Murim School Record - Chapter 58

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 58: You Cannot Linger Long in Enemy Territory (3)

Everything was in chaos.
Nothing made sense.
Crash!
Wi Ji Gwang’s eyes widened so far they seemed to tear as he watched the Byeonche Hwanyong unfold before him.
He himself had not yet reached the level of mastery in that art.
“Ugh!”
At the sight of Yi Mo Baek’s true face revealed, Wi Ji Gwang’s teeth ground together and he let out a groan of pain.
“Nnngh!”
Gasping, unable to draw breath properly, he exhaled a low grinding moan.
His mind went blank.
The shock was that immense.
Wi Ji Gwang lifted his head.
His body, shattered far worse than it appeared on the surface, made even raising his head a struggle.
Trembling, he forced his gaze upon Yi Mo Baek.
He had always prided himself on being flawless.
He approached everything with the caution of one who tests even a sturdy bridge before crossing.
Yet he had never once suspected that Tan Hwang’s true nature was anything amiss.
There was a saying—the Monkey Falls from the Tree—meaning that even the most skilled can make mistakes. But he had not thought it would happen to him.
Retch!
Wi Ji Gwang spat blood again.
His grandfather, his father, and he himself had served the Mo Yong Clan through three generations.
Yet what came in return was always that position—the second chair.
A fate where he could never become master.
So he had resolved to seize that seat for himself.
He had prepared meticulously, quietly gathering followers and positioning them in key places.
Perhaps heaven itself pitied the Wi Ji Family’s sorrow, for it had arranged for Mo Yong Cheon to fall ill after an assassin’s sudden assault.
And so the Mo Yong Clan became a mountain without an owner.
It was true heaven’s fortune—he could become master without shedding a single drop of blood.
But then an unforeseen variable had appeared.
An External Appointment.
Someone from outside had nominated the next Gaju. Who would have believed it?
He had believed him dead, killed in the forest called Songlim Won, not far below Jinhoe.
With that weight lifted, all that remained was to solidify his foundation more firmly.
External networks, especially, had been nonexistent.
While Mo Yong Cheon’s authority had made it possible to build supporters within the clan itself, dealing with outsiders or other powers had been difficult.
Any such dealings would have been discovered too quickly.
Was it because he had been so starved for allies? Tan Hwang had been the first outsider he had embraced, and in his excitement, Wi Ji Gwang had not even questioned him.
He should have kept a cool head and weighed everything carefully.
Whoosh!
Yi Mo Baek crouched down.
Their eyes were now level.
Drip…
Blood continued to pour from Wi Ji Gwang’s mouth.
Trembling!
Wi Ji Gwang’s face convulsed violently.
Rage pierced the heavens.
Three generations of the Wi Ji Family had served loyally, and now, when he was finally on the verge of taking the master’s seat, it crumbled.
“I… I thought heaven was on my side.”
“I shall erect for the Wi Ji Family a monument to your loyalty toward the Mo Yong Clan.”
“Ghaaaack!”
Blood erupted like a fountain, spraying across the face of Yi Mo Baek as their eyes locked, covering it entirely.
His face was drenched in blood.
Drip!
Patter, patter, patter!
To anyone who did not know the truth, it would appear that Yi Mo Baek was the one bleeding, the droplets falling to the ground like beads.
Hack, hack!
Wi Ji Gwang’s breathing had grown ragged.
His face flushed crimson, and his eyes burned like wildfire.
Then came a sudden show of life returning—the Hoegwang Banjo.
As if burning the final soul before death, he rallied the strength of his entire body.
“Aaaaaaah!”
It sounded like a groan, but it was a cry.
The violent last struggle of a challenger who must collapse with the summit in sight.
It was not only Wi Ji Gwang himself who faltered one step short.
Three generations—grandfather, father, and son—crumbled together.
Such a sorrowful family history.
Shudder, shudder, shudder, shudder!
The body that had trembled so long gradually stilled and went limp.
Though his eyes remained open, Wi Ji Gwang’s breathing had stopped.
Swish.
Yi Mo Baek closed his eyes for him.
He could well imagine what Wi Ji Gwang’s heart must have felt.
Had it been himself, he would have gone completely mad.
Yi Mo Baek rose from his seat, lingering for a moment over the body.
Crash!
The women huddled in the corner were ghastly pale.
“Please… please spare us.”
The courtesans, draped in thin gauze that exposed their bare skin, trembled violently.
Yi Mo Baek’s brow furrowed.
Given the circumstances unfolding, he ought to kill every one of them.
This was not yet information for the outside world to know, and if he let them go, they would certainly spread word of what had happened here.
“Tan Hwang,”
“If you would spare us… if you would only spare us.”
Yi Mo Baek walked to the table Wi Ji Gwang had used and opened a drawer.
It held miscellaneous items. He opened the second drawer and his eyes widened.
Silver Taels lay inside.
Ten bundles of a thousand taels each—a hundred taels per bundle.
Whish!
Yi Mo Baek hurled all ten bundles of silver into the corner where the courtesans huddled.
“Take that and go home to your villages. It means you are not to return to Jinling.”
It was an enormous sum.
The courtesans scrambled over one another to gather up the bundles of silver.
“If I ever see your faces in Jinling again, I will sever your necks without hesitation.”
“We swear we shall never return to Jinling.”
The courtesans fled the chamber without even taking time to change into proper clothes.
As the courtesans departed, Yi Mo Baek vanished from the room.

Yi Mo Baek reappeared at Uhadang, where Elder Jongli Gun was staying.
Deep in the night, Uhadang lay silent.
“Who—cough!”
A guard spotted Yi Mo Baek and cried out, but his skull had already been crushed.
Crack!
The sound of skulls breaking echoed from here and there, then fell silent.
Yi Mo Baek strode into Uhadang.
He had eliminated all the perimeter guards protecting it.
Quiet.
The lit candle suggested Jongli Gun had not yet retired.
Creak.
He opened the door and stepped inside.
Beneath the candlelight, an elderly man sat in meditation pose. He froze upon seeing Yi Mo Baek.
His eyes blinked as though questioning whether he had seen correctly.
The man in his memory—the one at the entrance—was dead.
Dead by his own hand, certainly.
Only the body had never been confirmed.
Jongli Gun rose slowly to his feet.
“You…you are?”
His words trailed away unfinished.
“Who am I?”
The name circled in his mouth but would not come out.
There was reason enough.
Though he had never confirmed the corpse, the circumstances at the time spoke of an attack so absolute, so perfect, that survival was impossible.
First he had sent subordinates to Jinhoe; second, he had struck at Yi Mo Baek and his company while they recovered from their wounds at Songlim Won.
“You seem reluctant to speak my name, unwilling to accept the truth. Allow me to answer in your stead. Yes, I am Yi Mo Baek.”
A sharp intake of breath.
Something clicked in Jongli Gun’s mind, and his eyes widened suddenly.
“Could it be Tan Hwang?”
“They say age dulls the mind, yet yours is sharp enough. Yes, you have guessed correctly. Tan Hwang died by my hand, and I merely wore his guise for a time.”
“What of the Gaju?”
At that moment, footsteps thundered toward them, and a figure burst through the entrance.
“Elder, the Gaju…the Gaju…”
Trembling with urgency, the messenger began his report, then stopped short and turned his head aside.
He had spotted a stranger and froze.
He did not know Yi Mo Baek.
But Yi Mo Baek knew him—the man before him was Bi Ryeong, attendant to Wi Ji Gwang.
Crack!
Yi Mo Baek did not hesitate.
And Bi Ryeong, never expecting such an attack, had no time to dodge—her face met the blow directly.
Thud!
She crumpled to the left, one side of her face caved in completely.
As she writhed on the ground, Yi Mo Baek stepped forward and delivered a vicious kick—a footwork variation of the Baekbo Singyeong, channeled with devastating force.
Crunch!
His right foot drove into her ribs, and a sickening crack echoed through the air.
The sound of bone breaking.
Slam!
Bi Ryeong crashed against the wall and fell, struggling to rise.
But Yi Mo Baek’s kick was mightier than any iron club, and her body could not withstand it.
“Not even…a single exchange of blows…”
She understood she was strong, yet the injustice of it burned.
Shudder.
Bi Ryeong convulsed once, violently, then fell silent.
Yi Mo Baek turned back to Jongli Gun, a smile crossing his lips.
“Wi Ji Gwang is dead.”
Jongli Gun could find no words.
Yi Mo Baek’s martial skill was different.
Not the skill of that time.
Not the Yi Mo Baek who had crumbled before him.
Bi Ryeong, whom they said had lost her mind with grief over Wi Ji Gwang’s death, he had sent away in just two strikes.
Bi Ryeong was a woman trained directly by Mo Yong Cheon himself.
Mo Yong Cheon, the Murim Alliance Master, had deemed his Nominated Disciple worthy of a bodyguard who could match him, and on Wi Ji Gwang’s twentieth birthday, he had presented her as a gift.
Gulp.
Jongli Gun swallowed hard as Yi Mo Baek put the question to him.
“If you follow me, you will live.”
Jongli Gun spoke.
“The first master this old one served was Murim Alliance Master Mo Yong Cheon. I then changed allegiance to the second, Gaju Wi Ji Gwang. But to ask me to shift my loyalty a third time—that is unreasonable. And how could I face the countless disciples of Joongwon?”
Whoosh!
Yi Mo Baek surged forward.
The Bobeop—his movement technique.
He seemed visible, and yet in an instant, a fist was already at arm’s length.
“Agh!”
Jongli Gun let out an involuntary cry.
The speed was so overwhelming that his body reacted before his mind could think.
Swish!
He hastily extended his Ujang.
Crash!
A fist thrown with full force, properly extended, is inevitably a world apart from a palm hastily shoved outward in desperation.
The palm carried no real power behind it.
“Ugh!”
As Jongli Gun staggered backward, Yi Mo Baek’s fists followed like a shadow, raining down one after another.
Thud!
Crack!
Left fist and right fist drove into his chest in succession.
He bounced backward, struck the wall, then came forward again—only to have both fists, left and right, drive into his face.
Splat!
Jongli Gun’s back was against the wall now, his face a mask of blood.
His features were so pulped it looked like watching a smashed piece of fruit.
Yet still he breathed.
Pant, pant, pant, pant, pant!
Someone once said that if you don’t want to die, breathe hard.
Breathe well, and you won’t die.
With his nose crushed, he gasped through his open mouth—Jongli Gun’s last desperate measure to cling to life.
His eyes were gone.
Where his eyes should have been, only blood streamed down.
“Sangjeon Byeokhai they call it… yet in barely a month’s time… those aren’t fists anymore—that’s the Hyeolpo Singyeong technique itself.”
Yi Mo Baek’s Baekbo Singyeong had transformed—utterly, completely.
They were no longer fists.

Once, long ago, there was a man whom an Underworld Emissary had come to claim.
The man resisted so fiercely that the Emissary threw a punch—and the man’s face shattered into fragments.
King Yama questioned the Emissary.

“Where did the face go?”
“He resisted so much, I struck him once, and it crumbled.”
“Does the Emissary not know that his fist wields the Hyeolpo Singyeong technique?”

The work of an Underworld Emissary is arduous and sorrowful.
The dead do not come quietly and obedient.
Please, save me.
Give me just one more chance.
My children are still young. If you let me raise them until they’re fifteen, couldn’t you take me then?
Violence becomes necessary.
To be prepared for such resistance, the Emissaries never neglect their martial training.
The fist they train is the Hyeolpo Singyeong technique.
Among the dead are surely masters who once wielded absolute power in the Jianghu—and to subdue them and drag them forth requires a fist worthy of the task.

“One strike of Hyeolpo Singyeong and they come without fail.”
“When Baekbo Singyeong reaches its height, there is nothing it cannot shatter.”

One is the fist of the underworld; the other, the fist of the mortal realm.
The descriptions of their power sound alike, and so for ages there has circulated the rumor that Hyeolpo Singyeong and Baekbo Singyeong are one and the same.
Shaolin says otherwise, yet the two techniques are too similar.

“In some aspects, they are identical.”

So testify those who died and returned.
They saw the Underworld Emissary’s fist in motion—and it looked exactly like Baekbo Singyeong.
Somewhere in Tianzhu stands a temple called Talpa Temple.
It is a congregation of painted demons wearing the mask of a monastery, and its head abbot, Master Rahanda, has perished.
His journey to hell is as certain as sunrise.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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