Episode 175. I Am the Cult Leader’s Greatest Enemy.

Suddenly, I remembered I had forgotten that when inner force was added to Cheonok, drowsiness often came pouring in. The White-Faced Young Master was unconscious anyway, so I closed my eyes for a moment while sitting cross-legged.

It was somewhat absurd even to me that sleepiness was washing over me after I had beaten him to my heart’s content, harassed him, and raised such a commotion, but when one is sleepy, one must sleep. There was no helping it. This phenomenon was precisely why I did not use the Cheonok Star-Absorbing Great Art often.

With my head drooping heavily to the left, I dreamed on the border between sleep and waking. The contents of the dream were that I was sleeping soundly in a very comfortable place.

A sorrowful dream of dreaming that I was sleeping soundly, perhaps.

This must be why Zhuangzi (莊子) said it was difficult to know whether he had dreamed of being a butterfly, or whether a butterfly had dreamed of being Zhuangzi.

Feeling that I might fall into a deep sleep at this rate, I forced my head back and looked up at the sky through half-lidded eyes.

“…….”

After watching the indifferent sky and clouds for a while, my eyes grew stiff and gritty, as if they were full of dust.

I watched the sky while muttering as though reciting scripture.

“I Jaha, who cannot sleep when he should, becomes the Mad Demon. I Jaha, who forgets sleep, becomes the Mad Demon. I Jaha, who can sleep in peace, is not the Mad Demon.”

Letting out a long, drawn-out yawn, I kept my mind on guard.

Killing was not always the answer.

I soothed myself by thinking that, in the larger picture, I needed to gather information if I wanted to beat even more of the demonic path to death.

At some point, I sensed that the breathing of the White-Faced Young Master, who still had not opened his eyes, had changed ever so slightly, and I spoke to him.

“You’ve been caught, so open your eyes.”

As soon as I finished speaking, the White-Faced Young Master quietly opened his eyes. This fellow also let out a long sigh.

For a moment, the man robbed of his inner force and the man robbed of his sleep glared at each other.

The White-Faced Young Master spoke in a calm tone.

“Hao Sect Leader.”

“What?”

“Does losing my inner force and being defeated in a single fight make me weak? I truly do not know what it feels like to be weak, so stop asking me. I don’t know. I said I don’t know. Can you not ask me something else?”

When I thought about it carefully, I felt he did have a point.

“Are you saying you don’t know the feelings of the weak at all?”

“I don’t. I was taught that defeat means death. Must I even understand the feelings of the weak?”

“Did this bastard take drugs? Or did you attain the Dao while you were unconscious? Why have you become so composed?”

I pried open the White-Faced Young Master’s eyes with my fingers to examine his gaze, then seized his jaw and checked his tongue.

I could find no trace that he had taken any medicine.

I said to the White-Faced Young Master,

“Good. Druggie, I won’t kill you right now. Since you say you don’t know how it feels to become weak, I have no choice but to teach you. What’s so special about being weak? If you’re cold and hungry, you’re weak. If you get beaten to death like that, you become a pitiful weakling.”

I grabbed the White-Faced Young Master by the collar, lifted him up to his feet, then smacked him across the head.

“First, walk.”

The White-Faced Young Master staggered forward, then cursed at me.

“Do you think the Hao Sect will remain unharmed from now on?”

“It’s already not unharmed, so what kind of idiotic threat is that? Do I look unharmed to you?”

“…….”

“In any case, your martial arts have become pathetic, so if you answer my questions, I can let you live.”

The White-Faced Young Master replied in a powerless tone.

“What are you curious about?”

“First, how to resolve the withdrawal symptoms from the antidote.”

The White-Faced Young Master spoke as he walked.

“How could there be such a thing? You simply have to stop taking it. Thirty days will be like hell, but the next twenty days will be the pain of your whole body being torn apart by insects, the ten or so days after that will be the pain of your whole body itching, and after three or four days of suffering a high fever, you’ll slowly return to normal. Of course, for those who took a great deal, the hellish suffering will continue forever. That is a poison with no antidote.”

I walked side by side with the White-Faced Young Master and asked,

“Why did you make something like that in the first place?”

“We made it to survive as well.”

“You intended to survive by plunging others into suffering.”

The White-Faced Young Master spoke in a flat tone.

“Sect Leader… I have lived my whole life in fear of our family head. And our family head fears the Cult Leader. People like us are those dragged onto the battlefield, unable to make any choice in the conflict between those two. I’m a soldier who was dragged onto this battlefield the moment I was born. This service only ends when I die, so what do you expect me to do?”

“Even with these petty schemes, you should have no chance of winning against the Cult Leader. Why is your family head doing this?”

The White-Faced Young Master nodded.

“He foresaw that the Cult Leader would one day walk a path beyond humanity. He said we had to prepare if we were to protect the family. When I asked what preparation was needed against an in-law, he said there was no helping it because the Cult Leader was touching forbidden demonic arts. This is not a matter of victory or defeat. It has become a matter of survival.”

I expected the forbidden demonic art to be Cheonok, but I asked just in case.

“What is this forbidden demonic art?”

“I don’t know exactly. I heard there was fierce opposition because it used people of the jianghu as materials. I heard that if the numbers were insufficient, he might brand families with relatively weak loyalty, or families he disliked, as apostates and annihilate them. That could be our family as well.”

The Cult Leader was the sort of man who would do that and more, so I felt no particular stir of emotion.

I was about to climb the mountain, but I changed my mind, entered an inn on a quiet road, and took a seat.

The pale-faced White-Faced Young Master sat across from me and leaned his head against the wall.

I waved away the waiter who came to take our order, then looked at the White-Faced Young Master.

The White-Faced Young Master looked outside the inn and said,

“Can you defeat the Cult Leader?”

“Even if I can’t defeat him right now, I am steadily stopping the Cult Leader from becoming stronger than he already is.”

“How?”

“By eliminating fellows like you.”

“That will take quite a long time. There can’t be only one or two fellows like me.”

“And in the meantime, I skip meals, cut down on sleep, and train.”

“That, too, will take quite a long time. Just how many ages do you think that will take?”

“If I can’t do it, then I hope my disciples will do it one day.”

“You’re young, yet you already have disciples?”

“Not yet.”

“Why go so far to kill the Cult Leader? Is it revenge?”

“No.”

“Then why in the world are you doing this?”

I stretched and said,

“From the look of things, this is something only I can do. I saw the Cult Leader once before. He treated me like an insect. It was an absolutely thrilling feeling. This bastard thinks I’m an insect. I am an insect. Fine, let’s see what happens. That sort of feeling.”

The White-Faced Young Master murmured,

“So you were a hero of your age. Do you know that the Cult Leader killed all of his half-siblings?”

“Not in detail.”

“Full brothers, half brothers, hidden brothers…… eight, was it? Or nine. Those who were part of the succession structure from the start were trying to kill one another anyway, so they had less cause to feel wronged. But in the end, he even found every last one who had no interest in the succession struggle and hanged them. Who do you think a man like that would seat in the position of Vice Cult Leader?”

“The one who survived.”

“Exactly. Not his child. The one who survived. If you were our Third Young Master, what would you have done? Your brothers try to kill you at every turn, and the man called your father has no trace of humanity. If you tried to put everything down and escape, that would be the most foolish thing of all. You’d be dragged back to the Cult Leader and killed. Even if you tried to compete with skill, the Eldest Young Master and the Second Young Master’s factions were stronger from the beginning. Their martial arts go without saying. The heads of the young masters’ maternal families each occupy positions in the cult as well. And the Cult Leader is watching all of this. What would you do?”

I sank into thought for a moment.

The White-Faced Young Master, who had his head against the wall, continued speaking.

“I don’t really understand how the weak feel. But what I’ve always wondered is this: what kind of person could possibly not become a demon in an environment like that? I’ve always been curious about it. You’re a clever man. Try giving me an answer.

“……”

“You don’t have any brilliant solution either, do you? Still, I’d rather someone like you had been my superior, the Third Young Master. You seem like you might find some way. I mean, look at what happened to me. To think you deceived me from start to finish with a surprise attack in mind.”

The head of the White-Faced Young Master, which had been leaning against the wall, slowly drooped downward.

I smacked the head of the White-Faced Young Master, who was hanging it low.

“Don’t pretend to be dead. What kind of idiotic crap is that?”

The White-Faced Young Master lifted his head and glared at me.

“Can’t you just be fooled for once? You turned me into a cripple. What more do you want? You want me to tell you the location of my clan so you can kill them all? I can’t do that. I can tell you other things, but not that.”

“A cripple is a cripple, but I still left you a little internal energy. That means you can recover through circulating qi and regulating your breath. And wait a moment. I need to find an answer.”

“As if there is one.”

Only then did I call the waiter and order wine and a few dishes.

With my arms crossed, I tried to find an answer to the question the White-Faced Young Master had thrown at me. Even I wondered why I was trying so hard to find one.

Perhaps if I were to keep facing the demonic path…….

It was because the thought crossed my mind that I should somehow know the answer.

I had no particular basis for it.

‘If I were the Third Young Master, what would I have done?’

If I had killed my brothers in order to live, I would have become the same demonic path as them. It meant that those bastards and I were humans of no real difference.

“Strangely, I can’t come up with an answer.”

The White-Faced Young Master grinned.

“Right? There’s no answer, is there?”

“It’s a little different from what you’re thinking.”

“What’s different?”

“I don’t think I could possibly have killed my brothers.”

The White-Faced Young Master laughed with a deflating sound.

“What a stupid thing to say. Then you’d be the one to die.”

“Listen, having brothers was a little dream of mine when I was young. I can’t kill my own dream, can I? I could beat them up, though.”

“If there had been a way, the clever Cult Leader wouldn’t have killed his brothers. Those Orthodox Path bastards should know how happy they are. Hell doesn’t start from the very beginning for them.”

“Who exactly is this Orthodox Path you’re lumping together?”

“Aren’t they bastards who build up wealth with martial arts and live well?”

“You insane son of a bitch.”

I raised my hand, then held back because if I hit him again, he looked like he might die. The waiter brought the wine and food, so I drank the wine first.

Once the wine went in, I woke up a bit and my head cleared.

“I’ve realized it.”

The White-Faced Young Master, in the middle of pouring himself a cup of wine with a trembling hand, looked at me.

“What?”

“If I had been the Third Young Master…… what I would have done.”

After drinking his wine, the White-Faced Young Master waited for my words.

I spoke while sinking into the illusion that I had become the Third Young Master of the Demon Cult.

“First, I’d train my lightness skill like my life depended on it, then run away.”

The White-Faced Young Master looked at me as if I were pathetic.

“Just run away? Pursuers would follow.”

“They wouldn’t catch me.”

“Why not?”

I said with a serious expression.

“Because I’d run to the ends of the world.”

“And what would you gain from that?”

“What’s there to gain? I’d just be running away. So my brothers couldn’t kill me. So I wouldn’t kill my brothers. I’d run. To the ends of the world. Thinking of it as a journey. Go to the sea off Zhejiang, board a ship, and cross the great ocean. Or pass through Tibet and head to the Western Regions. Or go north and reach an island in the North Sea.”

I had brought up the sea off Zhejiang without thinking, and the Mad Monk came to mind. It seemed he had simply popped into my head without any particular causal connection.

The White-Faced Young Master looked at me.

“And then?”

I answered with both hands spread out to either side.

“That’s the end.”

“……”

“There’s only one condition under which I could return. When I’d obtained overwhelming martial strength enough to beat up everyone who caused this problem. Then I’d come back. Whether it took ten years or twenty, it wouldn’t matter.”

“And what about those left behind in the meantime?”

“What good is worrying about that? It’d be better to train instead.”

“When you return?”

“I’d beat them all up.”

The White-Faced Young Master cackled.

“What a truly idiotic answer.”

I looked at the White-Faced Young Master with a serious expression.

“……You can either cough up the location of your clan or cough up the place that makes that antidote. If you don’t know either, die right here.”

“If I do?”

“I’ll send you on a journey.”

“To the afterlife?”

“No, to the ends of the world. In any case, your ruined dantian and internal energy will only recover if you spend more than ten years circulating qi and regulating your breath. Come back then and check this place. Either they’ll all have been killed by the Cult Leader, or the Cult Leader will have died by my hand.”

The White-Faced Young Master laughed.

I watched him laugh, then said,

“And strategically speaking, if you want to increase the chances of your clan surviving, you should hand over as much information to me as possible. For example, tell me about the Eldest Young Master and the Second Young Master too. Their forces, maternal clans, areas where they appear, and so on. If I beat those two to death, the chances of your clan surviving intact will increase.”

The White-Faced Young Master stared at me with a startled expression.

I pointed at the White-Faced Young Master with my finger and said,

“Use me. I am the Cult Leader’s greatest archenemy.”

“The Cult Leader has many enemies. I cannot agree that you are the greatest among them.”

I drank a cup of wine and replied.

“It’s me. The man who created the Hao Gate.”

“Are you drunk?”

“You are the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. I am Haomun. This is a clash between a bastard trying to become a Demon God and a bastard who rolled around at the very bottom. Up there, high above, is your Cult Leader, and down at the lowest point is me. Bastards who want to become gods are best beaten to death by a former tavern boy.”

A passing tavern boy flinched in fright, then hurriedly fled into the kitchen.

Suddenly, the White-Faced Young Master glared at me, his eyes wide.

“You were a tavern boy?”

I answered by slapping the White-Faced Young Master across the cheek.

“Why? Does that piss you off?”

While the White-Faced Young Master clutched his cheek, I kindly explained.

“……That is how it goes. Imagine how pissed the Cult Leader would be if I slapped him across the face. Just thinking about it……ooh.”

I rubbed my forearm.

“Goosebumps.”