WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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Chapter 19: The First Gate (3)

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The First Gate (3)

Mumu stood there holding the ripped-out gate, smacking his lips.

'Ah... I really messed up.'

He'd meant to open the gate, but he'd torn it clean off without meaning to. He'd clearly caused some serious trouble.

'Is this thing really expensive?'

Judging by how quiet everything had gone around him, it might well be. Feeling the weight of all those stares, Mumu stood there with the gate in his hands, racking his brains over what to do with it.

While Mumu fretted over such a trivial thing, Jin-hyeok, Mo Il-hwa, and Hae Ryang were so dumbfounded their mouths hung open and the words deserted them. Naturally, they had assumed Mumu would fail this test. The gate could only be opened with internal energy, so no matter how strong a person was, this one thing was supposed to be beyond raw muscle. The result, though, was a shock through and through.

The first to come to her senses, Mo Il-hwa pointed at Mumu and said,

"Him! Him! He, he ripped the gate right off. You see that?"

How could anyone not see it?

'Insane...'

Jin-hyeok was genuinely floored. Even with monstrous strength, surely this was going too far. That gate had been built by two geniuses, the Master of Ten Thousand Wisdoms and Jegal Po-won, both counted among the three greatest renowned figures in the martial world, who had pooled their talents and ground countless mechanism formations into its making. And yet someone had smashed it apart through sheer force.

'Mumu, what on earth are you...'

It made no sense by any normal measure. What in the world had his father Yu Yeop-kyung picked up out there in exile?

"Y, young master Jin-hyeok... didn't you say your brother had never learned any, any martial arts?"

Hae Ryang of the Hao clan asked, stammering, unable to believe it. The result had so overshot his expectations that his tongue had seized up. Reactions much like his were rippling out in every direction. The front of the gate had become a cauldron of chaos before anyone realized it.

"Wh, what is this?" "He broke the gate?" "Didn't they say he never learned martial arts?" "No. Even if you did learn martial arts, is that even possible?" "Tch. How am I supposed to know?" "Even the successors of the Four Immortal Masters couldn't tear the gate off like that, could they?" "That's what I'm saying!"

Then someone shouted in a panic.

"Huh? Wh, what is that guy doing now?"

Everyone's eyes snapped to Mumu at once. The enormous gate, all of the first through third gates combined into something around sixteen cheok across, was still in Mumu's hands, and he came teetering backward toward them, wondering where to set it down.

'!?'

"Hey, everyone. Sorry, but I'm trying to put this thing down, so could you all step aside?"

At Mumu's call, the flustered applicants broke into a stir.

"Uh, uh, uh, uh?" "D, don't come over here! There's nowhere to back up to!" "Hey, hey! I, I told you there are way too many people her..."

Whoooosh!

"Aaaagh!" "D, dodge!"

Most of the gathered applicants stood between five and six cheok tall. A gate nearly three times their size came swinging in like some giant fan, and the applicants ringing the front of it in a half circle scrambled back in terror. It looked like a tide of bodies rolling and swelling.

Whoooosh! Whoooosh!

Every time the torn-out gate moved, pandemonium broke loose and people dove this way and that, until the ground before the wall had turned into an utter shambles.

"What a complete handful of a kid. Master... what in the world is that one?"

Watching all this from atop the wall, Yeon Nam-gyeong spoke as though he could hardly believe it. Seeing him, the supervisor Hak Gyu snapped at him in irritation.

"How should I know!"

He was just as bewildered. He'd taken the boy for some country bumpkin throwing his weight around, one who couldn't even use martial arts. Who could have guessed he'd tear off a gate linked together with mechanism formations like that? It was the first such incident since the founding of Changcheon Martial Academy.

"Master. More to the point, what do we do?"

At Yeon Nam-gyeong's words, Hak Gyu furrowed his brow. He had never faced a situation like this, so he had no idea how to rule on it. The boy had clearly claimed he'd never learned martial arts, yet he had forced that gate off.

'Did he really not learn martial arts?'

Even if he had, that was a problem. Even the successors of the Four Immortal Masters had managed no more than opening the gate. This one had ripped it clean off.

'If it were just a matter of breaking the gate, you might manage it somehow with a special technique, but is it even possible to tear it off like that?'

Honestly, he wasn't sure he could. Simple force, just pushing or pulling, was bound to be weaker than a strike. A strike, after all, meant loading speed onto strength and detonating it.

'Which would mean that boy's internal energy might just surpass my own...'

That was hard to admit. It was an impossibility.

'There's no way.'

There was a limit to how much internal energy one could hold at that age. Short of some truly special case, crossing that limit was flat out impossible.

'Nothing for it.'

After all his deliberation, Hak Gyu made his decision. There was no real way around it other than checking for himself.

Kwoong!

Just then a heavy sound came from below the gate, along with a slight tremor. Looking down, he saw that Mumu had finally set down the gate he'd been carrying, but only after plowing through the crowd. And now he was fiddling with something at his wrist.

'What is he doing now?'

Shaking his head at the sight, Hak Gyu soon leapt down from the top of the wall to the ground.

Footnotes:

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