Chapter 914

Jingle.

At the clear chime, which seemed to ring inside his head, the Emperor was suddenly seized by a splitting headache.

The Maoshan Sect.

The name remained in his memory, however faintly.

He and every other prince had studied the art of ruling. They were expected to know the history of the Great Nation and the imperial family inside and out.

That history included the Maoshan Sect—or, more precisely, the event known as the “Maoshan Rebellion.”

Third year of Pyeongjeong.

When His Majesty Taizu declared Nanjing in Jiangsu the Imperial Capital, the treasonous Maoshan rebels opposed the decision, rallied their forces, and rose against him.

The court historians had given the event only a brief mention, but its repercussions had been considerable.

It was an open revolt against the first Emperor, who had emerged from the long, fierce age of warring heroes as the continent’s final victor and established himself as an absolute ruler with boundless power.

That was why he’d been more merciless than ever.

Taizu, founder of the unified dynasty, was as cruel as he was great.

The day the imperial court received word that the Maoshan Sect, facing the loss of its ancestral home after generations of inhabiting it, had gathered its forces to oppose the relocation of the capital, Taizu immediately ordered his troops to march.

Three days later, it had disappeared from the world.

The mountain they had risked their lives to protect was engulfed in flames. Everything connected to the three characters that spelled Maoshan Sect was hacked apart by wave after wave of soldiers and thrown onto the pyres.

Humans and livestock alike.

The living and the dead alike.

But…

The records were wrong. Someone survived.

The Emperor endured the pain stabbing through his skull and looked down the seemingly endless flight of stairs.

There stood the Maoshan Sect’s last surviving root, gazing back at him. He had endured through the ages for this day alone, his eyes burning with the hatred of a man who had never once forgotten his grudge.

“I’ve always wondered why you wanted to destroy the imperial family and the Great Nation.”

The Emperor slowly rose from his throne. The hem of his long, ornate dragon robe brushed the ground.

Swish.

He walked forward at an unhurried pace. Baek Yeon, standing beside him, blocked his path with a rigid expression, but the Emperor did not stop.

Step. Step.

One step. Then another.

The Emperor descended the stairs carpeted in crimson silk. The two men who had once been bound as ruler and subject drew closer to each other.

Then the Emperor stopped halfway down, and a quiet voice slipped through his cracked lips.

“So you betrayed the late Emperor—my father?”

“Betrayed?”

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord laughed aloud at the abrupt question, though his monstrous face was twisted into anything but a smile.

“Who betrayed whom? I never gave you bastards my loyalty for even a single moment.”

He had waited a very long time for this day.

How many nights had he lain awake, reliving his sense of betrayal and his thirst for revenge?

How many buckets of blood had he spilled mastering the martial arts manuals his Master had entrusted to him as the sect faced destruction?

The boy had chosen to become a eunuch as the surest way to bring down the impregnable fortress of the Great Nation. Then, one day after he had grown into a young man, an unwelcome visitor appeared with an offer.

“I bring you the words of the almighty and great Lord of Heaven.”

And that day, the young man joined the demonic army.

“Do you still not understand?”

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord stared at the Emperor with cold, gray eyes.

“You’re not the ones who were betrayed.”

His father had often said that an age of peace and prosperity would come someday. His two older brothers had been dragged off to the battlefield as though they were captives, yet they had promised to return alive.

And their mother, who had lost her husband and two sons, had believed that at least her youngest boy—far too young to be on his own—would survive.

But she had been wrong.

Every last one of their hopes had been betrayed.

The boy had lost his entire family and barely survived a battlefield he’d been forced onto. Then the second happiness that had found him, almost like a miracle, was stolen away as well.

“You betrayed me first.”

All of them.

“No—the whole world.”

Jingle.

“You betrayed it.”

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord’s voice and gaze, both cold until now, seethed like molten lava.

As he saw it, he was the one who had been betrayed first. The common people had been betrayed. The whole world had been betrayed.

He had lost his family to the struggles of men dreaming of becoming kings and ministers. His Master and fellow disciples, who had become another family to him, had been hacked apart by countless spears and swords.

And there had been only one reason.

They had tried to protect the home passed down to them through generations, defying Taizu’s decree that no martial artists could live near the Imperial Capital.

That was all.

“That is why you must die.”

In the most miserable, most horrific way possible.

“For that one wish alone, I have endured and waited all this time.”

It had taken many years for the boy to become a young man, the young man to become middle-aged, and finally for his hair to turn white. But those years had not been wasted.

The mask of Cang Gong that the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord wore was magnificent and powerful.

The East Depot’s intelligence network stretched across the world, and few among the civil and military officials who upheld the Great Nation had no connection to him.

As both the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord and Cang Gong, he was second in power only to the Emperor.

He might not have worn a dragon robe, but he was another absolute ruler—second to one, above all others. Most of the court lay in his grasp.

Even the imperial family.

“I—or rather, we are…”

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord’s voice boiled as he spoke to the Emperor looking down at him.

“The Great Nation.”

“……!”

“……!”

The air around them froze. At the same time, the worn bell in the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord’s hand began to tremble wildly.

Jingle. Jingle. Jingle.

Sound like the wailing of ghosts spread in every direction.

Louder. Farther.

It crossed the vast banquet hall and reached the stone walls covered in the bodies of the Imperial Guards.

It was loud enough to raise those who already lay there in a pitiful state from the dead.

GRAAAH!

A roar that chilled the spine alone shook the night air. The monsters, now more ferocious and powerful, advanced in response to the sound waves ringing through their minds.

Toward the towering stairs. Toward the Emperor standing at their center.

And at the head of that surging wave of the dead was the man who had waited for this day alone.

“Now, let’s see it through to the end.”

He muttered the words as though making a vow to himself, then took a step.

No—he was about to shoot forward and tear the Emperor to pieces.

Then a voice pierced his ear.

“Stop.”

“……!”

“I know what you’re trying to do, but you’d better leave it at that.”

Hummm.

The air shuddered.

There was clearly only one speaker, yet the voice came from several directions.

Six-Harmonies Voice Transmission—a technique even a Supreme Peak master would scarcely dare attempt.

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord felt the terrifying internal energy behind it and bit down on his lip.

He remembered his bitter defeat more than a decade ago and fixed his gaze on the woman looking down at him from just behind the Emperor’s shoulder.

So Gyo.

On the surface, she looked like nothing more than a beautiful, graceful woman. But he had suffered a crushing defeat once before because of her intervention. He knew exactly how much power was contained in that slender body.

He knew how much he himself had grown in the years since, too.

But there was one thing he still had no way of knowing.

“Who the hell are you, woman?”

So Gyo’s image was reflected in his darkened eyes.

An unknown superhuman whose identity had eluded even the intelligence networks of Dark Heaven and the East Depot.

The greatest enemy of his life, who had appeared without warning one day and left wounds on his body and soul that would never heal.

The grave Internal Injury she had inflicted on him had never healed, forcing him to turn himself into a jiangshi. Even now, he could not be sure who So Gyo was.

“Answer me. Who are you?”

If she were an agent of the orthodox faction, she would not have stood by while matters reached this point. If she were a master secretly raised by the imperial family, she should have appeared to stop him long ago.

But So Gyo was neither.

Gripping a weapon resembling a curved saber in each hand, she looked straight at him, her gaze untroubled.

She had cast off the black clothing that had once covered her from head to toe and freely released the immense power she had kept confined within her body.

Fwoooosh.

It was unmistakable. Overwhelming.

An unprecedented energy took visible form, rising in fine strands from all over So Gyo’s body. Her calm voice, at odds with the situation, rang out from all six directions.

“Well, I have my own circumstances, just like you do. I’m not sure I should tell you for free…”

Step.

She walked forward slowly, and her gaze turned cold.

“If you bite down on a sword and kill yourself right now, I might think about telling you.”

“……!”

“Oh. Would that not kill you anymore?”

Crack.

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord clenched his teeth without realizing it. But having stopped, he found it difficult to take another step.

Why?

By now, he had achieved Great Completion in all of his sect’s supreme techniques.

The Maoshan Sect’s arts might have focused on sorcery, including the art of controlling jiangshi, but he had made even death his own and become a superhuman in a different sense.

And yet…

She’s dangerous.

He knew it instinctively. If he moved carelessly now, So Gyo would get the better of him.

Even though he could no longer die or feel pain, his Qi Sense kept sending him warning after warning.

“Master.”

His Disciple Ma Sanbao’s low voice reached his ear, but the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord did not move. He stared at So Gyo without a word.

The aura he felt from her now was on a level with the Fire King, Jeok Cheongang.

Considering the full strength at his disposal, he still had a good chance of winning, even with the Emperor, Baek Yeon, and the Emperor’s hidden guards against him.

Strictly speaking, he judged his own martial prowess to be half a step below the Fire King’s or So Gyo’s. But he and every soldier under his command possessed such horrifying tenacity that they could keep attacking as though each strike were meant to take their own lives along with the enemy’s.

Even if their arms and legs were cut off, even if their chests were pierced, they would not stop.

Not until every living person had fallen.

Not until their enemies’ bodies and the blood flowing through them had gone cold as ice.

If I capture the Emperor and Prince Shangshan—or kill that woman—this will all be over.

The battle to the death was not taking place in this hall alone. By now, the armies of the Great Nation, divided into two, would be fighting a bloody battle around the imperial capital, and his side would win.

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord opened his tightly shut mouth.

“Go.”

Jingle.

The worn bell, a divine artifact of the Maoshan Sect, gave a strange chime.

Rumble!

More than a thousand of the dead—the Great Nation’s elite soldiers, once known as the Imperial Guards—charged across the banquet hall.

GRAAAAH!

As the shrieking army surged forward like a wave, two streaks of light burst toward it.

Shwaaah!

Brilliant light flashed.

At the same time, the overwhelming Force unleashed by Baek Yeon and So Gyo, the two superhumans who had stepped in front of the Emperor, crushed and smashed the flesh and bones of the dead.

CRUNCH!

The vanguard was pulverized in an instant. But the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord knew what the two of them could do and was not the least bit surprised.

I expected this.

Humans were made of flesh and blood, and all were fated to die.

Even those called superhuman had limits. Their limits might be far beyond those of ordinary people, but they were human limits all the same.

I’ll wait for an opening and kill them in one strike.

The Eastern Heaven Demon Lord moved forward, his gaze dark. With his Disciple Ma Sanbao on one side and a master of the Twelve Palaces of the Zodiac, returned from the dead, on the other, he climbed the stairs now covered in rotten blood and shattered corpses.

Splash.

And at that very moment—

“Are you busy right now?”

The voice came from some distance behind him.

Only then did he realize that the howls of his followers, which had been ringing out far away, were beginning to die down.

Perhaps the limits he had assigned to superhumans were higher than he thought.

Swish.

He turned, his face rigid, and saw two men he had not expected to meet again so soon.

“Hey, ugly-ass big bro. If you’re not too busy, make some time for me.”

“Indeed. This old man will take very good care of you.”

Jeok Cheongang and Jin Taekyung stood there looking like men drenched in blood. They bared their white teeth and grinned.

They looked so much alike.