Seeing Namgung Jeong's mouth hanging open wide enough to unhinge his jaw, dignity forgotten, Namgung Un lowered his head in embarrassment.
"I am sorry. Brother Bu told me not to pass those words along, and I have blundered again..."
Whatever their friendship, Bu Eunseol was a demonic path practitioner.
And by generational standing he was far junior, so for him to say such a thing could be an insult to Namgung Jeong, Palace Master of the Southern Palace.
"It is all right."
Namgung Jeong gathered himself and shook his head.
"Is your sworn brother not already a grandmaster of his generation, one who has transcended orthodox and unorthodox? I do not mind."
Rustle, rustle.
Just then, far off among the trees, a great many masked men revealed themselves.
Namgung Un's face tightened.
They numbered roughly two hundred, and they radiated an aura on a completely different level from the masked men he had faced until now.
'Has Brother Bu's prediction gone wrong?'
A force of that size could not be called an ambush by a small elite.
His own life, and his father Namgung Jeong's as well, could be in danger.
"Palace Master."
Namgung Un said, turning to Namgung Jeong.
"I will try to break the encirclement, so please get clear."
"A pity."
Namgung Jeong gave an answer entirely beside the point, gazing at the distant sky.
"Had I known it would come to this, I would have drawn things out a little longer."
He had not known he would be fighting a force that size until the blood ran, with Namgung Un at his side.
Had he known, he thought with regret, he would have gazed upon his wife's face for just a little longer.
"Sir?"
"It is nothing."
He shook his head and put out his hand.
The Golden Needle Sword at his waist sprang up of its own accord and settled into his grip.
"A trap that would certainly have killed your father had he been alone."
Namgung Jeong had only to look at the masked men's bearing and their formation.
From that alone, he could sense that these were men who had honed a secret art capable of blocking the Emperor Sword Form perfectly.
But Namgung Un had abruptly forged a strange, singular body of sword learning that even Namgung Jeong found hard to measure.
He had traveled the martial world with Bu Eunseol.
Thanks to the many battles fought across the line between life and death, he had become a veteran of a hundred wars.
The battle about to unfold would be a fierce close engagement whose outcome could not be foreseen.
"Today I shall see just how far my swordsmanship has come."
An aura like Mount Tai surged up from Namgung Jeong's body.
Meeting his beloved wife again in the Mind World had left him briefly dispirited.
But he had realized anew that Namgung Un was the fruit of the love he had shared with her.
Then he saw his son, grown now into a fine figure who stood shoulder to shoulder with him.
And in his chest, a hot will and a fighting spirit blazed up once more.
'Un's talent has not yet fully bloomed.'
Namgung Un would grow further yet, and without limit.
He had a duty to witness the rise of his son, who before long would reach the absolute pinnacle.
* * *
It was at about the same hour.
The carriage carrying Yeong Cheongja, bound for the Wudang Sect, had also come to a stop.
"Something is wrong. It feels as though we have been circling the same spot for the time it takes to eat a meal."
Bewilderment ran through the voice of Song Hyeon, the first-generation disciple driving the carriage.
Yeong Cheongja stepped down from the carriage and looked around outside.
All around stood larches so identical it was uncanny.
Looking closely, the shape of the fallen branches, even the direction of the moss on the rocks... It was as though the same things had been stacked up over and over without end.
Shhhhh.
A dank fog had begun to creep up between the trees, and it was swallowing all sight.
"A strange sorcery."
A low sigh escaped Yeong Cheongja's lips.
"An illusion formation where ghosts raise walls to block the path."
At a glance, he saw through it. Someone had set out deliberately to lure the carriage here.
In that very moment, the forest's stillness broke.
Shhhhh.
Cloud and mist billowed up all at once.
More than a hundred assassins appeared without a sound and surrounded the carriage.
All had veiled their faces, and their exposed eyes were stained black, as though subjected to some sinister secret art.
"A defeated general ought to return quietly to his own ground. Why then do you block this old Taoist's road?"
Yeong Cheongja had seen that the masked men were assassins of the sects that had failed in the invasion of the Central Plains.
"..."
But there was no answer.
Instead, one assassin at the front drew his sword.
It was a motion holding nothing but a sharp intent to kill, meant only to cut the man before him.
Shk!
Taking that as the signal, the masked men moved in a whirl and scattered terrible killing forms.
Yeong Cheongja drew a deep breath and began to unfold a fist art with the utmost slowness.
It was the essence of Taiji.
Drawing soft circles without cease, it took in every attack and at the same time sent it flowing far away.
Pat, pat, pat!
But something entirely unforeseen happened.
The masked men ignored the profound principle Yeong Cheongja was unfolding—the soft overcoming the hard.
With swordsmanship of pure force and nothing else, they were breaking his Taiji.
'So they have come prepared with a counter-technique.'
In a fight between masters, one utterly trivial factor becomes the variable that divides life from death.
And however outstanding a martial art may be, once its forms and principles are exposed, it is bound to lose its subtlety.
For that reason, the true martial arts of each sect's Sect Leader are kept in the strictest secrecy, and are not revealed for any ordinary matter.
Yeong Cheongja in particular, as Sect Leader of the Wudang Sect, had almost never contested anyone in the open.
Then how in the world had these men managed it?
How could they undo his Taiji at a single stroke?
Ziiiing.
The masked men's sword aura carried an overwhelming internal force within it.
Each time he blocked an attack, that power ran down his wrist and set Yeong Cheongja's body ringing.
Yeong Cheongja unfolded Taiji's Grasp Sparrow's Tail without cease, winding the oncoming sword energies away.
But each time, the sword energies curved gently after him and bored into his vital points.
It was a breaking method that had measured Yeong Cheongja's habits and his methods perfectly.
'To think even my habits are being read perfectly.'
His expression grew endlessly grim.
It was not because his life was threatened, but because he sensed there was a spy within the Wudang Sect.
Otherwise, there was no way they could know his habit of adding the endless changes of the Yang Intent Sword to his Taiji and scattering the empty and the solid by turns.
Pat, pat, pat!
In that span, Yeong Cheongja executed a profound technique concealing a single deadly strike within twelve feints.
The masked men were not deceived in the least, and ignored the whole of that intricate change.
With the fastest and simplest straight-line attacks, they were cutting into Yeong Cheongja's body.
'There is no sign of the disciples, either.'
The presences of the Sangcheong Palace disciples, who had attended him as escort as well as in cultivation, had all vanished too.
Pat, pat, pat!
In that span, red lines were drawn across Yeong Cheongja's body.
This was the Sect Leader of the great Wudang Sect.
Against masked men whose identity he did not know, he could not even unfold his martial arts properly.
The forms he began were read for their movement and their intent in advance, and cut off at once.
Trickle.
A sword had pierced Yeong Cheongja's forearm, and a wound had opened at his side as well.
'A well-built trap indeed.'
They had quietly disposed of his escorting disciples and had grasped the habits of a martial art he had honed for decades.
That meant this was no improvised assassination attempt, but a plan meticulously prepared long ago.
Shwaaak!
With a violent sound of tearing air, the masked men's swordsmanship began to pierce the Taiji defense perfectly.
Yeong Cheongja twisted his body in haste, but a sharp sword aura tore through his sleeve as it passed.
Pat!
With a cold sensation grazing his shoulder, another red line was drawn.
Their attacks looked utterly monotonous, but they were the perfect counter to Wudang's martial arts.
Not Yeong Cheongja, nor any master of Wudang who might have come, could have withstood them.
Shk.
A sharp sword aura grazed past Yeong Cheongja's throat.
At this rate, his head would fall before forty exchanges were done.
Sensing a life-or-death crisis, Yeong Cheongja finally prepared to circulate his Jade Dew True Qi.
"Kihihihi!"
A grotesque laugh rang out abruptly across the distant sky.
"Oohihihihi!"
It sounded less like a human laugh and more like the wailing of a madman digging up graves in the night.
At that skin-crawling laughter, the masked men stopped where they stood and turned their heads toward the direction it came from.
Thud. Thud.
The mouth of the path through the darkened forest lay ahead.
Slowly, a shadow revealed itself there.
His gait staggered as though he were drunk and sneering at the world, and the hem of his snow-white Taoist robe dragged along, fouled with muddy water.
But from the Songmun Ancient Sword gripped in his hand, ghastly drops of blood were falling, as though it had cut the flesh from someone.
"Song Ak?"
Yeong Cheongja's eyes went wide, as though he could not believe it.
This was the successor to the position of Sect Leader, the man carrying Wudang's future on his shoulders.
Why then did he wear the shape of a madman, giving off a vicious stink of blood and a killing intent that chilled to the bone?
"Heuhihihi! What a delightful feast has been laid out! Let me join in!"
Song Ak kicked off from the ground.
His form scattered like a heat shimmer, and in a moment, dozens of afterimages spread out across the masked men's faces.
"Kugh!"
Greatly startled, the masked men swung their swords in confusion and began to form a sword formation.
"That looks like fun!"
As the sword formation took shape, Song Ak grew more delighted still and began to rave.
The sword forms he swung followed no set path. They grazed the ground as though to cut low, then shot up like a ghost's hand and struck high.
They seemed to aim left, then appeared behind the masked man on the right and stabbed at his opening.
Leap! Flap!
At times, without warning, he would dive toward the ground and thrash wildly like a freshly caught fish.
It was a madman's swordsmanship, impossible to grasp, mocking reason and the common principles of martial arts alike.
―'This is bad.'
Bewilderment spread through the masked men's eyes.
They had long honed the breaking method for Wudang's supreme arts and had grasped the habits and the fighting styles of their key targets.
But they had never seen a sword dance with neither root nor form like this.
Before this mad Taoist's sword, the counter-techniques they had mastered over long years were completely useless.
'That swordsmanship...'
Yeong Cheongja, watching Song Ak's swordsmanship, let his mouth fall open.
Song Ak seemed to have become a madman swinging his sword without sense, yet every single form carried within it the most profound principles of the Wudang sword.
'Could it be Immortal Sambong's technique?'
One technique rose in his mind.
It governed a fearsome, inborn killing intent and madness with the Taoist principle of non-action.
It was the founding patriarch's art from beyond the heavens, which raised all of Wudang's martial arts into a secret learning no one could predict.
"Kuurgh!"
"Uurgh!"
But there was no time even to be astonished.
In the blink of an eye, half the masked men who had been driving Yeong Cheongja back had fallen with screams.
Like a skilled butcher dressing meat without hesitation, Song Ak carved wildly through bone and muscle with the Songmun Ancient Sword.
Each time his sword passed by, fresh blood shot up like a fountain, and severed limbs flew through the air.
"Do not be fooled by the madness!"
The masked men's leader shouted.
"This one is using Wudang's Yang Intent Sword arts!"
He seemed to be pouring out methods of extreme cruelty that could not be predicted.
In fact, Song Ak was unfolding the Wudang Sect's Yang Intent Sword in a grotesque form.
"Use the Reverse Seven Stars Sword Formation!"
The masked men had seen that the source of that maddened swordsmanship was, in the end, the Wudang sword.
They unfolded a sword formation built to suppress every Wudang martial art to the utmost.
Ziiiing.
When the Reverse Seven Stars Sword Formation took effect, the power of the swordsmanship Song Ak unfolded fell away sharply, as expected.
Shwaaak! Pat!
A long wound had opened along Song Ak's side.
The Reverse Seven Stars Sword Formation proved effective, and his maddened swordsmanship was completely shut down.
"Die!"
The leader found an opening at last in Song Ak's shifting forms and drove a sharp killing sword toward his throat.
Claaang!
With a clear ring of metal, a treasured sword giving off a white radiance blocked the form.
It was Yeong Cheongja, who had drawn the Zhenwu Sword.
"Through madness, one enters sagehood; at madness's peak, one communes with the profound truth."
A master of the Western Vajra Gate had once cruelly murdered a young disciple of Wudang.
Zhang Sanfeng, the Wudang Sect's founding patriarch, could not hold down the killing intent that burst out of him and killed the man without mercy.
From that affair, the tale is handed down that he turned killing intent and madness to his own use and created an art that carried Wudang's martial learning to its utmost.
And it was not an invented story. It had actually happened.
To unfold that art, however, one had to possess a vast killing intent by birth, as Sambong Jinin did.
And the forms it put forth were so excessively cruel that it had in the end been quietly sealed away.
'Someone recognized Song Ak's disposition and set a hand to him.'
Song Ak had been born with a clear Taoist heart, and at the same time, he harbored an enormous killing intent.
Someone had used a method resembling the art Sambong Jinin created.
Yeong Cheongja saw that they had handed down to Song Ak a way of raising his madness into sword learning.
'But it is somewhat crude.'
Unable to watch any longer, Yeong Cheongja acted at last.
There was a dharma text set down in the Purple Yang Treasured Canon, which only the Sect Leader might read.
It was Sambong Jinin's method for achieving the Way within madness, and Yeong Cheongja was transmitting it to him now.
"Can you do as the dharma text says?"
This was Song Ak's answer to Yeong Cheongja's question.
Shk!
He licked the blood-soaked sword clean with his red tongue.
* * *
The air of the deep forest, where not even moonlight could seep in, was sticky as a spiderweb.
There was not a sound of leaves brushing, only the stillness of death hanging over everything.
Tearing that stillness, black shadows like a swarm of bats were assaulting the carriage without a sound.
Shaaaak!
The sound that split the darkness was like the scream of a snake, and like the wailing of steel.
Out of the pitch-black darkness, a single black flash stretched forth, writhing like a living creature.
It was the Water Dragon Rope, released from the ring Tang Gon wore.
"So it is true."
Tang Gon's voice rang out, low but cold as a sheet of ice.
"They have completely broken this clan's martial arts."
When his hand drew a strange trajectory in the air, the Water Dragon Rope split into three strands and shot out fiercely.
It was the Four Lineages of Tang Pae, the essence of the Tang Clan's Eight Great Secret Transmissions.
Shaak!
The first line split the air.
The masked man at the front was cut in two without so much as a scream, spilling his insides in every direction.
The second line flew like the tongue of a giant viper and pierced the throats of two others.
The last, the third line, crossed the two that had gone before.
Rumble!
At that point, a virulent poison spread as though exploding, forming an enormous net of death.
"Aaaargh!"
The assassins trapped inside it melted in an instant like moths engulfed in flame, their bodies tearing into pieces and scattering.
The fight was over in a moment.
Tang Gon stood in the middle of a forest reeking of blood and poison, looking down at the Water Dragon Rope, which still gave off a faint killing intent.
A dark red liquid dripped from the Water Dragon Rope, melting the stones on the ground with a sizzling sound.
He caught his breath, and into his mind rose the contents of a secret letter sent by the friend he respected.
―'...(Beginning omitted)... In this matter, the odds are high that they will select the heads of any faction likely to obstruct their plan and strike at them all simultaneously. But so as to leave absolutely no trace... (Rest omitted)...'
Bu Eunseol had long moved between the two great allied powers and had been caught up in the whirlpool of countless conspiracies.
He knew the Martial Alliance's dark underside better than anyone.
He had mobilized outstanding talents to dig out Baek Museong's wicked plan.
But he soon realized it was impossible to predict their schemes perfectly in so short a time.
He changed his strategy at once.
In the name of the Society Leader of the Martial Soul Society, he shook the board himself and turned the eyes of Baek Museong and the Buddha Venerable toward him.
Baek Museong, having become Alliance Leader and thirsting for success, would never tolerate a variable.
In the end, that plan succeeded.
Just as Bu Eunseol had foreseen, the invasion by the forces from beyond the border ended easily, and an assassination plan to remove future trouble was set in motion.
If it succeeded, the seeds of future disaster would be uprooted entirely.
And even if it failed, they could denounce the vicious methods of the forces from beyond the border and keep the Orthodox Path Alliance standing.
"It is not far off now."
This ambush had ended in failure.
That was owed to Bu Eunseol's uncanny prediction and to the fact that, with his help, Tang Gon's martial prowess had grown sharply, to an unfathomable degree.
Tang Gon left the coldly stiffening corpses behind him and looked up at the distant sky.
"The day I stand shoulder to shoulder with you and fight."
He too, with Bu Eunseol's help, had come to sense the dark clouds over the martial world.
In the fight about to begin, there would be no such thing as orthodox and unorthodox.
He would be able to stand proudly at his friend's side.
That was what Tang Gon had waited for his whole life.
* * *
Bukgung Ryeong, Leader of the Azure Sky Alliance, stood with his arms folded and his robe streaming.
Around him lay the corpses of the assassins who had been hunting him a moment before, smashed like toys.
Every one of them had come with a perfect countermeasure against the Inner Bullet Technique.
They absorbed internal force with strange armor and dispersed the rebounding energy with a special formation.
But the man he was now was not yesterday's Bukgung Ryeong.
Even before Bu Eunseol's hint reached him, he had already passed beyond the realm of the Inner Bullet Technique.
His martial learning was no longer merely a matter of destroying and smashing something.
It had developed into a secret art that absorbed an enemy's incoming force and detonated it from within.
They had blocked the Inner Bullet Technique perfectly, but in the end, their own force exploded inside them, and they died to no purpose.
Looking down at the corpses growing cold, Bukgung Ryeong sank into deep thought.
"Masters of the Red Cloud Sect."
The ambushers who had put their faith in that grotesque armor were masters of the Red Cloud Sect of the Western Regions.
But there was another party behind them.
"So even the Buddha Venerable, called the spiritual pillar of the righteous path, has truly been stained with evil."
Bukgung Ryeong did not want to believe it.
If even that man, abbot of Shaolin and the figure he had held to be the last elder of the righteous martial world, was rotten?
Then there was no hope left in the righteous path.
"But the information that fellow sends has always been true."
Bukgung Ryeong could not hide his gloom.
The great tree called the righteous path had already rotted through from the roots.
The only thing that could still hold up the banner of the righteous path now was the Azure Sky Alliance he led himself.
"Hoo."
Bukgung Ryeong let out a sigh before he knew it. A heavy weight settled in his chest.
"So the fate of the martial world rests on your shoulders after all."
He was the head of the Azure Sky Alliance.
Whatever happened, he was bound by a yoke that made him put the prosperity of the righteous path and the safety of his own warriors first.
But Bu Eunseol was different.
He was the head of an enormous organization.
And yet he was throwing everything he had into the safety and justice of a martial world that was crumbling.
He was the only man walking that lonely road in silence, with no one at all to acknowledge him for it.
"For now, I must gather strength quietly, I suppose?"
Bukgung Ryeong looked up at the dark sky.
Countless stars were shining, but to his eyes, only one star was visible, burning brightest of all and alone.
It was the Star of Salvation, the star destined to save the martial world.
* * *
The road toward Sichuan was peaceful to the point of tedium.
The creak of the carriage and the sound of hoofbeats rang monotonously into the night sky.
Bu Eunseol, disguised as the Society Leader of the Martial Soul Society, was riding quietly back.
Boooom!
Just then, with a roar that shook heaven and earth, the carriage was flung into the air.
Splinters of wood and shards of iron scattered in every direction, and flames swallowed everything like a fire demon.
Before the blast wave had even settled, a figure revealed itself like a ghost within the thick smoke.
It was an assassin in night clothes that seemed to have been shaped out of pitch-black darkness.
"You are late."
Swoooosh.
In that span, Bu Eunseol parted the swirling dust with a single gesture and spoke at his leisure.
"I've been waiting so long my eyes were starting to grow sore."
Crick.
The situation must have been unexpected.
The masked man tilted his neck to one side and narrowed his eyes.
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