The Legend of Red Cloud - Chapter 95

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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 95. Misunderstanding
Clang!
The sound of metal rang out, and the Yuseong Mace flew backward.
Through the wide eyes of the astonished woman, she saw Ryu spring to his feet like lightning.
In his left hand, he now gripped another blade.
Roooar!
It sounded as though a tiger were roaring at his side.
‘Could it be…?’
In the Jurchen tongue, Tassha—in the Central Plains dialect, the Ho Do.
A treasure of the Jurchen.
The Spirit-Binding Sword, said to imprison the White Tiger, the sacred spirit of Changbai Mountain Sky Lake.
A blade stronger and heavier than any other in the world.
That very sword, now in the hands of a man devoid of Internal Qi, had just parried the Yuseong Mace brimming with Yuseong Chu Hon’s tremendous power.
Cough.
The woman clicked her tongue softly at the sight of blood spilling from Ryu’s mouth.
It was a pity.
Though if one truly expected someone without Internal Qi to wield the Spirit-Binding Sword and emerge unscathed, that would be nothing but a thief’s wishful thinking.
That his body hadn’t shattered and had endured at all was worthy of praise.
In any case, Ryu had once again withstood Yuseong Chu Hon’s assault.
But that too was merely a momentary advantage borrowed from the blade’s power.
The gap between Yuseong Chu Hon, pouring forth immense Internal Qi and twisting his face into a Fierce Devil Expression, and Ryu, who possessed no Internal Qi at all, was simply too vast to bridge.
“I’ll kill you!”
Yuseong Chu Hon’s form exploded forward with a roar, bearing down upon Ryu.
Watching his opponent surge toward him, Ryu clenched his teeth.
According to the explanation given by the Blood Shadow Demon Lord’s subordinate who had presented this blade—boasting proudly as he did—the Tassha, legendary among the Jurchen, could never be broken.
The Blood Shadow Demon Lord had even conducted tests in the past, so Ryu chose to trust that word.
Besides, he had no other recourse at the moment.
And so, without hesitation, Ryu extended the Tassha between the incoming Yuseong Mace and himself.
But there was more—Ryu wagered on a further gamble.
Following the method of Wind Cultivation, he attempted to resonate with the wind around him.
Ryu had judged that, lacking Internal Qi, he could not receive his opponent’s Yuseong Mace on the Tassha’s strength alone.
There was no time to search for the small, light winds that normally clung close to his body; in haste, he summoned the larger winds about him and drew them to himself.
Moreover, he concentrated the resonance solely in his left arm, the one holding the Tassha.
This too was because he lacked the time to finely adjust his Qi Meridians across his entire body.
His effort achieved half success.
The resonance took hold, but its range fell short of his expectation.
Only the muscles from his wrist to his hand resonated, not his entire left arm.
In that instant, the Yuseong Mace, imbued with tremendous force, struck at the blade’s tip as though to shatter it.
Clang!
The woman’s eyes widened again.
Contrary to all expectation that his entire left arm would be torn away alongside the blade, Ryu had parried the Yuseong Mace.
Though it was true that he could not withstand the force contained within the mace itself and was sent flying backward.
Yet in that moment, Ryu displayed a move that defied belief.
Even as he flew backward, he twisted his body and drew a bow.
It was such a nimble motion that the woman herself scarcely caught how he had dropped both blades and taken up the bow.
Twang!
An arrow flew from the string toward Yuseong Chu Hon, whose expression mirrored the woman’s shock.
Yet fired in haste through mid-air, the arrow veered wide of its mark.
Though the woman had witnessed Ryu’s curved arrow attacks before, this time his error was unmistakable.
The arrow sailed far too distant from Yuseong Chu Hon to connect.
As Yuseong Chu Hon’s eyes left the futile arrow and he ground his teeth, preparing to leap toward the sprawled Ryu in the distance—
Thud!
With an eerie sound, Yuseong Chu Hon stiffened, and his slowly lowering gaze beheld an arrow shaft piercing clean through his abdomen, its sharp head protruding.
The arrow that had passed wide of him in an impossible direction curved through the air, describing a semicircle, and struck him from behind.
Yuseong Chu Hon was not the sort to collapse merely from an arrow piercing his abdomen.
At once, twisting his face into a Fierce Devil Expression, Yuseong Chu Hon advanced, determined to end this.
At the sight of him, the woman’s gaze shifted urgently to where Ryu lay, crumpled in the distance.
He showed no movement—he had lost consciousness.
Indeed, with a body devoid of Internal Qi, he had met head-on the sheer force contained in the Yuseong Mace wielded by Yuseong Chu Hon at near full power.
Struck by that force and driven directly into the earth, it would have been strange if all the bones in his body had not been shattered.
In truth, even immediately after the collision with the Yuseong Mace, a tremendous shock must have been reverberating through Ryu’s body.
That he twisted his frame and fired an arrow in such a state was nothing short of impossible.
As consciousness drained from Ryu, Yuseong Chu Hon was drawing near.
This miracle, too, was ending now…….
“What!”
A gasp of surprise escaped from the Woman’s lips as her thoughts shattered.
Yuseong Chu Hon, who had taken several steps toward Ryu lying collapsed at a distance with an expression murderous enough to kill, suddenly coughed blood, staggered, and fell senseless to the ground.
Startled by this, the Woman hurried down from the tree, placed her hand on Yuseong Chu Hon’s Ming Men Acupoint, and probed his interior.
“Hah.”
It was both astonishing and absurd.
Inside Yuseong Chu Hon’s body, Qi was raging like an angry horse.
The arrow that had pierced through Yuseong Chu Hon’s abdomen had created this catastrophe.
That arrow had severed with precision the blood vessel connected to the Qi Meridian that channeled Qi from the Dantian.
With the pathway cut, Qi surged through Yuseong Chu Hon’s body alongside blood, wild and uncontrolled.
Rather than irritation at Yuseong Chu Hon, who had raged blindly in anger without awareness of what transpired within him—a master of Internal Qi renowned enough to have his name inscribed on the Yeongha Baekwi—the Woman felt first a shock at the one who had orchestrated this situation: Ryu.
“Could he have aimed for this?”
The Woman’s eyes glimmered as she gazed upon Ryu, sprawled motionless in the distance.
But only briefly; sensing the approach of footsteps from all around, she began to rise, then paused and looked down at Yuseong Chu Hon.
“Tsk.”
With a dissatisfied click of her tongue, the Woman hurriedly pressed a Stabilizing Pill into Yuseong Chu Hon’s mouth, struck a pressure point near his throat to force him to swallow, and concealed her form.
Moments later, the warriors of the Yuseong Iron Family burst in and, upon discovering their lord unconscious on the ground, erupted in chaos.
The Yuseong Iron Family’s warriors scoured the surroundings in search of the culprit, but found no one.
Not only was Ryu nowhere to be found, sprawled as he was in the distance, but even the two swords he had hurled into the air to seize his bow had vanished.
After searching the empty forest for some time, the Yuseong Iron Family’s warriors hastily fashioned a litter, placed the still-unconscious Yuseong Chu Hon upon it, and departed.
***
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Ryu jolted awake amid the sound of falling water droplets.
“Ugh.”
He lurched upright suddenly, only for agony to flood through his entire body.
The sight that greeted him in the midst of that pain was…….
“A cave?”
He was bewildered.
He had lost consciousness during the battle in the forest, yet he had awakened in a cave of all places.
As confusion settled over him, Ryu turned his gaze and belatedly discovered the Woman lying beside him.
“The woman I extracted from the Yuseong Iron Family?”
Recognizing the identity of the figure lying at his side, Ryu examined her even as the bones and muscles of his entire body screamed, ignoring their protests.
No visible wounds, breathing steady and even.
Ryu realized she was merely in a state of unconsciousness, and a sigh of relief escaped his lips.
“Phew…….”
Only then did Ryu acknowledge the screaming of his battered form.
He lay back flat.
“Mmm…….”
Even lying still, an involuntary whimper seeped from between his teeth.
It felt as though not a single muscle remained unharmed.
Then again, he had withstood an attack imbued with the power of a Supreme Master with scarcely any protection.
He was fortunate his body hadn’t simply burst apart.
In this midst, he found himself grateful to the heavens that his bones had survived.
Many of his joints throbbed as though they had been broken and then mended, yet none were immobilized.
If the bones had truly fractured, they would not move like this.
Thus, while many bones had cracked, none were actually broken.
In gratitude for this, as Ryu inspected every corner of his body, he nearly cried out when he found his left wrist—the very one that bore no pain—completely intact.
His left wrist, which had borne the greatest impact while gripping the Tassha and facing Yuseong Chu Hon’s Yuseong Mace, was paradoxically the most unscathed—a realization that stirred his memory of the brief resonance he had induced through Wind Cultivation.
Ryu understood that his desperate gamble, an attempt he had undertaken with nothing left to rely upon, had succeeded.
In this discovery, Ryu had found another possibility within Wind Cultivation.
As he laughed weakly with a cough, he did not notice.
The slight movement of the Woman’s lips in response to his laughter.
Was it the weight of his shattered and ruined body settling upon the ground?
Before long, Ryu succumbed to the tide of slumber that crashed over him.
The moment Ryu’s eyes closed in sleep, the Woman stirred and rose.
“That was a close one.”
The Woman spoke in a hushed voice, careful not to wake him, and gazed down at Ryu in deep sleep.
She had used all six Spirit Pills—elixirs worthy of the name—and poured out Qi Channeling Healing for four full double-hours before she could finally restore him to any semblance of human form. The truth was, Ryu’s injuries had been catastrophic.
Every bone in his body had shattered, his meridians torn in countless places—he had been little better than a corpse.
The left wrist especially, which had gripped the Tassha and received Yuseong Chu Hon’s Yuseong Mace, was nearly severed clean through.
Three of the six Spirit Pills had gone into saving that ruined left wrist alone.
She knew that crushing them for external application would yield only half their potency, but with bones shattered into fragments and blood vessels torn to tatters, there had been no other choice.
It was only possible because, unlike the catastrophic damage to bone and vessel, the muscles had miraculously remained largely intact.
Without that mercy, even an elixir-grade Spirit Pill and the Woman’s exceptional Qi Channeling Healing would never have saved that left wrist.
After barely managing to pull him back from the brink, she had finally looked upon his face properly to see what manner of man he was—and paused.
“Yes. Exactly my taste.”
Seeing him again only confirmed it: a smile curved across the Woman’s lips as she gazed down at the sleeping Ryu.
Not a pretty-boy’s face, no—but handsomely proportioned with a stubborn jawline that spoke of quiet resolve, and bearing beneath that exterior a certain weathered dignity, as though he had endured years of hardship. It was precisely her taste.
Which was why, moments after she had finished the Qi Channeling Healing, she had reached out to touch his face—her hand rising to his cheek—only for Ryu to open his eyes in that instant, startling her so badly that she had collapsed and feigned unconsciousness.
In any case, it was her favor that had kept Ryu alive.
Though she had examined his face only after saving him, so strictly speaking, it was not his appearance that had first won her over.
The problem was that the man who had won her favor—
“—has a betrothed.”
The moment she heard that cry from him, pretending to be unconscious, she had nearly bolted upright.
Six Spirit Pills—as good as a second life itself—squandered, and her Internal Qi wrung out in brutal measure, four double-hours poured into saving this man, only to learn he belonged to another woman. The frustration had nearly choked her.
The Woman did not consider herself virtuous, but she had always believed she was not so contemptible as to poach another woman’s man.
So then—
“Ah. Pie in the sky, as they say.”
Whatever was on her mind, she clicked her tongue softly, her expression rueful as she studied Ryu’s sleeping face for a long time.
***
Ryu opened his eyes two double-hours later.
By then, the Woman was asleep.
He had finished his Qi Regulation Breathing to replenish the vast reserves of Internal Qi she had expended, and woke just as she was drifting off—the natural conclusion of her exhaustion.
But Ryu, knowing nothing of this, assumed the Woman still had not regained consciousness.
Concern stirred in him, so he rose quietly and gazed down at her with care.
Though he was not usually one to admire beauty, the Woman looked quite lovely in sleep.
He had heard the patriarch of the Yuseong Iron Family was so besotted with her beauty that he had been willing to abuse his authority—and now, seeing her thus, he began to understand why.
Still, at least she had been saved. That was a mercy.
The real question was why he and this Woman were here at all—
After brief deliberation, Ryu formed a hypothesis.
A Righteous Wanderer.
A master of Kangho who aided those in need without asking for reward.
Even in the insular world of Haenam, he did not imagine such people did not exist.
So he cautiously reasoned that perhaps he and the Woman had received aid from such a person.
Otherwise, the present circumstances made no sense at all.
The master of the Yuseong Iron Family he had faced at the end—judged by his overwhelming power—was likely Yuseong Chu Hon, the patriarch himself.
Such a man would never have spared him and brought him here, so Ryu concluded his hypothesis was sound reasoning.
Having reached his own conclusion, Ryu finally allowed himself ease of mind, and began slowly to examine the Cave around him.

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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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