Ak Jupae’s son.

Ak Seowon was someone Zhuge Yeon knew as well.

Of course he was.

That was precisely why she had been so stunned when Eunsong said that he and Soyak had killed Ak Seowon.

Stunned was hardly the word.

She had been shocked.

The Ak Seowon she remembered had never seemed like such an evil man.

He had simply been loyal...

The moment her thoughts reached that point, Zhuge Yeon understood why he had died.

He had been too “loyal.”

He must have carried out every order he was given with absolute fidelity.

Without a single exception. Without a shred of mercy. He would have killed them all and burned everything.

Which meant...

Soyak’s family as well.

“You figured it out?”

“...He was there, wasn’t he? When the Flower-Halo Sect was burned.”

“He was. Soyak survived what happened afterward... and was eventually sold as a servant to the Gwak Household.”

“...No....”

Namgung Byeok and Jang Yul remained silent.

There was nothing they could add.

Unlike them, Zhuge Yeon had never personally lost someone to the Sword Sovereign.

But she understood their convictions and their resentment deeply.

“And when I went to bring Soyak back, I stopped at a village. The entire place had been burned. An old man there told me his son... belonged to the Reverse Heaven Society.”

“...Then why burn the entire village?”

“They said collective punishment had been instituted starting this year. Apparently the excuse was that people kept rising up and talking about revenge.”

Even Zhuge Yeon fell silent.

They had burned an entire village under collective punishment...

It was madness.

No matter how high the order came from, few people could actually carry something like that out.

Killing innocent people was not easy.

Of course, the more one killed, the more numb one became...

But growing numb to murder and growing numb to murdering the innocent were two different things.

“...There were still survivors in the village. People who had escaped the flames.”

“...Surely not.”

“After we put out the fire, he came back to kill them again. The villagers were so terrified that they insisted they had to die. They must have known he was capable of inflicting something even worse than death.”

Zhuge Yeon lowered her head grimly.

Blood seeped from the lip she had bitten through.

The Ak Seowon she remembered had not been that kind of man...

Though admittedly, she had known him when they were both younger.

“...He changed a lot.”

“The world? Or the Young Master Ak you knew?”

“Both. And everything keeps getting more horrible.”

“Is that not why we gathered here?”

Eunsong slowly drained the tea in his cup.

Then he set it down in silence.

His expression was no better than hers.

Those memories...

were not easy to revisit.

“...How did it feel?”

“What do you mean?”

“You could call it... half of your revenge, couldn’t you?”

Eunsong blamed Zhuge Yeon, but the death of the woman he loved had not been her fault alone.

Flame-Saber Lord Ak Jupae had borne an even greater share of the blame.

That was why Eunsong had named him an enemy alongside the Sword Sovereign.

And now Eunsong, too, had killed someone precious to Ak Jupae.

Together with Soyak.

In a sense, both of them had achieved half their revenge.

And because of it, Ak Jupae had been broken.

If he had thrown himself into the Demonic Cult, there was little else to call it.

All the more so if he had accepted Demonic Energy.

And if he had already fallen so far as to become a Demonic Beast...

Then perhaps they could cut off his head, hang it in the marketplace as a warning, heap every disgrace upon his name, and call their revenge complete.

Of course, as long as the Sword Sovereign lived, the same thing would happen again.

There would be a second Ak Jupae, a third Ak Jupae.

A second Ak Seowon, and a third.

And in turn, there would be a second and third Eunsong.

A second and third Soyak.

More victims.

More people left behind to suffer.

The power to prevent tragedy from reaching them personally?

They both possessed more than enough of that.

Eunsong was one of Mount Hua’s finest talents, and Soyak was a master standing at the very edge of Transcendent Apex.

But the strength of an “individual” would always be crushed beneath that of a greater individual or a larger organization.

To prevent such tragedies at their root...

they would ultimately have to overturn the entire board.

“...But something doesn’t add up.”

Zhuge Yeon steadied herself and went back over Eunsong’s story.

It did not take long to find the inconsistency.

If Soyak and Eunsong had truly been the ones to finish Ak Seowon...

“...Then he must have died to a Mount Hua sword art. Why did Uncle Ak go all the way to the Demonic Cult? He isn’t someone who would fail to recognize it.”

Ak Jupae might have been more accomplished in practical martial skill than in martial theory.

Even so, the martial arts of the Nine Great Sects and Five Great Households each possessed unmistakable characteristics.

Mount Hua’s sword arts in particular were known for pursuing exquisite subtlety through a blend of illusion and speed.

At one point, they had even been mistaken for the martial arts of an unorthodox faction rather than a righteous sect.

There was no reason Ak Jupae should have failed to infer Mount Hua’s sword from the wounds left on the corpse.

No matter how little interest he had in martial theory, he had spent a lifetime watching the sword arts of the Nine Great Sects and Five Great Households.

The traces left by a Mount Hua sword path should have been familiar to him.

So why had he failed to identify the killer?

More than that, why was he still wandering in ignorance, unable even to determine what sword art had been used?

“Because it was a sword art he had never seen before.”

“...What?”

“The sword art Soyak learned has not appeared in the world for a very long time. The last time may well have been when the Great Grand Master first created it.”

Zhuge Yeon blinked.

That certainly could explain it.

It was true that Mount Hua’s martial arts were characterized by the exquisite interplay of illusion and speed...

But that did not mean every sword art sharing those qualities had originated from Mount Hua.

If it had been the Ninefold Heaven Plum Sword or the Flower-Haze Sword, their forms were well known enough to identify.

But what if it was something else?

What if the characteristics were merely similar, while the sword path inferred from the wounds belonged to an art no one had ever seen before?

“Then there’s one more thing I want to ask.”

“Go ahead.”

The tea had gone cold.

No steam rose from it anymore.

Zhuge Yeon drained the cold tea in a single gulp.

It was hardly proper etiquette, but no one there was inclined to criticize her, nor was this the moment for such concerns.

Jang Yul simply refilled her cup with freshly brewed tea.

“...Do you really think the Demonic Cult has information about the Falling Plum Elegy?”

It was a question Eunsong had considered as well.

Did the Demonic Cult truly know anything about the Falling Plum Elegy?

Or had they merely recognized Ak Jupae’s thirst for revenge and used it to lure him into the cult?

Even without any information, it would have been a worthwhile gamble for them.

Ak Jupae had little choice but to accept.

And even if he realized the deception after accepting Demonic Energy, there would be nothing he could do.

It could not be undone.

Once Demonic Energy burrowed into the dantian, removing it was extraordinarily difficult.

And if its source was a piece of the Heavenly Demon that one had willingly taken into oneself...

There would be no coming back.

Ever.

The fragment of the Heavenly Demon lodged within his body would remain coiled there, becoming a conduit to the Malevolent God and drawing in Demonic Energy.

That energy would gradually stain his dantian and all of his internal energy...

Until eventually, he became a man moved entirely by Demonic Energy.

One did not practice Demonic Arts and thereby gain Demonic Energy.

One accepted Demonic Energy first, and only then became capable of learning Demonic Arts.

And martial arts powered by Demonic Energy circulating through the body in a grand circulation that ran against heaven...

Even if they had not originally been Demonic Arts, they would eventually be twisted and distorted into something no different from them.

The Flame-Saber Lord’s Flame-Dragon Saber Canon was probably no exception.

If he had truly accepted a piece of the Heavenly Demon, then by now...

he had long since crossed the point of no return.

“...Whether they have it or not probably doesn’t matter.”

“...I suppose not.”

“They most likely don’t. But if they do....”

The Heavenly Demon was ancient.

The Heavenly Demon Divine Cult was no young organization either. If anything, it was older than many of the Nine Great Sects.

That was the nature of religion.

Kill it, erase it, burn it away—it would still rise again and spread among people like a plague.

If so...

There was a chance that records from the era of Mount Hua’s founding had survived as well.

It was an absurdly remote possibility, but...

What if the Great Grand Master had created the Harmonization Scripture and the Falling Plum Elegy, and then used them to fight the Demonic Cult?

...There may still be a record of it.

A record several centuries old at the very least.

The Demonic Cult would surely have tried to learn and catalogue every martial art in the Central Plains.

Their goal, after all, was to invade the Central Plains and bring all under heaven beneath their feet.

The maxim that one who knew both enemy and self would not be defeated had endured because it was true.

Then would the Demonic Cult really have preserved records of some unknown Mount Hua martial art they had glimpsed centuries ago...

and continued studying it all this time?

By ordinary reasoning, no.

But they were fanatics who had always defied ordinary reason.

“If they do...?”

A sense of foreboding crept over Zhuge Yeon as she looked up at Eunsong.

Eunsong narrowed his eyes and finished his thought.

“...Then Flame-Saber Lord Ak Jupae will come to Mount Hua.”

“...Ah.”