My Father Is the Number One Under Heaven - Chapter 128

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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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Chapter 128. How He Became Such a Monster
“My love…!”
A woman hurried toward Dang Jin-woo just as he pushed open the door to enter.
“Did you truly mean it? That if we cannot capture him alive, it is permissible to kill him?”
She was a middle-aged woman bearing the unmistakable marks of illness.
Her eyes, already brimming with tears, trembled as she spoke through a voice thick with sorrow.
This was the Sacheon Dang Estate. The room belonged to Hwang A-gyeong, wife of the Clan Patriarch Dang Jin-woo.
She had been frail from birth and had long been fighting a losing battle against sickness.
Hearing that his bedridden wife was searching for him desperately, Dang Jin-woo had come at once.
Dang Jin-woo regarded his wife looking up at him and gave a slow nod, his expression utterly unmoved.
“Yes.”
“Ah… ah…”
Having heard the confirmation from her husband’s own lips, Hwang A-gyeong staggered backward.
Dang Jin-woo quickly steadied her.
Supported by her husband’s arm, she sank back onto the bed and drew a labored breath.
Her pale lips quivered as she forced out the words with difficulty.
“Is there truly…?”
“………”
“Is there truly no other way?”
“That wretch slaughtered innocent members of the Sacheon Dang household without mercy. And he departed vowing to destroy this family with his own hands.”
There was no wavering in Dang Jin-woo’s voice.
“Ah… oh…”
At last, tears began to fall freely from Hwang A-gyeong’s eyes.
Grasping at her husband’s robe, she bowed her head.
“I’m sorry. It is my fault. It is because I raised him poorly… oh…”
“Do not speak such things. How could this be your responsibility?”
“Oh…”
A pitiful weeping, mingled with anguish and self-reproach, hung low in the room.
“Could you not… reconsider this one more time…?”
“………”
Dang Jin-woo did not answer.
He was ordinarily a devoted husband who would grant his wife’s every wish.
But this time was different.
Dang Gu-hwi had become the enemy of the Sacheon Dang Family.
No matter that he was the son of the current Clan Patriarch—if this matter were not settled definitively, the very foundation of the Sacheon Dang Family might crumble.
This was beyond what a parent could shield and forgive.
Hwang A-gyeong understood his silence and bit down hard on her lip.
She felt the hopelessness of trying to change her husband’s resolve.
Of course, she knew as well.
She knew the magnitude and horror of the crimes her eldest son had committed.
And she understood how desperate her husband’s heart must be in issuing the Execution Order, and how selfish her own plea to stop him must appear.
The situation had long since passed the point of no return, and she had finally to accept it.
Hwang A-gyeong recalled the fierce, resentful light blazing in Dang Gu-hwi’s eyes those nights when she, dragging her ailing body, had come to find him—eyes full of bitter injustice and indignation.
‘My son. What on earth made you become this way?’
Yet perhaps this was a hell of his own making.
She knew well enough the misdeeds of Dang Gu-hwi from his childhood, acts that no amount of counseling or warning could curb.
Now she had to accept it.
The hand clutching at Dang Jin-woo’s robe grew limp and fell away.
“Ah…”
Dang Jin-woo watched his wife bowing her head, her body trembling with sobs, then rose from his seat.
“…Rest now.”
As he left the room, Dang Jin-woo’s clenched fists trembled.
He too was suffering as perhaps no one else was.
He did not fail to understand that his son’s conduct was deeply flawed.
But he had believed that such problems could be improved through teaching, through second chances, through careful guidance and care.
Yet that had been his delusion.
His eldest son, Dang Gu-hwi, was steeped in wickedness far deeper than Dang Jin-woo had ever imagined.
What had gone wrong?
‘No—in the end, it is all because I failed to teach him properly.’
Like his wife, Dang Jin-woo turned his recriminations inward.
It was then.
“Father.”
Dang Mu-jun appeared before him.
Dang Jin-woo steadied his emotions and spoke in an even tone.
“What is it?”
“We’ve located him—my brother.”
Dang Jin-woo’s brow twitched.
Dang Mu-jun quickly continued.
“We have his position. The pursuit teams are closing in and engaging him now.”
“I’ll say it once more—there’s no need to keep him alive.”
“…I understand.”
“Yet they still haven’t finished him?”
“Correct. So it seems.”
“This Demonic Art of his appears to be quite formidable.”
The power Dang Gu-hwi wielded now far exceeded anything he’d possessed even when his body was whole.
He had never been particularly exceptional in Martial Arts compared to Dang Mu-jun.
Ordinarily, he should have struggled to withstand even a single pursuit team alone.
Yet Dang Gu-hwi had already destroyed two of the Sacheon Dang Family’s pursuit teams completely.
So this time, they had sent a force equivalent to four pursuit teams combined.
But even that seemed insufficient.
“I will go myself.”
“I will accompany you.”
At Dang Mu-jun’s words, Dang Jin-woo shook his head.
“No. You stay here.”
“Father.”
“That’s an order.”
“Forgive me, but…I cannot do that.”
For the first time, Dang Mu-jun did not simply bow to his father’s command.
He could not send his father to that place alone.
There had to be something he could do there.
And he did not wish to see his father return alone, hollow, after taking his brother’s life.
It would be agonizing, but he needed to be there with him.
That was why he insisted on following.
Why else would he go to a place where he might have to kill his own brother?
Dang Jin-woo, sensing the resolve in his son’s eyes, let out a heavy sigh and then nodded.
Soon they set out toward where Dang Gu-hwi was.
Remarkably, he was not far away at all.
***
Squelch!
Dang Gu-hwi’s hand pierced straight through the bodies of two Sacheon Dang pursuit team members rushing at him.
“Urgh!”
“Grrk…”
As his hand withdrew with a sickening sound, the two pursuit team members—their abdomens completely skewered—crumpled to the ground.
But their bodies were shriveled, withered as if wrung dry.
As though their very life force had been drained away.
Looking around, countless corpses lay heaped near Dang Gu-hwi, every one of them bearing the same gruesome condition.
“Persistent things. You should never have followed. Tsk, tsk.”
Dang Gu-hwi, his form drenched crimson with blood, laughed with an eerie, twisted sound.
“How did you become such a monster, Crown Prince?”
“Hm? There’s still someone calling me Crown Prince? Now that’s gratifying. Hehehehe.”
Dang Gu-hwi made no effort to wipe the blood dripping from his hand; instead, he slowly brought it to his mouth.
As he licked the blood away, a look of ecstasy seized him, and his body trembled.
“Ahhh…tearing humans apart is such exquisite pleasure. The blood is so sweet. I should have savored this bliss long ago. Hehehehe.”
The sole surviving member of the Sacheon Dang pursuit team stared at the horrific scene, his face drained of all color.
He was undoubtedly an elite warrior of the Sacheon Dang Family, a man seasoned by countless campaigns and battles—yet what unfolded before his eyes now was something he had never witnessed in all his years.
And that opponent was Dang Gu-hwi, the Crown Prince of the Sacheon Dang Family.
The usually fastidious, eccentric man had transformed into this.
‘Is he possessed by a ghost? Or how can a human change so completely?’
Though he had always been cruel by nature, it had never been to this degree.
The Dang Gu-hwi before him now was no longer human—a monster with his humanity utterly obliterated.
Facing such a monster, it was only natural for the body to recoil—a perfectly human response.
Yet he clung to hope, telling himself that other pursuit teams would arrive soon, that he only needed to hold on a little longer.
He had to endure, no matter what.
That was all that occupied his mind now.
Then,
“Ugh? Uaaarggh!”
Suddenly Dang Gu-hwi convulsed in agony, his body beginning to flush a deep crimson.
It was as if human skin had become capable of bleeding red far beyond any natural limit.
But that was far from all.
As Dang Gu-hwi’s frame swelled, his arms stretched to grotesque, impossible lengths.
In moments, he had acquired the bulk of two ordinary men combined, his eyes gleaming black and wet.
The sight was horrifying, uncanny, and deeply unsettling.

“Gh-gh. A monster!”

At that ghastly visage, the lone surviving pursuer’s eyes went wide as saucers.
This was wrong. He had to run. He could never hold against this!
Without a backward glance, he bolted for escape.
But the instant his eyes met Dang Gu-hwi’s by accident, his body turned rigid as stone—he could not move.
“Guhhhh!”
At the sight, Dang Gu-hwi bared a savage grin.

“Well then, let us end you as well.”

Dang Gu-hwi’s form simply dropped through the ground, only to materialize directly before the man.

“Ah, no—”
Crunch.

The man’s head severed before he could even finish his scream, landing with a dull thud on the earth.
As Dang Gu-hwi seized the headless corpse, the flesh shriveled and withered in his grip, desiccating like parchment.
“Kehehehehaha!”
Watching the severed head roll across the ground, Dang Gu-hwi burst into manic laughter.
“These are the elite warriors the Dang Family prides itself on? They’re no better than mayflies. Kehehehe!”
He gave not a moment’s thought to how he—once a cripple—had awakened to command such terrible strength.
He was consumed entirely by this overwhelming power and a strange, insatiable thirst and hunger.
As it always was, humans grew simple before such overwhelming pleasure that it stripped away reason itself.
And when one had been drowning in despair, all the more so!
“It’s not enough. More. I need more.”
Drenched in blood, his eyes gleaming, there was nothing left of the Dang Gu-hwi from before.
Only a nameless beast wearing his face remained.
Driven mad by terrible thirst, he tore through the forest—and a small village came into view.
“Hehehehe. There.”
Dang Gu-hwi licked his crimson tongue across his lips.
***
“Hmm? Where is the young master?”
Peng Do-hwan paused his training and asked O Chae-mu with a puzzled expression.
The night before, he’d had questions about the Wind Dragon Soul Origin Art that he’d wanted to ask while doing separate cultivation, but the young master hadn’t appeared all day.
O Chae-mu wiped the sweat from his brow and replied,
“He had some business and seems to have stepped away for a few days.”
“Is that so? I wonder what it could be.”
“Hard to say. There’s someone who’s been visiting occasionally lately, and after he spoke with them for a moment, he left for somewhere.”
“Well, well! I do hope he’s not off handling some major affair.”
Suddenly Gi-su and Gi-sang interjected with their typical nonsense, and Do-gyeong gave both their heads a very familiar swat.
“Is the young master you lot? Does he go out and come back after handling affairs? Eh? Watch your mouths.”
“No, we were just joking. And besides, the young master could certainly do such a thing. Isn’t that right, everyone?”
“Come now, enough idle talk while the young master is away. Back to training!”
“Yes!”
“What, ignoring us like that?”
Gi-su and Gi-sang were, as always, the recipients of a thorough scolding.
But did they know?
That the twin brothers might be right?
In any case, the Training Ground soon filled with the vigorous cries of the Baeklang Dae members—not dying, precisely, but training with fierce determination.
“Hey, wait. Another one’s passed out here. Quick, get some water!”

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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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