Chapter 296: Promise (3)
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I could feel it. Myeong-gyeong was angrier right now than she had ever been before. This was nothing like mere irritation or sulking.
“Whatever happened to the Company Lord, you have grown quite brazen.”
The Emperor looked at Myeong-gyeong with displeasure.
Originally, she had been a child who could not even make a peep before him, so it was only natural that he would be displeased to see her stand so boldly now.
The Emperor would think Myeong-gyeong had changed in a short span of time, but in truth she had changed gradually over the year she had spent with me.
“Do they not say that after facing death, one gains a new life? It is much the same.”
Myeong-gyeong’s voice was still sharp.
By now, even the ministers must have all understood. At the very least, that the Emperor’s request had been a trap.
“How dare you speak such nonsense.”
Naturally, the Emperor played dumb. I had not expected him to admit it.
Besides, we were the ones who had gone in knowing full well that there was likely a trap.
The stage for resolving this through talk had already passed. Resolving things through conversation was like undoing a knot one thread at a time. We had no time for that, and above all, we had no desire for it.
In that sense, my slapping the Grand Eunuch across the face had been a clear statement of intent.
“……Your Majesty. Please grant me leave to repay the insult that man dealt me.”
The Grand Eunuch’s face, flushed red, trembled. To be struck across the face before so many ministers. For someone who had risen to the position of Grand Eunuch, it was an insult almost impossible to imagine.
“I do not wish to see blood, but the insult the Grand Eunuch feels seems quite severe. Youngest. What do you think?”
The Emperor spoke. Myeong-gyeong shrugged.
“It is a matter between the two of them. Still, in the martial world, it is not an uncommon way to settle things. I would like to support it.”
“Then I too have no reason to object.”
The Grand Eunuch glared at me with the face of a vengeful ghost. He looked ready to flay me alive at any moment. He was clearly strong. Had it not been the Grand Eunuch who had ambushed me during the New Justice Festival and put me through hell?
In the end, the situation became a strange one. Before the Imperial Palace and all the ministers. I stood with my sword drawn against the Grand Eunuch in the plaza before the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
“If you meant to shatter my peace, then I must say you did very well. In all my life, I do not think I have ever suffered such a grave insult.”
“You have lived quite easily, then. To call that the worst insult you have ever known.”
“That is the first time I have heard anyone say life was easy after having his balls cut off.”
“I will concede that much. I spoke out of turn.”
If he had his balls cut off, then he had not lived easily. On that point alone, I agreed as one man to another.
“You grew arrogant after defeating Seo Jong-haeng. Do you think I am the same as Seo Jong-haeng?”
“We are different. Lord Seo exists. You, Grand Eunuch, do not.”
“I do not know where you get such confidence, but unless I let my guard down, you are no match for me.”
The Grand Eunuch was not wrong. At the New Justice Festival a few months ago, he had clearly overwhelmed me with tremendous speed and swift swordwork. I had only managed to parry once at the very end.
Not much time had passed since then, so it was only natural that the Grand Eunuch thought that way.
But in truth, not much time passing applied only to the Grand Eunuch.
“Shall we begin?”
This was not a friendly match, so there was no referee. It was a clash between martial artists meant to settle insult with insult.
The Grand Eunuch smiled darkly at the corner of his mouth.
“We have already begun. It seems only you do not know it.”
“Ah, you mean the poison mist?”
At my cheerful reply, the Grand Eunuch’s face hardened. I opened the fist I had been clenching tight. A thick drop of poison water fell from my palm to the ground.
The blue bricks filling the plaza of the Hall of Supreme Harmony smoked and sizzled as they burned. I had known it had begun long ago.
After he spread a qi curtain so that energy would not leak outward, the Eastern Depot Grand Eunuch had exhaled poison mist. As expected of the Eastern Depot, he had even mastered sinister arts like poison techniques.
I had nearly failed to notice at first. I had not expected him to use such a vile trick from the outset.
As the Grand Eunuch himself had said, he already had a record of overwhelming me once. Yet he had still spread poison mist in advance. I could not help but think that this was precisely the sort of action that showed what the Eastern Depot truly was.
The poison mist was colorless and odorless, which made it hard to detect. The reason I had noticed the poison was unexpectedly my external arts.
As someone with the grade-3 talent Martial King’s Body, the proficiency of my external arts had risen at an absurd speed. Even Myeong-gyeong, who saw me every day, was shocked enough to click her tongue in disbelief.
Because I had devoted effort to my external arts, including my skin, the sensation detected through my skin had become quite sensitive. No matter how colorless, odorless, and formless it was, there had to be a difference between air carrying poison and natural air. My skin felt faintly stinging.
Clearly, just as the Company Lord of the Radiant Crystal Merchant Company had advised, once I reached a certain level in my external arts, my perspective on martial arts itself had broadened somewhat.
The moment I sensed the poison mist, I immediately spread the character absorption seal with my hand, drew in all the air, filtered out the poison, and reduced it to a handful.
“How cunning. To know and yet pretend not to.”
“Even I did not know you would go that far, old man.”
At my insolence, the Grand Eunuch’s eyes began to blaze. Of course. Apart from the Emperor, the Grand Eunuch had always received nothing but the highest treatment. When would a man who had spent long years as Grand Eunuch ever have been toyed with like this? Perhaps in his days as an inner-court eunuch it might have been different, but for someone who had already lived many years as Grand Eunuch, my manner of speech must have been truly hard to adjust to.
The Grand Eunuch moved first. He did not even say he was starting. As he had said earlier, once he had spread the poison mist, the fight had already begun, so there was no need to declare anything more.
Energy shot in from behind my shoulder. Before I knew it, he had taken position behind me and was attacking from a blind angle. It was still a precise, secretive, and threatening sword.
“Ooh!”
Voices burst out among the ministers. They were civil officials with no interest in martial arts, so to them it must have looked as though he had vanished and then reappeared.
It was an overwhelming speed, but I was not unable to follow it as before. I spun my body and knocked the incoming sword outward.
“Hoh?”
The Grand Eunuch’s eyes widened, as though he had not expected me to react at such speed.
By the Grand Eunuch’s reckoning, a few months ago I should have been too slow to keep up and busy doing nothing but defending.
I immediately deployed Shifting Form Changing Position and seized the blind angle behind the Grand Eunuch’s shoulder with the same method.
“What trickery is this?”
“What trickery?”
“It is something like the foundation of a martial artist, one that cannot explosively raise speed and strength. Not unless one uses sorcery!”
“Would you be any less underhanded than spreading poison mist before the fight even began?”
The Grand Eunuch’s expression twisted sharply. It was not only his words. He was being pushed back in the swordplay as well. By his common sense, it was something he could not possibly accept. I could understand why he kept insisting it was sorcery.
But what could be done? The talents I had bought from the shop were simply too outstanding.
The Grand Eunuch seemed to decide this would not do, and sprang far away. From the sleeves of the Grand Eunuch, who was rapidly putting distance between us, hidden weapons poured out, including throwing needles and throwing blades.
I drew my sword in a circle through empty air. Before the transparent sword curtain, all the hidden weapons struck it and clattered down.
The Grand Eunuch’s complexion changed completely. Surely the Grand Eunuch had also imbued his hidden weapons with internal energy, so the fact that they failed to pierce the sword curtain formed from my internal energy meant one thing. My internal energy was deeper than the Grand Eunuch’s.
“This is, this is impossible……!”
The Eastern Depot Grand Eunuch was also a martial artist on the verge of peak mastery. Unlike the Wudang Taoists, who had already adapted to my incomprehensible rate of growth, the Grand Eunuch had not yet adapted.
The Grand Eunuch seized my back again. But this time I was already turning around. When our eyes met, the Grand Eunuch startled badly.
The Grand Eunuch, teeth clenched tight, swiftly swung both short swords. The speed was so tremendous that whirlwinds rose around his feet from the mere act of swinging the blades.
“What a messy display of blade work.”
With a single stroke, I dismantled every change in those swords. The first form of the Hunwon Muhui Sword Art, New Moon, severed the overlapping points in the trajectories of the twin short swords all at once.
The startled Grand Eunuch lay his body flat with the Iron Plate Bridge technique. A savage sword aura tore through the air and grazed past the tip of the Grand Eunuch’s nose.
“You do not recognize it?”
But that was naturally not all I had. My body had now been strengthened enough that I could move swiftly even while unleashing New Moon. In the past, it had been a first form I could barely use because I nearly had to stop from the recoil of New Moon itself. Training my external arts had clearly produced a distinct change in areas like this.
“Now you are no match for me.”
Before the Grand Eunuch, lying flat, could spring back up, I kicked his chest with the sole of my foot and slammed him into the ground.
“Kuhk!”
Along with the sound of breaking bone, the bricks of the floor shattered and fragments flew everywhere. The aftershock of my shock step shook the entire plaza.
Beneath my foot, the Grand Eunuch’s eyes were twisted in pain. There was some blood at the corner of his mouth, but his organs were only slightly injured. It was not a fatal wound. If I withdrew my foot now, after a few days of recuperation he would be able to use his martial arts and move as usual again.
But of course I had no intention of ending it that way. As I stepped on the Grand Eunuch, I bent the knee of the foot pinning him and put my weight into it.
“Kuh, ugh.”
“Grand Eunuch. You have lived long enough.”
“Y-you, you wouldn’t……”
The Grand Eunuch’s eyes filled with terror. The pressure grew heavier and heavier, the sound of bone creaking could be heard, and his chest caving in became visible to the naked eye.
Even though the Grand Eunuch had challenged me to a fight, he likely had not thought he would die. Of course he would have intended only to kill me.
He probably even thought that even if he lost, he would not die. Naturally. How could he imagine that a madman existed who could kill the Eastern Depot Grand Eunuch, the Emperor’s close attendant, right before the Emperor?
“P-please spare me! Your Majesty the Emperor!”
Seeing my eyes, the Grand Eunuch screamed convulsively. The moment he made a sound, blood burst out. Bone had pierced inward and injured his organs.
He must have been in a state where even speaking was difficult and painful, yet he screamed like that because he had guessed something from my eyes.
“Wait!”
Only then did the Emperor seem to realize what I was about to do. He shot up from his seat, his face drained of color.
“Why?”
I stopped putting force into my foot and looked at the Emperor.
“Are you now intending to kill the Grand Eunuch before me?”
“Your Majesty saw it as well, did you not? The Grand Eunuch clearly tried to kill me. Every minister here is a witness.”
I spoke as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The Emperor was left speechless. From the initial poison onward, and the killing intent he had unleashed in between, there was no room for excuse. Even the civil officials ignorant of martial arts must have recognized that the Grand Eunuch had tried to kill me.
“The Grand Eunuch is the head of the Eastern Depot and my close attendant. Do you not know what it would mean in the Imperial State to murder him before me?”
“What it means in the Imperial State does not matter much to me. I am a martial artist. The Grand Eunuch also invoked a personal insult, so I believe he entered this fight as one martial artist among many.”
“Do not do it. It is the Emperor’s command.”
The corners of the Emperor’s eyes trembled. I withdrew my foot. A sigh of relief escaped the Grand Eunuch lying on the ground, and just as the Emperor was about to feel reassured—
“I refuse.”
Even then, I swung the Bright Elegance I had been holding in my hand. The head and shoulders of the Grand Eunuch lying on the ground separated, and his neck gaped open. Blood spurted from the severed cross-section, and the severed head rolled, as if by design, straight toward the Emperor.
The Emperor and everyone else wore eyes of horror. In this situation, there was not a single person who dared open his mouth.