The World’s Greatest Martial Arts Instructor - Chapter 154
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 154. It’s Been a While
The tavern Song Ho-sin took him to was quite decent.
Perhaps due to the atmosphere on Chang’an’s streets today, it was completely empty, yet the owner was still operating.
Thanks to this, Ha Mu-baek was able to enjoy a satisfying late-night meal.
Song Ho-sin also filled his hunger in the late night. Though they each paid for their own meals.
When they came out onto the dark streets.
Ha Mu-baek looked toward one place.
“Looks like they’ve finally given up.”
Song Ho-sin was truly curious. Just who was he chasing, and how could he know his target’s movements with just a single glance?
“How’s your Lightness Skill?”
Ha Mu-baek asked, looking at Song Ho-sin.
“Huh? Well… I can do it a little.”
In truth, it was his specialty. However, the man before him seemed like he would dash off at an impossible speed the moment he said that.
So he answered as humbly as possible.
“Well, follow me closely.”
Ha Mu-baek nodded and lightly kicked off the ground.
Chasing after his rapidly running figure was absolutely no easy task.
He had to use his Lightness Skill with all his might just to keep the distance from widening.
There was even the temptation to use this as an excuse to run off somewhere else.
But he couldn’t do that.
Ryeon’s orders were orders, and now he also wanted to satisfy his maddening curiosity.
Since he had finally been told to follow along, he could watch comfortably from the side.
So Song Ho-sin ran with all his strength.
The place they arrived at.
Looking at the signboard before his eyes, Song Ho-sin made an incredulous expression.
Punghwa Inn.
A signboard with four characters.
Wasn’t this the place where he and Ha Mu-baek had departed from today?
So they had wandered all around Chang’an just to come to this place?
“Interesting. This place, of all places.”
Ha Mu-baek smiled broadly and opened the door to enter.
Inn Owner Hwang Chan watched them.
Despair was written across his face.
‘How did he say he’d leave without any trouble…’
In fact, when someone who seemed to be a high-ranking member of a sect had secretly visited this place, he had already half given up.
It was surely a sign that something big would happen.
Still, he had hoped.
Maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal.
But now the top-priority surveillance target who had left during the day had returned.
His intuition, gained from many years of experience, told him.
That an unmanageable disaster was about to occur.
Ha Mu-baek looked at Hwang Chan and said nonchalantly.
“I won’t go around smashing things up. Don’t make that face.”
Then he walked forward with steady steps.
Hwang Chan looked at Ha Mu-baek with a bewildered expression for a moment.
The place he headed wasn’t where the stairs were.
The middle of the first-floor restaurant space.
There, he looked around in all directions.
Song Ho-sin stood a step back, quietly watching that scene.
How long had he been looking around?
Ha Mu-baek muttered with a resigned face.
“I can’t find it. Can’t be helped.”
The moment those words fell.
Ha Mu-baek raised his fist and struck down at the floor.
Crash!
With a loud sound, a hole big enough for two people to pass through was punched in the floor.
Hwang Chan watched the scene with trembling eyes.
He had just said he wouldn’t smash things up, but he started by destroying the floor.
‘As expected, you can’t trust the words of Murim bastards.’
He held back tears that were about to fall as his precious inn was being destroyed.
Hwang Chan’s gaze was fixed on the door beside the stairs.
There was a door in such a visible place, yet he said he couldn’t find it and smashed the floor.
So Hwang Chan missed one fact.
He momentarily forgot what kind of floor this was.
Song Ho-sin watched the scene with incredulous eyes.
The martial prowess to punch such a hole in the floor with a simple fist strike was amazing, but he had clearly heard what Ha Mu-baek had said just before.
“Why the floor…?”
“Ah, I know there’s something down here, but no matter how much I look, I can’t see an entrance. What else can I do but break through?”
Had he heard Song Ho-sin’s muttering? Ha Mu-baek kindly answered with the reason.
And then he went down below.
Song Ho-sin hurriedly followed behind him. Behind this unpredictable character.
“It’s been a while. Ye Cho-ah. How many years has it been?”
Ha Mu-baek looked toward one side and spoke as if truly glad to see her.
Song Ho-sin flinched at the suddenly mentioned name.
He had no choice.
As an intelligence agent stationed in Chang’an, there was no way he wouldn’t know that name.
‘Damn. The Hao Sect Leader? What the hell is this guy? Even if he’s a top-priority surveillance target.’
From calling the Four Seas Alliance Leader and the Four Seas Alliance’s Military Advisor like neighborhood friends, he had thought this wasn’t an ordinary person.
But to think the person he’d been chasing all day was the Hao Sect Leader.
The Hao Sect was the number one sect in the unorthodox faction when it came to information. Moreover, this was Chang’an, where their main headquarters was located.
In Chang’an especially, Ye Cho-ah’s movements were extremely secretive, and those who knew her location could truly be counted on one hand.
The place Ha Mu-baek looked toward.
A middle-aged beauty was glaring at Ha Mu-baek with venomous eyes.
Beside her was only one old man.
Too modest an appearance for a Hao Sect Leader.
“Just how did you find this place?”
At Ye Cho-ah’s question, Ha Mu-baek raised his finger and pointed upward.
“You saw it. I broke through and came in.”
Ha Mu-baek’s calm answer.
Song Ho-sin’s eyes widened as he looked up following the finger.
He had thought it was a wooden floor that was broken, but it wasn’t.
He could see a ceiling made of solid stone.
It appeared to be at least one ja (about 30cm) thick.
‘Crazy. He broke through this with just one simple punch?’
Ha Mu-baek had broken through so easily that Song Ho-sin briefly reflected on his short-sighted assumption that it was just a wooden floor.
“Why didn’t you use the perfectly good entrance!”
Ye Cho-ah’s indignant appearance.
She had good reason to be upset, as this place wasn’t simply the underground of Punghwa Inn.
It was a place that could only be reached by passing through all sorts of mechanism devices.
That’s why Ye Cho-ah had chosen this as her final location.
But by breaking through the ceiling and coming down, all those arrangements had become useless.
“You hid the entrance so well, didn’t you?”
As if.
The door was sitting there plain as day in a very conspicuous spot.
She needed to lure him with the mechanism devices, but things couldn’t go according to plan.
“Did I look like enough of a fool to just follow along through such an obviously suspicious door? Me? Heh.”
Ye Cho-ah trembled with rage at Ha Mu-baek’s laughter.
“You, you bastard…”
“Or did you think you could stop me with mere mechanisms like those? Someone of the Hao Sect Leader’s caliber?”
Ha Mu-baek’s cold voice.
Of course, she hadn’t thought they could stop him.
Still, she had hoped they could at least slow him down.
In the meantime, she planned to escape Chang’an through the secret passage.
Ha Mu-baek gazed intently at such Ye Cho-ah.
His Infinite Bright Wheel Eye was in operation.
“I gave you a chance. But you learned it.”
Brief words.
“Ah.”
The one who gasped at those words was Second Guardian.
He had grasped the meaning contained in those brief words.
“You. So you knew about the manuscript all along but left it alone.”
He had suspected as much.
“That chance was the price of Yeong So-hye’s life.”
The words that followed.
At those words, Ye Cho-ah’s eyes turned venomous once again.
“You, you damn bastard dared to touch my daughter!!!”
A cry filled with rage.
That voice was filled with the single-minded determination to curse Ha Mu-baek.
“You’re the one who sent your daughter to a place of death.”
“That’s ridiculous nonsense! You could have not killed her! But you killed her! Just because you have power! Just because you’re strong! You do whatever you want! That’s why we’re trying to become strong too!! What’s wrong with that! Why are you tormenting us so viciously!!!”
Anger and resentment, sorrow, desperation.
It was a scream containing all sorts of complex emotions.
Ha Mu-baek silently listened to those words.
Then he opened his mouth.
“Didn’t you also do whatever you wanted to those weaker than you? You know well too. That this is Gangho. The demonic path would be even more brutal, wouldn’t it?”
At Ha Mu-baek’s question, Ye Cho-ah couldn’t say anything.
Because it was true.
The law of the jungle.
It was one of the absolute truths of the demonic path’s Gangho.
“At least I gave you three chances. Thanks to you not properly informing your daughter about what kind of person I am, Yeong So-hye threw away all those chances. Isn’t that right?”
Ha Mu-baek’s gaze turned toward Second Guardian.
He had been there together at that time.
Second Guardian couldn’t say anything.
He had been the first to be struck down by Ha Mu-baek at that time. Of course, even so, he had been watching the entire situation.
“Hm? Say something.”
Ha Mu-baek’s urging.
Second Guardian reluctantly answered.
“That is correct. You gave her chances.”
“When the chances I give are over, there are no more. You should have told her that too. If you just call someone a madman, she wouldn’t know such things. Being the Hao Sect Leader’s daughter, she threw away all the chances I gave her, thinking there was no way I could actually kill her. What can I do? I have to do as I said.”
At Ha Mu-baek’s words, Ye Cho-ah trembled all over.
That was it.
The leisure that only the strong possessed. And their tyranny.
Haomun didn’t have that.
They only knew a lot, but weren’t strong.
It was infinitely disadvantageous for existing in the demonic path’s Murim where the law of the jungle prevailed.
Haomun was made up of those who banded together to become strong because they were weak, but their power was still insufficient.
Second Guardian’s gaze turned toward Song Ho-sin.
“You’re an intelligence agent of the Four Seas Alliance, aren’t you? Song Ho-sin, was it?”
At those words, Song Ho-sin nodded.
He wasn’t particularly surprised.
Since this was Chang’an where Haomun’s main headquarters was located, he figured they would have identified all the Four Seas Alliance’s intelligence agents.
It was like they were playing peek-a-boo while knowing about each other.
“What is Ryeon’s answer?”
“I was only given orders to monitor this person.”
“How?”
“Whatever he does, absolutely do not intervene and watch from afar.”
Song Ho-sin calmly shared the orders he had received.
Second Guardian quietly nodded and said.
“They abandoned us. They abandoned our Haomun.”
It was a voice that had given up on everything.
“You shouldn’t have coveted the Annihilation Technique in the first place.”
Ha Mu-baek spoke in a cold voice.
“Uuugh.”
Just then, a small groan flowed out from between Ye Cho-ah’s clenched teeth. Ha Mu-baek frowned as he looked at Ye Cho-ah in such a state.
“I’m warning you. Don’t do it. You didn’t just learn it, you’ve already crossed the line. See, I told you that’s not something you can handle. Tsk.”
Despite Ha Mu-baek’s warning, Ye Cho-ah drew up all the internal energy in her body.
The past few days.
Ye Cho-ah, who had been tormented by anxiety, made a decision she shouldn’t have made.
She abandoned the work of analyzing and improving the Annihilation Technique to remove the curse, and just learned the Annihilation Technique itself as it was.
And at an accelerated pace at that.
The reason was simple.
The fear that Ha Mu-baek was coming, and the desperation that she needed to become strong.
Those two factors worked in combination.
“This is why I hate the Annihilation Technique.”
As Ye Cho-ah began to operate the Annihilation Technique in earnest, its achievement level became visible to the Infinite Bright Wheel Eye.
Eleventh Achievement.
It was just before the twelfth achievement, which was the great completion that would turn her into a Dark Blood Jiangshi.
It was a terrifying martial art that, when one discovered the path of acceleration and rushed down that path, could instantly raise one’s achievement according to talent and turn the practitioner into a jiangshi.
Ye Cho-ah’s eyes turned bright blue.
It was a trace of her efforts to remove the curse. Her eyes had turned bright blue as a trace of learning the Annihilation Technique that Haomun had improved in their own way.
It was different from the typical Annihilation Technique, but that didn’t matter.
What mattered was that she had learned the Annihilation Technique and was now trying to use it.
“This is the second warning. Don’t do it.”
The moment those words fell.
Ye Cho-ah’s body movement disappeared.
Yuyumijongbo!
The Hao Sect Leader’s exclusive martial arts unfolded.
Yuyuhwanyeonggong utilizing the Chaotic Blood River Destruction Art maximized its power, and Yuyumijongbo created a truly phantasmagorical maze.
Ye Cho-ah rushed toward Ha Mu-baek like that and swung her sword.
Clack.
However, she was caught by Ha Mu-baek all too futilely.
“How, how could you….”
Ye Cho-ah spoke with an expression of disbelief.
She had learned and utilized the Destruction Art up to the Eleventh Achievement, yet was blocked at the very first sword strike.
She had deployed Yuyumijongbo beyond the Ultimate Achievement.
It couldn’t be helped.
“It seems the results weren’t entirely without merit. You deliberately slowed your achievement progress at the Eleventh Achievement. It appears you succeeded in preserving that last thread of reason. Though it seems you failed to stop becoming a Dark Blood Jiangshi by removing the curse.”
Ha Mu-baek said while examining Ye Cho-ah’s Chaotic Blood River Destruction Art.
Because there had been small progress, unlike the others, her two eyes were tinged blue.
Ha Mu-baek swung his arm and threw Ye Cho-ah.
Crash!
Ye Cho-ah struck the stone wall directly.
“Urgh.”
A thin moan flowed from her mouth.
“This is my final warning.”
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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