Chapter 768: Bloodline (2)

Qing, startled, rushed to pull Beom Yakgong up.

She came from that certain future country that followed Confucian etiquette to the core, so there was just no way for her to feel comfortable with an elderly elder dropping to his knees in front of her.

Of course, when it came to anyone with over a hundred points of karmic debt, Qing was absolutely the type who could make them kneel, yank out their intestines, and chuckle and chat over it while treating them as non-human.

But in this case, the other party was showing goodwill—and he was someone who’d had ties with Yeonsul in the past.

“To see that my lady has achieved such tremendous attainment makes this humble subject glad as well, and proud beyond words. It is truly lamentable that this old man cannot boast to the whole world that he taught you the sword.”

“Mm, thing is, it’s not certain yet. And if you recognized me just from seeing my sword, well, the sword style’s changed several times up to now.”

Qing’s swordsmanship had, at first, been nothing more than a stiff imitation of the forms the Martial-Arts Archive had carved directly into her brain.

It had then changed and changed, over and over, until now she could swing as she pleased, embedding whatever subtlety she wanted into each cut.

So the forms she’d shown just now couldn’t have been identical to how Princess Yeonsul had swung back then—so how could he recognize her and be sure?

“Do you think this humble subject does not understand that? How could a master of the harmonized realm possibly still be clinging to the nasty little habits she had when she first learned the sword? Anyone who did that would never reach the absolute pinnacle, let alone the harmonized realm.”

“Really?”

“Indeed, my lady, you displayed the true body of the Moon-Maiden Sword. There is but one person in this world capable of such an art, and that is you.”

Qing tilted her head.

Only one person in the world?

“Uh, not two?”

There had to be at least two people, counting whoever taught it to her. It wasn’t as if martial arts got beamed into you by some ancestor showing up in your dreams.

But Beom Yakgong shook his head.

“What this humble subject taught you, my lady, was a common military drill. No matter how you begged, how could I have dared to pass down a true martial art at will? I only taught it because Moon-Maiden Sword, as it was used in the army, was basic among basics—a shape anyone could copy.”

No matter how much a princess cried and wailed and threw tantrums and pecked at him nonstop with that rapid-fire little beak of hers, no servant drawing pay from the imperial palace could afford to break national law.

Fortunately, the young Yeonsul had read the tale of the moon maiden, fallen completely in love with the legend, and specifically demanded Moon-Maiden Sword.

That much, even if it got found out, could be brushed off as, “She must have watched the Golden Guard’s training and copied it,” and they’d get away with it.

And in practice, that was exactly what had happened.

It wasn’t like the little princess only picked up a wooden sword and swung it around going yaap yaap for just a day or two.

And on top of that, from her mouth came, “Take this! Moon-Maiden Sword! Moon-Maiden Ascends to Heaven! Moon-Maiden Charges the Sky! Moon-Maiden Rends the Firmament!”—for some reason all starting with “Moon-Maiden” and ending in “Heaven” as she made up forms and shouted them. The palace was full of thousands of eyes and just as many ears.

So everyone simply thought, There goes Princess Yeonsul being Princess Yeonsul again, and didn’t take it seriously.

Some of the Golden Guard or Eastern Depot even flopped over with satisfying screams to entertain the young princess and make her happy.

And then some bastard ran his mouth.

To this day, that bastard’s identity remained unknown.

That’s not the real Moon-Maiden Sword, it’s the fake.

The real Moon-Maiden Sword is somewhere else.

In the deepest part {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} of the palace armory there is an original secret manual, but no one has ever mastered it—a legendary sword art.

Children are creatures who overestimate themselves.

They are creatures who harbor baseless belief that they can do what no one else can, so Yeonsul’s eyes could hardly help but gleam.

The original Moon-Maiden Sword secret manual hidden in the depths of the palace armory!

One that no one has ever mastered!

A legendary sword art!

It wasn’t a lie.

A genuine “original secret manual” did exist.

But it was a manual from before martial arts existed in any real form, with not a single word about internal energy circulation—just a handful of poses copied down as pictures.

And because it had been drawn by a painter who didn’t know swordsmanship, it was nothing more than a string of disconnected scenes, utterly ignoring basic stance, coordination between sword and body, or the flow of movements.

It was, in truth, just an artbook proving that the moon maiden, Acheong, had been a beauty—a picture book, nothing more.

So of course no one had ever mastered it.

The true-body original manual of Moon-Maiden Sword that remained only as a legend.

“Eh? Then Princess Yeonsul had nothing to do with ‘my’ Moon-Maiden Sword at all, did she?”

“On the contrary. My lady, you mastered that. From that ragged picture book alone.”

It was an absurd thing to hear.

“Eh? How?”

“If I recall her exact words, they were: ‘That’s because I am Acheong herself! I’m an unprecedented great genius!’”

“Was she actually a genius?”

“I cannot say. From that point on, it was no longer just an imitation of common sword drills. Since it was an issue that could have ended in capital punishment under national law, I reported it to the Empress. After a thorough scolding, she stopped training it and only swung it as a kind of game.”

Mm.

So she hadn’t completely stopped swinging it.

Kind of made Qing want to see with her own eyes just what sort of princess that had been.

“But my lady, you are the recognized successor to Shaolin’s divine art that was thought to have vanished into legend—Tathagata Divine Palm, are you not?”

“Uh... that just kind of happened?”

“In truth, I have always been curious. If my lady had properly learned martial arts, what level of attainment could you have reached? If you truly were an unprecedented great genius. Whether perhaps you possessed some wondrous ability to instantly grasp the whole from even the shoddiest manual. What do you think?”

“Oh, come on, there’s no such ability.”

Qing—repeat-offender Martial-Arts Archive-contact-based martial-arts thief—waved her hand.

Beom Yakgong studied her closely, then answered, firm and unshakable,

“Such an ability does exist.”

“Eh. Really? Someone like that actually existed? Maybe the Martial Emperor of the Unseen Sky, er, the Martial—whatever.”

“My lady. It’s the Martial Celestial. My lady.”

“Right. That Martial Celestial guy?”

“It was not that one. Though, now that you mention it, I have heard the rumor that you inherited that man’s martial art as well.”

Beom Yakgong’s eyes narrowed.

“My lady, might you know of a martial art called Formless Art—mm, never mind.”

He cut himself off mid-sentence.

Seeing that same expression as ever—that genuinely blank look that only appeared when she really had no idea—he could tell the answer without even asking.

But Qing had gotten curious.

“Formless Art?”

Once upon a time, there had been a mysterious sect that housed unknown masters.

All of that sect’s martial arts had transcended the world’s norms and possessed bizarre, miraculous capabilities.

At first, befitting a mysterious sect, they had cut all ties with the mundane world and lived apart, but over time they’d begun to descend into the world, enjoying the praise lavished upon them for their protean, miraculous arts.

And as they did, their arrogance had soared to the point that they called themselves immortals and brazenly claimed to be a sect above Heaven itself.

Naturally, the imperial palace could not leave that alone.

They’d been sharpening their knives, intending to crush them hard.

And then, right at that moment, the sect had split into factions and, in the course of fighting among themselves to claim ownership of their martial arts, had burned themselves to ashes in a single day.

Thanks to that, those miraculous arts had scattered to the winds.

“Huh. I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere...”

“It is a famous anecdote. Proof that no matter how powerful the ones called ‘martial artists’ may be, they ultimately cannot escape the limits of greedy wild folk. Those who dared call themselves immortals and impersonate the Heavenly Plane tore each other apart in their greed and perished, which, for the tribe called martial artists, is only natural.”

The mood suddenly swerved into martial-artist-hate.

Hard to join in, hard to deny—better just keep your mouth shut.

“Formless Art was one of their divine arts.”

Formless Art, or Lesser Formless Art.

One who mastered Formless Art could, it was said, understand any martial art in the world just by watching it.

And further, when they went on to train that martial art, their attainment would leap over decades of time and settle into their body as proficiency at once.

Even if they learned mutually conflicting martial arts, they suffered no side effects.

A power that would let them wield every martial art in existence as skillfully as if it were their own.

“Whoa...”

Qing was impressed.

That was one hell of a martial art that sounded just like the Martial-Arts Archive.

No, hadn’t it actually surpassed the Martial-Arts Archive?

The Martial-Arts Archive needed her to physically touch a complete manual or receive mnemonics to register a style, whereas this let you understand it just by looking, then master it at the level of decades of training.

Martial-Arts Archive, you smug little bastard, you were just a pleb all along. Absolute trash.

The Martial-Arts Archive, for its part, would have every right to feel terribly wronged.

This ungrateful wench, does she not even know whose fault—or rather, whose merit—it is that she’s living this well, and she talks like this?

But it had no way to protest, so it could only feel wronged—assuming, of course, that a will-less Martial-Arts Archive could feel wronged at all.

“But does something like that really exist? I don’t quite get it. What are you supposed to learn to end up like that? Is it some kind of miracle study method?”

Like those “hundred-day exam prep,” “fifty-day exam prep,” “thirty-day exam prep,” “night-before-exam prep” schemes—no different from the empty dreams and hopes of people who never tried in the first place, was it?

“The tales are like that, but unlike the other divine arts, its nature has never been clearly confirmed. It may not be a ‘learned art’ at all, but a divine object that inscribes itself on the soul in some kind of sorcerous form, or it may simply be rumor. The other arts besides Formless Art have surfaced from time to time since their extermination: White-Rainbow Palm, Six-Sun Palm, Ripple-Stepping Footwork, and so on. Ah. My lady, you are currently the owner of Ripple-Stepping Footwork, are you not?”

“Ah! Right. That one.”

“Ohh, does something come back to you?”

“No, I just meant that story about the sect sounded familiar. When the person who passed me the Ripple-Stepping Footwork manual told me about it, they said something like, ‘a manual that calls down blood,’ that there’d been a big fight over it. Right?”

“I did say they had already massacred one another, exterminating their entire sect...”

Beom Yakgong’s tone as he replied sounded just a little bit sulky.

“Ahem. My lady, it fills this humble subject with nothing but emotion to see how you have grown.”

“Oh, are you heading back in?”

“My heart longs dearly to stand by your side and guard you as in the past, but as the one tasked with Hwanggeuk Hall, I must beg forgiveness for not being able to leave my post for long.”

“No, I mean, who am I to forgive or not forgive you.”

Beom Yakgong gave a gentle smile.

“When I think back, those days were truly good. I will come visit from time to time. May this humble subject receive your permission to do so?”

*****

The Crown Prince was waiting without sleep.

If even Beom Yakgong were to fall for that Heavenly Flower Sword—for that wicked impersonator’s beguiling tongue—what then?

If everyone he had been close to since childhood all spoke with one voice and insisted that Heavenly Flower Sword was the real Yeonsul—

What else could he do?

In that case, he would simply have to step forward himself and settle it.

She might deceive others, but she could never deceive him.

Look at Yeonsul in the past.

No matter how her over-the-top cheerfulness and sickeningly exaggerated courtesy had fooled countless figures in the palace, the Crown Prince alone had seen through to her true inside—that of an uncivilized beast no different from a pig or a monkey.

Thus he would strip away Heavenly Flower Sword’s disgusting hypocrisy and drag out the beastly nature hiding inside, and then everyone would see Yeonsul’s true reality, Yeonsul’s true form—

No, wait, what the hell.

Didn’t that make it sound like Heavenly Flower Sword was Yeonsul in hiding?

Where exactly had his train of thought veered off into this labyrinth?

Truly, Heavenly Flower Sword—so deep are your schemes that you befuddle even my own heart! How terrifying your mind is!

In that moment—

—Your Highness, this humble subject Beom Yakgong.

“Oh, come in.”

The Crown Prince welcomed his nighttime guest.

The Crown Prince’s palace complex, the Southern Three Halls, ran in sequence from the southern main gate through Dan’gyeong Hall, Danbon Palace, and then Hilbang Hall, so naturally anyone going in or out of Hilbang Hall had to pass by Danbon Palace.

It was therefore perfectly natural and unobtrusive for Beom Yakgong, having stopped by Hilbang Hall to see Qing, to then head into the Crown Prince’s residence.

“Well then, how was she?”

Suddenly, with a THUMP, Beom Yakgong dropped to his knees before the Crown Prince.

“Your Highness, I beg you to punish this humble subject.”

“What is this now? Why are you doing this?”

“This humble subject laid eyes upon a capital criminal whose sin cries out to Heaven, a criminal who dared impersonate the Heavenly Dynasty, and yet failed to cut her down on the spot and instead returned empty-handed. My crime pierces the sky.”

“Heavenly Dynasty” meant the dynasty of Heaven, that is, the imperial house of the Central Plains.

And if he called someone a capital criminal who had desecrated the Heavenly Dynasty, the meaning could hardly be unclear.

“Your words are...”

Beom Yakgong, wearing a resolute expression, confessed in a rush.

“Heavenly Flower Sword is a treasonous ringleader who, with utterly absurd nonsense, dares attempt to mock and desecrate the Heavenly Dynasty. So I beg you, merely give the order. I will deal with her in secret and erase her from this world.”