Chapter 136

“How did you get here……?”

The bewilderment in Jin Si-myeong’s narrowed eyes was unmistakable.
Understandable.
According to his calculations, I should still have been floundering through the traps.
I spoke leisurely.

“Is this really the time to be distracted? Weren’t you trying to kill me?”
“So you knew the No-Return Cave was meant to be your grave?”
“You made it so obvious. How could I not know?”
“And yet you still came in. That’s quite some confidence.”
“Did you already forget what I said outside? Take away my confidence and I’m as good as dead.”
“Of course not. I said I hoped you could maintain that attitude until the end. Hehe, I’ll at least give you credit for your nerve and speed. Surely you haven’t been searching for me?”
“I wasn’t following you. I followed the scent of a fortuitous chance.”
“Nonsense. You must have run into Yuk Ja-heung outside. Did he babble about there being something in here?”
“More accurately, I overheard it.”
“Either way, you’ve walked here on your own to hasten your death.”

Jin Si-myeong twisted the corner of his mouth and continued.

“You have no idea how my killing intent has been boiling over all this time. You threw me into the gutter, then strutted around basking in the Cult Leader’s favor. It was disgusting to watch, especially from someone whose actual skill is worthless.”
“My skill is worthless?”
“I know exactly what you’ve been doing. Scheming, dazzling people with your tongue. You’ve kept yourself alive with every trick imaginable. How many times have you ever won a straightforward victory that made demonic martial artists’ blood boil?”

Setting aside why I was supposed to make their blood boil, honestly, there hadn’t been many.
All I had was the True Blood Severed Meridians, so I rarely had the luxury of fighting head-on.
But so what?
Without losing the slightest bit of confidence, I asked back.

“So that’s why you even borrowed help from outside?”

Jin Si-myeong’s eyes wavered slightly.
But mockery quickly returned to them.

“You must be talking about Jin Mu-myeong.”
“That bastard isn’t from a collateral branch of the Radiant Moon Jin Family, is he?”
“There is no reason to hide it from a man who will soon be dead. I hear he is one of the five finest rising talents of Nightflower Valley.”

Nightflower Valley.
It was the name of an organization formed by wandering mercenaries who accepted any commission as long as the money was good.
The mercenaries who had lain in ambush when I went to the Fire Spirit Grounds to transport the Sacred Flame had belonged to this place.
They were lunatics willing to accept even a Little Demon of the Demon Cult as a target.

“Jin Mu-myeong is nothing more than a tool. He was only meant to make eliminating the target easier. But even without him, disposing of you poses no problem. If anything, this works out better. I’ll return the Divine Cult to what it was before you ever existed.”
“With only this?”

I looked over the collateral-branch martial artists lined up behind him.
Their expressions stiffened.
I added one more remark.

“You lot don’t look in any condition to take me on.”

It was true.
Reddened faces. Ragged breathing.
They were already exhausted from the heat.
Only Jin Si-myeong, with his deep internal energy, and I, protected by a Heat-Warding Talisman, were properly resisting the heat.

“Hmph. Leave him half-dead. I’ll finish him myself.”

At Jin Si-myeong’s gesture, the four collateral members moved at once.
Click, click.
They pulled short spear shafts from the cases on their backs and connected them to spearheads fastened at their waists.
The Radiant Moon Jin Family was renowned for its spear arts.
By using sectional spears, they had overcome the limitations of fighting in confined spaces.
Unfortunately for them, it wouldn’t be very effective against me.

Guuung-
The cavern trembled again.
Lava surged here and there, flickering like the tongues of demons.

Guuung-
The cavern shook more violently than before, but no one paid it any attention.
They advanced while surrounding me in a semicircle.
They intended to cut off my escape and attack all at once.

I swept my gaze from left to right.
A river of lava perhaps twenty to twenty-four meters wide, a narrow passage, four Peak Realm martial artists, and the wall.

‘How many straightforward victories have I ever had?’

Not many.
Even so, I was certain.

‘You’re the ones dying here.’

With that thought, I stepped forward instead.
It looked as though I were willingly walking into their encirclement.
I had no intention of dragging this battle out.

At that moment, as if they had been waiting for it, all four short spears moved simultaneously.
Sword Eye clearly captured the trajectories drawn by the spears.
A horizontal sweep from the left, thrusts coming high and low from the front, and a diagonal slash from the right.
As expected of members of the Seven Demonic Houses, their coordination, built through rigorous training, was precise.
Even with Sword Eye awakened, the old me could never have handled all four at once.
But now was different.

At the instant the trajectories of the four spears crossed, a minuscule opening appeared.
The moment they subtly adjusted their angles to avoid interfering with one another, I used Death-Line Step to slip into that hair-thin gap.

My body passed between the pouring spear strikes.
Spearheads brushed my clothes and severed a few strands of hair, but not a single scratch appeared on my body.

“……!”

The eyes of the man who had swung last widened.
I drove my cold-iron dagger between the ribs he had failed to protect.
I felt it pierce his heart.
The first man collapsed without even managing a scream.
I kicked his body into the path of another man rushing toward me, then moved toward the one beside him.

-When the enemy sees you, you must already be there.

Recalling the essence of Lightning Step that the Heavenly Demon had taught me, I shot forward with a Paang!
I was beside him before he could even register my presence.
He belatedly raised his spear shaft in shock, but he was too late.
The cold-iron dagger had already sliced across his throat.

As I left the spraying blood behind, the remaining two charged me at once.
Their spear strikes were powerful from rage, but just as sloppy.
Just before the two spear trajectories crossed, I stepped forward and lowered my body.
Shuuk! The spearheads swept over my head.
From my lowered stance, I kicked one man in the calf.

“Uht!”

His lower body buckled as though he were about to fall.
I thrust out an arm and shoved the other man hard, using the rebound to kick the first man’s legs again.
At last, he completely lost his balance, and I hooked an arm around his waist.
This time, I used the force of his resistance against him.
Using his center of gravity as an axis, I spun my body like a top and hurled him away.

‘See you.’

With a desperate scream, his body fell into the roiling lava.
Peong!
The instant he touched the lava, a thunderous sound erupted. His body was engulfed in flames in an instant.

“Uaaaaaagh-!”

It was a scream so horrific it would linger in my ears for days.
As the scream faded, the sole survivor among the four backed away.
His previously flushed face had gone bloodless, apparently from the shock of watching three men go down in an instant.

“H-Hyung-nim!”

He tripped over a rock and then crawled toward Jin Si-myeong on all fours.
By the time he scrambled pitifully behind Jin Si-myeong, his spear lay abandoned on the ground.

I flicked the blood from my dagger and looked at Jin Si-myeong.
He looked every bit as shocked as the last survivor.
It had taken no more than a few blinks of an eye for the three of them to die.
A feat Jin Si-myeong himself couldn’t hope to reproduce.

Jin Si-myeong didn’t move.
Only his gaze had changed.
The composure from moments ago had vanished, leaving only wariness and bewilderment.

“You should have been skewered apart in the very first exchange. How……?”

I didn’t answer. There was no reason to.

“……Useless bastards. This is why people say collateral branches are worthless.”
“Aren’t you collateral too?”

I asked.
Jin Si-myeong’s eyes narrowed.

“The former Patriarch of the Radiant Moon Jin Family is my grandfather.”
“And the current Patriarch?”
“My eldest uncle.”
“Then you’re collateral. The moment one of the former Patriarch’s children becomes Patriarch, the remaining siblings and their descendants are classified as collateral branches. You didn’t even know something that basic?”

Jin Si-myeong’s expression hardened.
He looked as though I had struck a sore spot.
He might have considered himself different from other collateral members, but so what?
It didn’t change the fact that he was one too.

“……Shut up.”

His voice dropped low.
Jin Si-myeong reached behind his back.
Click, click.
He pulled out two spear shafts and joined them together.
His weapon differed from those of the other collateral members in several ways.
For one, it was longer, and the spear itself looked far more refined.
Fine patterns were engraved along the shaft, while a sharp aura emanated from the spearhead.
It was no ordinary weapon.

Jin Si-myeong slowly raised the spear.
Its point aimed at me.

“I admit it. I underestimated you. But don’t lump me in with collateral trash like them.”
“What makes you better than them? Your internal energy is deeper, and your spear is a little better. That’s about it. Fundamentally, there’s no difference. Oh wait, actually, there is one.”

I chuckled and continued.

“They’re already dead, while you’re still alive. But that difference will disappear soon enough.”

Jin Si-myeong’s face flushed and darkened with rage.

“I’ll tear that mouth apart myself.”

His voice was calm, but he was clearly agitated.
His grip on the spear was far too tight.
He wasn’t so enraged that he charged blindly and instead approached slowly, but my attention drifted past him toward the lava.
Something about it felt off. The lava was moving far more violently than when I had first entered the cavern.
Lava surged here and there like demonic tongues, while what had looked thick, sticky, and almost solid was now sloshing like water.

‘Something’s wrong.’

Just as my brow furrowed,
Kururururu-!
the cavern began shaking violently, enough to make it difficult to stand upright.

I immediately pressed myself against the wall.
Lava erupted wildly and began spilling across the ground.
Jin Si-myeong and the surviving collateral member pressed themselves against the wall as well.
The fight no longer mattered. Staying alive came first.
How long did it continue?
The shaking abruptly stopped, as though the chaos moments ago had been a lie.

“I-is it over?”

Jin Si-myeong voiced the question.
I was wondering the same thing.
Kwaaaaaaang!
A roar incomparable to anything before erupted.
It came from the place in the distance that I had taken for an altar.

The rocks around the altar cracked apart, and lava shot upward like a fountain.
It surged all the way to the ceiling before descending again.

‘No. It isn’t falling.’

The lava was gathering in one place as if forming a shape.
Ggulleok, ggulleok. With grotesque sounds, masses of lava clumped together and took on an enormous form.
A gigantic four-legged beast with neither bone nor flesh, made entirely of boiling, viscous lava.
Its surface was a horrific mixture of cooled, hardened black crust and blood-red lava bursting through the cracks.
Jin Si-myeong muttered in disbelief.

“A-a demonic beast……?”

I shook my head slightly.
This was a phantom beast.
Unlike demonic beasts, which existed on their own, phantom beasts could only exist through Illusory Formation Arrays.
Whether it had been designed to appear from the beginning, or whether the merging of the routes had caused some abnormal reaction among the Illusory Formation Arrays,
there was no way to know right now.
Only one thing was certain.
That phantom beast might be guarding the secret manual.
It had emerged from the lava directly in front of the altar, so perhaps its role was to protect it.

-Kwooooooh!

A wave of heat swept through the cavern like a storm with its roar.
I glanced aside and saw Jin Si-myeong’s eyelids trembling.
He was afraid.

“U-uaaaah!”

The surviving collateral member seemed to have lost his mind. After trembling violently, he began running in the opposite direction from the entrance.
Even if he had run the right way, it would still have been a fatal mistake.
The phantom beast’s gaze locked onto him.

-Grrrrrr.

With a low growl, the phantom beast leapt.
Lava streaming behind it like a mane, it closed the distance with speed that belied its enormous size and opened its jaws.

“Hiiik!”

The collateral member shrieked.
Kwajik!
The phantom beast’s teeth tore into his upper body.
At the same time, the man burst into flames while still alive.

“Kkeuuuueoogh!”

The sound of flesh burning.
The screams quickly stopped.
Still caught in the phantom beast’s jaws, he became a lump of charcoal in an instant.

Ptoo. The phantom beast spat out the corpse.
The blackened figure sprawled across the ground.

“Th-this is absurd…….”

Jin Si-myeong’s face went pale.
His composure had long since vanished.
The hand gripping his spear trembled.
His gaze moved back and forth between me and the phantom beast.
He seemed to be calculating something.

‘Looks like he’s planning to run.’

Just as I expected, Jin Si-myeong turned around.
He sprinted toward the cavern entrance.
He was closer to the phantom beast than I was, so he must have assumed he would be its next target.

I didn’t block his path.
He and I approached our goals differently.
Unlike him, who had merely come to see whether a fortuitous chance even existed, I knew exactly what was here.
I absolutely needed that secret manual.
And.

‘I don’t think the phantom beast is just going to let him leave.’

Sure enough, the phantom beast’s jaws opened wide.
Puhwak!
A mass of lava shot from its mouth toward Jin Si-myeong.

“Ugh!”

He tried to evade it completely, but things didn’t go as planned.
The instant the mass of lava struck the ground, it exploded violently.
Caught in the blast, Jin Si-myeong was hurled into the air and disappeared into the darkness.
I couldn’t tell whether he was dead or alive.
More accurately, I didn’t care.

Because the phantom beast was staring at me.
Its gaze seemed to ask, What are you going to do?
It looked ready to pounce the moment I moved, just as it had before.

‘What do I do about this?’

This was troublesome.
I hadn’t expected a phantom beast to appear.
No matter what strange effects the resonating Illusory Formation Arrays produced, something like this didn’t seem likely to arise naturally in the very place where the secret manual lay hidden.
Then the past Cult Leader who wrote the secret manual must have deliberately created it to guard the manual.
To keep the unqualified from laying hands on it.

An enormous body, agile movements, and the ability to spit devastating masses of lava.
There was no telling what other abilities it possessed.
I had no idea how I was supposed to fight it.
How had the discoverer in my past life gotten past this thing?

‘Ah. He never needed to.’

The question suddenly answered itself, and a bitter smile formed on my lips.
Several years from now, all the mechanisms and Illusory Formation Arrays would have been shut down for the major overhaul.
Naturally, a phantom beast like this would never have appeared.

‘Seriously, what am I supposed to do with this thing?’

I quickly made a decision.
I would test a few things.

I shifted my upper body slightly toward the entrance.
Immediately, the phantom beast’s jaws began to open.
When I stopped, its mouth closed again.

This time, I moved toward the phantom beast.
Its body lowered, ready to charge at any moment.
When I stopped again, so did it.

‘Run and it attacks. Approach and it attacks. Stay still and I’m safe.’

But I couldn’t stand there forever.
What about fighting it directly?
I shook my head.

I recalled what I had just witnessed.
The speed with which it had caught the collateral member, and the lava projectile that had blown Jin Si-myeong away.
It was absurdly fast for something so large, and it even had a ranged attack.
On top of that, it had neither flesh nor bone. It was lava itself.
Would my cold-iron dagger even work on it?
Even from over thirty meters away, waves of heat reached me.
The moment I got close, my skin might be roasted crisp.

‘No. Reaching it is the problem before anything else.’

Even in the crimson lava cavern, one spot shone especially brightly.
The phantom beast’s abdomen.
Inside it sat a core similar in shape to the one from the dragon phantom beast we had killed on the Frozen Plain.
Back then, it had only become visible after we used the Revealing Truth Treasure Mirror, but for some reason, I could see this one clearly.
But how was I supposed to reach that weak point?

Was I supposed to gamble on such lousy odds and use Death-Line Step against that terrifying phantom beast?
Get close, then throw the cold-iron dagger or something to break the core?

‘Not a chance.’

A bitter smile suddenly formed on my lips.
Because I could imagine exactly what the Heavenly Demon would say if he were watching me right now.
He would probably speak in a voice colder than ice.
You learned Death-Line Step and still hesitate? Are you that afraid of death?

‘……Should I try it?’

I immediately shook my head.
Charging straight through was the Heavenly Demon’s path.
I didn’t have to follow it.
Just as the Heavenly Demon had his way, I had mine.
If I wasn’t confident I could break through it with Death-Line Step, then I just had to make it possible.

‘Let’s begin.’

I stared at the phantom beast and put strength into my legs.