The Heavenly Demon of the Blue Sky - Chapter 4

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

Azure Heaven Demon Master 004
To be honest, there was no reason for me to step forward. Who was I?
The Demon Master of Azure Heaven—a man who had reached the pinnacle of power alone, trusting no one.
I had simply opened my eyes to find myself trapped in the body of this stranger called Nam Gung Hyuk.
Clan, family—such things were utterly worthless.
It made no difference that an old man called Uncle had come bursting in.
I told myself it was none of my concern.
“Ahhhhh! Sister!”
“Let go!”
The moment those rough-handed brutes reached for my sisters, something in my chest erupted like molten lava.
……!?
I had known them only a few days. I hadn’t even wanted to be held in their arms.
‘The supreme demon master of all creation—angry over something so trivial as affection?’
I tried to turn away coldly, telling myself it was unlike me.
But my feet wouldn’t leave the ground. They clung there as if nailed in place.
In my mind’s eye, I saw their radiant smiles—my sisters’ bright, uncomplicated joy. The way they wanted to give me everything.
I had rolled through bloody winds my entire life. No formation technique in all creation, however sinister, had ever barred my path.
Yet this pitiful thread of affection had ensnared my feet so completely that I couldn’t even take a single honest step forward.
“Damn it.”
And so I moved. For the first time, I stepped forward to save someone.
Crash—! I caught the enemy’s strike in an instant, blocking it cold.
I twisted my lips at the look of shock frozen on his face.
“What’s wrong? Never seen a living corpse before?”
Crack—! The moment I twisted my hand, wreathed in Demonic Energy, his wrist snapped like dry wood.
“Aaahhhhh!”
I drove my heel into his abdomen, and he crashed to the ground with a final scream.
Without sparing the fallen man a glance, I kicked the wooden sword lying on the floor lightly upward with my toes.
Whoosh—tap! The rough grip of the sword settled into my palm.
Without hesitation, I leveled the blade at Uncle’s throat.
“Uncle, you say?”
The words that came from the sickly youngest son’s mouth were chilling in a way no one could have anticipated.
Uncle involuntarily felt fear flood through him, and he stepped back.
“Y-you! How dare you point a blade at your elder!”
“Spare me the nonsense. What makes you think you deserve respect from anyone? You laid hands on my sisters without permission from me—the legitimate son of this house.”
Hearing profanity from a mere child, Uncle’s face flushed crimson.
“Y-you insolent brat! Those medicines I sent you—thanks to them, you’ve regained a little strength, but have you no shame? The main house has long since fallen, and I am the true power of Nam Gung now!”
With that, he retreated sharply and wheeled toward his escort warriors, his face darkening with fury.
“What are you gawking at! Don’t just stand there—beat him down! Who cares about family honor when the clan is already ruined!”
“Yes, sir!”
The moment the order fell, five warriors surged forward with murderous intent.
“Hyuk!”
My sisters cried out and tried to rush in, but I raised my hand to stop them.
‘They’ll only be in the way now.’
The Demonic Energy I could draw from my core was barely a handful. My body, too, was wholly untrained.
Yet the experience of having lived countless times as the Demon Master of Azure Heaven, having crossed the line of death ten thousand times, remained intact within me.
‘Bound by form, their next move is transparent to me.’
The first enemy’s blade thrust toward the space between my eyes.
The thrust had good momentum, but the withdrawal was sluggish—a clumsy attack with obvious flaws.
Thud—! I twisted my upper body and slipped forward half a step.
I let his blade pass by a hair’s breadth, then struck precisely upward with the blunt pommel of the wooden sword, hitting the Yeon Cheon Acupoint beneath his jaw. Crack—!
“Gagh!”
His eyes rolled back, and he collapsed, foaming at the mouth.
“Hah!”
Two panicked warriors came at me from both sides in a coordinated assault.
They moved to cover each other’s gaps—skilled enough on the surface, but that was all it amounted to.
“Your feet are locked from matching your timing together.”
Instead of clashing swords, I dropped low and drove forward from below.
Not the upright footwork of the Orthodox Sect, but the covert Body Technique of the Demon Path.
“H-he vanished?!”
I was behind them in an instant, and they spun around in confusion.
The wooden sword cut through the air without mercy. Crack! Thud!
“Aaaaagh!”
“My, my knees……!”
One of them collapsed, screaming as his knee joint shattered completely.
In one fluid motion, Nam Gung Hyuk spun and snapped the wrist bone of the remaining attacker.
“Aahhh!”
Two left standing.
They cried out and thrust their blades forward, but fear had already crippled them.
Their strikes were pathetic, lacking even the fundamentals of proper swordplay.
“Hardly worth the effort to block.”
He flicked their attacks aside with contemptuous ease, completely shattering their balance, then rained down a flurry of strikes against their undefended shoulder blades and ribs.
Thud! Crack—!
Three breaths. That was all.
The five men who had rushed at him fell like harvested stalks of grain, not a single effective blow landed among them.
“I, iiiieeek!”
Then Uncle, left alone, lost all reason and charged.
“What, playing games now?”
A coward who had fled and survived while his clan crumbled.
Unsurprisingly, his swordplay was wretched, despite bearing the Nam Gung name.
“Tsk. Not worth crossing blades with.”
He clicked his tongue softly and twisted his shoulder, letting Uncle’s sword slide harmlessly past.
In that fraction of an instant when Uncle’s momentum carried him forward uncontrolled—
Nam Gung Hyuk drove his fist straight into his nose, shattering it mercilessly. Crack!
“Aaaaagh!”
Uncle dropped his sword and tumbled across the ground, clutching his broken nose.
Blood poured ceaselessly between his fingers.
“D, don’t come closer…….”
“Don’t want to?”
He seized Uncle’s hair with brutal force as the man scrambled backward in panic, yanking his head back to force him to meet his gaze—
“Ungh!”
And that was when it struck—a pain like his heart was being torn to shreds.
Spray! At the same instant, dark blood erupted from his mouth like a fountain, gushing forth with manic intensity.
“Gggkkkh……!”
The Severed Meridian. He had moved his body too forcefully, and now he paid the price in severe internal bleeding.
By sheer misfortune, the enormous volume of blood splattered directly across Uncle’s face.
“Hiiiieeeek!!”
Uncle shrieked in horror, drenched in blood that wasn’t his own.
“Hyuk!”
His sisters rushed over in alarm while he fumbled through his garments with trembling hands.
He drew out a cigarette rolled in thin paper and brought it to his blood-stained lips.
Tap! A faint thread of Demonic Energy gathered at his fingertip and flicked against the end.
The tip ignited crimson, and a strange bitter scent began to mask the stench of blood.
Inhale—! As he drew the acrid smoke deep into his lungs, Uncle’s voice trembled with dread.
“You, treating your father’s elder cousin—an elder of this house—with such brutality……. And yet you dare call yourself a legitimate son of Nam Gung?”
A desperate, frantic rebuke.
Cigarette still between his lips, he swept back his blood-matted hair.
He exhaled a plume of violet smoke directly into Uncle’s face.
Whoosh—!
As Uncle choked and sputtered, engulfed in the acrid fumes, Nam Gung Hyuk spoke with utter indifference.
“So what. I’m not the one you knew anymore.”
He seized Uncle by the collar and bound him tightly to one of the thick pillars at the edge of the Training Ground.
“Please……please, let me go…….”
Ignoring Uncle’s terrified pleas entirely, he rummaged through the cart they had brought.
Deep within a box concealed beneath a seat, he found the account ledgers from all this time.
“Hmm?”
His breath grew sharp as he turned each page.
“Thirty taels lent out, and in half a year it becomes two hundred taels in principal and interest?”
Even usurers would blush at such profiteering. And that was only the beginning.
Looking at the medicinal ingredient purchases in the ledger was enough to make him laugh bitterly.
“The inner core of a Ten-Thousand Year Fire Carp? The Nine-Leaf Snow Lotus they claim was harvested from the depths of the Northern Sea?”
Legendary Spiritual Medicines were listed one after another—the sort that would set the eyes of every master in the martial world ablaze were they to hear mere mention of their names.
“Bullshit. There’s no way these things would’ve ended up in this godforsaken backwater.”
The scheme was transparent. The ailment afflicting this body was a Severed Meridian—something no physician under heaven could heal.
An ordinary physician like the old herbalist couldn’t possibly procure such medicines, nor even authenticate them if he tried—so he’d only mentioned these mythical Spiritual Medicines to begin with.
“He peddled the story that he’d barely managed to acquire them through Underworld merchants, charging whatever price he demanded. Then he probably just boiled up some cheap weeds that looked vaguely similar and fed that to them.”
And what if, after consuming such expensive medicine, the illness didn’t improve?
One simply claims the sickness runs too deep—that even Spiritual Medicine cannot save him.
It wasn’t that his sisters didn’t understand the ways of the world and had been deceived.
They merely wanted—desperately wanted—to cling to that threadbare hope, that slimmest possibility that a dying brother might be saved.
The clutching of a drowning family at straws.
That weakness had been exploited. There could be no crueler con.
“Real scum. This bastard.”
Even the Demon Path kept to merchant ethics. But here was someone from the Orthodox Sect, deceiving and tormenting his own nieces like this?
“That’s it. Uncle or not. Time to fight.”
He seized the Leather Whip from the empty stable and swung it down on Uncle’s chest with all his strength, without mercy.
“Ahhhhgh!”
“Are you an elder? Hmm? Is this what the Orthodox Sect teaches?”
Crack—! Snap!
A sickly boy binding and thrashing a portly man like a pig.
After a long barrage, sweat began to stream down his brow.
“Ahhhh! I-I was wrong! I’m worthless! Spare me, please! Sob, sob…….”
As flesh split and blood sprayed, Uncle began to wail as though his very breath were being stolen, tears and snot streaming down his face.
“Hyuk…….”
Confronted with such brutality, his sisters turned their heads away, unable to bear the sight.
“Ptui!”
He spat out a mouthful of blood-stained saliva, then hurled the whip to the floor with a dull thud.
Instead, he retrieved an old Abacus and began to flick its beads. Click-clack, tap, tap.
“You ask to be spared? Then spared you shall be. We share the same blood, after all.”
“Th-thank you……! I’ll burn that Account Ledger at once and absolve all debts……!”
“What nonsense. Absolve debts?”
He ceased his flicking and fixed Uncle with a stern look.
“From now on, Uncle owes me.”
“W-what……?”
Narrowing his eyes, he began to enumerate the charges, one by one.
“First: unauthorized entry and trespass, bringing ruffians onto family grounds without permission, causing property damage and interference with operations. Five hundred taels.”
“F-five hundred……!”
“Second: attempted human trafficking and defamation—scheming to sell off highborn direct-line women of the Nam Gung main house to common rabble at a pittance. This crime carries steeper penalty. A thousand taels per woman, totaling three thousand taels.”
Click-clack, tap. The beads rolled smoothly beneath his fingertips.
“And third, the final count: negligent protection and instigation of assassination—plotting harm against myself, the legitimate son and prospective patriarch of Chang Cheon Nam Gung. A life’s value demands no less than five thousand taels, wouldn’t you say?”
Uncle’s eyes bulged as though they might burst from their sockets.
“Th-this is madness! Even if I sold every last coin I possess, I couldn’t……!”
“You can’t? Then you die.”
He retrieved the blood-soaked Leather Whip from the floor.
Spinning his shoulder with a sharp whoosh, the blood-caked Uncle’s cheeks trembled like aspen leaves.
“Wait! W-wait please! I’ll pay! I’ll pay! Eight thousand five hundred taels!!”
“Fine. Send someone to fetch it. Until then, you’ll remain bound in this place.”
With that, he pulled out the Account Ledger and thrust it before Uncle’s eyes.
“As for interest, it compounds at one hundred percent per day. One hundred percent. Do you understand? One hundred percent! And from now on, the main house will supply medicinal herbs, so take note. I’ll accept payment at whatever rate Uncle set. Keep that in mind.”
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. That is the law of the Demon Path.
At this savage pronouncement, a moan of despair escaped Uncle’s lips, as though his soul were being torn from his body.
“Hhhngh…….”
But he wasn’t finished. He needed to leave a deterrent, to snuff out any foolish thoughts Uncle might harbor.
“If word spreads that this coward who deserted during the war with Hyul Gyo has now threatened the main house itself, would Uncle truly be able to show his face in the martial world?”
Especially the Orthodox Sect—a brotherhood that prized righteousness and chivalry, that held honor above life itself.
Knowing this, he smoothed out Uncle’s tattered, torn clothing with a cruel smile.
“Uncle said it himself, didn’t he? That since even someone like me survived, we’ve been scraping by on scraps. So let me help you scrape by. Don’t you think?”
And with that, he tapped Uncle’s thick cheeks lightly with his palm.
“So behave yourself, yes? That way, when others look upon you, they’ll think: ‘Ah, he renounced his house and fled for the sake of his descendants!’ Doesn’t that sound better? There’s still honor to be salvaged.”
Carrot and stick, he drained the very will from Uncle.
Yet Uncle’s mind seemed to have stopped working altogether; consumed by terror, his lips only trembled while his eyes darted about frantically, unable to produce a single word.
“You have no sense at all, do you?”
The pleasantries ended there. With a soft chuckle, Nam Gung Hyuk pressed his fingertips against Uncle’s neck—a faint wisp of Demonic Energy coiled around them as they found the acupoint.
“Hiiieeegh……!”
Uncle’s eyes rolled back as a terrible, suffocating pain seized him, cutting off his breath.
“Are my words unclear?”
“Uaaaagh!”
Nam Gung Hyuk leaned close, his voice dropping to a whisper at Uncle’s ear.
“Answer me.”
There was no escape. In the martial world, survival meant one thing: abandon your own skin, wear the mask he demanded, and spend a lifetime as his puppet on a string.
At the lethal calm in his voice, Uncle’s head—bound tight with rope—finally went limp, falling toward the floor.
“Y-yes, I shall do as you say…….”
Shameful surrender crawled between Uncle’s bloodied, trembling lips. But the words came too faintly. Not satisfying enough.
“Louder!”
“Eeegh! Uhuh-ughhhh!”
This time Nam Gung Hyuk’s fingers wedged into the hollow of Uncle’s collarbone, angling to dislocate the bone. Uncle’s head lolled, drool spilling from his mouth. At last, the answer came as desired.
“Y-yes, I shall do as you sayyyyyeeegh!”
Money. His life. Even the Orthodox Sect’s flimsy honor—all of it, perfectly crushed in his grip. Complete victory.
Nam Gung Hyuk smiled with satisfaction, breathing warm and wet against Uncle’s ear.
“Good. Let’s do this well together, shall we?”

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