Chapter 66: The Heavenly Demon (1)

Chapter 66: The Heavenly Demon (1)

“Lady Heavenly Demon, it won’t work.”

“Lady Heavenly Demon, half of the Blood Demon Unit is dead! The elders were spread all over the world, but we already lost contact with them. This is not the time to fight those idiots of the Righteous Faction. The cult might be in danger—no, maybe the entire world is in danger. The people of the Beggar Gang...”

“Lady Heavenly Demon, as you ordered, we set up clinics in every sect. The head of the Sichuang Tang Sect and experts from the Mount Mao Sect are here too. We’re planning to capture several jiangshi soldiers and experiment on them, so we’ll see results soon...”

“...Lady Heavenly Demon, the Moonlight and Blood Demon Kings are down. Even if we manage to kill a hundred jiangshi, a thousand more are made the next day. This plague is out of our control! The doctors in the clinics say that it’s possible to put them to sleep if we protect their upper dantian by blocking the Yamen acupoint and the Tianshu acupoint, but...”

“...Lady Heavenly Demon, seek shelter. Go to a remote island and seclude yourself. Even if there are ten million jiangshi, they won’t be able to cross the ocean. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the only murim in the world. Anywhere you, our cult’s leader, are will be murim.... “

“...Lady Heavenly Demon, the oath of the great war isn’t important anymore. It was made before this chaos began. The laws of nature have changed, so humans’ duties can no longer be set in stone. Please forget the oath you made with the Murim Alliance's leader and retreat so you can rise again...”

“Lady Heavenly Demon.”

“Lady Heavenly Demon.”

***

The cave was weighed down by a long silence.

“...How did you endure it?” I eventually asked.

The world was ending, and all of humanity had become walking corpses. The Heavenly Demon and the Murim Alliance's leader were half-corpses themselves. If their circulation of qi paused for even a moment, their hearts would stop. How could they have endured that for three long years?

The two martial artists seemed to struggle to find an answer to my question. They exchanged an enigmatic look, and then nodded together.

“Follow us.”

The pair exited the cave and I followed. We didn’t talk and walked carefully so as not to wake the others up. The silence hung in the air for a long time.

Right after we exited the cave, the Heavenly Demon broke the silence.

“Everyone dies someday.”

Dawn was coming.

“There is a funny story told in murim. A peak master had Ten Thousand Poison Immunity and the Indestructible Body. No poison could scourge his innards, and no sword was able to pierce his skin.” The Heavenly Demon’s breath emerged as white puffs in the cold air. “It was no exaggeration to say that he was almost invincible. The world’s most lethal poison couldn’t harm him, nor could the sharpest sword, so it was practically impossible for his enemies to kill him.”

The dawning sun brought a faint blue back to the sky and cast wan shadows across the earth.

“But there is one thing that the old tales never tolerate—invincibility.”

The Heavenly Demon and the Murim Alliance's leader slowly walked through the pale shadows one step after another. It was the humans’ footsteps that distinguished the sky and the earth. The earth was where the footsteps reached, and the sky began where the footsteps didn’t touch.

“Child.” The Heavenly Demon glanced back at me.

We were outside the cave and were walking toward the snowfield where we had been surrounded by the zombies yesterday.

“Can you tell how the master died?”

“How did he die?” I asked.

“He died from bedding a Lust Demon.” The Heavenly Demon smirked. “The pleasure from the unification of yin and yang isn’t poison. It’s also far from a sword.”

“Uhh... But isn’t too much pleasure poisonous?”

“You’re right. That was why the Lust Demon didn’t drown the master in pleasure from the start. She was skillful and took time to tame him. The pleasure was very faint at first, but he eventually became obsessed and sought more—even the most lethal one.”

The sun slowly came up and brightened the snowfield, sweeping away the gray until it was white like the Heavenly Demon’s breath.

“The master no longer perceived the Lust Demon’s slaps during their intercourse as pain. The whip she swung was just another pleasure. The Lust Demon’s every move was just the master’s source of happiness.” The Heavenly Demon held up her hand and stroked her neck. “At the last moment, the Lust Demon lightly—very lightly—choked the master.

“She didn’t need a supreme understanding of martial arts, nor did she use a profound amount of qi either. It was just her two hands around his neck. As she suffocated him, the master smiled, drenched in pleasure.” The Heavenly Demon giggled. “He died at the peak like the peak master he was. It wasn’t an unhappy death after all.”

I saw corpses in the snowfield that moved as if they weren’t dead. They stood still under the dawn light, creating a forest of shadows across the snow.

“The lesson of this story is simple.”

“Never fool around with a Lust Demon!” the Murim Alliance's leader grumbled. “It isn’t just an old tale, that actually happened. Tsk, tsk! The Sichuang Tang Sect moved heaven and earth to train him, but that wench secretly sent a Lust Demon to assassinate him.”

“Haha.”

The zombies were still scattered across the snowfield.

“Most of the greenhorns that first go out to gangho believe that the goal of martial artists is to be invincible. They learn martial arts so they can be immortal.” The Heavenly Demon approached the zombies and picked up one of them with a grunt. “It’s nonsense.”

The Murim Alliance's leader also lifted a zombie and moved it.

“Those who obtained Ten Thousand Poison Immunity are killed by something other than poison. The same goes for the people that have the Indestructible Body. It’s just the sword that can’t kill them, not everything.” The Heavenly Demon heaved the zombie into position. “Do you get it? When people choose which martial arts to learn, they not only decide what kind of martial artist they’ll be but also how they shall die.”

She moved slowly with the zombie in her arms. Like a delivery man with a heavy package, she kept putting the zombie down after a while, taking a deep breath, and moving again.

“We know that everyone dies someday, so it can’t bring us sorrow.”

The Heavenly Demon and the Murim Alliance's leader gathered together the scattered zombies. It looked like the zombies had been moving around last night.

The world was cruel because one couldn’t choose how they were born. How, then, was the world where one couldn’t die as they wanted to? That meant that there would be no proper conclusion in the world, and the lives in it would be cut short.

—What are you going to do? the Guardian quietly asked. Are you going to kill the Heavenly Demon and Murim Alliance's leader on their behalf? Well, I guess that can be a mercy in a way. I would certainly do that for them, but we shouldn’t forget that we’re just outsiders here.

“I know.”

The two martial artists weren’t hoping to commit suicide. If they had to die, they hoped that it would be at each other’s hands. It wasn’t a plague that was going to bring down the Heavenly Demon Cult and the Righteous Faction—they were going to bring destruction to each of their factions. That was the proper ending to their lives that they could accept.

Even if I crashed into the fight and killed both of them, that wasn’t a good ending or a merciful gift. It was just a child scribbling on a fairy tale book.

“I’m going to conclude this world in my own way.”

—What is your way?

I didn’t answer the Guardian’s question.

The evening was almost over; dusk had come.

“I-it’s already evening, old man,” the Heavenly Demon panted.

“Maybe because it’s winter... Huff. The day ends very quickly...”

“I’ll end you tomorrow, whatever it takes.”

“I could say the same thing...” the Murim Alliance's leader grumbled between labored breaths.

The Great War of Good and Evil entered a ceasefire for the 990th time. The Heavenly Demon and the Murim Alliance's leader returned to the cave looking more tired than yesterday.

“Where have you been?” the Viper asked.

The other Hunters were waiting for us. While the Viper was standing guard at the cave’s entrance, the Chemist and the Medicine King were hunched over the zombie—the leader of the Wudang Sect that had surprised us yesterday—busy studying it.

“We were looking at the patient,” the Chemist told me. “It was too hectic yesterday...”

“Did you make any progress?”

The Medicine King and the Chemist looked at each other. The Medicine King clicked his tongue. “Not yet.”

“Yeah... I-it’s our first time dealing with a virus like this,” the Chemist agreed.

I’d figured.

The Heavenly Demon and the Murim Alliance's leader walked away to get some rest.

When they got far enough, I turned my head. “Miss Chemist.”

“Yes?”

“Please be honest with me. How many days, roughly, would it take to make a cure?”

“Oh, uhm... Uhh...” The Chemist hesitated before she answered, “If I’m really honest...it’ll take at least a hundred twenty days.”

“It may take three times longer than that. You’re supposed to schedule enough time for this kind of task because it always takes longer than the schedule,” the Medicine King grumbled.

The Chemist’s head drooped. “...Yes, he’s right. That’s the worst-case scenario, though...”

“So it’s one hundred days at minimum and three hundred days at the longest. Did I understand that correctly?”

“Umm...” The Chemist’s head drooped lower. “I-it might be impossible to create the cure at all. We barely have any facilities or equipment, and the environment isn’t helpful either. I can’t guarantee anything at this point. I’m sorry, Mr. Death King... You brought me here because you trust me...but it’s impossible to create the cure within our time frame.”

I remembered what the Indoor Librarian had said before sending us into the apocalyptic book.

“Once you open your eyes, you’ll find yourselves in the world ten days before the serialization of the Heavenly Demon Chronicle unfortunately discontinues.”

“I hope you’ll show me a great ending.”

In other words, the world would meet its true end after ten days, although I didn’t know what exactly was going to happen. It would kill the Heavenly Demon and the Murim Alliance's leader after all of their struggles to survive. Those ten days were what the Chemist meant by our time frame.

“I’m really sorry...”

I shook my head. “No, that’s good enough.”

“W-what?”

“Don’t worry.” I slowly stroked the handle of the sword hung on my belt. “I’ll take care of the time issue. Please don’t give up—continue with your research. Do you remember what I told you when we first arrived in this world?”

“But this is a world, not a book. And we’re here to save it. You know that, right?”

“...I-I remember. Of course I do, Mr. Death King...” The Chemist nodded cautiously.

I nodded back. “I’ll tell you what I said to you yesterday. The time, the fact that we won’t be able to escape from this world forever if we don’t clear the stage... Please don’t think about any of that. I’ll do my best, so please show me your best too.”

“Don’t think about anything else...”

“Yes—I promise you, I’ll take care of everything else,” I told the future leader of the Alchemist Office. “Please trust me and continue your research.”