The Time-Limited Elixir of the Ruined Clan - Chapter 76

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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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The Doomed Heir of a Fallen House — Episode 76

“Could we go look at paintings together sometime, like you and Seong A-rang do?”
“Of course, naturally. Everyone in the family is busy, so I feel a bit embarrassed sitting here idly sketching flowers, but…”
When Seok Ban An smiled faintly, the passersby around them faltered and stopped, then continued on with steps noticeably slowed.
Ry’en thought she understood why Seok Ban An and Dan Mok Hyeon Yo had married each other.
The grief and pain that both of them carried were perceived by others as nothing more than fragments of beauty.
“Oh! My aunt has been quite busy lately with the work of sending messages to those branch families.”
“Indeed. Your aunt is really something—always puts her whole heart into whatever she does.”
“She was saying she wished someone would write the formal invitations for her instead…”

“Formal invitations?”
“Yes, the letters asking the branch families to come. Since we’re a martial family, everyone’s writing isn’t exactly… well. My aunt didn’t say it so directly, but that’s what she meant.”
“Ah, I see…”
Seok Ban An couldn’t quite bring himself to deny it, so his words trailed away. But a peculiar light kindled in his eyes.
Seok Ban An had been born the third son of a great merchant house. The heir had been chosen long ago—what was the youngest son of a wealthy family, forever barred from inheriting the family trade, to do with his days?
He was clever, but not overwhelmingly so. He had ambitions, but they were not fierce.
So he had found contentment in poetry, calligraphy, and painting, though he remained a man with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to feel.
‘Surely there’s much I’ve overheard at Pung Rim Jeon Zhang.’
If he gradually became involved in the family’s affairs, he could learn through them how a great merchant house like Pung Rim Jeon Zhang earned money and managed people—knowledge he could then apply to the Seok family itself. And couldn’t he also develop businesses that leveraged his artistic sensibility? This was Ry’en’s ultimate plan.
For instance, if he were to paint a small picture of pines symbolizing longevity and good health, and Ry’en were to infuse it with Yeong Gi, it would become a painting that genuinely carried the blessing of longevity and health.
‘Hmm, perhaps that doesn’t require much artistic discernment after all. But since he does paint well, it works well enough!’
Setting that aside, even if it hadn’t been a purely political marriage, it was generous of them to have treated him—someone from a great merchant house—as if he were merely a guest, claiming he didn’t know martial arts.
His own wife, Dan Mok Hyeon Yo, loved him, yet didn’t she exclude him from household matters with the reasoning that ‘he is someone without martial training’? It was unavoidable, having been raised in a martial family as she was.
But how could a person survive on love alone?
The fact that Seok Ban An had endured this long in the role of beloved companion was remarkable in itself.
A person cannot live without water, yet water alone cannot sustain life.
Without realizing it, Seok Ban An quickened his pace, then slowed again to match Ry’en’s stride, trying to conceal the excitement that threatened to show.
Ry’en watched him with a satisfied smile.

* * *

Baek Ui Myeong’s eyes snapped open.
His eyes burned with pain. Scanning his surroundings, he found the sun setting—the low, deep crimson of the descending sun was attacking him mercilessly.
Gasp!
His last memory was being beaten senseless by that pretty-faced boy—pummeled like vermin. In an instant, Baek Ui Myeong’s face went deathly pale.
And in the same moment, Baek Ui Myeong lurched to his feet. He’d been unconscious on the cold autumn ground for who knew how long, and before that he’d been beaten into pulp, yet moving wasn’t difficult.
‘I have to run!’
Baek Ui Myeong immediately looked for an escape route. Not here. That half-crazed master wouldn’t stop hunting him if he ran—he’d kill him for sure.
‘Far, far away… as far as I possibly can!’
His granddaughter was in Hang Zhou; surely he wouldn’t search that far.
‘But how far is far enough…?’
Nam Jik Rye Seong was practically on his doorstep.
Ha Nan Province, where the Martial Alliance was based? That wasn’t far either from here.
Si Cheon Seong? A considerable distance, but a single boat ride down the Yangtze and it was over in a blink.
Farther than that!
‘Cheong Hae Seong?’
Cheong Hae Seong, where the Kunlun Sect made its home… even thinking that far made his heart even more uneasy.
The Daoists there, bordering Ma Cheon Gyo as they did, had a viciousness unlike Baek Do Murim, or so he’d heard.
If he were caught pickpocketing there, they might cut off his hand.
‘Cheon San! That’s it—I’ll go all the way to Cheon San.’
Even though it was Ma Cheon Gyo’s headquarters, somehow it seemed safer.
Ma Cheon Gyo had many terrible rumors—that they forced children to kill each other until only one survivor became the successor, or that they brainwashed all the nearby villagers to use them as human shields in emergencies—but the most terrifying tale in martial circles was about the Hyup Seong Dae Beop, which only the cult master could master.
Didn’t they say that once you became the master, you would drain all the internal energy from your followers and become an exponentially stronger martial artist?
Even now, when Blood Coral Valley had monopolized all the world’s terror and malice, the Ma Cheon Gyo master’s Hyup Seong Dae Beop remained an object of dread.
‘But wait—I have no internal energy!’
So this was what it meant to find joy in such a thing, living as long as I have.
Besides, why would a skilled master rooted in Hang Zhou ever make the journey ten thousand miles out to this place?
And Baek Ui Myeong was willing to pay ten thousand miles’ worth as the price of his life.
With that thought, his mind grew a little calmer. Surely there were places like Hwan Byeok Ru in Cheon San too. If he took the money he’d saved up and went there, living as he did now….
“My money!”
Baek Ui Myeong, who had been hurrying toward Hwan Byeok Ru almost at a run, stopped dead in his tracks and ransacked everything—his waist, his chest, even the cloth covering his hindquarters.
The money pouch was gone.
The sky seemed to turn yellow.
“My, my money… my money!”
Who had stolen it?
Someone passing by while he lay unconscious? Or had he dropped it himself somewhere in that alley?
Baek Ui Myeong ran back to the alley and even dug through a puddle, but his money pouch never appeared.
‘It was him.’
Too frightened to speak aloud, Baek Ui Myeong trembled. That boy must have beaten him senseless and made off with the pouch.
‘The old bastard… stealing money from a young man so shamefully…!’
He had left some things at the inn, so he could manage somehow, but now that he realized he’d been thrashed and robbed, his chest ached.
When Baek Ui Myeong returned to Hwan Byeok Ru, he gave only a perfunctory wave to the attendants and gatekeepers, then headed to his room.
Since he didn’t have much, he discarded most of it without regret, stuffed his mouth with some hardened sweets, and gathered only a few pieces of clothing and a pair of shoes.
Then he leaped out the window and stealthily slipped away from Hwan Byeok Ru. If he’d left properly, his trail might have been noticed and his life endangered.
He rushed to a pier where he could take a boat, thrust double the fare into the boatman’s hand, and demanded they go as fast as possible. The boatman said nothing in reply, poling steadily and swiftly without complaint.
Sitting in one corner of the boat, tapping his leg nervously while brooding over his future, Baek Ui Myeong suddenly became aware of his body’s condition.
‘What? Why am I not tired?’
After being beaten to a pulp, weeping and wailing, then going to Hwan Byeok Ru, then to the alley, then back again, and finally here to board the boat….
Why wasn’t he exhausted?
Rather, hadn’t he sprinted here feeling lighter than usual?
Baek Ui Myeong began to run his hands over his own body.
The boatman, noticing him, flinched and began poling a little faster. But Baek Ui Myeong had no attention to spare for such things.
‘What, what, what, what!’
His lower back, near the dantian, which had been twisted slightly from half-brutal training under a master since childhood, now stood straight and firm.
He drew one deep breath and suddenly sensed dozens of grasshoppers hiding far away along the riverbank. At the same moment, he heard a fish leap and splash in the water.
These were sounds from a realm he had never touched in his entire life.
Baek Ui Myeong gently stroked his lower abdomen. It was very, very faint—barely perceptible, the slightest tremor—but it was there.
A dantian. The warped and twisted meridians had straightened out and now pulsed, and the tiny amount of internal energy left by the scraps of To Nap Beop that he had tried for so long was flowing into his dantian….
“Uuuuaaaagh!”
“Uh, uuuaaaagh!”
Between his screams, the boatman—possessed of that peculiar force born of ferrying strange passengers—had been poling hard, and now he too shrieked in alarm.
After they’d screamed back and forth for a good while, Baek Ui Myeong pleaded desperately.
“Turn the boat around, turn the boat around! Please turn it back!”
“What, what did you say?”
“I have to go back!”
“What are you talking about, I, I, at this point….”
The boatman, hearing such absurd words, at first voiced his refusal, but when faced with a strange passenger who tapped his legs nervously after boarding and kept touching his own body, he couldn’t help but speak with a trembling voice.
“I, I have a home back there too, so I only took you this way. If you ask me to turn back now, where am I supposed to sleep….”
“I’ll give you double again.”
“Let’s go then. We just go back the way we came, yes?”
“Yes, yes.”
As the boatman vigorously turned the boat around, Baek Ui Myeong tapped his leg again, rapidly.
‘No wonder it hurt so terribly—so that’s what they call Choo Goong Gwa Hyeol

that I’d only ever heard rumors of!’

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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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