So? Did Someone Force You to Become the Heavenly Demon?

Chapter 351 : Preparation (1)

"That's a different face from the one I saw."Il-mok's words made the three Orthodox Faction members' expressions darken with even deeper suspicion.

"That doesn't make any sense."

"It's possible the portrait we drew was inaccurate, or perhaps your memory has simply faded over time."

Faced with Taoist Master Cheongmok and the Beggar King’s words, Il-mok gave a slight bow of his head.

"If you'll excuse me for a moment."

He turned to look in the direction of his companions.

"Miss Jin, do you still have the portrait of the Jiangshi on you?"

Jin Hayeon immediately unpacked the bundle she always carried around whenever they traveled.

As a member of the Hidden Guard Pavilion who also served as his maid, she always made sure to carry the items necessary to assist Il-mok.

After searching through her belongings, Jin Hayeon found a specific piece of paper and promptly handed it over to Il-mok.

"This is the face of the Jiangshi I saw. Does it match the one you encountered?"

Il-mok had asked on the off chance that their portrait might have been the mistaken one, but all three of them shook their heads.

They were studying the portrait with complicated expressions when Little Tiger Beggar muttered. "If you had a portrait like this, it would've been nice to hear about it sooner…"

"."

Beggar King's sharp voice cut him off.

Little Tiger Beggar shut his mouth immediately, but Il-mok pressed his fists together in a respectful salute and dipped his head slightly.

"My apologies. Things were hectic on my end as well. And since I have no talent for drawing, I kept quiet rather than risk spreading around a bad portrait."

"Then what is this portrait?"

"It's not one we drew ourselves."     

Using that shocking revelation as a springboard, Il-mok proceeded to recount the events he encountered in the northern grassland.

He detailed the sacred northern tradition of sky burials and the grave-robbing spree that had forced the tribes to abandon it, specifically highlighting the stolen corpse of the grassland's undisputed strongest warrior.

"On a hunch, I asked the tribe's chieftain to draw the face of the missing body, and this is what he gave me."

After giving them the brief rundown, Il-mok pressed his fists together again.

"It was a portrait we'd only just obtained ourselves, and by the time we returned from the Western Regions, word had already spread far and wide that the Blood Cult had been wiped out. I know we're late in delivering this crucial intelligence, but I hope you can understand our difficult position."

In truth, Il-mok had acquired the portrait for years, but Il-mok casually wove truth and lies together without batting an eye. He could hardly tell them he'd sat on it, hoping they'd all kill each other.

"Hmm. If that's the way things were, then I suppose it couldn't be helped."

Taoist Master Cheongmok gave a measured word of support in Il-mok's favor. Meanwhile, the Beggar King stared at the portrait with a troubled look.

"So the Blood Cult sourced the body for their Jiangshi all the way from the north?"

"Master, that would explain why we failed to catch wind of their remnants despite them still being active."

"Right. There are no beggars in the north, so news doesn't travel there."

The north was an unforgiving land. Nobody there had anything spare to give a beggar, and the moment you became one, you were as good as dead.

After exchanging a few words with his disciple, the Beggar King collected his thoughts and spoke.

"I'll be honest with you, I can't take everything you've said at face value. But this is clearly too important a matter to leave unconfirmed."

"What kind of verification are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking about turning the entire Central Plains upside down to find any trace of the Blood Cult. If the Jiangshi that the Alliance Leader killed was a fake, then it means their remnants are still out there. Hell, if the real Jiangshi is still intact, it's less like remnants and more like the Blood Cult itself is still alive."

Il-mok gave a nod at the Beggar King's words.

"The Maitreya Luminous Cult will look into things as far as our reach extends."

"Pass anything along if something turns up. We'll be on our way then. This is urgent enough that we can't afford to dawdle."

True to his word, the Beggar King led his beggars away, coming and going like the wind itself.

Il-mok watched them go for a moment, then turned to Taoist Master Cheongmok who had stayed behind.

"What does Qingcheng plan to do?"

"Now that we know the Blood Cult deceived us, we have no choice but to track them down."

Taoist Master Cheongmok had gained enlightenment and carried a refreshing air about him. But interwoven within that refreshing aura is a thick and unmistakable killing intent.

'I recall that Qingcheng's disciples were caught in that nighmarish Formation and ended up fighting each other to death…'

Given how deep Qingcheng's grudge against the Blood Cult ran, that reaction made perfect sense.

"Come to think of it, this might actually work out for the better. Staying cooped up in Sichuan makes it hard to gather information. This is a good opportunity to work as escorts and pick up what we can on the Blood Cult from across the Central Plains."

"So you've decided to run an escort agency."

"Indeed. And I have the Maitreya Luminous Cult's advice to thank for that. Namo Amituofo."

With that, Taoist Master Cheongmok led Qingcheng's disciples away as well.

Il-mok watched him go, then sank into thought over the question he'd deliberately left unspoken.

'Why use a fake Jiangshi? With the scale of bloodshed they caused, they should've had more than enough to complete the real one.'

The single event that had accelerated the war against the Blood Cult was the massacre in Guizhou Province, where the majority of the small and mid-sized factions had been wiped out, and thousands of civilians were swept up in the carnage along with them.

By sheer body count alone, it surpassed even the Sichuan massacre, which meant the Blood Cult should have seized an enormous amount of power from it.

So with all that power at their disposal, why would they use a fake?

'Using it to lull the Orthodox Faction into complacency doesn't hold up. No matter how convincing the fake, they would've had to sacrifice a substantial portion of their forces just to sell the deception.'

The more he turned it over, the more something shifted in his thinking.

'…What if it wasn't the Blood Cult that carried out that massacre?'

The only reason the fractured Orthodox Faction finally banded together was the massacre in Guizhou Province.

Before that, they'd been using the Blood Cult as an excuse to squabble over territory among themselves. From the Blood Cult's perspective, it was easier for them to survive if the Orthodox Faction remained fractured.

Which meant only one question remained.

Who had disguised themselves as the Blood Cult and carried out that horrific slaughter?

Even if you turned the entire martial world upside down, there wasn’t any faction capable of annihilating countless small and mid-sized sects while perfectly planting fake evidence to frame the Blood Cult without leaving a single trace.

'The ones who ultimately profited from the whole affair were the Martial Alliance, but that doesn't add up either.'

The Martial Alliance wasn't a monolithic organization.

If they'd orchestrated a massacre of that scale just to gain justification for hunting down the Blood Cult, there was virtually no way the information wouldn't have leaked.

The moment that thought crystallized, a name surfaced in Il-mok's mind.

He realized this was a far more serious problem than he'd anticipated, and he urgently sent a mental transmission to Jin Hayeon.

***

Hidden somewhere within the vast expanse of the Central Plains sat an unnamed mountain.

Beyond its jagged, treacherous peaks that made climbing a living nightmare, the mountain was completely devoid of the mystical Qi that blessed famous spiritual lands like the Five Great Mountains, rendering it a barren wasteland completely ignored by humanity.

Deep within the heart of that unremarkable mountain lay a cavern, hidden away by an intricate and mysterious Formation.

Inside the cavern, a single corpse lay in state with a talisman affixed to its forehead. Surrounding the corpse was a sprawl of grotesque ink lines dyed with the color of blood. And from each cardinal direction, candles reeking of sulfur stood burning.

An old man had been chanting incantations in a low, eerie voice before that strange Formation, but he stopped and turned around at the sound of footsteps approaching from behind.

"How are things progressing?"

"Everything is proceeding according to your will, Cult Leader. Every last one of those dimwitted Orthodox Faction bastards has fallen for your scheme."

Despite the report that their enemies had been successfully deceived, the Cult Leader let out a deep sigh and there was no trace of satisfaction on his face.

It was a completely understandable reaction.

The deception they had staged had come at a staggering cost.

The Blood Cult's last hope, the Heavenly Blood Jiangshi.

In the course of countless experiments aimed at developing it, they had once succeeded in creating a Jiangshi that came closest to the real thing; it was their strongest Blood Jiangshi, essentially serving as the ultimate prototype for the Heavenly Blood Jiangshi and the nearest thing that came close to the might of a Heavenly Blood Jiangshi.

And the Blood Cult Leader had been forced to sacrifice that Jiangshi as bait to deceive the Orthodox Faction.

On top of that, the First Elder of his cult had also willingly walked into that death trap by donning his attire, all so that the Blood Cult could escape that calamity.

Even ignoring the sacrifice made by the First Elder, the Cult Leader had also lost a massive chunk of his greatest sorcerers and elite enforcers in that bloody masquerade.

If you didn't count the half-finished Heavenly Blood Jiangshi looming in the shadows behind him, the Blood Cult had essentially vaporized half of its entire combat force in that single staged defeat.

Even now, just thinking about the humiliating sacrifices he was forced to make that day caused the Cult Leader to grind his teeth in seething fury.

"I will never forgive those hypocritical bastards."

He knew for a fact that a hidden faction had orchestrated the massacre in Guizhou Province and framed the Blood Cult for the atrocities.

"That damned Cheok Pae-myeong. I will hunt him down and torture him before turning his corpse into a Heavenly Blood Jiangshi and make him my slave."

The Blood Cult Leader was certain that everything had been the work of Martial Alliance Leader Cheok Pae-myeong and Chief Strategist Gongsun Hyeon.

Hearing his master's vow of vengeance, the subordinate who had come to make the report slammed his forehead into the floor and cried out.

"With the Heavenly Blood Jiangshi on our side, your divine will cannot be stopped, Cult Leader; the glorious era of the Blood Cult's supremacy over the Jianghu is finally upon us!!"

The Blood Cult Leader looked down at his subordinate for a moment before issuing his orders.

"Tell our forces to keep hiding and watch the martial world's movements. The Orthodox Faction's hypocrites are the kind who can't help but draw blood in the end. The day they are blinded by greed and begin slaughtering each other will be the day we use their blood to complete the Heavenly Blood Jiangshi and realize the Blood Cult's dominion."

***

Miles away from that dark cavern, Il-mok handed his freshly penned emergency dispatch to Ouyang Mun and ordered him to ride straight back to Lanzhou.

Then Il-mok and the rest of the group headed south again to Mount Emei, where they returned the roughly hundred corpses and the nuns they had kept captive back to the Emei Sect.

"As promised, the Emei Sect will seal its gate for fifty years."

"Thank you for your mercy."

The Emei Sect's Elders said so with grim expressions.

At their signal, the sect's disciples wrapped a thick rope braided from straw around the main gate and hung a cloth bearing the character Sealed [封] over it.

It was the moment the Emei Sect, one of the most powerful factions in the Central Plains and a member of the Nine Great Sects and One Gang, went into seclusion.

With his business at the Emei Sect concluded, Il-mok headed north again to deal with a more pressing matter.

Around the time Il-mok was making his way toward Lanzhou in Gansu Province.

Back at the Martial Alliance near Dongting Lake.

"How did things go on your end?"

The Chief Strategist asked while doing his best to conceal the unease stirring inside him.

He was asking this specifically because it was far too early a time for the Alliance Leader to have already returned from his campaign.

Given this incredibly short timeframe, it was practically at the level of him simply dropping by Sichuan Province and immediately turning right back around.

"We were too late; by the time we arrived, the Emei Sect had already been crushed by the Maitreya Luminous Cult and voluntarily sealed their gates."

Unlike his usual confident self, the Alliance Leader's voice was dripping with irritation.

"I intended to punish them personally, but the Beggars’ Gang and Qingcheng got in the way."

Cheok Pae-myeong then gave Gongsun Hyeon a brief account of the conversations he'd had with the Beggar King and Taoist Master Cheongmok.

"…I apologize, Alliance Leader. The Beggars’ Gang has always been a thorn in our side, so that much I had anticipated to some extent, but I didn't foresee Qingcheng turning on us like that." Gongsun Hyeon bowed his head as he spoke.

Cheok Pae-myeong clicked his tongue and replied. "Tch. Forget it. What's done is done; there's nothing to be done about it now. The Beggars’ Gang, the Hwangbo Family, and now Qingcheng on top of that. A bunch of busibodies."

It was clearly meant to be a reassuring thing to say, but for some reason, the sound of that tongue click rang loud in Gongsun Hyeon's ears.

He could tell the Alliance Leader was in a very foul mood, so he chose his next words with extreme care.

There was news he had to deliver regardless, because hiding it would only irritate him further.

"Alliance Leader, the Beggars’ Gang, Qingcheng, and the Hwangbo Family aren't the end of it."

"What are you talking about?"

"Two additional individuals have joined the Hwangbo Family's reinforcements that departed from Shandong to aid the Maitreya Luminous Cult."

"Two people?"

Reporting the addition of just two people made sense only if those two were extraordinary figures.

Cheok Pae-myeong repeated the question with an uneasy look on his face. Gongsun Hyeon answered.

"Wudang's Supreme Ultimate Sword Immortal and Sword Dragon Daoist Un-baek have joined their ranks."