The North Sea Martial Warrior - Chapter 09

========== 9. THIRTY YEARS OF PENANCE ==========

“How on earth… how did you become that strong?”

Watching the back of Airak, who had crushed the giant Balkar in just ten strikes, Harku asked as if possessed.

“I am curious as well.”

Garkan said.

“You were strong even before you left for the Extreme Yin Land, Jokjang-nim… but now, it’s on a completely different level.”

“It’s not the realm of a human.”

Taikan muttered.

“That just now… it was closer to a natural disaster than martial arts.”

Instead of answering, Airak quietly gripped his left chest. Beneath his worn wolf-fur cloak, there lay a black, hard scar that would never fade for the rest of his life.

“Jokjang-nim, that scar is….”

“Don’t ask.”

“…….”

“If you want to know, go to the Extreme Yin Land.”

Airak’s voice sank low.

“If you can make it back alive, that is.”

His gaze turned toward the far north.

The Extreme Yin Land, where even the sun bows its head.

Thirty years ago, the white hell where he had imprisoned himself unfolded before his eyes.

Year 1.

On the first day he set foot in the Extreme Yin Land, Airak realized he had made a mistake.

‘This… isn’t just cold.’

It wasn’t a chill. It was a massive will that denied everything living. If he inhaled, his alveoli felt like they would freeze and burst, and if he tried to circulate his internal energy, his Dantian would shake as if it were about to shatter.

The first night.

Three of his toes turned black.

‘Frostbite.’

He had to cut them off. If he left them, they would rot. Airak gritted his teeth and lifted his curved blade.

Puck.

Three toes fell onto the snow. Blood gushed out, but it froze instantly, stopping the bleeding.

“…Keuheok.”

Even his groan froze.

Ten days later, he lost two more toes. A month later, his left ear turned black and rotted off.

‘I’ll die like this.’

But he couldn’t go back. Karani was waiting.

‘I need to get stronger. Strong enough to change the rules of the Ice Palace.’

Instead of cowering in a cave to avoid the cold, he stood in the middle of the blizzard, naked.

His skin cracked, and his flesh fell off. His bones were exposed.

Yet, he stood.

‘I must not block the cold.’

At some point, a strange realization flashed through his frozen brain.

‘The more I block it, the faster I die. If so…’

He tore down the walls.

He reversed the formula of the Northern Sea Ice Essence Divine Art, accepting the external cold into his very marrow.

The pain vanished.

No, he transcended pain. As he became a part of the Northern Sea, the wind finally began to feel like a breath rather than a blade.

The severed toes and ear did not return. But he survived.

Year 5.

He went deeper into the Extreme Yin Land.

It was on a different level from where he had endured the first year. The air itself was frozen, making it impossible to breathe. He had to squeeze out air using his internal energy.

‘One breath consumes one seong of internal energy.’

If he breathed a thousand times a day, a thousand seong of internal energy vanished. If he slept, he died. If he stopped breathing, he died.

‘I will not sleep.’

Airak did not close his eyes. One year. Two years. Three years.

Sleeping as if not sleeping… on the third day of surviving on catnaps, his mind began to fracture.

‘Karani…?’

He saw Karani before his eyes. She was smiling. He reached out, but he couldn’t catch her.

It was a hallucination.

‘I’m going crazy.’

He gritted his teeth. It was fine to go crazy. As long as he became stronger.

Year 10.

In the deepest abyss of the Extreme Yin Land, ‘it’ found him.

It was a place so dark that even light was frozen, darker than pitch black. At first, he couldn’t even feel its presence. But at some moment… his blood was hardening. Inside his veins, the blood was turning into crystals, crunching as it moved.

‘This is… what?’

It had no form and no sound. It was an existence where the extreme cold itself seemed to have a will. It was an Ice Demon.

‘My blood… is freezing.’

The blood pumped from his heart froze before it could reach his arms. It solidified before it could reach his legs. The blood vessels all over his body turned into ice thorns, stabbing his flesh from the inside.

‘Kuaaaaak!’

A scream erupted. He had never felt pain like this.

His fingernails fell off. The frozen blood pushed out from under his nails.

“…Ugh!”

His toenails fell off, too. One by one. All ten toenails fell off. His skin cracked open as well. Ice crystals bloomed between the cracks.

As if flowers were blooming from within his flesh. It was beautiful, and cruel.

The Ice Demon seeped in.

Into his bones, into his organs, into his soul.

‘I’ll… die like this.’

Resistance was useless. The Ice Demon fed on the warmth of living beings and devoured everything.

There was no way to stop it.

‘Karani….’

Her face came to mind. The face that had looked at the sunset from the edge of the cliff.

‘I can’t… die yet.’

But there was no way. The Ice Demon lived by eating warmth. As long as there was warmth, the Ice Demon would not retreat.

‘If so…’

Airak’s gaze changed.

‘I will eliminate the warmth.’

It was a crazy thought.

‘I will die first.’

There was only one way to eliminate the warmth. Stopping his heart.

Airak gathered all the energy of the Ice Essence Divine Art flowing through his entire body and focused it on his heart.

Kung.

His heart beat.

Kung.

Once more.

Kung……

And it stopped.

A veil of cold, colder than a ten-thousand-year glacier, wrapped around his heart. He had frozen his own heart, falling into a state of suspended animation.

A perfect stop.

Airak’s body, devoid of warmth, was no different from a dead lump of stone. Judging that its prey had disappeared, the Ice Demon slowly retreated.

Time passed. He didn’t know how much.

The veil on his frozen heart cracked minutely.

Ku-gung.

The stopped heartbeat began again.

“Keuheok…!”

Airak vomited blood. It wasn’t dark red blood. It was pitch-black blood mixed with ice crystals.

The price for returning from death was harsh.

The flesh where his heart had been had necrotized, leaving a permanent freezing scar.

When he touched it, he felt the texture of cold stone, not skin.

It was proof that the 14th Martial Warrior had conquered death.

At the same time, it was a seal of a curse that meant he could never hold warm human emotions again.

Year 20.

The northernmost tip of the Extreme Yin Land.

It took five years to reach that place. Every step he took felt like his bones were shattering. His flesh fell off. He was no longer in human form.

“Just a little… more.”

At the place he finally arrived, Airak discovered a strange phenomenon.

The wind had stopped.

Snowflakes were stuck in the air, not falling. A bird was suspended with its wings spread. With its eyes open. Alive. Yet unable to move.

‘Time… is stopped?’

The extreme cold had frozen even the flow of time.

Airak threw his body into that frozen space.

Instantly, his whole body stiffened.

‘Move….’

Even his thoughts slowed down. In a space where time had stopped, he too had to stop.

‘No. If I stop here, I die.’

He burned his will. He pulled up all the internal energy remaining in his Dantian.

‘Move!’

One finger moved. Just that consumed an immense amount of internal energy. He felt his Dantian go empty.

‘More…!’

It took a day to move one step. Ten days for ten steps. One hundred days for one hundred steps.

He walked like that for three years.

He didn’t rest even once for three years. If he rested, he died. If he stopped, he would be stuck in that spot forever.

Crossing silently between the frozen snowflakes, he learned how to freeze space itself.

‘Now… I see it.’

The completion of the Mutu Suragyeol.

When he swung his curved blade, not only the enemy’s body but the atmosphere and space they were standing on would freeze and shatter to pieces.

Speed or distance no longer had any meaning to him.

Year 30.

It was one day that year.

Airak was still sitting at the northernmost tip of the Extreme Yin Land. He hadn’t moved for thirty years. He only breathed. Everything was gathered into his internal energy and solidified.

He was no longer human.

His skin had turned white like ice. His pupils were gray. His heart was frozen solid.

A bizarre vibration occurred in his chest.

‘……?’

It was a sensation he felt for the first time.

A feeling he had never felt in his life, like a sharp thread snapping.

‘What is this?’

His heart hurt. No, his heart was already frozen and couldn’t hurt. Yet it hurt. Something other than his heart was hurting.

It was his soul.

“…Karani?”

The bond that had been connected to his heart—no, the bond that had been hanging onto the last fragment of his soul—scattered into ash in an instant.

‘This feeling is…’

It was death. Someone’s death. Someone connected to him.

‘Karani!’

For the first time in thirty years, his heart surged.

It hurt as if his frozen heart was breaking.

‘What happened!’

Airak instinctively realized. That something had happened to her.

He uncrossed his legs, a position he hadn’t broken even once in thirty years, and stood up.

Kureureureu…!

Just by him standing up, the massive ice walls around him resonated and collapsed.

The snow and ice that had piled up for thirty years poured down like an avalanche.

For the first time in thirty years, the Extreme Yin Land sent one human out into the world.

No, it wasn’t a human.

What was born at the end of thirty years of penance was not a human, but a Sura forged from ice.

Back to the present.

Airak’s hand dropped from his chest.

Harku and his subordinates held their breath, overwhelmed by the deep loneliness in his eyes—a loneliness that was hard to see as human.

“There was a reason I wanted to become strong.”

Airak’s voice was as empty as the wind of the Northern Sea.

“To gain that power, I lost my toes. My ears fell off.”

“…….”

“I didn’t sleep. For three years. I endured while going insane.”

“…….”

“I even froze my heart. I died and came back to life. I got this scar as the price.”

Airak brushed the scar on his chest.

“But… I was too late after all.”

“Jokjang-nim….”

Garkan opened his mouth, but he didn’t know what to say.

Airak gripped his curved blade again and began to walk toward the south.

The revenge had already begun, but he himself did not know what awaited at the end of it.

The only thing certain was that wherever he walked, the world would be submerged in the thirty years of cold he had endured.