Chapter 161

‘What the hell is that?’

A chill ran down my spine.
The strange woman charging toward me was more than a little grotesque.
Udeudeuk, udeudeuk.
The sound of bones breaking came continuously from her unnaturally bent knee joints.

“Kkihihihihit!”

There was no trace of emotion on the face letting out that ghostly shriek.
Her eyes and mouth alike were nothing more than straight lines.
And with skin stitched together like a patchwork quilt, she hardly looked human at all.

‘This won’t be easy.’

I could tell from her presence and appearance.
This fight would be unlike anything I had experienced before.

Huuung!
Ak Mu-jin blocked the strange woman’s path and swung his saber in a wide arc.
The strange woman’s waist suddenly folded backward at an angle no human spine should have allowed.
With another crack of bone, her upper body snapped back like a spring.
Peong!
Her head slammed into Ak Mu-jin’s chest.

‘Her counterattack was a headbutt?’

This was nothing like martial arts.
Her movements brought to mind the instincts of a beast.

More surprising was the fact that Ak Mu-jin had been driven backward.
He was a Transcendent master, yet a single move had pushed him back.
And.

‘She’s fine?’

Her forehead had reddened, but she had taken no serious damage.
Ak Mu-jin’s Corpse-Body Reinforcement Art had reached the seventh stage.
His body was hard enough that anyone below the Extreme Demon Realm would struggle to damage it barehanded.
Yet the woman charged at me again as though the impact had done nothing to her.

“Haap!”

Im Yeon closed in from the side and swept her sword horizontally.
The strange woman slipped inside Im Yeon’s reach, latched onto her arm, and used her entire body to wrench her away and hurl her into the distance.

“Uwaaah!”

Im Yeon regained her balance in midair and landed safely.
In that brief opening, the strange woman reached right in front of me.
With two movements that barely resembled martial arts, she had helplessly driven back a Transcendent master and a Peak Realm master.

‘Even so, that won’t work on me.’

I drew my cold-iron dagger.
I twisted at the ankle and spun.
In an instant, I slipped out of the strange woman’s path.

The strange woman swung her arm.

‘She can’t reach me.’

I had left enough distance between us.
There was no way an arm that length could reach me.
But then,

‘……!’

Her fingernails grew.
Right before my eyes, in real time.
In an instant, they extended several feet, looking less like fingernails than five daggers.

I hurriedly jerked my head back.
The sharp force brushed past the tip of my nose, slicing off several strands of hair.

At the same time, I struck upward with my cold-iron dagger.
Kang!
The strange woman’s hand was knocked aside. Her nails seemed as hard as the rest of her body, leaving behind only a tiny nick.

She immediately spun and slashed diagonally with her left hand. A flurry of utterly unorthodox attacks poured down on me in an instant.

‘Did she think I’d go down that easily?’

I had countless battles from both my previous life and this one behind me.
Kang! Kang!
I knocked her attacks aside and deflected them as I held my ground.
Then Im Yeon and Ak Mu-jin rushed back in from different directions.

Im Yeon’s sword qi swept across the strange woman’s back first.
The strange woman bent forward, rounding her back.
Spat.
The sword qi carried considerable power, but it failed.
The sound alone was too shallow.
Sure enough, it merely tore her clothes and left a small scratch on her skin.

Ak Mu-jin fared little better.
No, there was one difference.
His attack failed just the same, but he also received a vicious counterattack.

The strange woman’s nails raked across Ak Mu-jin’s chest.
The front of his clothes split into five strips.
But there was something she didn’t know.
Ak Mu-jin’s body was much harder than she expected.
Kkigigigik-
Not even a scratch appeared on Ak Mu-jin’s chest.
Only sparks flew as the strange woman’s nails were ground down.

But the strange woman was no pushover.
She rammed her shoulder into Ak Mu-jin, bounced away, slashed at Im Yeon with her nails, then changed direction again and lunged at me.
With a body that was both elastic and hard, she rammed, clawed, and bit at anything in reach.

‘She’s practically a beast.’

This wasn’t martial arts.
She was fighting purely on animal instinct.
Just what was she?

‘A soulless puppet?’

A being created through a complicated process that stripped away the soul and left only the corporeal spirit.
In other words, a jiangshi.

‘No.’

I immediately shook my head.
A properly made soulless puppet was certainly powerful. But the special solution used in the creation process caused its joints and muscles to stiffen.
It gained a hardened body at the cost of flexibility.
Yet this strange woman was both hard and flexible.

‘No matter how I look at her, she doesn’t even seem human.’

By all appearances, she had been artificially made.
This was probably the Ink Scholar’s doing.

‘Just what the hell did that bastard make?’

“Watch out, Young Lord!”

Im Yeon shouted.
Pillars rose behind me as Heaven Rebelling Society members burst out of them.
The situation was getting messy.
If even one of them decided to set off Falling Thunder Powder, things would turn disastrous.

‘I need to deal with them before that happens.’

I left the strange woman to Ak Mu-jin and Im Yeon and dealt with the small fry.
There was no need to go as far as using Six Extremes Demon King Step. Whirlwind Floating Leaf Step and Soul-Extinguishing Flash Step were enough to sweep them aside with ease.

The Heaven Rebelling Society members kept appearing.
The strange woman in front, Heaven Rebelling Society members behind.
The battle was utterly chaotic.

‘What happened to Hwang Seung-hyu?’

His face suddenly came to mind.
It felt like quite some time had passed since we were trapped.
Something inside the formation should have changed by now, but there wasn’t the slightest sign of it.

All sorts of possibilities crossed my mind.
Had something happened outside?
Had Flying Swallow failed to do her part?

“Kuk.”

A stifled groan escaped Im Yeon.
The strange woman had kicked out with both feet while airborne, and it seemed Im Yeon had suffered internal injury trying to withstand it.

‘This isn’t the time to think.’

Even now, our fighting strength was slowly being worn down.
My qi and blood would begin overheating before long as well, so I needed to end this as quickly as possible.
Otherwise, the chances of a bad outcome would only keep rising.

‘The key is this woman.’

She was the one who had brought this formation into being, and she was also the core of the battle.
I needed to neutralize her if I wanted an opening.

‘She has to have a weakness.’

A body stitched together like patchwork couldn’t possibly be perfect.
There had to be a flaw somewhere.
The problem was that I would never spot it while tangled up in the fight like this.

‘I need to pull back.’

Not just one step.
I needed to withdraw from the battle entirely.
There were things a fighter couldn’t see that became visible to someone watching from the outside.

Of course, it wasn’t ideal.
If I pulled out, it would leave a huge hole in our fighting strength.
Im Yeon and Ak Mu-jin alone would struggle to handle both the Society members and the strange woman.

‘Still, there’s no other choice.’

“Guard Im, handle the Heaven Rebelling Society members! Don’t let a single one get near me!”
“Yes, Young Lord!”
“Unit Leader Ak, keep that strange woman pinned down however you can!”
“Understood!”

Neither of them questioned my orders.
I moved several paces away.
I focused my senses on the strange woman’s interior, hoping I might find a vital weak point.

‘I can’t read her.’

All I could sense was murky energy swirling inside her.
I couldn’t read anything else.
Was it because she was something close to a soulless puppet?

“Kkiiyat!”

The strange woman slashed with both hands.
She must have put everything into it. One hand left a deep crack in Ak Mu-jin’s Saber Qi, while the other raked across the area over his heart.

Ak Mu-jin grimaced.
As the strange woman’s nails wore down, the bloody gashes carved into Ak Mu-jin were growing deeper as well.
The Corpse-Body Reinforcement Art was not limitless to begin with, so it couldn’t be helped.
We needed to finish this before he suffered a serious injury.

Huuung!
Ak Mu-jin aggressively blocked the strange woman’s path as though the bloody gashes meant nothing to him.
He swung his saber in broad arcs and at times simply rammed her with his shoulder.
It carried a high risk of injury, but it was effective at keeping the strange woman tied down.

While Ak Mu-jin struggled against her, I focused on reading her movements.
It wasn’t easy.
I was trying to find a flaw in the movements of a beast with no rules whatsoever.

‘Wait.’

Then something suddenly caught my eye.
The strange woman didn’t care where she was attacked.
Head, arms, waist.
No matter the location, she simply minimized the impact with those beastlike movements and immediately counterattacked.
But whenever Ak Mu-jin’s saber passed near her left side, her reaction was different.
Her body curled inward ever so slightly.
Like an animal hiding an injured spot.

‘Let’s test it.’

“Unit Leader Ak, hammer her left side with your ultimate moves!”

Ak Mu-jin’s saber immediately erupted with dazzling light.
Swaswaswak!
The attacks converged on the strange woman’s left side.

The strange woman curled inward, flipped through the air, and retreated.
It was the first time.
Since appearing, she hadn’t retreated even once until now.

‘I was right.’

But even while retreating, the strange woman did not forget to counterattack.
As she flipped, her claws raked across Ak Mu-jin’s face.
A bloody gash stretched from his jaw to his cheek.

“…….”

Ak Mu-jin furrowed his brow.
His complexion had paled. Unleashing those ultimate moves had apparently drained a great deal of his internal energy.
That had weakened his Corpse-Body Reinforcement Art, so even an attack similar in strength to the earlier ones left a much deeper wound.

Even so, Ak Mu-jin’s saber had done its job.
It had grazed the strange woman’s left side and torn away a large section of her clothing.
Beneath it, a line of stitches was revealed.

The stitches on her arms and legs were sparse and crude.
The thread was thick and widely spaced, as though those parts had been sewn together carelessly.
But the stitching on her left side was dense.
The thread was fine, with barely any space between each stitch.
Someone had stitched that area together meticulously, with obvious care.

‘Why is this spot different?’

There was no reason to put that much effort into somewhere unimportant.
Which meant this place was important.

What if something vital to maintaining this body was inside there?
What if that was why it had been stitched more securely than everywhere else?

‘I need to tear that open.’

“Unit Leader Ak, hold that woman still. I only need a moment!”

Her weakness had been exposed.
From now on, she would undoubtedly try to protect it at all costs.
That would only make things more troublesome.

Clang!
Instead of answering, Ak Mu-jin threw aside his saber.
He seized the strange woman’s right arm with his bare hands.
The strange woman drove the nails of her left hand into Ak Mu-jin’s forearm.
Their blunted tips dug shallowly into his flesh.
Twice. Three times.
Each strike drove them deeper until they finally punched through his forearm and blood sprayed out.

Ak Mu-jin did not let go.
The strange woman twisted, contorted, rammed him, and kicked at him.
But he gritted his teeth and held on.

‘Now.’

As she struggled, her side opened up.
I unleashed Lightning Step.

Paang!
The strange woman’s survival instinct kicked in.
She instinctively tried to cover her side, but the nails of her left hand were embedded in Ak Mu-jin’s arm while her right arm was trapped in his grip.
She kicked at me, but that alone wasn’t enough to stop me.

Spat!
As I slipped past her, I drew the tip of my dagger along the stitch line.
Nothing happened.
There was a strange elasticity to the stitching, and the blade simply slid uselessly across her skin.
I realized it immediately.
I couldn’t slash through it.

‘I have to stab it.’

I reversed my grip on the dagger.
I drew up Chaotic Demonic Qi.
The energy erupted from my dantian, surged down my arm, and poured into the dagger.
My qi and blood began to heat up.
I surged back toward the strange woman with Reverse Step.
The strange woman thrashed wildly, twisting again and again as she tried to break free of Ak Mu-jin.
Peok!
Her foot slammed into my side.
The air was knocked out of me, but I didn’t stop.

Biting down on my lower lip, I drove the dagger downward.
The dagger tip, packed with Chaotic Demonic Qi, sank into the center of the stitch line.

“Kkyaaaaaaak!”

The strange woman screamed.
Her voice was chillingly high-pitched.
I put strength into my arm and dragged the dagger downward.
Chwachwachwak!
The tightly packed stitches snapped one after another.
The strange woman thrashed violently.

She ripped her nails free of Ak Mu-jin and clawed at me like mad.
Several bloody lines opened across my forearm, but I ignored them.

At last, the final stitch snapped.
All strength left the strange woman’s body.
Her limbs went limp, and even the last trace of light faded from her empty eyes.

‘Is she dead?’

No.
She was still breathing.
It seemed my attack had damaged whatever allowed her to function.

“Huff, huff.”

Breathing hard, I looked around.
Ak Mu-jin was covered in blood, down on one knee.
Blood streamed from the forearm where the strange woman’s nails had been embedded, but he silently worked to stop the bleeding.

Im Yeon was overwhelming the Heaven Rebelling Society members.
She was unleashing the sword art she had learned from her grandfather like a wrathful ghost.

“Whoo.”

I let out a sigh of relief.
Fortunately, no one had suffered a serious injury.

Jjiiiii-
That was when it happened.
The space inside the formation split open.
The scenery surrounding us tore apart like paper, and a familiar figure appeared through the opening.
It was the Ink Scholar.
Unlike before, he entered the formation by rolling the wheels of his wheelchair himself.
His face looked as though he had just bitten into dirt.

With the strange woman lying at my feet, I curled my lips into a smile.

“We meet again so soon, sir. Did you enjoy the show?”

The Ink Scholar shook his head and replied.

“Not particularly, Seventh Young Lord.”

Seventh Young Lord.
It seemed he had figured out my identity.
I chuckled.