North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 85

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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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85. Treading Backward

The campfire scattered across the dry embankment was dying out.
For days now, they had met each dawn with eyes that never sank into deep sleep.
The road behind them lay empty, and nothing stirred at their backs.
No one drew near. No incident unfolded.
If they changed course, that hand would have to reach for them again—and he had meant to wait with patience until it did. But within days, his tolerance had worn thin.
Whenever they scouted for a campsite, the Northerner’s eyes would drift across the vacant road, then go dead.
With each passing day, the weight of waiting grew heavier.
It was a stretch of time that felt like doing something, yet truly did nothing at all.
Se Rian was the first to break the silence.
She looked at Aelak and spoke.
“Waiting just means we’re being dragged along. What if we dug backward instead? Find out who that hand belongs to before they find us.”
The plan to alter their route had also sprung from her mind.
Two hands, one head: the hand that paved the road with corpses, and the hand that leaked the Cheok Family’s movements. Tread backward on that hand, and the head reveals itself.
Aelak did not belabor the point. His face said that if the foremost mind of the Hu-ku Tribe had finished calculating, that was enough.
“So it shall be.”
His gray eyes flicked briefly toward her, then withdrew.
It fell to her to decide who went where.

Past midnight, in the hour before dawn.
While the Cheok siblings slept, Aelak summoned Arko and Taikan away from the fire, into the darkness beyond. Garkan and Harku remained by the flames to guard the camp and keep the sisters from waking.
The order was brief.
“Find out what kind of man he is.”
Se Rian continued.
“Arko will find the traces for us.”
“I have a firm grip on that sort of thing.”
Arko spoke with confidence.
“Even if we find the traces, we can only glean fragments of his martial arts—tiny scraps, dust. We’ll need to reconstruct the opponent from that. Taikan, that’s your work.”
“Understood.”
“Leave at once.”
This affair had to proceed without the Cheok siblings knowing.
In this situation, they could trust no one from the Central Plains.

Morning broke.
Cheok Ha-rin noticed that two of them were gone and looked puzzled.
“Where did those two go?”
It was an innocent and straightforward question.
Se Rian did not pause in her work of sorting herbs, but answered gently.
“They had something they needed to look into. It’ll take a few days. Why don’t you rest well while they’re gone.”
Cheok Ha-rin took the words at face value.
But Cheok Mu-yeong’s eyes shifted. What connection did the Northerner have in the Central Plains, and what was he going to investigate that required him to leave without a word?
‘They didn’t even give us a hint. Something secret has begun.’
He maintained his composure.

Meanwhile, Arko was already retracing the path they had come by, walking it backward.
The opponent left no trace. He erased his footprints and did not disturb the grass. Yet traces remained. Footprints could be wiped away, grass could go untrampled, but the mark left by martial arts could not be erased.
Arko knelt at the entrance of the Abandoned Temple.
He sensed the flow of wind with the back of his hand, then pressed his nose to the earth.
A nose hardened and sealed in the ice of the North.
If any scent lingered, he would catch it without fail.
And he did catch it.
A thin thread of dried blood-scent rose from between the soil and stone.
“…Here.”
With his fingertips, he measured the depth and spacing of the footprint pressed into that place. Beast-like acuity of smell and the eyes of one who knew how to hunt for traces became one.
The first fragment of the Stepping Method began to take shape in his fingertips.
The direction of both feet, one foot dragged diagonally to the side, the center of gravity.
“Even if he slipped on ice…”
An unusual Stepping Method. It could be seen as a slip, but it isn’t. This is unmistakably a trace left by a Stepping Method.
If he’d slipped, the grass beside him would have been swept in the same direction. But the grass was pressed the opposite way, and on the stone there was nothing but a scratch mark where his foot had kicked and turned away.
“It wasn’t a slip.”
The way the foot turned was not a slip, but an intentional pivot on a fixed axis. A deliberate rotation.
“Traces don’t lie. They just don’t tell you everything at once.”
In this spot, that hand had read the center of gravity. Only one foot had sunk deep, and the turning arc was short. He’d pressed almost no weight into the ground.
“It can’t be called a mistake… Is it a Stepping Method where he places his foot as a feint and escapes in another direction? A foot that deceives direction.”
He had a rough sense of how the movement went.
From only a few faint traces imprinted on the ground, he’d read the motion itself.
Three pieces clicked together in Arko’s mind.
The quick blade that had cut through firewood at the Abandoned Temple in a single strike, the cunning that had laid corpses like a road and left a false trail, and this Stepping Method.
A person who possessed all three was uncommon.
What sword it was, what Stepping Method it was—that was the question. But the Method’s shape had been found.
“The third one’s going to have his hands full.”

What Arko had brought could be called neither sparse nor sufficient.
A man who heard from afar and saw from afar—Taikan.
He surveyed the people. There was no use showing traces to those without an eye to recognize Martial Arts. It had to be someone with vision deep enough to place the Martial Arts and speak of a specific person.
He unwrapped the Horn Bow from cloth at his back.
His task today was not to drop people. It was to open their mouths.
Behind the Gambling House, where the game had gone cold.
A martial artist soaked in drink, having lost his money, staggered out with his pants unbuttoned.
Thud!
A single blow!
Before the man came to his senses, his nape was pinned against the wall.
The martial artist’s feet lifted slightly off the ground. The whites of his eyes rolled upward, and from his gaping mouth came only the whistle of air escaping instead of sound.
His throat clamped shut; he couldn’t even swallow.
When he tried belatedly to wrench his hand free, his wrist was pressed down briefly.
Before his hand could reach the sword hilt. His two dangling legs couldn’t support his weight and trembled, cold sweat running down his nape and touching the back of Taikan’s hand.
There was no fight to speak of. No one in the bustling crowd noticed a man had vanished.
Taikan laid before the man what Arko had read from the traces. A drawing traced from the Stepping Method’s marks, and a piece of sword edge scorched from friction heat.
“This Stepping Method. This quick blade.”
A question without excess.
“Whose work?”
The man dragged out rolled his eyes. Whether he was feigning ignorance or truly didn’t know was impossible to tell. Not a word of any grandiose technique name passed between them—only the traces and the question hung in the darkness.
“Don’t know. Never seen anything like this.”
He spouted nonsense in his drunkenness and weaseled out.
Taikan didn’t press him. He let him go. He hadn’t come to kill but to pry, and it was the law of the North not to strike a man’s back.
He didn’t expect to be satisfied with one. He set out to find the next martial artist.

The second was a vagrant swordsman carrying a Curved Saber. Same traces, same question. The man stared at the drawing for a long while, then narrowed his eyes.
“Looks familiar… But giving away something like this would be a loss. What’s in it for me?”
“Your life.”
“Who do you take me for a fool. That much won’t—”
Crack!
He knocked him unconscious.
Taikan could tell the real from the bluff. More than anyone, he distinguished people coldly and clearly. This one was just trying to squeeze money out of him.

The third also failed to give a satisfying answer. Pressing him made no difference. But even in his resistance, something slipped out.
“A Stepping Method like this isn’t something we ordinary folk can know. You need to find someone at least higher than me.”
Taikan shifted direction entirely.

The fourth was chosen according to the third’s advice—a man who looked strong in Martial Arts.
He stared at the drawing and spoke without hesitation.
“A Stepping Method like this with a blade scorched from burning wood… That’s a school famous for using their heads well. Obvious. In the Martial World, there’s no one without connections to them…”
The man speaking there suddenly twisted his mouth.
A strange smile rose in his eyes as the drink fog cleared.
“But you think you’ll figure it out from a few words? Bringing something like this when you don’t even know what’s what? Who’d recognize this as a Stepping Method? Are they standing on a desk and dancing?”
It was the same reaction as the second man he’d caught. But Taikan let not a single word slip past him.
This one had spoken of two things: martial prowess and a family renowned for strategy.
Taikan produced a coin.
“Tell me, and this is yours. But if you’re lying… you die.”

The pinnacle of cunning and tactics.
A family that boasted the finest minds in the Martial World—they did not crush their enemies beneath overwhelming force, but rather conquered through meticulous planning, intelligence networks, and military strategy.
They excelled in Qimen Dunjia and Formation Methods, and the current head of the family now served as a military strategist for the Murim Alliance…
Their primary weapon was the Iron Thread Weapon.
He’d considered excluding it since it wasn’t a sword, but the Heavenly Mechanism Fan Method was lightning-fast—when the fan unfurled, it achieved a sharpness that rivaled the blade.
Their mastery of the Seven Star Sword Method was also formidable.
But what truly drew his interest were the Qimen Step and the Eight Formation Step.
The Eight Formation Step involved moving while treading upon the compass points of the Eight Trigrams, while the Qimen Step made a martial artist’s movements appear to vanish or split into multiple illusions before an opponent’s eyes.
By blending these two stepping methods, they created a subtle formation merely by moving about that clouded one’s field of vision.
The Zhuge Family.

At that same moment, Arko’s eyes flashed—he’d been waiting for Taikan.
He’d caught the presence of someone.
A presence without footfalls or breath. It seemed to be there, then wasn’t. He’d think it was one direction, only to find emptiness. The moment he thought he’d grasped its trail, it vanished.
Arko wrinkled his nose toward the empty darkness.
A person always left something behind in their wake—scent, at the very least. But there was nothing.
‘There’s someone there, that much is certain… but they slipped past my senses. This one is extraordinary.’
Arko remained vigilant.

The pale light before dawn.
While the Cheok sisters still slept, four figures reconvened.
Taikan surveyed the ridge’s far end first.
“There—far off, a single figure. Too distant. I can only make out a silhouette, nothing more.”
Beyond distance, nothing else registered.
“Is that the one I missed?”
Arko answered him.
“No footfalls, no breath. They left no scent whatsoever.”
This was his report on Aelak.
While the two of them dug into whoever had been tracking them, they themselves were being read by someone—whether by that same person or another entirely remained unclear.
Se Rian cross-referenced the information the two had gathered.
“The Zhuge Family head is military strategist for the Murim Alliance. Cheok Gong-ja is inspector-general for the Alliance. They know each other. For now, we have to rule Cheok Gong-ja out.”
She continued without pause.
“We observe for the time being, verification only. If the family head holds a military post with the Alliance… the moment we move against him, we face the entire Martial World of the Central Plains.”
Aelak said nothing, only stared at the wooden puppet.
The mark carved on its back—a wound that ran down the spine as if seared by flame.
He’d thought it was from a sword. Had it been the Iron Thread Weapon instead?
If so, the sharpness of the Iron Thread must be no less than a blade. This could be confirmed the moment they saw the weapon…
“The Zhuge Family.”
Aelak murmured the name.
The group, which had been drifting aimlessly until now, finally held an enemy’s name in their grasp. It was not a cause for joy—only the cool satisfaction of a hunter who’d scented blood.
Aelak spoke.
“We go to the Zhuge Family.”
A single phrase fell at last—to see for themselves.

Morning broke, and the Cheok sisters awoke.
They had no knowledge of what had transpired in the night. They’d assumed they would rest here for several more days. Yet Arko and Taikan had returned.
The group’s movements differed from the day before. They prepared to depart as if toward a specific destination, methodically and without laughter or chatter.
Without the sisters knowing, the blade had already been leveled at a single family—the Zhuge Family, a name spoken by none.

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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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