Chapter 218: Son of a Bitch (1)

After deciding to rest here for a day, the group left the Formation and headed toward the Kongtong Sect's main hall.

The place had been run by impostors, but they hadn't wrecked it.

After cleaning up the corpses of the Taoist fiends whom Dam Bin had assassinated when they first entered, Il-mok picked the cleanest hall among them to get some sleep.

He wasn't about to sleep without taking a long bath and changing into fresh clothes, of course.

Those scammers must have lived here when they weren't busy with their death rituals, as there were spare robes and plenty of water.

He was dead to the world, so deep in sleep he had no idea how much time had passed.

"Haaaaah."

Il-mok woke with a lazy stretch and stepped out of the hall to find the sun already high in the sky.

Maybe it was because he'd gotten some solid rest, but even the headache from breaking through the blood barrier had settled down quite a bit.

"You're awake, Young Master?"

"A-are you feeling b-better now?"

Ouyang Mun and Jeong Hyeon greeted Il-mok as he emerged.

"I feel pretty refreshed. Are you two doing alright?"

"We took turns standing guard in three shifts of two, so we managed to get some rest."

"Th-the others are st-still sleeping right now."

Il-mok nodded at their response and sat down cross-legged.

"Alright. We should probably start getting ready to move. I'm going to meditate until everyone else is up."

He spent the next thirty minutes or so finally circulating his qi, something he'd been too injured to do last night.

After restoring his internal energy to some degree, he opened his eyes to find everyone else had woken up as well.

The group scrounged up a quick meal from whatever the fake Kongtong Sect had left behind.

"Young Master, while we were on watch, we searched the buildings and the bodies. We found a few more things."

Dam Bin presented Il-mok with items the group had collected.

It was mostly small trinkets and charms, but there were also a few books.

"Are these related to sorcery too?"

Jin Hayeon answered Il-mok's question.

"I skimmed through them, but they're not like the Blood Curse Record. Some are about sorcery, but if I had to describe them, they're more like journals written by the Ghost Valley Master's disciples."

Following her explanation, Il-mok pocketed the books first, then entered the Formation again with his companions.

Their first destination was the cave that had been packed full of corpses.

"We need to dig the ground so we can bury them properly."

At his word, the whole team started digging.

Since they were all top-tier martial artists, they just channeled their energy into their hands, and graves appeared in seconds.

While the group was busy digging dozens of graves...

Il-mok, whose obsessive clean-freak tendencies were flaring up, decided to read one of the journals they'd found instead of getting his hands dirty.

'There might be clues about the Blood Cult, so I should look through this first.'

The book he started reading was indeed a journal, just as Jin Hayeon had said.

It contained most of what the Taoist bastard who wrote this journal had done.

Learning sorcery from the Ghost Valley Master, deceiving innocent people from Pingliang County and using them as sacrifices, managing the Butterfly Dream Grass growing in the fields, and so on.

As he quickly skimmed through the journal filled with various records...

"Hmm?"

Il-mok paused at one particular passage.

'I wonder if this matters much?'

As Il-mok pondered how to digest this unexpected information...

Dam Bin's voice snapped him back to attention.

"Young Master, we've made about a hundred graves for now."

Il-mok closed the book and said, "Then we should start taking the corpses from the cave and burying them one by one."

With those words, Il-mok took a deep breath and started walking.

'Let's just do what I can.'

Il-mok wrapped his arms with a cloth he'd prepared in advance, then began removing corpses from the cave with his companions and placing them in the graves—

—You crazy bastard! Don't you know about corpse poison!?

—GTHE GERMS! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MANY GERMS ARE ON THAT THING!?

—While fighting against the side effect screaming in one corner of his mind.

Even though he was getting stronger and began to step away from Extremity, he still fell short of achieving Transcendent in the end.

It took every ounce of his willpower to ignore his screaming OCD and touch the dead bodies.

'SHUT THE FUCK UP!!'

Still, Il-mok yelled back in his mind and kept working.

This was about honoring the dead. He couldn't back down just because it was "unclean."

The reason he had entrusted the digging of the graves to the party was so that he could move the bodies with his own hands.

If his hygiene compulsion had already flared up from digging in the dirt, he likely wouldn't have been able to touch them at all.

He'd only managed to move five bodies when Seon-ah saw the cold sweat on his brow and grabbed his arm.

"Big Brother, please rest and leave this work to us."

"These people died unjustly. I should help however I can to honor their spirits."

Hearing that, the others finally got what was going on and chimed in.

"Young Master, you already killed the monster responsible for this. That's the most important thing. They will understand that you can't help it due to your condition."

"That's right, Young Master. Our Divine Cult’s doctrine emphasises killing the evil doer who torments the common folk. You’ve done more than enough.”

Dam Bin and Jin Hayeon tried to stop Il-mok with their own logic.

"P-please r-rest..."

Then there was Jeong Hyeon, who tried to chime in but was too quiet to be heard.

"Hahaha. If you overexert yourself and fall into Qi Deviation and go on a rampage, Young Master, we won't be able to handle it."

"That's fine by me! If the Young Master goes berserk, I will gladly sacrifice myself to stop him!"

"Oh! That method works too, Miss Ju! If that happens, Hayeon and I..."

"Don't even start, Senior Ouyang."

And then there were Ouyang Mun and Ju Seo-yeon, who took turns spouting nonsense.

He understood that, in their own weird ways, they were all just worried about him. Realizing this, Il-mok finally relented and watched them work with a small nod of thanks.

'This won't completely ease your resentment, but I hope you can rest a little more peacefully.'

Time passed as they kept working.

As they pulled more and more bodies from the cave, it became clear that a hundred graves weren't going to be nearly enough.

In the end, some dug additional graves while others continued extracting bodies until they finally managed to bury all the corpses piled in the cave.

When they were done, there were one hundred and twenty-seven burial mounds.

Il-mok and his companions pressed their palms together and prayed for the dead.

As they stood in silent tribute, an eerie quiet fell over the valley.

It was broken by a soft, gentle breeze that seemed to sweep through the graves, as if paying its own respects.

And right after the breeze departed, caressing the burial mounds...

From a far distance, a very faint noise could be heard.

Recognizing it as human voices, the group opened their eyes and looked at each other.

"Could be more of the Ghost Valley Master’s disciples."

With cold expressions, they nodded and quickly exited the Formation.

But when they got there, the scene was not at all what they'd expected. The newcomers weren't those Taoist scammers but the townspeople.

"P-pleeeease~!!"

"S-send us to paradise!"

To be precise, they were the addicts.

They looked awful. Not just because the drug had ravaged their bodies, but also from the trip they'd made to get here.

While Pingliang County is indeed the closest county to Mount Kongtong, the actual distance is still dozens of miles away.

A martial artist could make the trip in three hours or so, but for the common folks, it would take at least half a day of walking to reach this distance.

On top of that, they'd had to climb Mount Kongtong's treacherous terrain, which meant these people had walked continuously for a day to get here.

Their clothes were covered in dust and dirt, and their faces and bodies showed small cuts and scrapes.

They'd walked this entire distance until they looked like this. Just to get a bit of that damn drug.

The team looked to Il-mok, and Il-mok sighed once and gave his orders.

"Knock them out. Hit their pressure points to paralyze them and keep them quiet. Then force-feed them some water and food. After that, put them to sleep."

There was no way he was going to give them the drug, no matter how much they begged.

While the team was busy gently taking down the desperate townspeople, Il-mok laid out the next phase.

"Miss Ju and Young Warrior Ouyang will stay here. Handle any others that show up the same way. The rest of us are going back to burn that damn flower field to the ground."

Ouyang Mun and Ju Seo-yeon didn't look too happy about being left behind, but Il-mok didn't care.

As Il-mok turned his back and started on the path back toward the Formation—

"Hm?"

—He stopped and tilted his head at a strange sight.

What he was looking at was the demonic sword Ouyang Mun had retrieved for him the day before. The demonic sword that he had left on the side because it felt distasteful to touch.

'Did I sense it wrong yesterday because I wasn't feeling well? It seems like... the ghostly qi has decreased?'

Still, a demonic sword was a demonic sword.

Il-mok quickly lost interest and entered the Formation with his companions.

They first moved toward the nearby stream.

After filling jars and gourds they'd brought from the Kongtong Sect's hall with water, they headed to the field.

Dam Bin used a fire-starter she took from her sleeve to set fire to one side of the field.

The wind caught the flames, and the fire started to spread.

Il-mok watched it carefully. Whenever the fire tried to jump from the flowers to the surrounding forest, he would flash a hand sign.

Shaaaaaaa.

While Il-mok extinguished fires using the Dew Condensation Spell, his companions also used jars and gourds to put out flames that spread to the wrong places.

In Jin Hayeon's case, she used the cold energy from her White Hand Demonic Art to suppress the fire.

And while Il-mok and Jin Hayeon bought time, the companions repeatedly fetched more water and sprinkled it around.

Fire naturally goes out when it runs out of fuel. They simply prevented the flames from spreading outward while burning the field.

After wrestling with fire for about two hours, the place where the fire had completely died out had transformed into a burned field covered only in ash.

With their job done, they left the Formation again and returned to the hall.

In the two hours they'd been gone, three more addicts had shown up at Mount Kongtong.

Il-mok briefly observed those subdued by Ouyang Mun and Ju Seo-yeon.

"Looks like the situation in Pingliang County is much more serious than I had thought."

Since it was already too late to return to Lanzhou immediately anyway, Il-mok decided to stop by Pingliang County to check on the situation while resting.

As everyone started packing up their gear, Il-mok glanced at the cursed sword one more time.

"Hm?"

The ghostly qi had decreased quite a bit more. At this point, calling it a demonic sword felt like an overstatement.

"Why?"

Puzzled, Il-mok picked up the demonic sword and left the Kongtong Sect's hall with his companions.

Each carrying civilians who'd been put to sleep with acupoint pressure.

Using their lightness skills, they managed to enter Pingliang County again.

"Haah..."

They could see the village looking even more anxious and lethargic than when they'd visited before.

Sighing at the bitter scene, Il-mok felt something strange and looked down toward his hip.

The demonic sword he'd strapped to his side for travel was vibrating faintly, as if crying.

Naturally, Il-mok thought about the changes in the demonic sword.

'After we held the funeral for the bodies, the ghostly qi decreased. And it decreased again after we burned that field.'

As a result, Il-mok arrived at a certain hypothesis.

"...You want me to resolve their grudges, don't you?"

Many of those who'd become sacrifices to this sword must have been from this village. Which meant the people still living here were their families or friends.

Maybe the spirits' last regret, the one thing tying them to this world, was worrying about the people they'd left behind.

As if to say, Yes, that's it!, the sword let out a powerful hum.

WOOONG!

Il-mok looked down at the sword and spoke to it soothingly.

"We can't do it with just us right now. We don't have enough manpower. So wait just a little longer."

With those words, Il-mok turned his head to look somewhere.

It was the direction where Lanzhou lay.

***

After resting in Pingliang County, Il-mok and his companions ran continuously from early dawn for half a day before arriving at the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult's Lanzhou branch around afternoon.

The Lanzhou Branch Leader greeted Il-mok with respect as he returned four days after leaving.

"Young Master! A special dog from the Beggars’ Gang has come!"

Unfortunately, he also came with some unexpected news.