WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
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◈ The Martial Genius who Remembers Everything ◈
Chapter 329: Spirit Hunt (4)
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The Scarlet Radiance Sword slipped from my hand and hit the ground.
“...Y-you... you could talk?!”
I clutched the Sunfire Monkey, but the light of life was already fading from its eyes.
“Why... why didn’t you tell me sooner?!”
Blood continued to pour from the hole in its heart.
Overwhelming regret and remorse crashed over me like waves.
If I’d stabbed it just a little later...
“My... money...”
The image of myself laughing heartily atop a mountain of gold and silver treasures slowly faded away.
How could I be this unlucky...?
As I despaired, my thoughts suddenly cooled.
But the last thing this bastard said was “Heavenly Demon,” right?
“...”
What were the odds of finding a talking monkey, and of its first words being “Heavenly Demon”?
Wouldn’t it be more likely for me to throw myself off some random cliff and find a fated encounter?
“And I’m the bastard who failed to realize that and killed it...”
I blamed myself endlessly, then shook my head.
A monkey tainted by the Heavenly Demon.
Before I could ever use it as a spectacle, the monkey’s destination would be the basement of the Martial Alliance’s Enforcement Hall.
And as its owner, I’d inevitably be dragged in with it.
Wouldn’t they be curious about who owned a talking monkey? I’d be damn curious.
Curious enough to rummage through that person’s head and find out why they taught a monkey the words “Heavenly Demon.”
“Yeah... I was right to kill it. Good job, Jin Sowoon... Huh? Why are my cheeks wet? Did it rain?”
I pulled myself together and picked up the Scarlet Radiance Sword again.
“Right. What good is making a mountain of gold? An inner core is better. An inner core from something like this will surely make me the strongest under heaven.”
That’s right.
I comforted myself as I cut open the Sunfire Monkey’s chest.
Crack.
Blood streamed out as its chest split apart.
After waiting a while, I pulled the wound wide open, exposing its organs.
Then, as I pushed aside the organs where the inner core should have been, I found something glowing faintly. It was no larger than a millet grain.
“...Does the Sunfire Monkey keep its inner core somewhere else? Yeah. It has to.”
I searched through its organs and dug around inside again.
“No way...”
There was nothing resembling an inner core anywhere.
Was this for real?
“...”
What kind of bullshit was this?
If I’d known, I would’ve trained it properly.
Sweeping away demons and eliminating evil.
The pronunciation was similar enough. I could’ve taught it to say that, avoided going to the Enforcement Hall, turned it into a spectacle, and made money...
“Argh!”
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
After venting for a while, I finally came back to my senses.
“Ha...”
I stared at the Sunfire Monkey’s inner core resting on my fingertip, then put it in my mouth.
It would’ve felt too unfair not to eat at least this.
Once I calmed down, I organized my thoughts again.
First. Divine spirits lived in Mukrim.
Second. The Academy students and lecturers had tried to hunt Sun Wukong[1]... no, the Sunfire Monkey, one of those divine spirits, and failed.
Third. I happened to catch the Sunfire Monkey, and it could talk.
Fourth. The only thing it said was “Heavenly Demon”...
What the fuck was this?
Scratch, scratch.
No matter how many times I scratched the back of my head, I couldn’t clear my mind.
“Does any of this make sense?”
I’d organized the facts myself, yet the whole chain of events was absurd.
If this report made it to the Mantong Office, Jegal Somyeong might tear it to pieces and burn it.
“Not that I was planning to report it anyway.”
The fourth point was more troubling than the third.
A talking monkey was shocking enough, but the fact that this demonic Maogong had said “Heavenly Demon”...
What connection could there be between Mukrim’s divine spirits and the Heavenly Demon?
“These damn bastards never leave anything alone.”
I already had plenty of resentment toward them, but now it had grown even greater.
When I met them, I wanted to crack their skulls open and ask one question.
How did they make a monkey talk?
It wasn’t because of money. Really, it wasn’t.
“Whew... Let’s go back.”
There happened to be a pit nearby, so I put the Sunfire Monkey inside and covered it with dirt.
It was obvious that something had been buried there, but the surroundings were already a complete mess, so it didn’t stand out too much.
Just as I was about to return to where my group was waiting, keeping my mouth shut about everything...
Fwoosh.
A fire began burning in my dantian.
#
I’d eaten poison cores and inner cores in Mukrim before, but I had never actually practiced qi-regulating breathing afterward.
The internal energy in my dantian was already enormous, so qi circulation alone had been enough to absorb any foreign energy. If I used the Azure Dragon Bangle, I didn’t even need to do that.
This time was different.
The tiny flame quickly began feeding on the internal energy in my dantian, growing larger and larger.
I was already devastated over losing a talking monkey, and now its inner core was devouring my internal energy.
“What kind of bullshit is this now...?”
I hurriedly sat cross-legged and began circulating my internal energy, but the flame showed no sign of dying down.
Instead, it drew in even more energy and burned with mad intensity.
The heat that began in my dantian spread through my blood vessels and across my entire body.
Even with the Wind Bell keeping the temperature comfortable, the scorching heat coiled around me as if it would burn me alive.
‘N-no!’
The most serious problem was that the inner core was making the internal energy in my dantian disappear.
Do you know how hard it was to gather all that?!
I desperately gathered all the energy in my dantian and smothered the heat at once.
I thought that if I used an ocean of energy, something as small as a millet grain would be easy to suppress.
But...
‘S-stop, you crazy bastard!’
The heat kept boiling over and expanding.
The more I tried to constrict it, the more fiercely it spread.
I felt as though my entire body might turn into a candle if this went wrong.
This was driving me insane.
I had to control this heat somehow. Or expel it...
‘Huh? Expel it?’
I remembered what the Sunfire Monkey had done.
It had set its mane ablaze and released heat.
...But could a person do that too?
There was no time left to keep thinking.
At this rate, all my blood vessels would burn away.
“Whew...”
I pushed the internal energy in my dantian to one side and moved only the heat.
Once I stopped restraining it, the Sunfire Monkey’s inner core, which had been sending heat through my blood vessels, began racing through my body with even greater enthusiasm.
Heat spread along the pathways of my blood vessels and lesser meridians, leaving no place from my fingertips to my toes untouched by pain.
It felt as though my entire body were melting inside a pit of fire.
At the point where I could no longer endure it, I expelled the heat outside, just as I would force alcohol fumes out through my entire body.
Fwoosh!
Even through my tightly shut eyelids, I could sense a bright light shining through the darkness.
‘Did it work?’
The temperature in my blood vessels and lesser meridians had clearly dropped.
Yet heat rising from my dantian tried to surge up again, so I expelled it through my pores once more.
Fwoosh!
The light was even brighter than before.
When I cautiously opened my eyes, I saw little flames around me burning dry leaves.
‘Good heavens.’
It was surprising enough that I could expel the heat like this, but I was actually spewing flames.
Now that I knew it worked, there was no reason to hesitate.
Fwoosh.
Fwoosh.
Each time I expelled it, fire energy spread in every direction, and the flames burning in my dantian gradually weakened.
How much time passed like that?
When I regained my senses from that state of selflessness, the fire energy that had been devouring my dantian had disappeared.
“Whew...”
The flames in my dantian were gone, but I didn’t feel as though the Sunfire Monkey’s inner core had vanished.
No, it was the opposite.
I raised my hand in front of me and poured intent into my fist.
My fist immediately turned bright red.
“...”
This was probably the ability the Sunfire Monkey had shown.
When I checked my dantian, my internal energy had neither increased nor decreased.
The Sunfire Monkey’s inner core had probably replenished what it had devoured.
“...So the Sunfire Monkey’s inner core had an effect like this.”
It wasn’t particularly strange for a martial artist to learn a fire art, but if it became known that I had gained this kind of power from a single inner core, No Jinha and the other lecturers definitely wouldn’t sit still.
“No wonder it was called a divine spirit.”
I wanted to learn more about the Sunfire Monkey’s inner core, but I didn’t have time.
“There’s still a long time until sunrise, but at this rate...”
My clothes had already burned away, and I was about to return naked.
#
After returning to my group in clothes roughly woven from grass, I used sound transmission to tell Geumpyo to bring me spare clothes.
A little later, someone approached.
“What on earth have you been doing... Eek!”
What was with Geumpyo’s strange voice...
“...”
Saryeon screamed and dropped the clothes.
I called Geumpyo, so why had she come?
I quickly fired the Flying Dragon Claw and snatched the clothes out of the air.
“I’m not even naked. Why are you reacting like that?”
The clothes were crudely made, but they still had the basic shape of actual clothing.
If there was anything worth teasing... no, being surprised about, it was only how primitive they looked.
“W-what happened to your clothes this time?”
Saryeon’s face had somehow turned red, and she kept awkwardly avoiding my gaze.
Her acting like that was making me feel strange too.
“...Well, something happened.”
“What happened... Sniff, sniff. Are you going to put those on?”
“Why?”
“Sniff, sniff. Can’t you smell that? Did you fall into some demonic beast’s dung pit or something?”
When I brought my nose to my arm as Saryeon suggested, a foul stench stabbed into my nostrils.
My skin had looked clean all this time, so I hadn’t noticed at all.
“...”
I climbed into a pond I’d spotted on the way back and scrubbed myself with a stone. Yellow grime flowed off me.
“Ugh... How long have you gone without washing?”
Why had she followed me? I told her to go first.
“More importantly, I called Geumpyo. Why did you come? It wasn’t your turn to keep watch.”
Saryeon gave me an incredulous look.
“Whose fault do you think that is?”
“What now?”
Had something happened while I was gone?
“Do you know how much Lecturer No Jinha caused a scene last night?”
“Huh?”
“They suddenly barged in during the night, shouting about where Senior Brother was and whether you’d gone to hunt a divine spirit. They demanded that we hand you over and made a huge fuss.”
Saryeon continued with a sharp look.
“The lecturer was causing a scene, and for some reason Senior Brother wasn’t there. Of course we thought you’d really gone off to hunt a divine spirit.”
Had No Jinha discovered I was missing while tracking the Sunfire Monkey? Or had they seen me chasing it?
The way I had to respond would be completely different depending on which it was.
More importantly, if it came out that I had consumed the Sunfire Monkey’s spiritual medicine, it could become a huge problem later.
It wouldn’t end with a simple question of who had eaten the inner core.
It would begin with who had contributed the most during the hunt for the Sunfire Monkey and eventually become a dispute over who actually owned the inner core.
“Hmm, I’m fucked.”
If I were found at fault, I might have to pay an enormous sum in compensation.
Compensation for the Sunfire Monkey’s inner core?
I’d rather die than watch that money leave my pocket.
It wasn’t as though Taeul Sect had that kind of money in the first place.
As I splashed more water over myself, I asked Saryeon, “Hmm... What exactly did they say? Did they raise hell shouting, ‘Didn’t he go hunt a divine spirit?!’... No, did they make a scene?”
“How would I remember that? I’m not you, Senior Brother.”
“Try to remember. It’s a pretty important issue.”
“Why would that be important?”
“‘Didn’t he go hunt a divine spirit?!’ and ‘He went to hunt a divine spirit!’ mean completely different things. How I respond depends on which one it was.”
“...Senior Brother.”
Shock appeared on Saryeon’s face.
“Don’t tell me...”
She then took a large step toward the pond.
Why was she holding a stone?
“Did you catch a divine spirit?”
My juniors really were perceptive.
Would I be able to keep this a secret?
[1] Sun Wukong: The Monkey King, the supernatural simian hero of the Chinese classic Journey to the West.
Footnotes:
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