He had told her to keep it on her.

Had Eunsong foreseen all of this?

The poison was so vicious that even the Thousand-Year Purple Shell had taken quite a long time to cleanse it.

Soyak slowly rose to her feet.

She had already lost to the Dark Emperor once.

Her body was wrecked from head to toe, and the leg with the dagger sunk deep into it was barely usable.

The martial uniform she wore had been shredded to the end.

She could feel the weight of the sword at her fingertips.

Never before had the black, slender Falling Blossom Tranquil Edge felt as heavy as it did today.

It was not just a weapon.

It was an old relic of Mount Hua, a keepsake left behind by her dead parents,

and the sacred treasure of the Flower-Halo Sect.

Through this sword, Soyak had to decide her fate.

So she could not let it go.

“You could have died in peace. Seems you have a nasty hobby.”

The Dark Emperor’s sword was still wrapped in fierce Sword Force.

Soyak silently drew up Sword Qi along Falling Blossom Tranquil Edge.

A treasured sword truly was a treasured sword. Not even now had a single chip appeared in its edge.

If the weapon remained intact, then at least the minimum condition for fighting was still there.

Of course, victory was hardly something she could speak of.

But she could still fight.

“It isn’t over yet.”

Soyak sent qi into the fingertips of her left hand and struck the acupoints near the wound in her thigh.

Then she gripped the dagger.

“...Hngh.”

Pain so sharp it felt as if tears might spill from the corners of her eyes.

But in the end, Soyak pulled the blade free.

Then she hurled the blood-dripping dagger far away.

The Dark Emperor watched the whole thing with obvious interest.

Even for him, it was not a sight he saw often.

Usually, people broke first.

Or else they died before they ever had the chance to break.

“No. It’s over.”

The Dark Emperor shook his head with a mocking smile.

Whether he said so or not, Soyak slowly leveled her sword at him.

Her eyes were pitch-black.

A light rose in that abyss, empty as the void between stars in the night sky.

As she gathered the last of her remaining internal energy, the starlight of the Army-Breaking Star rose into her gaze.

It was the long-buried vow to shatter and cut apart the age itself.

More than anything, it was a desperate will that she could not let everything end here.

“You still think you can win?”

The mockery had not left the Dark Emperor’s mouth.

It was the same in his eyes.

His fierce killing intent poured over Soyak, but she did not shrink back in the slightest.

Instead of answering, Soyak silently took the opening stance of the Ninefold Heaven Plum Sword.

She would not be able to perform it properly with the wound in one leg.

But seeing that the leg still moved, the tendon was not severed.

If she gritted her teeth and endured the pain somehow,

then at the very least, it could still move enough for her to execute the form.

In any case, she had never been a martial artist who relied heavily on physical strength to begin with.

She replaced all of it with immense, overpowering internal energy.

And she still had internal energy left.

“...Haaaap.”

A shout she normally would never have given.

But right now, even a single breath was precious.

And from the sharp tip of the sword in her hand, dark crimson plum blossoms bloomed one by one and spread outward.

“Hah. And what kind of trick is this?”

The Dark Emperor was an old man of ninety.

If they were martial artists of Mount Hua, he had killed them until he was sick of it, fought them until he was sick of it.

But never once among them had he seen plum blossoms this dark red.

A color like drops of blood.

The space filled with black plum blossoms was so savage it looked like the garden King Yama might cultivate if he ever chose to raise flowers.

Every single one of them carried Soyak’s will and internal energy.

Every single one of them was a killing move.

Ninefold Heaven Plum Sword, Second Form.

Plum Branch Unbowed by Snow.

The branch of a plum tree that even a blizzard could not break.

But the Dark Emperor scattered all of them with a few casual movements of his hand.

Soyak’s plum blossoms occupied the surrounding space in every direction,

but they could not press into the space where the Dark Emperor stood.

Yet the true value of this form did not lie in the blossoms it created.

Between the drifting dark crimson-black plum blossoms, Falling Blossom Tranquil Edge flashed.

A black blade.

That dark blade, gleaming with a strange radiance beneath the petals, struck for the Dark Emperor’s neck.

“I told you it wouldn’t work!”

The Dark Emperor knocked Soyak’s sword aside with his short sword wrapped in Sword Force.

The impact ran all the way into the hilt.

For an instant, she nearly lost her grip on the weapon, but Soyak did not stop there.

“Hup...!”

Drawing in a breath, she planted herself again.

She drove her sound right foot hard into the ground, then turned the deflected blade back and reclaimed it in one fluid motion.

Soyak was small.

No matter that the Dark Emperor was a ninety-year-old man, she was still smaller than he was.

Ninefold Heaven Plum Sword, First Form.

Spring’s Arrival, Blossoms Open.

It rose like flowers blooming in full at the coming of spring.

That was why a form that surged from below to above was effective.

A fierce radiance of Sword Qi streamed along the blade and took on visible shape.

Then it flashed.

Sword Force and Sword Qi collided.

Naturally, Sword Qi should have been the one to lose, but—

the Dark Emperor frowned as well.

...What?

If she had poured that much internal energy into it, then by all rights her reserves should have been completely exhausted by now.

Yet the girl in front of him had borne the internal-energy drain of near-fatal techniques over and over again.

As though she possessed a bottomless well that never ran dry.

The same was true of her body.

Every clash should have stacked an impossible burden onto that slender frame.

That was what it meant to cross blades with a master of the Transformation Realm.

Even Jang Yul, a sturdy grown man, had not endured more than a few exchanges before the flesh of his grip split open.

But Soyak was different.

“First... that is a remarkable treasured sword.”

Greed flickered in the Dark Emperor’s eyes.

After the girl’s heart, it was the thing he wanted most.

Soyak was using it on instinct, but—

that was precisely the power Falling Blossom Tranquil Edge possessed.

No matter how immense the force that struck it, it remained unchanged.

Paradoxically, to cut the unchanging and the deathless, the blade itself had to be unchanging and deathless.

A sword most suited to the energy of the Harmonization Scripture, yet not itself made a target by the Harmonization Scripture.

That was Falling Blossom Tranquil Edge.

“And second... there is no way someone your age should possess this much internal energy.”

Soyak did not answer the question.

Two forms in a row had been blocked.

And both of them at the most perfect possible moment.

The gap in skill was immeasurable.

And yet a larger, fiercer tide of internal energy was beginning to roar through Soyak’s body.

The black qilin awakened in her dantian stormed through all eight extraordinary meridians.

And in that deeper place—

beneath the depths of the dantian, below the surface of that inner world—

the Heavenly Killing Star was opening its eyes.

“Haa...”

Even her exhale carried internal energy.

What filled the space around them was killing intent.

There was no stench of blood here, no lingering thoughts of the dead—

but this place held something more than enough to take their place.

The Dark Emperor’s killing intent.

“Hoo...”

Killing intent was not, by its nature, a tangible force like internal energy.

It had no true substance. It was something closer to an atmosphere.

But the Heavenly Killing Star, that monstrous born killer beyond all reason, responded violently to it.

It was not like the lingering thoughts of the dead, floating through internal energy in their own right.

Which meant she could not breathe it in and throw it to the black qilin as food to replenish her internal energy.

But this situation—

where every moment was a brush with death, every instant a dividing line—

was the most perfect opportunity imaginable for the Heavenly Killing Star to awaken every fragment of talent and latent potential it possessed.

Her black hair billowed like the mane of a qilin, like the tail of a dragon.

“Can you not answer me?!”

The Dark Emperor roared, frowning.

Even enduring disregard had its limits.

Soyak had stayed completely consistent, giving him not a scrap of information.

In the end, that had irritated him more deeply than he cared to admit.

“...If I die here anyway, then what will there be left to save?”

Soyak spoke in a low voice.

She did not say it to give him information.

“What would I need to hold back for?”

“Don’t tell me—”

In that instant, Soyak’s presence crushed down over the Dark Emperor’s.

A vast and terrible surge of internal energy exploded out of her body.

And the moment he felt it, the Dark Emperor understood.

He understood why she possessed such power.

“You’re using Innate True Qi?”

Most martial artists, even in the moment of death, would not use Innate True Qi unless driven to the absolute brink.

First, because it made the process of dying unimaginably more painful.

Second, because once it was spent, the least possible outcome was crippling ruin, and the worst was death.

“I would rather kill myself than let you take my heart.”

So that was a final measure no different from suicide.

That was also why cases of assassins using Innate True Qi were unusually common.

Because if there was no escape,

assassins were the kind who died together with their target.

Soyak gripped the sword with both hands.

The unnecessarily long hilt of Falling Blossom Tranquil Edge.

The unnecessarily long blade.

The moment she took it in both hands, all of that ceased to be a problem.

Then what appeared was the opening stance of Falling Plum Elegy.

The Dark Emperor’s eyes widened.

He had never seen such an opening stance in all his ninety years.

“...You use a strange martial art.”

But that was not all.

Innate True Qi was the distilled essence of the power contained in life itself.

The energy at the very source that sustained living existence.

It was endlessly pure, and endlessly powerful—

so much so that, for a brief time, it made its user seem as though they had shattered through their own wall and stepped into the next realm.

Sword Force blazed from Soyak’s sword.

Complete Sword Force, with a sharp and unmistakable shape—

for a few brief moments, Soyak had borrowed power equal to the Dark Emperor’s own realm by paying for it with her life.

A miracle possible only because she was the Heavenly Killing Star.

And because this place was filled with killing intent.

“If I die, I’ll take at least one of your legs with me.”

Soyak muttered coldly.

And for the first time in his life, the Dark Emperor felt a chill run down his spine at another person’s icy killing intent.

That look in the Heavenly Killing Star’s eyes...

was unmistakably that of a real killer.

Chapter 113

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