Chapter 910: Tripitaka Master and the Thief of Benevolence and Righteousness (3)

Qing studied the “monsters” one by one, carefully.

Honestly, their makeup was beyond crude—whether they’d smeared ash on their faces or kneaded soot into a paste, it was about that level of filthy mess.

But thanks to that, they’d become even more grotesque, like something you’d actually call a monster—if you really had to classify it, they looked closer to primitives than monsters.

Bandit packs that threw the world into chaos—killing them all in a single stroke would be no problem.

Her plan had been to make an example by purging one “monster,” then tell them to spill everything they knew about the suspicious figure in Changbai Mountain if they wanted to live.

But behind the crude disguises—wood horns jammed on their heads, animal hides thrown over padded coats—there were faces so miserable they weren’t hidden at all, and they stopped Qing’s words in her throat.

Gaunt, ragged, starved and cold and filthy—there was that exhausted gloom that clung to people who couldn’t even hold on to the most basic things, the root needs of a human being, the kind that, if you don’t have them, makes you very, very, painfully miserable.

“[You—]”

Qing was just about to speak—

CRACK.

A sound that felt ominous in a way that went past sound—more like a faint vibration, a warning tremor.

No way.

Here, first—

The Yalu River usually stayed frozen until late March, sometimes even into early April.

But there was a massive difference between the ice thickness of deep winter, when everything was locked solid, and the ice thickness around March and April, which counted as spring by the seasonal markers.

Second—

Ice on a frozen river thickened near the banks, and thinned the closer you got to the center.

Third—

A horse was heavy by nature.

Especially a sturdy horse used as a warhorse—over eight hundred geun was the baseline, and when you piled on the luggage and Qing as well, it became the weight of seven or eight muscular, thick-necked men.

And—

Qing had been standing out there on the Yalu River’s midpoint, on ice that had already started to soften and thin, because she wanted to “welcome” the monsters—so really, you could say the result was inevitable.

CRACK!

With the sound of ice breaking—

SPLOOSH!

Chunks of ice flew, and a brief, half-sized water column burst up and sprayed freezing water in all directions.

Tripitaka Master—sudden plunge!

“Ghk!” “Hngh!”

The monster pack swallowed panicked breaths at the sight of Tripitaka Master dropping straight down out of sight.

“This—what is this.” “Ah, Heavenly Flower Sword?”

The Plunderer Demon frowned as if troubled, and beside him, Gongryang Sayoon stared at the shattered ice with a weirdly excited, expectant look.

But only for a moment.

From the water surface beneath the broken ice, a horse’s torso suddenly surged up.

NEEEIGH!

The startled horse’s rough scream was deafening as Lu Bu scrambled, hauling his body onto the edge and flailing his legs.

Then he sprang upright—

and like startled horses always do, he bolted off in a blind run, charging away somewhere.

Everyone’s gaze followed the horse as it got farther and farther.

Then all heads turned back again, toward the hole punched open in the ice.

And a moment later—

Something shot up into the sky.

A woman spraying water in all directions, her clothes soaked through and plastered to her body, revealing the shamelessly infamous, sensual presence of a three-headed beauty.

But more than that—her beauty, exposed under the gauze veil flipped up and stuck to the back of her head, wasn’t ordinary at all.

That destructive beauty, easily called a leading contender for the most beautiful woman in the world even among the high-nosed Central Plain people—truly a face that could topple nations, the kind of face that made you hear, as if from nowhere, a furious lecture screaming, This is the face that endangers a country!

The Eastern “barbarians” dressed as monsters stared up at that beauty, dumbfounded.

“[A fairy...]”

And when one of them muttered it, everyone else went, ah, and nodded along as if it explained everything.

*****

Multiple campfires blazed on the riverbank, arranged in a small circle, and between them sat one woman and one horse.

“Damn, I’m freezing.”

No matter how much Qing was a cold-immune freak, there was no way she wouldn’t feel cold after getting soaked through and then standing in the riverbank’s knife wind.

Of course, the fact that she was standing there just fine at all was already an astonishing feat.

Normally, she should have had a pale-white face and blue lips, trembling while somehow starting to feel strangely comfortable, sleepiness washing over her, and then a creeping heat rising—by Qing’s hometown diagnostic standards, severe hypothermia symptoms.

But Qing was strong against the cold, and on top of that, her body was a monster’s body with durability beyond humanity.

So with the fires around her, it only reached the level of ugh, I’m cold, I’m cold.

To the “monsters” kneeling on the riverbank—the Eastern “barbarians”—even that was nothing but wonder.

These people, who drilled holes in the frozen Yalu River to fish in winter, understood extremely well what it meant to fall into the water on a day like this.

The Master was a true god. A true god.

But why was Tripitaka Master a nun? And an unmatched beauty at that—and what is with that body?

Maybe that’s the original Journey to the West, the authentic Journey to the West. Since it was coming into Joseon land, they must have changed the embarrassing customs.

Hah. Those scholar bastards really acted prim again!

Joseon’s scholars would feel wronged, and the Central Plain Mr. Wu who wrote the original Journey to the West would also feel extremely wronged, but anyway.

The Eastern “barbarians” lost the will to resist entirely.

A person who spread a halo like Thousand Hands Tathagata, and then calmly emerged from freezing water like it was nothing—what could a mere mortal do against a fairy like that?

And on top of that, she even refroze the broken ice—her divine power was no different from a Maitreya!

Qing had only refrozen it with Ice-Jade Divine Art because she figured someone might fall in if she left it open, but still.

Anyway.

Only after the riverwater soaked into her clothes started cooling into something like lukewarm body temperature and became unpleasantly clammy did Qing finally throw her gaze at the Eastern “barbarians,” who’d been kneeling and watching her mood the whole time.

In the meantime, they’d rubbed their faces hard until they wiped it off, so now they’d gone from monsters to people—more precisely, people who looked like beggars. Beggars of beggars.

“[I have descended again to capture the demon king reborn in the human world—specifically, to capture the Black-Blood Demon King, the incarnation of the Bull Demon King.]”

Qing spun the story smoothly without even wetting her lips.

This was the true might of the civil-service track!

The Black-Blood Demon King was, literally, a monster with black blood, its skin sprouting black veins in a wicked, hideous way.

And by rumor, the figure called the suspicious one of Baekdu Mountain was like that, too.

So this body—already ascended to the immortal realm, commanding the Jade Emperor on the right and Buddha on the left, the supreme Tripitaka Master who would kill even the Jade Emperor if he dared to act up, who would cut down Buddha if she met Buddha—had descended here.

“Pfft!”

Did I just hear someone snort?

Qing turned her head.

Gongryang Sayoon, with a perfectly calm expression, tilted her head like, what?

If an ordinary saint dared to tilt her head like that, she’d be out of her mind, but Gongryang Sayoon was objectively within the “beauty” category, so Qing decided to let it go.

“Ahem. Khm.”

Qing cleared her throat for no reason.

Mm. She was pretending she didn’t, but it was obvious Gongryang young lady knew Joseon too—damn it.

Damn. I went off because I thought she didn’t know Joseon. If I’d known she knew, I’d have kept it reasonable.

“Khm. [Anyway. Is there anyone among you who knows about the suspicious figure of Baekdu Mountain, or about the vicious Black-Blood Demon King?]”

The Eastern “barbarians” whispered among themselves.

Qing waited, and then one of them stepped forward.

“[Uh, I’ve heard something like that. My older sister used to live in a place called Twin-Fork Valley under Baekdu Mountain, and when I stopped by last year because she said she was heading south, she told me there was a high-attainment Daoist called Master Singwi who hated barbarians and caught and killed them wherever he saw them. So because of him, making a living wasn’t as desperate—but the Daoist’s personality was so eccentric, his appearance so ugly, and the way he moved even more bizarre, that sometimes he’d even beat Joseon people to death calling them barbarian spies or something, and it was terrifying, is what I heard.]”

“Oh. [And did she say his veins were black, like black lines stretched out beneath his skin?]”

“[I don’t know about veins, but I heard there were black lines on his skin.]”

“Ohhh.”

“[And what else—when they asked why he hated barbarians, he said he’d thought it was the study of the world’s greatest Daoist arts, but they made him learn a terrifying Wicked Arts, so how could he not be an enemy?]”

“Ohoho.”

Qing snapped her fingers with a sharp SNAP.

Doesn’t that fit perfectly?

Black lines on the skin.

And he thought it was a divine art, but it was Wicked Arts?

Meaning it was a demonic art.

The demonic art must already have seeped into his marrow.

Once killing intent rises, you need reasons to kill—at first, he resents the “barbarians” for teaching him the demonic art, and then if the “barbarians” start keeping their heads down, he invents excuses and even kills fellow Joseon people.

“[I see. Twin-Fork Valley? Where is that?]”

“[How would I know?]”

The man answering looked openly bewildered.

Like—why are you asking me that?

“[No, you said your older sister lived there. You don’t even know where the town your sister lives in is?]”

“[Ah, Master—Tripitaka Master doesn’t know how slash-and-burn settlers live, so that’s why you say that. If you get through winter three or four times, there’s no firewood left, the land’s exhausted, so you have to leave and open a new slash-and-burn plot. So the village keeps changing—how could I know? And now she went all the way south, so I don’t even know if I’ll ever see her face again while I’m alive.]”

The man’s face was bleak as he said it.

So Qing thought, well, mm—still, she’d confirmed there really was a Reverse-Blood Demon Practitioner.

Anyway, this time she’d been lucky.

Not only had she run into the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons, the Masquerade Troupe, almost immediately—she’d already gotten solid information, too.

And she’d learned the name Twin-Fork Valley as well. Even if the village existed now or didn’t, if she got close to Baekdu Mountain, there had to be one or two people who knew it.

Mm. This—this feels like—

No. No, wait. Last time I felt good, I ran into a martial-art robber, so thinking about it, isn’t this the kind of bad-luck line that’s basically “Did we get them...?”

Qing forcibly shook off the good feeling.

Then—mm.

What do I do with these guys?

Qing didn’t have some bizarre ambition to erase all evil people from the world.

She just used it as an excuse for slaughter whenever killing intent rose.

But that kind of excuse only really felt fun when you caught someone red-handed, or had firm testimony and evidence that amounted to the same thing.

This was only an attempted attack. They were still just “on the way” to go rob someone. And every single one of them looked pitiful, like gaunt refugees.

So, well.

Maybe she could just scold them, get a vow like we won’t do bad things again, and send them away.

So Qing spoke in a stern voice.

Her voice was so pleasant that it didn’t sound stern from the listener’s perspective, but anyway, Qing believed it was stern.

“[I understand you are human, but you intended to imitate monsters and assault homes—how is that heart any different from a monster’s? Is there any reason for me not to cut you down and broadly benefit the world where people live?]”

“[Ah—We were wrong!]”

“[Please spare us, Tripitaka Master!]”

It was a satisfying reaction.

So Qing dragged time out, going, hmm, as if she were thinking it over.

And then, after a moment—

“[Fine. If you truly repent and intend to live kindly from now on, I should give you one chance. Stop this monster business, and even if you do not help others, you must live a life where you do not harm them—swear it before the Heaven-and-Earth Spirits. If you break it, I will descend straight from the sky and kill you in a single stroke—no, I will kill you painfully, with many blows!]”

Tripitaka Master was a monk, so why she was telling them to swear before the Heaven-and-Earth Spirits, no one could know.

And what kind of monk foamed at the mouth saying she’d kill them painfully with many blows?

But Qing’s actions were often low on context in the first place, so you could just say Qing did Qing things.

The Eastern “barbarians” glanced at each other—

glanced at each other—

kept glancing at each other—

But no matter how long they exchanged looks, not a single one of them slammed down and answered that they would.

Qing’s outer eye twitched.

Oh? Look at these bastards?

“[What is it? Why can’t you swear? I’m saying I’ll spare you, and you can’t swear? Then are you saying you’ll spend your whole life wearing monster masks and robbing people?]”

Then the Eastern “barbarian” at the very front squeezed his eyes shut and shouted.

“[Tripitaka Master! That’s the same as telling us to die! This is the only way we have to live, and I don’t care what happens to me, but what about my family!? A little one is crying because they’re hungry, and there’s nothing to put in their mouth—if we don’t do even this, how do you expect us to live, huh!? Please...]”

And—

Qing’s expression twisted hard.