The Sect Master Does Nothing

I was trying to enjoy breakfast for the first time in a while when Gongson Han suddenly started shouting and spraying spit everywhere.

“No, what the hell kind of bullshit is that?”

I looked sadly at the side dishes that had been unexpectedly bombarded with spit and reduced to miserable corpses.

“Ah……fuck.”
“I asked what the hell you mean.”
“What? Why? Why the hell are you giving me shit first thing in the morning?”

Gongson Han stared at me with a somewhat agitated look.

“Who did you say you declared war on?”

I casually answered while picking up some rice with my chopsticks.

“The Black Serpent Gate. I killed the leaders of two of their subordinate gangs, so this was the best choice.”
“Are you insane? If a war breaks out, we’ll lose nine times out of ten.”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Why?”
“Did you already forget?”
“Forget what?”

With a grain of rice stuck to the corner of my mouth, I declared proudly,

“Because I am the strongest.”
“…….”
“And there won’t be a war. Because I’m going to fight the Black Serpent Gate Master in a one-on-one life-and-death duel.”
“Ah, is that so?”
“Even if it comes to that, I can beat down most of the Black Serpent Gate’s forces myself anyway.”
“Ah. I see. I must have underestimated our Sect Master terribly. What an incredible man you are. Why don’t you just go ahead and unite all under heaven while you’re at it?”

Amazingly, Gongson Han was sarcastically announcing what would one day become my goal.

He didn’t seem to realize it himself, so I nodded along in agreement.

“That’s right. That’s my goal. I’ll unite all under heaven and throw every bad bastard into the Scorching Hell.”
“I see. How shortsighted of me.”
“At least you understand now.”

Gongson Han let out a long sigh with a half-defeated expression.

“There ought to be a limit to how much bullshit one man can spout…….”
“…….”

This time, So Geum-ho, who had been listening to our profound discussion the entire time, stopped eating and joined in.

“Sect Master, then I’ll go too.”
“Where?”
“You’re going to attack them eventually anyway, aren’t you? Let me come with you.”

I put down my chopsticks and stared at So Geum-ho.

There was plenty to like about this bastard, but he was far too straightforward and excessively brave.

Truthfully, that kind of person was ideally suited to becoming an exceptional martial artist of the Kangho. But objectively speaking, the current So Geum-ho was not an exceptional martial artist.

He was just a good-natured martial artist.
I said,

“Deputy Sect Master, stay here and train hard with the disciples.”
“Why?”
“You’re not skilled enough for me to make use of you yet. It might sound cruel, but that’s the truth. So train until your bones and muscles wear away. There’s no real trick to learning martial arts. Just train like your life depends on it.”

Of course, even if there were no tricks, there were miraculous opportunities. Like reincarnation, for instance.

Of course, that had nothing to do with So Geum-ho, so I dropped the thought. At my comment about his lack of skill, his expression became slightly dejected.

But what could I do? It was true that these bastards were still weak, and it was also true that if they didn’t want to remain weak martial artists, all they could do was train themselves to death.

If those somewhat harsh words stirred something in So Geum-ho’s heart, that was enough.

After all, So Geum-ho possessed the mindset of a martial artist.

I turned my head and looked again at the bastard who seemed to possess not even a speck of a martial artist’s mindset.

He looked like the sort who would be more pissed off about his pride being bruised than about being weak. Gongson Han stared shamelessly back at me.

“What?”

I pointed at Gongson Han with my thumb and said to So Geum-ho,

“Look at that bastard. He doesn’t even understand how miserable it is to be weak. He’s the slippery type who finds it easier to cling to someone strong than to become strong himself. At least you’re not like that, right?”
“That is true.”
“As long as you have the desire to become stronger, that’s enough. Don’t forget that feeling and train hard. Drag that bastard along and work him over sometimes too. He’s still the Chief Steward of a sword sect. We can’t have him going around getting beaten up.”
“Yes.”

As the conversation increasingly turned toward insulting him, Gongson Han glared directly at me.

‘Why the hell are you giving me shit all of a sudden?’

……was what his expression seemed to say.

But I was neither compassionate nor experienced at comforting people in the first place, so instead of offering words of encouragement, I gave Gongson Han another job.

“Gongson Han. Find out if there are any skilled smiths around here.”
“A smith? Why all of a sudden?”
“I want to buy a sword. He doesn’t need to be some legendary master smith. I just need something made well enough that it won’t break too easily. I don’t know when we’ll attack the Black Serpent Gate, so find one as quickly as you can.”
“Something that won’t break too easily……all right.”
“Good. Now eat your damn breakfast.”
“Yes.”

There was one thing the last battle had made perfectly clear. I still wasn’t ready to wield the Demon Wail Sword.

I compared what it had been like unleashing the Demon Wail Sword’s full power in my previous life with using Black Flash against the Heavy Serpent Gang Leader.

What that told me was that the amount of the Demon Wail’s power I could currently use without serious trouble was slightly less than one-tenth of its full strength.

And even using that much once drained my mental strength completely and brought an overwhelming wave of exhaustion with it.

So until my body reached a certain level, I planned to use an ordinary sword while conserving the Demon Wail Sword as much as possible and bringing it out only at the decisive moment.

You could say it would be like the ultimate trump card every great martial artist seemed to have tucked away.

Of course, if I met the Cult Leader, swinging the Demon Wail as my ultimate trump card probably wouldn’t mean much.

The Cult Leader was the kind of bastard who could wipe away most people’s ultimate techniques with a single gesture.

As for how I knew that……I wished I didn’t.

Why did my chest ache for no reason even though I didn’t have a single wound?

But I had no reason to meet or even think about the Cult Leader right now, so I heartily finished off the food Gongson Han had sprayed with spit.

A few more days passed before some semblance of order and structure finally settled over the mess that was the Dokgo Gate.

So Geum-ho’s role was to work the Dokgo Gate disciples hard, train them, and pummel them with endless nagging while tormenting both their bodies and minds. In other words, he was something like a swordsmanship instructor.

Truthfully, both my swordsmanship and my ability to teach the sword were superior to So Geum-ho’s.

That was only natural in a way, since I’d once been a swordsmanship instructor in the Demon Cult myself.

But if I trained the disciples my way, most of them would end up dead.

I’d learned how to train cultists, not how to deal with normal human beings.

Next, all the clerical work, administrative work, and anything else requiring a brain fell entirely to Chief Steward Gongson.

I was too stupid to handle all the thinking, So Geum-ho was stupid, the Dokgo Gate disciples were stupid, and men who spent their lives around swords were generally stupid anyway. There was nothing to be done about it.

If I tried to stick around and help Gongson Han with his work, either he’d die from pent-up rage or my head would explode and send me ascending to heaven.

Then what did I, the Sect Master of the Dokgo Gate, actually do? Truthfully, I did nothing. It might sound like a joke, but that was the truth.

But what the hell did anyone expect? I was the Sect Master. If they had a problem with it, they could beat the shit out of me and take the position for themselves.

In truth, it wasn’t just me. Sect Masters generally didn’t do much on a day-to-day basis.

A Sect Master’s duty was to leave the thinking to those who used their heads and the physical work to those who used their bodies.

But even if a Sect Master did nothing, a sect disappeared when its Sect Master disappeared, and a sect fell apart when its Sect Master was an idiot.

What if a perfectly competent Sect Master got drunk one day and assigned physical work to the thinkers and thinking work to the laborers?

That was how a sect met its ruin.

That was why the Sect Master did the least while also being the most important person in the entire sect.

In order to remain faithful to the essence of being a Sect Master, I spent my days doing my absolute best to look like a man with nothing whatsoever to do.

I ate breakfast, smiled in satisfaction while my subordinates screamed in agony as they tore their muscles through training, then put myself through the same body-grinding regimen, and when the sun set and night fell, I sat alone on the roof accumulating internal energy.

Truthfully, there was nothing particularly complicated about becoming the greatest under heaven.

If you repeated this shit every single day without rest until your hair turned white with age, that was how you became the greatest under heaven.

Every martial artist in the Kangho knew this, so why was it so rare for the greatest under heaven to emerge?

Because martial artists were human too.

Because they were human, they wanted to take a day off sometimes, and when the weather was nice, they wanted to go look at flowers.

This was also why I was so wary of the Cult Leader.

To grow further removed from humanity meant erasing the weaknesses that came with being human, one by one…….

If the Cult Leader ever discarded his humanity completely, the Kangho would finally become a world ruled by the Demonic Path.

In my previous life, I’d stolen the Demon Wail Sword, swung a blade at the Cult Leader’s face, and pulled every kind of insane shit imaginable to stop that from happening. Somehow, I’d ended up doing the same shit all over again in this life.

In the end, it all came back around to the same bullshit.

So that one day I could unleash even greater bullshit upon the Cult Leader……I continued accumulating internal energy in my still woefully inadequate dantian.

Roughly two weeks had already passed since we’d sent the Black Serpent Gate our declaration of war, yet things remained peaceful.

At this point, had the letter somehow gotten lost along the way?

That was how completely motionless the Black Serpent Gate had remained. Gongson Han’s description had certainly been accurate.

They really were a sinister, shadowy bunch.

It was like a nest of writhing snakes making every possible preparation before going after their prey.

Truthfully, I hadn’t particularly intended to strike the Black Serpent Gate first.

I’d assumed that if we sent them an outrageously arrogant letter, they would come charging over on their own to beat us down.

After all, we were still a bunch of nobodies without much fame or even much notoriety.

I’d planned to beat the shit out of the Black Serpent Gate if they underestimated the Dokgo Gate and came charging in without thinking…….

But apparently, it wasn’t that the Black Serpent Gate had underestimated us. I had misunderstood the kind of man their Sect Master was.

The Black Serpent Gate Master was far more cunning and cautious than I’d expected.

If my assumption that the other side would be stupid had missed the mark, there was nothing to be done. I would simply have to be the stupid one instead.

I still hadn’t confirmed the Black Serpent Gate Master’s martial prowess, but there was no chance of me losing anyway. Because I was the strongest.

If the Black Serpent Gate Master turned out to be the greatest reclusive expert in all the Kangho, then sure, I’d lose. But the odds of that were about the same as the Cult Leader reforming himself and joining the White Path.

Just as I finished organizing my thoughts and started to rise, the doors to the main hall opened and a man walked in.

Had the Black Serpent Gate finally come to attack?

Apparently not. This time, Gongson Han appeared empty-handed and said,

“Sect Master, I found the smith you asked for.”
“Oh. Really?”

It wasn’t the information I’d been waiting for, but it was welcome news nonetheless.

For a swordsman, hearing that he might soon obtain a new sword was always thrilling.

For some reason, however, Gongson Han didn’t look nearly as pleased as I did. If anything, he looked deeply troubled.

Why was that bastard making a face like he’d bitten into shit again?

Just as I decided there was no way he’d actually eaten shit, Gongson Han scratched the back of his head and said,

“……Yes, but there is one thing that bothers me.”
“Something bothers you? What?”
“His skill is apparently beyond doubt, but I hear he has an extremely difficult temperament. Even people who offer him enormous sums for commissions usually just get told to piss off.”

I rested my chin on my hand and stared impassively at Gongson Han.

“He’s got a difficult personality?”
“Yes. That’s what worries me.”
“Did they say he’s worse than me?”
“……Ah.”

The problem was solved in an instant. If people were ranked by how shitty their personalities were, I figured I’d be competing with the very best under heaven.

Even the Cult Leader didn’t have a worse personality than me.

In short……what I mean is, I’m a master at being a pain in the ass not just in a fight, but in everyday life too. Whether that’s an advantage or a disadvantage remains to be seen.

Following the map Gongson Han had drawn for me, I climbed the mountain in search of the mysterious smith. So Geum-ho had whined so insistently about coming along that I had no choice but to bring him.

Still……was there really a skilled smith living this deep in such rugged mountains?

Of course, skilled craftsmen and experts had always had a tendency to seclude themselves deep in sparsely populated mountains.

That was where the term reclusive expert came from in the first place. Why they did it, I had no idea.

But then a thought suddenly occurred to me. What if that bastard Gongson Han had deliberately drawn me the wrong map to lure me somewhere isolated?

The moment I decided it was a fairly reasonable theory, a chill ran through me. So Geum-ho asked,

“Why are you making that face?”
“I just came up with an incredible conspiracy theory.”
“What is it?”
“Listen, so…….”
“Huh?”

Just as I was about to unveil my incredible theory, So Geum-ho pointed somewhere.

I followed his finger with my gaze……and not far away stood a shabby little cabin, stubbornly holding itself together.

At a glance, the cabin was so dilapidated that it could have passed for a long-abandoned mountain lodge, or perhaps a building left behind by a fallen sect.

Still, I felt relieved. At least I no longer needed to kill Gongson Han.

My relief lasted only a moment……before a thunderous roar suddenly erupted from inside the cabin.

“You goddamned bastard! Piss off!”

After that thunderous shout, like the roar of a tiger, an iron hammer came hurtling out from the cabin’s front door.

I caught the iron hammer out of the air and examined it closely. It looked like a craftsman’s tool with clear signs of long use.

I had barely begun admiring the hammer when a loud crashing noise came from inside, followed by two rough-looking men bursting out in a panic as though fleeing for their lives.

“What the hell’s wrong with that old bastard!”
“Just you wait tillnext time!”

What the hell was this scene supposed to be?

Still holding the iron hammer, I stared for a long while in the direction the men had fled.

A moment later, I heard the cabin door open, followed by the voice of a middle-aged man who sounded stubborn from the very first word.

“Who the hell are you?”

I kindly answered his question.

“Ah, we’re…….”
“Don’t care. Give me back my hammer and get the hell out of here before I crack all your skulls open.”
“…….”

This was the first time since reincarnating that someone had left me speechless.

Someone had actually managed to silence a man whose tongue already did whatever the hell it pleased. That could only mean a formidable opponent had appeared.

Gongson Han’s face suddenly came to mind. My conspiracy theory might have been wrong, but a curse still rose naturally to my lips.

‘Gongson Han, you fucking bastard…….’