WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: DereKimchi
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Mad Demon in a Novel ◈
Chapter 27: The Thieves
──────
As soon as I entered the dark alley with the Pale Enchantress Fairy, I let out a hollow laugh.
“Look here. The ties between people really are hard to break.”
The elder I’d seen at the inn was picking their teeth in the deep shadows.
And beside them...
“I observed him closely, but a little external martial training seems to be the limit of his abilities. He has no real sharpness to his aura.”
There was the man in the bamboo hat, who’d kept his head down and silently slurped noodles.
“Ha.”
I’d never imagined that all the people I’d singled out as suspicious would be working together.
And as a party of thieves, at that.
Step, step.
The Pale Enchantress Fairy blocked the alley with an expressionless face, and the bastards suddenly began working out the split.
“No matter how much we get, half is mine.”
At her icy words, the elder nodded.
“You took the risk of revealing your sect’s unique martial arts in demonic territory. I’ll grant you that. Agreed.”
“Then I’ll take thirty percent.”
The elder frowned at the middle-aged man.
“I at least drew his attention. All you did was stuff your face with noodles.”
“He may only be a foot soldier, but he’s still a member of the Demonic Cult. Do you have another way to dispose of his body without my Rot-Dissolving Acid?”
“Why must you always be like this? Keep this up, and we can’t work together.”
“Then count me out.”
“Oh, fine, fine. That temper of yours.”
Seeing members of the orthodox faction robbing people in demonic territory was strange enough.
But the sheer shamelessness of dividing the profits right in front of their very much living target...
Was this really possible in the world of Mad Heaven Records?
I considered beating the shit out of them without another word, but I couldn’t resist my growing curiosity.
“Hmm. Aren’t all of you part of the River North Alliance? If you get caught doing this, won’t you immediately become public enemies of the martial world?”
The elder chuckled.
“Does warm sunlight reach every corner of the world? Even this alley is covered in gloomy shadows.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Alliance pays no attention to people like us, who’ve drifted away from the mainstream.”
This elder’s sense of self.
There was definitely something unusual about it.
This went beyond modestly lowering oneself. The way they spoke was almost self-deprecating.
An orthodox martial artist who lived for reputation and dignity, and an old one with a firmly set personality at that, was perfectly comfortable putting themself down like this?
‘Hmm.’
Of course, the orthodox faction was made up of people too. There were bound to be some bastards with no conscience or common sense.
But doing this as a joint business?
If even one of these three ran their mouth, their reputations would hit rock bottom.
It wouldn’t end with them alone.
Their masters, and even their entire martial lineages under the same ancestral teacher, would be condemned along with them.
For orthodox martial artists, this was far too big a gamble.
Come to think of it, things had been strange at the inn too.
In the original novel, the Pale Enchantress Fairy had been extremely proud of inheriting the true legacy of the Ancient Tomb Sect.
Yet she’d even put on an act of trembling hands without any trouble.
Until she could accurately judge her opponent’s strength, meaning mine, she’d made herself as small as possible.
Could someone with the Pale Enchantress Fairy’s lofty sense of self really act that pathetically?
The same went for that middle-aged man who’d kept his head down and done nothing but shovel noodles into his mouth.
‘Yeah, something’s off here.’
The Pale Enchantress Fairy removed obstacles, the elder drew attention, and the noodle addict carefully studied my abilities to size me up.
The whole process of dividing roles, negotiating shares, and arguing over cleanup...
They certainly didn’t seem like people with the rigid personalities of a martial arts world.
They were too efficient. It felt like watching a raid party that had worked together dozens of times.
This was probably...
“Take it.”
I undid my bundle and poured out every gold ingot in a clattering heap.
The orthodox thieves recoiled and grabbed their weapons.
“G-good heavens! Just how much is that?”
“We’ve hit the jackpot! We’ve finally hit the jackpot!”
I grinned at the thieves.
“Why are you standing there? Take as much as you want.”
A heap of gold ingots lay on the dark alley floor.
Even faced with those lumps of gold giving off an eerie yellow glow in the shadows, the bastards hesitated to move.
“I can practically hear your eyes spinning from here. What’s there to think so hard about?”
When the elder edged toward the gold, the Pale Enchantress Fairy sharply raised her blade.
“D-don’t move! I’ll divide it!”
Sure enough, they couldn’t even trust each other. What a shitshow.
The elder swallowed and quietly stepped back.
As I’d expected, the Pale Enchantress Fairy seemed to be the strongest martial artist of the three.
With a heap of bright yellow gold right in front of them, they’d completely lost their heads.
“Hmph! And why should we trust you?”
As the middle-aged man turned his sword and stepped in front of the Pale Enchantress Fairy, I slowly, quietly unwound the cloth around Silent Aeon Demon Soul.
My vision expanded in an instant, revealing a colorless world.
Thin, blood-red lines settled over the silent alley.
The Mad Demon’s Demon Calamity Snow Domain unfolded at once.
The bastards, who’d been busy keeping each other in check, froze with looks of utter mental shutdown.
Icy mist shimmered all around us.
Then the elder began laughing like someone who’d lost their mind.
“F-fucking hell... What is this... This is impossible...”
The Pale Enchantress Fairy’s eyes were open as wide as they could go.
“The M-Mad Demon...!”
A silver-white afterimage formed before my eyes.
Following the target marked by a bright red lock-on dot, Wind-Snow Demon Calamity River shot out like rays of light.
“Huuh...”
The elder, who’d reacted first, was cut off in an instant.
A hole as thick as a finger had appeared in their head.
Gurrrrrgle...
Beside them, the noodle addict was coughing up bloody foam.
He’d tried to resist with his protective qi barrier, only to have his blood and qi circulation utterly ruined.
“Hngh!”
Whoooooosh!
Only the Pale Enchantress Fairy was still alive and reacting.
As the ice blades rushed at her without pause, she swept her sword across their paths and twisted desperately to survive.
Her back struck the wall, and she sank to the ground, her face pale.
A transparent spike of ice had buried itself deep in her left shoulder.
Her sword dropped limply from her hand with a Clang!
“Aaaaargh!”
I walked over without a care, surrounded by Demon Calamity Snow Domain, the declaration of the Mad Demon’s absolute territory.
Slowly, I picked up the gold ingots covered in white frost.
The frozen ingots made cheerful clinking sounds inside my bundle.
After dropping in the last one, I looked at the Pale Enchantress Fairy as she struggled for breath.
“F-fuck! This is too... This is way too broken!”
The Pale Enchantress Fairy was screaming in protest, her face deathly pale.
Now I knew without even having to ask.
She, no, every one of these thieves was a Galler.
“Fucking hell... You don’t give off even a trace of internal energy... How the hell was I supposed to prepare for this... Ugh...”
“That’s luck for you. The most important thing in life.”
With a cruel grin, I searched the noodle addict’s corpse.
Sure enough, I found a foul-smelling bottle inside his long robe.
So this was the Rot-Dissolving Acid that could melt a person without a trace within seven and a half minutes.
Glug, glug.
The bodies softened and began melting as soon as I poured it over them.
I quietly watched the elder’s face run down in a grotesque mess.
Human life really was fleeting.
What could I do?
They’d have to blame their own rotten luck for running into the Mad Demon.
Next life, you guys can possess the Mad Demon.
Hissssss.
The sickening sound of dissolving bodies scraped through the alley’s silence.
I tossed the bottle onto the ground and glared again at the Pale Enchantress Fairy, who was still trembling against the wall.
A slight flick of Silent Aeon Demon Soul would kill her, but for some reason, I wanted to talk a little more.
Wrapped in icy mist, I crouched in front of her.
“Go on. Start talking.”
“W-will you let me live?”
“Let’s hear you out first.”
Even as she shook violently from the cold, she bit her lip.
“I’m destined to... die soon from one of the Tang Clan’s secret deadly poisons.”
I played dumb.
“Do you possess the Heavenly Eye?”
“A-anyway... The poison I’m going to be struck with is Soul-Annihilating Poison... You know how much those people in the Tang Clan charge for its antidote...”
“It must be very expensive. Antidotes usually are.”
“I-I wanted to live.”
Her reason for taking such a reckless risk was so exactly what I’d expected that I lost interest.
Well.
It was only a trivial reason from my point of view. To her, it must have been the most desperate reason of all.
Anyway, I probably wouldn’t see her again.
She was probably just barely holding it back with her tremendous cultivated power, but Silent Aeon Demon Soul’s spiritual energy wasn’t something a human could resist.
Five minutes at the shortest. Thirty at most.
“Well, then. Goodbye.”
“P-please spare me! Please!”
The Pale Enchantress Fairy grabbed my trouser leg, tears falling from her eyes.
“If you stab someone, you should be ready to take a blade in your own gut.”
“I’ll do anything you tell me to! Please...!”
She’d do anything this Mad Demon told her to?
“Hmm.”
The Pale Enchantress Sect.
A sect that had awkwardly tried to stand between the orthodox and unorthodox factions, only to fall after earning the River North Alliance’s hostility.
But it was also a mysterious sect that had inherited the true legacy of the Ancient Tomb Sect of old. Its reputation couldn’t be dismissed.
Wait. Since I needed to disguise my identity, wouldn’t this be pretty suitable?
The Pale Enchantress Sect had already fallen anyway. The identities of its disciples probably weren’t well known in the jianghu.
“Then can you be my junior martial sister?”
“Your junior martial sister? What do you...”
“And of course, you’ll teach me that Pale Enchantress Sword Formula too.”
“No... What?”
I turned away.
“Then just die here. That cold spiritual energy inside your body will never disappear unless the person who put it there takes it back. It’s an even more frightening poison than Soul-Annihilating Poison.”
The Pale Enchantress Fairy’s eyes darted around as she thought. Soon, she looked troubled.
“A Venerable of the Demonic Cult intends to walk freely through the River North Alliance’s territory? But I’m... not exactly welcome in River North.”
“You don’t need to worry about that, bitch.”
“B-but passing on the Pale Enchantress Sword Formula... That would clearly be the grave sin of betraying my master and ancestors...”
“Do you even have any ancestral masters still alive?”
That excuse wasn’t going to work on me.
The Pale Enchantress Sect had been utterly destroyed.
She was probably the most senior person left in the sect right now, and she dared try to sell me that bullshit?
As I started walking again...
“I’ll do it! Fine, I’ll do it!”
Only then did I smile and take hold of Silent Aeon Demon Soul again.
I angled its tip toward the ice spike buried deep in her shoulder.
The mist of Demon Calamity Snow Domain filling the alley began to swirl.
“Hngh!”
The transparent ice spike in the Pale Enchantress Fairy’s shoulder gave off a soft blue-white glow.
Then it turned to vapor like smoke.
Hissssss...
The cold spiritual energy rose like a lotus flower, then faded.
The extreme yin spiritual energy that had invaded her muscles and meridians returned to the embrace of Demon Calamity Snow Domain.
“Haa...”
As the poisonous cold that had been cutting through her entire body drained away like an ebbing tide, the Pale Enchantress Fairy’s eyes quickly went unfocused, all strength leaving her.
“You’d better not think about running. Try anything funny, and I’ll have the entire Hundred Thousand Mountains hunting you down.”
Her shoulders trembled slightly, as if the thought alone was horrifying.
“Then... what do I need to do?”
I smiled and held out two gold ingots.
“Exchange these. All of it for silver. If you’re even one piece short, I’ll put another ice spike in you.”
“Fuck, how am I supposed to do that without buying anything...”
“What was that?”
The Pale Enchantress Fairy shot me a fierce glare, then slipped out of the alley and disappeared into the crowd.
Oh, that rear view was pretty...
With that sight behind me, I sat down at the mouth of the alley.
Was this what they called turning misfortune into good fortune? A fucking sweet deal?
With the Mad Demon’s personality mixed into my head, acting like a thug was starting to feel perfectly natural.
“Heh. This is fun as hell.”
I am the Mad Demon.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
