Chapter 145. Trying to Row a Boat On Land (16)

Gyeong Mu-Gi got up from the bed and stood in front of the table, bowing to the manuals.

“Thank you, Master. I will cultivate diligently and wait so that you and Father won’t be disappointed the next time you come to see me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Everyone knows their own body best.

Gyeong Mu-Gi had already realized that his mysterious master had not only left him something, but also taken something from him—his illness was gone.

***

Woo-Moon chose a rather untrodden path through the mountains. This time, rather than filling his chest pocket, Eun-Ah was his steed.

Following her transformation, she had reached the Absolute realm herself, and her speed was now mind-boggling. In spite of the unwelcoming terrain, Woo-Moon barely felt any time pass before they reached the place where the Cruel Sandstorm Riders had been seen.

Woo-Moon took out the letter Ma-Ra had left him and read it again.

—Gun-Ha disappeared all of a sudden. It seems that she was asking about Gansu Province before that, so she most likely headed there. We’ll be going there to find her.

It was his mother’s handwriting.

He had checked it several times while riding Eun-Ah, and there was no mistake. Moreover, there was no way Ma-Ra would have given him a fake letter, either.

‘Gun-Ha... how could that innocent Gun-Ha disappear all of a sudden? Could the same thing that had happened to Si-Hyeon happen to Gun-Ha? And where could my parents have gone?’

Zzt!

Suddenly, his heart felt like it was going to shatter.

The scene of his grandfather and his junior sister dying came back to mind.

Crack!!

‘Martial Heaven, I’ll never forgive you.’

As he clenched his fists, his nails tore into his palms, causing them to bleed again.

He had thought that he had shaken off the remnants of the shock and grieving after spending such a long time in a daze, but it seemed that wasn’t the case.

Woo-Moon had thought a lot during his stay at the secret hideout of Namar and the others.

At first, all kinds of emotions swirled around him.

Grief over his grandfather’s death.

Regret and sorrow over Si-Hyeon’s death.

Rage toward Martial Heaven.

Shame and anger at himself for not being able to save those he loved the most.

Everything was so intense and painful that he couldn’t even move.

Time passed in his frozen state.

The longer it went, the more intense the emotions became.

Eventually, he wondered if he would become lost in those emotions and disappear.

Suddenly, when it reached its peak, it stopped.

All of his thoughts stopped.

Nothing came to mind.

Perfect nothingness.[1]

In that state, Woo-Moon spent a time the length of which he could not comprehend before finally waking up .

As a result, he was able to obtain quintessential comprehension that helped him truly cross the threshold that he had just barely stepped foot on.

Comprehension that brought him into the Paragon realm.

After running around for a while, Woo-Moon saw a small pond and got down from Eun-Ah’s back.

Shing!

He drew Lightflash as he looked at his reflection in the pond.

What looked back at him was something more akin to a hairy beast than a human. Woo-Moon wondered if it was really him.

Scritch. Scritch.

Woo-Moon calmed his mind as he shaved his beard with Lightflash.

‘My judgment will become clouded, and I’ll lose my head if I get caught up in revenge. Moreover, my grandfather and Si-Hyeon would be sad if I lived in misery because of my desire for revenge. Martial Heaven will pay with every single life of every single member, but I won’t lose myself.’

Trials and tribulations were what made people grow. In that sense, Woo-Moon had grown a lot.

He neatly shaved his beard and saw himself reflected in the water. A familiar image of himself began to appear, an image that he had seen all his life. However...

‘Grandfather... Junior sister.’

Two people appeared on the shimmering surface of the water. They were as vivid as if they were standing side by side with him and watching the surface of the water together.

Drip!

A single teardrop fell.

The ripples it made spread in a circle and dissipated the figures of Woo-Moon, the Palm Martial Emperor, and Si-Hyeon.

Closing his eyes tightly, Woo-Moon wiped away the remnants of tears that littered his eyes before climbing onto Eun-Ah’s back.

“Okay, let’s go now!”

With Woo-Moon’s lively voice, Eun-Ah ran again.

As they left the forest and walked a little further, Woo-Moon finally saw the sight of truly wide-open plains.

“It’s really impressive.”

It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen plains before—after all, he came from a place known as the Central Plains. However, the grassland before him was incomparable to anything he had seen before.

The plains stretched out endlessly, the expanse so wide that one wondered if there really was an end to them.

Woo-Moon looked at the expanse and took a deep breath. It felt like his heart was being refreshed.

Still, even that only lasted for a moment.

‘If Ma-Ra was here to see this... If Si-Hyeon was here...’

Although Ma-Ra wasn’t around at the moment, Woo-Moon was sure they could see it together someday.

However, he could never do this with Si-Hyeon. When he realized that, his heart ached again, and his anger toward Martial Heaven raged around him.

“Kya!!!!”

He suddenly heard a scream from far away.

‘What the...?’

The moment he recognized what was going on, Woo-Moon’s figure flashed and disappeared.

He reappeared in front of a horse rider who had just plunged his spear into a woman’s heart.

Woo-Moon’s eyes flashed coldly.

There were five horse bandits in front of him. They were giggling as they skewered the corpses of children and women with spears, as if they were children playing a game.

Behind them were about a hundred horse bandits, watching and clapping with glee. They all turned around, surprised to see Woo-Moon suddenly appear out of nowhere.

“Who the hell are you?”

“He has a sword. Is he from the

murim

?”

They didn’t seem to be an ordinary group of horse bandits, either. Those who appeared to be the leaders had all reached the Transcendent realm!

However, Woo-Moon wasn’t the same person he used to be.

Lightflash blinked for a split second as it emerged from its scabbard, then went back in.

“Huh?”

Four heads separated from the shoulders, and four spears were split in twain.

“Agk!!”

Woo-Moon appeared right in front of the horse bandit that had impaled a woman.

With his feet on the horse’s head, Woo-Moon had already drawn his sword and pointed it at the bandit’s throat.

Even though Woo-Moon was standing on top of the horse’s head, the horse did not move, as if it couldn’t feel even the slightest of weight.

“You’re the Cruel Sandstorm Riders, right?”

The horse bandit couldn’t answer, completely frozen.

“What’s with that bastard? Kill him!”

“Kill!!”

The horse bandits watching from the back spurred their horses and galloped forward.

Woo-Moon kicked the dantian of the horse bandit in front of him and then leisurely floated to the ground without even the slightest of sounds.

Woo-Moon strolled toward the hundred or so bandits rushing him.

“Is any of you worth keeping alive? No one? Alright.”

With a simple comment, Woo-Moon leaped into the air.

He drew a line horizontally at the same height as the bandits on the horses.

Squelch!

The vacuum created by Woo-Moon’s attack became the sharpest of swords, cleaving the necks, heads, and chests of almost all of the bandits in a single blow.

The horses continued to gallop forward, unaware that their owners were dead, while the bandit pieces fell off their horses one by one.

“A—AGHHHH!”

The three bandits who had survived had done so by sheer virtue of being particularly short. Frightened by the sight of a heaven beyond their heavens, they turned their horses away to flee from Woo-Moon.

Growl.

Eun-Ah blocked their path.

The horses immediately reacted in shock, rearing on their back legs.

The three bandits kicked off their horses, leaped into the air, and hurled their spears at Eun-Ah, in hope they could take her down and flee.

Clang, clang, clang!

It sounded like metal clashing against metal; the spear shafts all shattered, unable to even scratch Eun-Ah’s hide.

GROWL!

Eun-Ah roared and swung her massive front paws.

The three men raised their arms to block her, but it was in vain. Facing the claws of a spiritual beast, all they could do was die on the spot, crushed.

The single surviving member of the Cruel Sandstorm Riders, who was crawling powerless on the ground because of the wrecked dantian, was so terrified he even forgot the hellish pain.

‘I-is that really one of those Absolute Masters? And what the hell is with that white tiger? How could a mere beast do that to people of the murim?’

The bandit crawled on the ground, trying to escape Woo-Moon and Eun-Ah, continuing to move even as the pain of a shattered dantian made him want to scream. However, he soon had no choice but to stop.

He could see Woo-Moon’s feet in front of him.

Thud!

Woo-Moon kicked the bandit, flipping him face-up. He then placed a hand on the bandit’s shoulder. The bandit froze like a frog standing before a snake.

Woo-Moon raised his sword and slowly stabbed the bandit in the shoulder.

“AGH!!!!”

Although it would have been cleaner to simply run the bandit through, Woo-Moon didn’t do that. Rather, he cut into the bandit’s shoulder little by little.

“S-Stop! Please, stop...!”

Woo-Moon stopped what he was doing, but as he looked at the bandit, his eyes were cold and emotionless.

“I want to ask you something.”

The bandit blubbered with tears and snot running down his face.

“W-what would you like to know?”

An effective torturer usually stripped their target of their clothes first.

As people were clothed almost immediately after birth, they tended to squirm when they were naked.

What Woo-Moon had done had the same effect, though on a different level. The bandit very much kept his garments, but a martial artist stripped of cultivation was more naked than a newborn.

If a martial artist were to lose the fundamental power that protected them in an instant, no matter how strong they were, they were bound to become even weaker than a normal person out of fear and shock.

That was why the bandit had given in to Woo-Moon so quickly.

“You’re part of the Cruel Sandstorm Riders, right?”

“Y-yes, that’s right.”

“How much damage did the Cruel Sandstorm Riders suffer in the war?”

“I-I heard it was about three hundred people.”

Woo-Moon’s eyes narrowed.

“That’s all?”

“Y-yes. I’m sure of it.”

“Then, what about the Hegemon Clan?”

“More or less the same...”

‘Both sides were just pretending to fight.’

If even one of the two forces had the will to battle properly, there was no way that the war would have ended with so few casualties.

During a massive war in which the Justice Coalition had been significantly weakened and the Black Bull Gang eventually destroyed, the Hegemon Clan and the Cruel Sandstorm Riders had only pretended to fight over and over again, stalling until the war ended.

Something was very, very wrong.

It smelled like a conspiracy.

Why had the Hegemon Emperor, who had been so angry when the Sword Emperor had first told him about the news regarding the Cruel Sandstorm Riders, fought so passively?

No...forget about being passive. Having such few casualties and such minor damage was simply impossible unless there was some secret agreement between the Hegemon Clan and the Cruel Sandstorm Riders.

“Where is the main base of the Cruel Sandstorm Riders?”

“T-that is...”

Such a massive group like the Cruel Sandstorm Riders, which was formed of several bands of horse bandits, had to have a main base that played a central role in keeping them together.

However, since horse bandits were wanderers and periodically moved their main base to avoid subjugation, finding the place was nearly impossible on his own.

However, Woo-Moon knew that someone with a cultivation that had reached the Transcendent level, like the bandit in front of him, would definitely know the location.

When the man hesitated again, Woo-Moon began to push his sword forward again.

Squelch.

“AGHH!!!!”

The man screamed in excruciating pain, and blood flowed down his shoulder.

“Speak.”

“I-if you go northeast from here, you’ll see a massive boulder. If you go east from there, you’ll run into a canyon. Continue along the canyon—

argh!

”

“It’ll be there?”

“AGH!!! YES!!!”

“Good.”

Woo-Moon pulled his sword from the bandit’s shoulder and decapitated him, putting him out of his misery.

“Cruel Sandstorm Riders... and the Hegemon Clan, too.”

Woo-Moon muttered to himself as he walked away, collecting the bodies of the children and women still skewered on spears and the women who had been stabbed through the heart in front of him.

He struck the ground with his palm, excavating a massive pit where he buried their bodies.

“I pray for your journey to paradise...”

When he was done with that, Woo-Moon cut a strip of cloth from his robe and improvised a mask.

“Eun-Ah, I have to go somewhere secretly, so you have to wait around here for a while, okay?”

Grawr.

Eun-Ah had truly grown up, in body and spirit alike. She could take care of herself now, and she was no longer whining just because Woo-Moon asked her to do something. She just nodded and rubbed her head against his chest.

After parting with Eun-Ah, Woo-Moon used his movement technique to move invisibly toward the main base of the Cruel Sandstorm Riders.

1.

Mu

or

wu

無 means literally “nothing” but also the state of nothingness. It’s the same

wu

as in

wuji

, the limitless and undefined primordial universe that comes prior to

taiji

(“supreme polarity”) where the two “poles” are yin and yang. ☜