The Time-Limited Elixir of the Ruined Clan - Chapter 43

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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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A Fallen Clan’s Final Days — Episode 43

“Master, the Patriarch is before you.”
Wi Ji-cheong spoke quietly. Geum Jeok-geol sat down slowly, struggling to steady his breath—damp and labored as it was.
“……The Patriarch kept silent, said nothing, and yet sent Hyeonseong to the Martial Duel that I requested.”
“Ha! I remember perfectly well what people whispered when they saw the Danmok Clan’s fortunes crumbling. I have not forgotten a single word.”
What happened at Dongjeong Blood Hall spread among the people, and everyone knew how grave the wounds were—wounds that the Patriarch Danmok Cheon-gi, then clan leader and Strongest in the Land, and his eldest son Danmok Hyeonseong had both suffered.
After that blood hall ended, Danmok Cheon-gi shut himself away within the clan, and people gossiped that his injuries had never healed. Even when Danmok Hyeonseong showed his face, there were whispered suspicions that he was still in pain.
“Everyone watched our clan fall into ruin while saying that I, and Hyeonseong, could not overcome our wounds. Are you telling me you didn’t know that?”
“I believed in you!”
Geum Jeok-geol clenched his jaw.
“Of course I believed it was all slander from the world. Hyeonseong……he was not a man who would grow so weak……it couldn’t be true…….”
He had believed that everything circulating in the world was nothing but empty rumor.
Danmok Cheon-gi sighed, watching him.
“So? You sent that Duel Challenge Letter without knowing anything, and should I have told you that Hyeonseong still hadn’t recovered from his battle with Hyeolragok? That his body was failing day by day, coughing blood as he defended against the attack on the day Ryeon was born, and therefore must avoid a duel with you? No matter what words I spoke, people would have pointed and called the Danmok Clan cowardly and foreseen our doom!”
“Is that fear of their pointing fingers so great that you now cast out even Hyeonseong’s daughter in such a manner!”
“Master!”
When Wi Ji-cheong’s voice rose once more, Geum Jeok-geol finally fell silent.
Burning with conflict, he kept his gaze fixed on the sky, trying to rein in eyes that threatened to betray him.
Danmok Cheon-gi watched him in silence for a moment, then slowly his expression shifted.
The feigned fury scattered like sunlight, and his face returned to that pallid, worn look etched by years.
“So that’s why you’ve been sending all those Medicinal Materials?”
“……!”
Geum Jeok-geol flinched, just as he was managing to steady his breathing after suppressing his anger. Danmok Cheon-gi turned his head with a bitter expression.
“Did you truly think we wouldn’t discover it? Even if the Danmok Clan had fallen, we still had power enough to track a few herb merchants.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
His feigned ignorance seemed distinctly out of place. Danmok Cheon-gi smiled bitterly.
As the Danmok Clan’s fortunes waned, the Debts of Gratitude accumulated in the clan likewise eroded.
Those who had received favors quickly settled their accounts and left with a clean conscience, while those who harbored resentment did not miss this chance to strike at them.
Just when everyone believed no Debts of Gratitude remained, a handful of people suddenly began pressing rare Medicinal Materials upon the clan.
Since there was no one indebted to repay, it naturally seemed suspicious, so they investigated—and at the end of that investigation was Geum, the house master.
Danmok Cheon-gi’s eyes darkened as he pressed his brow quietly with his finger.
“……Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Say what, exactly?”
“Why didn’t you tell people back then, at that Martial Duel, that you hadn’t known Hyeonseong’s condition?”
For the first time, Geum Jeok-geol’s expression crumbled.
Wronged, infuriated, heartbroken—and yet simultaneously consumed by guilt, knowing not where to turn.
A heavy silence passed over the table.
“……How……how could I say such a thing…….”
If he had been capable of such deeds, if he had been a man who, knowing the successor of an entire clan was bedridden, would challenge him to a duel and seize that opportunity to murder him—then perhaps he could have done it.
He might have made excuses, claimed ignorance, attended the funeral with a grieving heart.
But Geum Jeok-geol had not done this. He could not.
How could he brazenly attend that funeral and confess to the father, the mother, the daughter—whether he had known or not—that he had merely been unaware, that he had merely sent a challenge? That he had killed their son through his own hand, whether knowingly or in ignorance?
Would such a confession bring the dead back to life? Would it give Danmok Cheon-gi a place where his heart could find peace?
Or would it provide some way to tell his children how their father had died……?
Danmok Cheon-gi gazed quietly into Geum Jeok-geol’s eyes, then slowly lowered his own, as though sunk in regret.
“……Then if you say nothing, how could we say anything?”
Confusion bloomed across Geum Jeok-geol’s eyes.

* * *

Geum Jeok-geol stood before the Ancestral Hall with an unfamiliar expression. Danmok Cheon-gi and Wi Ji-cheong stood one step behind him.
“That person……was one of the many things he regretted until the very end.”
“What……is this.”
Geum Jeok-geol turned around.
“I was greedy for something that wasn’t mine…….”
Wi Ji-cheong gazed at the Ancestral Hall with distant eyes. Within it lay her husband’s Ancestral Tablet, resting in silence.
When Wi Ji-cheong first met Danmok Hyeonseong, he was a man in whom only twisted cynicism about the world and somber tenderness remained.
Yet in his final moment, when he looked at her, his eyes crinkled shut and he smiled as gently as a spring flower.
Each time the memory returned, she felt such longing that she tried not to recall it, only to find it growing hazy in her mind—yet when she deliberately brought it back, there was nothing but that ache again.
“The Duel Challenge Letter that the Master sent…… I could have avoided it as you said, but he truly wanted to accept that Martial Duel.”
Danmok Hyeonseong remembered the youth his own age who managed a martial hall alongside his parents—the first son of the Master, whom he had never once defeated yet who persisted in challenging him relentlessly.
In that stretch of time when his once-brilliant, crystal-clear future grew dim and murky as a lamp before the wind, Danmok Hyeonseong seized the chance to prove something when it came.
“That man had no…… time.”
A crack formed across Geum Jeok-geol’s face.
In the year Danmok Hyeonseong turned fifteen, he followed his father Danmok Cheon-gi to protect people from Hyeolragok.
And as a result, when others were at their most brilliant, blooming at their brightest, frost settled upon Danmok Hyeonseong’s years.
Yet Danmok Hyeonseong had never spoken of it aloud.
He found pity abhorrent.
But when even that winter finally began to show signs of ending at last.
When he came to accept that there was truly nothing left he could do or change, the unknowing Geum Jeok-geol sent the Duel Challenge Letter.
“So after that Martial Duel ended, he felt deeply…… deeply sorry.”
Those Danmok Hyeonseong had most regretted were Wi Ji-cheong, Danmok Ryeon, and Danmok Bi.
For he had burned away the time he might have spent with his family, however precariously, in order to prove himself.
And beyond that, what he had most regretted was…….
“He worried that the Master would be left with nothing but groundless guilt for all the years to come…….”
Had Danmok Hyeonseong stepped forward to defend Geum Jeok-geol, people would have simply marveled at his magnanimity, and Geum Jeok-geol would have become not a man who would stop at nothing to restore his clan’s fortunes, but a third-rate swordsman with sloppy martial skill—one who had challenged a cripple to a duel only to accidentally kill him. The Danmok Clan could not speak first on such a matter.
A powerless cause only wounds itself.
To place justice upon one too weak to bear it is only to sink together; and so the Danmok Clan had held their silence regarding Geum Jeok-geol.

* * *

Geum Jeok-geol saw Danmok Hyeonseong’s Ancestral Tablet for the first time. He wondered whether he should light incense or press his palms together, but abandoned the thought and instead stared long at the name carved upon the tablet.
In Danmok Hyeonseong’s lifetime, Geum Jeok-geol—then younger still, the word “young” fitting him better than it did now—carried many feelings toward him.
A sense of inferiority close to premonition that he would never surpass him, a kinship felt by a firstborn bearing his parents’ expectations on his shoulders, a sense of defeat knowing he could never match the Danmok Clan in this Jeolgang Province, yet alongside it an overwhelming desire to defeat him one day, and an unspoken wish that he might cast it all away and become an ordinary friend. All of this dwelled within him.
And so the young Geum Jeok-geol, the moment he saw advancement in his own path, applied for a Martial Duel without knowing anything—uncertain whether he could truly defeat Danmok Hyeonseong, yet clinging to the hope that he had drawn one step closer.
But when Danmok Hyeonseong died at the end of that duel, that hope shattered into pieces, and unwanted guilt and resentment with nowhere to go came rushing down upon him, tormenting him.
There was no one to whom he could turn.
The Danmok Clan would not believe his claim of ignorance, those who had watched his rise and approached him would turn away, and those who despised his cowardice would think he had lied as well.
And so he had come this far.
Until he saw his own son commit such an act before the point where he himself had come to despise even hearing the name Danmok Clan, Geum Jeok-geol had never imagined stepping foot within this Manor.
Nor had he imagined he would see the shadow of that day from years ago recast in the Martial Duel between his daughter and Geum Jeok-geol’s son.

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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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