WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: BerageeBomb
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Obtained the Martial God’s Book ◈
Chapter 11: Marketplace
──────
The marketplace across the river was much larger than the ferry landing.
At the entrance, I ran into an escort agency convoy.
Its name was stamped across yellow flags.
Five carts rumbled by while escort guards swung their spear shafts to clear the road.
“Move aside! Move aside!”
“It’s an escorted consignment headed for Hap-su. They say it’s loaded with silver taels.”
“Only escort agencies profit in wartime.”
The head escort riding at the front swept their gaze over the crowd.
Their eyes had been weathered by battle.
When they passed over me, I lowered the brim of my bamboo hat another half inch.
Once the convoy had passed, the marketplace grew noisy again.
At an eatery, I paid six mun for a bowl of rice soup and emptied it.
It was my first hot meal in three days.
As the steaming broth went down my throat, my eyes stung.
Just as I rose from the table, a commotion broke out in the middle of the market.
“Hit them! Hit them!”
“A fight!”
People rushed over and formed a circle around the scene.
I took my place at the back.
There was no better hiding place than a crowd of spectators.
Two people stood facing each other inside the circle.
One was a young martial artist dressed in fine blue robes.
An expensive sword hung at his waist, and the emblem of his sect was embroidered over his chest.
Two more people in the same blue robes stood behind him with their arms crossed arrogantly.
His opponent was a shabby wandering swordfighter.
The wanderer wore an old scabbard, and they looked as if they had not eaten for days.
The spectators’ chatter quickly told me what had happened.
The wandering swordfighter had kicked the blue-robed martial artist’s sword, which had been left in front of the eatery.
“This beggar actually dared to step on a sword of our sect?”
“What was I supposed to do? A sword lying in the road caught my foot.”
“You should’ve dropped to the ground and begged the instant you kicked it!”
“Senior Brother Min Gyeom. Teach that lowlife a lesson.”
The two blue-robed companions behind him kept egging him on.
“If an Azure Cloud Sword Sect sword gets kicked by a beggar and we laugh it off, it’ll disgrace the sect.”
“Draw!”
The blue-robed martial artist named Min Gyeom drew his sword.
Its finely honed edge flashed beneath the noon sun.
The spectators each stepped back half a pace.
“He’s an Azure Cloud Sword Sect disciple. Their swordsmanship is supposed to be pretty good around here.”
“That wanderer has some nerve.”
“Two mun says I’m betting on the blue robes.”
“I’ll take the wanderer. Look at the way they drew their sword.”
That was the way of the marketplace. A fight even drew wagers.
The wanderer silently drew their own sword.
It was a shabby blade, notched all along its edge.
But the motion of their hand was as smooth as flowing water.
Min Gyeom rushed in first.
It was an honest sword.
A heavy diagonal cut descending from his shoulder.
A textbook stroke he must have practiced ten thousand times in the training yard.
Yet that honesty looked strangely slow to me.
His elbow moved first, revealing exactly where the sword tip would go before the cut even fell.
The wanderer shifted half a step aside and lightly deflected it.
The two swords tangled.
Clang. Clang-clang.
Min Gyeom’s sword was broad and direct.
The wanderer’s was small and swift.
Whenever Min Gyeom’s sword drew a textbook circle, the wanderer’s blade thrust straight through the opening.
Five exchanges passed. Then six.
An anxious Min Gyeom gritted his teeth and brought out a proper technique.
Three thrusts connecting the shoulder, chest, and abdomen.
It was a Triple Strike, good enough to earn its keep in a sect.
The instant those three points connected smoothly, a name surfaced in my mind.
[Azure Cloud Sword Technique]
I knew nothing of that sect’s history.
It was the name of some borderland sect I had never heard of, no matter how many times I had played Records of the Martial God.
Yet I knew it.
That realization sent another chill down my spine.
Pressed by the barrage of thrusts, the wanderer stepped back twice for the first time.
The spectators let out impressed cries.
But I saw something else.
The third thrust was always one beat late.
A gap opened between the second and third as Min Gyeom caught his breath.
The wanderer seemed to have read that opening as well.
I forgot the noise around me and focused only on their sword paths.
Min Gyeom’s sword had firm roots, but too many branches.
Before every cut, his shoulder rose and his elbow drifted outward.
At its apex, the tip circled out by half a span.
That half-span made it look flashy, but in real combat it was wasted motion.
The wanderer’s sword had no branches, but its roots were shallow.
Its straight thrusts were astonishingly fast.
But they carried no weight. All its force came from the wrist.
The wanderer’s waist hung idle.
No name surfaced for the wanderer’s sword.
A nameless sword was overpowering the sword of a named sect.
Whenever their blades collided, something strange happened in my mind.
The firm roots of Min Gyeom’s sword began to overlap with the wanderer’s directness.
Don’t raise the shoulder.
Keep the elbow close to the side.
Drive with the waist.
Finish with the wrist.
A single swing stripped of the excess from both their swords formed vividly in my mind.
No one had taught it to me.
I had simply picked the strengths from two crude swords and joined them together.
My hands, starving to learn, itched.
The old sword on my back felt especially heavy.
The match was decided on the ninth exchange.
Min Gyeom’s broad cut once again made its habitual half-span circle.
At that exact moment, the wanderer’s old sword slipped into the open blind spot on the inside and thrust straight ahead.
Then it cut across the back of Min Gyeom’s hand.
“Urgh!”
Min Gyeom’s sword fell to the dirt with a thud.
The two blue-robed companions who had been acting so smugly froze, then placed their hands on their sword hilts.
“If you two want to join in…”
The wanderer spoke with the bloodstained tip of their sword lowered toward the ground.
“Next time, it won’t end with a cut across the back of your hand.”
Their hands fell from their sword hilts.
The wanderer sheathed their sword and turned away.
“Our sect will never forget what happened today!”
Min Gyeom shouted, clutching his bleeding hand.
The vow never to forget always belonged to the loser.
The wanderer did not answer. The wanderer pushed through the crowd and vanished.
Copper coins changed hands as sighs and cheers mingled.
The spectators dispersed, each offering their own judgment.
“For an Azure Cloud Sword Sect disciple, that was humiliating.”
“That wanderer could handle a sword better than they looked. What sect could they possibly be from?”
I could have told them that the wanderer’s sword had no name because the wanderer lacked a respectable pedigree.
But I kept my mouth shut.
They would immediately ask how I knew the details of someone else’s martial arts.
I left the circle of spectators and set off along the northwestern mountain path.
For a free show, it had taught me more than enough.
* * *
After leaving the marketplace, I avoided the crowded main road and took a secluded field path.
After walking half a day, I rested my legs in a seldom-frequented pine grove.
I set down my pack.
My hands had been itching since the marketplace, and I could no longer endure it.
Before the image in my mind faded, I had to try it with my body.
I unwrapped the coarse mat and drew the old sword.
Don’t raise the shoulder.
Keep the elbow close to the side to conceal the path of the blade.
Turn the waist and drive forward.
At the last moment, finish with the wrist by half an inch.
I swung.
Whoosh.
The old iron sword gave a sharp cry.
It was the sound I had made exactly once in the training yard, then never again.
I looked down at the halted sword tip.
Not my straining arm, but the waist that had driven the recoil was tingling.
I corrected my stance and swung again.
Whoosh.
The sword cried out once more.
The third and fourth swings were the same.
My arms and muscles remembered the structure: killing the shoulder, driving with the waist, and finishing with the wrist.
A dry laugh escaped between my ragged breaths.
It was not some grand ultimate art.
It was only like correcting the way I held chopsticks after gripping them crookedly.
Yet that small difference decided who lived and died on the battlefield.
If Jang Pal had seen it, he would have bluntly said that once a strike like that came out twice in a row, it stopped being luck.
I wrapped the sword in the coarse mat again.
The trembling in my hands had already stopped.
The sun dipped red through the pines.
The ominous rumors I had heard in the marketplace followed me.
They said the northwestern mountain paths had been unsettled lately.
They said the mountain villages at the foot of Black Fang Mountain barred their doors as soon as the sun set.
They said people who set out alone on the night roads vanished without a trace.
Some blamed a bandit gang, while others said a man-eating beast had appeared.
Merchants were abandoning that treacherous shortcut and taking the river route instead, spending twice as much time and money.
My lifeline stretched toward those mountains.
In my clothes, I still had half a boiled potato given to me by the woman at the ferry.
It was all I had for dinner tonight.
I adjusted my pack and walked on.
The sun set, and dusk fell over the field path.
Far away, the scattered lights of villages at the foot of the mountains went out one after another in haste.
Though it was still early evening, every household seemed to have bolted its doors.
The disappearance rumors did not seem to be mere nonsense.
Black Fang Mountain was still two hundred seventy li away.
* * *
As I hurried through the night, I weighed the situation ahead.
It would be a grave mistake to think that, after four years of fighting, the war must be nearing its end.
This war would devour ten years.
The maw of true hell had not even properly opened yet.
Blue Stone Valley was its warning.
The massacre in which twenty thousand people were burned alive overnight was only a single line in the timeline of the Demonic Cult route in the game.
Then what would a five-line incident be like?
What about a bloody battle that consumed an entire page of the timeline?
The farther the timeline went, the bolder its lines of text became, and from the fifth year onward, red lines began to appear among them.
Whenever a red line was drawn, a city vanished from the map or a sect was destroyed.
Some lines meant the ruin of an entire region.
Could a Demonic Cult foot soldier with not a scrap of internal energy survive that storm?
There had never been any way to hope for luck.
The larger the board became and the more masters rampaged across it, the less room a Demonic Cult foot soldier had to breathe.
For now, it was only five mediocre wandering martial artists and two hunting dogs.
Once winter deepened, the sword qi of masters would follow even a single set of tracks across the snow.
I had to hurry.
I had to reach Black Fang Mountain and seize the fated opportunity before heavy snow buried the mountain paths.
There was one more concern.
If the rumor about people vanishing from the villages below the mountain like night mist was the work of a beast, it would be troublesome.
Records of the Martial God did not contain only wild animals that tore apart livestock.
There were monstrous beasts that craved human vital essence, and demonic beasts that grew by feeding on demonic qi.
Each gave off a different monstrous aura.
Even among the same kind of monstrous beast, different auras required different methods of dealing with them.
The bones, hides, and teeth of powerful monstrous beasts sold for their weight in gold.
Weapons forged and armor made from them were said to take on the nature of those beasts.
There were also evil things that had lain coiled in dark places for centuries.
They were frequent guests in sudden mountain-path encounter events.
During my first playthrough, I had let my guard down and watched my character get mauled into a Game Over more than once or twice.
Bandits demanding silver taels would be a hundred times better.
Bandits were people. Words and money worked on them.
Nothing worked on a hungry beast.
All I could do was hope Black Fang Mountain was not the nest of such things.
I chewed the half of a cold potato I had saved into small pieces and hastened on.
During the day, I curled up and tried to sleep. At night, I moved under the cover of darkness.
After two days of that, I covered sixty li of rough terrain.
* * *
It was just before dawn on the third day.
As I rounded a mountain bend, the morning wind carried the sound of clashing metal.
A short scream followed the clash of weapons.
It sounded like a fight in which someone was dying.
I stopped, lay prone, and first judged the direction of the sounds.
They came from the lower path down the slope beyond the bend.
It was a route I had no choice but to pass if I wanted to cross this mountain.
Should I turn back?
Taking the slope around in a wide detour would cost half a day.
With my food and strength exhausted, half a day would be fatal.
Should I hide and wait for the fight to end, no matter whose blood was spilled?
My own road was already difficult enough. I had no life to risk in someone else’s sword fight.
I chose a third path.
There was a slanted rocky outcrop halfway up the slope.
The rocks hid it from the lower path, while from above, the lower path was clearly visible.
I intended to climb over those rocks and slip past the commotion.
I lowered my body and pressed close to the dirt of the slope.
My feet moved nimbly of their own accord.
I avoided dry branches and stepped over loose gravel.
To erase my scent, I stayed downwind.
I slipped from shadow to shadow.
When I spotted birds resting in the brush, I made a full fifty-pace detour.
If the birds took flight, even enemies ten li away could take it as a signal.
My breathing lowered as well.
It was not the shallow panting of my chest, but long, quiet breaths drawn deep into my belly and released again.
Having been hunted, my body had learned these instincts on its own.
The artifact in my chest would not let me forget the rules my body had carved into itself.
When I reached the rocky outcrop, I held my breath and looked down.
About a hundred fifty paces below, a narrow mountain path wound its way along the slope.
The cause of the commotion came fully into view.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
