WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Episode 9: Screaming Mountain Demon Beast Farm (3)
──────
‘Because of the formation, I got impatient and brought it out too early.’
For a brief instant, Ise reconsidered his own judgment.
He had never expected the man to recognize the spirit artifact the moment his demonic qi was sealed, then withdraw beyond the warding barrier without hesitation as soon as he understood.
Even with his wife on the verge of death, the man had chosen to preserve his own life first.
Since he had mentioned the principle of the Demonic-Qi-Sealing Formation, perhaps being a formation master had made it easier for him to recognize.
This was the difference in experience.
Qi Condensation Realm, tenth star. Ise could not even begin to imagine what kind of life someone who had reached this realm through the demonic path had lived, or how long that person had lived.
At the very least, this enemy was different from all the ones he had faced before.
This was the real thing.
Ise put away the Twin-Curtain Spirit-Domain Sealing Banner.
He could take it out again whenever necessary, but now that its effect had been exposed, it would be the first thing the enemy targeted.
‘The Needle-Launching Armor needs time before I can use it again, and the Twin-Curtain Spirit-Domain Sealing Banner has been figured out.’
As Ise kept the distant demonic cultivator in check with Fireball Art, the man lifted the hem of his robes.
He drew a palm-sized round plate from his waist.
Blood-red incantations were densely carved around its edge, while a single distorted pattern lay at its center.
A Formation Plate.
The man threw it straight onto the ground.
The moment it struck the dirt, the pattern atop it expanded in an instant, drawing a crimson formation that spread across the earth.
A blood-red circle expanded around the man.
Ise stopped breathing for a moment.
‘...A Blood Formation.’
The Blood Cultivation Art was one of the four secret arts of Cheoryang Thunder Gate described in the Great Exorcist Order Basic Handbook. It built one’s realm by using the blood of others as an offering.
This was a formation based on that art.
The most brutal aspect of the Blood Cultivation Art was that it granted its victims no peace.
It kept captured people trapped in suffering until they withered away.
Like a vampire bat dragging around its prey, it drew a fixed amount of blood every day and used it to nourish the cultivator’s realm.
The day their blood dried up and they became nothing but an empty husk was their final day.
Ise’s body stiffened slightly despite himself.
This was not simply someone who had fallen into corruption and become a demonic cultivator.
This was a true villain who had consumed countless people for the sake of his own realm.
‘...Kidnapping someone’s family and draining their blood until they die.’
Ise’s gaze briefly turned toward the woman lying on the ground.
‘Yet he cherishes his own family so terribly.’
Considering that he had willingly abandoned even them to save his own life, it was a farce that was not even funny.
Bloody streams shot from the man’s formation.
Four streams of blood came at Ise’s body from different angles.
They moved at more than twice the speed of an ordinary Jet Stream Art.
Ise immediately raised an Earth Wall.
Dirt surged from the ground and formed a shield-shaped wall.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The blood streams struck the Earth Wall one after another and burst apart.
Ise blocked the remaining stream with the Yellow Great Parasol, then ducked behind the Earth Wall.
The next attack took a different shape.
The blood split in the air, forming a five-fingered hand that curved around the Earth Wall and lunged at Ise.
Dokkaebi Shadow-Hunting Demonic Art.
Shadow Net Formation.
The Shadow Net Formation Ise deployed collided with the demonic cultivator’s bloody palm.
The tightly woven black net disrupted and pushed back the hand formed from blood. The hand lost its shape in midair and scattered.
After two attacks failed in succession, Ise could see the man beyond the ridge gritting his teeth even through spirit sight.
‘The power of our spells is about the same.’
Ise calmly moved his eyes beyond the Yellow Great Parasol.
As he caught his breath, he weighed the enemy’s strength against his own.
Internal qi. Even if he combined all the spiritual energy and demonic qi he possessed, it might not amount to half of the enemy’s reserves. In a prolonged battle, Ise would be the first to run dry.
Spirit artifacts. He did not know what else the enemy had hidden on him. Aside from the Formation Plate he had just thrown, there were likely several more.
Spell power. From their brief exchange, it seemed they were at a similar level.
Aside from formations, Ise held a slight advantage in pure spell power.
Physical strength. For a formation master, the man had trained his body fairly well. Still, compared to Great Exorcist Order cultivators who continuously cultivated both cultivation power and their bodies, he was clearly lacking.
‘There are no formations set up in advance.’
That was what Ise had feared most. A prearranged formation.
Permanent formations such as Concealment Formations, defensive formations, and alarm formations, which operated day and night, were monsters that devoured resources.
Only a huge sect could even consider maintaining them.
Setting up even one alarm formation around this mountain stronghold must have been a considerable burden for them.
There was nothing beyond that.
‘In a direct fight, we’re evenly matched.’
The enemy was a formation master rather than a combat-focused demonic cultivator, while Ise’s Heaven-Demon Dual-Meridian Physique offset much of the gap in their realms.
He finished every calculation in an instant.
Ise put his hatchet into his storage pouch and gripped the Vein-Severing Blade.
This was an opponent against whom he had to use every card he possessed.
Behind the Earth Wall, Ise’s toes lightly pushed off the ground.
The streams of blood came flying again.
This time, Ise did not raise an Earth Wall.
Instead, he poured spiritual energy into the Yellow Great Parasol and knocked away three streams in succession with its shield surface. The spiritual-energy-infused shield violently deflected the red aura.
Then he charged forward.
Using Dokkaebi Steps, Ise crossed several zhang at a time as he closed in on the man.
The man’s response was swift and cold.
He kept an appropriate distance, mindful of the Twin-Curtain Spirit-Domain Sealing Banner.
Ise deliberately chased him, forcing the man to shift position, then immediately changed direction.
His target was the Formation Plate on the ground.
If it was a spirit artifact the man valued, he would surely come to retrieve it.
Ise’s body sprang forward like a coiled spring. It was such an abrupt turn that anyone who had not expected it could not have followed.
Yet the man’s reaction was the opposite of what Ise had expected.
Even as Ise rushed toward the Formation Plate, the man did not move from where he stood.
No. More precisely, he began a different action.
He took three small flags from within his robes.
They cut through the air and landed around him in a triangular pattern.
A formation that required three formation artifacts. Since it was more difficult to set up than one using a Formation Plate, it would likely be more powerful.
The moment Ise reached the Formation Plate, alarm bells rang in the back of his mind.
‘...No. This is...’
He instinctively knew something was wrong, but he still placed a hand on the Formation Plate as though pulled by a spring.
A hard sensation touched his fingertips. Then the Formation Plate crunched apart and scattered like dust.
It was a single-use spirit artifact.
To the man, it had already been something to use and discard.
A consumable that vanished after doing its part in deploying one Blood Formation.
‘I misjudged.’
He turned his head too late. The aura pouring from the triangular formation artifacts had already made his skin crawl.
“Let’s see if you can stay standing after taking a Killing Formation, you Great Exorcist Order dog.”
The air gave off the sound of being sliced apart all at once.
Hundreds of translucent blades rose simultaneously from within the triangle and shot toward Ise.
Killing aura, forged from something he could not identify.
It was an instant-activation formation that shredded the body simply by standing within its range.
Ise reflexively raised the Yellow Great Parasol before himself and tried to protect his body with spiritual energy.
But the activated Killing Formation could not be stopped by such soft measures.
The thick hem of his robes split into several pieces in an instant.
His side, shoulder, thigh, and arm. Blood burst from every cut at once.
Some of the blades had cut deeply enough to wound bone.
He forcibly swallowed the scream that rose at the heavy pain.
His breath caught. A mouthful of blood spilled from his lips, and his balance broke as he staggered.
That was when the man’s cry rang out.
“Wife!”
When Ise turned his head, the woman impaled on the Earth Spear was finally going limp.
The man’s gaze turned toward her.
His eyes rolled completely back, and his lips trembled with rage.
“I will surely...”
The man howled like a beast.
“I will surely offer your blood in sacrifice to my wife...!”
Ise immediately took a Healing Pellet from his robes and tossed it into his mouth.
It was only a temporary measure, but it should at least let him move.
The pain was another matter. The pellet could heal wounds, but it could not stop the pain.
Every time he inhaled, it felt as if hot needles were being driven between his ribs and pulled back out.
The demonic cultivator lifted the brush-shaped formation artifact again and began drawing another instant-activation formation.
Ise tried to drive the Twin-Curtain Spirit-Domain Sealing Banner into the ground.
The demonic cultivator immediately abandoned the formation he had been drawing and retreated.
Taking that chance, Ise used Jet Stream Art to wash the blood from his body, then drew two more talismans from inside his robes.
A Concealment Talisman and a Spirit-Veiling Talisman.
The Concealment Talisman hid his body, while the Spirit-Veiling Talisman concealed his aura.
His figure vanished from the man’s sight.
“...?”
A beat later, the man with overturned eyes felt around the spot where Ise should have been.
Only bloodstains remained there.
The man hurriedly tried to draw an instant defensive formation, but a round spirit artifact flew in from somewhere and exploded.
Bang!
A broken poison bomb released a vicious toxin.
The man blocked his breathing too late. But toxic qi did not enter solely through breathing.
It seeped into the body through every open passage, skin, eyes, and ears.
The man’s qi and blood twisted in an instant. His beastlike overturned eyes lost focus and trembled, if only briefly.
The fingertips holding the brush shook, and the defensive formation pattern he had just begun drawing distorted halfway through.
In that instant, Ise’s body reappeared from the air.
The Vein-Severing Blade was already imbued with the golden light of Adamantine Chain.
The man instinctively turned and thrust out a bare hand.
The demonic cultivator’s demonic qi collided head-on with Ise’s spiritual energy.
The short blade met the bare hand, and the two energies pushed against each other.
Their clash was perfectly even.
In that moment of deadlock, Ise’s other hand moved.
Dokkaebi Shadow-Hunting Demonic Art.
Four-Directions Strike.
Four shadowy hands rose from the ground and struck at the demonic cultivator.
As the startled man divided his demonic qi to block the shadows, Ise’s Vein-Severing Blade moved again.
This time, it was not aimed at the neck.
It targeted the ankle. As long as he could drive the blade into any part of the body, victory would swing to his side.
“You persistent bastard...!”
The man reflexively gathered demonic qi at his feet, but he was a step too late.
Ise’s Vein-Severing Blade had already split the man’s ankle halfway through.
Unfortunately, he failed to drive it in.
But Ise’s assault was not over.
The stone palm summoned by the Stone Hand Pendant had already activated and smashed down onto the demonic cultivator’s head.
The demonic cultivator vomited blood, hurriedly threw out a single-use spirit artifact, and opened the distance.
His bloodstained robes, the toxin spreading through his body, his head covered in dirt, and the way he dragged one foot as he stumbled backward.
He looked as desperate as Ise, whose body was covered in wounds.
It was just as Ise thought he had driven the enemy back.
The man stretched one hand toward the woman’s corpse lying behind him.
Red aura rose from his fingertips in thin threads.
His wife’s blood. And the blood of the demon beasts Ise had pierced only moments ago.
In the end, the demonic cultivator had decided to use even his family and their demon beasts as sacrifices for the Blood Cultivation Art.
A decision fitting for a demonic cultivator.
Watching the blood droplets slowly gather, Ise felt an instinctive sense of danger.
This was dangerous.
His Dokkaebi Senses screamed like a warning.
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
