Into the Fragrance of the Sword (4)
The old man was still standing on that hill.
“Black Water Sword is dead.”
Even after hearing the report that his subordinate had died, the old man did not so much as blink.
“The losses are even greater this time. Over sixty men were killed, and around thirty were seriously wounded.”
“And them?”
“Their losses were minimal.”
The old man spoke with a look of disbelief.
“Was the Heavenly Palace Corps this strong? In the first place, I should not have recruited you lot. I should have recruited them instead.”
The man lowered his head deeply, his expression filled with shame. Truly, no one had expected such a result. It felt as if they had been bewitched by ghosts.
On top of that, he had never imagined that even their leader, Black Water Sword, would be defeated. He knew better than anyone just how strong Black Water Sword was.
“Was Black Water Sword killed by Jong Cheon-Rak?”
“No.”
“No?”
“While he was fighting Jong Cheon-Rak, someone else cut off his head.”
“Fool!”
The old man frowned. He almost asked who that someone else was, then stopped himself. He figured it had to be one of those Heavenly Palace Corps bastards anyway.
“Where are they now?”
“They entered the Sword Fragrance Forest. It seems they are heading toward the Life-and-Death Tower.”
The old man’s gaze turned toward a distant place that could not be seen.
“We have no choice. Send him in.”
From the old man’s tone and expression, it was clear that he was not particularly pleased with that decision.
“Understood.”
After his subordinate withdrew, the old man spoke as if talking to himself.
“So in the end, it finishes in such an ugly way.”
Seeing the Life-and-Death Tower again after so long stirred new emotions in me.
The Blood Sky Cult had three sacred sites in total. If someone who did not know heard the words “sacred site,” they might think they were incredibly holy places, but reality was not like that.
They were strategic strongholds built under the name of sacred sites.
Each sacred site had its own characteristics, and the sacred site here in the Sword Fragrance Forest was a place where scholarly research related to formations and mechanisms was carried out.
It was here that I fought a bloody battle against the Sword Demon. The Sword Demon was the master of this Life-and-Death Tower, and he was the guardian demon-man who protected the sacred site.
I fought him in this very clearing where I now stood, exchanging three hundred and ninety-six moves before I defeated him. Among true experts, four hundred or so exchanges could be considered not very long.
But during those four hundred or so exchanges, I almost died twice. Only later, when I looked back on that fight, did I understand why I had struggled so much.
It was because of greed.
At the time, my pride in my swordsmanship pierced the heavens, and I had wanted to defeat the Sword Demon, who was said to possess the strongest swordsmanship after the Demonic Cult Leader, as quickly as possible.
What if I could kill him within one hundred exchanges?
I had wanted to gain the reputation that even the Sword Demon of the Demonic Cult was nothing more than a hundred-exchange opponent to me. That greed nearly killed me, and it made the fight even longer.
If I had not been greedy, I think I could have defeated him within two hundred exchanges instead. Because of that fight, I never again became greedy about defeating an opponent quickly.
How many exchanges it takes to win is not important at all. Winning is the most important thing, and next comes how one wins. That was the lesson I properly learned.
It felt as if my fight with that Sword Demon had happened only yesterday.
One martial artist from the Heavenly Palace Corps walked over and carefully knocked on the door.
But no one came out from inside.
“The door is open.”
The martial artists entered and examined the interior.
A short while later, the martial artists who had gone inside came back out.
“It is completely empty.”
Jong Cheon-Rak’s disappointment was obvious. Perhaps he had not abandoned hope until the very end.
“The person we were supposed to contact seems to have already been dragged away by them.”
He probably wanted to say that.
But his instincts must also have been telling him that this was not the case.
I understood his confusion. He was someone who had devoted his entire life in loyalty to the Grand Martial Alliance and the Jianghu. How could he accept the fact that the Alliance Lord was trying to eliminate him?
The entire group went inside together.
Judging by the dust piled up everywhere, there was no doubt that the place had been empty for a long time.
Jong Cheon-Rak finally changed his mind.
“We will rest for a while before leaving.”
He had not decided whether he should really return to the Alliance, or if not, where he should go instead.
Except for the martial artists standing guard, everyone scattered here and there and sat down to rest. They were all exhausted from the consecutive battles.
Gal Sa-Ryang also looked very tired. Since he had not learned Martial Arts, he must have been the most exhausted.
“Please rest here for a while.”
After guiding him to one wall, I cleared away the dust on the floor and laid out some clothing for him.
“Thank you.”
“It is nothing.”
“You seem to come alive instead when things become like this.”
“Does it look that way?”
Gal Sa-Ryang nodded.
“The former Alliance Lord was like you. When everyone else was struggling, exhausted, and trembling all over in fear, the Alliance Lord would instead overflow with strength. That sight gave us great strength.”
Was I really like that?
After spending so many long years at war, life on the battlefield must have become ingrained in my body.
Come to think of it, for a while after the war ended, I actually felt empty. Of course, that emptiness was an emotion I could not tell anyone about. I thought I might be called a war maniac.
What about now? I think perhaps I might honestly tell Gwangdu about such feelings.
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When I escaped my thoughts and raised my head, Gal Sa-Ryang had already fallen asleep while leaning against the wall.
I quietly rose from my seat so that he would not wake.
Then I checked the wounds of the injured once more. Since we had used very good medicine, their condition was favorable. The Heavenly Palace Corps martial artists who had been looking after their comrades bowed their heads to me in gratitude.
I, too, bowed politely to them, then went up to the upper floor.
As I slowly climbed the stairs, I remembered going up here after defeating the Sword Demon. While my subordinates searched this place, I had gone up to the very top floor.
When I entered the room at the top, that day came vividly back to me. Rather than joy at having defeated the Sword Demon, I had been seized by the thought of why it had taken nearly four hundred exchanges, and I had stood by that window, staring endlessly outside.
Thinking about it now, it was truly pathetic. At that time, I was the Strongest Under Heaven and the Murim Alliance Lord. To others, I would have looked almost perfect. Through my past self, I realized that the foolishness humans commit has nothing to do with their position.
After looking out the window for a while, I looked around the room this time. Back then, I had been so lost in thought that I had not even considered properly looking around the room.
The sword stand placed to one side looked ordinary on the surface, but it had been made by a highly skilled craftsman. The bed and the tea table were the same.
Because there had been nothing particularly special, I had simply thought of it as some kind of attic, but now that I looked at it, I wondered whether this might have been the Sword Demon’s room.
Once I thought of it that way, the room looked different. I could sense his neat and clean personality.
At that moment, something caught my eye.
A small lock was hanging on the handle of the wardrobe. It was not locking the wardrobe; it was simply a lock hanging from the handle like an ornament.
There were characters written on the lock. Looking closely, I saw that it was made so that one could rotate a device made of toothed wheels and combine characters.
Click, click-click.
I turned it this way and that. It seemed to be a lock that would only open if the characters were matched exactly. There were so many characters that combining them properly seemed impossible.
Since it was hanging there as a decoration anyway, there was no need to match the password.
I was about to leave, but then I turned back.
Suddenly, I noticed certain characters on the wheels.
Ghost. Eight.
The moment I saw those two characters that happened to catch my eye, one word surfaced in my mind.
Ghost Demon Eight Forms.
It was the name of the Sword Demon’s final technique. When I turned the wheels, the remaining characters were also among the ones that could be combined.
The moment I aligned the characters to form Ghost Demon Eight Forms.
Clank.
The wall on the opposite side of the wardrobe opened.
I was startled. I had matched the lock on the wardrobe, yet the wall on the opposite side opened? I had not imagined there would be such an incredible device here.
It was a very small room. Inside, there was a small writing desk, and on top of it lay one thick book.
Ghost Gate Evasion Treatise.
When I opened it, it was a book about the formations that had been researched here.
“Ah, so this was hidden here.”
In the past, I had not discovered this.
I knew that it was because of me.
That day, I had been on edge because I had failed to kill the Sword Demon quickly. My subordinates had been watching my mood, and naturally, the search of this seventh floor, where I had been staying, had not been carried out thoroughly.
Then again, even if it had been carried out properly, finding this secret room would have been impossible.
The fact that the Sword Demon’s final technique was called Ghost Demon Eight Forms was something only I knew, from the words he had spoken before he died.
How could a martial artist searching the place have known that technique? Moreover, the wardrobe was not locked, and since this lock was hanging like a decoration, they probably turned it once or twice and simply passed it by.
My eyes trembled as I looked down at the Ghost Gate Evasion Treatise.
This was a book containing the essence of the Blood Sky Cult’s knowledge on formations. It was a book that would be of great help in the grand undertaking ahead.
After carefully placing the book inside my clothes, I turned the lock randomly again.
Then the secret room door closed.
I left the room and went down to the first floor.
As I slowly descended, a strange sense of discomfort swept over me. I felt an ominous feeling I could not quite identify.
Indeed, everyone on the first floor had collapsed.
And to one side, a man was trying to take off the pants of an unconscious Heavenly Palace Corps martial artist.
My expression wrinkled on its own. He was a man who indulged in male-male lust. On top of that, he was extremely ugly. I truly was not someone who judged people by appearance, but when it came to this man, the only word I could think of to describe him was ugly.
He stopped the hand that had been taking off the pants and looked at me.
“Huh? Why are you fine?”
Something had clearly been scattered throughout the entire first-floor space.
Fortunately, what he had spread was not a lethal poison, but a poison that made people lose consciousness. It was a poison with extremely strong effects, and since everyone had been exhausted, they had not been able to avoid being poisoned.
“You have profound internal energy.”
After saying that, he blew out a puff of air. Something must have flowed out from his mouth.
It was not because my internal energy was profound. I had become a body immune to all poisons, so no poison or aphrodisiac could affect me.
“Wake them up.”
At my words, the man smirked.
“Do you know who I am? In the Jianghu, they call me Charming Poison.”
Charming Poison.
It was a name I had heard before.
He was an expert in poison arts with considerable knowledge of poisons, and he was a bizarre bastard who spread bewitching drugs and indulged in men. The reason he gave himself the name “Charming” was probably because of an inferiority complex about his appearance.
After unifying the Jianghu, I placed restrictions on the use of poison. Through the wars against the Unorthodox Faction and the Demonic Cult, I had grown utterly sick of the endless assassination attempts using poison.
Most sects that used poison were sects that inherited the lineages of the Unorthodox Faction and the dark path. They protested, but I dismissed them. Since the Orthodox Faction had unified the Jianghu, they had to endure at least that much.
“Then do you know who I am?”
“Who are you? I have never heard that there was a brat with such profound internal energy.”
Even so, he was relaxed. He had complete faith that I would soon collapse.
“The person who decided that filth like this poison should not be used.”
“What?”
My body flew from the stairs.
Thud!
My kick, which flew across the space in an instant, twisted Charming Poison’s jaw.
After spinning once and crashing into the floor, he sprang back up.
“You bastard!”
This time, he tried to scatter deadly poison.
Tap, tap.
But I was one step faster and sealed his paralysis point.
I dragged him outside. Then I searched inside his clothes and found a poison pouch. Inside were around twenty bottles of different sizes.
“You must be thinking I could never know which one is the antidote.”
I opened the bottle stoppers one by one and checked what was inside.
Seeing me sniffing the bottles, he smiled in triumph.
But when I did not collapse, he was startled.
“Don’t tell me you are immune to all poisons…”
At that moment, when I held the bottle I had been smelling right in front of his nose, he was terrified.
He held his breath so hard that his face turned red. It was his own poison, but it was such a vicious poison that he would die if he had not taken the antidote in advance.
If I could not check, then perhaps I would not know, but I was able to distinguish what was poison and what was not. My body distinguished it, and his reaction distinguished it.
In the end, he confessed which one the antidote was. Since I was about to make him consume the most vicious poison among his own poisons, he could no longer endure.
Because I had chosen from among the things that were not poison, I did not worry and scattered it on the first floor as he instructed. Ah, of course, I also pulled the loosened pants back up.
A short while later, people began waking up one by one.
Before they fully came to their senses, I strode over to Charming Poison.
“If I had scattered poison from the start, they would all have died!”
“You kept them alive because you wanted to do something filthy. In the end, you would have killed them all anyway, wouldn’t you?”
At those words, he could offer no other excuse.
“In any case, I told you the antidote, so…”
Slash!
Before he could even finish speaking, I cut off his head with one stroke.
When I returned inside, everyone had regained consciousness.
Jong Cheon-Rak asked in shock.
“What in the world happened?”
I told him exactly as it was.
“I was on the seventh floor and came down after you had already been poisoned by that man. I subdued him, threatened him, and found the antidote.”
“You saved us again.”
“I just happened to be on the seventh floor… We were lucky.”
Everyone looked at me with eyes full of admiration. They knew that if it had not been for me, they would already have died several times over.
“This is not the time. We must move quickly.”
At my words, Jong Cheon-Rak asked Gal Sa-Ryang.
“What should we do now? Should we return to the Alliance?”
If it was certain that he had been betrayed by the Alliance Lord, he could not decide what he should do.
Jong Cheon-Rak was no longer being stubborn. Moreover, as I had saved their lives repeatedly, he had now decided to follow our will.
As if he had already finished thinking about this part, Gal Sa-Ryang answered without hesitation.
“We must return to the Alliance.”
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