Chapter 1095

Bwooo! Bwooooooo!

The deep, resonant sound of a horn carried across hundreds of jang¹ and pierced Jin Taekyung’s ears. He was suddenly sure he’d heard a similar sound before.

In a damp, pitch-dark land thousands of li² away, at the very southern edge.

…No way.

A suspicion flashed through his mind. Eyes wide, he stared toward the sound.

And at last, he saw them.

Enormous creatures were charging through a thick cloud of dust in the distance. Even from this far away, their great swinging trunks were unmistakable.

Those are…

Elephants.

The largest, strongest creatures alive—not just among beasts, but among everything that lived on land or in rivers.

The people of the Central Plains called them xiang—elephants—and regarded them as mysterious animals. But to a few people, Jin Taekyung among them, they were fairly familiar.

For a brief time, they’d lived among people who shared their home with countless animals, trained and tamed them, and carved beautiful horns from elephants’ tusks after they died.

“Nanman Beast Palace! The Nanman Beast Palace is here!”

On the nearby wall, Hyuk Mujin spotted the herd—hundreds of elephants by his rough estimate—and shouted, brimming with excitement.

“See that, you bastards?!”

Barely fifteen minutes ago, he’d stood on the wall swallowing nervously as he watched the fierce battle below. Not anymore.

“Come on, then! Let’s have a proper fight! We’re not so badly outnumbered now!”

He had good reason to be confident.

Soon after the enormous upheaval caused by the Southern Heaven Demon Empress’s scheme had been brought under control, the Nanman Beast Palace had begun to move in earnest.

No—“move” hardly did it justice. It was a migration on a staggering scale.

They’d purged every diseased shoot that had grown within their ranks. Then they’d gone further, abandoning the homeland where their ancestors had lived since time immemorial.

Beast Miao King Yayul Cheok had been furious at Dark Heaven’s scheme, which had drenched Nanman’s jungles in blood. He’d grieved the death of his sworn brother Baeksang more than anyone. And he’d been deeply moved by the outsiders from the Central Plains who had saved his people from that terrible crisis.

United at last under the Beast Miao King, the Nanman Beast Palace swore to join the Murim Alliance and avenge their people. Then they left their bloodstained homeland.

Every last one of Nanman’s tens of thousands of people went with them, along with the countless ferocious beasts they commanded.

And the fact that the Nanman Beast Palace’s forces—who should have been in Sichuan—had appeared here meant something else, too.

“The Nanman Beast Palace, the Sichuan Tang Clan, Qingcheng, and Emei must have come together! You’re all dead now!”

At Hyuk Mujin’s shout, his fist clenched tight, the allies on the wall finally brightened. Until then, Dark Heaven’s overwhelming forces had left them frozen stiff.

“Waaah!”

“Reinforcements! The reinforcements are here!”

“Yeah, you bastards! Let’s have a proper fight!”

The Nanman Beast Palace’s forces were said to be practically a small kingdom in their own right. And now they had three great sects with them, each representing the very heart of the martial world.

Those who had already resigned themselves to defeat and those who had been clinging to hope while forcing down their fear all cheered at the top of their lungs, as if they’d never felt either.

But amid the wave of joy sweeping the wall, one man gazed at the approaching dust cloud with eyes that had only grown darker.

The Nanman Beast Palace and the other three Sichuan factions? They couldn’t possibly have left Sichuan unguarded.

Sitting on Taishan’s unusually high shoulder, Namho slowly retraced his thoughts as he watched beyond the wall with a seasoned gaze.

The strength of the Nanman Beast Palace. The current state of Sichuan’s Murim, already dealt a tremendous blow by the chain of events centered on the Western Heaven Demon Lord.

And the reason he’d thought they couldn’t come.

Sichuan is one of the largest regions in the world. With front lines that extensive, the imperial army alone wouldn’t be enough. So how could they…?

The world today was like a steep mountainside where even the boundary between Murim and the state had disappeared.

The snowball that was Dark Heaven had been rolling for half a century. By now, the enemy was a boulder weighing ten thousand geun,³ tumbling down the slope and about to crush the villages below.

No—the entire world.

That was why the Murim Alliance couldn’t have found a way to rescue Qinghai under these circumstances.

Leave the slightest gap, and Dark Heaven would drive into it like a sharp awl.

Not merely piercing the surface. With the bizarre sorcery of a Moving Formation, they could reach somewhere deep inside.

And Sichuan’s Murim was in worse shape than any other region of the Central Plains.

Worse than bad. Its situation could hardly have been more dire.

Enemies appearing like ghosts somewhere within Sichuan weren’t the only threat it faced.

If they really have abandoned their base to save us, the enemies across Sichuan’s border in Tibet could march straight through it and into the Central Plains…

The countless thoughts tangled together in Namho’s mind, looping and colliding, vanished all at once.

A chill ran down his spine. As he froze, a low exclamation reached his ears.

“Would you look at all those elephants in one place. What a sight from up here. Glad I stayed.”

Great Sir.

It was him.

Unlike Bow Saint, Cheongpung, and the other Supreme Peak masters, he had stubbornly held his position until now. He muttered in a carefree tone, like a spectator enjoying the view.

“Strange, though. I heard you can barely breathe just standing still in Nanman, but do all its people shave their heads like that?”

Namho, who had gone blank with shock, whipped around to face him.

“What… What on earth are you talking about?”

“What do you mean? I’m just saying what I see.”

Great Sir tilted his head and pointed at the dust cloud slowly drawing nearer from hundreds of jang away.

From atop the wall, dozens of jang high, his Supreme Peak eyesight let him see what no one else could.

No.

Through the pale dust, so thick it seemed impossible to make out anything an inch ahead, thousands of people in red and yellow robes were advancing behind the elephants.

“Huh? Wait. Now that I look again…”

Great Sir stared hard at them, scratching his chin, then added:

“They look a bit like monks.”

At that moment—

A shout burst from the lips of the Hidden Shadow Pavilion agent, who was nearing eighty. Even Namho startled himself with its volume.

“You goddamn bastard! That’s the Potala Palace!”

At the same moment—

Bwooooooo!

To the deep, resonant sound of the horn, the Potala Palace’s army charged like mad, hundreds of elephants leading the way.

There was an undeniable gap between the modern world of the twenty-first century and this one.

Some things were similar. Others were a little different.

And the land people here called Xizang, tens of thousands of li from the Central Plains and counted among the Outer Lands, fell closer to the latter as far as I understood it.

Xizang.

In Murim, I alone knew its other name: Tibet.

And there was another religious group living there within its own little world—the Potala Palace.

That was the identity of the enormous dust cloud that had suddenly appeared.

Bwooooo!

Hundreds of elephants trumpeted at once as they charged like mad.

Now that I could see them better, their tusks, which ought to have been long and beautiful, were blackened as if they’d been deep-fried somewhere. Their bloodshot eyes looked completely gone.

Those things… are elephants?

As they drew closer by the second, I felt it again.

They were different. On another level entirely.

They were nothing like the elephants I’d seen behind the bars at the zoo when I was a kid holding my mom’s hand. Or the ones I’d seen in Nanman.

Their size, their madness, their ferocity. All of it.

Dumbo, the baby elephant I’d seen as a kid?

Give me a fucking break.

If the original author had used these lunatics as inspiration, the cartoon I’d watched would’ve been called He’s Just a Baby, but He’s a Fucking Strong Elephant: Heavenly Demon’s Reign.

Rumble, rumble, rumble!

The earth shook as if they really were using the Heavenly Demon’s Reign.

No, that wasn’t enough. Now the ground was splitting open.

Faced with real-life versions of the giant elephants from that movie about little folk destroying a ring, Cheongpung murmured, half dazed, “Whoa. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life…”

Neither have I, shit.

The words nearly escaped, but I managed to hold them back.

Why?

Simple.

Even without the Potala Palace rapidly closing the distance, Dark Heaven’s forces still surrounded us on every side, packed tightly around us even now.

“They arrived sooner than expected. How fortunate.”

The Blood Lord spoke with a relaxed smile.

“Of course, it’s the worst possible luck for you.”

I tightened my grip on the shaft of my spear instead of answering.

This was getting worse by the second.

We were already at a disadvantage, and now the Potala Palace from Tibet had joined Dark Heaven, too.

They never cared about Sichuan in the first place.

It wasn’t as if I’d never considered this possibility. I’d just thought it unlikely.

So had most people.

We believed Dark Heaven had drawn in the Potala Palace, which had been quietly staying in Tibet, to block the front lines in Sichuan and stop any reinforcements from reaching Qinghai Province.

We were wrong.

What the Blood Lord—or rather, the Lord of Heaven behind him—wanted from what was happening in Qinghai wasn’t some foothold from which to advance into the Central Plains.

Me. It was me.

With that realization, a huge rock seemed to press down on one corner of my chest.

So heavy it made me ache.

“Why?”

The question slipped out before I knew it.

The Blood Lord understood what I meant and answered readily.

“Do you think a fishing rod cast over a lake knows what its owner is thinking?”

“What?”

“I don’t know, either. I only do as my master commands. If he’d had them attack Sichuan, they might have opened a route into the Central Plains… but the Lord of Heaven had other ideas.”

“…!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll keep my promise to spare you today. But understand this: you’re already caught in a net. One you’ll never escape.”

Then the Blood Lord’s low Sound Transmission pierced my ears.

I’ll give you one day. If you sever your Sinews and Meridians and surrender of your own accord within that time, I’ll spare everyone but you.

He slowly raised a hand and smiled at me as I stood frozen.

I swear by the name of the Lord of Heaven, that person who is my one and only light and sky. This is my last mercy—and the only way to save your people.

That was the end of it.

As the encirclement parted at the Blood Lord’s gesture, the scornful smile on his lips stabbed into my chest.