WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Haruto

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◈ The Martial Alliance Rulebook Archives ◈

Chapter 75: Departed Soul (1)

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The Life-and-Death Gambler looked at me. There was no doubt in her eyes over the sudden appearance of an option that had not even been proposed as a candidate.

Nor was there any bewilderment, like one might feel upon encountering something new or suffering an unexpected accident.

There was delight.

It was the delight of a naturalist who had succeeded in observing an unknown new species. An accident and a new discovery both involved seeing something unfamiliar, but the emotions they inspired could not have been more different.

“Wonderful!”

Her smile was innocent. In two ways, she resembled a child. First, she enjoyed the present moment without caring about complicated interests or consequences.

“If you can’t get back up, I’ll help you!”

Second, she was cruel because she did not care about another person's pain.

What kind of help did she mean? It certainly would not involve letting me leave in one piece.

“Young Hero! It’s dangerous!”

Zhuge Byeok shouted as if screaming. I shook my head. This was the safest path.

“There is someone else who can help me.”

I looked at Peng Juhyeok. He nodded.

The Ghost Valley Master's power, leaking out as a sign of descent, had thrown every order in this land into chaos, from the sense of direction of those walking upon it to space itself.

In these circumstances, the Ghost Valley Master alone could walk the ground properly and kill anyone who approached.

In a way, it touched upon the fundamentals of martial arts. Make my attacks hit while evading the opponent's.

Since the Ghost Valley Master alone could move correctly within this chaos, it could take a life with every move and deflect every attack aimed its way.

But Peng Juhyeok and I had one thing in common. The Heart-Succession Secret Book, an essential tool for Records Officers.

It possessed the power to transmit writing across great distances. In other words, it served as a guidepost that revealed our positions to one another.

If we used the nature of the Heart-Succession Secret Book, we would surely be able to break through this maze-like formation array.

This gave us a way to subdue me before the Ghost Valley Master who had taken my body killed everyone.

The moment the Life-and-Death Gambler seemed about to add something else, the scenery began to appear extremely slow.

Every tiny movement lingered like an afterimage. Before long, everything in the world stretched endlessly and appeared as a tangled, chaotic line drawing.

The color remaining in each line was bleached away, as though being sucked somewhere. My vision became the center of a black-and-white ink painting.

And finally.

『O departed soul.』

The Ghost Valley Master had come.

『Are you there?』

* * *

The scenery changed completely. Before I knew it, I was in my room.

Not the cheap inn room from my days as a wandering martial artist, nor the lodging assigned to the Formation Array Research Department by the Martial Alliance.

I was in that room, cool with the air conditioner running and filled with the low hum of my computer's cooling fan.

Yet I could not directly feel the wind from the air conditioner or hear the fan.

My body would not move. Not only my body, but every object in my room remained still.

I felt like a living stuffed specimen.

Both of my hands rested on the keyboard. The monitor displayed the difficulty selection screen for Chronicles of Black and White Heroes.

The screen that had sent me into this Chaotic World.

I could not blink. I could not even lift my bare fingers, as though a thousand-geun weight had been tied to them.

But I could feel the power dwelling within me. There was a faint but certain warmth near my lower abdomen.

The internal energy within my dantian. The Demonic Qi I had absorbed through the Star-Absorbing Great Method, and the internal energy refined from it.

The moment my will became firm, it would spread through my limbs and body, break these shackles, and free my frozen flesh.

But not yet.

A sound came to me.

A voice that seemed to pour in from every direction, like the sound of a grand cinema speaker.

『What sort of mindscape is this?』

Something like a sigh flowing from that voice filled my room.

It was hot because it was human breath.

It was damp because it was full of greed.

It was cold because it sought to judge me.

The fact that it was hot filled me with the greatest fear.

This being.

This monster that had cast away its body and lived within the flow of time.

Even so, it was not an Anomaly, but a martial artist. It had reached such wonders through the cultivation it had built for itself.

What was martial arts, that it could distort a person's existence to this extent?

『Has a departed soul independent from the villa found the Essence, Qi, and Spirit beyond the Red County Divine Continent? Such a unique form of development would be rare even beyond the borders of the Nine Provinces and Eight Wastelands.』

What was that talking about?

I vaguely knew about the Nine Provinces and Eight Wastelands. It was a term that often appeared in martial arts novels.

The Nine Provinces. A system said to have divided the world into nine regions when King Yu controlled the floods. In other words, the Central Plains.

The Eight Wastelands. The vast lands stretching out in all eight directions. The Nine Provinces and Eight Wastelands referred to the Central Plains and the vast lands surrounding it. In other words, the world.

Yet the Ghost Valley Master was speaking far too casually about what lay beyond the world.

The Anomaly Records Office and the stairs came to mind again. The stairs that led somewhere other than the Martial Alliance.

The moment they led somewhere other than this martial world. Beyond the Nine Provinces and Eight Wastelands.

I caught the thoughts threatening to continue endlessly and brought them to a halt. I had no room to focus on another problem now.

The moment the Ghost Valley Master approached, I would have to resist with everything I had.

A presence made itself felt behind me. Something enormous, which had stirred the very flow of air filling the room with a single breath, had compressed itself into a human-sized form and stood at my back.

It stood behind me and looked down at the monitor.

“Hmm. Are these letters that shine by themselves?”

A shadow fell over me. I remembered being caught using the computer without my parents knowing. They had not said a word, yet their presence, breathing, and shadow behind me had been enough to make me sense the disaster approaching.

A similar but vastly greater terror writhed inside me. At worst, my parents' anger would lead to a lecture. That thing's anger would mean death at the very least.

I recited the rulebooks I had encountered so far.

I had never read the Ghost Valley Master's rulebook, but I was certain the same sentence would be written there as well.

Exercise a martial artist's right.

I was measuring the most suitable time to exercise my right.

While the Ghost Valley Master regarded me as no more than human remains devoured by a red shadow. Until the interest it felt while observing my mindscape crossed the line into carelessness.

“Chronicles of Black and White Heroes.”

The Ghost Valley Master slowly read the words. Not only the title written in Chinese characters, but also the detailed text written in Korean.

Was it an extension of its ability to invade a mindscape?

“The martial arts of the Demonic Path are...”

It slowly read the passage discussing the Orthodox Path and Unorthodox Path. Then, upon seeing the introduction that discussed the Demonic Path, it stopped dead.

『Strange.』

That word struck my eyes as well. The Ghost Valley Master gasped.

“Not merely beyond the Red County Divine Continent, nor beyond the Lesser Nine Provinces... Beyond the Greater Nine Provinces? Still not given up? The Heavenly Demon...!”

Bewilderment.

The moment the Ghost Valley Master's breath faltered, I moved my internal energy.

Crack!

My body screamed as though I had been seated in the same place without moving for an eternity.

The discord between bone and flesh. The qi flowing through my blood vessels seeped into the muscles touching those vessels before it reached my bones, and the movement of my flesh and bones could not properly respond.

It felt as though my joints were moving on their own. They had long exceeded the limits of movement allowed to a human body, and my body billed me for the excess in pain.

I ignored it. I restrained the hand that wanted to curl into a fist from the pain and forced it open with internal energy.

My chair spun. I rose from it as if springing upward.

Crash!

The chair I had pushed struck the desk. At the moment the monitor was about to fall from the impact, I reached out.

Even as both hands shot forward, there was no sound of the monitor falling. It was precariously close to toppling over, but my movement was faster than any attack I had made until now.

And finally, I saw the Ghost Valley Master.

It resembled the Ghost Valley Master from the dream I had seen under the influence of the Soul-Binding Art on the night before the Newcomer Welcome Banquet.

That only meant it resembled the form from my dream more than anything else I knew.

Its appearance was like a mosaic painting. Its entire body seemed assembled from different fragments. It fit only the outline of a human form, without any unity.

The index finger of its right hand was the sun-darkened, bronze-colored finger of a man. The middle finger beside it was slender, but callused at the tip. It was clearly the finger of a musician who plucked an instrument similar to a zither.

Its clothes were the same. The hem was red like the Ghost Valley Master's clothes in my dream, but the part directly above it was purple. The styles of its garments were also mixed together, making it impossible to say exactly what they were.

The chaos was most apparent in its face. Its unrestrained features were distorted in fragments, strange like the face of a person portrayed in Cubism.

None of those fragments remained the same for even a moment. Its appearance changed constantly.

I instinctively knew that the forms making up the Ghost Valley Master were the appearances of others it had swallowed before.

Bewilderment still remained on its face. It did not seem to come from the shock that I had moved.

Its cry of “beyond the Greater Nine Provinces.” The shock from when its thoughts reached that phrase seemed to remain like an aftershock. The emotions rising from my movement had only just begun to emerge.

That emotion was curiosity. Beyond it, I could faintly glimpse something else.

But I could not give it time.

Before that next emotion could fully ripen, I seized the Ghost Valley Master's form. I grabbed its throat with my left hand and pressed the palm of my right hand against the area of its heart, near the Danzhong acupoint.

The force created by the Star-Absorbing Great Method raged from the centers of my palms.

The Ghost Valley Master's gaze shook. All its fragmented features lost their bearings and continued changing without end.

I caught a flow in my hands. From the violently raging waves of internal energy came the scent of blood, similar to Soul-Severing Mountain Villa.

I thrust my hand into that flow and extended the pull of the Star-Absorbing Great Method toward the place that smelled like blood.

The Soul-Reaving Demon's brain transplantation art. The Soul-Separation Grand Method, the ultimate realm of the Soul-Binding Art. Fragments of stories about moving from one body to another rose and vanished.

To invade me, that thing would surely have to send its internal energy into me. Through precise acupoints and qi channels.

I intended to use the Star-Absorbing Great Method to disrupt that path beyond recognition. If the transplantation did not proceed properly, the Ghost Valley Master would not remain unharmed either.

The stratagem of letting the plum tree die in place of the peach tree. If it tried to devour my self, it would be broken as well.

Suddenly, it opened its mouth.

“O departed soul from beyond the Greater Nine Provinces.”

Even though I was strangling it with all my strength, there was not the slightest sign that it was short of breath.

The flow of internal energy beneath my hands grew fiercer. It was too much for a half-baked Peak realm martial artist to endure.

“I pity your fate.”

But I did not retreat.

It was resistance like the water play of children using their hands to dam a stream. I knew I could never stop this power alone, yet I resisted anyway.

“This is my mercy. It was originally for those burdened with wisdom too difficult for them to bear on their own... Yet you wear expectations that nothing in the Red County Divine Continent can bear like shackles. Death will be more peaceful for you than life.”

The stream became a river.

The Ghost Valley Master's neck, which had been smooth like a woman's neck until moments ago, sprouted an Adam's apple.

The river became the sea.

The Ghost Valley Master's ever-changing eyes settled into a form that resembled mine.

At the moment it was about to become an irresistible tidal wave.

“A martial artist's right!”

I shouted the words with all my fury and slammed my forehead into the Ghost Valley Master's face, which was about to be completed.

My own brow cracked instead, but as my vision turned red, I felt delight instead.

Its appearance and mine were different.

I bled. It did not.

That difference gave me an inspiration.

I realized I could turn the flow of the Star-Absorbing Great Method upon myself and injure myself.

The special physician had once told me that I could survive despite forcing out my latent potential because of my excellent control over internal energy and my insignificant cultivation method.

Now, I had the Star-Absorbing Great Method, which I could use for both internal energy control and a cultivation method.

“You claim you are granting mercy? By taking my body? Then I’ll grant you mercy as well.”

I could rupture myself more quickly and surely than before.

“I’ll destroy my acupoints so thoroughly that the instant you enter, you’ll die. So thoroughly that no one will ever be able to mend them again.”

Why did I end up in situations like this every time I became involved with this bastard? I laughed at my own wretched fate.

“I guarantee you a peaceful death.”

Footnotes:

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