Chapter 63

As I swallowed the pill, a hot qi slid down my throat.

The Un Family Spiritual Pill.

This pill had clearly been slipped in by the Un Family to round out the prizes for the martial contest.

If the contest had gone according to plan, the pill would have naturally ended up back in Solitary Cloud Manor’s hands.

Because this pill was not something anyone would proudly present as a prize.

The pill was also known as the Death-Stealing Wicked Pill.

As the name suggests, it was made by stealing people’s life force.

Un Ji-kang’s ancestral home had been the Jinju Un Family in Hebei, but it had since been wiped out.

The surviving descendants followed Un Ji-kang into Solitary Cloud Manor and served him as the head of their extinguished house.

The twisted loyalty of the Lonely Claw Troops toward Un Ji-kang came from that fact—they had never truly followed Bukgung Bi-beom in the first place.

The Jinju Un Family was a peculiar place.

They professed orthodoxy, yet were notorious for the Jiangshi Skill as their signature art.

Originally, Jiangshi Skill didn’t control corpses; it hardened the skin and dulled the senses so practitioners resembled jiangshi.

But the process was so brutal that many Un Family children died young.

Naturally, this did not sit well with the White Path martial world.

Thus the history of the Jinju Un Family reads like a litany of persecution and oppression.

The forces of the White Murim perpetrated many cruelties against them.

Until even the name Jinju Un Family sank into the soil.

The family was annihilated, and Un Ji-kang himself was blamed as a murim-arts culprit.

The Un Family’s fate twisted and tangled like a river through rapids.

Still, the Un Family—

Isn’t this a little too much?

After his family’s fall, Un Ji-kang planned revenge against the entire murim world.

“The Jiangshi Skill you all hated—I’ll show you what it truly is.”

It was no surprise he turned to human offerings and death sorcery.

The corpses buried beneath the Wang Merchant Union and this Death-Stealing Wicked Pill were all products of Un Ji-kang’s jiangshi arts, conceived for revenge.

I sat cross-legged, watched my dantian, and began circulating qi.

A single Death-Stealing Wicked Pill required the innate qi of a hundred young men and a hundred maidens.

And that was not the end.

It also demanded the innate qi of a hundred children who had not yet experienced either menarche or nocturnal emissions.

This was the true nature of the Un Family Spiritual Pill that no one had noticed.

An ordinary person could not withstand the poison and the vengeful spirits contained in the pill.

This was not a pill made for human consumption.

It was an undying, monstrous medicine the Un Family had forged to create perfect jiangshi.

But now—

Not a chance. It was my turn to swallow it.

A hundred youths, a hundred maidens, a hundred children.

The wailing of three hundred vengeful spirits flowed along my dantian and meridians.

But I did not falter.

The body and meridians I’d honed with Travelling Swallow Qi Cultivation could withstand the Death-Stealing Wicked Pill’s poison.

My vast internal qi, burning like a furnace, ravenously received the pill’s energy.

I endured, determined not to let a single speck of the pill’s qi slip away.

So the deaths of the countless people sacrificed for this pellet would not be in vain.

And while feeling the seething heat of Un Ji-kang’s revenge for his lost clan,

one week for the first circulation, a second week for the second—

the pill’s qi welcomed my pure body, burrowing into the twelve meridians and three vessels and taking its seat.

The raiders who’d stormed the mansion were astonished by the purity of my body and the vastness of my dantian.

The palace I’d built could easily hold about three hundred.

I slipped into a selfless state and delved into circulating qi.

As I absorbed a certain amount of the pill’s qi, another thought quietly surfaced.

Originally I’d entered the martial match to obtain the pill, but the aftermath had grown bigger than I’d expected.

Solitary Cloud Manor—Bukgung Bi-beom—has lost ties to the Hwangbo and Zhuge families.

No—it’s more accurate to blame Un Ji-kang than Bukgung Bi-beom.

Because he was the one who desperately needed Shandong’s support.

The First Young Master of Central China, the Second of Southern China, the Third of Yun-Gui, the Fourth of Sichuan, the Fifth of Xiangdong…

Have I mentioned? The Bukgung children each build power bases in their own regions.

Bukgung Cheon’s influence is strongest around Beijing in North China; of the remaining regions, only two lie beyond the family’s reach.

Shandong and Shaanxi.

There are powers in the northwest, northeast, and Hainan, but they’re too far away to be immediately useful.

The sects of Shaanxi are at odds with the Bukgung Family, so the only remaining strategic point is Shandong.

To become Family Lord, those supporting forces were exactly what was needed.

It’s not just about throwing money around to buy friendships and land.

Stronger power means stronger influence.

So what does it mean when the existing forces fall away?

It means a direct threat to the succession of the Family Lord.

This was an irreparable blow to Un Ji-kang.

Hwangbo Ryeong and Zhuge Kwan were not simply declaring a political break with Solitary Cloud Manor.

They realized how useless and foolish the rope they’d been clinging to—Bukgung Bi-beom—really was.

And they were right.

Bukgung Bi-beom truly was nothing without Un Ji-kang’s blade.

“We cannot imagine a future where a powerless manor lord becomes the heir to the greatest family under heaven.”

Well said, Zhuge.

No fool will keep holding a rope once they see it’s rotted through.

Those two families will never return to Solitary Cloud Manor. Ever.

Un Ji-kang has effectively become a kite whose string has been cut.

Then the problem now is…

I know better than anyone.

Un Ji-kang is not the sort to sit down and give up just because things went wrong.

The Un Ji-kang I knew, when a plan misfired, would do something crazier than imagined to claw his way back.

And the moment he might commit such madness could come sooner than expected.

Well… maybe in about three days?

“Huuuu…”

When I opened my eyes, my clothes were already stained with sweat, bodily fluids, and every kind of filth.

The process of taking in a new guest is messy—was there still this much residue left in my body?

Anyway, that’s not the important thing.

“Chief Un… Un Family… Ji-kang…”

What crazy thing do you plan to do this time?

“Manor Lord. I think a war is going to break out.”

“What?”

Bukgung Yoon looked at Yeon Mujin with an expression that asked what nonsense he was spouting this time.

“Captain Yeon, we haven’t even had a welcome ceremony for your return from leave—what are you talking about now? And what’s that smell?”

“A welcome ceremony? Did I go off to a war and come back?”

“You went and caused a ruckus in another manor, so it was sort of like a war. But what’s that smell?”

“I didn’t intend for things to escalate like this either. If you look closely, isn’t it your doing, Manor Lord, that made it blow up?”

“Me? What did I do? No, where is that smell coming from…”

“If you hadn’t said that I could detoxify with a Dragon Eye Pearl, I wouldn’t have kept him alive.”

“When someone’s dying it’s the right thing to do… No, really, don’t you smell something?”

“I don’t.”

“I’m sure I can smell it…”

Bukgung Yoon regarded Yeon Mujin suspiciously, but Yeon Mujin kept denying it to the end.

No matter who Yeon Mujin was, he wouldn’t relish the reputation of being the smelly wanderer.

“You saw what happened this time, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I saw. I was just thinking about how to lure the Zhuge and Hwangbo families to our side.”

On the desk across from me, piles of documents about the two families were stacked like mountains.

Without prompting, Bukgung Yoon was already thinking about her next moves.

Yeon Mujin felt a pang of admiration.

“I have a plan for that, but that’s not the point for now.”

“What do you mean by saying a war is likely to break out?”

“In the literal sense. Something will happen at Solitary Cloud Manor in the near future.”

“Brother?”

“To be exact… Chief Un will be the one to start it.”

“Chief Un?”

Bukgung Yoon tilted her head in puzzlement.

“But won’t the Chief’s standing within Solitary Cloud Manor be significantly diminished by this? They say the Chief organized the contest and deceived people with a fake sacred relic. If I were you, I wouldn’t leave such a Chief alone.”

“There is one thing you do not know, Manor Lord.”

“What is it that I don’t know?”

“The Sixth Young Master holds less power within Solitary Cloud Manor than you think.”

“What?”

“All of Solitary Cloud Manor’s power is concentrated in a single person: the Chief. It was the Chief who planted informers in Flying Swallow Manor, who founded the Lonely Claw Troops and built their strength, and who drew in Shandong’s forces and plotted schemes.”

This was not an unfamiliar story to Bukgung Yoon.

“People thought the Lord of Flying Swallow Manor was a puppet, but the real puppet was someone else. The Bukgung Bi-beom of Solitary Cloud Manor is the true straw man. He barks when Un Ji-kang tells him to bark and bites when told to bite—a fake manor lord.”

“…”

“And the Un Ji-kang I know is not one to step back like this.”

A somewhat long silence followed.

What was Bukgung Yoon thinking?

“Captain Yeon.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that sometimes you are really strange, Captain Yeon?”

“Sometimes? That’s a generous assessment.”

Bukgung Yoon smiled faintly at Yeon Mujin’s joke.

“Talking with you, Captain Yeon, sometimes feels as if one could foresee future events like reading the lines of a palm. I’ve met countless people, but none have given that impression. Sometimes you seem to know the Bukgung Family inside out—aware of secrets and scandals others don’t know—even though you haven’t been at our manor for a year.”

Bukgung Yoon stared at Yeon Mujin.

“Is that my overreaching conjecture?”

“Perhaps my mind is more alert than others’.”

Bukgung Yoon let out a sigh.

Yeon Mujin never bothered with much explanation.

He simply always presented a straightforward answer.

“Then tell me. What is your plan for the coming war?”

“First of all,” Yeon began. “There is a role only the Manor Lord can play in this war—something no one else can do.”