Chapter 37 :

Second-Rate Warrior Facing a Legend (2)

[Taeul Sect? Was there such a sect?]

[You know. The sect that spread lies to enter the One Hundred Eight Peaks.]

[Ah, the Taeul Sword Emperor. Wow. Will we be able to learn a move from the descendant of our Taeul Sword Emperor?]

[Be careful. There is a legend that no one who faced the Taeul Sword Emperor survived properly.]

The ability to remember everything even affects dreams.

The memories of the past, delivered clearly even in dreams, made me realize that I was dreaming, and on most such days, my mood was rotten all day.

Still, this time, I could not blame that memory, because the moment I realized in the dream that I had been sucked into the Soul-Extinguishing Formation, I was able to quickly regain my senses.

“…Damn it.”

A hazy fog covered my vision in every direction.

-S-Save me!

-Someone help me!

-Is anyone there!

In a place where the boundaries of time and space had vanished, screams that could not be distinguished as near or far rang in my ears.

They were probably the screams of those who had entered the Soul-Extinguishing Formation, saying they would find a path.

Among the different voices I heard, there were no voices gathered in groups.

Hundreds of people had entered the formation, but each of them was isolated in a different place.

“Are the two million routes of the formation completely separating everyone from one another?”

This was why the Maosan Sect’s art practitioners had understood the structure of the formation and still absolutely refused to enter.

I tried to strengthen my eyesight, but my core was empty.

“Have I lost my mind? I had forgotten that I fired the Vast Heaven Divine Palm.”

It had happened so suddenly that even my absolute memory had not been able to function.

“He really is a chilling bastard.”

Considering that he had quickly overcome the breaking forms even in my previous life, I could understand that, but seeing him deflect the Vast Heaven Divine Palm and still being unable to easily believe it was another matter.

“And yet he threw me into the Soul-Extinguishing Formation. He was a sinister bastard even from a young age.”

In that brief moment, he had realized the destructive power of the Vast Heaven Divine Palm, judged that I would interfere with his work, and shoved me into the Soul-Extinguishing Formation.

He was an enemy, but I had to admit his head worked quickly, almost sharply.

He did not choose means or methods for the sake of his goal, possessed the martial power and influence to push those things through, and set up a great cause without clinging to small sacrifices.

Perhaps people followed him because they were captivated by such a powerful figure.

“Thinking about it, he may be more dangerous than the Demonic Cult.”

Until now, I had thought my goal was simply to protect the Taeul Sect under the influence of the Murim Alliance.

But even that would become meaningless if the people moving the Murim Alliance ultimately pushed us into hell.

‘Perhaps I may have to fight Yong Soa.’

No, a moment would definitely come when I had to fight him.

Just thinking about how he threw me into the Soul-Extinguishing Formation made me feel like my anger would not be relieved even if I tore off all four of his limbs.

But what could I, who had learned nothing but the Small Heaven Sword Technique, do against a monster who even deflected the Vast Heaven Divine Palm?

The anger that had suddenly blazed like wildfire died down.

“My life is as impossible to see ahead in as this Soul-Extinguishing Formation.”

In any case, what mattered was that I had to leave the Soul-Extinguishing Formation.

If I could not leave this place, my sixty years of internal energy would become meaningless, and I would not get the chance to take revenge on Yong Soa.

When I sat down immediately and began circulating my energy, I felt my internal energy fill back up to a certain degree.

However, in that brief time while my eyes were closed, the formation had taken on a completely different scenery.

The fog in every direction had all disappeared, and now only pitch-black darkness blocked every side.

The screams of people could no longer be heard either.

Out of a total of two million one hundred thousand routes, I had memorized only one million eight hundred thousand routes.

If I had memorized just a little more, I would have been able to find the structure of the routes, but because I had entered the Soul-Extinguishing Formation without such preparation, I had to fill in the remaining three hundred thousand routes myself.

Moreover, the problem was that I could not identify which route I had started from.

To identify the route, I either needed to be able to calculate the formation or open the upper core, but I was currently unable to do either.

“It seems I now have another thing I must not tell the junior brothers.”

Since I could not immediately think of a formula that could calculate it, there was only one choice I could make.

I sat down again, crossed my legs, and began breathing circulation.

Every time I completed a small heavenly cycle, the powers of the elixirs sleeping throughout my body began waking one by one.

The vigorous energy that burned away the impurities in the fine meridians and opened the acupoints moved from the Central Pole Point to the Supreme Yang Point, passed through the Spirit Path Point, and was asking where it should go.

And I began moving my internal energy toward the Hundred Convergences Point.

Suddenly, I remembered what I had heard when I first learned an internal cultivation method.

-Jin Sowoon, never try to open the upper core. Never.

Ordinary martial artists also never touched the upper core unless something extraordinary happened.

All the more inside the Soul-Extinguishing Formation, anyone would clearly see it as madness.

Even the Demonic Cult bastards, full of madmen under heaven, would surely shake their heads if they saw me now.

‘Still, I have to do it.’

Thanks to the Calming Heart Pill, I could prevent qi deviation once, so this was a mad act I could attempt.

The internal energy that had been slowly waiting began moving again.

It asked me several times if this was right.

If entering here was truly right.

I sent my will and pulled the internal energy up in one stroke.

Boom.

A massive impact sounded inside my head, and thunder and lightning roared.

Boom.

While my whole body trembled with numbness as if all my nerves were burning, pain surged in like a tide, as if my mind would snap.

Keurgh.

The shock that rang through all my acupoints threw my insides into chaos, and blood flowed from the corner of my mouth.

Boom.

Amid the suffocating pain that continued as if every pore were being stabbed with needles, a strange sensation that might have been pain or ecstasy was felt in my head.

Swaaaah.

A sound like valley water flowing rang inside my head, and the pain that had covered my whole body suddenly changed into a refreshing coolness.

The cool sensation lingering inside my head rushed throughout my body and began opening blocked acupoints.

During that, this great force absorbed all the remaining powers of the elixirs and boosted its strength even further.

‘Stop, stop.’

The feeling was good, but the internal energy began growing so large that I feared I might no longer be able to control it.

The energy that came even more powerfully than when it opened the Hundred Convergences Point did not stop even under my will, and while rushing through my body and widening its path as it pleased, it stopped at a certain point.

‘No way.’

As if the internal energy did not like the blocked middle core, it rubbed against it wildly, trying to break through the path.

Cough.

Trying to force through a blocked place turned my organs upside down, and I kept coughing up blood.

At this rate, I could not avoid qi deviation.

‘Since I already opened the upper core and have the Calming Heart Pill… it is either death or unconsciousness.’

Boom.

When the flow of internal energy and the direction of my will aligned, the energy seemed even more excited and began pushing through the middle core.

Boom.

With a massive impact that made my whole body shake, even the middle core finally opened, and the internal energy rushed through my entire body with nothing left to obstruct it.

Only after the energy wandered every corner for a long time and settled in my core could I open my eyes.

“Whew…”

The internal energy I felt in my core was roughly one hundred years of internal energy.

The upper and middle cores had been opened, and there was no blockage in the flow of internal energy.

In an instant, I had reached the realm of Five Dragons Offering to the Saint.

What I saw with my eyes became clearer, and the sensations entering through my five senses allowed me to objectify myself.

Simply put, I had reached the realm where experts could catch objects flying from their blind spots without looking.

“Heavenly luck helped me.”

It was an extremely dangerous gamble I would not have even thought of attempting without the Calming Heart Pill.

Thanks to that, I had even opened the middle core and absorbed all the power of the elixirs remaining inside my body.

Once my five senses opened, I began to feel the flow of the formation.

The routes according to the Eight Trigrams, Twelve Branches, Sixty Cycle, and three hundred sixty-five changes.

While feeling the flow, I compared it with the routes filling my head and identified where I was and where I had to go.

At some point, the clouds and mist around me had changed to red again.

And I was certain.

“I can go.”

I moved my foot in one direction.

The red fog that had blocked everything hazily instantly moved far away and opened a path.

It meant I had properly found the route.

Another step.

The red fog changed into yellow fog.

Evidence that I had entered a different route.

Another step.

Once again, the fog suddenly pushed back and opened the path.

Then I encountered darkness.

This path was one the Maosan Sect’s art practitioners had not yet calculated.

Even so, I could not go around or retreat like in the cave.

The route would begin again, and eventually, I would end up caught by the same curtain again.

“I have to fill in the routes I could not finish.”

At the same time as I sent internal energy to my upper core, I began recording all the routes of the Soul-Extinguishing Formation on one wall of the library inside my head.

Once I filled the entire endlessly tall wall, a space where three hundred thousand routes had to go appeared in the lower left.

It was a space that could not be filled by calculation in the first place.

I began inferring the common laws of the other routes and memorizing new routes.

It was clearly madness, but for some reason, an absurd feeling that it might be possible made me unable to stop.

Perhaps thanks to opening the upper core, the missing numbers began filling in according to each mystery.

One route recorded another route, and the two routes created that way recorded four more routes.

The head, receiving energy through the upper core, forcibly created an overload, and the blood rushing into the thin mucous membrane of my nose could not be contained and poured out in streams.

By the time I thought I could fill a small gourd with nosebleed alone,

“It is done.”

Once two million one hundred two thousand four hundred routes were completed, the darkness before my eyes was no longer an object of fear.

Step.

The world suddenly brightened, and I felt a radiant cluster of light.

When I took another step, the fog began to clear.

With every step I took, the fog grew thinner, and I began seeing those who had died around me.

And the moment I felt I had reached the end of the Soul-Extinguishing Formation,

a white wall rose before my eyes, so high its end could not be seen.

I stepped on one part of that wall.

Whoosh.

The white wall lifted, and I entered a dark cave again.

“Haa, haa.”

Before my eyes, ice hanging like stalactites gave off blue light, brightly illuminating the cave.

“The Mita Divine Water…”

The moment my tension loosened like that, I lost consciousness and collapsed.

#

When I regained consciousness, my whole body felt light, as if all my fatigue had been washed away.

In addition, my core was about half full of internal energy, and considering that I had not performed breathing circulation, I could tell that opening the upper core and middle core had made the natural speed of energy accumulation even faster.

“If someone saw me, they would think I had caused a bloodbath.”

My blue martial uniform was stained with the blood I had spat out and the nosebleed I had poured, soaking it with blood.

“Not that there is anyone to see.”

There was no one inside the cave.

It meant that hundreds of people had entered the Soul-Extinguishing Formation on their own, but I was the only one who had reached this place.

“Haha, so this really was true.”

The struggle for the Mita Divine Water became controversial not only because five thousand people had been sacrificed, but also because, in the end, the Mita Divine Water was never found.

Because of that, some said it had been false information spread by Haomun to bring chaos to the murim world.

“But in the end, I am seeing it with my own eyes like this.”

The Mita Divine Water hanging long from the ceiling emitted light by itself.

I quickly took an awl from my robe, brought the specially made canteen close, and tapped the Mita Divine Water.

Crack.

A piece of the Mita Divine Water broke off and fell into the canteen, and then the awl began freezing with a crackling sound, so I quickly threw the awl away.

The yin energy of the Mita Divine Water was so strong that the palm that had been holding the awl was already frozen solid.

When I raised my internal energy, my hand slowly thawed, and water streamed down.

It was truly a bizarre sight that would be hard to see again in the human world.

“Anyway, the place where the Taeul Sword Emperor was sealed should definitely be here.”

My original purpose had been to find traces of the Taeul Sword Emperor.

After entering the cave, the series of events that unfolded only fueled my suspicions further.

“The Infinite Indestructible Soul-Extinguishing Formation, which can never be broken and never disappears.”

Just what had the world tried to seal away by deploying an absolute formation thirty jang wide?

-The masters of the sun decided to separate the Dark Sky and the Ten Thousand Swords from the human world.

From the beginning, the Soul-Extinguishing Formation was not something that could be broken with powerful energy.

The fact that they deployed a formation that separated even the soul from the human world meant that the target’s influence was that immense.

-Beside Chu’s tray. At the end of the hell where heaven and earth meet, they sealed the Dark Sky and the Ten Thousand Swords. Then the world became peaceful.

The legend of the Taeul Sword Emperor was real, and to seal it, they had deployed the absolute formation known as the Infinite Indestructible Soul-Extinguishing Formation.

“There must be something here. A trace of my great-grandmaster.”

I stepped toward the Soul-Extinguishing Formation on the opposite side of the path I had entered through.

Now, the fog and darkness that obscured my surroundings were no longer frightening at all, as if I were walking through a familiar neighborhood alley.

With every step, the fog was pushed far away.

Between the parted fog, as if guiding the way, I faced the white wall again.

I squeezed through part of the wall and pushed my body inside, and a cavern filled entirely with darkness appeared.

I closed my eyes for a moment, raised my internal energy, and strengthened my eyesight. Then I saw two figures sitting at opposite ends of a space reaching ten jang in every direction.

One figure was an old man with white hair.

The figure on the opposite side was a middle-aged man with black hair and a beard.

Drawn by a pull I did not understand, I approached the old man, and then I saw densely written characters carved into the floor around him.

And at the very top of those characters, the eight characters carved deepest of all.

Ten Thousand Swords Under Heaven.

Taeul Sword Emperor.

Something struck my abdomen, and something surged up inside me.

Across my previous life and this life, it was the emotion of sorrow melted into the five hundred years of disgrace endured by the ancestors of the Taeul Sect.

The strength left my knees, and I knelt.

I bowed down as I was, with no time to wipe away the tears flowing down, and spoke while choking back sobs.

“Jin Sowoon, eighteenth-generation disciple of the Taeul Sect, pays respects to the great-grandmaster.”