He set foot inside the hall.

Thud.

Behind him, the door swung shut of its own accord.

Seo Woojin paid it no mind and took another step forward.

Tak.

That was where it began.

Sound went first. The brush of cloth. A blade leaving its sheath.

‘Ah. Ah.’

And then he could not hear his own voice either.

It was like being submerged in water.

Sight went second. Pitch darkness came down and he could not see a hand in front of his face. The one mercy was that even in that blackness he could still make out the shape of his own body.

‘Do they truly mean to kill me?’

This was not merely a disordering of the qi-sense, as Woon Seorin had warned.

‘Haha. It seems I’ve fallen rather far out of favor.’

It was a formation of a kind he had never felt in his life — unfamiliar, and fear rose with the strangeness of it.

But Seo Woojin made himself set the fear aside.

No — to be honest about it, something else had his heart going a little faster. Much the same feeling as fighting the Crazed Fiend.

The joy of coming to know the unknown.

That unforgettable exhilaration was in him again.

‘Hoo.’

He breathed out and walked on.

And then he saw a light not far off. A very small flame.

The moment he took another step toward it—

Shhk—!

‘Kh!’

Seo Woojin staggered back a pace or two, and touched his left arm against the burning of it.

‘Blood…’

A sword wound.

He had felt nothing at all.

‘Someone’s here.’

Seo Woojin put the situation in order calmly.

‘They aren’t affected by the formation. How is that possible?’

He turned his head slightly to the left.

‘What if there’s a space the formation doesn’t reach? The Gate of Life, is that what it’s called?’

The moment he set his foot down, a blade came across.

But it did not cut cleanly. Which meant the man had moved hastily — that he had swung without allowing for reflexes.

‘If my assumption is right, the enemy is five feet away at the outside.’

He moved the instant the thought finished.

Shk—! Tak! Whip!

He stepped forward again and immediately twisted left.

His sword went across like lightning.

‘Clang!’

A violent crash of steel on steel must have broken out. The heavy recoil running up his wrist was proof enough.

Seo Woojin spun without stopping.

And cut again.

This time nothing caught.

Tak.

He came down where the man should have been, and there was no one.

‘Gone.’

Had he thought it through wrongly?

Seo Woojin gave a slight shake of his head.

‘One thing is certain, at least. There was an enemy here.’

The weight of turning that blade aside was still in his hand.

Which meant he had moved elsewhere.

‘But the assumption that this is the Gate of Life — was that wrong?’

He had expected that standing here would put him outside the formation’s reach.

Nothing had changed at all.

He meant to think it through slowly again. This time there was no room for it.

‘Kh!’

Pain across his back. Someone had struck him.

Caught defenseless, he was carried forward a step.

Whoooosh—!

A chill went down his spine and an alarm bell rang in his head.

Seo Woojin brought his sword up on instinct.

Wind Flow Eighteen Swords. Azure Wind Circling Shadow.

A blade drawing a circle made a shadow of the wind.

A heavy shock came through it, and a gap opened.

Seo Woojin threw himself backward.

Tak! Skiiid!

His body slid back several yards.

‘Haah, haah.’

He drew an imaginary line in the darkness.

‘Cross that line and they attack. From somewhere I can’t see.’

That last had been luck, perhaps. Had he ignored the alarm in his head, he would have been butchered.

‘A fine mess. I talked big and I can’t see how to break it.’

He had always thought the Woon Clan stood level with the Cheon and the Gok on their commercial holdings alone.

It seemed now that their strength was not only that.

‘Of course. If the Woon Clan had held nothing but trade, it would have been taken from them by force long ago.’

He kept the idle thinking up as he went on scanning around him.

Unfortunately his grandfather had never taught him what to do when trapped in a formation. He had only issued dire warnings against going near such places to begin with.

‘I can’t see, I can’t hear, and so I can’t feel. But they can see me.’

A blade he had thrown up in haste had turned their weapons aside easily. They had not even managed to stop him retreating inside his own safe line.

‘Which is evidence their martial prowess isn’t much.’

Did that not mean there was some way for him to move as freely as they did?

And what would it be?

[Woojin. Never be idle in your training. Today’s blood and sweat is what will save the you of the future.]

Of all things, his grandfather’s threadbare line came back to him now.

Seo Woojin gave a small laugh. What he had said at the time was still clear to him.

[Will there be a future me at all? The me of today might die training.]

And he had taken a knuckle to the head and two hours of lecturing for it.

Toward the end the old man had said something absurd. What was it again?

[If you have not been idle in your training, then in the face of danger your body will move on its own. What does that mean? It means that if you are dropped into a fog and have to block an enemy’s attack — your eyes will see nothing, but your body will block them by itself!]

He had thought the boasting truly magnificent at the time.

‘And now I can’t help believing it.’

In those last two movements, the words had been proven.

Coincidence, perhaps. But Seo Woojin believed his grandfather.

He drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and walked straight forward.

He did not know how far he went.

He moved on instinct alone.

He could not hear and he could not see. His qi-sense gave him nothing. He wiped thought away as well.

He only walked forward.

And then his sword moved, fast.

A heavy contact registered at his fingertips, and he forgot that too.

Perfect self-forgetting.

CRAAACK—!!

Boooom!

With a noise that drove into his ears, Seo Woojin opened his eyes.

The pitch-black curtain that had blocked his sight and confounded his qi-sense shattered like a great wall coming apart. The view behind the illusion came clear in front of him.

The first thing he saw was a small stone, broken in two.

Seo Woojin turned slowly. Black-clad men lay collapsed on the floor.

It might have been bewildering. Somehow he felt only calm.

He looked across at a staircase that had not been visible before.

“And how many more floors of this are there supposed to be?”

A hollow laugh came out of him.

What in the world did Clan Head Woon want to establish about him?

He had guessed at the Woon Clan’s intent well enough. They would want an Alliance Lord out in front to check the Cheon and the Gok and the rest of the hardliners.

But if he died here, that came to nothing.

So did they have another option?

“No. With a certain option they’d simply discard me.”

There would be no need to go to this trouble to test him.

“In short — he needs me, but if I don’t show more than he expects, he’d rather not have me at all?”

Put that way, the intent was clear.

He had refused the Woon Clan’s will from the very beginning. Clan Head Woon had not forgotten that beginning.

You won’t follow our will obligingly in any case, so show us more than we expect.

That, most likely, was what Clan Head Woon was after.

Seo Woojin grinned and pushed his hair back.

“An interesting fellow.”

He walked toward the stairs.

The man had better be prepared. If he was shown more than he had imagined, there would be a matching price to pay for it.

The second floor was unlike the first.

His senses were not taken from him, but more warriors were waiting than before, and their martial prowess looked considerable.

Off to one side, people knelt, bound.

One of the warriors leveled a blade at a bound man’s throat and made their meaning plain.

Drop your weapon if you want them to live.

Seo Woojin let out a small laugh. He had wondered what formation would be waiting, and they had prepared a piece of theatre instead.

He did not hesitate. He closed and attacked.

Their alarm was plain, but they moved with composure.

They were nowhere near enough to stop him.

It was, quite literally, a wolf loose among sheep.

After a very short time, no one was left standing.

Because Seo Woojin had put down the hostages as well.

“If you’re going to play at hostages, you might at least hide the killing intent.”

It had been the barest instant, but he had felt it clearly — the killing intent in the look the bound men sent him.

They had some cause to feel hard done by.

What he had been through on the first floor had, paradoxically, honed his senses to an edge — which was how he caught a killing intent that would ordinarily have gone unnoticed.

Seo Woojin broke the formation stone set at the end of the wall and climbed the stairs again.

This floor differed from the last as well.

There was no crowd of warriors past counting. Only one man, waiting in the middle of the room.

There was another difference. A pressure bore down on him, as though the pull of the earth-qi were working several times over.

The waiting man made a small sound of admiration and spoke.

“Unexpected. It doesn’t seem long since word came that you’d set foot in this hall.”

Seo Woojin ignored him and loosened himself off — rolling his ankles, turning his shoulders.

The man gave a small, scornful laugh at the sight.

“Tsk. You seem rattled, I take it. Well — set beside the rubbish downstairs, I’d feel rather like a mountain to you. So I’ll show you particular mercy. This one is the Undefeated Lone Traveler, Hwang Man, a name that rang through the dark path’s martial world! If you value your life, throw down your weapon at once and—”

He did not get to finish.

Seo Woojin had already broken into a sprint.

Hwang Man burst into anger and swung a staff as large as his own frame.

“Why, you—!!”

Vwoom—!!

The iron came down to shatter Seo Woojin’s skull, blue energy stirring along its length.

Staff-energy. A master of the pinnacle realm at the least.

So the arrogant speech had not been pure bluster.

CRAAASH!!

But the staff struck nothing except the innocent floor.

“Clan Head Woon must be short of men. Or else I looked that much like a joke to him.”

Seo Woojin’s voice came at Hwang Man’s ear.

Hwang Man turned in haste and tried to bring the staff around. The point of Seo Woojin’s sword was faster.

Thuck!

It went into his back. The edge was blunt, of course, so it did not break the skin.

That was enough. The storm the blade carried drove into him.

BOOOOM!

Hwang Man felt his senses scattering by degrees, to a roar only he could hear.

Thud—!

The iron staff he had swung so easily turned heavy, and in the end he had to let it go.

His true qi would not run smoothly. As though someone were deliberately cutting the road it traveled.

“Kuh—!!”

His meridians twisted, and the internal injury came.

Hwang Man brought up a mouthful of blood and followed him with appalled eyes.

Seo Woojin had already put him out of mind and was walking toward the formation stone.

“This… this can’t be…”

He found the whole thing absurd, and had no chance to resolve his confusion.

Thud.

He pitched forward and lost consciousness.

Seo Woojin left him there and went straight up.

His step, which had not faltered once until now, checked for the first time.

“S-spare me…! P-please!!”

A man was bound to a pillar.

He was weeping and crying out, and a faint light leaked from around his abdomen.

Above his head was fixed a placard: Stone Hidden in the Belly.

Seo Woojin’s gaze went to the end of the wall. Unlike the floors before, there was no formation stone to be seen.

Read plainly, the characters meant the stone was inside the man.

“Right. The Woon Clan is a house of the dark path too, in the end.”

What in the world did they take a human life to be?

There was malice in it.

Cut the belly open and take the stone out.

Or else.

Die.

Whoooosh! Clang!

A hidden weapon came from the wall.

And that was the start of it. Hidden weapons shot at Seo Woojin from every direction.

Seo Woojin worked his blade and dodged. They kept coming after him, which meant they were tracking his movement.

‘I can’t get near the man. Unless I break the formation stone, I’m to go on dodging these.’

The intent, most likely, was to have him weigh that man’s life against his own.

The Seo Woojin of the past would have been unable to move either way.

The Seo Woojin of now already had an answer.

‘I use the Lingering Heart Sword Art. But I’ll have to run it far more delicately.’

The man was, at a glance, an ordinary person whose qi meridians had never been opened. Let the true qi run rough by so much as a hair and his organs would not survive it.

Seo Woojin went on evading the hidden weapons while moving the internal energy in his dantian with care. He drew out a very fine thread of true qi and set it turning.

It was a far weaker rotation than usual, and enough to break the stone inside him.

‘Carefully.’

He struck aside a weapon that had come to his face.

Claang—!

Whoosh!

And closed.

The hidden weapons followed, aimed at his back.

“Aaaaagh—!!”

The man screamed in terror.

Reaching him, Seo Woojin spun on the spot.

Thuck!

He struck the man’s abdomen first.

Kagagagang!

Then turned aside the weapons following behind.

“Guhk—!”

The man let out a groan of pain.

And the endless stream of hidden weapons stopped.

Seo Woojin let out a faint sigh and untied the rope binding the man to the pillar.

“Listen carefully. The formation stone in your belly will have been reduced to powder. So there’s no fear of fragments damaging your organs. Even so, I’d urge you to see a physician to be sure.”

Having said only what he meant to say, Seo Woojin struck the man’s sleep acupoint, and he slumped unconscious.

With a small sigh, Seo Woojin turned his head.

As before, a staircase that had not been visible appeared. He went up without hesitating.

On the fifth floor stood a long table, and at the end of it sat a middle-aged man of amiable appearance.

He wore a gentle smile as he greeted Seo Woojin.

“Well come. I am the Clan Head of the Black Dragon Woon Clan. I am Woon Taeryun.”

The last floor had Woon Taeryun waiting on it.

(End of Chapter 45)