Chapter 453 : Cornered Against the Wall (1)
Chapter 453: Cornered Against the Wall (1)
The boisterous laughter faded from Yeom Ga-hwi's face, and his expression settled back into his usual solemn expression.
"Come to think of it, I heard from the Demonic Physician. He said that without the Left Guardian's help, repairing my arm would have been impossible. I'm truly grateful."
It was a face well-suited to a man of his character. An upright man who the late Heavenly Demon had entrusted to become the Hall Master of the Demonic Way.
Il-mok laughed sheepishly at the praise.
‘The Demonic Physician really is working hard at promoting me.’
It was one thing to brag to the regular foot soldiers, but Il-mok never imagined the Demonic Physician would go out of his way to talk about painkillers and disinfectant alcohol to Yeom Ga-hwi of all people.
"I simply stumbled upon it by sheer luck."
"Hahaha! Always so humble. But tell me, were you heavily wounded as well?"
Yeom Ga-hwi glanced around, apparently remembering that this was a place where patients came to be treated.
"I encountered the Divine Monk and took serious internal injuries fighting him," Il-mok answered.
Yeom Ga-hwi let out an uncharacteristically heavy sigh upon hearing that. "Hah. As you already know, Left Guardian, my arms ended up in this state because of him as well. My own injuries are of no consequence, but I am worried for the others fighting while I am stuck receiving treatment in the rear."
The weariness in Yeom Ga-hwi's voice when he mentioned the Divine Monk made Il-mok realize something he'd missed until now.
‘Ah. I must've been loaded into the carriage the second I passed out.’
The carriage carrying him must have moved fast enough that the news of their victory hadn't reached Xi'an yet.
"There's no need to worry about the Divine Monk."
"What do you mean by that, Left Guardian? How can you say not to worry about that dreadful old monster?"
"The Divine Monk is already dead."
"D-Dead? What do you mean by dead? W-who killed him? Did the Cult Leader finally achieve Transcendence in the Heavenly Demon Divine Arts?"
Yeom Ga-hwi loses his usual composure and pours a mountain of questions. That was how hard it was to believe what he was hearing.
"Well, we did launch a coordinated assault against him, but ultimately... I am the one who succeeded in killing him."
It felt a little like bragging, so Il-mok answered with a slightly sheepish tone.
Yeom Ga-hwi stared back at him with his jaw dropping.
***
After finishing his conversation with Yeom Ga-hwi, Il-mok returned to his room to rest.
Several hours had passed since then.
"Left Guardian, I've brought your evening herbal decoction."
Seo Jae-pil arrived carrying a decoction that had a subtly different smell from the one Il-mok had taken earlier in the day.
"Before you drink it, let me take your pulse just to be sure."
He wanted to check how Il-mok's condition was progressing.
After taking his pulse and exchanging a bit of conversation, Il-mok drank the decoction. That’s when something came to his mind.
"Now that I think about it, I heard the Demonic Physician personally operated on Hall Master Yeom's arms. Were you in the room for that, Physician Seo?"
"Yes. Elder Demonic Physician was kind enough to assign me as his assistant. I learned a great deal from it."
Seeing the genuinely joyful smile on his face, Il-mok couldn't help but ask.
"Was it dangerous?"
"It was a risky surgery, yes."
"And you went ahead with that risky surgery even knowing that?"
In his mind, he raised the level of insanity of the duo to another level again. But the answer that came back surprised him.
"We didn't have a choice. The Hall Master was unyielding in his choice. We warned him that the success rate was abysmal and that the shock could easily kill him outright rather than just leaving him an amputee. But even after all those warnings, he said that a martial artist who loses both arms is no different from a dead man and still chose the surgery.”
The surgery was a success, but it had been a terrifying gamble.
A severe inflammatory response occurred following the surgery and Yeom Ga-hwi experienced a severe fever. The reason he survived the fever was that his masterful control over his internal energy allowed him to purge the infection out of his body and the Demonic Physician’s constant care.
"Hmm. Well, I'm glad it turned out alright in the end."
"Hahaha. Indeed."
Seo Jae-pil gave a light laugh, then seemed to remember something and turned the conversation around.
"Come to think of it, I heard you succeeded in killing the Divine Monk."
The news had apparently reached Xi'an at last.
"I got lucky."
Thank heavens for that luck. That old monster had been sending a constant stream of casualties our way, day after day."
Hearing Seo Jae-pil sound so normal, Il-mok tilted his head in genuine confusion.
"That's surprising. I'd have thought you'd be happy about having more patients to tes—I mean, to treat.”
"Of course not."
Seo Jae-pil answered with an expression that made it clear he found the idea absurd, and Il-mok began to wonder if he'd been misjudging him all along.
"What kind of physician actively wishes for a mountain of dying patients? I merely enjoy studying bizarre diseases and entirely unprecedented physical constitutions. That's all."
So why the fuck though?
When he strings his reasons, his eyes drift to Il-mok.
***
By the following days, the news that Il-mok had killed Hyeon Am spread across all of Xi'an.
Perhaps because the war had dragged on without much progress for weeks, people reacted as if the whole thing were already won.
Cheers erupted from everywhere, and people gathered together to sing hymns of praise. The volume was so loud that the sound of their singing easily reached Il-mok's ears even as he rested inside the ward.
Mixed in among all those cheers and hymns was his own name. The detail that he was the one who finally put the invincible Hyeon Am in the ground had spread just as fast as the victory itself.
Listening to his name being chanted without pause made Il-mok deeply uncomfortable, and he muttered to himself with a wry smile.
"I really don't think this is a good thing..."
Hearing his grumbling, Seon-ah tilted her head.
"They're praising the Left Guardian's achievement. Isn't this exactly what you deserve?"
Seeing the reverent look in Seon-ah's eyes as she gazed up at him, Il-mok chose not to open his mouth to argue further.
'...The attention is one thing, but the real problem is that my name seems to be coming up a lot more than my Eldest Brother's.'
He kept that thought to himself.
He rested for a while with Hyeokryeon Seon-ah looking after him, and then the door opened and Ju Seo-yeon walked in.
"Time for the shift change."
At Ju Seo-yeon's words, Seon-ah rose from her seat with none of her usual reluctance and walked out of the hall. It was incredibly out of character for her. Normally, she was the type to linger and keep chatting with Il-mok long after her shift was supposed to end. But Il-mok had a pretty good idea of why she was currently behaving this way.
'Maybe it's for the best.'
Given the Demonic Art that Seon-ah had learned, it was probably better for her to gradually create some distance from him. At least, that was how Il-mok saw it.
Meanwhile, after trading places with Ju Seo-yeon and leaving the ward, Seon-ah left the ward entirely and headed somewhere else.
She headed to the former headquarters of the Xi'an Provincial Military Command, a compound now fully occupied by the Demonic Cult.
Seon-ah made a beeline for the expansive training grounds.
Over in one corner, Jeong Hyeon was already standing perfectly still with her bow drawn taut.
It had been like this ever since they first returned to Xi'an. The three maids took turns looking after Il-mok, and whenever the other two had free time, they came to the training grounds like this and put themselves through drill after drill.
In particular, Jeong Hyeon and Hyeokryeon Seon-ah were pushing themselves through training that bordered on self-torture.
To the rest of the world, that battle was a legendary victory where Il-mok slew the Divine Monk and tipped the scales of the war.
But for these two women, it didn't feel like a victory at all.
Even now, Hyeokryeon Cheon-gang's words still wouldn't leave either of their minds.
That they were in the way during the fight with the Divine Monk. That they should fall back to the rear.
Both women understood why he'd said it. They weren't so dull that they couldn't see he'd said it to keep them alive. But regardless of his intentions, the fact remained that they hadn't been able to take part in that battle would only have been a hindrance if they lingered.
Out of all of them, only Jin Hayeon had proven strong enough to earn the right to stand on that battlefield.
The realization that they were nothing but a liability to the person they wanted to serve for the rest of their lives had shattered their pride as prodigies, leaving them with a crushing sense of inadequacy.
***
While Il-mok was resting in the rear and the two women were deep in their training, there was an old man working himself into a frenzy just as much as they were.
"Send the order! Pull every scattered unit back toward Henan right now!"
As the dark clouds gathered over the war's fortunes, the Supreme Eunuch stepped forward personally to take command of the imperial forces. With the allied faction's martial artists all but wiped out, at least the command structure itself wasn't complicated.
Over the next few days, he managed to consolidate the troops he'd dispersed for skirmishing and pull them back to the rear, but his expression showed no sign of brightening. The army had already taken heavy losses from the string of defeats, and now additional casualties had been incurred during the retreat and consolidation.
He forced his anger down and swept his gaze around the command tent.
Setting himself aside, there were only two fighters left who could be called experts in their own right.
The Central Military Commander and the remaining Vice Commander of the Embroidered Guard. The Commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard was still back in the Forbidden City, but calling him away when he was supposed to be protecting the Emperor was out of the question.
The Supreme Eunuch barked in irritation.
"What's the status of the reinforcement requests sent to the Eastern Military Command and the Northern Military Command?"
The Central Military Commander and the Vice Commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard both lowered their heads as they answered.
"Th-The Eastern Military Command says they have no capacity to spare reinforcements at this time. Apparently, the rebellion that broke out in Guangdong has spread all the way to Zhejiang, Fujian, and Jiangsu, and they're overwhelmed."
"The Northern Military Commander sent only a letter, saying he cannot dispatch troops because he must guard against the barbarians in the north."
The two men's reports made Supreme Eunuch's beard tremble with barely contained fury. But no amount of shaking with rage was going to change anything.
Loss after loss had accumulated and crashed down all at once, and the tide of the war had shifted so completely against them that it seemed almost impossible to recover. No matter how hard he thought about how to turn things around, only one answer kept surfacing.
'It seems I have no choice but to use it.'
He concluded that he had no choice but to unleash the trump card he had originally prepared for the event if the previous Heavenly Demon attempted to assassinate the Emperor.
***
A few more days of mandatory bed rest passed in the rear.
Just as Il-mok’s injuries were beginning to heal and showing real signs of recovery, another victory report rolled into Xi'an.
If Il-mok's victory had been the first to break the stalemate, the next news to arrive concerned Cult Leader Wi Jin-hak himself. The Buddha Venerable had been slain, and Seo Wan-pyeong had killed the Director of the Eastern Depot.
After that, the war turned into a completely one-sided massacre.
There were occasional reports of minor damage inflicted by the Supreme Eunuch, but it was nowhere near enough to turn the tide. Victory reports kept coming in one after another, and since Wi Jin-hak was the overall commander behind every one of those battles, his name rang out across Xi'an without pause.
Honestly, Il-mok couldn't have been happier.
He'd been making speeches and putting himself at the front of battles every time to keep morale up and minimize casualties, but he'd never been the kind of person who enjoyed being in the spotlight. If he had been, he wouldn't have chosen to be a civil servant in his previous life.
'The Supreme Eunuch is a little worrying, but the end of the war is finally in sight.'
The thought even crossed his mind that the whole thing might be over before he'd finished recovering in the rear. That was how drastically the balance of power had shifted.
Just then, Seo Jae-pil arrived with a fresh batch of decoctions and brought a new report.
"They say the enemy forces holding the fortifications in Henan and Shanxi have been driven out. From what I hear, the enemy leadership has fled toward Hebei."
"Then the Cult Leader must be pursuing them."
Il-mok said it offhandedly, but something nagged at him almost immediately after.
‘Hold on a second. Why the hell are they retreating toward Hebei when they have a perfectly healthy Northern Military Command and an intact Eastern Military Command they could rally behind?’
If they crossed through Hebei, they would end up right on the doorstep of Beijing where the Forbidden City stood.
'To protect the Emperor and the Imperial Seal?'
It wasn't an unreasonable choice of action, but something still felt off.
'If that's what they're after, couldn't they just take both and leave?'
Like King Seonjo during the Imjin War for example. Abandoning the capital when a war went completely sideways wasn't exactly a popular move, but history proved it happened.
Viewed that way, retreating into the Forbidden City to protect the Emperor and the Imperial Seal was an even more absurd choice of action. That was just backing themselves into a corner with nowhere left to run.
Il-mok turned the enemy's intentions over and over in his mind, and when a piece of information resurfaced in his mind.
It was something he'd come across in the early days of the war and nearly forgotten entirely.