Chapter 56

The Head Elder was the first to notice Lee Cheonbaek’s arrival.

The head himself has entered the fray.

The fierce wave of qi blasting across the gorge, and the killing intent rolling with it, made that obvious even without seeing him.

Sure enough—

“You bastards!”

Lee Cheonbaek appeared with a thunderous roar. His half-gray hair whipped around like a mane, and his eyes burned red.

The Mount Heng Sword Sect’s core forces arrived on his heels. First Rate martial artists, and three Peak masters!

“Wipe out those Jin Family of Taiyuan bastards!”

“The Sect Leader is here! The Sect Leader has come!”

“Waaaah!”

The cheers rekindled the fighting spirit that had begun to fade. Lee Cheonbaek surged forward along the path that had opened in an instant.

“Kill those treacherous Jin Family of Taiyuan bastards!”

Jin Wikyung was not the kind of man to stand by and watch.

“The time has come.”

The Head Elder answered.

“I agree.”

In truth, he had not welcomed Lee Cheonbaek’s arrival. A certain amount of attrition would have made the cleanup easier.

But the losses on both sides—the Jin Family of Taiyuan and the Mount Heng Sword Sect—were still nothing to speak of.

It doesn’t matter. They’ll be making their move anyway.

The two great powers claimed to be the rulers of Shanxi, but compared to them, they were insignificant.

Even in its former heyday, the Jin Family of Taiyuan had been treated as nothing more than a martial family from the frontier. How could it possibly stand against them?

A mere martial family…

The Head Elder swallowed a bitter smile and drew his sword.

Shing.

For many years he had carried two swords. One at his chest, the other at his waist.

There was no need for more words.

“I’ll handle Lee Cheonbaek.”

“Please do.”

Who was Blood Wolf Sword Lee Cheonbaek? The man who had founded the Mount Heng Sword Sect with nothing but a single sword, and who now meant to become the ruler of an entire city. Enemy or not, there was no denying he was a Peak martial artist of the highest caliber.

I want to fight him.

But Jin Wikyung forced down the heat in his blood.

This was a battle with the family’s fate at stake. Competitive spirit had no place here.

“Wipeng.”

“Yes.”

Wipeng had already drawn his sharp, narrow blade and taken his place at Jin Wikyung’s side.

“You and I will handle the rest.”

“As you command.”

There was not a trace of hesitation in the answer. Jin Wikyung smiled faintly and drew his own sword—the family’s treasured blade, passed down through generations of the Jin Family of Taiyuan.

It was the only thing left behind by the father who had vanished one day without a trace.

I’m going to travel around the Central Plains for a while.

Use this in the meantime.

Remembering the letter that had been stuffed carelessly into the scabbard, Jin Wikyung felt his blood boil all over again.

Travel around the Central Plains, my ass. You spent your whole life having fun.

He didn’t even know where that so-called Family Head was, or what he was doing. And his second brother, thousands of li away, had probably only just received the letter.

I have to protect them.

Martial artists, maids, servants, children.

Jin Wikyung was the Family Head of the Jin Family of Taiyuan now. No one else.

Their deaths and their survival were his to carry, and his alone.

We will win.

Jin Wikyung’s eyes flared wide. Sword raised, an Azure Dragon’s Roar burst from his mouth.

“Don’t let a single one of them live!”

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

The Jin Family’s masters kicked off the ground and leaped into the air. Taking that as the signal, a single fire arrow rose high behind them.

That was when dozens of figures stood up along the cliffs.

“Fire!”

Beneath arrows pouring down like a sudden rain, the fight between the masters who would decide the course of the battle began.

Blood Wolf Sword Lee Cheonbaek was a born martial artist.

With innate talent for martial arts and beastlike instincts, he had cut down his enemies and realized his ambitions one after another.

He had founded the Mount Heng Sword Sect and grown its strength by absorbing the surrounding factions one by one. His aim was to lay the foundation for a prestigious house that would one day be recognized even in the Central Plains.

Sect Leader! The Young Master…

Then, one day, his second son came home a corpse.

It had not been a fair duel. Deadly poison had taken him, and he had died with blood pouring from all seven orifices.

Lee Cheonbaek swore an oath.

He would kill and burn everything connected to the Jin Family of Taiyuan.

And then Jin Wikyung appeared before his eyes.

Lee Cheonbaek’s eyes blazed.

“You bastard—!”

He charged like a beast. The blade, holding sixty years of internal energy, shone milky white.

With this much power, it could cut through any armor, any divine weapon.

That bastard dies here!

Just as Lee Cheonbaek, sure of it, was about to swing—

“Oho. Sword Energy?”

A low voice, from behind him.

Lee Cheonbaek’s heart sank.

How?

To give up his back so cheaply. His reaction was lightning-fast. He drove the sword backward in a reverse grip.

Whoosh.

The blade stabbed empty air, and that bought him time. Only then could he see his opponent’s face.

A beard hanging down to his chest. A relaxed smile at the corners of his mouth.

A white-haired old man.

Lee Cheonbaek knew him at once.

“Blade of Flowers?”

The Head Elder nodded.

“I haven’t heard that name in a long time. Then you must be Lee Cheonbaek.”

“That’s right.”

Even as he answered, a chill ran down Lee Cheonbaek’s spine.

He didn’t dare look for Jin Wikyung, or check how the battle was going. Take his eyes off the old man, and he felt his head would come off on the spot.

Coincidence? No.

It was true that seeing Jin Wikyung had agitated him past reason. It was true that he had been impatient.

But Lee Cheonbaek was a Peak master.

A Peak master who had reached the realm of Sword Energy Frost Blade.

The answer was already clear.

A master!

Whether in one form or half a form, the old man in front of him was a master a league above Lee Cheonbaek.

Lee Cheonbaek tightened his grip on his beloved sword.

“I’ve heard much of your reputation.”

“Reputation? I’m nothing more than an old man in the back room.”

“Then why leave the back room?”

“You’re still a young fellow, so there’s a lot you don’t know. The older you get, the more you have to get moving now and then.”

Lee Cheonbaek ground his teeth at the Head Elder’s sly manner.

Damn old man.

He had been watching the Jin Family of Taiyuan for a long time.

He knew there was a faction centered on the Head Elder that opposed the Family Head. He had even privately hoped the family would split from within.

But things had gone the opposite of what he had expected.

So when an outside enemy invades, they unite as one?

Lee Cheonbaek stared at the Head Elder with heavy eyes, then opened his mouth.

“How strong are you?”

“As strong as you believe me to be.”

“Word games.”

“When I was called Blade of Flowers, I was thirty.”

At thirty, the Head Elder had already been a Peak martial artist.

Now he was a man of seventy. How had his martial arts changed since then?

After a moment’s thought, Lee Cheonbaek let out a wry laugh.

I’m getting old, too.

Blood Wolf Sword.

In his youth, Lee Cheonbaek had been unstoppable. Without an exceptional martial art or a respectable master, he had carved his way through everything on his own.

Even against an opponent a level above him, he never backed down. He charged like a wolf and tore out their throats.

I lived half my life that way…

At some point, people had started calling him Sect Leader instead of Blood Wolf Sword.

Blood relatives, subordinates, wealth.

The things he had to protect had piled up like a mountain.

Time spent training shrank; time spent on affairs grew. When it was time to act, he started thinking instead.

Just as he was now.

“Why are you laughing?”

Lee Cheonbaek answered the Head Elder’s question.

“I’m laughing because I find myself pathetic.”

“You’re afraid of me.”

Lee Cheonbaek nodded in silence.

“Were you afraid of death?”

“For a very brief moment.”

“And now?”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Someone of your level won’t manage it.”

“You have to measure them to know which is longer, don’t you?”

“That’s what the short ones always say. They never realize that even after you measure, the result doesn’t change.”

“Your tongue is sharp.”

“Is it only my tongue?”

The Head Elder lowered his sword.

It looked like an ordinary blue-steel sword, but the moment it entered his hand, it began to give off a vicious killing edge.

“Come at me first.”

Lee Cheonbaek did not refuse.

The blade, having drawn in sixty years of internal energy, raised a shimmering haze of light.

The realm of Sword Energy Frost Blade—a realm countless martial artists dreamed of reaching.

Tssss.

The moment the Sword Energy rose three inches—about ten centimeters—Lee Cheonbaek’s body shot forward.

A unique martial art, perfected through countless real battles, unfolded from his fingertips.

Whoosh! Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh!

Boom!

Sword Energy hacked wildly in every direction. Screams burst from between the mounds of earth that erupted in an instant.

“Graaagh!”

They were the cries of martial artists caught in the gap.

Every voice was a young man’s.

A red warning light went on in Lee Cheonbaek’s mind.

Behind!

He spun and swung at the same time.

He saw the white beard fluttering in the wind.

And the sword in the old man’s hand.

Boom!

Kh.

Lee Cheonbaek fell back in a daze amid the thunderous crash. He was not even given time to feel the pain in his wrist.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Every time the two swords met, thunder and lightning rolled.

Sword Energy poured out in a continuous stream, smashing the ground and tearing the wind.

Whoosh!

“What in the world is that…?”

The martial artists of both sides forgot they were fighting. They could only stare, slack-faced, at this staggering life-and-death duel.

In that moment, every one of them was thinking the same thing.

Are those two really human beings like us?

The ceaseless thunder. A feast of Sword Energy so dazzling it left them spellbound just to watch.

The movements of the two men at its center were faster and stronger than anyone they had ever seen.

Someone muttered, almost a groan.

“So this is a Peak master…”

To their eyes, it was a fight where either outcome would have made sense.

But the superiority in strength was obvious.

After some three hundred exchanges, the Head Elder’s sword changed.

Whoosh—slice!

“Ghk.”

Lee Cheonbaek bit down on his lip.

Blood streamed from the forearm the Head Elder’s sword had raked.

The strength drained from the hand on his sword.

Of all things.

He shifted the sword to his other hand at once, but he was a right-handed swordsman by nature.

Even at full power he would have been hard-pressed. Now that the arm he used to wield a sword was injured, the outcome was all but decided.

Boom!

Crack.

A single blow snapped his wrist.

His Sword Energy, weakened by the severe drain on his internal energy, could no longer stand against the Head Elder.

But Lee Cheonbaek did not give up.

Not yet. It isn’t over yet.

He had taken worse injuries than this, plenty of times.

Using the strength in his arm, his waist, his legs, Lee Cheonbaek swung his sword.

No—he tried to.

Slash!

This time, it was the knee.

The tendons had been cut, and the knee buckled slowly, with no regard for Lee Cheonbaek’s will.

His sword carved uselessly through empty air.

Shhk. Shhk-shhk-shhk.

His side. His shoulder. His chest.

Lightning stabbed and sliced through his whole body. The fierce Sword Energy did more than cut flesh and bone—it churned his insides.

“Bleeegh!”

Lee Cheonbaek vomited blood mixed with pieces of organ and looked up at the Head Elder through clouded eyes.

The old man’s face was impassive.

No joy at having put his opponent down. No delight that the war was ending.

To him, all of this was simply the natural result.

“Cough… So Shanxi’s Number One was standing right in front of me.”

“If you’re not Number One Under Heaven, you’re nothing more than a martial brute from the frontier. Neither you nor I have that kind of capacity.”

“Tell me what you want. I’ll give you my neck. I’ll make my men surrender, and I’ll seal the sect for ten years—or a hundred. So…”

“Impossible. What I want is annihilation. Complete annihilation, without a single blade of grass left standing.”

“Why…!”

“Don’t ask me that. If you had won, it would have been this family facing annihilation.”

Lee Cheonbaek glared at the Head Elder with bloodshot eyes.

He wanted to snap that wrinkled neck then and there.

But in his condition, all a man with wounds like his could do was wring out a voice.

“Jin Family of Taiyuan. You started this, didn’t you? You killed that boy—my son!”

“Ah, Lee Seogeun. That’s right. That child was where it began.”

The Head Elder wore a sardonic smile.

Even the master of the Mount Heng Sword Sect, one of the two powers splitting Shanxi between them, had failed to notice their intervention.

Not even with death at his doorstep.

—When you meet King Yama, ask him. Ask who killed Lee Seogeun.

The Sound Transmission burrowing into his ear made Lee Cheonbaek’s eyes flare wide.

“What does that mean…?”

It had been a thoroughly impulsive act.

Perhaps pity for Lee Cheonbaek, who was about to die knowing nothing.

Or perhaps nothing more than an old man’s whim.

—Fare for the road to the afterlife. Think it over on the long journey.

The Head Elder raised his sword.

The sunset beyond the winter ridge shattered into fragments along the blade.

With this…

With the death of the giant called Lee Cheonbaek, the Mount Heng Sword Sect would collapse.

Those who resisted would die. Those who surrendered would be taken.

One war would end like that…

And a new war would begin, at the very moment everyone was drunk on victory.

It’s over.

At last, the Head Elder’s sword moved.

Screeeech—!

A sharp sound tore the air.

Sensing the end, Lee Cheonbaek closed his eyes.

The blade, wrapped in blue Sword Energy, traced a beautiful line.

Slice.

But the tearing sound that had come first, and the direction of the sword, were both beyond Lee Cheonbaek’s expectations.

The Head Elder split a spear that came flying at his back out of nowhere, cutting it apart with Sword Energy.

An enraged roar burst from his mouth.

“Who the hell are you!”

The answer came the next instant.

“It’s me, you fucking bastard!”

The Head Elder saw the face of a young man standing tall on a low hill, and groaned.

“Jin Taekyung?”