The World’s Greatest Junior Martial Brother - Chapter 30

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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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Cheonha Jeil Sajae (30)
Only when great faith turns into betrayal does one earn the right to face the truth.
‘No… this can’t be!’
Mokanja could hardly keep his wits about him.
How could something like this be unfolding right before his eyes?
He was the eldest of the Second-Generation Disciples and had entered the sect the earliest, so he was known as the “senior brother among the second generation.”
But he was naturally timid and shy, and he had always been compared, endlessly, to Mokyangja, who was bold and openhearted.
As a result, he always lost.
Neither in martial skill nor in temperament did Mokanja have an edge over Mokyangja, so the master and the other disciples of Qingcheng quietly regarded Mokyangja as the next senior brother.
Naturally, it stung, but he never showed it. No, he couldn’t show it.
Mok An-ja was that sort of man. He had no nerve to voice his complaints to anyone or to argue and demand fairness.
The one who took the hand of the discouraged Mok An-ja was none other than Su Shinja.
Su Shinja was Mok An-ja’s great-uncle in the sect, yet he offered more encouragement than the master did, and in secret he even passed on his martial arts.
He said that Mok An-ja’s temperament was just like his own.
Naturally, Mok An-ja leaned on Su Shinja more than on any elder of the sect, and in the end he grew to follow him even more than the Qingcheng sect leader.
And yet, that was the man he had trusted.
“S-Senior Great-Uncle! That Shenfa—!”
Some of the Woomun Family men, still gasping and catching their breath, exchanged glances.
―Now.
―It’s time.
Though they had been momentarily thrown by Jin Muok’s sudden appearance, they knew that if they didn’t act here, they would be shackled forever, and so they had decided to move.
Swish.
Just as they were circling around behind the Woomun formation and about to dash toward the Qingcheng side—
Whirrrr!
Something unidentified flew in from somewhere, snagged their ankles, and one after another the Woomun fighters charging toward the Qingcheng disciples went sprawling.
Thud! Crash! Bang!
―What? What was that?
―What caught my ankle?
Those who had planted their faces in the dirt in such a ridiculous state instinctively scanned their surroundings.
They were highly trained fighters. There was no way they would trip over a stone or a tangle of vines.
―This!
The thing that had wrapped around their ankles was a hair-fine thread, too fine for the eye to see. And the jianghu was said to have a young expert who could manipulate such threads at will.
That man was—
Byeok Eunsa! The Poison Thread!
Whoosh!
A bitter, icy wind swept in, and the Woomun men, turning their heads toward it, were forced to witness a long-haired man with a face devoid of expression stepping forward.
A long-haired man who emerged as if from nowhere, holding a doll that clashed with his wretchedly sorrowful expression.
The little girl doll added in a shrill voice.
“I caught one too.”
“Senior Great-Uncle Su! What on earth is that?”
When Mok An-ja pointed at him, Su Shinja, who had evaded Jin Muok’s attack with movements that were not Qingcheng footwork, forced an awkward smile. Yet the corners of his mouth trembled, no matter how hard he tried to hold the expression.
Because only a moment ago, he had tasted death.
And all of it from a single line of thread.
Could this even make sense?
So he had dodged on instinct with a secret technique he had kept hidden, and it seemed Mok An-ja had recognized it.
I need to smooth this over.
“I was flustered and my feet got tangled…”
“Amyeong Seupun.”
With his wooden club resting on his shoulder, Jin Muok approached Su Shinja slowly, like a hunter driving his prey into a corner.
“Changing direction twelve times in a single step, then one more step to seize the enemy’s rear. A movement unmatched in all the world.”
“W-what are you talking about?”
Without so much as glancing at Su Shinja, who swallowed dry-throated without meaning to, Jin Muok kept closing in and continued.
“And so, among the Forty-Four Peerless Arts of the Demonic Sect, it proudly holds thirty-seventh place. A footwork technique.”
Thud!
“S-Senior Brother!”
Mok An-ja’s face drained of color, and a murmur began to ripple among the Qingcheng disciples.
If Jin Muok’s words were true, then the footwork Su Shinja had just unleashed was a secret martial art of the Demonic Cult.
“What! You must be mistaken!”
Brushing off Su Shinja’s excuse as if it were nothing, Jin Muok tapped his own shoulder with the wooden club and curled the corner of his mouth.
“We’ll find out whether I’m mistaken or not soon enough.”
Jin Muok, who had been moving at a leisurely pace, suddenly lunged at Susinja with fierce momentum.
“No matter how well you hide it—”
Crack!
The moment he charged like a thunderbolt, the dew clinging to the tea leaves shot up all at once.
“In the end, it all comes spilling out, doesn’t it?”
How cheap can you get!
When such crude slang, fit only for a back-alley ruffian in the marketplace, spilled from the lips of this heaven-born pretty boy, the people of the Qingcheng and Woomun families gaped in astonishment.
It was a speech pattern utterly at odds with the fair youth’s appearance.
And then.
Had Baekri Unhak been present, he would have recognized someone at once.
But he was still struggling to recover from the aftereffects of his Qi Deviation and was confined to bed at the Tang Clan, which was a pity.
The real problem was not the cheap way of speaking but Jin Muok’s martial skill, which was on an entirely different level.
Chaeng—!
Glass shattering. Jade beads breaking apart.
Using the momentum of his charge, Jin Muok swept his Wooden Club diagonally, and the dew droplets floating around Susinja shattered into pieces, scattering icy blue fragments in every direction.
Crash!
Jin Muok pressed in, brushing past the dew that scattered like foam.
“Gah!”
Susinja retreated, attempting to evade Jin Muok’s strikes with the Qingcheng Sect’s Songseo Chosangbi.
Songseo Chosangbi. Even the ordinary Chosangbi was an outstanding Shenfa, but Songseo Chosangbi elevated it a full step further into a superior form of movement.
Just as Susinja, moving as nimbly as a squirrel leaping from branch to branch, believed he had slipped past the zone Jin Muok’s Wooden Club controlled—
Snap!
Jin Muok’s stroke, which had seemed diagonal, dropped at an angle that could never be bent, and surged toward Susinja.
“W-what is this!”
Confronted with another death, Susinja strained to pull his body upward, and Jin Muok, rising in pursuit, spun his body like a windmill.
“Not so fast.”
‘What a fight.’
Byeok Eunsa, having already subdued the men who appeared to be Woomun Family reinforcements, glanced sidelong at the battle between Jin Muok and Susinja.
Through a short period of relentless effort, Jin Muok’s stamina and strength had grown rapidly, but they still fell far short of a grown man’s. So Jin Muok made the fullest use of centrifugal force and momentum to make up for his lacking stamina and strength.
As a result, he had reached the point of overwhelming Susinja, a First-Generation Disciple of Qingcheng—truly, was he not the embodiment of improvisation?
‘Unbelievable.’
It was the moment a monster was born in the Jianghu.
Hwireureung!
A whirlwind! A dragon-coiling gust!
A living cyclone!
Pressing Susinja hard, Jin Muok pressed him with a fearsome demand.
“Originally, Amyeong Seupun was the peculiar stepping art of Neukun Goema, who was said to be second to none in treachery among the Sipdae Hobeop of the Demonic Cult.”
Kwareureung!
His Wooden Club, having already shifted from a diagonal to a horizontal line, aimed at Susinja’s side.
Leaping lightly aside to evade Jin Muok’s attack, Susinja ground his molars together.
“If you keep threatening this Binto, I will not hold back any longer!”
Don’t hold back, please, don’t.
Jin Muok lightly chewed up Susinja’s furious outburst and kindly continued his explanation.
“Still, I thought that ten years ago, when he met his death at Sipman Daesan at the hands of Bukjin Gwangpung, Amyeong Seupun must have naturally fallen into disuse.”
“H-how could you know such a thing!”
Thinking about it, there was one such man.
I can’t tell what bitter karma bound him in his Previous Life, but he was a man sworn to be at irreconcilable enmity with the Demonic Cult. Upon emerging into the Jianghu, he not only smashed the Demonic Cult’s Southwestern Branch to pieces but went on to destroy every one of them he came across—a martial artist of that sort.
Naturally, the Demonic Cult also tried to eliminate him, but each time they were driven back by his overwhelming martial prowess.
But I heard he had become a corpse on the battlefield ten years ago.
“B-but could you possibly be… the youngest of Bukjin Gwangpung’s disciples…?”
Shugagagak!
Jin Muok answered nothing, and as he swung his Wooden Club, Susinja retreated with Songseo Chosangbi, but the attack refused to let him fall back.
Cutting off his positions. Severing his line of retreat and encroaching even upon the space around him.
Of course, this was a technique he had mastered in his fight with Dang Cheon: a reinterpretation, in Jin Muok’s own manner, of “Position Devouring,” which the old master known as the Heaven of Sichuan had displayed as a rare hidden-weapon art, Amyeong Gonghwa.
“……!”
Startled, Susinja gave up on evasion and raised his sword to try to block the attack, but Jin Muok’s Wooden Club—two strikes, three strikes, no, changing endlessly—denied the middle-aged Taoist any chance to respond at all.
“Taaaah!”
Snap!
Jin Muok’s Wooden Club, once again bent at an unbelievable angle.
“Gah!”
Just as Susinja was pressing his heel down hard, bracing to block, the strange arc of the Wooden Club startled him. He hurriedly shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, but Jin Muok’s strike was already within arm’s reach.
If I take that…
I’m dead!
Pak!
Unable to master his fear, Susinja threw himself aside, dodging the Wooden Club and, by pure reflex, seized the position behind Jin Muok’s back.
“Die, huh?”
Jin Muok had vanished as though he had never been there at all, and in his place stood the gazes of the countless Qingcheng disciples staring straight at Susinja.
“W-what’s wrong with you all?”
Suspicion and distrust, shock and fury, all of it poured down on him from every eye in the courtyard, and Susinja’s face twisted into an expression beyond words.
“Why is everyone acting like this? What, what did I do wrong?”
The Lightness Skill he had unleashed to evade Jin Muok’s Wooden Club did not belong to Qingcheng. Had it been some outsider’s movement, I could have let it pass. But the footwork his legs traced as they crossed—
“The way he releases Demonic Qi that burns the air as he changes direction in an instant, and the step that seizes his opponent’s back—there is only one such footwork in the Jianghu.”
Jin Muok, who had been watching Susinja with eyes far sharper than his leisurely stride suggested, pointed the Wooden Club at him.
“It’s nothing but the Amyeong Seupun you kept unleashing, isn’t it?”
When a person is cornered, he instinctively reaches for whatever is most familiar.
Susinja was no different.
Though Jin Muok had refined the Bukhae Mupa a little further while keeping company with Dang Wana, it still could not produce a move that would be remembered for ages. Had Susinja only kept his composure, he would have evaded Jin Muok’s attack with some other method.
But he could not withstand Jin Muok’s mounting pressure and the silent stares of the Qingcheng disciples, and so he leaned on the method he knew best.
“Wh-when did this start?”
Mokanja staggered forward and spread his arms wide.
“To me, Senior Uncle has been more precious than my master, or indeed anyone else! And yet Senior Uncle, you of all people, dabbling in demonic arts!”
Tearing at his own robe with the anguish of one spitting blood, Mokanja cried out in despair.
“When exactly did you set foot on the demonic path? Which bastard handed you that accursed Demonic Manual, Senior Uncle?”
Susinja answered with nothing but silence.
Hwiiing!
A small whirlwind slipped between Mokanja and Susinja and rushed past.
“Kekekek.”
A faint, mocking laugh began low in Susinja’s throat, so quiet it seemed no one would hear it unless they strained to listen. But it spread like ripples across water, and at last it rolled over the Thirty-Six Peaks of Qingcheng, resounding far and wide.
“Ahahahaha! Kkwahahahaha!”
A chilling, unhinged howl! A ghostly chill that wrapped around the whole body!
“Who handed it to me, you ask? When did I set foot on this path?”
Abruptly cutting off his laughter, Susinja raised both hands, and violet Demonic Qi came roaring out from his palms.
“I am the demonic path itself. Why would anyone need to hand it to me, or wonder when I stepped onto it?”
“S-Senior… Uncle?”
Kwang!
He hurled a palm strike at Mokanja’s wide-open eyes, but the blow was blocked by Jin Muok.
Without so much as a glance at Mokanja, who still stared at Susinja with a look that refused to believe, Jin Muok muttered through clenched teeth.
“When a faith too great turns into betrayal, only then does one earn the right to face the truth.”

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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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