Chapter 9 : First Experience

Chapter 9: First Experience

Dong Bong-su went through the pierced hole and stepped forward with one foot. Now, he was standing not in Machil’s room, but in the room next to it. With this, he had completely removed himself from the list of suspects. With just a single step.

In any case, the incident was already heading toward a conclusion as the suicide of Machil and Choseon, but even if someone suspected that they had been murdered, there would be no way to find the culprit.

Soon.

Thud-.

That room would become a sealed chamber.

With a light sound, a wooden pillar reappeared in the empty hole. This technique was, in fact, not that simple. Pulling the pillar out had posed no particular problem, since there was no glue-like bonding between the pillars, but putting it back in required quite sophisticated ‘inventory control’.

When taking it out of the inventory, it had to be retrieved in a single motion, aligned perfectly with all the joints. For this, Dong Bong-su had honed his precise use of the inventory over the past few months. Of that, he could be certain. That this inventory would be of infinite help to him in the future.

This incident was nothing more than that ‘first experience’.

Now, there was no way for anyone to know exactly how Machil and Choseon had died. Whether it was a sealed-room suicide or a sealed-room murder did not matter either way.

There were only the dead; there was no killer. Whether the murderer was oneself or another, that was.

Dong Bong-su went to the center of the room and sat down.

He had just confirmed yet another law of the new Murim Online.

People were experience points. It was not yet perfect, but the fact that they were experience points could not be denied.

If experience points accumulated, one could level up. If one leveled up, one became stronger. If one became stronger, hunting would become easier. If hunting became easier, one could accumulate experience points even faster.

If experience points accumulated....

An infinite ‘virtuous cycle’ occurred. Of course, to someone else, it would become an infinite ‘vicious cycle’.

With this, Dong Bong-su was given a new motive for murder.

Creak.

Soon, the door opened, and a woman with a voluptuous figure, the courtesan, entered the room carrying a lavishly set table. This was something Dong Bong-su had ordered to buy time to deal with Machil.

Warm steam rose gently from the dishes.

That sight was as if.

It were celebrating the adaptation of a murderer.

● ● ●

And so the festival began.

“Aaah!”

Dong Bong-su’s waist moved rapidly. As if in sync with that movement, the courtesan’s buttocks rippled like waves as sticky moans heated the room.

Dong Bong-su’s sex techniques—called *bedchamber arts* in the local parlance—were truly seamless beyond reproach. At least when it came to matters of sex, this place, Murim, had no chance of keeping up with modern Earth. And Dong Bong-su was an expert in every skill ‘required’ for his hobby.

Of course, she did not realise it, but Aeng-aeng was lucky today. She had sidestepped a fate of death, and while still alive, she was touring paradise—what greater fortune could there possibly be?

Dong Bong-su’s waist rotated strangely, storm-like as it battered Aeng-aeng’s erogenous zones.

“Hhngh!”

Aeng-aeng convulsed as she felt a climax she would never experience again in her life.

However, if Aeng-aeng had turned her head at that moment and looked into Dong Bong-su’s eyes, the heat climbing her body would have cooled in an instant.

Dong Bong-su’s eyes were calm. Like the surface of the River of Three Crossings, said to be crossed by the dead. They were low, tranquil, and obscene.

As if even the heavens were startled by that eerie sight, thunder suddenly struck.

Kwagwagwang!

Rain poured down immediately afterward.

Today was the first day since Dong Bong-su had come here that he committed murder and had sex.

Even the heavens were weeping in fear of that ‘terrible adaptation’.

● ● ●

New Murim Online Rule No. 2: Dong Bong-su could place into his inventory any object that was in direct contact with any part of his body. (However, it had to be smaller than the inventory itself and could not be a living being.)

New Murim Online Rule No. 3: Insects and animals (this was not yet certain. Further experiments were needed on animals other than rats) did not grant experience points, and killing humans increased experience points. (Differences according to strength and weakness required confirmation.)

● ● ●

Anhui Province.

In the north the Huai River flowed, and through the central region, the Yangtze River flowed eastward, forming a vast agricultural plain. Along the riverbanks of these two waterways, wetlands surrounded by swamps and ponds were widely distributed, boasting the fertile land. Their symbols were the pride of the Central Plains: the North China Plain and Lake Chaohu.

Since ancient times, due to the abundance of fertile land, great rivers, and the interaction of lakes, commerce and trade have flourished in this region. Geographically, it was advantageous for business as well, bordering Jiangsu Province and Zhejiang Province to the east, Shandong Province to the north, and Hubei Province and Henan Province to the west.

Naturally, goods from all over the country gathered here, and money flowed in.

Just as flies, the smell of money was strong, thieves and scoundrels from heterodox sects were bound to swarm.

And to drive them off and uphold the code of the Martial World, many sects also arose in Anhui Province.

Among them, the most representative sect was the Namgung Family, one of the Five Great Families of the Central Plains, located in Hefei. Even among the Five Great Families of the Central Plains, the Namgung Family stood head and shoulders above the rest. Since the day they opened their gates, Anhui Province had not been ravaged even once by factions of the unorthodox sects or the demonic path.

Imperial King Sword Form, Vault of the Firmament Unhindered Sword Art, Great Swallow Sword Art, Flash Lightning Thirteen Sword Thunders, Heavenly Wind Sword Art, Heavenly Thunder Imperial King Divine Art, Vault of the Firmament Great Swallow Divine Art, Heavenly Thunder Energy, Heavenly Thunder Three Palms, Heavenly Wind Palm Force, Great Vault of the Firmament Unhindered Sword Formation....

Even merely listing their names was enough to make members of heretical factions tremble. Armed with such martial arts, the Namgung Family alone towered as the greatest sect in Anhui—Anhui’s number one great faction.

The might of the Namgung Family was so overwhelming that other sects in Anhui Province were insignificant, like fireflies before the moon. Still, there were sects in every county and city.

Among those many sects was the Danri Family. Though it could not be compared to the Namgung Family, within Bongyang it was the foremost family. So much so that a saying had arisen in Bongyang: even in death, those bearing the surname Danri rode in four-horse carriages.

Within the Danri Family, there was the Black Five Division as an intelligence and law-enforcement organization, and the Cross Heavenly Sword Division as the family’s specialized armed force. All of them had mastered the family’s secret martial arts, the Flying Heaven Sword Art and the Single Heaven Flying Sword Technique, and their reputation within Anhui Province was quite formidable.

In particular, the Black Five Division’s intelligence-gathering ability was unrivaled. To what extent? When it came to information, even the beggars of the Beggars’ Sect, who would resent being called second-best, had to concede a step to the Danri Family’s Black Five Division—at least within Bongyang City.

However, that very Black Five Division was currently racking its brains over something that had happened recently.

● ● ●

The Suicide Plague.

It was a term spreading among the people, referring to how suicides were running rampant in Bongyang as if they were an epidemic.

Over the past month alone, as many as two hundred people had committed suicide.

How utterly abnormal was that?

There had been suicides before, of course, but never this many. At most, one or two a month.

Even if two hundred murder cases occurred in a single month, it would be enough to throw everything into chaos. Yet here, there had been two hundred suicide cases—something far from ordinary for a mid-sized city like Bongyang.

Naturally, the city’s residents were shaken.

Rumors spread that ghosts were secretly killing people and disguising it as suicide; that horsehair worms were not only driving insects but even humans to suicide; that a genuine suicide plague had broken out.

Various other hypotheses circulated as well.

No matter which of the rampant rumors was true, the sense of dread was the same.

Among them, there was one hypothesis that the authorities took particular note of.

It was the theory that an unorthodox sect had entered Bongyang.

That a terrifying demonic faction, unknown to the Murim world, had recently infiltrated Bongyang and was perpetrating these acts.

The reason this claim gained persuasiveness was simple.

Murim people, both in the past and now, were beings who built walls between themselves and ordinary people—and the authorities. Though they were citizens of the state, from another perspective, they were also not quite citizens. In the eyes of ordinary people, they were people of the Outer World.

People who flew through the sky, used shrinking-the-earth techniques, and cleaved mountains and rivers. If such things were possible, how could it be impossible for them to secretly kill people without anyone knowing? Moreover, among them, those of the unorthodox path sometimes killed people to drain their livers and brains, or absorb vital essence to build internal energy. There were no such corpses among those discovered, but who was to say it was not some new kind of internal-energy cultivation through livestock?

However.

The Bongyang City inspector was not a Murim person. If this hypothesis was correct, there was no way for him to ferret them out, nor any way to catch them.

Of course, the authorities also had masters. But most of them belonged to the imperial court, and as a rule, they did not come down to assist with matters in such a small city.

In the end, the inspector reached the point of requesting help from a Murim sect. The counterpart was, naturally, the Danri Family.

The head of the Danri Family, Dan Ri Cheon-u, maintained a symbiotic relationship with the authorities and readily accepted the request. Such incidents did not happen often, but they had occurred from time to time.

And each time, the Black Five Division stepped forward and resolved things splendidly.

But....

● ● ●

Gi Dae-hyo, the head of the Black Five Division, was perplexed. Acting under Dan Ri Cheon-u’s orders, he had no choice but to begin an investigation into the ‘Suicide Plague’, yet he could not grasp its true nature at all.

‘There’s definitely something strange somewhere....’

But that was all. There was only evidence of suicide—nothing that could be considered circumstances of murder—in well over a hundred cases.

The reason he found these cases suspicious was that while the scenes clearly proclaimed suicide, it also seemed difficult to definitively conclude that they were suicides.

A significant number of the suicides were people who had reasons to kill themselves. Life was hard, they had been abandoned by a lover, or they could no longer endure parental abuse. Suicides like these were understandable.

But the problem was that there were many who were not like that. People who had lived their entire lives satisfied with their lot and happily—killing themselves overnight?

Gi Dae-hyo found it hard to understand.

Did suicide absolutely need a reason? If one asked that, it also seemed possible that it did not....

‘But, it doesn’t sit right.’

He was someone who had experienced battles on land, water, sea, and even dogfights in Murim.

His sense of smell was strongly insisting that these cases reeked of something foul.

“Who was the very first person to die again?”

Gi Dae-hyo decided to trace it from the beginning.

To his question, Gi Man-ji, the deputy head of the Black Five Division and his son, answered.

“Machil and Choseon. A military hireling of the family and a courtesan.”