So-hyeon…

Yeon Seo-rin turned the conversation over in her mind, her thoughts snagging on a single, jarring revelation. The timing of his emergence from seclusion matches the exact moment the current Demonic Cult revealed itself? It was an observation loaded with heavy implication, the kind that birthed a thousand dark suspicions.

Instead of turning to her brother with questioning eyes, she tightened her jaw and stepped firmly into the space behind him, crossing her arms as her gaze hardened into a glare directed solely at the former Martial Righteous Alliance Leader, Wang Cheol-jin.

“…Seamless Heavenly Robe.” Wang Cheol-jin offered a bitter, thin smile as he felt the weight of her stare. “That is hardly an appropriate attitude for a warrior who should be seeking the truth.”

He addressed her directly, abandoning the indifference he had shown her moments before. “Have you chosen to simply close your eyes rather than struggle to escape the web of doubt and delusion?”

His words carried a sharp sting, but Seo-rin didn’t even flinch.

“Hah.” She let out a derisive snort and squared her shoulders, meeting his gaze with absolute defiance. “I’ve simply acted as any sister in this world would. Furthermore, I am not merely a ‘warrior’; I am a martial artist of the Luoyang Sword Clan. For us, virtue is not found in the pursuit of abstract truth, but in the unwavering trust and loyalty we owe our Lord.”

“Even if that Lord is straying onto a darkened path?” Wang Cheol-jin pressed.

Seo-rin didn’t hesitate for a heartbeat. “My brother is surrounded by many people. If he requires a lecture on loyalty and righteousness, I’m sure one of them will handle it.” Her lips curled into a bright, confident smile. “My only job is to believe in him and support him with everything I have.”

Standing before her, Grand Young Master Yeon So-hyeon closed his eyes and allowed a small, private smile to grace his face.

Sister…

Seo-rin could not possibly know the weight of her words. She couldn’t know that even if her defiance was born from a simple antipathy toward Wang Cheol-jin, her support was a lifeline.

Deep within, the eternal struggle against the Scripture that Commands the Dark and Quakes the Heavens continued to gnaw at So-hyeon’s psyche in real-time, every moment a battle to discern if his own judgments were truly his own or merely echoes of the manual’s corruption.

On the outside, he was a lone man juggling a mountain of crises that would have crushed a lesser being.

“I am on So-hyeon’s side.”

Those words echoed in the parched, desolate chambers of his heart like a warm, resonant bell.

Wang Cheol-jin fell silent, his unreadable eyes fixed on her as Seo-rin steeled herself, expecting a sharp rebuke. To a practitioner of the Immortal Path like Wang Cheol-jin, a man who had spent his entire life, perhaps his very soul, warring against the Cult, her declaration must have sounded like the stubborn, naive tantrum of a child.

But when he finally spoke, his voice was a whisper of gravel and wind. “…I envy you.”

“What…?”

The admission was so unexpected that Seo-rin’s guard momentarily slipped.

“I said I envy you.”

The dying light of the sunset bathed the Alliance Leader’s face, casting long, stark shadows into the deep ravines of his wrinkles until, in that amber glow, his face looked like an ancient, weary mountain range that had endured eons of storm and erosion.

“Long ago,” he said, slowly turning his face toward the horizon, his eyes squinting against the glare as if the light itself were painful, “I had people like you by my side as well.”

His voice was saturated with a profound, aching regret.

“…And now?” Seo-rin asked softly, her hostility flickering. “Are you saying there is no one left who believes in you, Alliance Leader?”

Wang Cheol-jin offered a hollow, mirthless laugh. “It isn’t that people stopped believing in me…”

So-hyeon finished the thought for him, his voice flat and insightful. “…It’s that you ran out of people you could believe in.”

Wang Cheol-jin’s deep, searching eyes snapped to the Grand Young Master. “…Indeed.”

Despite the surge of emotion visible in his gaze, his self-discipline was peerless. His voice didn’t tremble as he continued. “That is the reality of fighting the Demonic Cult. Every human has moments of weakness, and the Cult knows how to exploit those moments better than anyone.”

The tremors were absent from his voice, but the ancient scars in his eyes were laid bare. “In those moments of vulnerability, those monsters position themselves closer to you than even your most cherished loved ones.”

Seo-rin let out a low, pained groan. Her mind could perhaps begin to grasp a fraction of the horrors this man had witnessed over the decades, but her heart couldn’t possibly fathom a hundredth of the weight he carried.

“But… what about Grand Strategist Sima?” Seo-rin asked, breaking the heavy silence. “In the days of the Martial Righteous Alliance, were you two not called ‘soul-friends’?”

They were the legendary duo, the Leader and the Grand Strategist. Together, they had achieved the impossible feat of exterminating the Demonic Cult that had plagued the Central Plains since the empire’s founding. And now, that same Grand Strategist was only a few miles away, commanding the very battlefield they overlooked.

“Grand Strategist Sima, you say…” Wang Cheol-jin looked toward the distant din of combat, a bitter smile playing on his lips.

What is it? Seo-rin wondered. Is there something broken between them?

The answer came from her brother. “If the Alliance Leader truly trusted Grand Strategist Sima to the bitter end,” So-hyeon said, “he would never have allowed the Martial Righteous Alliance to be dissolved so easily.”

“…”

Seo-rin whirled toward Wang Cheol-jin, her eyes wide. The Alliance Leader himself let the Alliance fall?

“Truly… you are remarkable.” Wang Cheol-jin stared at So-hyeon, his unreadable mask slipping to reveal a flicker of genuine shock. “The rumors say the Grand Young Master of the Sword Clan reads hearts as if he were a master of mind-reading. It seems the rumors did not lie.”

So-hyeon neither confirmed nor denied the praise. “It was the only logical conclusion,” he said, as if he had finally found the missing piece of a puzzle. “The Martial Righteous Alliance of that era had achieved such monumental feats. For it to dissolve so simply, merely because its primary enemy was gone, always felt… wrong.”

The Alliance had been too massive, too entrenched to vanish in a heartbeat just because a nemesis had been neutralized.

“The Alliance had outlived its purpose,” Wang Cheol-jin said firmly. “At that point, it had to be dismantled. It was a necessity.”

“Because where power gathers, corruption inevitably follows,” So-hyeon finished.

Wang Cheol-jin nodded. “Exactly. The Alliance that conquered the Demonic Cult, a feat the Emperors themselves could not manage, held far too much centralized power. Eventually…” He trailed off, the words seemingly too heavy to speak aloud.

But So-hyeon would not allow the silence to take root. “I suspect that discussions regarding the ‘future’ of the Alliance began to surface. Perhaps some even entertained bold, even treasonous, ambitions.”

He met Wang Cheol-jin’s gaze head-on. “And at the center of all those discussions about the future of the Martial Righteous Alliance stood Grand Strategist Sima.”

A long pause stretched between them. Finally, Wang Cheol-jin gave a slow, deliberate nod of acknowledgment. “…He did.”

Despite the admission, he felt a strange sense of relief, as if a weight were being lifted. “In those days, Grand Strategist Sima was more obsessed than anyone with drafting a new goal, a new future for the Alliance.”

These were secrets Wang Cheol-jin had never shared, thoughts locked in the lonely heart of a supreme leader and the solitary successor of a secretive sect.

“It was dangerous.”

He had spent his life warring against the Cult, yet he had never spoken of his internal struggles as he was doing now.

“Are you saying the atmosphere of the Alliance was that treacherous?” Seo-rin asked, her voice hushed.

“No,” Wang Cheol-jin replied, shaking his head with chilling finality. “I was the one in danger.”

“You mean… the vision for the Alliance’s future was so seductive it even shook your resolve, Leader?”

“No.” Seo-rin saw a flash of celestial energy, sharp as a lightning bolt, flicker in Wang Cheol-jin’s eyes. “It was dangerous because the sight of those men driven mad by power, their sheer obsession with authority… it was indistinguishable from the madness of the Demonic Cultists.”

To a layman, his words might have sounded like hyperbole or an exaggerated leap in logic, but Seo-rin understood perfectly. She had been raised in the political viper’s nest of the Luoyang Sword Clan; she knew exactly what the lust for power looked like when it turned parasitic.

“So you allowed the Alliance to crumble under the weight of internal strife?” So-hyeon asked.

“I did,” Wang Cheol-jin confirmed. “Because if even a single ember of the Cult remained, the Martial Righteous Alliance of that time was a place far too vulnerable to temptation.”

And that applies perfectly to the Luoyang Sword Clan of today, Seo-rin thought, feeling a sudden urge to steer Wang Cheol-jin’s suspicion away from her brother.

“So the conclusion is…” All eyes turned to Seo-rin as she continued. “That you still do not fully trust Grand Strategist Sima even now, Leader?”

“…I do not,” Wang Cheol-jin answered honestly, perhaps influenced by the momentum of his own rare candor. “I do not trust him in the slightest.”

“Then…” Seo-rin started cautiously. “Isn’t it possible that Grand Strategist Sima himself is a Cultist, or at least in league with them?”

“No. That is the one thing I am certain of.”

“How can you be so sure—”

“Because,” So-hyeon interjected, his voice calm, “the person the Alliance Leader has been watching most closely all these years is undoubtedly Grand Strategist Sima.”

The realization hit Seo-rin like a physical blow. That was why Wang Cheol-jin was almost always seen in Sima’s vicinity. He wasn’t just a friend or a teacher; he was a jailer.

“Thus far,” Wang Cheol-jin added, “Sima’s countermeasures against the Cult have been lukewarm at best, but they have never crossed into the realm of suspicion.”

“Lukewarm?”

“He is no longer the Grand Strategist of the Martial Righteous Alliance,” Wang Cheol-jin said. He was now the strategist for the Third Young Master’s faction, and given what she knew of Sima’s ambition, Seo-rin found the explanation plausible.

She was about to nod in agreement when her brother spoke again, his eyes locked on Wang Cheol-jin.

“But Alliance Leader… couldn’t one interpret that ‘lukewarm’ response in a different way?”

Wang Cheol-jin’s eyes narrowed at So-hyeon’s knowing smile.

“If the Cult is allowed to run rampant due to a ‘lukewarm’ defense, the Central Plains will eventually find itself in desperate need of a new Martial Righteous Alliance.”

And a new Alliance would need a Grand Strategist, specifically one with the proven experience of having conquered the Cult once before.

“In that scenario,” So-hyeon continued, pausing for effect, “Grand Strategist Sima and his Military Strategy Bureau would no longer be mere lackeys helping a family scion in a succession struggle. They would return to their former glory, reclaiming the absolute authority and universal respect of the Martial Righteous Alliance.”

He leaned in, driving the point home like a wedge. “That seems like a more than sufficient reason for Grand Strategist Sima to ‘deliberately’ provide a lukewarm response to the Demonic Cult’s return, wouldn’t you say?”

So-hyeon watched as Wang Cheol-jin’s mouth pressed into a hard, grim line.

“What do you think, Alliance Leader?”