North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 9

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

9. Thirty Years of Ascetic Cultivation

“How… how did you become so strong?”
Harku watched Airak’s retreating form as he spoke, his voice trembling with awe. The giant Balkar had been brought down in a mere ten exchanges.
“I wonder the same thing.”
Garkan murmured.
“You were powerful even before you left for Geumeum-ji, but now… it’s on an entirely different level.”
“He’s no longer human.”
Taikan breathed the words.
“That just now wasn’t martial arts at all—it was closer to a cosmic upheaval.”
Instead of answering, Airak quietly gripped his left chest. Beneath the Worn Wolf Fur Cloak, there lay a black, rigid scar that would never fade for as long as he lived.
“That scar—”
“Don’t ask.”
……
“If you want to know, go to Geumeum-ji.”
Airak’s voice grew distant and hollow.
“If you can come back alive, that is.”
His gaze turned toward the far north.
Geumeum-ji—where even the sun bows its head.
Thirty years ago, that white hell where he had sealed himself away unfolded once more before his eyes.

* * *

Year one.
On the first day he set foot in Geumeum-ji, Airak realized he had made a terrible mistake.
‘This isn’t… cold.’
It was not mere chill. It was a vast, malevolent will that denied all living things. When he breathed in, it felt as though his lungs would freeze and shatter; when he tried to channel his Inner Force, his Dantian convulsed as if it would split apart.
The first night.
Three of his toes turned black.
‘Frostbite.’
They had to be severed. Left as they were, they would rot. Airak clenched his teeth and drew the Mangoktdo.
Thwack.
Three toes fell onto the snow. Blood welled up, but froze instantly, sealing the wound.
“…Ugh.”
Even his groan froze solid.
Ten days later, he lost two more toes. A month in, his left ear blackened and fell away.
‘At this rate, I’ll die.’
But he could not turn back. Karani was waiting.
‘I have to grow stronger. Strong enough to change the Ice Palace’s laws.’
Rather than hide in caves to escape the cold, he stood naked in the heart of the blizzard.
His skin split open. Flesh tore away. Bone showed through.
Still, he stood.
‘I can’t resist the cold.’
In that moment, a strange insight pierced his frozen mind.
‘The more I resist, the faster I die. Then…’
He broke down his walls.
He reversed the secret incantation of the Northern Sea Frost Divine Art, drawing the external cold deep into his very marrow.
The pain vanished.
More than that—he transcended it. When he became part of the Northern Sea itself, the wind ceased to be a blade and became breath.
The lost toes and ear never returned. But he lived.
Year five.
He descended deeper into Geumeum-ji.
This place was utterly different from where he had endured in the first year. The air itself had frozen solid; he could not breathe. He had to force-wring the air itself into existence with his Inner Force.
‘Each breath costs one level of Inner Force.’
A thousand breaths a day meant a thousand levels drained away. Sleep meant death. To stop breathing meant death.
‘I will not sleep.’
Airak did not close his eyes. One year. Two years. Three years.
Drifting between sleep and wakefulness, surviving on snatches of rest, on the third year it began—his mind fracturing.
‘Karani…?’
He saw her before him. She was smiling. He reached out, but his hand passed through her.
A hallucination.
‘I’m losing my mind.’
He clenched his teeth. Let it break. So long as he grew stronger.
By the tenth year.
In the deepest abyss of Geumeum-ji, “it” came for him.
Light itself froze in that place, darker than pitch. At first he sensed nothing. But then, at some moment, his blood began to crystallize. Inside his veins, his lifeblood transformed into jagged ice.
‘What… is this?’

It had no form and made no sound. Only the extreme cold itself seemed to possess will—a Frost Demon.
‘My blood… is freezing.’
Blood pumped from his heart froze before reaching his arms. It solidified before it could reach his legs. Every vessel in his body transformed into ice spikes, piercing his flesh from within.
‘Aaaagh!’
A scream tore from his throat. He had never known such agony.
His fingernails fell out. The crystallized blood pushed them from beneath.
“…Ugh!”
His toenails followed. One by one. All ten nails fell away. His skin split and cracked. Through the fissures, ice crystals bloomed.
As if flowers were flowering from within his flesh. Beautiful and cruel.
The Frost Demon seeped inward.
Into bone, into organs, into soul.
‘At this rate… I die.’
Resistance was useless. The Frost Demon fed on the warmth of living things and consumed everything.
There was no way to stop it.
‘Karani….’
Her face came to him. That face, watching the sunset at the edge of the Cliff.
‘I cannot… die yet.’
But there was no way. The Frost Demon lived on warmth. As long as warmth existed, it would not retreat.
‘Then…’
Airak’s gaze shifted.
‘I eliminate the warmth.’
It was a mad thought.
‘I die first.’
There was only one way to eliminate warmth. To stop the heart.
Airak drew every strand of the Northern Sea Frost Divine Art flowing through his body and concentrated it upon his own heart.
Thump.
His heart beat.
Thump.
Once more.
Thump……
And then it stopped.
A curtain of cold, colder than ten-million-year-old glacial ice, enveloped his heart. He had frozen his own heart, plunging himself into a False Death State.
Perfect stillness.
Airak’s body, drained of warmth, became no different from a dead stone. Believing its food had vanished, the Frost Demon slowly withdrew.
Time passed. He could not know how much.
The frozen curtain around his heart cracked, microscopically.
Thump-thump.
The halted pulse resumed.
“Cough…!”
Airak vomited blood. Not crimson blood. A blackened blood mixed with ice crystals.
The price of return from death was cruel.
The flesh where his heart had been darkened into necrosis, leaving a permanent frostbite scar.
To touch it was to feel not living tissue but cold stone.
It was proof that the fourteenth Asura warrior had conquered death.
And simultaneously, a curse’s seal—he could never again harbor the warmth of human emotion.
By the twentieth year.
The northernmost reaches of Geumeum-ji.
Five years to reach that place. With each step, bones shattered. Flesh fell away. He was no longer recognizably human.
“Just a little more…”
At last, arriving at that place, Airak discovered something extraordinary.
The wind had stopped.
Snowflakes hung suspended in the air, refusing to fall. A bird remained motionless, wings spread wide. Eyes open. Alive. Yet utterly still.
‘Time itself… has frozen?’
The extreme cold had frozen even the passage of time.
Airak threw himself into that frozen space.
In an instant, his entire body stiffened.
‘Move… I…’
Even thought slowed. Within a space where time had stopped, he too had to be still.
‘No. If I stop here, I die.’
He burned his will. He dredged up every last fragment of Inner Force from his Dantian.
‘Move!’
A single finger moved. That alone consumed tremendous Inner Force. He felt his Dantian draining empty.
‘More…!’
One step took a day. Ten steps took ten days. A hundred steps took a hundred days.
Thus he walked for three years.
For three years he never once rested. To rest was to die. To stop was to be frozen forever in that place.
Threading silently between the suspended snowflakes, he came to understand how to freeze space itself.
‘Now… I see it.’
The completion of the Asura Martial Art Completion.
When he swung the Mangoktdo, not only his enemy’s flesh shattered and froze—the very air and space beneath their feet crystallized and splintered.
Speed and distance meant nothing to him anymore.
Year thirty.
It came on a certain day of that year.
Airak still sat at the northernmost point of Geumeum-ji. For thirty years he had not moved. He breathed alone. Everything had been absorbed into his Inner Force and solidified.
He was no longer human.
His skin had turned white as ice. His eyes had taken on a grey cast. His heart had frozen solid and cold.
And then, a strange vibration rose from his chest.
‘…?’
It was a sensation he had never felt before.
A sharp, keen feeling—like a thread snapping—that he had never known in all his life.

‘What is this…?’
His heart ached. No—his heart was already frozen, incapable of pain. And yet it ached. Something other than his heart was in pain.
It was his soul.
“…Karani?”
The bond that had been tethered to his heart—or rather, hanging from the last fragment of his soul—turned to ash and scattered in an instant.
‘This feeling is…’
Death. Someone’s death. Someone connected to him.
‘Karani!’
For the first time in thirty years, his heart convulsed.
The frozen heart cracked, and the pain was exquisite.
‘What has happened!’
Airak understood instinctively. That something had befallen her.
He rose from the lotus position he had not once broken in thirty years.
Rumble-rumble-rumble…!
His rising alone caused the vast walls of ice around him to resonate and collapse.
Thirty years of accumulated snow and ice poured down like an avalanche.
Geumeum-ji released a single human to the world for the first time in thirty years.
But he was no longer human.
What emerged from thirty years of ascetic cultivation was no human—it was an Asura sculpted from ice.

* * *

Back to the present.
Airak’s hand fell away from his chest.
Harku and his subordinates held their breath, overwhelmed by the depth of solitude that lay in his eyes—something scarcely human.
“There was a reason I wished to grow strong.”
Airak’s voice carried the emptiness of the Northern Sea’s wind.
“I lost my toes to gain that power. My ear was torn away.”
“…….”
“I did not sleep. For three years. I endured even as madness crept in.”
“…….”
“I froze my own heart. Died and came back. And this scar was the price.”
Airak ran his hand across the scar on his chest.
“But… in the end, it was too late.”
“Chieftain….”
Garkan opened his mouth, but he did not know what to say.
Airak gripped the Mangoktdo once more and began walking toward the south.
Revenge had already begun, though what awaited at its end, even he could not say.
Only one thing was certain: wherever he walked, the world would sink beneath the thirty years of cold he had endured.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————