Chapter 817: Our Wish Is Slaughter (8)

Why would a corpse stench be drifting through a coal mine?

It was a very faint lingering trace—so fine that anyone but Qing wouldn’t have noticed it.

Had an animal carcass rotted down here?

Like they found a hibernating bear and... no, that didn’t make sense.

This wasn’t a cave. It was a mine—space carved by people. There was no way an animal would come here to hibernate, and besides, it was warm even in winter.

More than anything, even if it had happened, would they really leave an animal carcass to rot?

In a closed space like this, underground with no ventilation, they wouldn’t just leave a stink—especially corpse stench, the worst of smells—unaddressed.

Or maybe there’d been some kind of accident.

The tunnel collapsed, and they had no choice but to abandon the bodies beyond it, letting them rot.

Maybe that was where that bastard Jeong Ryujang’s evil karma came from.

The obvious, overused story that always showed up in mine horror tales:

Miners buried under a collapsed shaft, and a rescue plan that never happens.

Because digging would collapse the entire mine.

Or because, by a cold merchant’s logic, “cleanup” is cheaper than rescue.

Or because they want to quietly pretend it never happened...

If so, then even right now, injured people could be trapped under the tunnel, waiting for someone to reach them.

Qing closed her eyes and listened.

But even with her sharp ears, she heard nothing—only her own breathing, harsh and loud inside her body.

And only then did it hit her.

The world was too quiet.

And Qing realized she’d only now become aware of the silence that had been there all along.

And it was too dark.

The starlight of aura was, in the end, nothing but a cold blade meant for killing. Of course a razor-edged malice couldn’t be bright.

So the darkness was endless.

The world was no more than a faint sketch in dim lines—weak shadows and weak contrast.

Qing wandered through that silent darkness.

Chasing nothing but that unpleasant trace brushing her nose.

Heading deeper underground, without even knowing the direction.

For a long time.

How much time had passed?

At last, bedrock blocked her path.

The end of this shaft.

An hour? An hour and a half?

Or maybe only fifteen minutes. Or thirty.

In a place this dim, where you can’t even see ahead—and there isn’t a hint of human presence, not even the ordinary noises of nature—time becomes a pathetic kind of ignorance. Impossible to measure.

Of course, if you dig straight in a line, that’s a tunnel, not a mine.

A mine shaft branched like an ant nest—maybe not that complicated, but still—and she’d only reached the end of one corridor.

But.

The corpse stench was coming from here...

And then—

Tap.

Qing’s toe nudged something.

The space under Qing’s feet was a blind spot her vision didn’t reach, thanks to her body’s structure.

But normally, she never tripped on obstacles, because her Awakening Divine Art gave her all-direction sight—spatial perception that read even the ground under her feet.

So if Qing “caught her foot” on something, it didn’t mean she’d made a careless mistake.

It meant she’d deliberately touched it.

Her toe tapped again.

Tap tap.

This time—

CLACK CLACK.

A low metallic sound, like tapping a sheet of iron.

A steel plate had been embedded into the mine floor for no reason at all.

At each corner of the rectangular plate, a strip of cloth had been jammed in.

It looked like they’d sealed it so tightly there wasn’t even a hairline gap between the plate and the ground.

Inside her mask, Qing’s expression hardened.

A kind of premonition—one that squeezed her heart—spiked up all at once.

No. Come on.

That can’t be it.

Nothing she’d “sensed” has been right lately.

From the drug peddler all the way to here, she kept thinking it was finally going to be a slaughter opportunity, and then it wasn’t.

Qing forced herself into cheerful thoughts.

Ah, maybe it’s... a drain?

No. A drain in the middle of a mine is weird.

And they wouldn’t seal a drain this carefully anyway.

Ah—don’t tell me.

It’s not a latrine, is it?

If you think about it, miners have bodily functions. It’s not like they can go outside every single time.

SHING—

A sword slid free.

The tip pressed down and stabbed at the cloth scraps jammed into the gap between steel plate and ground.

In a situation this suspicious, she had no idea what kind of cloth it was.

In the worst case, it could be recycled “cleanup cloth.”

So touching it with her hands was out of the question.

Then again, stabbing a suspicious wad of cloth with a sword also wasn’t what you’d call normal behavior.

There were people who’d foam at the mouth and scream about what a swordswoman thought a sword was supposed to be.

But Qing used weapons however she pleased.

And a sword was something meant to go inside an enemy’s body anyway, right?

So the dirtier it was, the better it worked—wasn’t that how it went?

Carefully, Qing pulled.

Hooking and dragging out the cloth wedged under a thick steel plate with nothing but a blade looked easy, but it was basically an absurd feat.

But Qing treated her blade like her own fingers, trained by Cheon Yuhak’s sword-hand drills.

At last, the cloth that had been stretching longer and longer—

YANK—

ripped free and tore out.

And at the same time—

A stench slammed into her face.

Qing had found the source of the corpse stench.

She lifted the thick steel plate.

It had to weigh over a hundred geun, but she flipped it like she was peeling back a mat.

A gaping hole opened beneath it—a vertical cavern shaft.

“Ghk—”

The stench that surged up from deep in her lungs was so foul that even Qing—who could stomach anything—had to swallow bile back down.

From the look of it, this wasn’t a hole people had dug.

It was a natural cave opening that had been buried underground.

Maybe five zhang deep.

Along the rim of the hole, iron spikes had been hammered in, and a rope ladder hung down.

The ladder had a glossy, half-worn look—an ambiguous trace of use.

And—

At around five zhang down, she could actually see the bottom.

Even with aura light and Qing’s beyond-human eyesight, the space below should’ve been pitch-black—only shadows barely visible.

So if she could see the bottom clearly, it meant something down there was emitting light and illuminating the space.

And Qing knew exactly what kind of light it was.

That soft jade-green illumination.

In Seol House Commercial Guild’s highest-grade guest rooms—those rooms with ridiculous names about “Supremes” and whatnot—there were always those decorative night lights installed, gentle green in the dark.

That Central Plains mystery she could never understand no matter how many times she saw it.

The signature glow of a night-glowing pearl.

Qing grabbed the rope ladder and went down.

The airflow rising from below was like it was made entirely of stench—so suffocating it made her head ache.

And at the bottom of the vertical shaft—

A wide natural cavern opened up.

And so did the piles of human corpses.

Still hanging from the rope ladder dangling down from the ceiling hole, Qing stared down at the catastrophe with eyes stained by an ominous color.

When a person dies and is buried in the earth, the laws of nature take over.

They break down and disappear naturally, becoming nourishment for insects and plants.

But when a person dies without touching nature—

That’s when the sight becomes unbearable.

And in a cave with not even a handful of soil—inside bedrock—where even the usual bugs you’d expect in stone were scarce—

It was worse.

There wasn’t just one mountain of bodies.

There were already several.

One heap had bones nearly exposed, flesh and organs melted down into thick black corpse slurry pooled across the floor—enough time had passed that it had progressed far.

Another heap had swollen grotesquely, fused into a single enormous mound of meat—a hill made of stuck-together bodies, an earlier stage of rot, comparatively “recent,” still intact.

It was a kind of “batching.”

Every time a new group arrived—families of patients who’d sold their bodies—they were slaughtered all at once, and the corpse-towers were stacked.

Suddenly, the face of that mine worker flashed through Qing’s head—the one who’d smiled pleasantly and said, yeah, it’s something you could do, being a miner.

Idiot.

Just because you were in a mine, where was the guarantee you were a miner?

He’d been in on it from the start.

With hundreds—maybe over a thousand—bodies piled deep in the mine, there was no way the workers here didn’t know.

If they killed them outside, they’d have carried the bodies in and thrown them down this hole.

Even if they tricked them into coming and shoved them into the shaft—

How could you not notice hundreds of people going in and never coming back?

Why.

How could they do this?

Qing’s eyes trembled thinly.

It could be some ritual. Some sorcery-driven purpose.

Like those Blood Cult butcher monks’ lair on the Qinghai lands back then.

Or—

Or—

Or what the hell else?

Unless Danryun Jin-in were here—a real sorcery specialist—Qing couldn’t even guess why these people had to rot in silence, deep underground in a cavern no one knew existed.

So Qing didn’t do something half-assed like digging through the heaps.

She didn’t “inspect” and “look around.”

Instead, she climbed the rope ladder back up in silence.

Because if you don’t know something, you can ask.

Ask the one who knows the answer.

Ask the one who created this spectacle—directly.

And then demand the responsibility for this sin.

*****

The reason the group had insisted on following Qing all the way to the foothills near the mine entrance wasn’t really “support.”

It was closer to surveillance.

They were afraid she’d cause an incident and then vanish on her own.

They all understood her behavioral logic by now.

It wasn’t that she didn’t care.

It was that she didn’t want to drag her friends into any kind of danger—her way of showing consideration, her own kind of affection.

The problem was, that one-sided “consideration” felt extremely hurtful, and extremely infuriating.

Because she was the amazing Transformation Realm master, so it was more convenient to move alone.

And if she had to worry about them, it would only inconvenience her.

They’d only get in the way of the great master showing her power—wasn’t that what it meant?

If Qing heard that, she’d flinch—and feel wronged.

What, it wasn’t wrong, was it?

Honestly, if you were even Manifest Realm, I’d relax and let you watch my back.

Do you even know how vicious and dangerous the rivers-and-lakes world is?

This is a neighborhood where someone at Manifest Realm will pull a sword and threaten to kill you.

If I meet an enemy so strong I can barely protect myself, and I can’t afford to look after you too—what if you get badly hurt?

From that day on, the Central Plains gets its own Kim Satgat—no, Seomun Satgat—a miserable wandering vagrant who lives in lifelong shame, unable to face the sky.

With that being the reality, how could they not chase her?

Especially when Qing stuck her nose into other people’s problems with an overbearing meddlesomeness as wide as the great sea of the Northern Underworld—

But for her own danger, she wanted to bear it alone and tell everyone to leave.

So when Qing insisted Jeong Family Manor was suspicious, it did sound plausible if you listened—

But only to that extent.

They hadn’t treated it as truly serious.

This was the vast Central Plains. Scammers weren’t rare.

Even if something was suspicious, wasn’t it also common for people to siphon off manpower for dirty work?

They could be trafficking people for real under the excuse of mining.

Or they could be using them for things banned by the law—cultivating drugs, smuggling salt, and so on.

That’s what it had been.

But then—

The look in Qing’s eyes when she returned from infiltrating was wrong from the start.

And the terrible corpse stench clinging to her clothes—

Unlike Qing’s homeland, in the Central Plains, corpse stench wasn’t an experience people never had.

Bodies left by the roadside were uncommon, but not “unthinkable,” in this era.

And even besides that, corpse stench could come from animal carcasses, and the Central Plains were wild lands where big animals still ran in the mountains behind your house.

And then, a story spilled out—

Far more horrific and cruel than anyone expected.

There were piles of human corpses stacked like mountains.

Hidden deep inside the mine, sealed away.

Separated and stacked apart by “batch.”

“First, we should notify the Martial Alliance. A crime on that scale, carried out in secret—and you said there were night-glowing pearls down there. That kind of construction, and the kind of funding it takes... if it’s a group that can mobilize that much—”

Jegal Ihyeon trailed off, but most of them understood what he’d left unsaid.

The Blood Cult.

Who else but the Blood Cult would commit atrocities like this?

That was when—

Tang Nanna, who’d been thinking hard, suddenly threw a question at Qing.

“Qing. That pit—what was the environment like? The humidity. Wasn’t it damp?”

“Well... it’s a cave.”

“Then the bodies—you said they were stacked, right? Were they stacked in a concave basin? Or did they stack bricks around it—something like that? Anyway—did it look like they set it up so corpse slurry would pool?”

Corpse slurry meant the runoff—liquid that seeped out as bodies melted and rotted.

Qing frowned slightly.

There hadn’t been any bricks, but now that she thought about it, there had been rotten liquid pooling thick under the body-mountains.

She’d assumed it was just natural—bodies produce that kind of runoff.

Tang Nanna’s expression turned grim.

“That... sounds like they’re trying to manufacture corpse poison.”