Chapter 23 : Tang-oh

Chapter 23: Tang-oh

“What?”

It had been an extremely short utterance, yet with that single word, everyone present except Dong Bong-su was overwhelmed. Dong Bong-su felt his heart tingle sharply for a moment at the cold words of the middle-aged man in brown robes, but he did not shrink back. It was simply that he had learned for the first time what it felt like when internal energy was carried in a voice.

He was not someone who felt fear toward others or instinctively recoiled. He merely pretended to do so.

The middle-aged man in brown robes turned his head and looked over the people. Dong Bong-su hid his gaze behind Yeoro. It was an instinctive action. In this world, he was still an underdeveloped predator. There was absolutely nothing to be gained by catching the eye of another predator with overwhelming power. Especially when one needed to probe the opponent, that was even more the case.

The middle-aged man in brown robes only gave Yeoro a brief glance before, as if uninterested, turning his gaze back to Gi Dae-hyo.

Dong Bong-su also refocused his attention on Gi Dae-hyo. Gi Dae-hyo was the hands and feet of the Danri Family, as well as its eyes. Dong Bong-su had hoped that he would explain who the man in brown robes was. However, as if he too did not know the man’s identity, he swallowed hard and stated his rank and name.

“I am Gi Dae-hyo, the leader of the Black Five Division of the Danri Family. And the person you are oppressing right now is a young master of the Danri Family. If you do not withdraw immediately, I will not let this pass quietly.”

Gi Dae-hyo was issuing a threat, but it was clearly not a confident voice. He had already been pushed back in terms of momentum.

Dong Bong-su realized that Gi Dae-hyo knew absolutely nothing about the man in brown robes. From that alone, several things could be inferred. The leader of the Black Five Division had encountered someone unknown in Bongyang.

In other words, that man was not a martial artist of Bongyang. No, beyond that, he was likely not even a martial artist active in Anhui Province. Gi Dae-hyo and the Black Five Division possessed information-gathering capabilities so outstanding that there was hardly a corner of the Anhui martial world they did not know. If he did not know the man, it was clear that he was not from this area.

‘An outsider. And an immeasurable master.’

Dong Bong-su had to make a decision. A master with a level difference of at least ten was revealing hostility toward them. Although he could not know for certain, by his judgment, the man in brown robes was even more skilled than Dan Ri Cheon-u. With the people present here, there was absolutely no way they could handle him.

Should he flee? Or should he continue to observe the situation?

His deliberation did not last long.

Dong Bong-su was not someone born with killing intent, but he possessed an exceptional talent for reading it. That was because the intensity of killing intent was extremely useful in determining the rank of a predator.

Those without killing intent, like himself, stood at the apex.

First, once killing intent was detected, it was possible to measure the degree of that savagery and predatory nature according to its intensity.

For now, that man was not emitting killing intent. He was not someone who originally lacked killing intent; it was simply the feeling of a lion looking at insects. It was certain that he had no intention of eliminating Dong Bong-su or the Black Five Division.

Dong Bong-su chose the latter.

As his eyes shone sharply, the man in brown robes looked at Gi Dae-hyo and quietly opened his mouth.

“The Danri Family? What is that? Is it something you eat?”

To Gi Dae-hyo, the words were utterly contemptuous, but to Dong Bong-su, they were a clue to the man’s strength. Dong Bong-su realized that the man in brown robes was someone who did not even consider the Danri Family worth his attention.

Yet he continued to stand his ground. There was still no killing intent to be felt from the opponent.

Instead, Gi Dae-hyo’s face was turning red and blue by turns.

It must have been hard to endure. The Danri Family was, in its own way, a family with a well-known name in Anhui, and to be treated like that was no small insult. Still, Gi Dae-hyo was indeed a composed individual. Or perhaps he had been completely overwhelmed by the aura of the middle-aged man in brown robes.

Gi Dae-hyo clenched his teeth and spoke to the man in brown robes.

“What you just said is an insult to the Danri Family. May I take it that way?”

For Gi Dae-hyo, this was the best response he could muster. Ideally, he would have liked to swing his sword and attack immediately, but instinctively, he knew that he must not do that. Thus, the few words he had just spoken were the best course of action available to him.

Regardless, the man in brown robes responded with an even colder expression than before.

“Well? I don’t know whether the Danri Family is something you eat, something you excrete, or something you step on.”

“Ghk....”

As he said the final words, “something you step on,” the middle-aged man in brown robes put strength into his foot. Kang Hae’s face instantly turned pale, and his eyes began to roll back. His airway had been completely blocked. If just a little more force were applied in that state, he would meet his end on the spot.

Accordingly, Gi Dae-hyo’s face also turned deathly white. If Kang Hae died, then his own life was as good as forfeit as well. Now, there was no other choice left for him. He immediately raised his hand, pointed at the middle-aged man in brown robes, and shouted loudly.

“All members of the Black Five Division, attack him and save the young master!”

On the other hand, Dong Bong-su continued to simply observe the man in brown robes. Even now, he could not feel the slightest trace of killing intent from him. It was merely that Gi Dae-hyo could not sense what Dong Bong-su was sensing.

Dong Bong-su calmly watched the clash between the man in brown robes and the Black Five Division. Now that his safety was assured, all he had to do was witness the man’s high-level martial arts.

To the man in brown robes, the Black Five Division was nothing more than playthings. No one killed their playthings. They might break them by accident, but that was all.

Pababak-!

Gi Dae-hyo, Gi Man-ji, and the entirety of the Black Five Division charged toward the middle-aged man in brown robes.

The middle-aged man in brown robes remained relaxed even as he watched that scene. He still did not lift the foot pressed against Danri Kang Hae’s neck, and raised only one hand to shoulder height.

To Dong Bong-su’s sharp eyes, hundreds of fine needles could be seen wedged between his fingers.

‘Hidden weapon technique?’

At the very moment he thought that, the middle-aged man in brown robes lightly flicked his hand toward Gi Dae-hyo and the members of the Black Five Division.

Pyubyubyubyeok-.

It was not fast. The needles that left the man’s hand merely gathered into butterfly-like clusters, flying toward the Black Five Division’s elites while drawing bizarre arcs, as if a swarm of bees were zigzagging through the air. Yet none of the Black Five Division members managed to avoid those not-fast needles. No, they could not avoid them.

To Dong Bong-su, it looked like a guided missile one would only see on modern Earth.

“Kkh!”

“Ugh!”

“Ahk!”

Along with several kinds of short screams, Gi Dae-hyo and all the members of the Black Five Division collapsed to the ground simultaneously. It had been a single move. With one strike, the Black Five Division, the pride of the Danri Family, had been subdued.

“Th-this! Soul-Chasing Flying Butterflies!? Th-then you are!”

Gi Dae-hyo, his body paralyzed, barely lifted only his head to look at the man in brown robes, wearing a shocked expression. He had never seen this technique before, but it was an assassination art far too famous in the Jianghu.

A martial art named for the way it moved like a butterfly chasing a soul.

Soul-Chasing Flying Butterflies was the secret art of the Sichuan Tang Family, one of the Five Great Families of the Central Plains. And within the Tang Clan, there was one master said to have reached a godlike realm with this martial art.

Gi Dae-hyo looked once more at the man in brown robes’ face.

Ah, why had he only recognized it now? The appearance of the Tang Clan’s supreme master that Gi Dae-hyo remembered and the appearance of this middle-aged man in brown robes were perfectly identical.

The middle-aged man in brown robes sneered upon hearing Gi Dae-hyo’s cry of realization. Then, looking down at Gi Dae-hyo, he let out a cold voice.

“For a backwater hireling, your eyes aren’t completely rotten. This old man is Tang-oh.”

Tang-oh.

A master who belonged to the Ten Greats among the twenty strongest in the martial world, the Two Gods, Three Monsters, Five High Masters, and Ten Greats. The supreme master of the Sichuan Tang Family, one of the Five Great Families of the Central Plains. An absolute master so peerless that it was difficult to find anyone who could match him within Sichuan Province.

There were many epithets used to describe him, but in the end, nothing expressed him better than his sobriquet.

Soul-Chasing Poison Hand.

[Those who offend Tang-oh’s temper shall not escape his poison hand, even after death, when they have become wandering souls!]

Originally, the Tang Clan had been a family famous for hidden weapons and poison arts, a sect that stood between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy. However, when the Murim Alliance was first formed, it was through the persuasion of Great Master Hyein, who had been the abbot of Shaolin at the time, that they came to establish themselves as one pillar of the Murim Alliance. Although there had been several rises and falls since then, they had never once fallen out of the position of the Five Great Families of the Central Plains, remaining a formidable power throughout.

The Sichuan Tang Family had produced many masters famed for their venomous hearts, as much as for being the origin of that martial art, but among them, Tang-oh was a truly unrivaled existence. Aside from Myriad Flower Rain, which had now almost become a practical, real-battle technique, Soul-Chasing Flying Butterflies was the most difficult hidden-weapon art to master and the hardest in which to accumulate refinement and aftermath. Having cultivated it to the point of near extremity, Tang-oh was without doubt a master who had carved a decisive mark into the history of the Tang Family.

In fact, he had revised and corrected several weaknesses that existed in the original Soul-Chasing Flying Butterflies, developing it into its current form, and with it he had driven back and defeated countless masters of the Unorthodox Faction.

Moreover, Tang-oh possessed an innate genius in poison arts as well, having developed innumerable poisons that he had yet to even name. If he had harbored truly lethal intent just moments ago, he would have deployed nameless poison together with the techniques of Soul-Chasing Flying Butterflies. Had that been the case, it was obvious that Gi Dae-hyo would not even have been able to wear such a shocked expression now.

Tang-oh’s prestige was so renowned that even Dong Bong-su had heard his name once or twice.

‘One of the twenty great masters of the martial world.’

Dong Bong-su looked at Gi Dae-hyo, who was paralyzed and holding his head rigidly upright. Gi Dae-hyo was staring at Tang-oh, his face having turned as pale as if his soul had already left his body. It seemed as though he had something he wanted to say, his lips twitching faintly, but having been shocked to the point that his spirit had nearly fled, where would he find the composure to speak?

An apology? He did not look like he had the mental strength to do anything of the sort.

Just from Gi Dae-hyo’s reaction alone, one could grasp the weight carried by the name of the Sichuan Tang Family and the Twenty Great Masters. And by that same measure, it was fair to say that the trouble Danri Kang Hae had caused today outweighed all the mishaps he had committed throughout his entire life combined.

Dong Bong-su did not know exactly what mistake had been made, but if someone of Tang-oh’s stature had been offended, then depending on the nature of it, even a family like the Danri Family could easily have its gates sealed...

...yet Dong Bong-su remained at ease.

Tang-oh was still standing there with a lofty bearing, glaring coldly, but he had not killed anyone yet. And if he had intended to kill, everyone would have died earlier to Soul-Chasing Flying Butterflies.

Dong Bong-su merely recalled the techniques of Soul-Chasing Flying Butterflies that Tang-oh had just employed, and quietly watched to see how this situation would unfold.

At that moment.

“Grandfather.”

From outside Haengho Inn, a slender woman stepped out, her face covered with a brown cotton veil.