WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Martial Genius who Remembers Everything ◈
Chapter 331: Chasing Shadows
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“What came out?”
Seong Moran’s question snapped me back to my senses.
When I looked at the Red Phoenix Bangle again, it had already stopped vibrating.
‘Was I imagining things?’
It was a bracelet hanging loosely around my wrist, not secured to my arm.
If I moved the wrong way, it could have shaken and started moving on its own...
‘Yeah, right.’
Running from reality wasn’t going to help in a situation like this.
I could only deal with a problem by facing it head-on.
Maybe it was a coincidence.
Maybe the bracelet had simply shaken.
...But that damned monkey had uttered the blasphemous words, “Heavenly Demon.”
Two terribly ominous things had happened in a row. If I tried to put a positive spin on even that, there’d be something wrong with my head.
And I wasn’t crazy.
“Where did the main group go?”
I pressed the stragglers for answers, but nothing useful came of it.
There was nothing I could do with people who had lost their sense of direction.
I grabbed a hunter by the collar.
“...Th-the divine spirit’s curse... Th-the divine spirit is watching us...”
When people went through something too shocking, they lost their minds.
There were plenty of people like that on the battlefield. Even those who had lived alongside death their entire lives could break when unexpected misfortune finally struck.
If people like this weren’t treated quickly, they could cause even bigger problems for their allies.
“Young Master Jin, what are you...”
“Luckily, I learned the treatment.”
“...Th-the divine spirit’s curse...”
Thud!
The hunter’s head snapped halfway to one side, and some life returned to their vacant eyes.
“Ugh... Th-the divine spirit...”
“You were puffing out your chest about hunting a divine spirit. Why are you trembling over a curse now?”
They still needed more treatment.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
I struck only the most painful vital acupoints, and the hunter flailed their hands.
“S-stop! Stop! What on earth are you doing?!”
Oh, it looked like their head was finally fixed.
Without lowering my raised hand, I asked again.
“Where did the main group go?”
“...”
Was there still some lingering aftereffect?
For aftereffects, a beating was the best medicine...
“I-I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you, so lower your fist!”
Blood streamed from the hunter’s mouth as they pointed north with a trembling finger.
“Th-that way... They went that way.”
“Lead us.”
“Y-you’re thinking of chasing them? Are you crazy? Even if you know the direction, they’re already half a day ahead. How are you supposed to catch them?!”
Who were they trying to fool?
“You hunters have a way to track each other, don’t you? Did you think I wouldn’t know?”
They weren’t idiots who would enter a labyrinth like this without preparing for the possibility of getting lost.
“...”
When I raised my bloodied fist again, the hunter covered their face with both hands.
“A-all right. I’ll guide you. What kind of White Path representative is... N-no! I didn’t say anything! And I absolutely won’t take the lead...”
Once I let go of the hunter’s collar, they hurriedly backed away.
“What was that about?”
Seong Moran frowned as if she had just witnessed something unpleasant.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to chase the lecturers? They won’t stay quiet after you interfered with them.”
“If my guess is right, the lecturers won’t be a major problem.”
After all, people only raised objections when there wasn’t truly a major problem.
#
The group moved slowly after the stragglers joined us.
We had to cross the natural formation while carrying the injured.
To make matters worse, we ran into monsters.
The creatures had barely shown themselves while we’d been searching for them, but now two appeared at once and threw the group into confusion.
“Kill them!”
“Yes!”
Thanks to my unit members, who were well-practiced at hunting monsters, there wasn’t much trouble.
Using the Thousand-Li Scent hunters used to track one another, we followed the lecturers.
Then we found more stragglers.
“...This...”
“...This is serious.”
There were three dead among the stragglers we found this time.
Most of the others had suffered severe injuries as well.
Seong Moran burst out, unable to hide her anger.
“Even if they were blinded by their greed for elixir pellets, isn’t this going too far?”
I agreed.
The lecturers probably would too.
No matter how many elixir pellets they obtained, things would spiral out of control if so many Academy students died.
“Hey, what happened here?”
“Jin... Sowoon?”
I woke the Academy student who looked the least injured and tried to get the full story.
“We... never should have hunted the divine spirit. We were wrong...”
Those were the only words they managed to force out before passing out.
Yang Japyeong groaned and asked me, “What do we do?”
“For now, we’ll take the injured with us and move.”
The number of injured had already surpassed half the number of people still in good condition.
Taking them along would make it harder to fight monsters, but I couldn’t leave them behind either.
“The bodies...”
“We’ll leave them for now. Later, we’ll retrieve them with the Namgwon Sect’s help.”
“...Understood.”
Yang Japyeong seemed to have a lot more to say, but he soon nodded.
As we arranged our formation to move again...
Chirrr.
Grrrrowl.
Unwelcome sounds reached us.
“Damn it...”
Five pairs of yellow eyes flashed between the bushes.
After taking up a defensive stance, I quietly called out to the others.
“Prepare for battle!”
As if they had been waiting for that moment, five monsters leaped out at once.
#
We moved as quickly as we could, but our pace kept slowing.
Most of the stragglers were injured, unable to move properly, or useless in a fight. On top of that, monsters kept appearing.
“Why are there more and more of them?!”
Seong Moran shouted, but there was no monster polite enough to retreat after hearing her.
Some seemed to know we were in trouble. They attacked more fiercely or targeted only the injured whenever they spotted an opening.
“Huu...!”
We had already killed nearly ten monsters.
Crack.
There was no time to absorb the poison cores.
Too many people were watching.
I even divided the tiny elixir pellets among my unit members. We didn’t have the leisure to sit down and circulate our qi right now.
Then...
“What’s that?”
An Academy student with a splinted broken arm pointed at what we were doing.
I answered briefly.
“A monster’s inner core.”
“...A monster’s inner core? I didn’t know such things existed.”
What was this person trying to say?
“...Have only you people been eating them all this time?”
Hm. So they wanted to spout nonsense after all.
I tilted my head to the side.
“So what if we have?”
A sense of entitlement was buried deep in the mind, making it hard to erase even in moments like this.
Even when people were in a position where groveling wouldn’t have been enough, the thought that they deserved special treatment didn’t easily disappear.
“What?”
“Can you absorb one right now? It may be an inner core, but it’s poisonous. Ah, don’t tell me you expect us to wait patiently until you absorb it?”
“...”
They couldn’t argue, yet the resentment on their face remained.
Then all they managed to say was...
“Hmph! They say trash like you aren’t worth associating with.”
Unable to watch any longer, Seong Moran sprang to her feet and grabbed the student by the collar.
“Hey, where did the rest of the Orthodox Society you love so much go?”
“...”
“We’re the ones who took you in after the Orthodox Society abandoned you. Do you still not get it? Or do you want to stay in Mukrim alone and become a monster’s delicious meal?”
“...!”
For the first time, they seemed to understand their situation.
Their expression was utterly confused.
As Seong Moran said, a single word from us could decide whether they lived or died.
As if she had touched something filthy, Seong Moran brushed off the hand she had used to grab their collar and muttered quietly.
“Don’t say another word until we leave Mukrim. If you do, I’ll throw you into the natural formation.”
“...”
That one sentence from Seong Moran was effective.
Those who had been voicing their complaints, openly or otherwise, all clamped their mouths shut.
I looked over everyone and gave the order.
“We move again.”
Even those who had been whining about how tired they were stopped complaining.
They had finally realized exactly who held their leashes.
“Those who ate an inner core, focus on circulating your qi whenever we rest. In the worst case, we might not get any time to rest at all.”
“Young Master Jin, is this really all right?”
As Seong Moran said, continuing like this was inefficient.
“Wouldn’t it be better to send a few people ahead to the camp?”
In some ways, that might have been the best choice.
Still, I shook my head.
“Since the lecturers left the camp, we won’t be able to get help there. If we leave these people behind... they probably won’t last even half a day.”
For some reason, the monsters had become more ferocious.
These weren’t creatures that avoided humans and hid themselves.
The Demonic Realm had literally become hell.
“For now, the best option is to gather as many stragglers as possible and return to the camp before the other unit members suffer any more casualties.”
Our speed increased considerably thanks to Seong Moran.
After hunting two more monsters, we arrived at...
“Hm.”
For the first time, we found a large group of nearly thirty stragglers.
A corpse that looked like an Academy student and a monster carcass lay off to one side.
It looked as if they had hunted a monster among themselves after getting separated and ended up like this.
“Who’s in charge here?”
I called for whoever was responsible among the thirty people, but nobody answered.
They only watched us with hostile eyes.
“Is there no one here who can speak?”
When I asked again, a mocking voice came from one side.
“You really are like a jackal. How did you even know we were here?”
When Taoists pulled their hair back to wear a crown, their exposed foreheads and eyes sometimes made their faces resemble a horse’s head. That was why people occasionally mocked them as horse-nosed Taoists.
But this Taoist’s nose actually looked like a horse’s.
“Hey, horse nose. Are you in charge?”
“...”
“What happened?”
“Hah! Do you think I’ll tell you?”
I stared quietly at their nose.
“Is it only your nose that looks like a horse’s, or is your head at that level too?”
“What did you say?!”
“I’ve seen five bodies on the way here. All of them were Academy students. Do you not understand what that means?”
“...”
“Don’t tell me you think that because you followed the lecturers’ orders, you aren’t at fault.”
At that moment, the horse-nosed Taoist’s nose wrinkled deeply.
Wow, they really had been thinking that. What a completely shameless bastard.
“A divine spirit or whatever, people have died. If that bastard lecturer kept chasing the divine spirit until things got this bad, then we should consider them a Black Path spy.”
When I struck at the truth, the horse-nosed Taoist who had been so confident until now cried out as if they were about to collapse.
“O-our senior would never do that!”
Ah, so they were from the Qingcheng Sect.
I sighed and stepped closer.
“What happened?”
“...”
Their gaze shifted toward the stragglers we had brought.
They lowered their head in silence for a moment before asking, “C-can we come with you too?”
They looked up at me with the saddest eyes imaginable.
Ugh, idiot.
In the end, they were just immature kids.
They had been fooled by that bastard lecturer, No Jinha, and nearly died without knowing why.
As I turned away, I answered flatly.
“If you keep up and behave.”
“...We lost the divine spirit while chasing it. While we rested, it appeared again with creatures that seemed to be its young. We had to move in a hurry, so we couldn’t follow the main group.”
I looked at Yang Japyeong.
He slowly shook his head.
Even wild animals had maternal instincts. When predators pursued them, they instinctively didn’t run toward where their young were.
No matter how divine a spirit it was, it made no sense for it to reappear with its young.
In the end, I had no choice but to face the truth I had been trying to ignore.
What the lecturers and Academy students were chasing wasn’t a divine spirit.
“What the hell are these idiots chasing?”
A certain ominous word tickled the back of my mind, but I decided not to say it aloud.
If that really was it... then it was too bleak.
Damn it, even if my second life had been cursed by the Demon God, that would be too much.
I refused to affirm or deny it.
Didn’t Confucius say moderation was best?
I clapped my hands once and looked around.
“Get ready to move. What have you all been doing without even administering first aid?”
While the stragglers treated their injuries with golden wound medicine, I walked toward the monster.
The horse-nosed Taoist interrupted their treatment and stared at me in confusion.
“W-what are you going to do?”
“What do you think? Even when we’re in a hurry, we need to take what we can.”
Of course, you did hunt it.
Footnotes:
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