WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: BerageeBomb
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◈ I Obtained the Martial God’s Book ◈
Chapter 19: Ghost Sword Demon Venerable
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I thought back to the short cutscene in the game where the wandering martial vagabond fell.
The fall lasted barely the blink of an eye.
After hitting the ground, they groaned and limped, but got up on their own and pushed through the bushes.
It was a height from which even a third-rate martial artist without a protective qi aura could fall, injure their bones, and still walk.
The event description said the drop was a thousand body lengths deep, but if it really had been, even the game’s assistance wouldn’t have helped.
So Heartbreak Cliff wasn’t a dizzying drop that made your guts feel as if they were tearing apart.
It was probably five or six times an adult’s height.
At its base, there had to be an unusually thick growth of tough bushes to catch a falling body.
The second clue was the condition of the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable, the original owner of this fated opportunity.
His wounds had torn his intestines and scattered his internal energy.
Someone in that state wouldn’t have climbed a cliff to find a hiding place.
Climbing down one after losing his martial arts would have been almost impossible, too.
That meant the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable must have staggered in along the valley floor.
He must have wandered around the bases of the cliffs until he found a level cave he could crawl into on his own.
Since he couldn’t have walked far, it wouldn’t have been far from the foot of the mountain.
And thick bushes would have hidden the entrance from sight.
As the pieces fell into place, the conditions narrowed down the cliffs I needed to search.
‘First. Not a sheer cliff, but a height that won’t kill someone instantly if they fall.’
‘Second. An unusually thick growth of tough bushes at its base.’
‘Third. Terrain that allows someone to walk in from level ground instead of climbing a rock face.’
Of the thirty cliffs, only ten met all three conditions.
Thirty fruitless searches were enough to make me despair. Ten were different.
I could grit my teeth and give it a try.
* * *
As soon as dawn broke the next day, I began searching the ten cliffs in order.
As expected, thick bushes covered the base of the first cliff.
But when I pushed them aside, I found nothing but a smooth wall of solid rock.
There wasn’t even a crack where a cave could have formed.
I crossed it off.
When I pushed through the bushes beneath the second cliff, I found a hole big enough for one person to crawl into.
My heart pounded as if it might burst.
I squeezed inside, only to find a shallow fox den.
An earthen wall blocked me before I’d taken three steps.
I crossed it off.
The following morning, I entered the valley I’d marked as my third candidate.
A large rock towering at the valley entrance caught my eye.
My feet stopped before I could think.
The upper half of the rock had been sliced off at an angle.
It wasn’t a surface broken by weathering or split by lightning.
Nor was it the mark of a crude axe hacking at it or a thick saber striking down.
A single sharp blade had swept through it.
It was a sword mark that had split solid rock as easily as slicing tofu.
Decades had passed, and thick moss covered the cut surface, but the smoothness left by that sword remained.
The Book of the Martial God inside my chest suddenly grew hot.
The heat was far stronger than when I’d read the Mount Hua Sect’s swordsmanship in Blue Stone Valley.
It almost seemed pleased to encounter a familiar trace after so long.
Or perhaps it was hungry to devour the essence of martial arts contained in that trace.
Yet once again, no name for the martial art appeared.
It was different from when I’d watched the Azure Cloud Sword Sect’s swordsmanship in the marketplace.
Probably because this wasn’t a sword moving before me.
A single cut wasn’t enough to reveal the full shape of the swordsmanship.
Even so, my eyes were growing sharper on their own in response to the Book of the Martial God.
There were things I could read from that one slanted surface.
The stroke hadn’t come down from above. It had slashed fiercely upward from below.
It was the path of an exhausted arm making the most of its last remaining strength.
I’d never seen this swordsmanship before.
Yet my right hand, the one I held my sword with, tingled strangely.
I widened my gaze and scanned the valley around the rock.
More traces left by that sword came into view, one after another.
There was a large rock split vertically in two, its halves weathering side by side.
There was an old tree that had grown into a twisted shape, sending new branches out above a diagonal cut.
Strangely, the cut rocks and trees all lined up in one direction.
This was clearly a path.
Someone had entered this valley, cutting a way through with a single sword.
These weren’t the marks of a wild melee.
If someone had fought for their life here, sword marks should have been scattered in every direction.
These were the traces of a dying person forcing out the last of their will.
A straight line opened one heavy step at a time in search of shelter, conserving even the strength needed to strike an enemy.
The distances between the sword marks told the story of that day, too.
Near the valley entrance, a rock had been split every twenty steps.
A little farther in, the gaps widened to fifty steps.
Deeper still, there was only one every hundred steps.
His strength to swing the sword and his inner qi had rapidly run dry.
Instead of cutting through obstacles, he had spent more and more steps struggling quietly around them.
The final few sword marks in the deepest part of the valley hadn’t split the rocks.
They were shallow lines left by a trembling hand that could no longer bear even the sword’s weight.
‘The Ghost Sword Demon Venerable.’
Decades ago, a martial artist had bled and died here alone.
As if in a trance, I followed the markers he’d left behind.
Then the traces abruptly vanished on the slope above a steep cliff.
It was the very cliff I’d chosen as one of my ten candidates.
* * *
The slope above the cliff was a sea of grass.
Dry weeds had grown waist-high over the entire steep incline.
I pushed through the thick grass, carefully placing my feet as I followed the cliff’s edge.
Then the ground beneath my left foot gave way.
I threw my upper body backward on instinct and grabbed a clump of tough grass with all my strength.
Cold sweat poured off me.
There was no earth or stone where my left foot had landed.
Only a tangled mass of grass pretending to be solid ground.
Weeds growing out beyond the cliff’s edge had woven a grassy roof over empty air.
Year after year, dead brush and fallen leaves had piled on top.
It was a trap woven over decades.
From above, it looked exactly like a level dirt path.
But anyone who stepped on it carelessly would plunge through the empty space beneath.
So much for Elder Bae’s warning to turn back if there was even a thirty percent chance of slipping.
As I gasped for breath, a question suddenly answered itself.
Why had that wandering martial vagabond in the game fallen off the cliff?
Third-rate or not, they were still a martial artist.
They couldn’t have been clumsy enough to tumble off a perfectly visible edge.
The answer lay right where my left foot had just sunk.
Like me, that wandering martial vagabond must have mistaken this thin roof of grass for a dirt path.
With trembling hands, I took the rope from my pack and tied one end around the base of a thick pine tree.
I wrapped the other end around my waist and lay flat on the ground.
Almost crawling, I approached the edge and peered down beyond the grassy roof.
The cliff was about five or six times an adult’s height.
Dark bushes covered the ground below.
Tough thorn bushes and dry vines tangled together in a thick mass well over an adult’s height.
They were thick enough to catch a falling person like a spiderweb.
I examined one corner of the bushes.
An unusually deep shadow lurked where the brush met the base of the cliff.
It wasn’t the shade of a tree.
It was a black hole, as if the rocky mountain had opened its mouth.
My heart beat so loudly that it seemed to pound against my eardrums.
The cutscene I’d watched on a monitor overlapped with the view before me.
It was the scene of that fated opportunity I’d watched so many times.
These were the bushes where the third-rate wandering martial vagabond had landed with a groan after falling.
That was the cool patch of shadow they’d crawled toward, bleeding, before pushing through the vines and entering.
I’d found it.
I steadied my quickening breath and checked the sun’s position first.
It was afternoon, with about half a day left until sunset.
Getting down and climbing back up before dark would be a tight squeeze.
Not that I intended to set foot on this slope again tonight.
If what I sought really was beneath those bushes, I’d gladly spend the night in the cave, even with a corpse for company.
I secured the knots on my pack, untied the rope from my waist, and lowered it down the cliff.
The bushes had saved that wandering martial vagabond from dying on impact, but they must have broken a couple of ribs and badly injured a leg.
I wasn’t willing to sacrifice even a couple of bones.
I would meet this fated opportunity with my body intact.
* * *
I climbed down the rope, enduring the burning pain in my palms.
My toes sank into the soft bushes.
Even reaching the hole at the base of the cliff took a long time.
Thorns pierced my vest and scratched my skin, but I paid them no mind.
At last, I stood before that deep shadow.
It was a cave.
The entrance was so narrow that an adult would have to bend halfway over to crawl inside.
When I pulled away the old vines blocking it, cool, stale darkness flowed out.
It was the darkness of the dead, trapped inside for decades.
Before entering, I examined the dirt at the entrance.
There were no tracks from animals or people coming and going.
No clumps of fur, no droppings, and no scraps of gnawed bone.
No dangerous animal had claimed this cave.
The lessons I’d risked my life learning while hunting the tiger a few days ago had already become a habit.
I took a resin-rich pine branch from my pack and lit it with my fire tube.
Crackle. An orange flame sprang up.
In its light, I saw my hand trembling faintly like a leaf.
I hadn’t noticed how hard the descent and the struggle through the bushes had been.
Now that my goal was before me, the tension I’d held down came pouring out.
I let out one deep breath, bent over, and entered the cave.
The entrance passage was so narrow that my shoulders brushed the walls.
After a little over ten steps with my back bent, the view opened up and the cave widened.
It was a natural chamber about the size of a room.
Unlike outside, the air within was frighteningly dry and still.
Not even a mountain breeze reached here.
It felt as if time itself, which wore away all things, had stopped in this place.
I raised the burning pine branch above my head.
Its light pushed the darkness back in every direction.
At last, he emerged from the shadows.
“Ah!”
My hand went to the sword hilt on my back before I knew it.
For a moment, I thought I’d met the gaze of a living, extraordinary master.
His posture was that straight, that tense with life.
Only a moment later did I realize he was a skeleton without flesh or blood.
Then I took my hand off the hilt.
A lone skeleton sat neatly cross-legged with its back against the cold rock wall.
Its spine hadn’t bent an inch, and its shoulders were spread wide, still holding an air of power.
There was something even death hadn’t broken.
The bearing and pride this man had honed throughout his life as a martial artist.
What struck me as strange was the direction of his skull.
It wasn’t facing the entrance.
His neck bones were turned slightly toward the stone wall on the right.
It was as if he’d been staring intently at something until the very last instant before death took him.
I lowered my eyes.
Two ribs on his left side had broken and set out of place.
Without treatment, they had only partly healed, and at the wrong angle.
Every breath must have brought him tearing pain.
In that state, he seemed to have split rocks, cut a path through the mountain, and crawled into this cave through sheer determination.
I shone the light over every part of the chamber floor.
There were no ashes from a fire, no bowl that had held water, no discarded animal bones or scraps of grain.
It seemed the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable hadn’t taken a sip of water or a bite of food before he died.
He must have poured the rest of his life into a single wish.
The clothes draped over the skeleton’s shoulders had rotted until only their shape remained.
They were roughly woven hemp robes dyed black.
The same clothes this body had worn for half a year, soaked in blood and rolling through the mud of the battlefield: the black hemp robes of the Demonic Cult.
Even the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable, who had once held the world beneath his feet, had died alone with the Demonic Cult’s black robes as his burial shroud.
To the very end, he hadn’t taken them off.
I suddenly remembered the Demonic Cult’s red sash folded inside my clothes.
It weighed against my chest like a lump of lead.
Across his crossed knees lay an old, fine sword, placed with care.
The sword was intact inside its black scabbard.
The wooden scabbard hadn’t withstood the years. It had rotted and split into ugly cracks.
But the leather wrapped around the hilt was different.
Decades of sweat and handling had polished it to a smooth shine.
It showed how its owner had gripped it every single day of his life.
It was a trace of a life fiercely devoted to martial arts.
The skeleton’s two bony hands rested one over the other on that gleaming hilt.
Hands that hadn’t let go of their weapon until the moment of death.
No, he hadn’t merely been holding a sword.
Those hands had embraced the sword he’d devoted his life to, like a lover, as he met his death.
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