Chapter 111 - Because I Didn't Know

The Wicked Laughing Demon was delighted.

He must have experienced all manner of things in his life as a Demon Supreme, but he would never have had a hand in choosing the Unorthodox Alliance's successor. No, he probably hadn't even imagined he would ever have the opportunity.

"Are you truly suggesting that we choose their successor?"

"Yes, I am."

"How?"

"If we decide their current successor, Bi Sain, is suitable, we'll help him retain his position. If someone else seems more advantageous to us, we'll put him in that seat instead. I may be a busybody, but when it comes to the Unorthodox Alliance's successor, I believe we should choose strictly according to what benefits the Cult, regardless of their individual character."

Of course, it had to be someone who benefited not only the Cult but me as well.

"Then we should put the biggest fucking idiot in the seat."

"No. That would only destabilize Murim. We need someone whose actions we can at least predict. In any case, if we handle this well, we'll render a great service to the Cult."

The Wicked Laughing Demon laughed heartily. Facing a formidable opponent like Seok Gwanchu was already a delight. Earning merit in the process would truly kill two birds with one stone.

"Will I finally get to see your world now, Second Young Master?"

Anticipation flickered in his eyes behind the mask's eyeholes.

"No. This is still your world, Laughing Demon."

"My world?"

"None of this would be possible without you. Would I even have considered taking on the Unorthodox Alliance's Grand Elder alone?"

"Are you deploying your Divine Art of Flattery again?"

"What makes it a divine art? You have to hone it all your life."

The Wicked Laughing Demon enjoyed my joke. He found the unfolding situation intriguing.

I sent Yi An and Blue Face to the safe house where the mistress of Thousand Flowers Pavilion was staying.

I ordered them to protect her, but I had two other reasons.

The first was the danger. Now that our chief enemy had been revealed to be Seok Gwanchu, the Unorthodox Alliance's Grand Elder, there was no telling what masters might turn up next.

The second was that I wanted Yi An and Blue Face to spend time together. I had told Yi An to win over her own subordinate. Whether she could accomplish that was up to her. All I could do was hope she had the capacity to take someone like Blue Face under her wing.

Before leaving, Yi An said just one thing to me.

"If anything happens to you, Young Master, I'll die too."

"All right. I'll fight as though I have two lives to protect."

After watching our exchange, Blue Face bowed his head respectfully to the Wicked Laughing Demon in farewell. The Wicked Laughing Demon said nothing.

He was curt with his subordinate, and I had never seen the two converse beyond official orders.

With the two of them on their way to the safe house, the Wicked Laughing Demon and I raced off using our lightness arts.

"Where are we going?"

"To White Night Valley to meet Bi Sain."

I had previously told Bi Sain that the men who had tried to kill the Wicked Laughing Demon were White Night Valley's Five Blood-Hand Shadows.

Since then, there had been no news from either Bi Sain or White Night Valley. That meant he still hadn't resolved the matter of finding the mastermind there.

* * *

Bi Sain was drinking at a tavern near White Night Valley.

His face was red, not from alcohol but from anger. As his worries deepened, the scar on his face grew more hideous.

He still hadn't identified the mastermind. He had obtained that precious information in exchange for withdrawing the Hundred Admonitions Merchant Company from Guizhou and paying an enormous sum, but things weren't going as he had hoped.

Until he arrived here, he had intended to pressure the lord of White Night Valley however he could and make him confess to using the Five Blood-Hand Shadows to try to kill the Wicked Laughing Demon.

If all else failed, he would force a confession out of him. Against Bi Sain and seven of the Thirteen Wolves of the Unorthodox Path, neither the valley's lord nor its masters could do anything.

But by the time they arrived, the lord of White Night Valley had already gone elsewhere. He had been here as recently as the day before their arrival, only to leave the valley in a hurry with his closest retainers.

Bi Sain had tried intimidating the remaining subordinates into revealing their lord's whereabouts, but they didn't know.

He began to suspect that someone might have warned the lord of his arrival. Secrets kept leaking out.

Bi Sain drained another cup. Suddenly, Geom Mugeuk came to mind. Whenever he felt cornered, he found himself thinking of that man without meaning to.

'What a waste of thought.'

He was just about to take another drink, as though to drive Geom Mugeuk from his mind, when a man with a bamboo hat pulled low strode toward his table. The seven members of the Thirteen Wolves seated nearby sprang up and drew their swords.

The approaching man removed his hat, revealing himself.

"It's been a while."

His visitor was none other than Geom Mugeuk. Having been thinking of him just moments earlier, Bi Sain was utterly startled by his appearance.

"How did you know I was here?"

Bi Sain glared at him, his face full of suspicion.

Geom Mugeuk, by contrast, was composed.

"I gave you the information, so naturally I could guess you'd come to White Night Valley. And with all of you traveling in a pack like this, how could I fail to find you?"

He glanced at the Thirteen Wolves around them. With eight martial artists traveling together, he meant, finding their whereabouts had been easy.

"May I sit?"

"Go ahead."

Geom Mugeuk sat opposite Bi Sain.

Bi Sain ordered the Thirteen Wolves to sit. They returned to their seats, still tense. First Wolf Baek Cheolgi sat beside him, ready to draw his sword at any moment.

"Why have you come?"

Though his question was curt, Bi Sain was inwardly glad to see him. He shouldn't have felt that way, yet he kept finding himself wanting to lean on Geom Mugeuk.

"I've come with important information for you, Young Master Bi."

"What is it?"

"I've discovered who's behind all this."

Bi Sain was startled. So was Baek Cheolgi beside him, along with every other member of the Thirteen Wolves present.

"Who is it?"

Geom Mugeuk didn't answer immediately.

"I can't simply give away information this important."

A moment later, Bi Sain looked at him with a sinking realization.

'Second Young Master, you've made a terrible mistake.'

He should never have mentioned such an important fact here.

The reason was the Thirteen Wolves.

Bi Sain suspected that among the seven who accompanied him was a spy planted by whoever wanted him dead.

Several things had gone badly of late, and he believed that was because the spy was passing information to the other side in advance.

Finding the lord of White Night Valley absent when they arrived had turned his suspicions into certainty. Someone was definitely feeding information to their opponents.

With such important information revealed under these circumstances, it was now only a matter of time before the mastermind heard about it.

When he had begun a sound transmission to Geom Mugeuk the other day, only to stop midway, he had been considering telling him this and asking for help. But he hadn't been able to bring himself to ask.

He regretted sending the transmission at all. The Unorthodox Alliance's successor asking the Heavenly Demon's son for help? He had reproached himself endlessly for nearly doing something so absurd.

"I've come a long way. I'm thirsty."

Geom Mugeuk held out his cup.

Bi Sain poured him a drink.

Just then, Geom Mugeuk's sound transmission reached him.

―Let's discuss the details after we've caught the rat.

―!

Bi Sain's pouring hand paused briefly before he finished filling the cup.

He understood now. Geom Mugeuk knew exactly what situation he was in. At the thought that the problem he had agonized over all this time might finally be resolved, his heart began to race.

This had started after he met Geom Mugeuk. The man kept making his heart race. Kept making him compare himself and feel small.

'Damn it!'

Kept giving him hope.

That night, a masked man landed soundlessly on the roof of the village's largest inn.

He hid something beneath a tile at the roof's edge. There was a fixed procedure for sending secret messages. In any village, he would hide the letter at a corner of the largest inn's roof, and someone would retrieve it and send it by carrier pigeon. In the mountains, there was a designated tree for hiding it; in open fields, a designated place to bury it.

He had hidden the letter and was about to hurry away when someone spoke behind him.

"Geom Mugeuk has identified the mastermind."

The masked man whirled around in alarm. Geom Mugeuk, who had approached without a sound, was already reading the letter he had hidden.

But before leaving, he had made certain that Geom Mugeuk had fallen asleep after drinking with Bi Sain at their lodgings in White Night Valley.

"I'm a light sleeper. While I was asleep, I heard someone creeping out like a cat burglar."

The masked man realized at once that the whole thing had been a trap. Thinking the information too important to delay, he had acted in haste—and that had been his undoing.

Just as he was about to flee, Geom Mugeuk spoke.

"I'll run after you and tell everyone that whichever member of the Thirteen Wolves is missing right now is the traitor. I'm confident in my lightness art, at least. You won't get back before I do."

The masked man jolted to a halt, and Geom Mugeuk taunted him.

"You'd be better off killing me right here. At least that way, your identity won't be exposed."

The masked man turned toward him and drew his sword.

He still hadn't uttered a word. With the outcome uncertain, he had no desire to let Geom Mugeuk hear his voice.

Now that things had come to this, there was only one option: kill the witness, return quietly, and feign ignorance.

The masked man charged straight at Geom Mugeuk.

WHOOSH!

His movements were impressive, befitting a master of a group whose members were reputed to be stronger than a Demon Supreme when two joined forces.

WHOOOOSH!

He closed the distance in an instant, hurtling toward Geom Mugeuk.

CLANG!

The instant their swords first met, the masked man's heart sank. Almost losing his grip on his sword, he realized that Geom Mugeuk possessed far greater internal energy than he did.

Nor was internal energy his only advantage.

CLANG! CLANG!

The moves that had dispatched his enemies so easily until now were utterly ineffective.

Every attack he aimed at a vital spot was blocked by Geom Mugeuk's sword. He was exerting all his strength, yet his opponent seemed to parry casually.

Recognizing the unmistakable gap in their abilities, the masked man hurled himself in the opposite direction after a dozen or so exchanges. His only thought was that he had to flee far away to survive.

At that very moment—

ZING!

THUD!

A blast of finger force pierced his thigh.

He gave a sharp scream, tumbled across the ground, then sprang to his feet. The man who had landed in his path was the Wicked Laughing Demon.

"A man turning his back in a fight? Have you no shame?"

The masked man's eyes reddened with humiliation.

Geom Mugeuk was already behind him. The problem was that those two weren't the only people who had appeared.

"Sixth Wolf!"

His heart sank at the call.

Bi Sain and the remaining members of the Thirteen Wolves emerged.

The masked man was Sixth Wolf, the sixth member of the Thirteen Wolves of the Unorthodox Path. Their leader, First Wolf Baek Cheolgi, was furious.

"Have you truly betrayed us?"

Even seeing it with his own eyes, Baek Cheolgi couldn't believe it. If anyone had asked him to rank all thirteen Wolves by how unlikely they were to betray them, Sixth Wolf would have been his first choice.

"Why in the world have you done this? Didn't you know the Thirteen Wolves must not involve themselves in politics?"

Sixth Wolf removed his mask.

"Why not?"

"What?"

"Why must we live bound by some damned rule when we don't even know who made it?"

"You fool! What more did you expect from a martial artist's life? If you didn't want this life, you should never have sworn your loyalty in the first place!"

"Because I didn't know. Because I didn't know the martial arts I'd spent my entire life honing would leave me living such a pathetic life! Because I didn't know I'd end up traveling in a pack just to protect one First Young Master!"

Bi Sain's expression hardened. He hadn't known Sixth Wolf had been accompanying him with such feelings. Did the others feel the same?

First Wolf shouted at him.

"Enough excuses! What did they offer you? What exactly did they offer to free you from this pathetic life?"

Sixth Wolf couldn't answer. It wasn't something he could say to First Wolf or his other comrades. He couldn't bring himself to admit that he had been promised an enormous sum and a high-ranking position.

"I'm not a traitor. I was only trying to claim a life of my own!"

Roaring those words, Sixth Wolf chose someone to take down with him in death. He chose Geom Mugeuk.

"This is all your fault!"

He hurled himself at Geom Mugeuk.

He hadn't been a match even when he was calm, and now he was wounded as well.

Just as he unleashed a flurry of moves at Geom Mugeuk—

SHUNK!

A sword pierced his back, its blade emerging from his chest.

Sixth Wolf slowly turned his head. Bi Sain stood behind him.

"... This is all your fault."

Bi Sain answered his accusation curtly.

"A moment ago, you said it was the Second Young Master's fault."

As though he had no desire to continue the conversation, Bi Sain pulled out his sword.

A fountain of blood erupted from Sixth Wolf's body beneath the moonlight. Had Geom Mugeuk remained where he stood, he would have been drenched, but he stepped aside. This was, after all, the Unorthodox Alliance's internal feud.

Holding his blood-dripping sword, Bi Sain asked Geom Mugeuk,

"Now, tell me. Who is behind this?"