North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 107

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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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107. The Third Blade Mark

“It wasn’t a clean cut.”
Aelak spoke low.
“This is… crushed. A Sword Master’s blade.”
The words fell softly onto the ash.
No one heard them. It was deep night, and he was alone.
On his knee lay Karani’s wooden doll.
The campfire had burned down to embers, their red glow trembling slowly across the doll’s wooden shoulder.
The third among eight blade marks.
The thick, gouged wound stood clearest in the ashen light.
Five breaths rose from a distance away.
Garkan slept with a snoring rumble. Harku tossed, still clutching his Dual Curved Swords. Arko too… and Serian in one corner… all deep in sleep except Taikan, who’d gone to scout.
Only Aelak remained awake.
He stared at the blade mark without blinking.
“If it were a sword, it would be thin.”
He spoke as if to himself.
“One line, clean, swift. This is different. A blade.”
The edges of the mark were crushed and mangled. Not sliced cleanly through, but torn and pulped where the blade edge had forced its way in.
A blade pressed down with force.
Pure Overwhelming Force with no Finesse Technique—brute Sword Method.
“He crushed Karani’s flesh.”
Those words fell onto the ash.
The third one who’d carved into Karani—unforgivable.
He was not a man who killed cleanly.
Aelak raised his finger and traced the blade mark slowly.
From where the blade entered to where it ended… the mark deepened, then grew heavier at the finish.
He traced the flow with the joints of his finger, then raised his hand and drew the same arc through empty air. Repeated it several times.
Certainly not a blade that cut with grace.
Shoulder braced, hip braced, one foot planted, all body weight driven to the tip. Such a blade… when his fingertip struck out in the same manner, the crude Sword Method came alive in his hand again.
Whoosh! Crack!
Any flesh it touched would be pulped where it fell.
Yet at the point where the blade tore away from the flesh… where the blade mark looked deepest… his fingertip caught on something.
Inside the thick mark, a thin line ran like a scratch—a trace as if the same blade had scored the inside a second time.
“It should’ve ended in one exchange, but this…”
He spoke low. But he couldn’t finish the thought.
“It’s not as if the blade was used twice.”
His hand stilled.
He stared at the wound on the wooden doll. He considered what that faint second line carved within might mean. But he could not find the answer.
Aelak pulled the doll closer to his chest.
Until the embers faded completely and the eastern ridge turned ashen gray, Aelak kept his eyes on that mark, the doll resting on his knee.

The next morning, Taikan returned.
Where he’d gone through the night—his whole body caked in sweat and dust—he spoke before even brushing the dirt from his clothes.
“In the Central Plains, there’s no shortage of those who stubbornly favor only Overwhelming Force blade work.”
“How many?”
Aelak asked.
“By name, five or six. They’re scattered across the Central Plains too, so tracking just these would take forty, fifty years.”
Taikan had never brought false information.
If he said five or six, there would be no fewer.
“The deeper the blade sinks in, the worse the crushing.”
“That detail… rumors couldn’t catch it.”
Taikan answered.
“I also asked who the strongest was, but it differs by account. Everyone fears most what they’ve seen with their own eyes.”
“One mark, but five or six names.”
Aelak received this quietly.
“Too many candidates.”
Serian fed a dry branch into the fire, adding her thought to the pile.
“We shouldn’t only think about individuals—we need to consider the sects too. There’s more than one faction that pursues the Overwhelming Force Sword Method. There’s more than one that wields the Dominant Blade. And if we include the unorthodox sects, the numbers only grow.”
“So they’re not narrowing down.”
Garkan interjected.
“Far from it. They’re multiplying.”
Serian folded down her fingers one by one.
“Taikan alone brought half a dozen. All of them share one trait—they wield thick, crude blades. But what if the one who went to the North Sea isn’t the greatest swordsman under heaven? What if he uses that kind of blade not out of cruelty, but because his martial skill falls short?”
Harku sat with his Dual Curved Swords across his lap, letting out a low laugh.
“We can’t pin down even one, yet the ones to kill keep multiplying. Hunting where the prey breeds itself—now that’s not a bad hunt.”
“Your mouth’s too loose, and that’s a problem!”
Garkan cuffed Harku on the head.
Harku shrugged.
The remark was flippant, yet beneath his eyes lay a quiet gleam of bloodlust.
More users of the Overwhelming Force Sword Method meant more targets to kill—and for Harku, that was no bad news.
No thread appeared that would narrow it down to a single name.
“Then we’ll use our feet to narrow it down.”
Aelak rose to his feet.
The five of them packed their things at those words.

Over the following days, they moved to narrow the candidates. On the road, they questioned every martial warrior they met; in inns, every swordsman—all of them about Blade Masters who wielded the Overwhelming Force Sword Method.
At one martial estate, a scarred old man sat on the threshold, sharpening a blade.
Serian asked him about Blade Masters who used thick, crude swords.
“Thick blades, you say.”
The old man stopped his whetstone.
“Such men aren’t rare. Just in the North Region, there must be a dozen who wield the Dominant Blade.”
“We mean someone who crushes a man in a single clash.”
Serian pressed further.
“Not cutting—crushing. Like grinding something to dust…”
The old man’s eyes narrowed for a moment.
“If you’re asking like that, you’re hunting an unorthodox sect member. Orthodox Dominant Blade practitioners cut—they don’t crush. Crushing is the work of a killer.”
“And his name?”
“I don’t know names. Men like that don’t sell their names. They take their blade’s price and vanish.”
Aelak’s steps faltered.
He reached out to touch the Wooden Doll lashed to the saddle, his eyes flaring with sudden light.
“Unorthodox. Solitary.”
A resolve to narrow the killer to the unorthodox path.
But this resolve had problems. A patriarch of an orthodox great sect like the Je-gal Family Head would never shake hands with an unorthodox practitioner to strike down a single person.
There was a second problem too. An orthodox master might deliberately feign cruel methods to conceal their identity.
Setting aside all such complications, they narrowed the net to unorthodox practitioners—not sect members, but those who wandered alone.
Aelak’s words were only two short phrases, yet half the candidates fell away right then.
“It’s narrowing down.”
Garkan said.
“We’ve crossed off all the orthodox Dominant Blade users.”
Still, those with similar blade habits remained caught in the net.

“He died two years ago, they say.”
Taikan returned from an inn and crossed one name off the list.
“Next.”
“This one wields a thick blade, but he’s not unorthodox. He comes from a noble sect.”
“He didn’t cut down Karani.”
Aelak cut him off.
“Erase him.”
“There’s one more whose blade habit matches.”
Taikan paused.
“But his whereabouts are unclear.”
“Where did he disappear to?”
“Three years ago he destroyed an entire Way Station in the North Region and vanished. No trace of him since.”
Aelak drew the Wooden Doll close, running his fingertips along the Blade Mark. He traced the flow of the scar where it thickened and grew heavy again at the end, then stopped his fingers on a thin line deeper within.
“Ask whether the one who destroyed the Way Station left that thin line inside.”
One who cast no shadow left no trail to follow.
Garkan clicked his tongue.
“Finding a single person is proving remarkably difficult.”
Serian exhaled slowly.
“At this rate we’re not narrowing the field—we’re expanding it. If we keep chasing him through brute force like this, word could reach his ears.”
“Let the word reach him.”
Aelak spoke.
“He cannot run.”
With each searcher, one possibility fell away. The pursuit circled endlessly. Yet Aelak understood a simple truth: eliminate the impossible one by one, and only the truth remains.
“We continue searching.”

Aelak drew out the wooden doll again, studying the wound marks.
The pattern was unmistakable.
A swordsman who wielded a blade like this—this was no imitation, no disguise. He had crushed flesh with genuine pleasure, with joy.
It would have been the cruelest of all the wounds Karani suffered.
This man was certainly of the Unorthodox Path. He had ample experience killing people with exquisite suffering.
‘I will catch you. I swear it.’
He might spend a lifetime wandering and never grasp even a thread of his enemy’s robe. The frustration weighed on his chest, but he paid it no mind.
He bound the doll to the saddle once more and turned his horse’s head to the road.
“Are we drawing closer, Clan Leader?”
Harku asked, wiping his blade.
“The circle tightens.”
Aelak answered tersely.
“This blade is singular. A distinguishing mark will emerge.”
“But there are so many swords like it now…”
“Then we discard them one by one, as we have been. In the end, only one remains.”
Harku fell silent.
The Clan Leader always spoke that way—sparse, economical with words. Yet those few words contained a path forward.

The breakthrough came from the Cheok siblings.
Evening camp. As Cheok Ha-rin steeped tea, her eyes caught the shoulder of the wooden doll that Aelak had set beside his knee, and she glanced toward it sidelong.
Sister Cheok Ha-rin poured the water, and brother Cheok Mu-yeong sat beside her, receiving the cup she offered.
Her gaze lingered on the blade marks.
“If a swordsman pushes forward with Overwhelming Force alone…”
Her words trailed away.
She closed her mouth.
The words had slipped out unbidden, yet that single phrase captured precisely the nature of those deep, brutal blade marks.
“Sister.”
Cheok Mu-yeong gently interrupted.
“Pour the tea.”
“…Yes.”
Cheok Ha-rin pretended ignorance and poured again.
Cheok Mu-yeong’s gentle word—in truth, it was a command to silence.
She understood, yet feigned not to.
Cheok Mu-yeong set down his teacup slowly. He glanced briefly toward the embers, let his eyes trace the tips of his sister’s fingers for a moment, then withdrew his gaze.
His eyes searched the distance briefly, then returned to the fire.
He opened his mouth.
“About those blade marks.”
Aelak turned his head.
“If a swordsman relies solely on Overwhelming Force and crushes an opponent in a single exchange, there is one man who comes to mind.”
“Speak.”
“If we align with the judgment of an Unorthodox Path swordsman operating alone—a man bound to no sect, carving his own way with the blade—in truth, such men are not numerous in the Central Plains.”
His tone was measured, collaborative. Yet his delivery held an extra smoothness, an unspoken confidence.
Aelak’s gray eyes rested briefly on Cheok Mu-yeong.
The look carried a silent pressure: ‘Continue.’
Thick. Crushing. A single decisive stroke.
Coincidence? The campfire flickered once.
“The name.”
A name fell clearly from Cheok Mu-yeong’s lips.
“Gwang-jin of the Scarlet Blood Blade. He is infamous as a vicious swordsman—so wild that even the Martial Alliance suffers greatly from his existence.”
An Evil Sect wanderer with the blade.
A Sword Method that crushes flesh in a single exchange—Overwhelming Force.
The pursuit, which had been cluttered with too many suspects and no clear path forward, suddenly narrowed to a single name.
Aelak did not accept the name at once. Only after settling his fingertip along the fine groove carved within the wooden doll’s blade mark did he lift his eyes.
Aelak’s grey eyes lingered for one more breath above Cheok Mu-yeong’s composed face, then dropped toward the figure, his fingertip tracing the blade mark.
“Gwang-jin…”
Garkan turned the name over on his tongue.
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“He is unknown in the North,” Cheok Mu-yeong replied.
He paused a breath before continuing.
“He moves only along the borderlands of the North Region. His murders are brutal, but he acts with great caution, so few know his name. He is more famous among the local people than among martial warriors—as an Evil Spirit.”
Taikan lifted his dust-covered eyes to Cheok Mu-yeong.
“That’s a name I couldn’t find even after digging everywhere, and you pinpoint it without warning. Ha!”
“The North Region. That’s far.”
“But we have to go, don’t we?”
Harku laughed, sheathing his sword.

The party took up the trail of that name.
“Where Gwang-jin is likely to be.”
He asked Taikan.
“This one cannot resist killing. We must follow the traces of murder. He does not kill martial warriors—only ordinary people, selecting those who suit his taste.”
“Lead the way.”
Aelak turned his horse’s head northward. Five followed behind him.
They had found a place worth following the third blade mark.

Where the party had been, only cold ash and trampled grass remained. As the sound of hoofbeats faded beyond the ridge, only the whisper of grass filled the ravine.
On the ridge behind them, at some distance, a shadow came to a halt.
The one who had left traces at every crossroads leading to the Je-gal Family. The very shadow that had drawn the party’s steps to the Je-gal estate.
Without footfall or breath, the shadow lay motionless in the grass-shade of the ridge.
The shadow watched the party turn northward.
As the party’s direction inclined toward the North Region, the shadow moved a single step in the same direction.
No one saw the shadow. Not even Aelak.

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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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