Sohwa had long harbored doubts about Zhuge Jihwi’s attitude.
She already knew that the Zhuge family was on the Blood Cult’s side. But there was something different about him.
Unlike Zhuge Inhwi, he seemed to know his family’s secrets—and to have been involved in them.
Even so, it was hard to say with certainty that he stood on the Blood Cult’s side.
The Alliance Leader had also said that it was Zhuge Jihwi who had shown him the Blood Cult’s records.
'Why would Zhuge Jihwi expose the Blood Demon’s hiding place to the Alliance Leader?'
As Sohwa followed that trail of suspicion, she heard footsteps.
Crunch.
When the scent of pine resin mixed into the bamboo fragrance and reached her, Sohwa turned her head. Namgung Hyun was walking toward her.
She hid her puzzlement and asked,
“It sounded like you were discussing something important. Has the meeting already ended?”
“No. I came out alone. I imagine the others are still talking.”
“You came out by yourself?”
“Yes.”
The people attending that meeting all held tremendous positions. Just opening one’s mouth in that place was pressure enough to crush you. She could not imagine how he had managed to slip away.
“I couldn’t stay when your expression looked so bad. It bothered me.”
At Namgung Hyun’s answer, Sohwa was at a loss for words for a moment.
“Don’t tell me you said that and walked out?”
Her words came out half-mocking, but Namgung Hyun gave a small smile and replied,
“In truth, it was the Clan Head who told me that if I was worried, I should go out and see how you were doing.”
“The Namgung Clan Head?”
Just as she was about to think that the Namgung Clan Head had once again rubbed salt in her father’s pride, Namgung Hyun said something strange.
“The Clan Head was the first to bring it up, but the Tang Clan Head said the same.”
“Father did?”
Sohwa repeated herself in disbelief.
She wondered if her father had been being sarcastic, but Namgung Hyun was not the sort who could not distinguish tone. He was someone who could sniff out anything negative said about him like a ghost; if he said the Tang Clan Head had allowed him to go out, then it must be true.
“In fact, the Tang Clan Head also... knows about me.”
Namgung Hyun started to say more, then, perhaps wary of their surroundings, glossed over it. But Sohwa understood what he had swallowed back.
Her eyes widened. If she had understood correctly, it meant Tang Ji-ha knew that Namgung Hyun was a sorcerer.
Seeing Sohwa’s expression harden, Namgung Hyun spoke in a tone that sounded almost like an excuse.
“The Clan Head seemed to have misunderstood you, so I had no choice but to tell him. It bothered me that you were in the dungeon... and since we’ll be seeing each other often from now on, I felt I should be honest.”
He bit his lip once, then continued,
“Having you be suspected every time would be hard on you.”
“So you told him everything?”
Sohwa, worried someone might overhear, likewise swallowed back anything to do with the Blood Cult.
“Yes. I don’t really know myself why I went that far. But I don’t regret telling him.”
What was on Namgung Hyun’s face was not worry or anxiety, but relief.
His cheeks were even a little flushed, making him look almost happy.
The situation was giving Sohwa a headache, but then something occurred to her.
“Then that means Father knows what you... are able to do, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. It was also the Clan Head who allowed me to stay in Young Lady Tang’s room.”
Sohwa had thought Tang Min had persuaded her father for her sake after passing along Namgung Hyun’s words—that her father had helped without asking her because Tang Min had coaxed him.
But it had not been Tang Min who swayed him.
When she had come out of the dungeon, the situation had been urgent, and outsiders had been entering the main hall, so she had not had a chance to go find Tang Min and ask what he had said to the Clan Head.
After they reached the Tang manor, she had lost her reason at the sight of flames shooting up from the inner compound and had sprinted to the Oral Transmission Pavilion; once she had detoxified Tang Hae-han, she had gone straight to the Medical Division to help the Divine Physician. There had been no leeway to sit back and leisurely discuss Namgung Hyun with Tang Min.
'So Father has learned that Namgung Hyun is a sorcerer.'
After a moment of silence, Sohwa’s expression turned strange.
She had no idea whether this was a good thing or not.
She murmured, almost to herself,
“In that case, if I disappear together with you, he’ll be able to guess why.”
Namgung Hyun did not understand why she phrased it that way. He only felt glad that the darkness on Tang Sohwa’s face had lightened a little.
He answered in a bright voice,
“Yes, I imagine he will. It seems he trusts me now, so I don’t think Young Lady Tang will be scolded too harshly.”
Sohwa’s voice, clearer now to match her complexion, pierced Namgung Hyun’s eardrums.
“Sir, there is something I’d like to ask of you.”
Namgung Hyun waited for her to speak. But instead of opening her mouth, Tang Sohwa stepped right up to him and took his hand.
Tang Sohwa traced characters into his palm.
'Hubei.'
Startled by the word written in his hand, Namgung Hyun looked at her.
“I won’t be gone long. Half a day is enough.”
She had found a way to ask Zhuge Jihwi and come back without rousing the Tang Clan Head’s suspicion. Everyone’s attention was elsewhere; even if she and Namgung Hyun disappeared for half a day, it should not cause a problem.
Namgung Hyun nodded.
“The meeting will probably be a long one anyway, so I don’t think it will be a big issue if I’m away for half a day.”
Then, wearing an expression whose meaning she could not quite read, he added,
“In fact, our Clan Head will probably be even more pleased if he learns I slipped away together with Young Lady Tang.”
Instead of answering that, Sohwa quickly took him with her and headed toward a secluded inner courtyard.
***
At the chill sound brushing past his ears, the Lord of the Sun Palace moved his eyes. When he flicked his hand, the thick cloth covering the window flew aside in an instant.
The worst.
A moon hung in the pitch-black night sky. Because the sand reflected the moonlight, the world was not truly dark.
Looking out at the heaving sand dunes, Hae-rak realized what the sound was.
Ssshhh.
The wind was moving a mountain-high dune of sand.
It was nothing special; it happened all the time.
But as he stared at the remade contours of the sand, Hae-rak’s eyes darkened.
Between the moon-soaked slope and its shadow, someone was standing. Like a long pole thrust into the ground, the tall man’s presence was overwhelming even from far away.
Even as the world changed at a dizzying pace, that man stood as unshaken as a tree with its roots deeply sunk.
Only the hair that fell all the way down to his toes streamed elegantly in the wind.
Watching the Blood Demon standing in the middle of the sea of sand, Hae-rak let out a laugh before he knew it.
“What a sight.”
At that, Min Doyu, who stood beside him, looked over. The face that had been taut with tension contorted at once.
His eyes asked if Hae-rak was out of his mind, but he could not speak. His body had gone stiff.
The other martial artists in the room were the same.
They were only facing the Blood Demon as a figure the size of a fingertip, yet already their knees were buckling.
Only then did the true weight of the freedom Hae-rak had coveted sink in.
The determination in the air quickly grew to match the fear, filling the Sun Palace. Heat boiled up like a kiln.
The beautiful palace that had found a new master now stood on the brink of being half-destroyed.
The new master, who liked beautiful things, felt his gut twist. He had taken it back with care, like handling a baby, worried it might be damaged; now, he had met the finest grinder in all the world, and all that effort was about to go to waste.
Of course, he had long suspected that the Blood Demon would eventually leave Geumeunsan, so he had expected they would meet someday.
It had simply happened sooner than he had thought.
It seemed the Blood Demon had graciously chosen the Great Desert as the first place he would visit.
Just then, someone blocked his view.
With his body between Hae-rak and the window, Min Doyu said,
“You mustn’t go.”
Lounging almost sprawled in the soft chair, the Sun Palace Lord asked,
“What?”
Clicking his tongue, he ran an irreverent gaze up and down Min Doyu.
“You acted like you’d do anything if it meant taking back the Sun Palace, and now you’re already scared?”
“There’s no need to go out and be beaten first. If you avoid him for a bit and let the others wear themselves out first...”
Min Doyu could not finish his sentence.
He had blocked the window because Hae-rak looked ready to go out, but if he had been capable of stopping him, then Min Hae-rak would never have taken back the Sun Palace in the first place.
Capturing the Sun Palace had not been all that hard for them. Retaking it, however, carried the meaning of a declaration of war. It signaled that they intended to break free of the Blood Demon.
Silently cursing in his heart, Min Doyu ran out into the desert after him.
With the Central Plains and the Northern Sea both there, he silently railed at the fact that the Great Desert was the first place the Blood Demon had come.
But given the Blood Demon’s obsession with Hae-rak, it was hardly surprising.
Even more than ten years ago, the Blood Demon had personally coveted the “frame” of the Sun Palace. His reasons then had been a little different from usual. The cultists who maintained the frames would occasionally report to the Blood Demon if they came across a child with truly outstanding talent. Naturally, the Sun Palace siblings had been reported to him as a matter of course.
Just as the martial arts of the Sun Palace had been left behind for those children, the siblings, born with bodies of extreme yang, had absorbed their ancestor’s martial arts and grown at a staggering pace.
When a frame had reached the right age to be absorbed by the Blood Demon, it would be relocated to another place to continue its cultivation. Their duty was to swell the energy held within it until the day the Blood Demon absorbed it.
But only a few years after the siblings were relocated, the Blood Demon summoned them to Geumeunsan. It had not been with the intent to absorb them. The Blood Demon was no fool; he had no intention of greedily devouring the inner energy of frames whose growth he could not yet see the end of.
He wanted something else.
From time to time, when there was a frame that pleased him, the Blood Demon would take it into his own hands and use it to create a new frame bearing his blood.
The report on the siblings had piqued his curiosity.
When the Blood Demon saw them with his own eyes, he took a great liking to the elder sister and decided to keep her.
But he had not realized that the siblings had inherited more than just the Sun Palace Lord’s body in perfect form.
They had inherited the Sun Palace Lord’s fiery temper just as completely, and the sister went on a rampage, intent on killing the Blood Demon. She kicked up such a storm that even the Blood Demon himself was taken aback.
He cherished bodies that could refine yin and yang energy, and there was not a single Blood Cultist who did not know that.
Yet that Blood Demon ended up killing a frame with a body of extreme yang, one he had personally brought into his own quarters, by mistake. In a panic, before the frame’s life was fully severed, he hurriedly absorbed the energy inside.
Even then, he considered himself fortunate.
There was still a younger sibling who possessed a talent similar to the sister’s. He would raise him properly and then absorb a fully matured yang energy.
But there was no way the descendants of the Sun Palace would submit to an old man who had tried to violate their older sister and killed her, then treated the younger one like a jar of liquor to be aged and drunk. The hot-blooded descendant of the Sun Palace had thrown himself at the Blood Demon, determined to kill him, and this time the Blood Demon had been careful not to make a mistake as he taught the boy the difference in their levels.
Even so, his spirit did not break, and for the first time, the Blood Demon found himself liking a frame.
He tried tirelessly to pair Hae-rak with one of the children who had received his blood. He failed again and again, but he did not give up and continued to summon Hae-rak from time to time.
At some point, Hae-rak accepted that he could not beat the Blood Demon. But he did not give up.
Even knowing that the Blood Demon had called him in to check how far he had grown, every time he had an audience, he treated it as a chance and tried to cut his throat.
If it meant getting close enough to the Blood Demon, he would do anything.
As a frame, Hae-rak had risen, unusually, to the position of Crimson Blood Hall Lord.
Even though the Blood Demon had treated him differently than the others, Hae-rak had not once abandoned his determination to kill him.
In truth, he had had no choice.
How could he call the wealth and power given to him “kindness”?
If a master fed good grain to a cow and let it roam on clean fields just to get good meat from it, could anyone say that master cherished the cow? When that same master had eaten his siblings and looked at him with eyes overwhelmed by appetite, how could he serve such a man?
So he had to kill him before he was eaten.
Kwoooom.
From far away, Min Doyu saw a mountain of sand collapse.
The one rampaging was his own hall lord, and the Blood Demon was deigning to face him.
Boom.
Yet there were moments when the Blood Demon, perhaps finding it bothersome, struck back in earnest.
Min Doyu climbed another giant hill of sand. When he had drawn close enough that the sand they kicked up could hit him, he heard a voice.
“Did you come to save your Crimson Blood Hall Lord, you little thing?”
At the voice that swept over his whole body, Min Doyu froze. His body, unable to endure the speed with which he had been running, pitched forward into the sand.
Thump.
The voice did not stop.
“Very well. I’ll give you a chance to save him.”
The Blood Demon’s laughter-tinged voice scraped across Min Doyu’s terror-stricken heart.
“Go to the Central Plains this instant and bring Tang Sohwa.”
