North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 86

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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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86. A Name Heard for the First Time

Hubei Province, Xiangyang, Longzhong.
Unfamiliar ground. She hadn’t known a place called Longzhong even existed. But it was famous enough that they wouldn’t lose their way.
The Cheok Family party needed no guide.
Arko led the way and cut through the path without hesitation.
Following Arko’s markers for days.
With each ridge that twilight settled upon, small traces of the Aelak Tribe were left behind. Snapped twigs, stones arranged in patterns. Markers so subtle that the careless eye would miss them entirely.
The party read those signs alone and found their direction. There was no need for words. Where their feet pointed was where their quarry led.
The vagueness that had haunted them when they first crossed into the Central Plains had vanished. The target had become sharp and clear.
One of the eight who had cut down Bing Gong-ju.
The very one who had driven their party into the mountains.
Once the Pursuit Formation was set, the group’s senses honed to a razor’s edge.
The hunter could become the hunted at any moment.
They sat on the parched knoll, yet no one released their vigilance. Their focus fixed on a single point—the target alone.
The path they had been dragged along had now become the path they pursued.

Wind swept through the dry grass of the knoll. Beyond it, the distant lights of Xiangyang Castle scattered like fractured starlight.
At last… the Jegal Family Manor.
Night dew beaded at the tips of grass blades, glinting coldly. From the moisture-laden earth, the faint scent of soil rose up. Beyond the knoll, even the chirring of insects had ceased.
Arko rose soundlessly to his feet.
“Scout the dwelling only. Don’t lay a hand on anything, and watch our rear.”
At Aelak’s command, Arko nodded sharply.
His fingers tightened the medicine pouch at his waist and gripped two quivers of poison darts without the slightest hesitation.
In an instant, he melted into the darkness below the knoll. It meant he had drawn that much closer to the enemy’s throat. Even in the moment the party steadied their breath, Arko’s senses pressed forward relentlessly toward the target.
A tense silence descended upon the knoll.
The dying embers of the campfire dimmed, and soot settled low.
No one added fresh kindling.
Firelight reveals the pursuer before the hunted.
Aelak’s gray eyes swept across the darkness where Arko had vanished, then shifted toward an invisible quarter beyond sight.
Who is watching us?
The troubling warning that Arko and Taikan had spoken.
For days now, treading the same path, an unseen gaze clung to their spines like something adhesive. No form, no affiliation, no sound—yet the weight of that pressure transmitted itself vividly.
“I can’t catch it.”
“Neither can I.”
Arko and Taikan shook their heads in agreement.
The enemy was too distant, moved too swiftly. The moment this side showed any sign of motion, it had already withdrawn.
Could even Aelak not catch such an opponent?
But Aelak remained silent.
Let them watch!
Aelak did not speak, but his intention was plain enough. When Aelak drew his blade, he would paint death itself.
The time of dancing to an invisible hand had ended. Now came the moment to strike back at that wrist.

Heedless of that lethal tension, Serian settled herself and unfolded the Wolf-skin Coat across her knees.
She meant to mend the left shoulder seam that the rain had loosened.
With the broken thread in her hand, her fingers danced swiftly in the manner unique to the Fu Ku Tribe.
Without haste, her hands moved with a steadiness in which centuries seemed to have settled—finding each original needle hole with precision, careful not to mar the old seam marks.
Choosing the laborious way when a faster path lay open.
Each time the needle pierced the leather, a small sound emerged. That sound alone lived within the silence.
Calluses had hardened the tips of Serian’s fingers.
Hands that had gripped the needle countless times. Her fingers read the grain of the leather even before her eyes could.
Cheok Ha-rin’s gaze lingered on those hands.
No matter how many times she watched, it struck her as distinctive.
A stitch pattern she had never seen in the Cheon Geom Mun. No—a garment mended as it had been mended, again and again. An old coat that Cheon Geom Mun would have long since replaced with something new.
Yet Serian’s hands moved with the care and caution of someone handling not ‘something to be discarded’ but ‘something that cannot be discarded.’
That subtle difference stayed with Cheok Ha-rin’s eyes.
Serian’s gaze remained fixed on the leather. It was the kind of calm only someone whose hands had learned a path could show.
Ha-rin leaned in close and asked abruptly.
“That outfit is quite worn. Why don’t you throw it away? A new one would be much warmer.”
Twenty years raised like a hothouse flower—the question emerged without malice, pure curiosity.
The rebuke Cheok Mu-yeong had given her days ago flickered through her mind, but she dismissed it as just a question about a piece of clothing.
Serian didn’t stop her needlework, only smiled faintly.
“This… isn’t a garment I can simply change.”
A firm, brief answer. She offered no reason, no name.
That you couldn’t change a garment meant the garment itself carried a weight far beyond cloth—a story tangled deep within.
The words left Ha-rin speechless.
She might have withdrawn then, but her eyes remained caught on that worn leather coat. Some instinct older than words told her there was more to this.
Serian’s smile lingered faintly at the corner of her mouth. What lay hidden in that smile, Ha-rin could not read.
Just then, Garkan’s footsteps halted as he walked the ridge.
Whether he’d heard Ha-rin’s words or not, the Bing-cheol-sae slung across his shoulder rang out with the weight of iron.
“Change it for something new? That’s nonsense.”
A northerner’s directness spilled out without restraint.
He jerked his chin toward the wolf-skin coat draped across Serian’s lap.
“That coat has withstood the North Sea’s vicious cold for tens of years. Through winds that cut to the bone, only that coat stood beside the Chieftain.”
His flat tone carried the glimmer of distant memory.
“Those from the Central Plains don’t know. Extreme lands freeze a person whole, dead.”
Garkan shrugged and continued.
His gaze turned briefly toward the far northern sky. It was the look of someone recalling that cold.
“And the one who made that coat… had a hand so fine, so meticulous. Each stitch was poured with care.”
Garkan added without thinking.
“That craftsmanship doesn’t exist anywhere else in the North Sea. Even roughnecks like us could see that.”
Only then did Ha-rin understand the care in Serian’s hands.
A desperate deference—refusing to erase the original maker’s touch. Whose work was it? Ha-rin’s curiosity rose again.
At last she asked without hesitation.
“Who… made this coat?”
An object in which someone’s soul dwelt.
She had no idea what ripples that name might send through this place. It was only a bright, honest question.
Serian’s fingertips stiffened in midair for an instant.
Yet she didn’t cut the thread. A pause would only breed questions, and questions would demand answers.
She chose silence instead.
Drawing a short breath, she threaded the needle again.
The tremor in her fingertips was hidden deep within the leather.
Deep enough that no eye would ever see it.
Meanwhile, oblivious Garkan hoisted the Bing-cheol-sae and spoke with casual ease.
“Erken made it. For the Chieftain. With her own hands.”
“Er… ken made it?”
“Erken means honored, revered. Hwaira is the word for a chieftain’s consort. It’s the formal title the Aelak Tribe uses for Bing Gong-ju Karani.”
“Ah! So Aelak got married?”
“The previous Hwaira was Karani. The current Hwaira is…”
Garkan gestured with his eyes toward Serian.
“Ah! I didn’t know.”
Ha-rin’s expression shifted to one of fresh surprise.
But her eyes quickly filled with curiosity again.
If she’d become Aelak’s wife after the last Bing Gong-ju died… then she was mending a coat made by her predecessor.
Is this normal for northerners? In the Central Plains, they’d scrub away every trace of a first wife and don entirely new clothes, new shoes.
Serian knew that gaze. She simply didn’t let the needle stop.

Erken Hwaira.
Even as that name scattered into the air, Aelak beyond the fire remained unmoved.
The name of his dead wife.
Yet his gray eyes held steady on the darkness, unwavering, and his massive back lay rigid as stone. It was the heavy silence of the one who had borne that name’s weight most bitterly.
In truth, Karani had never received the honorific Erken Hwaira. The two of them had not been joined in marriage.
Over the past thirty years, that was simply how Garkan and the Aelak Tribe had called her.
He had never corrected the title.
To correct it would have felt like a larger lie.
“Karani… ulgarna onnaraka, Hwaira…? Onru, hai?”
(Are you well, Hwaira…? Are you at peace, yes?)
(How do you fare in the afterlife, you…? Are you at ease, aren’t you?)
Aelak muttered the words, pressing them down like a weight.
The sounds that escaped his lips dissolved into darkness.
There was no one there to answer.
Yet knowing this, he asked the same question every night.

Cheok Mu-yeong was at Aelak’s side, but he let the name “Karani” pass without comment.
They weren’t revealing their destination, but judging from their course of travel, they were undoubtedly heading for the Jegal Family Manor.
At the Jegal Family Manor lived an old friend of his father.
Jegal Chan, master of the Shadowless Severing Fan.
A fan-wielder who cut down enemies without leaving even a shadow in his wake. Among the Jegal Family, known for their keen intellects, he stood apart as a cold, legendary figure whose art specialized in speed.
Should he follow them all the way to the Jegal Family Manor? Or part ways here? Continuing surveillance seemed the prudent choice.
His mind was wholly consumed with calculating his next move.
For one so absorbed in such considerations, there was no reason the name of the Northern Mistress should connect with Bing Gong.
No one atop this earthwork knew the abyss that Aelak carried.

Cheok Ha-rin, by contrast, was shaken.
Karani. A name she heard for the first time in her life.
Yet in that instant, a chill raced down her spine, and her heart plummeted.
A strange cold stirred within the depths of her chest.
Why did this name, heard for the first time, feel so familiar?
Cheok Ha-rin could not untangle the eerie contradiction. She forced herself to dismiss the sensation, attributing it to the sorrowful tale woven into the leather coat.
She pressed her palm to her chest. The trembling would not subside.
Those three syllables echoed in her ears. Karani. Though she had never heard it before, the name felt as though her lips had spoken it countless times, in some distant past.
What brushed her mind was only one thing: the white ice flower that had saved her life. The elixir that her father had brought back.
She knew nothing of who had given that flower, nor whose name had just been called, nor what identity lay behind the chill that pierced her heart.
Shrouded in fog, only those three syllables had arrived without reason and lodged themselves in her chest.

Serian watched Cheok Ha-rin’s wavering face in silence.
The sorrowful gaze of one who knows the truth.
Caught in a cruel place—unable to speak and reveal, yet unable to turn away and feign ignorance.
She could only bear witness.
To this moment, when the name of Bing Hwa—the first of the Fu Ku Tribe, now dead—had touched the heart of the woman who lived on.
The needle had stilled. Serian had not even noticed.

Far off, in thick darkness.
Arko’s footsteps rushed toward the Jegal Family Manor.
As the edge of vengeance drew one step closer to its target’s throat, the name of the dead was carved into Cheok Ha-rin’s heart for the first time.

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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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