Pay‑to‑Win King of Martial Arts (Novel) - Chapter 145 - Karmic Ties (9)

Chapter 145 – Karmic Ties (9)

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Translated by Heavenly Cat

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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“Hold on, hold on. Let’s sort this out.”

Before I could even answer, Cheong-su said it while pressing a hand to his forehead. In fairness, from Cheong-su’s point of view, there were too many headaches right now to count.

Cheong-su looked at me after glancing at the unconscious Fang family members slumped in the corner.

“Did you kill them?” “No. I only struck their sleep acupoints.”

Cheong-su turned his head again.

This time it was toward the body of the Wolf-Fang Sword King, which I had separated. “Did you defeat the Wolf-Fang Sword King?”

“It somehow turned out that way.”

“Huh. To think your attainments had already reached that level. The Wolf-Fang Sword King is a master whose name is known throughout Henan.” “I got lucky.”

I shrugged.

I myself hadn’t been in perfect condition either, but the Wolf-Fang Sword King had already been heavily drained from fighting Cheong-su, so I believed that was the only reason it was possible. “By the way, if what I vaguely saw is right, then you used Wudang’s sword art when you fought the Wolf-Fang Sword King.”

“I did. It didn’t seem like I was in any position to win while still hiding things.”

“…Then the entire reason I did this loses its meaning.”

As he touched his own face, Cheong-su suddenly started. Naturally, all the torn wounds there had already healed.

“So long as this incident doesn’t get tied to Wudang, that’s enough, isn’t it?”

“That part is true.” “But if we kill them, things get more troublesome. Even if only Fang Su-un dies, it’s the same. The Dudu Command saw my face, after all.”

“The Dudu Command?”

Fang Su-un wasn’t some nameless commoner. He was Luoyang’s foremost local notable.

If he died, the people connected to him would start digging into the incident, and naturally the Dudu Command would start looking for me.

Then it would inevitably lead back to Wudang. When I explained that to him, Cheong-su looked at Fang Su-un.

It seemed like a storm of emotions was churning in his eyes.

“…Then fine.” “So you won’t kill him.”

“I can’t bring disaster upon Wudang twice.”

“And you’re saying that after selling off the Taiji Wisdom Sword?”

At my words, Cheong-su lowered his head. At least he knew enough to be ashamed.

“I originally intended to die here no matter how this revenge ended.”

“Then why did you sell the Taiji Wisdom Sword?” Cheong-hwa hadn’t been able to tell me very much.

He’d only told me that I had to stop Cheong-su, so there was no way I wouldn’t be curious.

Cheong-su briefly explained the circumstances to me. That his younger sister Jang Hae-rin had killed herself because of Fang Su-un, and that his mother was in a condition that required extensive medicine costs.

“Even so.”

“That’s why I was planning to die. I even left behind a note asking to be expelled.” “But now you’ve survived. What are you going to do?”

“I hadn’t thought that far. In any case, if we don’t kill that bastard, can this be kept from being tied to Wudang?”

“That part we’ll have to work at.” I walked over to Fang Su-un and slapped his cheeks hard back and forth.

Cheong-su placed a hand on his own cheek.

“No wonder my face hurts. Just how many times did you hit me?”

“Well, what? Did you think I’d politely shake your shoulder instead?” “No matter what, slapping a Martial Uncle’s face is betraying your forebears and destroying the sect.”

“Even so, I still didn’t sell off a secret manual.”

Cheong-su’s mouth snapped shut. It seemed I had struck a rather deep acupoint just now.

It wasn’t until his cheeks had turned from red to blue that Fang Su-un stirred.

Soon Fang Su-un’s eyes opened. The moment he saw me and Cheong-su beside me, he jerked in terror.

Even if Cheong-su’s features had warped out of shape, the scars on his face were enough to let Fang Su-un roughly guess who he was.

“A-are you trying to kill me?” Fang Su-un’s voice stammered.

Then again, with death’s shadow hanging directly over him, speaking normally would have been stranger.

“I’m thinking about it. If I kill you, things will get troublesome. You’re a civilian, and if you die, the Dudu Command will get involved, won’t it.” I continued,

“That doesn’t mean I can’t kill you, of course. As you heard, I hold the office of censor in the Embroidered Uniform Guard, and I know a few people in the imperial palace too. The Fang Estate’s connections are impressive, sure, but if I run myself ragged enough, I think I could still smooth things over somehow.”

Cheong-su’s eyes went wide.

This was the first time he’d heard that I belonged to the Embroidered Uniform Guard, so that reaction was understandable. Fang Su-un, who already knew I belonged to the Embroidered Uniform Guard, went dark in the face.

He knew that together with the Eastern Depot, it was one of the only groups that could carry out immediate execution.

“So you mean to kill me?” “I said I’m thinking about it.”

Fang Su-un hastily looked at Cheong-su.

Before he could say anything, Cheong-su’s cold voice came first. “If you apologize here, I’ll kill you. I think I’d become very irritated if I had to listen to some self-serving apology about how you’re reflecting deeply now. And even if you were sincerely remorseful, my dead sister still wouldn’t come back, and the hearts of my wounded parents still wouldn’t heal.”

“…”

Fang Su-un’s mouth, which had been working, slowly closed. Judging by it, he really had been about to make some sort of apology, whether sincere or self-serving.

“I’m not trying to forgive you. Even now my hands tremble because I want to kill you. The only reason I’m holding back is because it would harm my sect. So what you owe me right now isn’t an apology. It’s a promise that you’ll bury this incident instead of making it any bigger.”

At Cheong-su’s words, Fang Su-un nodded wildly. Naturally.

If all he had to do to live was keep his mouth shut, what kind of man wouldn’t agree to that?

“Th-then are you really just leaving?” “Of course there has to be a promise.”

I cut across Cheong-su’s words and stepped in.

Fang Su-un’s trembling eyes rolled about.

“I can promise it a thousand times over.” “Sure, you can. But what value does a promise spoken only with words have?”

“Then shall I write a document?”

“And why would I trust that?” I jerked my chin toward Fang Su-un’s daughter lying unconscious nearby.

“I’ll be taking that child.”

“Wh-what nonsense is that! You’re taking my daughter!” “Why not. I think I’d raise her better than a man with a past of violating women.”

Fang Su-un fell silent.

I went on, “You should think of the daughter and the wife too. The daughter wouldn’t want to be raised under a father who committed rape, and the wife wouldn’t want to live under the same roof as one either.”

I said that and shook the shoulders of the two women who were still asleep.

When I grabbed their shoulders and shook them, Cheong-su looked at me with eyes full of betrayal. After a few more shakes, the little girl and the woman opened their eyes.

Naturally, the mother and daughter recoiled in terror when they found me before them.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. I only woke you because I wanted to ask you something. Of course I have no intention of killing you.”

“Wh-what is it?” Even while trembling, the woman naturally moved to hide her daughter behind her back.

The daughter, who looked not even ten years old yet, clung tightly to her mother’s back and stared at me with frightened eyes.

“Are you going to keep living with Fang Su-un?” I asked the woman.

The woman looked at Fang Su-un.

Then she answered in a somewhat steadier voice, “May I confirm just one thing first?”

“Of course.”

“You. Did you really violate a woman when you were young?” There was coldness in the woman’s voice.

Fang Su-un looked from face to face.

Cheong-su added his own words from the side. “The woman who was violated couldn’t bear the shame and ended up dying.”

Fang Su-un’s body shook.

He was in a true dilemma.

With Cheong-su here, there was no way he could deny it. “A-a mistake of youth…”

At Fang Su-un’s crumbling words, Cheong-su’s eyes turned fierce.

It was the sort of thing that would make someone who had directly lost family utterly lose control. But I caught Cheong-su by the wrist.

“So it was true.”

The woman’s voice was now laced through with cold. She rose and picked up her daughter.

“I can’t live with a shameless creature like this. I can’t raise my daughter under someone like him either.”

“W-wife!” Fang Su-un cried out.

It was ridiculous.

The man who had shattered someone else’s family was now desperate to cling to his own. I had expected something like this.

A distinguished house like the Fang Estate would naturally have married a woman from an equally distinguished house.

She would have been properly educated and would not be the type to be dragged around by a man.

The woman turned her cold face away from Fang Su-un and looked at Cheong-su. “…There is one thing I’d like to ask of you, Great Hero.”

“Great Hero? That’s rather an embarrassing title to hear right now.”

Cheong-su said. The woman shook her head.

“I heard you killed only martial artists and didn’t kill even the family members who hadn’t learned martial arts.”

“So they say. What is it you want to ask?” “I know you have every reason to resent him, but I wish to ask that you spare him.”

At her words, Cheong-su frowned.

I too found it unexpected. She was about to leave him anyway, and yet she was asking us to spare him.

The woman continued,

“Of course, to you he must be someone fit to be chewed to pieces. But he is still this child’s father. Of course I won’t let them meet, but it’s different for a child to have a father she cannot see than for her to have no father at all. For this child’s sake as well, I ask that you spare him. Forgive me for making such a shameless request.” The woman bowed in a perfectly proper posture, just as one would expect of a lady from a learned house.

Cheong-su sighed.

“Please stand. I had no intention of killing him anymore anyway.” “Is that so?”

“It is. If this piece of trash dies, things become troublesome for us too.”

“Even so, thank you.”

The woman rose and bowed again. I gave a dry cough and cut in.

“Since you’ve made a request of us, perhaps we’ll make one of our own.”

“What request?” “We’d like to keep your daughter with us.”

Naturally, the woman showed immediate and intense rejection at my words.

“…Why?” “Because that man might break his promise and report all this. If he does, we’ll really come to kill him, but in any case it would become troublesome. Even if it’s a daughter he can never see, he still wouldn’t want her dead.”

“So that’s your reasoning.”

Fang Su-un was already streaming tears. So the part I’d heard in my previous life, that he cherished his family, had apparently been true.

Of course, now that the truth was known, those tears looked nothing but disgusting to me and to anyone else.

“Fine.” “That’s good. The daughter will stay at the merchant company where I am and do attendant work while receiving an education. Naturally, whenever she says she wants to see her mother, I’ll send her.”

“No.”

“Hm?”

“I’m coming too.” “What?”

“If it’s a merchant company, you should be able to make room for someone like me, shouldn’t you?”

I let out a low hum. I’d never considered that this girl’s mother would come along too.

“I know how to do many things. I may not look it, but I was raised in a distinguished household. Do you know the Yu Family Estate of Jinzhong in Shanxi?”

“Ah.” The Yu Family Estate of Jinzhong in Shanxi.

Naturally I knew it.

It was one of Shanxi’s foremost great houses. She truly was from a distinguished family.

They were descendants of Emperor Xiaojing.

Judging either by history or by their current influence, they stood above the Fang Estate. “I know the house well. So you were born from a most illustrious family.”

“Yes. It’s embarrassing to hear myself say it.”

“Very well. Then I’ll prepare a place for you too.”

If she was a woman from the Yu Family Estate, then there would be some use for her no matter what. At worst, there were even many attendants who couldn’t read, so I could simply have her educate them.

“It seems everything’s been settled now.”

I clapped my hands together. It was a resolution that satisfied everyone except Fang Su-un.

And so Fang Su-un’s wife, Yu Cha-ryeon, took her daughter Fang So-hwa and left the house with us.

Of course, though things with the Fang Estate had been settled, Cheong-su’s matters had not. At a fork in the road beyond Luoyang, I looked at Cheong-su and said,

“Hall Master. We’re returning to Hubei now.”

“I should go with you.” “No. Start a new life. Conveniently enough, your face is so distorted now that even if you happened to run into someone from Wudang, no one would recognize you as the Hall Master.”

At my firm words, Cheong-su looked startled.

I continued in an even tone, “You want to live, don’t you? And to be honest, you’ve probably already noticed it, but that energy inside your body. If you return to Wudang with that body, that creates problems for me too. I have no excuse to offer.”

“…I did want to ask. What exactly did you do?”

“I only had a medicine containing that sort of energy, so I fed it to you. If I hadn’t, you would’ve died. What choice did I have?”

I summarized it simply. Cheong-su looked as though he had many more questions, but in the end lowered his head.

“Go back to your family.”

At my words, Cheong-su clenched his fists and trembled. Many emotions must have been rising in him.

Guilt toward Wudang, shame, and at the same time the desire to live and take care of his family.

All of that gathered together and fell as tears. Even so, Cheong-su was an adult.

He let only a single tear fall and didn’t let himself grow uglier than that.

“…Thank you.” Cheong-su bowed deeply once and turned away.

Since he’d said he had still been sending money, he probably knew where his parents were living.

Somehow a faint, lingering feeling rose in me, and I watched Cheong-su’s back until it passed beyond the hill. Just before he completely disappeared, from a distance where neither of us could properly see the other’s face, Cheong-su too stopped short and turned back toward me.

After standing still for a while, he turned away again and vanished beyond the hill.

Ah. This is a bit of a later story, but I heard the Fang Estate truly went completely to ruin. It seems that once the ugly rumor spread that any hired blades who entered service at the Fang Estate would die under the curse of a blood revenant, and Fang Su-un drowned himself in drink after sending his family away and could no longer manage the estate, it slowly declined until it finally collapsed.