Chapter 36 - Fierce Battle Aboard Ship (1)

That was because both sides had decided there was no need to overextend themselves and withdrawn their forces just when the fighting should have escalated. They had realized that fighting each other to the death would only hand the spoils to the other sects hungrily eyeing their territories.

In the end, the two forces spent another year or so fighting tedious minor engagements before finally agreeing to a truce. Under the agreement, all interests arising from Soho Lake belonged exclusively to the Namgung Clan. In exchange for promising not to expand any farther into Anhui, the Eighteen Waterway Strongholds of the Yangtze River secured the Namgung Clan's pledge not to interfere with their business on the Yangtze. Rather than keep snarling at each other, both sides had conceded what they could and gained what they wanted.

That had been over ten years ago, and it was the only real battle Gosangong had ever experienced. In truth, he had only just joined the Namgung Clan at the time, so he had scarcely seen actual combat, doing little more than scouting and standing watch.

Even so, he was still milking that single deployment for all it was worth, boasting about it to his squad.

But his squad members knew perfectly well that he was nothing special. Had he been otherwise, he would hardly have been stuck here leading a mere guard squad.

The reality was that Gosangong was nothing more than the leader of a guard squad watching the Cloud Bridge by the East Heaven Guest Hall from the second watch through the third. On days like today, when the pleasure sailing ship had gone out onto Soho Lake, he even had to shoulder the menial task of searching it. Since the pleasure boat almost invariably returned around this time, the least capable guard squad leaders were generally assigned this shift.

"Well then, Gosangong. I'll leave you to it."

After completing the handover, the Second Squad leader took his men back to their quarters. Among them were the men who had washed the drunken guest from Heaven Guest Hall earlier.

"Ugh, do we really have to search that thing?"

Gosangong frowned at the sailing ship moored in the deepest part of Soho Bay. There were guards over by the West Heaven Guest Hall too. The pleasure boat was plainly in the inlet midway between the islands housing the East and West Heaven Guest Halls, yet somehow the Cheonpung Unit's guard squad had to search it every time. He resented that.

Still, there was nothing he could do.

The Cheonroe Unit, which guarded the West Heaven Guest Hall, was also responsible for guarding Earth Guest Hall beyond it. Given that, quibbling over a pleasure boat search that was not even a daily occurrence would have been ridiculous.

"Hey, three of you stay here. Everyone else, get aboard the ship."

"Yes, Squad Leader!"

However little confidence he inspired, a squad leader was still a squad leader. Leaving behind only the minimum three men needed to stand watch, Third Squad headed toward the sailing ship.

As they made their way around the inlet, the light of their fire sticks reflected off Soho Lake, briefly illuminating the shores of Soho Bay.

A fairly strong wind was blowing, and the restless ripples glittered in the light. It made for an impressive nighttime view, but every member of the Cheonpung Unit had seen it often enough. They paid it little heed and simply walked toward the ship.

PLOP.

Just then, a faint sound came, as though something had slipped beneath the water.

It was so quiet that none of Third Squad heard it. Moreover, it had come from behind the East Heaven Guest Hall, toward Soho Lake inside Soho Bay—a blind spot hidden from view by the hall itself.

In fact, their guard post was not on the island housing the East Heaven Guest Hall, but across the Cloud Bridge connecting the island to the mainland. Their watch operated on the assumption that every guest staying in Heaven Guest Hall had already had their identity verified.

The squad members soon rounded the inlet's edge and reached the berth where the ship lay moored.

Resting in one corner of the dark inlet, the sailing ship was a silent little fortress. It was so quiet that, viewed a certain way, it even looked frightening.

But they had done this so many times that it no longer bothered them. One by one, they boarded by the gangway, a temporary set of steps placed against the bow.

A little later, the fire-stick lights flickering across the deck vanished completely. Presumably, they had all finished searching the deck and gone below.

When his men's distant lights disappeared, Gosangong draped his arms over the end of the Cloud Bridge and fell asleep standing up, just as he always did. The three remaining men were used to it by now. They ignored him and diligently kept watch.

Thus, the time it took to eat a meal—roughly thirty minutes—passed.

But...

Not one of the men sent to search the ship returned.

No, none of them could return.

DRIP, DRIP, DRIP...

For while Gosangong dozed and drooled, his seven squad members had already been reduced to a trickle of blood running down the tip of Dong Bongsu's sword.

Belowdecks aboard the sailing ship.

SLICE. THUD, CRUNCH.

The sounds of flesh being sliced and bones being crushed roamed the darkness.

With every movement of Dong Bongsu's hands, the corpses lost more of their original shape.

There were seven bodies.

He had originally meant to carve one "character" into each corpse's chest, but he was one man short. Instead, he was cutting the bodies into pieces and forming words by driving fragments of their bones into the floor belowdecks.

The salt-soaked cedar was tougher than he had expected. To set the bones precisely into the floor, Dong Bongsu had to stamp down on them with all his strength.

CRUNCH, CRACK.

His foot came down with an audible crunch on a rib he had just removed from a corpse. The bone shattered and sank deep into the cedar planking. That completed one stroke of one of the characters he intended to write.

Dong Bongsu continued his work.

THUD, CRUNCH. CRACK...

The spine-chilling sound of bones crumbling echoed incessantly through the space belowdecks.

How on earth had Dong Bongsu gotten here, and what was he doing?

In fact, when the men of the Cheonpung Unit's Second Squad had carried him into the East Heaven Guest Hall earlier, Dong Bongsu had already committed the surrounding terrain and layout to memory.

He waited for Tang Wu to finish visiting his room and leave, then immediately began his "work."

It was night, and all the martial experts lodging in Heaven Guest Hall were asleep. Every warrior on guard duty was on the mainland across the Cloud Bridge, not on the island housing the East Heaven Guest Hall. Naturally, he had confirmed all of this earlier.

Under these circumstances, as long as he did not leave through the door facing the Cloud Bridge, neither the guards nor any wedding guests still awake would catch him.

But the room had only one door.

Where could he leave without the guards seeing him?

The answer was simple. Every house in this part of Anhui was built from assembled components. It had been true in Fengyang, and it was true in the Namgung Clan estate. Heaven Guest Hall, within the estate, was no exception.

To Dong Bongsu, every side of such a building was a "door." He had already demonstrated that during the Suicide Plague incident.

He briefly watched the guards' movements through the crack in the door. Then, while they were milling toward the sailing ship, he put a pillar at the rear of his room into his Inventory and slipped out through the opening. It was a blind spot the guards across the Cloud Bridge could not have seen no matter how hard they tried, and ordinarily there would have been no reason to watch it. That was because it was a sheer drop, much like a cliff, straight into Soho Lake.

For Dong Bongsu, however, that was fortunate. Few places offered better concealment than water in the dark. He immediately submerged himself in Soho Lake, then stealthily followed the guards heading toward the ship.

Just as expected, the seven men of the Cheonpung Unit's Third Squad boarded the ship. Seizing that moment, Dong Bongsu moved toward the foul-smelling oar port where he had stuck his head during the nighttime outing. Just as the boat hand had said earlier, there was still no oar in it, leaving the opening clear.

The oar port was small, but so was Dong Bongsu's body. He was not short, but Sosam's frame itself was slight. With his narrow shoulders and hips, his scrawny body was small enough to squeeze through the opening.

He slipped through the oar port into the space belowdecks.

Soon, the men of Third Squad came below one at a time to conduct their search, unaware that a monster named Dong Bongsu lay in hiding.

And then, faced with Dong Bongsu's Three Forces Sword Art unfolding in the darkness, every one of them surrendered his life in exchange for experience.

Of course, Dong Bongsu had risked coming here in the middle of the night to break free of his current predicament, trapped as he was between two impossible choices. His method was quintessentially his own.

The words he was now inscribing in bone were a sort of "warning message."

Dong Bongsu continued removing bones from the corpses and inscribing his message.

Then, sometime after roughly half an hour had passed...

"Squad Leader, something's wrong. We should report to the unit leader..."

"You fucking idiot. What are you going to tell the deputy commander? That we sent our men aboard, they didn't come back, and we were too scared to check? Is that it? We need to find out what happened before we report it, don't we? Huh?"

Voices reached him. Not one, but several.

Who were they?

He did not need to think hard. Their conversation made it clear, and so did considering who was likely to come here.

The visitors were the remaining members of the same squad as the men whose bones were now being transformed, one by one, into strokes and dots of written characters. Judging by their conversation, their squad leader had definitely come with them.

'I took too long.'

Trying to make his warning a little more forceful had cost him too much time. He had not yet finished the eight characters he had planned. So far, he had completed only four.

CREAK, CREAK.

The upper deck directly above him shifted. They had already boarded and were walking across it.

Never mind the "bone script" he had originally planned—now he did not even have enough time to carve the remaining four characters with his sword.