How the Vice Cult Leader of the Demonic Cult Lives

Chapter 93: The Children Who Returned

The world forgot the memories of the countless bloodsheds that had begun with the Raw Ginger Time far too quickly.

That was because people’s lives were too harsh to remain shackled to fears of the past.

They were passing through the Great Famine, a time when even procuring food to feed one’s family that very evening was no easy task.

In that sense, the Ghost Cult’s momentum collapsed with startling emptiness. Their spread had been rooted in fear of bloodshed.

In contrast, the Bright Cult’s expansion was still proceeding rapidly. Wherever one went, the Bright Cult’s Doctrinal Officers were distributing food that was otherwise impossible to obtain.

Of course, it was not a plentiful amount.

It was such a meager ration that it was difficult to eat even one meal every three or four days. Even so, people were fervent because the Bright Cult was doing what even the government offices did not.

As a result, the Bright Cult’s missionary regions were spreading beyond Sichuan and Guizhou, reaching as far as Gansu.

In the midst of that situation, the Red Blade Unit returned. It was about half a month after Yul Han had come back to the Bright Cult.

But then—

“What are those children?”

At Yul Han’s question, asked with cold eyes, the Red Blade Unit Commander answered with a heavily tense expression.

“Children who could not find their parents, and—”

At that point, the Red Blade Unit Commander’s spoken words stopped, and a mental voice transmission came through.

–Children whose parents refused to take them back.

–Refused? What do you mean by that?

–They sold them because they couldn’t survive. They said that as long as the children were alive somewhere, it was better than starving to death together with them…

At that reply, Yul Han could not say anything.

Because he knew he could not simply condemn the children’s parents.

That was how severe the Great Famine sweeping across the Central Plains was. It had reached the point where people were dying of starvation everywhere.

–The shock to the children must have been great. Are they all right?

It was a question asked because the children must have seen their parents reject them.

To Yul Han’s question, the Red Blade Unit Commander looked back at the children with a pitiful gaze and replied.

–They were calmer than expected. Some even said they had known it would happen. But…

At the added remark at the end, Yul Han made a puzzled expression, and the Red Blade Unit Commander continued the mental transmission.

–The children cried a lot. At night, they sobbed quietly, trying to stifle the sound. It was really…

At the Red Blade Unit Commander’s words, Yul Han nodded with sunken eyes and asked via mental voice transmission.

–What do you mean by children who couldn’t find their parents?

–Ah! There were children from regions that were swept up in the bloodshed.

Perhaps because the topic of bloodshed had come up from an unexpected place, Yul Han looked startled as the Red Blade Unit Commander continued.

–In places swept away by bloodshed, entire cities and villages were wiped out… There was no way to find parents, let alone relatives.

–Do the children know?

–Yes. They didn’t say it outright, but they seemed to sense the deaths of their parents.

It was a sorrowful matter.

But it was not something that could be left at sorrow alone. There was only one place where children without families, cared for by the Bright Cult, could stay.

“Are you thinking of the Training Hall?”

At Yul Han’s question, the Red Blade Unit Commander nodded.

“I know it will be difficult, but otherwise there is only the path of starving to death…”

They were children not even ten years old yet. If such children had been left alone during a Great Famine like this, as the Red Blade Unit Commander said, they would have had no choice but to starve to death.

It meant they had been brought here with the thought, “If so, then better this.”

He did not like it, but he could not say that choice was wrong. For the Red Blade Unit Commander, it must have been the only alternative he could choose.

“Understood. Let’s go to the Training Hall.”

After throwing out those words and moving ahead, Yul Han was followed by the Red Blade Unit Commander, who brought along the few children who had no choice but to return, moving together with squad leader–rank martial artists.

The Training Hall was located on a steep, rugged slope at the foothills of the Heavenly Mountains, where the Bright Cult’s main stronghold was established.

Because the terrain was so harsh that ordinary people never set foot there, there was only a single narrow cliff path for entering and leaving, and even that was perfectly monitored by guard posts.

Yul Han stepped into such a place.

Upon hearing the news, the Lord of the Training Hall hurriedly ran out.

“Welcome, Vice Cult Leader.”

Yul Han nodded lightly in response to the Lord of the Training Hall’s respectful fist-and-palm salute and looked around.

“It’s barren.”

“Ah! Yes…”

The awkward reply from the Lord of the Training Hall was accompanied by a look in his eyes that seemed to say:

‘You already know all this, so why say something so random?’

It was an interesting phenomenon. The moment he saw the Lord of the Training Hall’s gaze, the other man’s intent surfaced in Yul Han’s mind as if it were being whispered directly into his ear.

It conveyed a certainty on a completely different level from the vague impressions one might guess from someone’s expression.

As Yul Han stood there, startled by what was happening to him, the Lord of the Training Hall asked,

“The Vice Cult Leader’s eyes are red… Have you perhaps mastered a new martial art?”

True to his role as the one responsible for overseeing the training of the Bright Cult’s martial artists, the Lord of the Training Hall showed deep interest in the reactions occurring in the Vice Cult Leader’s body.

At that question, Yul Han recalled the words he had heard from the Profound Demon not long ago.

<They are called Ghost Eyes. Eyes named for seeing ghosts and dealing with ghosts. Heretical arts will be useless. They will not work. You can distinguish truth from falsehood. As time passes, you will probably be able to see through people’s hearts as well. It was not for nothing that they were called a treasure of the Blood Cult.>

If the Profound Demon’s words were true, then his ability to perceive the Lord of the Training Hall’s thoughts as if hearing them spoken aloud must have been due to these Ghost Eyes.

It was certainly disconcerting.

But that did not mean he disliked it.

Knowing someone’s inner thoughts precisely tended to have more advantages than disadvantages.

Having reached that conclusion about what had happened to him, I turned my attention to what the Lord of the Training Hall’s gaze was saying.

‘You think I know everything?’

How had he noticed my thoughts? As if on cue, the Lord of the Training Hall brought up exactly that topic.

“Isn’t it about time you stopped learning new martial arts? You went through such hardship here when you were young, after all.”

“That… is true.”

“Yes. I still remember it vividly. Even when the Cult Leader told you that you didn’t have to come, you stubbornly insisted on it. You said that if you were a martial artist of the Bright Cult, there wasn’t a single person who could skip the place everyone had to go. Haha. I was so shocked back then when I ended up serving as the squad leader for your training group.”

That had already been several decades ago.

A child barely six years old had brushed aside the Cult Leader, who tried to stop him by saying, “You don’t have to go. This senior brother will teach you,” and had entered the Training Hall of his own accord.

The Lord of the Training Hall, who had been a squad leader at the Training Hall at the time, still remembered that scene clearly.

His training results had been the best as well.

So much so that later on, under the pretext that he needed to experience failure at least once, the entire Training Hall banded together and poured every grueling training regimen they had onto him—but the current Vice Cult Leader overcame it all with ease.

Of course, that was only in terms of results. It absolutely did not mean the process had been easy.

In reality, the Vice Cult Leader had passed through life-and-death crises dozens of times during that training process.

There was a reason people said that the previous Lord of the Training Hall had died young because he had been under so much strain back then.

The actual cause of the previous Lord of the Training Hall’s death had been a stroke—paralysis caused by ruptured or blocked blood vessels in the brain.

It was widely accepted as fact that the reason he had contracted a disease that almost never struck high-level martial artists was the daily mental anguish he had endured during the seven years the Vice Cult Leader stayed at the Training Hall.

After all, whenever word spread that the Vice Cult Leader had been injured during training, the Cult Leader would summon the Lord of the Training Hall and beat him to within an inch of his life under the pretense of a spar.

So severe had the Cult Leader’s fury been that most Bright Cult martial artists shared the belief that if the Vice Cult Leader had not completed the regular course in just seven years—cutting three full years off the schedule—the previous Lord of the Training Hall would not have died of a stroke, but would have been beaten to death by the Cult Leader.

Back then, the Cult Leader had truly been on edge when it came to the Vice Cult Leader’s safety.

After hearing all of that through the Lord of the Training Hall’s lengthy story, I merely nodded.

It was because those were not memories I possessed.

Still, there was one thing I acknowledged.

The overwhelming martial power residing in this body of mine had not been obtained for free, merely as a perk of being the beloved disciple of the Cult Leader.

Shaking off those thoughts, I asked the Lord of the Training Hall,

“How is the recruitment of basic trainees going?”

“Ah! Th-that is…”

It was difficult.

By the Vice Cult Leader’s direct order, all the children who had previously been kidnapped or bought with money had been sent back.

Because the training process had a survival rate of only one in ten, the number of people who volunteered on their own could be counted on one hand.

The only reason there were even that many was because those few children were all the offspring of Bright Cult martial artists.

Born into the Bright Cult, the only things they could do were learn martial arts and live as Bright Cult martial artists.

Even so, as numbers went, they were extremely few, just as already mentioned. Bright Cult martial artists rarely entered formal marriages to begin with.

Naturally, that meant the number of children born under Bright Cult martial artists was minuscule.

There was a reason why there were brothels within the Bright Cult and why courtesans openly worked there.

With so many rough men who practiced demonic arts, they could not simply suppress their desires; they did not marry; and the gender ratio among male and female martial artists was overwhelmingly skewed toward men. It was a desperate solution devised under those circumstances.

Why, you might ask, did Bright Cult martial artists avoid marriage so much?

The reason was simple.

Marriage came with responsibility.

The responsibility to support a family, to care for a wife and children.

The problem lay in the lives of Bright Cult martial artists.

Their lives were such that they might receive orders today, go out, and be killed and discarded in a field tomorrow.

In other words, their lives were fundamentally not stable enough to shoulder responsibility for others.

Another reason was that life itself was a continuous struggle. When there was no battle, they devoted everything to training.

If you rested today, tomorrow someone who had once been your subordinate would glare at you and challenge you to a duel—such was the Bright Cult.

It was because of the law of Might Makes Right. To avoid such humiliation, the only option was to train like a madman day after day.

That was why even the Five Demons, the highest-ranking among the elders, never skipped a single day of training.

In a place where even the Cult Leader trained every single day, what more needed to be said about the others?

After all, the Bright Cult was a place that, six separate times, had pushed the Hundred Paths—whose numbers exceeded theirs by more than tenfold, reaching over a hundred thousand—to the brink of annihilation.

Such formidable strength did not come about by chance.

For all those reasons, it was rare to see children within the Bright Cult. With so few marriages, it was only natural.

Being able to recruit only such children, the current recruitment numbers were inevitably incomparable to normal times.

It was hardly unreasonable for concerns to arise that if things continued this way, the number of Bright Cult martial artists would sharply decline starting ten years later, after the current batch completed their training.

Even so, it was not something that could be spoken of openly.

Because the one who had created this situation was none other than the Vice Cult Leader who was now asking the question.

“We… we are doing our best.”

At the Lord of the Training Hall’s flustered reply, I smiled faintly and asked,

“It’s not going well, is it?”

“Th-that is…”

As he failed to continue properly and laughed awkwardly, I asked him,

“You know why they’re not gathering, right?”