Return of the God of War - Chapter 79

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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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Episode 79. Hardly Worthy of the Title Murin.
Screeeech!
Each time the black sword passed through the air, a crimson line was painted across the void.
With every arc of its trajectory, flesh tore open and blood sprayed.
The air trembled with the metallic stench of gore.
Bang!
A fist like cast iron shredded muscle and splintered bone.
Shrieks and roars echoed forth as if woven into a single, terrible melody.
“……Haah.”
Ragged breath escaped his lips.
There was truth to the old saying—no matter how far below one’s opponent stands, numbers alone can tip the scales.
Muk Yeojin felt it keenly.
With each passing moment, his stamina drained faster, and his Naegong tilted toward exhaustion.
Yet strangely.
The killing intent that radiated from him only grew sharper with time.
There was nothing strange about it, truly.
The murin called Muk Yeojin.
His art of war had been forged on a battlefield where blood rained like a downpour and death flooded like a deluge.
Here.
In the heart of this Sea of Death, where a single misplaced step meant plunging into the abyss.
This very place was the birthplace of his Mudao, the origin point from which all else flowed.
And so his Mugong, his world, lived and breathed now with a ferocity unlike any moment before.
Crash!
Shriek! Screeeech!
His swordplay was brutally tyrannical.
Geuk Tou Shin Geom.
A practical, unstructured combat form with no set patterns.
Each technique flowed from his hand as a lethal, deadly blade.
Nor was it the sword alone.
Boom!
The fists, palms, and kicks of San Wang Mu swept forth like a tempest.
The realm of beasts.
The domain of Namman’s master.
The apex art of the Beast King unfolded before them.
Baek Yu’s Clan’s hunting hounds collapsed like whelps before a tiger.
Muk Yeojin’s gaze grew ever deeper.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.
As he deployed Yeol Pyo Bo, his form vanished from sight in an instant.
When he appeared again, four more corpses had already hit the ground headless.
Gwoe Rangdo, master of the assassination organization Blood Killing Sect, gasped in horror.
“Damn! No one said there’d be a monster like that!”
To Gwoe Rangdo’s eye, the figures moving across the battlefield, harvesting limbs as methodically as one would weed a grave, were nothing short of demons.
In that instant, he made his choice.
There was no way he could stand against them himself.
And so he turned his body toward the rear pavilion and fled.
But regrettably.
Whether he ran forward or backward, every path led to the same destination: the underworld.
Bang!
Thud.
Gwoe Rangdo collapsed.
Even from a distance, the frigid energy tore his head clean from his shoulders.
The man who had felled Gwoe Rangdo in a single strike.
Baek Yupae, the patriarch of Baek Yu’s Clan, had already drawn close to Muk Yeojin.
“Idiots. All of them.”
He surveyed the surroundings with eyes burning with killing intent.
Nearly half the assassins had already fallen.
Of the remainder, if he were to count only those still whole, the number would halve again.
Baek Yupae turned his head slightly to look behind him.
Ma Seon—a master swordswoman of considerable skill.
In his eyes, this might have been the perfect opportunity to rise among the sect’s inner circle.
He’d made a fool of himself because of those wet-behind-the-ears youngsters.
As Baek Yupae, he had to reclaim this situation by any means necessary.
“Fall back, all of you!”
He bellowed the command, channeling his true strength into the words.
At that.
The assassins encircling Muk Yeojin began withdrawing as one.
Muk Yeojin’s eyes flashed with interest.
‘Formidable.’
It was his laconic assessment upon facing Baek Yupae.
The crushing aura radiating from him set not only the Cangqiong Qi in his Danjeon but even the alarmed Geuk Won Ho Sin Gi trembling within his body.
The sheer volume of Naegong he possessed was vast beyond measure—a boundless ocean.
Yet the Yo Gi clinging to him was equally thick.
It meant he had drawn together all that vast Naegong using nothing but the single method of Chae Eum Bo Yang.
The number of women whose vital essence he had consumed over the years was beyond any reasonable reckoning.
Baek Yupae’s killing intent bloomed as he fixed his gaze on Muk Yeojin.
“Who in blazes are you?”
Instead of answering, Muk Yeojin spoke thus.
“A physician who claims to preserve life—and yet behind closed doors commits such shameless deeds? Don’t you feel the slightest shame? Though I suppose if you understood what shame was, you’d never have conceived of such acts in the first place. I misspoke.”
The words struck home, and Baek Yupae’s gaze grew darker still.
That only sharpened Muk Yeojin’s contempt.
This man had known full well how vile and wrong his deeds were—and committed them anyway.
That mad dog Yeomun deserved to die, but Baek Yupae was no less a monster.
“I asked you a question.”
“I’m the ferryman who’ll send every last one of you to the underworld.”
In that instant, Baek Yupae surged forward and unleashed a sinister palm strike.
Bang!
The tremendous shockwave sent Muk Yeojin’s body hurtling backward three zhang.
Baek Yupae’s eyes narrowed.
It was a strike infused with eight-star Naegong or higher.
Even a master of internal transformation arts would have suffered grievous injury—yet the young swordsman seemed utterly unaffected.
Baek Yupae forced a cold smile.
“Good, you’ve got some backbone. Now we can enjoy this properly.”
Whiiiir.
Frigid Qi began radiating outward from Baek Yupae’s entire body in all directions.
The caliber was formidable.
Space itself seemed to vibrate faintly from the tremor of his Qi.
Muk Yeojin’s eyes grew distant.
Ice arts of such refined mastery.
Unbidden, a face surfaced in his memory.
The fourth sister of his sworn siblings.
An absolute master of ice arts.
A woman as cold as a sheet of ice in both technique and bearing.
Yet her heart was warmer than anyone else in the world.
The Gungju of the Northern Sea Ice Palace, the Snow Radiant Empress, Baek Yeomun.
But.
“It’s different.”
At these cryptic words, Baek Yupae’s brow furrowed.
“What?”
“Different, I said. Your eerie, corrupted cold can’t compare to my sister’s frigid aura—pure as the eternal snow of the northern reaches itself. Tepid. That’s all you are.”
Bang!
Muk Yeojin charged forward with explosive force.
In the same breath, he drew the Black Night Sword from his waist and slashed it diagonally upward toward the upper right.
First form of Geuk Tou Shin Geom.
Cheon Swae Il Seom.
Baek Yupae extended his palm to meet the incoming sword light.
Screech!
“Ugh!”
Blood dripped from his palm.
A flash of dismay crossed Baek Yupae’s eyes.
He hadn’t anticipated that the blade would pierce through his defensive barrier of Byung Han Gong and draw blood.
“Arrogant fool!”
Muk Yeojin seized the opening and closed the distance.
Bang! Crash!
Muk Yeojin countered the dizzying successive ice palm strikes with a swift blade.
Dozens of moves flashed back and forth in an instant.
Slash!
Blood sprayed from the tip of Muk Yeojin’s shoulder.
Had he not instinctively twisted his body, the palm wind would have sheared away his shoulder blade—a chilling technique.
‘He’s fierce, no question about it.’
Each move triggered by that vast inner power was both heavy and sharp.
In raw force alone, he ranked with an elder or above from any major sect.
‘But.’
Hissss!
The Naegong within Muk Yeojin surged and stimulated the Yongcheon acupoint at the soles of his feet.
‘That’s all there is.’
The hunt of the Yeol Pyo Bo at full mastery.
Yeol Pyo Bo.
His form vanished in an instant, reappearing behind Baek Yupae.
It was movement at an astounding speed.
Without any visible footwork, he moved like a beam of light.
Judging by the acceleration alone, it was a footwork technique worthy of traversing all of Cheonha.
Urgency flickered across Baek Yupae’s face.
Rip!
His side was slashed open.
“Ugh!”
Splash!
He hurled an ice palm strike in response, but it cut only through empty air.
Rip!
“Argh!”
Baek Yupae staggered.
This time the back of his left knee had been cut.
“Not even half the warrior I am.”
Baek Yupae raised his head and looked forward.
Whoosh.
Muk Yeojin approached, radiating a sharp killing intent, his face entering Baek Yupae’s field of vision.
“You accumulated Naegong by sucking the yin essence from countless women—barely respectable, I grant you. But with such mediocre technique, you cannot wield that power properly. You have the Qi, but not the Art. To call yourself a Murin is an insult to the term. You’re pathetic.”
Baek Yupae’s face contorted completely.
It was his reverse scale—a wound that ran through his entire life as a martial aspirant.
Inferiority and shame crashed over him like a tsunami, and his eyes inevitably rolled back.
“You bastard! I’ll flay the skin from your bones and pickle you in salt!”
At the brink of life and death, the moment he lost himself to the provocation and abandoned reason.
It was a foregone conclusion whose name would be inscribed first in Yeomra Dae Wang’s register of the dead.
“Aaaaaagh!”
A pair of icy palm strikes so freezing that frost gathered in the air around them came flying.
But he had already read all of his patterns.
His simple techniques, bereft of meaningful variation, seemed to Muk Yeojin nothing more than the fumbling of a child.
Rip!
“Aaaaaaaagh!”
Both of Baek Yupae’s arms were severed below the elbows.
At that moment, a terrible killing intent flickered in Muk Yeojin’s eyes.
The Black Night Sword twisted toward his throat.
Screeeee!
“……!”
A sharp whistle pierced Muk Yeojin’s ear.
Surely not?
And yet such suspicions always seemed to materialize with uncanny accuracy—in the worst possible way.
Crash!
Energy erupted from Baek Yupae’s entire body in a violent explosion.
Simultaneously, his eyes turned a dark blue.
‘Jin Byeok An!’
The effect of the Gwang Pok Dan.
The problem was that Baek Yupae wasn’t the only one who had fallen into that frenzied state.
Crash!
From all directions, Singeoms caught in the frenzy unleashed torrents of force.
“Ugh. Useless fools—this is exactly why one cannot accomplish anything with such inferior rabble.”
Muk Yeojin’s gaze turned toward the figure perched against the hall’s doorframe.
‘The Ma Immortal!’
It appeared Baek Yu’s Clan had already administered the incomplete Gwang Pok Dan to all its retainers.
And here lay the truth of it.
‘So even for the Yuan Yin Sect, Baek Yu’s Clan is nothing but expendable.
In my previous life, Baek Yu’s Clan never achieved any great feats before their destruction came after the Blood Killing Sect’s fall.
Muk Gun had also become a Sub-Sect Leader, but what became of him after the Three Immortals’ collapse and Sadocheon’s ruin remains unclear.
‘Most likely he fell to the hands of those Yuan Yin Sect bastards.’
In the end, Baek Yu’s Clan was merely a pawn in perfecting the Gwang Pok Dan.
Muk Gun, too, was nothing but a long-game piece meant to destabilize Sadocheon’s power.
Crash!
The situation shifted violently.
Both Muk Yeojin and Cheon Hwarin threw themselves toward the position where Yang Hui and Yeocheon stood.
Yang Hui, his expression grave, spoke.
“Is that the Gwang Pok Dan you spoke of, Master Muk?”
“That’s right.”
Cheon Hwarin clicked her tongue and shook her head slightly.
“……Damn. This is a headache.”
The incomplete Gwang Pok Dan consumed the user’s life force, but its effectiveness was correspondingly devastating.
Even Muk Byeong-ho, though only briefly, had matched Muk Yeojin’s strength—need more be said?
Cheon Hwarin had instinctively sensed that danger herself.
Whoosh!
Bang!
She parried the strike of a Singeom engulfed in that frenzy.
The tremor at the corners of her eyes betrayed just how dire the present moment had become.
“We can’t stay. I’m sorry, but we need to fall back. Holding our ground here now would be nothing short of suicide.”
Yeocheon simply closed her lips.
However dire the situation, she could not bring herself to shamelessly ask three people to exhaust their strength for her sake.
Muk Yeojin, too, nodded his agreement with her words.
To charge into a regiment of Singeoms consumed by frenzy with their current strength would be madness.
‘With the current strength,’ that is.
Muk Yeojin regarded Cheon Hwarin.
Then, slowly, he opened his mouth.
“Sub-Sect Leader. Ascend to the Geuk Ma.”

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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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