North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 80

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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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80. The Familiar Cold Aura

Dawn was breaking.
Cheok Ha-rin sat in the dewy grass at first light and placed a kettle over the campfire. Then she retrieved a pouch of tea leaves from inside her saddle.
Before the kettle had even begun to warm, Cheok Ha-rin was already untying the knot of the tea sachet with deliberate slowness.
Tea she had brought with her when she left Cheon Geom Mun.
Dry tea leaves lay in her palm, rustling softly as they traced the lines of her hand.
“Is it a special tea?”
Garkan glanced up from across the flames and asked.
“Yes. It’s a tea I treasure.”
Cheok Ha-rin answered with a broad smile.
Yet even as she spoke, she drew the hand holding the tea closer to her lap, as if to say it was not something to show to just anyone.
Of the northerners, at least, Garkan seemed the most reserved.
“Normally a handmaid would brew it, but shall I prepare it for you?”
“No. I’ll brew it myself.”
Cheok Ha-rin waved her hand quickly.
Realizing how hastily she had refused, she lifted the corners of her mouth awkwardly. There were some things—preparing tea among them—that she did not wish to entrust to another’s hands.
Though it was early dawn, Garkan’s eyes remained open. In fact, throughout the long night, these northerners had taken turns keeping watch.
They woke without being roused, and the watch changed without anyone having to arrange it.
For all their easy laughter and carefree chatter on the surface, they did not lower their guard for a single moment.
Cheok Ha-rin glanced across the campfire.
Beneath the laughing, talkative faces lay a hard tension that pressed quietly against her skin.

Dawn light spread across the plain. Dewdrops that had clung to the tips of grass blades were gradually drying in the light of the rising sun.
Each time the wind swept across the field, the droplets slid from the grass and fell into the soil. The plain awoke slowly from its slumber.
The group began to pack.
Leather saddles were lifted onto the horses’ backs, and the sound of tightening straps cut sharply through the air at intervals.
Rather than help pack, Cheok Ha-rin continued to brew her tea. While everyone else prepared to depart, she devoted herself entirely to the task as if she had forgotten they were leaving.
‘Tea opens the heart.’
Cheok Ha-rin’s movements became even more deliberate and tender.
She adjusted the temperature of the boiling water several times, and once it reached the desired heat, she steeped the tea leaves.
She lifted the kettle’s lid slightly to let the steam escape, then brought the spout close to her nose.
The fragrance of the tea drifted gently across the grassy meadow.
But beneath the rich scent of grass, a subtle Cold Aura seeped through like an undertone. It was an alien presence, unlike what rose from ordinary tea.
The Cold Aura that emanated from her.
Cheok Ha-rin gazed quietly at her own wrist. That chill which clung to her without fail each time she brewed tea was present again today, true as ever.
Would the northerners recognize this Cold Aura?
Aelak gave off a distinctly intense Cold Aura. The others were cold too, but none compared to him. If someone had become so accustomed to such coldness… might he not also recognize the chill she carried?
You and I—we are the same kind.
This was what Cheok Ha-rin wanted to say to Aelak.
But the words remained only within her chest. She could not speak them aloud, for even she herself did not understand what those words truly meant.
She did not know why such a feeling had arisen. Perhaps because she had lain restless through the whole night, never finding sleep, feeling his Cold Aura all the while.
Cheok Ha-rin arranged seven teacups in a neat line on the grass and poured the tea.
Each time the liquid filled a cup, a delicate wisp of steam rose and faded away again.
There was no cup for herself.
The group was seven; seven cups would suffice, she thought without calculation. She did not count herself, the one preparing the tea.
From a long illness she had lost her appetite, and so remained only the joy of brewing tea; the pleasure of drinking it she had forgotten long ago.
Cheok Ha-rin rose, cradling the first cup in both hands. As the dawn wind swept across the meadow, she came to a stop before Aelak.
“Please drink this.”
Her voice was awkward but courteous.
Of all in the group, she had offered the tea to him first.
She could not have explained why his turn had come first. Her feet had simply carried her in his direction of their own accord.
The hand holding out the cup trembled faintly. She did not know why, and moreover, she herself was not aware that it trembled at all.
‘Can you feel it? I can generate Cold Aura too.’
She had no idea what the Cold Aura that the Seol-ryeon-gwa drew from her heart might mean to Aelak. She only wished to know the strange northerner. Aelak… seemed captivating to her.

Aelak accepted the cup.
His rough, thick hands cradled the small teacup with deliberate care.
He first examined the fragrance rising from it.
His gray eyes deepened. The tip of his nose twitched faintly.
Karani’s energy, seeping from the tea water.
In that instant, his fingers adjusted their grip on the cup handle—so subtly it barely registered. His expression betrayed no shift whatsoever.
The others were too preoccupied with their packing to notice, but even Serian, standing beyond the grass, could not escape his scrutiny.
A flash of memory lit Aelak’s mind: the sleeping quarters of Bing Gong.
The space where Karani’s habitual tea scent had lingered each day.
The air of that dark, cool room now overlapped this dawn meadow.
Yet what he detected now was not Karani’s natural essence. In truth, he had never smelled her tea fragrance before.
What he remembered was only the chill of the Cold Aura that had emanated from Karani’s chest—and that same energy now rose unmistakably from the tea Cheok Ha-rin had offered. Unmistakably.
‘Cheok Ha-rin possesses the Seol-ryeon-gwa. Cheok Moo-young lacks the audacity to touch the North Sea. So then… the finest swordsman under heaven, Cheok Un-hui. It was you. The one who drove a blade through Karani’s heart.’
A fleeting thought.
Even within that brief moment, Aelak’s gray eyes remained utterly still, unreadable.

A subtle expression crossed Cheok Ha-rin’s face.
Somehow, the Cold Aura that emanated from Aelak felt familiar—as though she had known that energy since ancient times.
What could the nature of this Cold Aura be?
Curiosity swelled, but she could not voice it aloud. The thought struck her that this was an energy she ought never to have grown accustomed to, and yet she felt it keenly.
So she bit her lip softly and swallowed the question that had risen to her throat.
“…….”
Aelak accepted the tea without a word of thanks.
He drank.
The cool Cold Aura circled his mouth, then traveled slowly down his throat.
Thirty-two years ago, the energy that had filled the dark sleeping quarters of the Aelak Tribe—the Moo-young Eun-sa Kyeol technique. That same Cold Aura that had seeped from Karani’s chest.
The moment that energy touched his tongue, Aelak’s Adam’s apple rose and fell with deliberate slowness.
His gaze fell to Cheok Ha-rin’s slender wrist. A thread-thin trace of Cold Aura seeped from her delicate skin.
He withdrew his eyes.
His gaze descended again to the tea in the cup.
His eyes held no tremor.
Cheok Ha-rin felt his gaze but did not meet it. She did not notice her cheeks warming faintly.
She was only aware that her heart was beating slowly, and deeply.
She had been ill for so long.
It had been so long since she’d left Cheon Geom Mun to meet someone unfamiliar.
Though she tried to soothe herself with these thoughts, the flutter in her chest would not quiet.
Unable to bear the awkwardness, she turned her head toward the dying fire, and the dawn breeze teased a single strand of her hair loose.
She tucked the tangled strand behind her ear with her fingertips, and found herself gazing at nothing but the embers.
“You didn’t sleep well last night, did you? I heard you tossing and turning.”
Cheok Ha-rin spoke with casual warmth.
She had offered tea, but he had not spoken a single word in return.
“……”
Aelak remained, as always, silent.
Then Garkan, sensing the air had grown heavy, stepped forward with ready good humor.
“Miss, don’t worry yourself over that. Our leader can sleep just fine with his legs stretched out on the ground, even if he can’t manage it in bed.”
“Is that so?”
Cheok Ha-rin turned to look at Garkan.
It was the moment when a narrow passage opened in the oppressive air.
Garkan slapped his knee and pressed on with his good spirits.
“Do all northerners sleep in the wilds?”
Garkan laughed heartily as he replied.
“Not all northerners—only us Aelak Tribe are like that. We have never had beds in our people, Miss.”
“How extraordinary! Really?”
Cheok Ha-rin’s laughter burst forth, soft and contained.
It was her second smile since yesterday. Her light laughter drifted across the meadow and dissolved into the open air.
Garkan, delighted by her laughter, revealed his yellowed teeth beneath his unkempt beard and laughed along with her.
The heavy silence that Aelak had created lifted somewhat in the wake of that laughter. Yet it did not vanish entirely.

Cheok Moo-young watched the entire scene from a distance, apart from the rest of the group.
He stood with his back against a rock, his hands clasped before his chest, motionless.
His sister’s lighthearted laughter, Garkan’s jest, and even Aelak’s subtle withdrawal from the moment—he took it all in with a single sweep of his eyes.
His fingers, resting on the hilt of his sword, tensed.
‘It’s not so bad that my sister grows closer to them. Her vigilance will lower.’
Yet his gaze remained fixed on Aelak alone, scarcely wavering.
He did not know that his sister emanated a Cold Aura. Beyond that, even Cheok Un-hui, the finest swordsman under heaven, remained wholly ignorant of this truth.
The Cold Aura of the Seol-ryeon-gwa could not be sensed through Energy Sensing.
Only those who carried Karani’s Cold Aura—those who had encountered it—or those capable of analyzing the Moo-young Eun-sa Kyeol and true energy could perceive it.
Naturally, he was unaware that Cheok Un-hui’s exposure had come about through these two.
‘The road to Huashan is still long. Her guard seems to have dropped… Perhaps I should proceed with careful observation.’
Surveillance. This was what he did best.
He withdrew his hand from the sword and swept his indifferent gaze across the grassland bathed in faint dawn light.

The party began to break camp.
As ash from the dying fire scattered on the wind, they saddled their horses and secured their packs with practiced efficiency.
Cheok Ha-rin held an empty teacup aloft in her palm, studying it. Inside the rim lingered a faint stain left by the tea.
When she brushed the mark lightly with her fingertip, a tepid warmth still clung to it.
‘Today the scent from the Cold Aura seemed stronger than usual.’
She could not fathom where the peculiar fragrance came from—how it wove so intricately with the tea’s aroma.
Cheok Ha-rin murmured quietly to herself.
“Strangely familiar, somehow.”
Aelak did not hear her words.
He had already mounted his horse and was scanning the path ahead; her whisper drifted across the grass and dissolved into nothing.
Only Serian caught the murmur.
Her steady eyes traced the empty cup resting in Cheok Ha-rin’s palm, and she too whispered softly to herself.
“A familiar Cold Aura, indeed.”
Serian’s gaze traveled slowly from the empty cup to Cheok Ha-rin’s wrist, then to her back.
Two women’s whispered thoughts crossed invisibly above the grassland.
One spoke of the fragrance lingering in tea leaves; the other spoke of the trace of cool, keen Cold Aura. Both were speaking of the same person—Karani—yet…
Cheok Ha-rin knew nothing of it.

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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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