Chapter 349

After a brief silence, the Heavenly Power Demon spoke.

“……A public-urination criminal? Do not call this old man by such a disgraceful name.”

Ah. My mistake.

It seemed the fiend who had once spread his infamy throughout the world found that title rather unpleasant.

After giving it some thought, I offered him a more appropriate alternative.

“Hmm. How about bedwetter?”

“Y-you little…”

“If you don’t like that, then The New Nation’s Little Pisser.¹”

“This old man did not wet himself!”

“Then He Who Peed. A Midsummer Night’s Pee, featuring the Kunlun Sect.²”

“……!”

I clicked my tongue at the Heavenly Power Demon, who couldn’t even come up with a response.

“I don’t know what got into you and made you start talking all of a sudden, but I don’t want to hear it, and I don’t want to talk to you. So eat your damn food and relieve yourself to your heart’s content. Shit, piss, or both at the same time. Whatever you want.”

“W-wait.”

Good grief. What a pain.

I had finished handing out the food and was about to leave the underground prison when I turned around with an irritated scowl.

“What?”

“There is something I wish to ask.”

“And if you have something to ask, am I obligated to answer?”

But the Heavenly Power Demon, seized by an inexplicable desperation, refused to back down. Wearing scraps of what might once have been called clothing, he opened his mouth with a gleam in his eyes.

“The Divine Cult. What has become of the Divine Cult?”

“The Divine Cult?”

“Yes, the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult!”

“Oh. The Demonic Cult.”

The different names used by the two sides had confused me for a moment.

To most Murim warriors, myself included, it was your Demonic Cult. But to members of the Demonic Cult, it could only be our Divine Cult.

Especially for the Heavenly Power Demon standing before me. Wasn’t he a fiend whose notoriety had once been considerable even among the Demonic Cult’s members?

“What, have you been locked up so long that you’re feeling homesick?”

“Tell me.”

“That’s easy enough.”

I gave a short laugh and continued.

“I don’t know either.”

“……What?”

“How would I know what the Demonic Cult is doing, holed up all the way out there? If a new inmate from the Demonic Cult ends up in the cell next to yours, ask him.”

The Heavenly Power Demon stared at me as if he couldn’t understand.

“Are you not the Fire King’s successor? Yet you claim to know nothing about the Divine Cult?”

“……How did you know that?”

“My dantian may be ruined, but these old ears still work.”

“You’re remarkably spry for your age. How much do you know?”

“Only that the Fire King is here to have his injuries treated.”

“Hmm.”

He was a rather perceptive old man.

Cheongpung had mentioned Jeok Cheongang’s name several times, but never loudly enough for the other prisoners to hear. Even if the Heavenly Power Demon had overheard him, it would have been difficult to infer the circumstances from those conversations alone.

He keeps his mouth shut and his ears open.

He was different from the other prisoners, who tried every possible trick to win me over the moment they saw an opening.

I found myself growing slightly interested in the old man before me.

“But why are you so curious about news of the Demonic Cult? You’ve been imprisoned for ages.”

“It has been forty-odd years.”

“The Great Faction War had already ended around then. Don’t you have a general idea of what happened?”

“A general idea?”

The Heavenly Power Demon smiled bitterly.

“Few people know the Divine Cult better than this old man.”

“Sounds like you pissed on things there too.”

“This old man was once an Elder of the Great Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. It was I who obeyed the august command of the Cult Leader, subjugated Qinghai, and fired the opening shot of the holy war.”

“Holy war, my ass.”

Despite my curt response, I was secretly surprised.

He’s a bigger deal than I thought.

From the bits and pieces I had picked up, the Demonic Cult had immensely powerful fiends known as the Ten Elders or the Seven Elders or something like that.

I had assumed he wasn’t an ordinary fiend after hearing that he’d pissed all over the Kunlun Sect’s signboard. But I had never imagined that the shabby old man waiting to die in an underground prison had once been an Elder of the Demonic Cult.

“You knew nothing about this old man, I suppose.”

“Of course not. That was ages ago. Today was the first time I’d even heard the title Heavenly Power Demon.”

“……Heh. Has it truly been so long already?”

As the Heavenly Power Demon let out a hollow, self-mocking laugh, I leaned against the prison wall.

“So what does a former Demonic Cult Elder from forty years ago want to ask me?”

“Tell me everything you know about the Divine Cult. Every piece of recent news, without adding or omitting anything.”

“I don’t know. Something about this feels off.”

“This old man has already passed his ninetieth year. Both body and spirit are exhausted. This is the final request of an old man who has already been given his day to die.”

“The request of a fiend who committed all kinds of atrocities, you mean.”

“Atrocities… I will gladly pay for the lives I have taken. But what, exactly, makes something demonic? The Divine Cult and your people opposed each other for many years, each standing by its own convictions. We merely lost the struggle in which we staked our fate. That is all.”

The Heavenly Power Demon continued in a clear voice, almost lamenting.

“Can that alone determine who was right and who was wrong? The world back then was like a powder keg that could explode at any moment. Had your side crossed Gansu and Qinghai first and reached the Divine Cult, you would have slaughtered our followers beneath the paltry excuses of serving the greater good and rooting out evil at its source.”

“But from what I’ve heard…”

“Boy.”

His quiet voice silenced me.

A pair of eyes blazed more fiercely than ever as they stared into mine.

They were not the eyes of an old man whose martial arts had been completely crippled, waiting for the day he would die.

They belonged to a general and Supreme Peak master who had once led an army and swept across the world.

“This old man saw it with his own eyes and experienced it firsthand. I saw how cruel men could become in a war of killing and being killed. Neither the followers of the Divine Cult who cried out for holy war nor the Sect Leaders of the Nine Sects and One Gang³ who called for the extermination of demons were exceptions. Even…”

At that moment, the fire in his eyes died away. Only his bitter voice remained, scattering through the air like ash.

“Even the Cult Leader was no exception. He lost the convictions with which he had begun and fell into corruption. Yes. Perhaps, as you orthodox faction warriors claim, the Divine Cult truly had become a Demonic Cult.”

The Heavenly Power Demon’s words left my thoughts tangled.

In a way, what he had just said aligned with something I had recently come to understand.

Good people and bad people exist everywhere.

The Demonic Cult and the orthodox Murim had been at odds for ages, each holding a match as they watched the other across a powder keg ready to explode.

The Demonic Cult had ultimately been the one to light the fuse. But what if the orthodox faction had struck the first match?

Would the Roaring Fury Swordsman and the Taeeul Merciless Sword have spared ordinary Demonic Cult civilians who knew nothing of martial arts?

No way.

For a moment, those two men overlapped with the Heavenly Power Demon in my mind.

Who was white, and who was black? Was there something unknown hidden in the history that had already passed?

Damn it. I don’t know.

I bit my lip hard and pulled my back away from the cold wall.

“There’s no point telling me any of that.”

The Heavenly Power Demon nodded weakly.

“……I know. Nothing is more futile than speaking of a past already gone.”

“And I’m not as knowledgeable about the Demonic Cult as you think. If that well-informed beggar were here instead, he might’ve been able to give you the news you want.”

“Did the Divine Cult fall?”

“I don’t know. Apparently not. From what I’ve heard, it has managed to survive somehow.”

Dark Heaven’s name had drawn so much attention lately that it was easy to forget, but the Demonic Cult remained the orthodox Murim’s eternal archenemy.

And with a possible connection between the Demonic Cult and Dark Heaven now under suspicion, the Murim Alliance headquarters in Henan was probably busy investigating both.

“I did hear that the Demonic Cult suffered devastating losses in the Great Faction War and shrank to a shadow of its former self.”

The Central Plains was not called the center of the world for nothing.

Unlike the orthodox Murim, which had recovered a considerable portion of its losses by absorbing the region’s abundant resources, goods, and population like a sponge, the Demonic Cult had been forced into the Tianshan Mountains while bearing the full weight of its tremendous losses.

“……Of course. It was a war in which the Divine Cult mobilized its full strength.”

He muttered under his breath, a self-mocking smile touching his lips.

“Heh. We once swallowed half the world, and now we are reduced to this pitiful state. I should have stopped the Cult Leader, even at the cost of my life, when he accepted vicious criminals like the Qilian Three Fiends and the Yin-Yang Twin Ghosts. Then again, that was when the Cult Leader himself began to change.”

“The Yin-Yang Twin Ghosts?”

“You may not know of them, but long ago, there were men called—”

“Oh, I know them.”

“What? You know the Yin-Yang Twin Ghosts?”

I nodded as if it were obvious.

“I don’t know much about the Qilian Three Fiends, but I know the Yin-Yang Twin Ghosts.”

“How can someone who has never even heard this old man’s title know of the Yin-Yang Twin Ghosts?”

“Well, you see…”

I scratched the back of my head and continued.

“I tend to remember the title of anyone I’ve fought. Especially masters of that caliber.”

“……W-what? You fought the Yin-Yang Twin Ghosts?”

“Technically, I only fought one of them—the Yang Ghost. Our Old Master—no, Master—killed the Yang Ghost. The Yin Ghost was killed by some crazy bastard and followed his friend to the afterlife. Anyway, do these fucking bastards think Henan is Gotham City…?”

“……!”

The Heavenly Power Demon froze with his mouth hanging open, then hurriedly poured out his questions.

“T-the Yin-Yang Twin Ghosts! How did those men survive and reappear in the Murim? And in Henan, no less? Did the Divine Cult launch a surprise attack on Shaolin?”

“They did raise hell at Shaolin, but it wasn’t the Demonic Cult’s doing.”

“Th-then who was responsible? Who did it?”

I had expected as much, but the Heavenly Power Demon truly knew nothing about the current state of the Murim.

The only outsider he ever spoke to was Old Man Gung.

Not that the old man is the type to explain things out of kindness.

Not unless he considered severing tendons a form of kindness.

After a moment’s thought, I decided to tell him the truth.

The Heavenly Power Demon had no chance of leaving the underground prison before his death anyway.

Besides, Dark Heaven’s existence had once been top secret, but word was already spreading among the major sects. Telling him would cause no harm.

“Uh, I’m not sure how to put this.”

“Tell me. Quickly!”

“Hold on.”

Ah, right.

At last, I found the perfect term. Impressed by my own brilliance, I opened my mouth.

“They changed jobs.”

“……?”

“I don’t know whether they joined another company or merely transferred to a different department, but until they died, they were working for a group called Dark Heaven instead of the Demonic Cult…”

In the end, I couldn’t finish.

Hurried footsteps approached, and a familiar face appeared.

“B’factor!”

“Swallow what’s in your mouth before you talk.”

“B’factor! B’factor! Try this too! It’s delish!”

“What’s with all the ‘B’factors’? Are you looking for the police chief who lives in Namcheon-dong?⁴”

“B’factor!”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m sure you went to the sauna, ate together, and did the whole nine yards.”

“It’s weally delish!”

Cheongpung had stuffed both cheeks full of snacks, and he was still carrying an armful of food wrapped in paper.

I pulled out a nicely roasted duck leg and was about to sink my teeth into it when I remembered the man I had momentarily forgotten and held it out to him.

“Want one?”

Only then did I finally see the Heavenly Power Demon, frozen like a stone statue.