Chapter 406 : Expansion (1)

The wave of surrender that had started at the Western Military Command's main force rippled outward fast, swallowing the left flank whole before long.

"Young Master Il-mok has taken the enemy general's head!!"

"YEAAAAHHHH!!"

With the Cult's Lanzhou army completely intoxicated by bloodlust and screaming the news of victory at the top of their lungs, the imperial soldiers were forced to hear the horrible truth whether they wanted to or not.

With the Western Military Commander confirmed dead, the morale of the left flank soldiers cratered completely.

The Provincial Military Commander didn't waste the opening. He poured his internal energy into his voice and bellowed across the field.

"Those who discard their weapons and surrender shall be granted mercy!!"

His officers scattered throughout the battlefield picked up the cry.

"Surrender!!"

"Anyone who keeps fighting will be executed!!"

Of course, the left flank's own officers weren't just going to stand there and take it.

"Don't fall for the fanatics' lies!!"

"The Commander is alive!! Pick up your weapons and fight!!"

But their voices didn't carry for long.

Slash.

An old man had been running wild like a madman through the enemy ranks, hunting down whoever was still shouting and putting his sword to work.

"Bwahahahaha!! Keep yelling!! Go on! I'll split the skull of every last bastard who dares to hold a sword!!"

The soldiers nearest to Dokgo Ryong's presence threw their weapons to the ground without a second thought.

Defeat was already written all over the battlefield, and not one of them had the nerve to keep fighting.

While the left flank completely crumbled into surrender right behind the main camp, the right flank of the Western Military Command was the only unit still actively holding the line.

"It's not over yet!"

"What are you doing!! Pick up your weapons!!"

"The Commander is alive!! Fall back to the main force and protect him!!"

Because the right flank's battle lines hadn't shattered yet, their overall morale hadn't completely tanked. However, they were completely failing to push their enemies back as they had before.

"RAAAGGGH!!"

"God is with us!!"

Upon hearing the news of victory, the Cult's zealots had gone completely rabid and pushed back without any care for their lives.

While the right flank was stuck between fighting or retreating, Il-mok and the Cult's elite martial artists crashed directly into their flank.

"The Commander is dead!! Lay down your weapons and surrender!!"

The spear mounted across Il-mok's back said everything that needed to be said.

Because of that, the morale of the right flank that had held out until the bitter end began to crack, and the wave of surrender slowly spread through their ranks as well.

***

Slash.

"Haa."

After cutting down the last enemy officer who had refused to give up, Il-mok let out a tired sigh.

He couldn't even begin to count how many people he'd killed today. If he were to exaggerate just a little, he probably killed more men today than he had in his entire life up to this point.

His body felt like it weighed ten thousand pounds and his voice was half gone from the nonstop shouting he'd done to pressure enemies into surrendering.

But he couldn't show any of that.

He couldn't afford to shake the faith and morale of the people who worshipped him as a living god.

All around him, he could hear his allies' cheers and the sound of enemy soldiers dropping their weapons in fear.

Through it all, Il-mok kept his steps steady and unhurried.

"Summon the Provincial Military Commander, Head of the Baik Family, and Head of the Dokgo Family. Have someone set up a table and chairs in the rear camp. There's still a mountain of work ahead, so we need to get organized quickly."

At his instructions, the maids and warriors who had been moving with him bowed and scattered to carry out their orders.

A short while later, Il-mok, the Provincial Military Commander, Baek Un-hak, and Dokgo Ryong settled around a round table and got to business.

The Provincial Military Commander was the first to speak.

"Out of our fifty-thousand-strong Lanzhou troops, roughly three thousand five hundred are confirmed dead. We're estimating about five thousand critically wounded. These are rough counts for now, so exact figures will take more time."

Il-mok's expression turned grim.

Too many people had died in such a ridiculously short window of time. And this was supposed to have been an overwhelming victory.

"What's the damage on the enemy side?"

"Approximately fifty thousand surrendered. However, since about seven thousand of them are critically wounded, I honestly can't promise that they'll live to see tomorrow."

Il-mok had braced himself after hearing his own side had lost three thousand men, but hearing that the enemy had suffered nearly ten times the casualties caused an immense wave of exhaustion to crash down on him.

But he couldn't afford to just sit there and wallow in his depression.

"Send word to Lanzhou immediately and have them round up every physician and medic in Gansu. Tell them to buy out all the medicinal herbs and cloth the apothecaries have. And on top of that, pick up every drop of hard liquor available from the taverns and inns."

After giving those orders to the Provincial Military Commander, Il-mok turned his gaze to Dokgo Ryong and Baek Un-hak.

Dokgo Ryong looked bored out of his mind while Baek Un-hak was staring at Dokgo Ryong with open displeasure.

"Head of the Dokgo Family, Head of the Baik Family, what are your casualty numbers?"

"Including the Cult's warriors and the nomads, seven dead. Sixteen seriously wounded."

Dokgo Ryong answered first, and then Baek Un-hak opened his mouth.

"Among the Cult's warriors, fifty-two dead. Seventy-one seriously wounded."

"Tsk. You led a thousand of the Divine Cult's finest warriors, and still took that kind of damage."

When Dokgo Ryong clicked his tongue in mock pity, a vein practically popped on Baek Un-hak's forehead.

"We hit the enemy's main force head-on. If we'd had the luxury of sneaking up and stabbing them in the back like your lot did, none of our people would have taken a single scratch."

"Hahahahaha. The poison-user in you really does love his excuses."

"Ha. The idiot in you is showing again, you shameless bastard. You ambushed the enemy from behind and peppered them from a safe distance with arrows, so how the hell did you end up with seven dead? Let me guess, you abandoned your troops and just selfishly charged into the fray alone, didn't you?"

"What did you just say!?"

Any other day, Dokgo Ryong might have brushed it off, but the casualties this time really did weigh something on his conscience, so he could only glare in anger at Baek Un-hak.

Baek Un-hak was right.

Most of the deaths and serious injuries in the three-thousand-man cavalry had been the result of carelessness. They had been hit by stray arrows blindly fired by the panicking left flank while their Dokgo Ryong was off doing his own thing. 

With two rival Family Heads who had hated each other for decades in the same room, the petty squabbling was bound to be endless.

"This really isn't the time for that."

When Il-mok finally intervened to break the two of them up, the two Family Heads snapped their mouths shut but continued to glare daggers at one another.

It wasn't long before Baek Un-hak figured out there was no point in a staring contest with an idiot and turned to face Il-mok instead.

"On a different note, there were Eastern Depot operatives embedded in the enemy's main force. Our casualty rate spiked exclusively because we had to deal with them."

Dokgo Ryong snorted loudly at the excuse, but Il-mok cut in before he could start another fight.

"What happened to them?"

"We killed more than half of them, but the moment the Western Military Commander went down, the rest bolted. I thought about chasing them down, but getting the enemy to surrender was the priority, so we couldn't follow through to the end."

"That was the right call, Head of the Baek Family."

With the notable incidents and casualty reports all accounted for, Il-mok addressed the table once again.

"For now, we'll return to Lanzhou with the prisoners. Once we get there, we'll triage the wounded and draft the able-bodied before marching out to the next battlefield."

Following Il-mok's orders, the higher-ups scattered to handle their respective logistics.

"Hmph."

"Tch."

Baek Un-hak and Dokgo Ryong threw one last glare at each other before turning their noses up in unison and walking off in opposite directions.

Il-mok let out a quiet sigh. "Haa."

He turned and looked at the maids standing behind him.

"I'm sorry, but I need you all to stand guard for a little while."

Even though they were completely drained from the battle, the maids offered him reassuring smiles.

"Please, don't worry about us."

"We won't let anyone near you."

"Thank you."

Il-mok crossed his legs and began circulating his Qi to heal.

Patching up his internal injuries was important, but his main goal was to process the residual Blood Qi clogging up his acupoints. The enemies toward the end of the battle hadn't been particularly skilled, so some of the Blood Qi he'd absorbed through the Ascension Sword hadn't been fully used and were still lingering inside him.

When Il-mok channeled that energy toward his Middle Dantian by using the formula of Raging Demon Sword Art, a faint laugh drifted up from somewhere in the back of his mind.

—Hehehehe.

Il-mok sneered at it.

‘Idiot.’

The ego of that Demonic Art thought that its corrupting influence over him would grow as his Middle Dantian expanded.

‘I'm going to gorge my Middle Dantian on every single drop of internal energy I gather, and smash right through the Extremity stage in one fell swoop. Let’s see if you can still laugh then.’

***

A few days later, Lanzhou had become a warzone in an entirely different sense.

Between the Lanzhou army and the surrendered enemy troops, the critically wounded alone numbered over ten thousand, and when the lightly wounded were factored in, the total climbed to a staggering level.

Every physician and medic in Lanzhou had turned out to help, along with the apothecary workers, but they were so short-handed that even having four hands per person wouldn't have been enough. 

If there was any silver lining to this disaster, it was that they had summoned every medical worker from across Gansu. Every single day, fresh waves of physicians and medics from the Maitreya Luminous Cult flooded into Nanju to join the triage effort.

But the real saving grace was the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult's medical division.

"Bring me more high-proof liquor! We need to distill it right now to disinfect these wounds!!"

"Bandages and scalpels!! And get me more of the medicine!!"

The Divine Cult's physicians were screaming until their throats gave out. But the "medicine" they were demanding wasn't your standard herbal remedy. They were actually using highly narcotics as anesthetics.

Traditionally, medicine in the Central Plains and the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult almost exclusively focused on regulating internal energy and organs through herbal concoctions and acupuncture. But thanks to Il-mok's modern influence, the radical concepts of sterilization and chemical anesthetics had been introduced to the Cult and birthed the practice of surgery smack dab in the middle of medieval China.

And since the Divine Cult was absolutely packed with lunatics constantly blowing themselves up while practicing Demonic Arts or getting slashed in periodic Qi Deviation ramapages, the Cult's physicians had near-infinite test subjects to rapidly perfect their surgical skills. 

And right at this moment, every bit of that progress was paying off.

***

"Gnnggh."

While groans filled with pain and with cold sweat pouring down his entire body, the soldier thought to himself.

‘A-Am I going to die here?’

He deeply regretted his past choices.

‘I-I must have been crazy to volunteer for this war.’

He hadn't even been a regular soldier. He was just a volunteer militiaman who had stepped forward to help the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult.

He'd been terrified when he first set out for the battlefield, but he'd pushed through that fear by singing hymns alongside his fellow soldiers.

It had been the same on the battlefield itself. He had been swept up in the divine aura radiating off Young Master Il-mok and marched into the battlefield without a single care for his life.

But when the fighting ended, all that was left was unbearable pain.

Rotting in this tent for days on end had slowly chipped away at his sanity, and his once-blazing religious zeal had completely fizzled out. Right at the moment where his broken mind started to genuinely resent the Cult for dragging him into this hellhole...

"I'm sorry for being late. There are so many patients that I couldn't help it."

A middle-aged man who looked like a physician walked over and promptly shoved a kind of crushed herb into his mouth.

"Mph!?"

He was startled by the rough handling for a second.

"Hehh?"

But the medicine worked fast.

He drifted into a half-conscious state, where the world was going soft and blurring at the edges.

But he hadn't completely lost his senses either.

"Gnngh."

Every now and then, a sharp jolt of pain would shoot through the injured area. But compared to what it had been before that stuff got shoved in his mouth, it was at least something he could endure.

While his drug-addled brain drifted in and out of the clouds, he sluggishly rolled his head over and saw the surgeon actively digging around inside his wound.

"Hehhhh?"

"Easy now. Don't move."

With a casual flick of his wrist, the surgeon jammed his fingers into the soldier's neck and struck his paralyzing acupoint.

He went back and forth between the haze of the medicine and brief flashes of clarity brought on by the physician's touch for some time.

Finally, one last sharp jolt snapped the soldier's eyes wide open, and the physician exhaled.

"Phew. Well, consider yourself incredibly lucky. Your wound wasn't actually that bad."

What kind of lunatic was this guy? Calling a life-threatening gash "not that bad"?

"Well, to be fair, if you got this injury a few years ago, you'd be a dead man. But thanks to the groundbreaking knowledge Young Master Il-mok taught us, fixing something like this is as easy as turning our palms. So when you're back on your feet, make sure you thank the Young Master."

The soldier wanted to tilt his head in confusion, but his pressure point was still suppressed and he couldn't move a muscle.

All he could do was lie there, turning the name Il-mok over and over in his mind.

‘Thank the Young Master?’

Instantly, the memory of Young Master Il-mok's godlike majesty on the battlefield flashed behind his eyes.

That image had been buried under days of agony and resentment, but now that he thinks of it again, it seems the Young Master didn't just have the power to take lives. He had the power to save them too.

‘Ahh. He really was an Envoy of God.’

As that thought drifted through the soldier's mind, the pain eased little by little and the haze crept back in.

With his pressure point suppressed, he stared blankly up at the sky.

Fluffy clouds were drifting through the heavens, and dancing between those clouds was Young Master Il-mok, showering the mortal realm in glorious light.

"Ahh. The whole world is Young Master Il-mok."

And all across the camp, hundreds of other heavily drugged patients were mumbling the same thing.