Chapter 455

“Cough, cough.”

Hunched over like a shrimp, the old man coughed with difficulty.

Whenever he moved, the chill rising from the underground prison’s cold stone floor seeped into his bones.

Yet no illness could take root in his body.

The several jiazi¹ of internal energy accumulated in his dantian over the long years no longer obeyed his control, but they were more than enough to protect his aged body.

And that only enraged him further.

Damn it…!

The already ugly old man’s features twisted into the face of a fiend.

Once, he had crossed the continent and left countless storms of blood in his wake. Now he was being treated like livestock that could be slaughtered at any moment.

“Then kill me! If you’re going to subject me to such humiliation, just kill me already!”

As the old man writhed and let out a tearing scream, the chains binding his body tightly grated against one another.

But like the internal energy sealed within his dantian, the dozen or so iron balls attached to those chains did not budge an inch.

“You bastaaaardsss!”

Though his martial arts had been sealed and he could no longer display his former might, his innate viciousness remained unchanged.

The old man glared through the thick iron bars with bloodshot eyes. Faces that must have been laughing at him somewhere flashed before his eyes like hallucinations.

“You bastards…!”

A grudge etched into his bones and soul.

They had killed his two brothers, born on the same day and hour as him, with whom he had spent his entire life. The old man himself had been captured and subjected to every humiliation imaginable.

They had even crushed his testicles as though castrating livestock. Calling them mortal enemies did not begin to describe it.

“Fine. Then I’ll survive, no matter what it takes.”

Flames poured from the old man’s eyes.

“I will escape this place and rip you bastards apart alive!”

His shout, thick with killing intent, echoed through the underground prison.

That was when a voice spoke.

“I heard your escape pledge. Quite moving.”

“……!”

When did he—?

The old man blinked. One of the faces that had flashed before his eyes moments ago was now staring at him from beyond the bars.

The smile on the young man’s lips sent a chill through his chest.

“Y-you…”

“How’s the busted part? Must hurt every time you take a piss.”

The old man almost nodded without realizing it.

But this young man’s name stood alongside the others at the very top of his kill list. He was someone the old man had to kill, whatever the cost.

The old man glared at him through the bars, eyes gleaming.

“If you’re curious, lift the seal on my martial arts right now. I’ll show you myself.”

“I’m not particularly curious about that…”

The smile on the young man’s lips—Jin Taekyung’s lips—vanished as if wiped away.

“You’ll have to tell me everything else you know, Third Fiend.”

In the modern world, torturing prisoners was classified as an illegal act. If such a fact became known, even a Great Nation would be condemned by the international community.

But this was Murim. The authority of the law was hazy, and the line between man and beast even hazier.

And as far as I was concerned, the Third Fiend was closer to a beast wearing human skin.

There’s no reason to hesitate.

He had harmed countless people over the course of many years.

He was a fiend who had slaughtered hundreds—thousands—of people merely to satisfy his bloodlust.

There was no room for flimsy morality on the bloody road he had walked, or in this damp, dark underground prison.

I stared coldly at the Third Fiend.

“Guhk… Hnggg…”

His body hung limp, bound to an iron chair.

Bloodstained saliva dripped from his open mouth, and his limbs, torn and broken all over, spasmed with pain.

“How is he?”

At my question, the old man examining him scratched his head with a bloodstained iron skewer.

“He has already reached his limit. At this point, we must assume he has confessed everything he knows.”

If torture skill were divided into realm stages, I was barely First Rate. The old man before me was a Supreme Peak master.

He had handled prisoners with such efficient cruelty during the Great Faction War that Zhuge Gonghu, the Fan-Wisdom King, had taken note of his methods and invited him to join the Zhuge Clan after the war.

“If we keep going…”

“He will die. Without fail. And in this old man’s opinion, beating him any further will yield nothing more.”

The old man’s voice rang with certainty.

The appearance of the Third Fiend, who had become half a corpse, and his aura, which seemed ready to go out at any moment, lent even greater weight to those words.

But this wasn’t enough. I stared at the Third Fiend as he trembled, nearly senseless.

Is this really everything?

It wasn’t as though he had known nothing.

For the first few shichen,² he had held out through sheer spite. But as the torture neared its final stages, he had grown talkative enough to fill five bamboo slips with densely packed writing.

Yet most of it was useless or concerned events from the past, and the information I needed most had never come out.

The series of incidents happening in Hubei Province right now.

The Sea Serpent Society had fallen, and Donghu Stronghold had been massacred.

The casualties had already far exceeded a thousand, including innocent commoners who did not know even a single martial move or half a stance.

As far as I knew, only one group possessed both the power and the sheer brutality to commit such madness.

Dark Heaven.

The problem was that I could not get hold of their trail.

Where and how had they attacked the Sea Serpent Society and Donghu Stronghold? Where had they hidden the Moving Formation?

And finally, where were the perpetrators now, and what were they doing?

“This won’t do.”

Muttering under my breath, I grabbed the unconscious Third Fiend by the wrist. The old man, who had been standing nearby with a bored expression, hurriedly tried to stop me.

“Great Hero, if you do that—!”

“It’s fine. I’m not trying to kill him.”

I sent internal energy through the Third Fiend’s wrist. As the warmth of Scorching Yang Qi flowed along his acupoints, color returned to his pale cheeks and his eyelids lifted.

My face appeared in his unfocused, trembling gray eyes.

“Y-you…”

“Wake up. It’s still too early.”

“J-just kill me.”

“Tell me everything you know, and you’ll get your wish. But if you insist on pretending to be a loyal servant…”

I poured more force into the faint stream of internal energy. The Third Fiend’s eyes flew open with a sharp gasp.

His body was already ruined inside and out. It could not endure the heat of Scorching Yang Qi.

“Ghk… Gack.”

His painful, gasping breaths carried the smell of meat being cooked. But I continued staring at the Third Fiend without wavering.

“That’s not the answer I want.”

“This old man—I have already told you everything.”

“Not that either.”

“Ghk. P-please…”

“If you can still hold out like this, you’re nowhere near death yet. Just like there’s still information I haven’t heard.”

“What else could you possibly want me to say…?”

“I’ve told you several times already. Everything about Dark Heaven. What’s happening in Hubei Province, and the Dongting Fisherman.”

“I told you, I don’t know—kuweeegh!”

With every exchange, the Scorching Yang Qi grew stronger.

The Third Fiend trembled violently, eyes rolling back until only the whites showed. A scream tore from his lips.

“Kill me! Hurry up and kill me! Even as a vengeful ghost, I’ll chew through your flesh and bones…!”

Damn it. That was as far as I could go.

I abruptly withdrew the internal energy I had been forcing into him. The Third Fiend immediately went limp, like a puppet with its strings cut.

Changing the flow, I gently stabilized his body from within. The old man, already standing by, quickly took his pulse and checked his condition.

“He’s a hard one to kill. Stopped right on the threshold of the afterlife.”

I knew. I had controlled my strength as carefully as possible to keep him alive.

He can’t die here.

The Third Fiend was one of the great fiends of the previous generation and a Supreme Peak master of Dark Heaven.

If we kept him alive and escorted him to Henan, there might be a way to learn even more information.

Of course, I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that those bamboo slips contained everything he knew.

No. That was probably the likeliest possibility.

If he still didn’t talk after all this… maybe he really has told us everything.

The mental strength and endurance of a Supreme Peak master defied imagination.

Yet the Third Fiend had begged me—someone no different from his mortal enemy—to stop. He had screamed for me to kill him instead.

And still, he had never changed his story.

I—I and my brothers only followed orders under the Demon Lord! I don’t know anything about Dark Heaven’s headquarters or what happened elsewhere, I tell you!

Remembering the cries he had repeated throughout the torture, I called out a name.

“Gung Gibang. Any news?”

Gung Gibang, leaning against the iron bars, shook his head.

“Nothing. Our Hubei branch still hasn’t found them.”

“Three Supreme Peak masters—or hundreds of people and ships—must have been mobilized. There’s no way they could’ve avoided attention. If we focus on outsiders, we might have a chance…”

“We already are, but it isn’t easy. Hundreds of large ships travel the Hubei stretch of the Yangtze every day, and the people moving by land are too numerous to count. And if this happened a good ten days ago… there’s a strong chance they’ve already left Hubei by one means or another.”

“Damn it.”

Unlike Shanxi Province, which was treated as a borderland, Hubei Province was part of the region known as the Central Plains, and its industries were well developed.

With merchants and travelers constantly pouring in and out of such a vast territory, even the Beggars’ Sect was bound to struggle.

Gung Gibang watched my expression, then spoke cautiously.

“Cheongpung and Hyuk Mujin went to the Lower District Sect, so all we can do is hope they found something. Their findings probably won’t be much different from those of our Hubei branch, but… we have to hold on to hope.”

Gung Gibang was right.

Half a shichen later, Cheongpung and Hyuk Mujin returned to the Zhuge Clan carrying a large bundle of bamboo slips.

A single man’s sobriquet was written on the cord binding them together.

Dongting Fisherman.

“This…”

Hyuk Mujin swallowed hard before continuing.

“It seems the Lower District Sect had some sort of dispute with the Dongting Fisherman. They said they’ve been keeping a close watch on him for several years under the Sect Leader’s orders… You should probably read it yourself.”

I quickly skimmed the contents of the bamboo slips.

Their records on the Dongting Fisherman went back no fewer than three years, and the bundle in my hands contained only a portion of them.

The records from one month ago through today revealed one fact.

The Dongting Fisherman is still in Hubei Province.

Which meant…

Clatter!

I shoved the bamboo slips into my robe and immediately went in search of one man.

Zhuge Gyun, the Divine Marvel Dragon and Lesser Family Head of the Zhuge Clan, had been issuing orders in place of the Family Head, Zhuge Feng. His eyes widened at my noisy arrival.

“What brings you here in such haste? My ancestor Zhuge Wuhou said that a junzi³ should always conduct himself properly and remain tranquil…”

“Shut up. Are the people ready?”

“The people my fath—no, the Family Head mentioned are already prepared to leave. Do you intend to depart immediately?”

“Yeah. But I think I need to stop somewhere else first.”

“Pardon? Where…?”

“Dongting Lake.”