North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 67

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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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67. Gwak Sam.

Morning sunlight touched the corner of his mouth.
The grass of the camp reeked of copper. The fire had collapsed into ash… and the blood that had beaded on the grass blades was beginning to dry in the light.
Where the dew had evaporated, the smell of blood rose up sharp and metallic.
Two horses grazed a little distance from the camp. They would react instantly if an intruder approached.
The wounded man lay in the grass and groaned.
His chest rose and fell, rose and fell. Each breath grew shallower… yet it did not stop.
The man seemed unable to accept that he was dying.
The body always surrenders later than the mind.
Se Rian placed her palm above his ribs. Two knuckles pressed below the rib cage… and she massaged gently.
Her fingers did not tremble.
The first daughters of the Fuku Clan learned to still the tremors of pain. Not to heal the wound. Only to press the pain away.
She pressed her fingers harder.
“You’ll be all right. It will ease soon.”
There was little worth saying to a dying hunter.
Anything that came from their mouths would be intelligence about their sect at best. What good was knowing such things?
Yet the reason Se Rian held fast to the wounded man was… because of Aelak.
Since entering the Central Plains, Aelak’s spirit had felt parched. No path appeared that might lead to his enemy.
She wanted to show that they would try anything, grasp at anything.
A tribesman of Aelak’s people would leap into hell at the clan leader’s word—that Garkan had carried the man here on his shoulder instead of putting him to death, as he’d been ordered, came from the same impulse.
At dawn yesterday, when Garkan crossed the grassland with the man slung across his shoulders, a single thread of blood had dripped from his back.
No one in the party questioned it when they saw. Garkan said nothing.
From that moment, they had all known the man would die.
Garkan… he honed the Bing Chol Swae at the edge of the camp.
Zing!
One strand of the Bing Chol Swae sang lightly from his wrist.
The strand that had cut down five men in the Mixed Forest yesterday.
Blood had crusted on the end of that strand. Garkan made no effort to wipe it away.
“The wound is deep, isn’t it?”
He asked curtly.
Se Rian nodded.
The stream of blood flowing from the man’s body briefly slowed. But from another place, blood began to seep again.
Seal one hole and it flows to the side; seal the side and it finds another path. Life was collapsing beneath the skin.
She drew a fine needle from her medical pouch.
‘I cannot save him, but I can buy time.’
Her hands pressed needles into Vital Points to slow the bleeding. These were not the hands of healing. They were the hands that purchased time. She knew the difference.
The hands that heal cover the skin; the hands that buy time search for a path beneath it. Though the hands looked the same, they reached toward different places.
The needle point entered the space below the ribs.
The wounded man’s breathing deepened for one breath. The flow of blood diminished again.
The man’s lips trembled slightly.
Dry saliva traced a single strand between his parted lips, following the cracks and falling onto the grass.
Arko shifted his knees to the man’s head and opened his Medicine Pouch again. A black Dan Hwan lay in his palm.
This Dan Hwan differed from the kind they had taken from the Heuk Woon Bang corpses yesterday. A preparation he had personally gathered and ground. A violent poison that struck the body harder, and that impact sharpens the mind.
In this moment, it could keep consciousness alive for one more breath.
The wounded man had already taken one tablet… give him this one and death comes easy. What of it? A dying life is a dying life.
He parted the man’s lips with his fingertip and placed the Dan Hwan inside.
The poison tablet dissolved between his teeth.
The wounded man expelled one deep breath.
The breath carried the acrid stench of poison. A mosquito that had been resting on the grass startled at the smell and flew beyond the blade.
Arko wiped the poison powder from his hand with pulled grass.
“That is all I can do. There is nothing left to press.”
A short statement.
Not self-pity, not excuse. A statement acknowledging the limit of his domain. He unfolded his Medicine Pouch again beside his knees.
The rough paper surface of the pouch still bore the marks of dawn dew.
A pharmacist’s hands spend a lifetime making pouches, and those lifelong hands finally come to rest at the mouth of the dying.
Arko was not the sort of man to linger over acceptance of a fact.

Garkan stood at the edge of the encampment.
A length of Bing Chol Swae was wound around his wrist—the same strand that had cut down five men in the Mixed Forest yesterday. Blood still clung, dried, to the back of his hand.
He unwound it slowly from his wrist.
From pinky to thumb, thumb to ring finger… his hand wound and unwound it in turn. The same motions, always.
The strand flowed between his fingers like something alive. Cold metal brushed his palm, then fell away.
The Bing Chol Swae had years of life shared with his hand.
When the hand forgets the weight of the strand, the strand forgets the hand. When the fingers stumble, the Bing Chol Swae stumbles too. They are already one body.
Garkan did not speak of it. He simply wound and unwound the strand each day so his fingers would not forget it.
A Black Cloud Insignia flashed through his mind—one he had glimpsed at dawn yesterday.
A single dark cloud traced in diagonal lines.
The mark embedded inside the shoulder cloth of Heuk Woon Bang. That same insignia was also carved into the inner seam of the dead man’s robe in the grass.
But he did not examine it further. There was nothing to gain from looking. Seeing one more insignia would not bring him closer to Karani.
The dying man’s sect: Heuk Woon Bang.
By tomorrow, he would have forgotten it all. The man, the sect, everything.
‘Why did I turn him over?’
The Bing Chol Swae rang softly, as if answering his thought.
Garkan offered himself no reply. The absence of an answer was itself the answer. The search for Karani’s killer was that distant a thing.
So. He had come to the Central Plains. And now? How was he to find anything here, among people he did not know?

Aelak had not lifted his gaze from the eastern sky.
Gray eyes fixed on Karani, tracing the blade scars etched across her body. They drifted like afterimages in the eastern sky—in the space where echoes lingered.
Wounds that had torn her flesh apart.
Eight of them—so sharp, so vivid that even now the memory of weapons flowing past was enough to see them clearly. Eight blades.
While all those weapons were driven into her body, no one had come to stop them.
Karani had died in agony.
That truth had solidified behind his gray eyes.
“Heaven gives what is desired when the time is right.”
Aelak murmured without thinking.
Words that came to mind unbidden. Would heaven also grant him information about his enemy when the time came?
Karani had told him that.
When his training faltered and he grew impatient, when trouble befell the tribe, whenever something would not come to pass—she had spoken the same words. And they had always had a strange way of stilling his heart, of wrapping it in warmth.
Karani’s voice had always lingered in a lower register. When that register settled into his chest, the rigid cold inside him would loosen by a thread.
But now… that loosening had not returned since Karani’s death.
“Enough. Let us go.”
Aelak moved his rigid body.
His knees straightened. The dried blood on the back of his hand scattered in the sunlight. His gaze, drawn from the eastern sky, descended slowly into the grass.

Though Aelak had said to leave, Se Rian did not relent—she pressed her ear closer to the wounded man’s lips, and another strand of her hair fell against his mouth.
The wounded man’s lips moved faintly.
A consonant came loose. A vowel followed. And the letters aligned to form a single character.
“Gwak.”
Se Rian gripped his hand more firmly.
“Gwak. And then? Who is it?”
She was already anticipating what would come next. Gwak Sam. But she held her ear close, in case some other name emerged.
This man was not speaking words he consciously chose. Rather, without knowing it himself, he was murmuring from the depths of unconsciousness.
Words drawn forth by someone who listened.
In that hazy, dreamlike state of consciousness, the feeling that he could still speak the words someone wanted, that he was still alive—it persisted.
The wounded man drew in a deep breath, gathering his failing strength. Another consonant and vowel came loose.
“Sam.”
Two characters were placed upon the sunlit grass.
Gwak. Sam.
Two consonants and two vowels. It took one breath to place them on the leaves of grass. During that one breath, no one in the company spoke.
Just as she had suspected. These men had been moving for the bounty that Gwak Sam had posted. Hunters driven by a notice of reward.
Se Rian swallowed a short sigh.
She had already known that the name Gwak Sam would emerge. Yet she had pressed her ear close for one reason alone: she had hoped for a different name. A name closer to Karani’s true enemy.
There was nothing more to learn. It was far from Karani’s killer.
All of this—yesterday, today—had been a wasted fight. But she did not speak that truth aloud. It was best to forget about Heuk Woon Bang, about the dark cloud insignia. Unless they came to attack again.
Calling it a wasted fight was not a word the living should carelessly use for the dead. For the dead, it had been their final battle.
Arko’s hand lingered briefly over the Medicine Pouch. He let out a short, bitter laugh.
“Gwak Sam… Should I have just killed him and been done with it?”
There was a note of self-mockery in his words. If he’d killed him outright, there would be no pointless bloodshed now.
Such regrets came often. But there were no answers. Decisions made on the road were rarely good ones.
Garkan replied without looking at Arko.
“We didn’t come to the Central Plains to kill people.”
That sentence hung in the air above the grassland for a breath.
Garkan wasn’t speaking of morality. Such things didn’t suit a man of the North Sea. He spoke of the path they had to walk.
The path to Karani’s enemy.
They hadn’t come to conquer the Central Plains. Once the enemy was dead, they would return. This alone was Karani’s path.
On this path, those who must be cut were already determined. Cut down the wrong one, and the path grew obscured. Garkan hated nothing more than a blurred path.
The wounded man’s breathing became shallow.
Se Rian slowly drew the hair back from the wounded man’s mouth.
She released the hand she had been holding. The wounded man was already dead.
The gesture of releasing her hand marked the end of her duty. In that movement there was neither sorrow nor rage. The First Flame of the Fuku Clan didn’t have the leisure to grieve every death.
“Gwak Sam. Chief Administrator of Ha-seo Pyo-guk. He’s proving quite troublesome.”
“Then cut him down.”
Garkan spoke with force.

The party began breaking camp.
Bedrolls were rolled up one by one. The Medicine Pouch was tied shut again. The saddle straps were cinched tight. The ash was covered with earth.
No one spoke of the fight that had occurred that day. Death was always at hand. It was not a weight that would grow lighter for being spoken aloud.
In the grassland, only the space where the wounded man had lain remained. Sunlight fell slanting across that place. The grass, pressed down by the weight of a body, had stiffened in the exact shape it had held.
Once the party moved on, that place too would be buried among the grass and fade. Grassland does not long remember where a person lay.
Se Rian drew a long breath and spoke.
“Where will we go?”

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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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