Chapter 28
#28. Martial Arts (5)
After losing everything to the First Young Master's schemes, the humiliations Cheon Yeo-hwa had endured were beyond description.
Yet she felt that the anger she was experiencing now surpassed anything she had felt then.
“I asked what the second way was!!”
“Khhrrk...”
Cheon Yeo-hwa shook Kang Hyeon-woo back and forth with an indignant expression.
But Kang Hyeon-woo did not wake up at all, as though he had taken a powerful sleeping potion.
Cheon Yeo-hwa glared down at Kang Hyeon-woo, snorting angrily.
Thinking it over again, she realized he had clearly brought up that strange subject about ways to make someone angry from the start just to tease her.
“How dare you play such word games with this lady...!!”
Infuriating! It was so infuriating she could hardly stand it.
In the end, Cheon Yeo-hwa resolved to punish him.
Before the deadly poison afflicted her, Cheon Yeo-hwa—the Moon Spirit Witch, who had caused countless casualties without distinguishing between the righteous and the demonic—brought her Moon Spirit Divine Hand down on Kang Hyeon-woo.
“Hehe, how dare a lecher be so insolent.”
Squish, squish—Kang Hyeon-woo's cheeks were repeatedly kneaded and stretched like clay.
“Uuugh...”
Good heavens, she was grabbing a sleeping man's cheeks and playing with them like toys.
The earth trembled and the heavens turned away at the Moon Spirit Witch's cruelty.
Just as she was playing with the sleeping Kang Hyeon-woo's cheeks, Cheon Yeo-hwa's complexion suddenly turned pale.
Smack! A sharp pain rose from the cheek she had reddened with the rather forceful slap.
‘To think I would let down my guard this much over a single meal and a place to sleep.’
It was an act her former self would never have tolerated.
To think that, on top of that, she had even shared a bed with a strange man she had known for barely half a day.
“Haa...”
How had things come to this?
She had become so utterly different from her former self.
What would her former self and her subordinates say if they saw her being this unguarded with another person?
She had grown weak. Ugly. Changed.
They would condemn her with words like those.
Of course, having lost the succession struggle, it was an undeniable fact that she could never return to those days.
If so, was there really any need to return to the person she had been back then?
‘...What a cheap excuse.’
It was a self-serving excuse.
An instinct curled up inside her was telling her:
Kill him right now, leave this place, and rebuild her power. Even if she had lost every force under her, as long as she alone survived, she could start over.
Even if every animal drinking from a lake were to die, the lake itself would not lose its significance.
In the end, new animals would come to the lake to drink.
I am a lake.
A vast lake that would make the broad, barren land of the Divine Cult fertile.
A lake only needed to be clear and clean.
There was no need for extraneous filth to taint it.
‘If I kill him now...’
Would even this weak heart that wanted to settle for the present disappear?
Cheon Yeo-hwa could not find any answer to her question. She merely stared vacantly at something for a long time, unable even to remember when she fell asleep.
***
Chirp-chirp—
When I lifted my heavy eyelids at the noisy birdsong, I felt puzzled.
It was clearly morning, judging by the brightness beyond the tent, so why was I still in this world?
[Remaining Matching Time: 13:51:34]
“Why... are there still fourteen hours left?”
When it was Iris, I had definitely been given roughly eight hours of spare time for my first matching.
If so, it made sense to assume I had been given about eight hours in this world as well.
I had stepped into this world at around 1 p.m., and I must have fallen asleep around 7 or 8 p.m., so my body should have returned to Earth while I slept.
I had gone to sleep taking that into account, too.
But I was still in this world, and there were a whopping fourteen hours left on the matching timer.
‘Why?’
Ding—
[Tip. Sleep time is not included in the matching time when matching with a new connection.]
‘Seriously?’
What?
There was no way the app could be this considerate.
Though I was suspicious of the app's excessive kindness, the terms were too sweet to reject outright.
Actually, this was something I had worried about for a while.
If the time I spent sleeping in another world were included in the matching time, I would either have to return to Earth every time I slept or use up a large portion of my allotted time.
And if I returned to Earth like that?
I would have to wait several days for the next matching period all over again.
When my Connection Level with Iris had been 0, the matching time had been only about eight hours.
But when it rose to Level 1, it increased to twelve hours, and after our last meeting, our Connection Level had become 3.
‘Excluding sleep, I’ve been here for about half a day, so does that make it roughly twenty hours?’
Apparently, Connection Levels applied separately to each person, but the matching time increased according to the highest Connection Level.
‘I don’t know why the app is being so kind, but at least I won’t have to worry about running out of matching time every time... Wait, why is my arm so heavy?’
I had been feeling an inexplicable weight on top of my right arm for some time.
When I turned my head to see what it was, there...
“Mmm...”
“...?”
Cheon Yeo-hwa was sleeping soundly with her head resting on my arm.
‘No wonder my arm felt numb...’
I looked around, wondering what had happened, but I had clearly not moved from where I had fallen asleep the previous night.
If anything, it was Cheon Yeo-hwa who had rolled toward me.
There was quite a lot of space remaining behind Cheon Yeo-hwa's back, which proved it.
“She talks in her sleep.”
Is this woman really the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult's young lady?
I had felt this since yesterday, but some of the things she did seemed a little clumsy.
‘Should I wake her?’
I considered it for a moment, then decided to leave her alone.
If she woke up like this, she would surely make a scene, accusing me of being a lecher and showing my true colors. I was too tired to deal with that first thing in the morning.
Even if my arm was numb, circulating mana would make my blood flow naturally as well. With that, the numbness was nothing.
“Now that I think about it, she’s ridiculously pretty.”
Her skin was clear and translucent, and her eyelashes were slightly sharp yet striking. We had the same black hair, but while mine was coarse and black like crow feathers, Cheon Yeo-hwa's hair was like silk.
Iris smelled of fragrant grass, while Cheon Yeo-hwa carried an endlessly gentle perfume scent.
It was not the artificial perfume women wore, but a scent that was both incredibly mild and stimulating—a contradiction.
As I watched Cheon Yeo-hwa sleeping for a while, I remembered what she had said to me last night.
-I had thought you were an assassin sent to kill me by the First Young Master.
Thanks to that one remark, the strange things I had noticed about Cheon Yeo-hwa until now began to make sense one by one.
The fact that a woman who was the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult's Second Young Lady had been bathing by a lakeside deep in the forest, and that she had been walking around in tattered clothes that looked months old.
The fact that she was wandering near Shaanxi, incredibly far from the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult's headquarters in the Hundred Thousand Mountains.
Everything could be explained by that one remark Cheon Yeo-hwa had given me last night.
‘Is this some kind of succession struggle?’
Judging only by her unusual personality, I would have thought she had been born with a diamond spoon in her mouth and lived throwing her weight around.
“...It looks like she’s had a hard life in her own way.”
I had suffered plenty as a war orphan too, but at least I had never had to worry about being assassinated.
Nor had I ever wandered like a homeless person in a distant place that would take more than half a year to reach.
At this point, even that forceful Cheon Yeo-hwa seemed a little pitiful.
‘But why is she sleeping with a strand of hair in her mouth?’
She was practically livestreaming herself eating her hair, so I tried to pull it out but accidentally touched her lips.
They felt wonderfully soft and moist, though.
“...?”
Perhaps that was what did it, because Cheon Yeo-hwa woke up.
“Oh, did you sleep well?”
“...You.”
Cheon Yeo-hwa brushed aside my cheerful morning greeting, and a heavy, murderous voice spilled from her lips.
“Do you remember the conditions this lady set for accompanying you?”
“...Leading the way, answering your questions honestly, and giving you chocolate?”
“You remember well. Then answer this lady's questions honestly.”
Cheon Yeo-hwa rose from my arm, and at some point she had taken hold of a familiar object in her left hand.
“Which do you prefer: being stabbed or being cut?”
***
After a commotion in the tent, the two of us walked through the forest toward Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi, once again that day.
“...”
“...”
Maintaining the same heavy silence as yesterday.
The two of us had certainly grown a little closer through the brief conversation we had shared the previous night.
But more than four hours passed without a single word exchanged between us.
Kang Hyeon-woo felt wronged, while Cheon Yeo-hwa was embarrassed.
At first, he had thought she had tried to lay filthy hands on him while he was asleep.
Of course, it had not taken long for him to realize that was a misunderstanding, but by the time he did, he had already been battered by the scabbard she had swung at him.
Even if it had been an accident caused by her being half-asleep and groggy, it was plainly her fault.
Unfortunately, Cheon Yeo-hwa did not know how to apologize to someone else.
She knew about it only in theory and had never apologized to anyone even once, so she did not know how to begin or how to bring it to an end.
Under the Divine Cult's creed that the strong are supreme, an apology was a humiliating plea offered by the weak to the strong.
To Cheon Yeo-hwa, who would one day become the successor to the Great Cult Leader, an apology was no different from a lowly act that must never be committed.
She had been taught this, internalized it, and lived by it.
Cheon Yeo-hwa had never been so incompetent that she needed to apologize to others in the first place.
Her judgments had always been correct, and subordinates unable to follow her orders had to bow their heads before her and beg for their lives under the guise of apologizing.
It was only after falling victim to the First Young Master's schemes that she could no longer be certain what the correct judgment was.
Even whether apologizing to him now was the right thing to do.
‘It was my mistake to fall asleep using his arm as a pillow, and to hit him with the scabbard because of a misunderstanding...’
Should she apologize?
Then how was she supposed to do it?
Should she bow her head as her subordinates did?
No matter how she thought about it, that did not seem right.
Then should she simply say she was sorry?
‘...Would an apology really be enough for something like that?’
Would trying to settle things with a single word not seem even more insolent?
If so, should she give him a gift he would find tempting as well?
But all she had now was a single sword and a tattered long robe...
Smack!
‘I-I must have gone mad. Surely I wasn't thinking of offering him my body!’
Cheon Yeo-hwa berated herself for having entertained such a thought, even for a moment.
Even if she took the position of Cult Leader, she had no intention of marrying a man.
She had even less intention of offering him her body.
And yet she had entertained such an outrageous thought about a man she had known for barely a day!
Wasn't that no different from being a courtesan?!
“That startled me. What was that? Why did you suddenly slap your cheek?”
“...A bug appeared.”
“A bug?”
Was a woman of the martial world really hitting her own cheek hard enough to make such a sound just because a bug had appeared?
Kang Hyeon-woo could not understand, but since she said that was what happened, he felt awkward pressing her about it.
Cheon Yeo-hwa bit her lip repeatedly as she watched Kang Hyeon-woo, wearing an unconcerned expression, resume leading the way.
She felt that if she did not say it now, she might never be able to.
“...Are you all right?”
A single sentence as heavy as the Thousand-Kilogram Drop technique finally struggled up her throat and burst into this world.
“What?”
“Did I injure you when I swung my scabbard...?”
The swelling scattered across Kang Hyeon-woo's face was proof.
Even Cheon Yeo-hwa, a young lady of the Divine Cult—a gathering of madmen called demonic practitioners governed by the law of the strong—realized that she had gone too far this time.
He had not only saved her, but also given her a delicious meal and a warm place to sleep.
“I-I think this lady should apologize to you...”
In the end, Cheon Yeo-hwa could not finish her sentence and lowered her head.
Kang Hyeon-woo gave a short laugh at the sight.
“What, is that why you haven’t said a word this whole time?”
Cheon Yeo-hwa nodded repeatedly with her head lowered.
She did not want him to see her bright-red face.
He’ll probably tease me again.
“You worry about what I think in the strangest situations. I never thought you’d care about that at all.”
Kang Hyeon-woo felt that he understood Cheon Yeo-hwa a little better.
“I’ve already forgotten about it, so don’t worry.”
“...Really?”
“Yeah.”
Seeing this unexpected side of her, Kang Hyeon-woo spread a mat nearby.
“Let’s have lunch.”
Cheon Yeo-hwa, who ate cream pasta for lunch that day, opened her eyes wide and made a great fuss.
Girls liking pasta is the same in another world, too.
***
A certain gorge near Xi'an.
Although the existence of the Mount Hua Sect and Zhongnan Sect had driven all the major unorthodox forces out of Shaanxi, a third force had established itself here without anyone knowing.
“Commander.”
“What is it?”
“We found her.”
In the past, after failing twice to conquer the Central Plains, the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult changed direction and decided to establish secret branches in regions containing sects and clans of the orthodox faction.
The likelihood of discovery rose accordingly, but this was all to prevent them from uniting under the name of the Murim Alliance before the Divine Cult's great conquest in the future.
Even if the orthodox bastards discovered the location of a branch, it did not matter. There was no trace of the Divine Cult here anyway.
None of the members except the commander practiced demonic arts. What they practiced were unorthodox martial arts or techniques that partially imitated orthodox martial arts.
In this third compound of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult's Shaanxi branch, people belonging to the First Young Master's faction had been stationed.
They had been tasked with searching for and assassinating the Second Young Lady, who had fled into the Central Plains, in cooperation with the First Young Master's forces in other branches.
“It’s the White Wolf.”
At the report from the member whose entire body was clad in black, the commander smiled.
It was a grotesque smile on a face covered in scars.