North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 99

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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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99. Names on Paper

The study lay suspended in the grey light before dawn, still reluctant to yield to day.
Cheok Un-hui sat motionless, the Jeol-hwi Geom resting across his knees.
The oil lamp burned low, its flame barely illuminating the papers on the desk.
Through the crack in the window, a pale blue haze slid cold across the lacquered sheath.
Urgent footsteps sounded from beyond the door.
‘Commotion at dawn. Never a good sign.’
The Messenger. He knelt beyond the threshold.
“Master. An Urgent Report has arrived from Yang-yang.”
Cheok Un-hui did not lift his head. An Urgent Report at dawn carried no joyful tidings.
“The Family Head of the Je-gal clan has… passed. By the blade of a man from the North Sea.”
In that moment, Cheok Un-hui pressed his hand against the sword hilt, then released it.
What fell from the Messenger’s lips was no mere Obituary Notice.
‘So it has come at last.’
The cold omen that had tightened around his throat for so long had finally taken flesh, arriving at his door.
Cheok Un-hui swallowed that sinister chill deep into his chest.
“When?”
“Six days past, they say.”
“The body?”
“The main house has taken custody. A Secret Letter with detailed circumstances should arrive within days.”
“Where are these northerners now?”
“They’ve vanished without a trace. Though reports suggest they’ve turned southward…”
Southward.
Cheok Un-hui’s fingers froze on the sword hilt.
South from Yang-yang traced a trajectory that drew closer to Cheon Geom Mun’s very doorstep.
“Leave.”
The Messenger withdrew in silence. Yet Cheok Un-hui’s gaze remained fixed on empty space.
The lamp’s shadow stretched across the desk, then rose again.

Je-gal Chan.
The name of an old friend surfaced briefly in his mind, then sank. The weight of what was unfolding made grief for a friend’s death seem trivial.
‘It has begun.’
The price of driving a blade into Aelak’s chest.
That crimson retribution had become a cold steel blade, descending southward, ever southward.
Only he and the six others who had journeyed with him to the North Sea knew whose throat that blade ultimately sought.
The karma of his own making and the northern blade that severed his friend’s neck six days hence were now woven into a single thread of blood.
A hell of his own forging.
Yet now that inferno’s flames were beginning to spread toward his own family.
He harbored no regret. His daughter breathed again and smiled—the debt was paid.

But… a dread distinct from remorse, a vicious and suffocating bind, struck the back of his skull.
Of all the bitter luck… that murderer and his two children were walking side by side.
For reasons unknown, a bewildering dispatch had arrived bearing word that his son and daughter traveled in the company of the northerner.
Cheok Mu-yeong had departed on a mission from the Martial Alliance to investigate Okmun Gwan, while Cheok Ha-rin had set out on her first journey to the Central Plains, chasing after her brother.
“Mu-yeong is entangled with that northerner?”
Cheok Un-hui spoke the words low.
The worst possible image unfolded in his mind.
Cheok Mu-yeong’s upright silhouette, Cheok Ha-rin’s fluttering skirts. And beside them, the ash-grey eyes of the northern fiend.
The blade summoned by his own karma had driven itself to his children’s very feet.
He had urged them so fervently to avoid collision, to step aside—yet here they were, crawling willingly into the tiger’s mouth.
The Supreme Swordmaster of the World, whose equilibrium had never faltered in a lifetime, felt a crack split through his resolve.
This was unmistakable terror.
“What lunacy could possess them to do such a thing?”
Cheok Un-hui’s voice sank to the depth of a cellar.
Veins rose stark against the back of the hand that gripped the sword hilt.
It was anger directed at his children, and at the same time, a painful self-reproach for his own arrogance in paving the way for them. But self-recrimination was brief. Dwelling in sentiment was not his way.
“Bring me Stone Instructor Seok.”

Moments later, Seok Jang-soon, the first instructor of Cheon Geom Mun, entered and bowed deeply.
Cheok Un-hui fixed him with a gaze sharp as a blade.
“Go to Mu-yeong at once. Bring them both back. Force them if you must.”
“Understood.”
“Take the fastest route. Bring them no matter what. And hear me well—this is a warning for you. Do not—under any circumstance—engage with the northerners. Evade them completely.”
“Understood.”
“Go. He was in Yang-yang six days ago. If fortune favors us, you’ll meet within four days.”
“I will bring them within that time, without fail.”
Seok Jang-soon bowed and withdrew.
His footsteps faded swiftly down the corridor.

Cheok Un-hui overlaid the span of four days against the speed of the northerners’ advance southward.
‘I must extract them before they arrive.’
They had to be pulled out before the killer grasped the true identities of his children. And then…
“…Do-myeong.”
Cheok Un-hui’s gaze snapped upward sharply.
His son’s message had contained his younger brother’s Daoist name.
The northerners had been heading for Hua-shan.
His two children might not understand what the northerners’ movements signified, but he grasped it. The blade from the North Sea was pointed at his brother.
“Do-myeong is exposed as well. But this—they shouldn’t have been able to find us this quickly.”
Cheok Un-hui tilted his head, unsettled.
A question gnawed at him.
‘The speed with which he identified Je-gal Chan is abnormal.’
How had a northerner pinpointed the Je-gal Family the moment they crossed into the Central Plains? The northerner’s affair had left no traces.
There was only one explanation: someone from within had opened the door for them.
Something was deeply wrong. But now was not the time to dwell on wrongness—safety came first. If the Je-gal Family Head had been murdered, Do-myeong Jin-in would not have escaped unscathed.
Cheok Un-hui hurriedly began writing a message.
The brush scraped across paper, tearing through the pre-dawn silence into fine, ragged strips.

– Leave Hua-shan. The northern matter is exposed.

The problem lay in Do-myeong Jin-in’s stubborn nature.
Tell him to flee because northerners are coming, and he would refuse unto death. More warrior than priest, bone and marrow.
“I must step forward first. Before more are injured. If they’re coming this way, it may work to our advantage.”
Cheok Un-hui gripped the Jeol-hwi Geom with a cold gaze.

That afternoon.
Cheok Un-hui received a boy drenched in road dust and sweat.
“I am Je-gal Yeom. By the Family Head’s orders, I have ridden here without pause.”
The boy extended a secret document.
His trembling fingertips betrayed days of unbroken travel.
Cheok Un-hui unfolded his friend’s final letter.
Was this Je-gal Chan’s last testament? The handwriting was urgent, yet the Family Head’s uprightness remained intact.
From the first line, Je-gal Chan’s despair was written plain.
‘Someone is guiding them. There is no other way they could find me so easily.’
A chill ran down Cheok Un-hui’s spine.
Je-gal Chan had arrived at the same conclusion he had. What was worse—Je-gal Chan had reached that conclusion and still failed to identify the culprit.
A shadow that had penetrated even the Je-gal Family’s network of intelligence.
Then this man held the weak points of both Cheon Geom Mun and the Je-gal Family in his grip simultaneously. A figure of great consequence.
Someone!
He knew of the eight who had journeyed to the North Sea.
He knew precisely who they were, and what they had done.
He was directing the northerners toward those eight.
His identity remained shrouded in mystery. A faceless rat held the leashes of the Central Plains’ absolute powers and shook them as he pleased.
There was a second item in the letter.
Intelligence that the northerners had intended to strike the Je-gal Family before turning toward Hua-shan.
He already knew this from his son’s message.
Do-myeong Jin-in. His younger brother’s blade was already at his throat.
The third item.
He knew he would die. To prepare for that moment, he had instructed his sharp-eyed nephew to record every detail of that hellscape, so that on the basis of those records, precautions could be taken.
Cheok Un-hui clenched his teeth.
A ruthless man who, knowing he would die, had pinned his nephew in place as an observer right up until the final moment of his death.
The rationality of his friend’s attitude—refusing to abandon the future even in the face of death—only proved all the more starkly the enemy’s savage ferocity.
Cheok Un-hui’s thumb slowly traced the edge of the Secret Letter.
“This is it.”
The boy withdrew the document and handed it over.
Instead of words, the Secret Letter spilled forth diagrams of disturbing precision.
The martial techniques of the North Sea demon—every trajectory of his movements.
The angles of the Step Technique that had evaded Je-gal Chan’s killing stroke, the single Sword Method that had severed the Family Head’s neck.
Each stroke bore numbers inscribed in the margins—the velocity at which the movement had occurred.
Je-gal Chan’s movements ranged between Seven and Nine, but the northerner’s speed was always Eleven.
A Transcendent Master’s movement is Seven. Eight to Ten belongs to the Extreme Speed of the truly transcendent. But Ten is Extreme Speed itself—the absolute ceiling of human velocity.
To the boy’s eyes, Je-gal Chan must have appeared as a Martial God.
Yet the opponent was Eleven. Beyond Extreme Speed altogether. A velocity unmeasurable by any standard of human capability.
A vivid blueprint of carnage—the kind only an eyewitness to the slaughter could have rendered.
The third item was the work of the “sharp-eyed” nephew.

Cheok Un-hui’s gaze fixed upon the creature’s evasion pattern.
His fingertips, braced against the paper, slowly traced along the lines of the diagram.
The angle at which he had twisted his flank nearly double, shedding the lethal blow. A trajectory no human spine could achieve.
Cheok Un-hui’s mind raced.
One: the creature was a true monster.
Two: the nephew who had watched his uncle’s head fly away before his very eyes had drawn this exaggeration in terror, having soiled himself in fright.
Everyone would rationalize toward the second explanation upon seeing such a diagram. But Cheok Un-hui could not. He wanted to, but he could not.
Looking at the numbers inscribed in the diagram, his breath caught in his throat.
Cheok Un-hui knew Je-gal Chan’s speed well. Using that speed and the boy’s assessment as a reference point, he back-calculated the creature’s slashing velocity.
‘Three times.’
Three times faster than Je-gal Chan.
The fingers of Cheok Un-hui’s hand, clutching the paper, turned to stone.
The Supreme Swordmaster of the World, undefeated. The arrogant man who had never once seen another’s back—for the first time, his hand trembled as he gazed down at it.
‘Can my blade keep pace with that monster’s speed? If this number is true, he is faster than me.’
The invincible confidence built over a lifetime stood on the verge of shattering into pieces from a single scrap of paper.
Before my Jeol-hwi Il-geom could even touch him, that beast’s Step Technique would carry him beyond my range. And then he would strike, cold and precise, across my throat.
A horrifying image.
Fear spread like a poisonous mushroom. But Cheok Un-hui forcibly smothered it.
‘There must be illusion mixed into this account. No blade exists faster than my Jeol-hwi Il-geom. An observer’s record is prone to exaggeration, corrupted by terror. Especially if he witnessed his uncle’s decapitation.’
In the end, he deliberately diminished the worth of the nephew’s “vision”—the very eye that Je-gal Chan had praised.
‘Not three times. At most, twice.’
If it was twice, he could pin the northerner within his blade’s reach and carve him to pieces.
Cheok Un-hui gripped the Jeol-hwi Geom.
Shring.
The keen blade, forged from Cheong-gang-seok stone, awakened ominously beneath the lamplight.
A cold, sharp edge crept across his wrist and spread to his shoulders.
Cheok Un-hui sprang from his seat and deployed his killing stroke into the empty air.
Jeol-hwi Il-geom.
A sword strike at the extreme—soundless, leaving no afterimage.
Whoosh.
As the blade’s tip tore through the void, the flame of the lamp atop the desk flickered and died, then flared back to life.
A mental bout within Cheok Un-hui’s mind.
Setting the creature’s speed at “twice,” he positioned the monster’s shadow at the blade’s tip. And in that mere instant as the flame wavered—the imagined beast was already split in two.
Cheok Un-hui sheathed the blade with a metallic ring.
The study fell silent once more, a heavy and oppressive quiet.
The sky beyond the window had begun to pale with the approach of dawn.
Spread across the table lay the testament of a dead friend and a diagram depicting the slaughter of the North Sea demon, side by side.
The monsters and bloodlines named on this paper would soon collide head-on in streets soaked with the stench of blood.

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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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