Chapter 92. Suddenly
Scattered skirmishes were still breaking out here and there, but most of the soldiers were simply staring at Dong Bong-su's back. Lee Ja-song was the same. He slowly rode his horse over and dismounted beside Timur Khan's corpse.
Tadak.
Lee Ja-song picked up Timur Khan's ear that had fallen to the ground.
"So the ear ghost has abandoned his ear ..."
With that, he had sufficiently grasped Dong Bong-su's intentions.
Puk.
Holding up Timur Khan's severed head, Lee Ja-song climbed up onto the fortress wall.
Then, raising it high so that all the soldiers who had entered the fortress could see, he shouted.
"Timur Khan is dead! Meaningless resistance will no longer be tolerated! If you all throw down your weapons and surrender, I will spare your lives!"
With that, the long and tedious war came to an end.
Lee Ja-song now turned his head outside the fortress.
Dong Bong-su was still slowly breaking through the path the soldiers had made and moving farther away from Guisui Fortress.
Toward that Dong Bong-su, Lee Ja-song shouted loudly.
"Where are you going?"
Dong Bong-su pulled the reins and stopped Kaiji. However, he did not turn his head.
"Central Plains."
It had always been a curt way of speaking, but now it was blatantly cut in half. Even so, Lee Ja-song smiled.
Whoosh.
Something left his hand and flew toward Dong Bong-su's back.
Tak.
Without even turning his head, Dong Bong-su stretched his hand back and snatched it. When he looked at it, it was one ear with a flashy ring-shaped earring attached.
"Take it with you. I'll keep the other one. If I go back to the court and manage to take a position, won't it be of some help to you?"
"......."
Without replying, Dong Bong-su put Timur Khan's ear into the inventory.
That was enough to satisfy Lee Ja-song.
"Farewell."
Kaiji began to move again. Soon, it dashed off, cutting through the blood-soaked land and disappearing far to the southeast.
"Is it really all right to just let him go like that?"
At some point, Adjutant Dang was standing behind Lee Ja-song.
"He is the man who hunted in the Northern Plains alone. Do we even have a way to stop him?"
Adjutant Dang could not answer. He already knew it as well. That he was someone who absolutely could not be caught, and someone who should not be caught.
Lee Ja-song looked in the direction where Dong Bong-su had disappeared, smacked his lips briefly, and then opened his mouth.
"A storm of blood will blow in the Central Plains."
A cutting wind blew, and a stinging scent of blood pricked the noses of Lee Ja-song and Adjutant Dang.
This world is a game, yet not a game. It is New Murim Online.
Here as well, enlightenment comes suddenly. And that fell upon Dong Bong-su's head. Just like how an apple suddenly fell on Newton's head—whether it was real or something later people made up did not matter.
***
– The 9th Law of New Murim Online: The system recognizes, within appropriate targets (still requires further research), them as spiritual beasts. For a player to tame a target as a spiritual beast, they must fulfill certain conditions designated by the system.
A tamed spiritual beast has its own separate status window or equipment window, and 60% of the experience points it gains are attributed to the player's experience.
A spiritual beast can recover its stamina by consuming food.
※ Nothing in this law is fixed or certain.
***
Rumors are fast.
They are even faster because they have many legs. Sometimes a horse, sometimes a person, and sometimes a bird becomes the legs of a rumor.
A rumor that originated in the north swept across the entire land.
Timur Khan of the Northern Plains is dead. Guisui Fortress has fallen.
That was the core of the rumor.
Timur Khan was a great hero of the Northern Plains and a peak expert. His death delivered no small shock not only to the authorities and the common people, but also to the martial artists of the martial world.
And,
a story about one man was also added as an extra and passed along with that rumor.
A man who rides a wolf that flies through the sky. A man who cuts down enemies' throats like an evil ghost. A man who wields dozens of swords as if they were his own limbs. And, a genius strategist.
All of that was rumor pointing to a single man. But it was soon buried among other rumors.
Because it made no sense.
How could a wolf fly in the sky, and how could a man with only two hands freely handle dozens of swords?
Everything was dismissed as stories fabricated by soldiers to praise Lee Ja-song, the commander of the Northern Expeditionary Army and the Governor-General of the Datong Governor-General's Office.
Rumors...
In the end, they end as rumors, and before long, the public's attention was withdrawn from the north.
Originally, the lifespan of a rumor lasts only until the next rumor starts circulating. When new, stimulating rumors began to spread through the martial world, the rumors from the north quietly faded away before anyone noticed.
[The Martial Alliance is holding a martial arts tournament!]
[The Martial Alliance Leader is going to select young experts under the age of thirty and create a new martial force!]
Normally, the Martial Alliance is nothing more than a symbolic organization of the orthodox path.
However, when the Central Plains are invaded by foreign forces, it becomes the true focal point of the orthodox path.
Now is exactly that time. Heavenly Demon Castle was constantly encroaching on the borders of the Central Plains, and the Hall of Gathering Evils was stretching its hands into various parts of the Central Plains.
Therefore, the current Martial Alliance Leader, True Immortal Hyeon-cheon, was in some sense the lord of the martial world.
The fact that he was holding a martial arts tournament and gathering young experts was an important event that would determine the future direction of the martial world.
The martial world was in an uproar over this, and Eulji Tae, the right-hand man of True Immortal Hyeon-cheon and the Heaven-Splitting Sticky Blade, was returning to Zhengzhou after completing a special mission related to this matter.
Together with one person who caught his attention ...
***
Sanmenxia.
A gorge where, according to ancient times, Yu, the founder of the Xia Dynasty, split the mountain with an axe and divided the flow of the river into three using ghost stones and divine stones.
Since ancient times, this place has been famous for having the strongest currents on the Yellow River. The two riverbanks, forty jang wide, are steep cliffs, and the river is divided into three by Renmen, a peninsula protruding from the north bank, and the two islands in the middle of the river, Shenmen Island and Guimen Island, forming a tremendous torrent.
Because of this, there has always been a joke that if you pass this place, you have already crossed half of the Yellow River.
Nevertheless, no matter how dangerous it was, it was difficult to go from Xi'an to Zhengzhou without passing through here, so it was always a place where many boats passed.
One could use another tributary of the Yellow River to the south, but that route was a long detour compared to passing through Sanmenxia, so people usually took the risk and passed through here.
Swoooosh—.
Even now, a small boat carrying three people was swiftly passing through Sanmenxia via the Shenmen Gate between Shenmen Island and Guimen Island.
One person was moving two oars here and there, riding the current—he was the boatman. The other two had their arms folded and were just watching, so they were clearly passengers of this ferry.
One was a middle-aged man with a cold and detached impression.
The other was someone whose long bangs came down to his chin, making it hard to guess his appearance. However, judging from his slim build and the sharp jawline without visible wrinkles, he was a young man.
Inside the violently shaking boat, the middle-aged man was staring intently at the young man's back. The boatman was at the very back and the young man was at the very front, so the place where he was sitting was the middle of the boat.
The middle-aged man, Eulji Tae, was curious about the young man sitting in front.
The young man was extremely taciturn.
In this martial world, there are two kinds of people who do not speak.
The strong, and the weak.
The strong do not speak because they are strong, and the weak do not speak because they are weak. It is not because they cannot speak, but because there is no need to.
The strong do not need to speak because everything around them is handled without them saying anything, and the weak do not need to speak because they only have to do as they are told.
But the young man in front—Eulji Tae could not tell which side he belonged to.
Is he strong? Or weak?
In order to fulfill the request of the Weapon Monster, Eulji Tae had waited for him at the Eight Directions Armory for more than a month. Even when the Northern Plains group invaded and shook the entire Datong Governor-General's Office, Eulji Tae did not hide and continued to wait for the young man.
Some time later, the young man finally came, and they met.
Since the conversation he had with him then, the young man had not spoken at all.
[Where are you?]
[If you are looking for the elder, he is in Zhengzhou.]
[Zhengzhou?]
[Right now, he is at the Martial Alliance. If you want to meet him, you have to go to Zhengzhou.]
[Understood.]
That was all.
From leaving Datong and coming up to Hejin, and from Hejin boarding a boat and coming all the way here to Sanmenxia, the young man had not spoken. Who exactly the "elder" was, why he went to Zhengzhou, why the young man had to follow him—Eulji Tae had not explained anything, yet the young man remained silent.
Judging only by the atmosphere, the young man was definitely on the side of the strong. However, the aura coming from his body was insignificant, and his temple (the sun point, the hollow where the end of the eyebrow and the corner of the eye meet) was flat. In other words, he had almost no internal energy and had never learned a heart method.
Those were conditions that made it impossible for him to be strong. There is a limit to the realm that can be achieved with external cultivation alone.
Nine times out of ten, the young man should be weak. If not, then he was either a strong person in another field, or perhaps a hidden eccentric who had reached the realm of returning to simplicity.
The Yangtze River flowing majestically beside them surged forward, pushing aside the current ahead and splashing everywhere, even settling on Eulji Tae's knees.
Eulji Tae thought that possibility was slim, but he suddenly found himself wishing that the young man in front was a person like the backflow of the Yangtze.
The current martial world is chaotic and difficult. Heavenly Demon Castle has risen greatly, and the Hall of Gathering Evils is also expanding its influence all over the Central Plains based on its immense financial power. On the other hand, the Martial Alliance and the orthodox path have only taken blows and become more and more suppressed.
New young blood—such things are needed. Moreover, although not many people know it yet, somewhere, a person born with the Extreme Yin Heavenly Slaughter Star should be lurking.
A lot of blood has been shed over the past few years, but much, much more blood will have to be shed before peace returns to the martial world.
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