Red Sun (4)

Listen to me, you coastlands. Pay attention, you peoples from far away. The Heavenly Father called me from the womb, and from my mother’s belly He remembered my epithet.
-<Isaiah Sutra 49:1>-

While the Afternoon Tea Party elders on the estate’s first floor were falling like autumn leaves by the Little Heavenly Demon’s hand, Irene Adler was tasting despair underground.

“You… what are you, exactly?!”

In a weary voice, Irene lifted her head and asked into empty air.

“Heehee. You’re… curious about Miss Louise…? Miss Louise is just Miss Louiseee.”

While the luminous-pearl powder shattered by sound skills glowed on the floor, pitch-black darkness filled the underground prison’s ceiling.

A voice shaking wildly, as if in a seizure, was coming from within the shadows.

“…Monster.”

Irene Adler murmured in a low voice.

Just now, the Mistress of Green Willow had asked the unknown opponent.

Not who it was, but what it was.

It was natural.

Irene was a master of sound skills, and Europe’s greatest primadonna, a peak diva.
On top of that, she was the leader of the Afternoon Tea Party, which handled the most secret information.

And what those facts meant was this.

Irene Adler’s senses, especially her hearing, were specialized in grasping and distinguishing information about people and environments without missing a thing.

Irene Adler had been prepared, even before birth, to inherit the Afternoon Tea Party Leader’s seat.

Her father was the previous Party Leader’s unmatched friend and trusted aide, and the childless Party Leader became Irene Adler’s God Father from the time she was in her mother’s womb.

It was also the previous Party Leader who gave her the name Irene.

Their bond was so special that the Party Leader even gave Irene, without holding back, the clan’s secret manual for Kung-Fu prenatal education.

Kung-Fu Tutorial was a secret training method that promoted potential by stimulating the fetus’s acupoints with the mother’s internal energy while the child remained in the womb, or attempting Succession through the umbilical cord.

It was special Kung-Fu education for the gifted, an extreme training where the mother moved pure Essence controlled with delicate intent, and from the most pristine moment before self-awareness existed, carried out guided breath control to awaken the child to the path of Kung-Fu.

A baby residing closest to the elixir field would complete preparations to walk the path of Kung-Fu before birth.

And the Classified textbook of prenatal Kung-Fu education Irene Adler’s parents learned was precisely Lotus Dharma Heavenly Ear Comprehension.

The six transcendent senses a Kung-Fuist gains when the senses reach their limit. Six Sense.

Lotus Dharma Heavenly Ear Comprehension was one of the manuals for obtaining the superhearing called Heavenly Ear Comprehension or Wind-Following Ear among the Six Sense.

A child who began continuously stimulating the Palace of Hearing Acupoint by following Lotus Dharma Heavenly Ear Comprehension from the prenatal stage would, upon reaching adulthood and attaining great completion, gain transcendent hearing surpassing spirit beasts of the wild.

A transcendent hearing that existed on a completely different level from the Direction-Positioning Great Method learned by those like the Postmaster General, Henry Fawcett, the Blue Bat, famed for his sharp ears.

Though she had not yet reached great completion, Irene Adler had already mastered Lotus Dharma Heavenly Ear Comprehension to the seventh stage at the young age of twenty-three.

Even the elders didn’t fully grasp it, but if there were no walls blocking her and excessive noise didn’t interfere, she possessed absurd hearing to the level of detecting even a small sigh made by someone a mile away.

It was true she restrained its use, because if she unfolded it to the extreme, she would have to taste unbearable pain.

However, if the flames that surged outside the estate earlier had been phantoms rather than real, she would have already realized through Heavenly Ear Comprehension that it was a formation’s efficacy.

Heavenly Ear Comprehension helped not a little in her work as a Diva, but fundamentally it was an ability specialized for gathering necessary information and commanding an organization, an indispensable power for an Afternoon Tea Party Leader.

Irene Adler trusted, without doubt, the Heavenly Ear Comprehension she had trained her whole life.

And precisely because of that, she was now in confusion.

From the heartbeat her ears captured to the Vital Kung-Fu Sign emitted by the body of the opponent hidden in the dark, everything was alien, to the point she could not possibly regard it as human.

More beast than human.
No. More than that.

A spirit creature that had lost its original form from birth through repeated experiments and become a completely different lifeform.

“Miss Louise is happy these days, because she’s gotten connected with pretty ladies-s. I got my hand stabbed by the fake married-lady… but it didn’t hurt, so, well, it’s okay.”

It was something bizarre you’d only see in the workshop of a mad alchemist whose Hundred Meetings acupoint had spun out while learning demonic arts was answering her in a human voice.

As the leader of an underworld group, Irene had long since discarded things like the ethics of Kung-Fu Christianity, yet whenever she heard the voice emitted by the unknown lifeform hiding in the dark and felt the alien energy carried within it, she couldn’t bear how disgust seemed to boil up from deep in her gut.

“But since it wasn’t real Miss Louise’s hand that bled, I can forgive it. I didn’t know the Little Heavenly Demon went around doing bad things to women, but if you were hurt so much, you must’ve ended up being th-that cruel too….”
“…Shut up.”
“Ahh… earlier, Miss Louise said this and that about the bouquet and you got hurt… I understand. Miss Louise didn’t feel right saying that to you either. But I only said what the Little Heavenly Demon told me to say…?”

The monstrous lifeform kept moving its mouth, unconcerned with Irene’s cold reply.

“Actually, it’d be a lie to say I didn’t add any creative touches at all, but I still captured the Little Heavenly Demon’s intent really well, okay? Miss Louise is confident at acting and directing too! I plucked one rose and gave it to the doctor lady, and her eyes were dripping honey, you know? Ah. Right, you were a primadonna… oopsie. Miss Louise dared to grab a Frill in front of a Heavenly Silkworm…! This is all the Little Heavenly Demon’s fault, okay. When we get out, I’m definitely going to scold him. Men who casually hurt women are Murim public enemies. Yeah, the worst.”

Guarding against “Miss Louise,” who babbled as if delirious, Irene lowered her gaze to the underground prison’s floor.

There, several Afternoon Tea Party members who had entered through the secret side entrance after hearing Irene’s Direct Message were lying fallen.

They weren’t at the elders’ level, but they were fairly strong, yet astonishingly, the intruder who had returned to a girl’s form had dropped them all with only a few acupoint strikes.

The biggest reason Irene called it a monster was the bizarre Kung-Fu she witnessed in that process.

When the uninvited guest first faced Irene, it ‘split’ its body into multiple branches to neutralize the sound skill she unleashed.

New skin sprouted over the separated body so bones and muscles wouldn’t show, but the shocking sight of a human body breaking into pieces and moving separately would be enough to make any ordinary person lose their mind.

Irene, who hadn’t brought cold iron powder, realized it would be difficult to physically subdue the opponent.

She immediately called for subordinates to take down the enemy, but this too was futile.

That ominous monster calling itself Miss Louise moved its segmented body freely and struck the Afternoon Tea Party members’ acupoints one after another.

‘That wasn’t an ordinary acupoint strike….’

The moment they came into contact with Louise’s body, Irene Adler’s subordinates lost consciousness one by one, collapsed to the floor, and could not move at all.

The acupoints it pressed were not vital points, nor did they have any notable special efficacy.

At the moment of the strike, it undoubtedly flowed Essence with an unusual nature.

‘If I give it distance, it’s the end….’

The opponent gathered its broken body into one again, hung from the ceiling, and looked down at this side.

Keeping her eyes on Louise, Irene began carefully moving toward the exit.

Though the underground prison’s thick walls and ceiling made her learn late that the real Little Heavenly Demon had appeared on the first floor, she could grasp what happened afterward because she unfolded Heavenly Ear Comprehension to the limit here and also heard the elders’ Direct Messages.

The egg had already been taken, and even if she reclaimed it, it didn’t benefit her.

But the real Little Heavenly Demon fighting executives on the first floor was a different matter.

He was loot Irene could still seize.

If she approached to a range her Qi Frequency could reach and triggered Lucky Seven’s toxicity, he would never be able to resist.

The freak hanging from the ceiling was also the Little Heavenly Demon’s companion.

If she showed that she could take Sherlock Holmes’s life at any time, that strange lifeform hiding in the dark and looking down at her would not dare charge in carelessly either.

From the look of it, it hadn’t killed the Afternoon Tea Party members, pretending to be orthodox and all, so the opponent likely wasn’t a Kung-Fuist cold-blooded enough to watch its own side die by an underworld hand.

If she could escape this prison, there was still a chance.

It might not be a perfect victory.
But if London burned away at an unwanted timing, the Afternoon Tea Party’s customers would disappear too, so the city continuing to exist as it was wouldn’t be a bad ending.

What she had to salvage here was the Little Heavenly Demon who would help her find the Heavenly Demon.

The Heavenly Demon Red Dragon, Phileas Fogg, was a component necessary for the Afternoon Tea Party’s grand wish and the completion of vengeance.

His disciple, the Little Heavenly Demon Sherlock Holmes, judged only by competence, was undoubtedly a slave candidate she would want to keep close and use for a long time.

She hadn’t expected the Little Heavenly Demon to realize the fast-acting poisons administered into his meals were ingredients for a secret poison he didn’t know, and to send a decoy first, but that didn’t mean the poison remaining in his body had vanished.

In a situation where a single gesture could drop her prey, she didn’t want to miss this opportunity because of some intruding freak who relied on brute force alone.

‘The fact it’s still hanging from the ceiling is because it confirmed I released Qi Frequency earlier when she acted as if she was poisoned. It’s wary that I might use movement arts to leap into the air and release Qi Frequency at the Little Heavenly Demon on the first floor.’

Then there was only one action she should take now.

The opponent’s sex was female. Then there was no need to feel shame.

-Peolleok!

Irene infused Essence into her dress at a speed too fast to see, then stripped it off and threw it into the air.

She was wearing another layer underneath anyway.

The Mistress of Green Willow deceived the opponent’s eyes and perception as if she had leapt upward, and sprinted toward another secret exit in the side wall.

However.

-Pat!

“My, why did you make me wait so long? You kept staring at that shed shell, so I wondered when you’d come, but you were thinking the same thing. Miss Louise was faster though.”
“Kuhuk.”

Louise, who had been concealing her presence and waiting in front of the exit, struck her acupoint.

“Sorry, but the lady has to die. Otherwise that scary Russian mister will keep being a nuisance.”

If necessary, a gentleman doesn’t hesitate to kill.

A cruel smile hung on Louise’s face.