My Father Is the Number One Under Heaven - Chapter 143
—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————
Chapter 143. Resentment Becomes Poison
“Damn it, damn it, damn it… I’ll never, never forgive them.”
A man continued muttering in a voice filled with hatred.
He was one of the Black Gate Thirteen Division who had picked a fight with Baeklang Dae during the day, wielded his Short Sword, and suffered a severe shoulder wound.
While Gui An-ma-gun, the leader of the Sa-do Alliance, terrified everyone into leaving Baeklang Dae untouched, he had led the Black Gate Thirteen Division to find them, thinking this was finally the moment to prove their worth.
But now it seemed he would be cast out from the Black Gate instead.
And the order came directly from Gui An-ma-gun himself.
‘Your shoulder blade isn’t the only thing broken—the tendons, nerves, and muscles are all damaged beyond recovery. Besides, I can see you’re right-handed. You’ve lost the use of your dominant arm, so you’re worthless to me now… You’re expelled from the Black Gate effective today.’
When he tried to protest, Gui An-ma-gun, irritated by his objection, struck him with a fist that knocked him unconscious and had him dragged away.
Once things reached that point, his comrades vanished as if they’d never known him, leaving his limp body at the Medical Bureau.
‘Bastards.’
His teeth ground together at their indifference.
What loyalty or hope could he seek in a place like this?
Here, even the slightest weakness meant being torn apart or abandoned.
He himself had always been the one doing it.
But now that he faced it himself, despair, humiliation, fury, and resentment washed over him.
They had committed the crime together, yet somehow he alone bore all the blame for it.
His skills had only recently been recognized, and he was scheduled to transfer to the Black Gate’s upper ranks soon.
He had believed a brilliant future lay before him.
But it all vanished like a mirage.
He felt utterly abandoned.
The injustice of it nearly drove him mad.
Yet besides grinding his teeth like this, there was nothing he could do.
What could a body like his accomplish anymore?
Gui An-ma-gun’s order for his expulsion from the Black Gate wasn’t because of what he and the Thirteen Division had done in seeking out Baeklang Dae, but because of his current condition—he could no longer fight.
He wanted to insist that he would recover somehow, but he could feel it.
It was impossible.
The physicians at the Medical Bureau had said the same thing Gui An-ma-gun did.
Even lifting his arm slightly caused excruciating pain.
Coarse curses flowed endlessly from his lips.
“Damn it! Damn it all! I’ll kill them all! Ahhh!”
That was when it happened.
“Hey. Shut that noise!”
Another member of the Black Gate Thirteen Division, sharing the same room, spat out curses at him in irritation.
“Why so loud when you’re about to leave anyway?”
“What?”
“Just shut your mouth and disappear quietly. Unless you want to die. Got it?”
“Are you talking to me like that?”
A man who had been a subordinate to the injured one within the Black Gate Thirteen Division now bared his teeth at him as if he’d swallowed something foul, and the injured man stared back with a blank expression for a moment.
At that, his opponent smirked and rose to approach him.
He spoke with eyes gleaming maliciously.
“Why so upset? Did you really think I’d grovel before you now that you’ve become a cripple? Huh?”
“You crazy bastard…”
Crack!
The injured man’s head snapped to the side.
His cheek swelled red.
“Don’t run your mouth. Say ‘this bastard’ or ‘that bastard’ one more time, and I swear I’ll beat you to death with my own hands. Consider yourself warned.”
“…….”
“Look at that expression. You still don’t get the situation? Or what—want me to smash your other shoulder too? Make sure you can’t even feed yourself for the rest of your life? Eyes down, now.”
In truth, the injured man had once been the strongest among the Black Gate Thirteen Division.
Before the shoulder wound, he certainly was.
But with today’s injury, he was no longer a match for his fellow Black Gate Thirteen Division members.
He couldn’t even properly grip a sword—what more was there to say?
He, whose positions had completely reversed with his former tormentor, had no choice but to accept reality.
He averted his gaze and quietly nodded.
“Yeah, that’s right. Hehehehe.”
His opponent, seeing him now thoroughly humiliated, laughed mockingly before lying back down on his own mat.
The injured man soon rose and left the room.
“Cripple.”
A mocking voice reached him once more from behind.
Grind.
His teeth clenched against an indignation and shame he could no longer contain.
‘Damn it all!’
He found himself in the Training Ground—empty now, darkening as dusk fell.
A place used only by the Black Gate Thirteen Division.
“Aaaahhhhh!”
There, with bloodshot eyes, he hurled curses into the void.
His body trembled with the force of his fury.
How had it come to this? All he’d wanted was…
Now that it had, his resentment had multiplied beyond counting.
There was Gui An-ma-gun, who’d issued the order for his exile. There were his comrades in the Black Gate Thirteen Division, who’d turned their backs as though waiting for precisely this ruin to befall him.
And there was the Alliance Leader himself, who’d summoned those cursed orthodox sects into the Sa-do Alliance.
But most of all—
Grind.
Those who’d reduced him to this broken thing.
‘Baeklang Dae….’
Especially those twin bastards who’d shattered his shoulders—them he could never forgive.
In truth, the seeds of all this lay with him and the Black Gate Thirteen Division, yet he found himself blaming the Baeklang Dae instead, nursing his grievance against them.
Had he possessed such discernment from the start, none of this would have happened.
But as it stood, there was nothing left for him to do.
Only this—spewing curses into the empty night, as he was doing now.
“I’ll kill them all. Every last one of them. Tear them to pieces! Ahhhhh!”
Like a madman, he raged through the empty Training Ground, unleashing every curse he could summon.
Then, in that moment—
“Hmm. You’ve worked yourself into quite a poison, haven’t you?”
“Huh!”
Someone had appeared behind him without warning.
He hadn’t sensed the approach at all.
“How convenient.”
“Who… who are you?”
He turned, and there stood a face he knew all too well.
No—a face that no one belonging to the Sa-do Alliance could fail to recognize.
The man stared at him with a blank expression, and the newcomer spoke.
His smile was unsettling in its thickness.
“Do you hunger for power?”
The man’s pupils dilated.
***
Yeo Un-hwi stole out of the Sa-do Alliance building and walked through the city.
Hunan. Yueyang.
Though the hour was late, the city’s beauty held his gaze fully.
He found himself thinking how much he’d like to bring his wife and daughter here someday to see this very scene—such was the loveliness of the place.
As he wandered through the streets in this contemplative state, he came to stand at the edge of a quiet thoroughfare.
And as though the moment had been anticipated, someone appeared and addressed him with perfect naturalness.
A middle-aged man with a round, open face.
“It’s an honor to meet the person I’ve heard so much about.”
Yeo Un-hwi smiled faintly.
“You know me?”
“Of course. How could I not recognize our most valued patron at Hao Wen?”
The man grinned with easy confidence.
Yet beneath those narrow eyes, a keenness flickered that suggested his round demeanor was only part of the truth.
He continued without pause.
“Moreover, didn’t you recently force our Hao Wen to deploy the Heaven Net Capture Formation—quite out of character for us?”
“You’re well-informed.”
“I was hastily pressed into service for it myself. Between you and me, there were no small amount of complaints at the time. Of course, the moment word went around that compensation would be paid to all participants, everyone’s mouths turned up at the corners.”
Yeo Un-hwi chuckled softly.
That made sense.
A fairly substantial sum had gone to each person involved.
But it hadn’t been money wasted.
Jin So-baek and Hao Wen had proven themselves more capable than even Yeo Un-hwi’s considerable expectations.
“Ha, I do tend to ramble on with introductions, don’t I? Here it is.”
He handed the letter to Yeo Un-hwi at once.
“Much obliged.”
“Think nothing of it. Do use our services whenever you have need.”
“I shall.”
With those words, Yeo Un-hwi vanished in an instant.
Like wind itself.
“Goodness! I…”
The man’s mouth fell open without his realizing it.
The Divine Method on display was nothing short of astonishing.
It bore no comparison to any Lightness Martial Arts he had witnessed in all his years.
Now he found himself genuinely curious about who this person truly was.
So much so that he almost wanted to violate Hao Wen’s first iron rule—that no one save the proprietor should take interest in a client’s particulars.
Of course, that was merely wishful thinking.
***
Before long, Yeo Un-hwi stood upon a height from which the city’s contours spread out below him like a map.
He settled casually onto a rock of suitable height and withdrew the letter given to him by the man, beginning to read.
It was a letter that had come from Jin So-baek.
The letter contained the various pieces of information that Yeo Un-hwi had asked him to look into.
The perpetually suspicious movements of the Murim League, the recently chaotic atmosphere within the Demonic Sect, and the circumstances of the Ten Great Masters and Twelve Supremes insofar as he could ascertain them.
Beyond that, Jin So-baek relayed that he was keeping constant watch over whether anything unusual was occurring at the Peng Estate in Hebei.
And he gave a brief account of what he had observed there.
From reading those few brief lines, the scene painted itself vividly before his eyes.
Yul-i playing freely in the beautiful garden, his wife and mother-in-law looking on with pleased smiles.
His father-in-law and the old elder still bickering over Yul-i as ever, with Peng Sejin caught awkwardly in the middle, his face troubled. And the martial masters and servants of the Peng Estate in Hebei greeting him warmly.
At the thought of them all, Yeo Un-hwi found a smile blooming unbidden across his face.
He longed to return.
To Hebei.
In truth, he had felt this way from the moment he set out on the road toward this place.
For Yeo Un-hwi, Yul-i and his wife Peng Seo-yeon were beings he could gaze upon forever and yet never tire of gazing upon.
And now, grateful and heartened by all that the Peng Estate in Hebei—which loved and cherished Yul-i and Peng Seo-yeon—had become to him.
He had come to understand the weight of the word “precious” with an aching clarity.
In truth, he had not been eager to come to the Sa-do Alliance.
But through his encounter with the Namgoong Clan—whom he had met through the matter of the Absolute Demon—Yeo Un-hwi had felt something stirring within him.
And though he stood to gain little from it himself, he had felt a strange kinship with Huk Mu-je, who had even risked his own injury to ask for a meeting with Baeklang Dae.
Though the ways in which they honored and remembered their departed families differed, one truth was shared between them.
They both loved their families more than anyone else could.
It was this kinship that had brought him on this distant journey.
Moreover, it would have been difficult to refuse the request of Huk Mu-je, one of the Twelve Supremes, when he pressed so earnestly.
And he was someone Yeo Un-hwi had always known he would eventually meet.
Yet his desire to return quickly could not be denied.
Once this matter was settled, Yeo Un-hwi resolved to spend a long while contentedly in his family’s company.
Yes. That day was not far off now.
Yeo Un-hwi rose to his feet with a small smile.
And soon he returned to the Sa-do Alliance.
But in this moment, he could not have imagined
what fate awaited him and Baeklang Dae in the days to come.
—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————