Chapter 913

A sea of corpses and blood.

There was no other way to describe it.

Everywhere the eye could see, corpses lay strewn about and blood ran in overflowing streams.

This vast space had been built for imperial celebrations. Today, it was a battlefield where countless people killed and died. The Embroidered Uniform Guard under Jeong Hogun had finally put down most of the traitors, but they had no chance to savor their victory.

Instead, they stood back-to-back, afraid.

Their battle wasn’t over.

Now they faced monsters far beyond the bounds of common sense.

Grrk. Grrrr.

A terrible stench smothered even the thick smell of blood.

Jeok Cheongang stood back-to-back with Jin Taekyung, watching the creatures surround them and let out cries no one could understand. Then he spoke.

“Let me ask you one thing.”

“You can ask me as many things as you want for three days straight.”

Jin Taekyung spat out the blood pooling in his mouth, picked up a spear and sword lying on the ground, and added:

“If those bastards are willing to wait that long, of course.”

Of course, Jin Taekyung knew there was no chance of that happening.

Everyone’s thinking the same thing.

The faces of the Fire Dragon Pavilion members and the Embroidered Uniform Guards, now standing back-to-back in a circle, showed the same feelings swirling inside him. And then Jeok Cheongang’s subdued voice came from behind him, tense in a way he couldn’t hide.

“The realm of immortals… Your homeland. Does it have things like those?”

Jin Taekyung answered without hesitation.

“Of course. Tons of them.”

“Tons? Just how many?”

“Uh, Old Master, how many meals do you think Taishan’s eaten in his life?”

“An awful lot, I’d imagine. Too many to count.”

“I think so, too. Now imagine at least dozens—no, hundreds of times that many.”

Understanding dawned, and Jeok Cheongang sighed.

“Fuck, that’s a lot.”

“Yeah. A fucking lot. Some lunatic must’ve accounted for different tastes, too, because there are all kinds.”

“Damn it. That’s no realm of immortals. It’s the Demon Realm.”

“Oh, that’s a separate place. I think I told you about it before.”

“…For fuck’s sake. What kind of world is that?”

“What kind? A shitty one. But you know what?”

“What?”

“This place seems to be getting just as shitty as my homeland.”

Jeok Cheongang was silent for a moment after Jin Taekyung answered. Then he spoke.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I think so, too. I suppose I’ve lived too long, to see a miserable sight like this.”

“Why say you’ve lived too long? Don’t jinx it.”

“Enough with the pointless worrying. I plan to live another fifty years.”

“That’s much better. Yeah. You’d better.”

Jin Taekyung tried to sound cheerful, but a great weight had settled in his chest.

Damn it.

He silently surveyed the area. Familiar and unfamiliar faces alike filled his vision.

On every face, the whirlpool of complicated emotions they were feeling showed plainly.

Tension. Shock. Fear.

And a handful of courage, drawn with difficulty from beneath it all.

How many of them will make it out alive?

Jin Taekyung forced himself to erase the ominous question that had suddenly crossed his mind. Right now, keeping his attention on the enemy was all he could manage.

“I have waited a very long time for this day.”

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord stood tall at the head and center of the army of the dead encircling the battlefield. He spoke slowly.

To everyone there.

No—to the Emperor.

“Today, in this very place, the Great Nation will cease to exist.”

At that moment—

Shhhhh.

An inexplicable chill spread through the air.

Pale energy flowed from the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord’s entire body, seeping like smoke across the battlefield.

No. It was swallowing the battlefield whole.

A bell in his hand rang, and the energy moved to its rhythm.

Jingle.

The eerie chime rang clear, yet it reached the mind rather than the ears. It was more like a wave of energy than an ordinary sound.

Most people lacked the martial arts realm to make sense of it.

But that same wave was raising those who no longer lived.

By the time Jin Taekyung realized what was happening, he was already too late.

Thump.

“Old Master!”

“Stop.”

Jeok Cheongang grabbed Jin Taekyung by the shoulder as he was about to shoot toward the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord, and continued in a sunken voice:

“It’s already too late.”

“…!”

Jin Taekyung’s eyes widened. The change that followed showed him what Jeok Cheongang meant.

Crick. Crrick.

The ground trembled. As the vibrations grew stronger, the pools of blood rippled and the air turned cold.

No. That’s not it.

Jin Taekyung swallowed a gasp. His trembling gaze fixed on the nameless corpse at his feet, which had begun to stir.

It isn’t the ground… It’s the corpses.

The thousands of corpses covering the battlefield were waking.

Returning to the world of the living, where they no longer belonged. Becoming something other than human.

“Hh…!”

“W-what is this?”

“Strike before they—before those monsters get up! Hurry!”

Thwack! Slice!

The air grew colder, and fear spread with it.

Spears and swords struck the corpses in a frenzy, but they would not stay down.

Amid the chaos, Jeok Cheongang remembered the legends of the Maoshan Sect, erased from Murim long ago. He looked at his Disciple.

“What do you call things like this where you live?”

Crunch!

Jin Taekyung stamped on the corpse beneath his foot and answered through gritted teeth.

“Undead.”

Grrr…

A corpse with its throat split open lifted its head from a pool of blood. Jin Taekyung had crushed its spine, yet it still struggled to rise.

“They’re monsters that aren’t dead, but aren’t alive, either.”

Jeok Cheongang nodded.

The pronunciation was unfamiliar, but the meaning was similar.

Among all the sects and martial families under Heaven, only the Maoshan Sect had preserved tales of such monsters. Undead described them perfectly.

Monsters that aren’t dead, but aren’t alive, either.

When Jeok Cheongang had first heard those tales, he had dismissed them as nonsense invented by idle gossips.

It was simply impossible.

It defied the natural order ordained by Heaven—an utterly bizarre legend.

But now, that was no longer the case.

The unbelievable legend was before his eyes.

“…Jiangshi.”

Jeok Cheongang murmured the word like a groan and reached toward the corpse twitching as it rose.

Fwoosh. Boom!

Despite his serious Internal Injury, his light-flames burst forth without dimming in the slightest. They ate through the flesh of the thing that had returned from beyond the river of death, burning its bones and organs.

Psssh. Splash.

Jeok Cheongang stamped on the remains as they crumbled to ash and dissolved into the pool of blood. Then he turned to his Disciple.

“What under Heaven could survive the Fire Gate Clan’s flames?”

“…!”

“Burn them without end. If they won’t die, burn them to ash until they do. Just as our sect’s ancestors did.”

Jin Taekyung stared at Jeok Cheongang with wide eyes, then replied with a deliberately serious expression:

“How did you know? That’s exactly what I’m best at.”

Master and Disciple smiled at each other at the same time.

Then they charged the corpses surging in from every direction.

One streak of flame. No—two.

The eerie bell kept ringing.

Jingle. Jingle.

KWAAAAH!

It was a clash between the dead and the living, like watching a boulder fall toward an egg.

GRAAAH!

Undead. Jiangshi.

Or perhaps something else entirely. The corpses shot toward the surviving humans from every direction, sharp and fast as spikes.

They weren’t stiff or slow like jiangshi, nor were they weak like undead.

That was what made them so formidable.

Crunch!

“Hold the line!”

“For His Majesty the Emperor—!”

Clang! Slice!

Their cries of loyalty vanished beneath the din.

Thousands of corpses crashed into the humans’ shieldlike circle. They moved as nimbly as they had in life, and their souls, caught by the sound of the bell, no longer feared injury or death.

Crunch!

“Aaagh!”

Crimson blood spurted like a fountain. Every scream wrenched from someone’s lungs belonged to the living.

Sword Energy severed arms, cut through legs, and pierced chests. Still the dead rose and advanced, breaking down the human formation little by little.

They followed the bell as it rang faster and sharper, carrying out their master’s command.

Jingle, jingle.

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord walked forward slowly. Hundreds of the dead followed him, Ma Sanbao among them. At the end of their path rose a high dais.

No—the Emperor stood there.

“When the long and fierce age of warring heroes was drawing to a close, I was only thirteen.”

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord spoke in a singsong voice. His gray gaze drifted to the young king trembling beside the Emperor.

A boy barely in his early teens.

Even he, an old man and a monster who had ceased to be human, had once been called a boy.

“I was a sinner from the moment I was born. A sinner guilty of being born in an age of chaos—a sin that could never be washed away.”

The day his father, an ordinary farmer, and his two older brothers, both still in their teens, were dragged off to the battlefield, the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord learned something for the first time.

Misfortune did not come only to those who had sinned.

Having no wealth, no strength, and no spear or sword with which to fight back was itself a crime.

“And yet the rulers who sent innocent people before spears and swords were not sinners. They were Heaven itself. Thousands, tens of thousands, died on battlefields of their making while they filled their bellies with rice and meat.”

The last blaze of that age of chaos was spectacular. Men who proclaimed themselves kings and Sons of Heaven fought hardest at the edge of the precipice.

Among the countless lives reduced to ash in that blaze were the young Eastern Heaven Demon Lord’s father and two older brothers.

And his mother, raped and killed after she resisted the soldiers who came to conscript her thirteen-year-old son.

From that day on, the boy did not cry.

Even a year later, after the final victor—who had ended the age of chaos with the sharpest and strongest spears and swords—ascended the throne.

Not when a Daoist recognized the wandering boy’s aptitude, took him as a Disciple, and brought him into his sect.

There, he met his Master and came to know his Senior and Junior Brothers.

At the Maoshan Sect, he found laughter instead of tears. Happiness.

And within a few years, that happiness ended.

“Did you know?”

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord stopped walking. Then he asked his enemy’s descendant, who was looking down at him from hundreds of steps above:

“What your grandfather, Taizu, did to us?”

Jingle.