North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 96

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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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96. The First Blood Feud

The rear gate opened without a sound.
Je Gal Chan stepped outside carrying no lantern.
He had dismissed his guards as well. The family head who once commanded the Martial World through the Qi Men Formation Technique walked into the dead of night empty-handed, his palms bare.
Paradoxically, this lightened his heart. It was the steady gait of a man with nothing left to protect, nothing left to hide.
The night air cut like a blade’s edge.
Wind that had crossed the garden wall brushed past the hem of his robe.
Nephew followed half a step behind.
A perceptive boy.
“You truly won’t call for guards, will you?”
The boy’s voice cut through the darkness, trembling faintly.
“Calling for them would be more dangerous.”
Je Gal Chan did not break stride.
“A hundred men dragged into their presence would amount to nothing but a hundred pieces of meat. To give them no pretext to draw their blades—that alone is the path to life.”
“Then what will guarantee your safety, family head?”
“It won’t be safe. That’s why I’m taking you. Watch closely.”
The boy fell silent.
Je Gal Chan had taught him the virtue of silence as well.
Only the boy’s breath followed carefully behind.
Je Gal Chan pretended not to hear its tremor. What the boy needed to witness was not fear itself, but a back that would not shatter even in its grip.

The path was clear.
Without light, feet that had trodden this ground for forty years read the terrain first.
The embankment path beyond the rear gate.
A familiar walking route along the grassland’s edge.
Night-wet grass leaves brushed against his ankles. Even the sound of insects had died in the darkness.
When a beast passes through, all living things hold their breath.
Je Gal Chan understood the meaning of that silence better than anyone.
Yet the coiled monster at its end remained incalculable even by forty years of wisdom. How strong it truly was.
A beast that had withdrawn despite seizing victory. One more step and it could have severed the breath of the Je Gal Family, yet it had not crossed the wall.
Strong beasts inspire fear, nothing more. But a beast that withdrew while victorious—its intent unknowable—it sent chills that bordered on madness.
Je Gal Chan understood the reason for that bizarre halt. That is why he was stepping into the hunting ground himself. For it was the only solution.
Cold sweat trickled down his spine.
He smoothed the edge of his robe with his fingertips and deliberately ignored it.
Fear was inevitable. But the moment he let it show on his face, he knew a martial master’s life was over.

Where the field path ended, a single red point wavered in the vast darkness.
A campfire. Flames rose in the middle of a grassland, and around it hunched bestial figures, low and crouched.
Sparks leapt upward into the darkness and faded.
The flickering firelight cast the shadows of the crouched forms long across the grass.
Those shadows were too large to be human, yet too still to be beasts. Je Gal Chan swallowed hard.
Yet he did not slow his pace.
The shelter of the creature that had shattered the family’s heart at dawn and departed.
With no thought of hiding, the firelight spread arrogantly in all directions.
‘Whoever comes, I will tear them apart.’
The flames themselves were a savage proclamation.
Nephew’s footsteps stopped abruptly.
Je Gal Chan did not turn back. He did not soothe the boy, but walked alone into the firelight with steady steps. To halt was the boy’s choice; to rush in like a moth to flame was the family head’s.

As he drew near, nothing stirred.
The beasts circled around the campfire fixed their gaze upon him.
A giant in a turned-bearskin, a long-armed man. They watched, but did not rise or reach for weapons.
Despite the enemy commander walking in of his own accord, they stared only at the flames.
Je Gal Chan pierced through the nature of that unsettling indifference.
An overwhelming confidence: that at any moment they could crush his throat.
Each of those beasts was a catastrophe unto itself.
Je Gal Chan sank heavily into the empty space beside the fire.
No greeting, no bloodlust—he warmed himself at the flames as brazenly as one of them.
The bone-deep chill melted slowly from his fingertips. Night or not, the air cut with a terrible cold.
He held his palms near the flames, and the frost locked in each joint gave way. Forty years—hands that had held the cards of formation techniques now basked in an enemy’s fire.
At this intrusion by neither foe nor guest, his companions fell silent.
A giant swathed in bearskin flicked a piece of hard bread toward him.
“Want some?”
Garkan. Crude strength radiated from his grip, his words rougher still.
Je Gal Chan stared at those thick, scarred hands.
Hands that had come to twist his clan now offered him bread.
Without protest, Je Gal Chan took the bread and chewed it down. His throat caught on its dry, mealy texture. Poor quality. Even commoners refused such fare these days.
Yet he chewed slowly, methodically, to the last crumb.
The gritty taste of chaff lingered long on his tongue.
‘Is this my final meal?’
Je Gal Chan let out a bitter laugh.
Come empty-handed, leave empty-handed—it was only fitting that he depart as he had arrived. At least this crust would go with him into the dark.
“You feed your enemies?”
Je Gal Chan asked between chews.
“A starved man makes poor meat.”
Garkan delivered the words without inflection.
A joke, perhaps. Yet even enemies who arrived at mealtime received bread. This was the law of the savage North Sea.
“I’ve heard that North Sea people do this. A code, then?”
“Code is nonsense. It’s just our way.”
Garkan turned his gaze away with those words.
The giant’s broad shoulders wheeled back toward the flames.
Je Gal Chan let out another low chuckle.
The absurdity of it struck him like a blow. A family patriarch sitting before an enemy’s fire, tearing into bread given by foe hands.
Swift slaughter and this strange hospitality twisted together in one space. The very contradiction pressed down on the moment with a sickening weight.
A silver-haired woman extended a teacup. Steam curled from the rim as she held it out with both hands in ceremonial respect.
“While it’s still warm.”
It was Serian.
“I wish it were poisoned.”
Je Gal Chan accepted the cup with a bitter smile—half-joke, half-shield.
The warmth of the cup in his palm seemed too gentle for this cold spring night.
“Poisoned or not, you’d drink it anyway.”
Serian’s slate-gray eyes curved with a chill smile.
“A man who walked into a place of slaughter without a single guard.”
“You see clearly, then.”
“From a distance, it was unmistakable—you came here to surrender your life.”
Je Gal Chan regarded that cool smile for a moment, then drank the tea in one breath.
The hot liquid traced down his throat.
Yet as warmth reached his belly, a colder hollow deepened somewhere in his chest.
The greater the hospitality, the nearer death drew.
He turned that paradox over in his mouth like a bitter taste.
The hand that threw the bread, the hand that offered the cup—both were the hands of strangers.

A long-armed man nodded toward something in the darkness.
“The clan leader is over there.”
At Taikan’s gesture lay a darkness untouched by the warmth of the fire.
“He wouldn’t have been waiting for me.”
“Did you think otherwise? You came without throwing a final strike. I understand his intention now.”
Taikan muttered the words.
Across the grassland, a shape merged with shadow became visible.
The moment Je Gal Chan turned his head, ash-gray eyes pierced through him with surgical precision—a chilling gaze that had watched him since he entered the Field Path.
Je Gal Chan set down the empty cup and rose slowly to his feet.
His knees ached with a dull throb, but he straightened his back.
“Thank you for the meal.”
These were the enemy leader’s final courtesies.
He turned his back on the beasts of slaughter and walked into the abyss where ash-gray eyes gleamed with terrible light.
The warmth of the campfire behind him receded with each step, and in its place came the bitter cold of absolute darkness to greet him.

* * *

Aelak did not rise.
With his arm severed, he merely gazed upward in silence at Je Gal Chan looking down from above.
Even in that absolute darkness, Aelak’s eyes captured the slightest tremor of his enemy’s muscles.
A Step Technique without wavering, a Folding Fan thrust firmly at the waist.
For a man without a blade, the fan was the blade.
A suffocating stillness stretched between the two great figures. The gazes of the prone and the standing collided in mid-air with a sharp crack.
Only the distant crackle of the campfire scratched at the edges of that silence.
The prone figure did not move a single fingertip. That motionless tranquility was what froze Je Gal Chan’s spine most deeply.
It was the one lying down who spoke first.
“May I see your martial skill?”
A low, spine-chilling voice. Not a simple question. If I see your martial skill, I can know your identity. Who are you?
“There is no need.”
Je Gal Chan met that cold pressure head-on.
“I struck Bing Gong-ju’s back. With this.”
A dry confession without a single excuse.
Je Gal Chan had placed a noose around his own neck. Rather than parading some shallow martial skill, that single sentence proved his guilt most nakedly—and the strategist knew it.
Aelak did not answer. His ash-colored eyes merely dimmed imperceptibly.
After a long silence, he murmured while still lying down.
“This was not done by one man alone.”
Not a question. Eight slash marks left on Karani’s corpse. The existence of an accomplice was already a settled fact.
Je Gal Chan’s shoulders stiffened slightly.
“No other words will leave your mouth. Do not expect them.”
The old fox admitted it without hesitation. He never shifted the blame. Yet he said nothing of his accomplice.
There was still neither rage nor disturbance in Aelak’s eyes.
Though the man who tore Karani apart stood before him confessing, Aelak pressed no further. Who was behind this? How was the board arranged? Not a single interrogation.
If he had meant to dig deeper, he would have begun torture long ago.
Aelak despised such exhausting methods. The rest would show themselves soon enough, and each time they did, he would slit their throats. That was all.
Je Gal Chan suffocated in that terrible non-response.
Had the man grabbed him by the collar and interrogated him frantically, it would have been easier somehow. This refusal to ask—it was an arrogant pronouncement that he had already seen through to the very bottom of the board.
His chest tightened slowly. The clan lord bore that pressure while his grip on the fan’s handle tightened imperceptibly.
Sweat pooled in his palm, dampening the fan’s ribs. Yet he did not release that hand. It was the last card he could hold.
“You do not even interrogate.”
Je Gal Chan tore through the silence.
Aelak remained silent.
The strategist read the answer in that suffocating stillness and shook his head with bitter resignation.
“Things will not go as you wish.”
Je Gal Chan’s final declaration, like a dying man’s last words.
The moment you rise, my Formation Technique and fan will answer your blade.
Knowing the monster’s true intent, the old clan lord’s pride would see its end through martial skill alone.
Aelak did not answer. Instead, his parched lips opened.
“Ber Karagun… Senyarna-Yolgama.”
(Berkaragun… Senyarna-Yolgama.)
(The first Blood Feud. I cast it beneath your feet…)

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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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