North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 108

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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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108. The Empty Room

Crash!
The door splintered inward.
The room was empty.

It was half a day ago when Taikan had pinpointed this Gorge.
The scent clinging to the path, the marks where a blade’s edge had brushed grass, the dried footprints in earth—he had woven it all into a single thread and followed it here.
“Here it is, Clan Leader.”
He pointed toward the remote Gorge beyond the bend.
“The scent of steel carries to that Ridge. There—where it’s collapsed—that’s his lair. Not a house where people live, but more like a burrow to hide in.”
“He spreads no rumors. He has no desire to elevate his name or reputation. So once he slips away, he’s hard to find.”
“The earth doesn’t lie. My eyes read the earth with precision.”
Taikan spoke with certainty.
A man who traveled alone, unbanded by faction.
The lair they sought seemed—no, it was perfectly suited for such a man to lay low and escape the gaze of the world.

The group rounded the bend.
Garkan paused before the dwelling’s entrance.
Beyond the closed door, the Blade Wanderer might be waiting with sword drawn. As Garkan pressed against the door frame, Harku’s hand settled on the grip of his Dual Curved Blades behind him.
Harku grinned and spoke.
“I hope he’s inside. It’d be a shame if we came up empty.”
“Quiet.”
Garkan’s voice fell low and sharp.
Cheok Ha-rin’s fingers found Cheok Mu-yeong’s sleeve, then released it without thinking.
On either side of a single door stood men readied to kill and readied to die.
It was a sight utterly foreign to her.
Crack!
The weathered wood split. The bar snapped, and the door fell inward.
Garkan shouldered his way through.
Beyond lay shadow and emptiness. No one was there.
They had expected a sword-wielding Blade Wanderer to burst forth—but there was no one.
The tension that had coiled in every shoulder drained away.
Harku kicked the broken door aside with his foot.
“Well, well. We went to all the trouble of smashing the door, and the owner’s fled. Hospitality’s clearly not his strong suit.”
No one laughed. Yet the oppressive silence lifted a little. The youngest’s jest had loosened the elder brothers’ breath.
Serian stepped into the room, her nostrils flaring.
“He’s run. And in a hurry.”
“How can you tell?”
Cheok Ha-rin spoke without thinking, then caught herself at the glint in Cheok Mu-yeong’s eye. But the words were already out. She had to finish.
“There’s the scent of human presence. It seems people were here just moments ago.”
She possessed no natural gift for detecting human scent. Yet since taking the Seol-ryeon-gwa, her sense of smell had grown acute.
Now she could distinguish the scent of people.
“He heard that Je-gal Chan is dead.”
Aelak, arriving late, surveyed the room and spoke quietly.
“He’d have realized it was his turn next. He knew we were coming after him. So he bolted. This one… yes.”
He turned to study the room.
A shelf along one wall tilted askew, and the floor bore the drag marks of something hauled away.
“Search. For anything—any trace. We won’t find a man to interrogate, but the signs he’s left behind will tell us where he ran and how.”
Aelak knelt before the hearth and sifted through the ashes. The surface was cold, but as his fingers dug deeper, warmth still lingered within.
“Half a day. He didn’t extinguish the fire more than half a day ago. He hasn’t gone far.”
“You can tell all that just from touching ash?”
Cheok Ha-rin spoke while watching Cheok Mu-yeong, unable to suppress her curiosity.
“I can.”
Taikan answered briefly.
“The warmth remaining inside means the fire was extinguished not long ago. A calm man would have waited for the ash to cool completely before leaving, or wouldn’t have lit a fire at all. This one couldn’t exercise that restraint.”
Near the threshold, a single strand of sword scabbard string lay scattered on the ground.
Aelak picked it up and examined where it had snapped.
The fibers had been torn away in haste—ripped apart rather than cleanly severed by a blade. The grain was entirely different.
“Ripped away in panic? Heh! He was in quite a hurry.”
He turned the cord over in his hands as he spoke.
“For a Blade Wanderer, his sword is his life. Yet he abandoned his scabbard string like this. He must have been terrified. Are we certain this one actually came from the North Sea? Everything about him screams small-fry.”
Harku remarked.
Garkan stepped forward and examined the cord as well.
“His sword technique speaks of someone ruthless and flawless… yet if a composed man left something like this behind… he’s genuinely trembling. He understands the gap between our martial prowess.”

Cheok Mu-yeong watched in silence.
These men were reading an entire escape in a handful of ash and a single severed string.
He was beginning to understand what it meant to have such opponents as enemies.
‘He shattered the Martial Alliance’s vanguard… and now we proceed in earnest… yet I still haven’t seen his true martial skill.’
Cheok Mu-yeong’s eyes flashed toward Aelak.

Beside the brazier lay a charred scrap of letter, half-consumed by flame.
Aelak unfolded the singed edges.
Though the front and back had turned to ash, a single line of script remained visible in the center.
‘Alone, you cannot endure.’
He could not tell who had sent the letter. But judging from its contents, someone was advising the Blade Wanderer to seek an ally.
“He has no confidence to fight alone,” Aelak said.
He held up the paper for the others to see.
“His flight has purpose. He’s running toward someone—to place himself under their protection.”
“But what good will it do, throwing himself on another’s mercy?”
Garkan took the paper from him.
“And does the man have no pride? A blade that once wandered the entire realm.”
“Fear made him abandon it,” Serian answered quietly.
Her voice carried the weight of understanding.
“He was desperate enough to forsake his sanctuary, even to lose his scabbard string.”
A blade that had trampled the world was being hunted.
Before the hunt had truly begun, the quarry was already crumbling.
Serian’s gaze lingered briefly on the Doll hanging at Aelak’s waist.
Her lips pressed into a thin line.
The third gash carved into that Doll—the deep blade mark it bore—belonged to the sword that trembled here in this Gorge.
“He must be in hell now. A martial warrior who understands his own station—that is true agony. Wouldn’t it be better to know nothing and die grinning in the heat of battle?”
Harku chuckled darkly.
“We should be honored he fears us. And we’ve only killed one man so far.”
Taikan glanced around the empty chamber.
Aelak turned toward the door and spoke.
“We’ve learned all we can here. Taikan, pick up the trail. We’ll have him soon.”
As Cheok Ha-rin heard Aelak’s words, she moved her nose once, twice.
‘The scent is too concentrated in one direction. Is he truly that frightened?’
She kept the thought to herself and said nothing.
Aelak had already moved to the threshold.
She rushed after him, hurrying through the doorway. In that instant… something fine and taut snapped beneath her feet.
Snap.
A thin cord stretched a hand’s breadth high across the threshold caught the top of her foot and severed.
It was the fugitive’s final gambit—a last gift for those who would pursue. If he couldn’t kill them with fear, he had left a trap to kill them in flesh. In that moment,
Crack!
The ceiling beam twisted violently, and two sections of Iron Grating crashed down from within the walls. Two spiked metal shutters, their surfaces bristling like teeth, plummeted directly toward the center of the chamber.
Simultaneously, a Jar on the floor shattered. From its broken pieces, a sickly yellow Poison Powder erupted, swirling up to chest height and choking the air.
“Poison!”
Arko clapped a hand over his nose and shouted.
“Hold your breath! It dissolves flesh!”
Too late. Cheok Ha-rin had already inhaled, and she staggered. Cheok Mu-yeong seized his sister’s arm and yanked her back, but he too sank to his ankles in the Poison Powder.
The Iron Grating was already falling past their heads.
“Move.”
Aelak’s command, sharp as a blade’s edge.
At that single word, the North Sea party understood instinctively what he would do.
Only Cheok Mu-yeong and Cheok Ha-rin were unaware.
Aelak neither dodged nor retreated. Instead, he stepped forward into the very center of the descending iron gratings.
The moment the metal teeth fell toward his shoulders, he thrust his left palm upward to catch the underside of the grating.
Crunch.
It was not the sound of steel crushing a man—it was the sound of a man stopping steel in its tracks.
The weight that should have crushed two people froze solid against his palm. His arm did not even tremble. He twisted his wrist, and the iron grating buckled sideways, crashing into the wall and shattering.
Without turning his body, he drove his fist toward the opposite grating.
Crack! Bang!
The center of the second grating crumpled, torn free along with the beam that supported it.
But before the dust could settle, a sickly yellow poison powder rose up to knee height.
“Gasp!”
Cheok Ha-rin swallowed her scream.
They had said that poison would rot flesh into pulp—yet the man from the North Sea stood in the very heart of it, breathing out as calmly as if taking a stroll. The poison froze to white frost wherever it touched his skin.
The poison powder crystallized into frost with each breath, settling in layers of ice.
Aelak walked slowly through the poison.
Everywhere his feet landed, the yellow vapor hardened into white frost and sank. Behind him, a dry path opened up where he had walked.
At the threshold, he extended his hand to Cheok Mu-yeong and Cheok Ha-rin.
“This way. The ground is frozen solid.”
The siblings stepped onto the frozen path and escaped.

Once outside, Cheok Ha-rin’s legs gave way beneath her.
Cheok Mu-yeong supported his sister with one arm, but his eyes remained fixed on the shattered dwelling, unable to look away.
‘So this is what he’s truly capable of.’
For twenty years, he had lived watching his father wield the blade.
The son of the Supreme Swordmaster of the World had finally encountered something that could be measured against his father.
“He caught the iron grating with his bare hands and broke it. The poison couldn’t touch him—he froze it instead. That man… he could rival Father, couldn’t he? Or perhaps… he’s even stronger than Father.”
Cheok Ha-rin’s voice trembled.
Without realizing it, she had grabbed her brother’s sleeve.
“Father is the Supreme Blade of Central Plains. That man is the King of the North Sea…”
‘What if they were to clash?’
The final thought only flickered in her mind—she did not speak it aloud.
Yet merely thinking it, a chill spread through her chest.
But that chill… it was a familiar Han Ki.
She could not explain why, but standing near this man did not frighten her—instead, she found herself wanting to stay at his side.

Meanwhile, all of Aelak’s followers wore expressions of indifference.
Garkan unwound the Bing Chulsae from his wrist and glanced dismissively at the shattered dwelling.
“The trap-laying craft is clumsy. No matter how I look at it, these are just amateurs.”
He said nothing of how Aelak had caught the iron grating one-handed and frozen the poison—it was beneath mention, as obvious as the sunrise.
“Would the Clan Leader be harmed by something like that?”
Harku chuckled.
“If twenty gratings had fallen instead of two, it would have made no difference.”
Taikan had already moved into the yard, examining the dirt floor.
To him, a single footprint in the soil mattered far more than the shattered iron grating.
Arko, too, turned his nose toward his specialty—the broken jar.
“The poison is common enough. Just a large quantity. This wouldn’t kill a master swordsman, and whoever set this trap would know that… they meant only to pin down the feet and buy time for an escape.”
He rubbed a handful of black powder between his fingertips and scattered it across the dirt floor.
“I’m no great thinker, but even I can see this much. Whoever set it was terrified and trying to buy time to run.”

Cheok Mu-yeong studied these men carefully, committing their faces to memory.
Despite the deadly trap that had just been sprung, not one of them looked impressed. Their attention was already fixed on pursuit, not on the mechanism itself.
The Clan Leader’s prowess was no surprise to them. It was not a rare occasion—it was always this way. And that made it all the more chilling.
Aelak had already turned and walked out into the yard.
“The direction?”
“The trail is clear.”
Taikan replied at once, pointing down at the ground.
Footprints in the soil—the stride of a person was unmistakable. The left foot had dug deeper than the right, and the trampled grass all bent in a single direction.
“The weight was shifted to one shoulder, concentrated all on one side. Only that foot pressed deep into the ground.”
“They were in a hurry.”
“Whatever it was, they didn’t abandon it—they carried it with them. Traces this clear leave nothing hidden: weight, direction, all of it remains.”
“Which way?”
Aelak asked curtly.
Taikan lifted his gaze.
The deep furrows in the earth, the trampled grass, the scattered soil—all pointed toward a single destination.
He rose slowly and extended one hand.
The eyes of the party followed the direction of his fingertips in unison.
The path opened onto the Northern Bank Border, and the ridge to the northeast gleamed white in the sunlight.
It was the direction the burdened man had fled toward, vanishing in a single breath.
“This way.”
Taikan murmured, his hand still pointing toward the ridge.
Aelak’s gray eyes fixed on the ridge’s end.
Until now, they had pursued him through rumor and hearsay alone. Now his tracks were stamped clearly into the earth. That vivid trail stretched straight beyond the bend ahead.
The man fleeing in terror—he drew them on without resistance, pulling them forward.

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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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