Chapter 34
Chapter 34: Third-rate Martial Family Becomes the Best Under Heaven
The opening ordeal of the Five Halls of Proper Sound was the Hall of Overcoming.
Within that place, one’s determination amidst hardship had been evaluated by ascending a massive, snow-laden mountain without yielding to exhaustion.
The second stage, the Hall of Virtue, was never finished and had been skipped entirely, yet its design was meant to weigh the righteousness of one’s character.
The third, the Hall of Sound, measured a practitioner’s grasp of tune and rhythm, while the fourth, the Hall of Martial Arts, demanded genuine combat genius to overcome.
Which raised the question…
What hidden virtue was the Sound Empress seeking to draw out in this fifth and concluding gate?
The solution revealed itself swiftly.
Pluck, strum, strum~
A delicate melody began filtering into his awareness, unnoticed at its start.
It was an alluring cadence that surpassed pleasant music, boring straight into the depths of his consciousness.
Nor was that all.
From every corner, constructed currents of qi drifted through the air.
This space was situated deep within an array far more formidable than the illusion that had erected the frozen peaks of the initial test.
Pluck, strum, strum~
These artificial streams of energy gradually fell in step with the pulsing tempo of the music.
With that convergence, an all too familiar vista materialized before his eyes—the bitter, unforgettable conclusion of his prior incarnation.
Without warning, Yanghwi found himself standing inside the desolate ravine where he had once journeyed beside his sworn brother, Chudal.
“Boss, why are you staring at me like that?”
He was greeted by the otter-like visage of his sworn brother, Baekri Chudal.
Chudal suddenly cried out, as though striking upon the truth.
“You’re cooking up another scheme to mess with me, aren’t you? That’s just cruel!”
What ought he to utter? That he had yearned to see him again?
Or seek forgiveness for failing to keep him alive?
Neither felt right.
A smirk broke across Yanghwi’s lips, and he gave Chudal a casual shove on the breast.
“Rascal. Your elder brother will be coming to collect you before long.”
“What? Collect me? I’m standing right next to you, so what kind of nonsense is that?”
“A matter far beyond the wits of a trivial, hundred-li shrimp like you.”
“Boss! I knew it! Do you get that much joy out of picking on m—gack!”
Without a whisper of warning, eleven veiled assassins emerged like phantoms from the haze.
At their vanguard stood Namgung Cheonyeong, driving his steel directly through Chudal’s chest.
“Guh, gah… ack…! Boss…”
A torrent of crimson gushed from Chudal’s lips.
His wide, trembling eyes locked onto Yanghwi’s gaze.
“Why… why couldn’t you… cough, keep me safe…”
The truest brother-in-arms he had ever encountered across his former existence.
The sworn brother with whom he had shared such easy kinship that they had sealed their bond over full cups.
“My end… is on your head, cough… You had better not lag behind me into the grave…”
Chudal burned with bitter malice toward Yanghwi.
His dying gasps were laced with venomous spite.
…And yet.
Yanghwi merely beamed.
Whatever spite a hundred-li squirt spat mattered little to him; he was genuinely thrilled to gaze upon that beloved face after an eternity apart.
Still, Lady Sound Empress possesses a truly spiteful streak of her own.
Musing thus, Yanghwi tossed a flippant retort toward Chudal’s corpse.
“You fool, your demise is entirely because you’re only worth a hundred li. I carved an escape path for you, so why did you manage to get cornered? Because of your blundering…”
I flew into such a blind fury that I perished seeking your vengeance.
Had I simply fled, I might have lived on.
Then again, turning back the wheel of time proved to be a magnificent windfall in the end.
“You have my condolences, Greatest Sword Among Wanderers.”
Namgung Cheonyeong flicked his blade to the side, tossing Chudal’s lifeless shell aside.
Sometime during the exchange, he had stripped away his veil, revealing an exceptionally somber countenance.
“Your natural gifts pose too great a peril. We cannot permit the Baek house to rise unchecked.”
Hearing that proclamation in his previous existence had sickened him with revulsion, but the present moment was entirely different.
His perspective had shifted, and his ground was secure.
At this very second, an electrifying thrill and an unshakeable conviction swelled within Yanghwi.
“Indeed, my talent is somewhat dangerous. Potent enough to glance past the greatest under heaven and seize the title of the greatest of all time.”
“Have you abandoned all modesty for sheer insolence?”
“Spare me the pretense. If I weren’t that terrifying, why would the Great Namgung, the apex lineage under heaven, stoop to cowardly assassination? Does that noble family name not burn your tongue?”
“…”
“No matter. You are all corpses already.”
He possessed the innate genius to climb from an insignificant, third-rate hereditary martial art straight to the apex realm.
The stature of a grandmaster, so immense that the noble house of Namgung, the unrivaled power under heaven in those days, had deployed an ambush just to silence him.
And on top of that foundation, he had turned back the river of time.
“Scrub your throats clean and wait for me. In this lifetime, you will be stripped of your noble mantle, let alone your reign as the greatest clan under heaven.”
He held utter confidence in bringing that destiny to pass.
To cement that fate, he had been toiling incessantly since the hour of his temporal return.
“I have already swallowed half of Ak’an County into my palm. Whispers abound that a sleeping dragon is coiling within the Baek Estate. Which makes me wonder—do you hounds set out to butcher hidden dragons as well?”
“Without hesitation. We purge every existence that threatens the main house.”
“More hot air.”
A breath of derision slipped past his lips. He was acutely aware that such a thing would never occur.
From the second he woke in the past, Yanghwi had flaunted his prowess openly and conducted himself far beyond his tender years.
Though intended to secure the utmost advantage for his clan, his deeds had been unmistakably brazen.
The reason he paid no heed to the watchful eyes of the preeminent houses was remarkably simple.
“You haughty Namgung bastards, peering down your arrogant noses, would never deign to notice a sleeping dragon taking root inside a third-rate martial clan.”
In his prior existence, Yanghwi had drifted across the land as an unmoored vagrant.
Throughout those wandering years, he had studied the mannerisms of countless prominent sects and noble houses, leaving him certain of one truth.
Those self-absorbed aristocrats from illustrious lineages would never waste a second glance on a lowly, third-rate martial clan.
Of course, harboring that exact belief back then is how I ended up ambushed from behind by the Namgung noble house.
Yet this lifetime differed fundamentally. He had already established two absolute safeguards.
Zhuge Seon, the young patriarch of the Zhuge family and his uncle-by-oath, who would refuse the path of isolated seclusion this time around.
The Wave-Piercing Sound Empress, one of the Ten Paragons Under Heaven, who had granted him permission to claim her as master, even if only as an outer lay disciple.
It remained an improbable scenario, but even should the Namgung noble house cast its gaze upon his clan, they could not act with impunity.
Furthermore, the sole cause behind their prior ambush was the simple fact that he had crossed into the apex realm.
A first-rate master could claim supremacy across an entire county.
Advancing into the apex realm, however, meant one’s martial reputation reverberated through a whole province, earning the genuine title of a master.
And what stood beyond the gate of the apex realm?
A grandmaster whose name shook an entire territory. A sovereign entity capable of establishing an entire sect and seizing absolute dominion over a grand metropolis.
That reality alone had provoked the Namgung noble house into ambushing Yanghwi in his previous life.
The Greatest Sword Among Wanderers, who had achieved the unfathomable miracle of stepping into the grandmaster tier armed only with third-rate martial arts.
All done to ensure a prodigy rivaling Sambong the True Man—who established the Wudang Sect starting from the Three Powers Sword Technique—would never plant roots in Jiangxi Province, right on the border of their ancestral domain in Anhui.
“Enough of this idle posturing. Let us begin.”
Yanghwi swept a calm gaze over the eleven Namgung swordsmen arrayed before him, weapons drawn beneath the command of Namgung Cheonyeong.
The scenario was drifting away from the end of his prior existence. In fact, it was turning considerably more vicious.
At this rate, am I truly expected to cut through eleven adversaries at once, with Namgung Cheonyeong leading the charge?
Lady Sound Empress, I recognize your desire to probe a disciple’s spine by conjuring old ghosts, but is this not excessive?
He grasped her intent: to discover whether a pupil held the indomitable battle resolve to refuse defeat even after being shattered.
Yet set at this severity, Seolha could never hope to endure, even should he prevail.
“Careful now!”
Twisting on his heel, Yanghwi deflected a sudden strike from a veiled assailant and cleaved the man’s skull from his shoulders in one fluid arc.
“Striking while someone’s back is turned? Is that how you conduct yourselves?”
“The disgrace belongs entirely to the fool who drops his guard, does it not?”
“A fair assessment.”
Yanghwi whipped his arm forward, hurtling his blade across the space to bury it deep into the brow of a distant assassin who had grown careless.
“Make an error, and you forfeit your life. Would you not agree, Namgung Cheonyeong?”
“You have surrendered your steel. Exactly a year from this day shall be the rites for your spirit.”
“We shall see about that.”
The remaining fighters converged as one. Yanghwi caught the oncoming edge of the nearest blade between his bare fingers.
Flesh had met tempered steel directly, an exchange that should have sheared his palms to bone.
Yet before a single eye could follow, the weapon slipped free from the assassin’s grip, settling effortlessly into Yanghwi’s hand.
“Empty-handed blade seizure!”
Catching the panicked shout of an assassin, Yanghwi carved the steel through the air.
Slash!
A single horizontal sweep sent two severed heads tumbling into the dirt, forcing the surviving fighters to retreat and reform their lines.
Observing their hesitation, Yanghwi rested the captured weapon casually upon his shoulder.
“Namgung Cheonyeong. Quit lingering on the edges and coordinate their assault with yourself at the vanguard. Otherwise, not a single one of you will walk out of here alive.”
“…”
Namgung Cheonyeong unsheathed his sword, unleashing an eruptive tempest of aura.
The pressure exerted far outstripped an ordinary surge of martial aura.
The stifling weight descended as if Namgung Cheonyeong had embodied the boundless heavens themselves, bearing down to crush the earth.
“Well now. It has been quite a while since I last felt this weight.”
Within his lower dantian, a colossal, refined reservoir of Harmonious Heaven qi, entirely distinct from his present youthful physique, surged into motion.
Nor was that the end of it.
Inside the middle dantian resting at his heart, primordial qi coiled like a slumbering dragon before racing through his meridians.
Meanwhile, at the Yintang acupoint within his upper dantian, the martial image Yanghwi had forged manifested as unadulterated power.
The qi of mental image, also revered as the qi of intent.
A domain of absolute mastery accessible only to those who had surpassed the absolute ceiling of the apex realm—the mortal threshold—and illuminated their upper dantian.
“In that previous existence, I recall remarking on something similar. That the Emperor’s Sword Form would serve as an exceptional whetstone for the Hundred and Eight Heaven-Splitting Swords.”
The majestic mental image rolling off Namgung Cheonyeong carried the supreme, untouchable authority of a sovereign.
Confronting that imperial might, Yanghwi unleashed his own qi of intent.
His pressure expanded with such ferocity that it refused to surrender an inch of ground to the celestial projection the Great Namgung had refined through centuries of unbroken lineage.
“T-This cannot be…!“
“What, are you astonished that a humble wanderer refuses to bend before the sky of Namgung?”
“Such a feat is utterly impossible!”
Ah, that familiar cry. He had absorbed those precise words in his past life.
Back then, Namgung Cheonyeong had dispatched his retainers to hunt down Chudal, seeking a lone duel to the death with him.
Even in that bygone era, he had stood paralyzed with shock when Yanghwi’s internal domain met his own without wavering.
“Where in this wide world does the word impossible hold weight, you brat?”
Yanghwi grinned. Silken threads of sword qi began weaving around his steel, binding tightly strand by strand.
What took form was the manifestation of pure materialization, far beyond a basic condensing of internal force.
It stood as absolute proof that he had unified body, qi, and spirit, unsealed all three dantians, and stepped completely into the apex realm.
It was nothing less than sword energy.
“Now then, take a taste of true sword energy!”
Shrouded in a brilliant mantle of white sword energy, Yanghwi’s weapon plunged toward Namgung Cheonyeong’s vital center.
Reacting instantly, Namgung Cheonyeong unleashed a counterstroke suffused with the azure hue of the heavens, yet…
CLANG!
The instant the arts collided, Namgung Cheonyeong recoiled in absolute terror as his brilliant blade-light was fractured and sheared away.
“How can this happen!”
Unlike mere sword qi, which arose from marshaling internal force through the harmony of will and energy…
The tier of sword energy demanded that a warrior compress sword qi through the power of intent over and over until it crystallized into tangible physical reality.
To put it plainly, the resilience of sword energy was directly bound to the absolute conviction of one’s intent.
“Slightly different from our former dance, isn’t it, boy?”
A mocking smirk touched Yanghwi’s lips.
During their previous life, the sword energy between Yanghwi and Namgung Cheonyeong had clashed on equal footing.
Yet enriched by the deep realizations gained from walking through this renewed existence, his refined sword energy held clear dominance over Namgung Cheonyeong’s martial intent.
“Come, let us finish this without pointless delays. Seolha is still waiting for my return on the other side.”
“Khk!”
As Yanghwi’s battle pressure surged to towering heights, Namgung Cheonyeong forced his own internal reserves to the brink in response.
Torrents of spiritual weight and the qi of intent churned across the expanse.
The two forces crashed together, casting vastly contrasting mental projections across the clearing.
Fixing his eyes upon Namgung Cheonyeong’s presence, which mirrored a vast, boundless azure vault, Yanghwi smirked once more.
“In this life, I shall etch it into your soul. The blade of the Baek house that blots out the azure sky.”
Every sword doctrine strived to pour the wielder’s soul into the edge, pursuing its own singular Dao.
The sword of the Huashan Sect reached for an exquisite elegance that mirrored a solitary plum blossom in bloom.
The sword of the Namgung noble house walked a lofty, unyielding path, looking upon creation like the high heavens themselves.
And the sword of the Baek house…
Was Heaven-Covering.
SKREEEEEEE—!
The piercing shriek of a white hawk swept across the world, swallowing everything whole.
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