WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: BerageeBomb
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◈ I Obtained the Martial God’s Book ◈
Chapter 6: Battlefield of Carnage
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A flaming arrow struck the reed field.
The dry reeds went up as if they had been soaked in oil.
They had, in fact, been soaked in oil.
It took less than a breath for the flames to leap from one reed tip to the next.
The entire southern reed field became a wall of fire, riding the wind deeper into the valley.
The flames swallowed the first barracks along the edge.
Men who had not yet awakened stumbled out with their clothes ablaze.
One burning man crashed into another, screaming.
The rank stench of burning flesh rolled in on the wind.
Even from a hundred paces away, the heat pulled the skin of my face taut and seemed to singe my eyebrows.
“Fire! Fire!”
Someone screamed until his throat tore.
There was no need to shout. The valley was already burning.
I sprang to my feet.
Something in my chest had become a brazier, heating the insides of my ribs.
The suspicion I had prayed was wrong came crashing down as reality.
But the blaze was far larger than I had expected.
Five hundred paces of reeds burned at once, baking the air in the valley.
A single breath scorched my throat.
“To the spring!”
Jang Pal thundered.
“Throw wet coarse mats over yourselves and dunk your bodies in the water! Anyone who looks back gets left behind!”
The twenty members of Third Squad moved as one.
We threw the soaked coarse mats over ourselves and ran, trampling the reeds beneath our feet.
The wounded soldiers’ barracks stood along our path.
It was closest to the reed field, and the flames had wrapped around it first.
Wounded soldiers writhed atop reed bedding.
The old soldier who had grabbed my sleeve, saying it felt like people were finally living, was in there.
He was missing a leg and could not even run.
The bedding I had laid out for them had become the firewood that burned them.
If I stopped, I would burn to death too.
I knew that, yet my legs turned to stone.
Only for a moment.
Then I ran again.
* * *
The camp was already beyond control.
“Gather at the entrance! Form ranks!”
The centurion’s shout broke through the flames again.
Twenty thousand men rushed toward the entrance with the flames at their backs.
Only the rocky mound at the western edge remained dark and quiet amid the firelight.
Panicked horses broke free of their reins and trampled people.
A driver was crushed beneath his own horse’s hooves.
One commander raised his sword and shouted.
“Do not retreat! Hold the formation!”
No one listened.
Before a fire, formations were useless.
Twenty thousand men surged like waves toward that one narrow gate they had locked from within.
The gate did not open.
People were crushed layer upon layer where the bar should have been lifted.
Those in front died pinned against the closed gate, while those behind kept shoving.
The screams no longer sounded human.
Someone climbed the palisade.
The instant he crossed the pointed logs, spearheads rose from outside.
The elites of the Orthodox Faction were waiting for those driven out by the flames.
Everyone who crossed the palisade was skewered, and the hanging corpses formed yet another wall.
They were in no hurry.
They merely collected the prey the fire drove to them.
Among them stood a man holding a sword instead of a spear.
A plum blossom was embroidered over his chest.
Whenever his sword flashed, two demonic foot soldiers fell.
At last, the Hundred Commander drew his blade.
He cut down the backs of his own men blocking his path.
“Move! Open the way!”
Blood sprayed, but the way did not open.
The wounded men fell and clutched at his ankles.
Before long, the wall of fire swallowed that pandemonium.
The silver-thread embroidery on his chest and his arrogant commands scattered as a handful of ash.
This was the valley where twenty thousand men had nailed shut their own coffin.
Now that coffin was on fire.
* * *
We reached the spring.
Jang Pal soaked his coarse mat thoroughly and threw it over himself.
The twenty squad members plunged into the water together.
For an instant, hope flashed through my mind that we might survive if we held out here.
But we were not the only ones who knew this pool.
People driven by the fire rushed in from every direction.
Hundreds leaped in like beasts where there was room for only twenty.
The clear spring water became a muddy swamp in an instant.
In a pool barely knee-deep, people were pinned beneath other people, unable to breathe.
“Don’t push! There are people underneath!”
The man who cried that out was the first to sink beneath everyone else’s feet.
The twenty of us beneath coarse mats disappeared into the chaos of hundreds.
A squadmate who had smiled shyly about holding his sister’s wedding vanished beneath the muddy water.
The eight country boys who had joined four days ago had disappeared without a trace.
Among the soot-covered faces, I could not tell squadmates from strangers.
Even the boundary between the living and the dead had blurred.
The flames reached the edge of the reed field.
The reeds surrounding the pool caught fire, and sparks rained over the water.
Thick smoke crawled across the surface.
When I lifted my head to breathe, smoke stabbed into my lungs.
When I pushed my head down, muddy water surged into my airway.
Either way meant death.
Those pinned underneath swallowed mud, while those standing above inhaled smoke and burned.
My calculation that the water would be a refuge collapsed here.
I had failed to account for hundreds jumping into a pool meant for twenty.
It had never been something I could account for.
* * *
“Big brother!”
Samdol called to me through the smoke.
He was flailing at the edge of the pool.
His coarse mat was gone, and his face was smeared with soot and terror.
“Big brother! Y-you told us to jump into the water! So I jumped!”
He reached out a hand.
I reached for it too.
Then a huge demonic foot soldier hurled himself into the pool.
The impact shoved Samdol beneath everyone’s feet.
His hand rose above the surface once.
“B-big brother. S-save me...”
Then it sank.
It never came back up.
I threw myself toward that spot.
Something pressed beneath my toes in the muddy water.
A person.
Countless people lay piled atop one another under the water.
There was no way to tell which one was Samdol.
They all seemed like Samdol, and none of them did.
He had laughed about buying three parcels of rice paddies once he returned home.
He had trusted that there was always a reason behind what I did.
* * *
“Seo Jin-hyeok!”
It was Du Chil.
With his one good arm, he seized my collar and forcibly dragged me above the surface.
Black mud dripped through the gap where his front teeth were missing.
“Get a hold of yourself! If you lose your mind here, you’ll die!”
Before his rebuke had even ended, a burning heap of reeds collapsed into the pool.
Du Chil shoved me aside and took my place.
The mass of flame covered Du Chil.
There was not even a scream.
The cotton cloth binding his shoulder floated briefly on the water.
Then it slowly sank.
He had been the one who cackled about wanting to eat meat simmered until tender.
* * *
The pool was already a grave.
Smoke had sunk to within a handspan of the surface, leaving no space to breathe.
No familiar faces remained when I looked around.
The only route left was the entrance, which the fire had not yet completely swallowed.
Beyond it, the spears of the orthodox sects waited.
Then Jang Pal waded toward me.
“It is a disaster because human effort cannot stop it. The dream you saw just happened to be that disaster. We’re going to the entrance.”
His voice was firm.
“If we stay here, we’ll be boiled to death. If we go there, we’ll be skewered by spears. Better to be skewered. At least it’ll hurt for less time.”
I nodded.
Jang Pal led the way.
We headed toward the entrance, against the river of fire.
* * *
The valley was hell.
The dead and dying lay everywhere we stepped.
No one helped them up.
We stepped on hands clutching at our trouser legs and moved on.
A familiar face, half-buried in ash, flashed past me.
It might have been someone from Third Squad.
I did not stop.
Nothing would change even if I checked.
A few days ago, I would have vomited bile at this sight.
Now, even a breath wasted on vomiting was too precious.
Whenever pillars of flame blocked our way, Jang Pal scattered the burning reeds with his wet coarse mat.
We ran for the gaps.
With every breath, my lungs felt as though they were baking into charcoal.
Yet something was strange.
My body was roasting, but I did not die.
The heat inside my chest seemed to rise into my throat and burn away the poison rushing in.
While others collapsed after a single breath of smoke, I remained standing.
The world slowed.
I could trace the path of every falling spark.
I could see where the flames would spread.
I could even see the brief path that opened behind them when the wind drove the blaze away.
My body moved into those gaps on its own.
It was that thing beating in my chest.
The power that had let me evade the strike of a Mount Hua swordsman now read the flow of the flames and made me walk.
It was the power that let my body claim as its own what my eyes had captured.
Suddenly, my steps faltered.
Would it not be easier to simply sit down in this pit of fire?
Du Chil and Samdol had fallen asleep in that hell.
But the thing deep in my chest burned away that surrender.
‘Live.’
It felt as though someone had commanded me.
It might have been the same voice I heard in my dream.
‘You who have reached the end of martial arts.’
Without realizing it, I took another step.
* * *
Before long, the entrance stood right before me.
The palisade had half-burned and collapsed.
Corpses were piled like a mountain between the charred logs.
Beyond them, people in white martial uniforms aimed their spears.
They were from the Mount Hua Sect, plum blossoms embroidered over their chests.
They stabbed down the demonic foot soldiers crawling through the flames as if killing insects.
Jang Pal climbed the mountain of corpses.
The moment he stood atop it, an orthodox martial artist thrust a spear.
The spearhead pierced Jang Pal’s chest and burst out through his back.
He did not even scream.
He gripped the spear shaft piercing his body with both hands and clenched his teeth.
“Cough. Seo Jin-hyeok.”
He turned toward me, coughing blood.
In the blazing firelight, the sword scar on his cheek gleamed red.
Jang Pal pulled the shaft with all his strength.
The martial artist holding the spear was dragged forward and lost balance.
A gap opened beyond the mountain of corpses, barely wide enough for one person to escape.
“Go. Make sure your damned dream... wasn’t for nothing.”
Those were his last words.
Still impaled on the spear, Jang Pal wrapped his arms around the enemy’s neck and plunged into the blaze with him.
He was the man said to have survived the Valley of Death alone ten years ago.
Here in Blue Stone Valley, he saved me and gave up his own life.
He was the man who had told me that as long as I was alive, I had done enough.
I had not repaid him anything yet.
* * *
I rolled through the gap Jang Pal had opened with his life.
I crossed the mountain of corpses and escaped beyond the entrance.
The instant my feet touched the ground, a man with a red plum blossom embroidered over his chest brought down his sword.
The blade fell for the crown of my head.
The world slowed again.
The path of the descending blade drew a line through the air.
I could see where it would strike, how it would turn, and where it would lose its force.
Though I had never learned it, my body understood its principle.
Then three characters surfaced in my mind.
[Plum Blossom Sword]
That was all.
Something else seemed to lie beyond the mist, but I could not reach it yet.
I did not need to force my memory.
It had been there from the beginning, as though it had always existed inside me.
I stepped half a pace aside.
Only far enough for the blade to graze past.
The wind from the sword tore through the air beside my shoulder and split the dirt.
Four days ago, it was a sword I had only narrowly escaped by throwing dirt.
Today, I evaded it with movement alone.
Before the enemy could regain balance, I threw myself into the darkness.
A shout erupted behind me.
“One got out! Chase him!”
Footsteps pursued me.
I ran.
My lungs felt ready to split, and my legs screamed.
Still, I did not stop.
The thing in my chest drove me onward, insisting that I live.
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