Yi-gang’s eyes were like glass marbles.
The shattering Shooting Star Fang was reflected in those eyes.
Because it was made of meteorite iron, Shooting Star Fang was dark and dull. It wasn’t something you could call flashy, but it was clearly a precious sword.
It had been well over ten years since Yi-gang first took up Shooting Star Fang.
Now, he saw it less as a sword and more as his own body.
Like most swordsmen, Yi-gang was the type to be attached to his sword.
And it was none other than the Immortal Divine Sword’s blade.
How many had Yi-gang cut down with Shooting Star Fang?
The Great Sage Equal to Heaven had declared that Shooting Star Fang itself had become an item on the level of a treasure.
Because since its birth, for hundreds of years, it had cut countless mighty foes and things that were not human, he said.
It was something to celebrate. If the sword had become special, wasn’t that good for its owner?
And yet, Shooting Star Fang, of all things, shattered to a bare hand.
He never imagined it would break in the hand of someone whose body was nearly split in two.
Shooting Star Fang, which had held the shape of a sword, came undone.
The shattered fragments scattered.
They were probably moving at a speed no different from loosed arrows. But to Yi-gang’s eyes, they looked terribly slow.
As hundreds of sword fragments flew apart, the light was dazzling.
It was like looking at the Milky Way.
Yi-gang felt like squeezing his eyes shut.
‘Master.’
He thought of Yu Jeong-shin and the Azure Forest disciples.
‘Father.’
Baek Ryu-san and the others trapped in Crouching Dragon Basin.
They had placed a duty on Yi-gang.
A duty to press on to the end.
A duty to never give up.
And hadn’t Yi-gang sworn he wouldn’t stop even before So-hwa?
So Yi-gang couldn’t give up, not until the end.
Now, it felt less like duty and more like a curse.
Having to crash into something impossible no matter what, even knowing he would fail.
Yi-gang thought of the Immortal Divine Sword.
‘Ancestor. Is this not a crisis?’
He had received a mirror from the Immortal Divine Sword.
He had said to look into the mirror when a desperate, do-or-die crisis came.
At one point, Yi-gang had even held hope.
Just as it had been with Zhang Sanfeng and the Heavenly Demon, wouldn’t the Immortal Divine Sword descend to help Yi-gang too?
Then this crushing burden would lighten, even a little.
But even after he faced crisis after crisis, nothing happened.
‘If you weren’t coming, why did you leave words like that?’
In the storm of flying blades, what Yi-gang felt was helplessness.
The blade of Shooting Star Fang, which had saved his life hundreds of times, embedded itself all over his body.
From fragments the size of a pinky nail to pieces as large as a handspan, they dug into his flesh.
His abdomen, his chest, his face, his limbs.
With blades lodged in him, Yi-gang toppled backward.
A heavy sound rang out, like a tree falling.
The Yellow Emperor looked down at Yi-gang calmly.
Then he reached his hand into the air.
The meteorite-iron fragments that hadn’t embedded in Yi-gang’s body gathered into his hand.
The fragments began to fuse together.
It was far thinner than Shooting Star Fang, but even if crude, it had clearly taken the shape of a sword.
It was undoubtedly the Xuanyuan Sword said to have been used by Gongsun Xuanyuan, the Yellow Emperor.
With that sword that had once been Shooting Star Fang, the Yellow Emperor tapped the Sealing Box. Tap. Tap.
Kigigigik-
The Sealing Box trembled on its own.
Seeing that, the Yellow Emperor smiled.
“It’ll open soon. It was truly designed in a complicated way. It’s not something you can simply smash.”
He looked at Yi-gang with a face as leisurely as ever.
Yi-gang was in a state no different from a corpse.
Blood was slowly pooling around him.
“Who do you think is the master of this earth?”
It was an unexpected question.
Yi-gang stared at the Yellow Emperor.
He wanted to spit out curses, but even making a sound was difficult.
“Humans. Without question.”
The Yellow Emperor answered without waiting for Yi-gang’s response.
“The sky is the heavenly gods’, and the underworld belongs to the kings, but the earth is clearly humans’. Who would deny that? If humans aren’t the masters, then who is. The ants under the ground? The eagles in the sky. The tigers in the forest?”
“…Crazy, bastard.”
“Humans! The problem is…”
The Yellow Emperor stood before the fallen Yi-gang.
Up close, his height felt real.
He was at least twice Yi-gang’s size. He didn’t seem human at all.
“The ones covering the earth right now, you lot, are not human.”
The Yellow Emperor grabbed Yi-gang by the throat with one hand and lifted him.
Blood dripped down in drops.
“You are not human. Humans vanished long ago. The sun didn’t rise for a hundred years. Only after the world was laid waste did you crawl out little by little. Creatures that imitate humans, but are truly, utterly grotesque.”
For the first time, something you could call emotion rose on the Yellow Emperor’s face, which had been expressionless until now.
He began to condemn Yi-gang and everyone in the world together.
“You imitate humans, but that doesn’t mean you can be real humans.”
“Why… are you… so worked up?”
“You should be able to understand this too. If monkeys from the jungle crawl out and start imitating humans, how revolting would that be!”
It was rage so intense it seemed fire might pour from his mouth.
Yi-gang’s answer to that rage was simple.
“Ptoo.”
Instead of spit, blood sprayed out and splattered the Yellow Emperor’s face.
The Yellow Emperor’s face, which had been pouring out anger, turned cold and rigid.
“It’s foolish to vent your temper at something that can’t even understand what you’re saying.”
Then he raised the Xuanyuan Sword.
And he brought its sharp tip to Yi-gang’s brow.
“See it for yourself. Why you are nothing but dregs.”
Kuk.
The sword tip mercilessly bored into Yi-gang’s brow.
Yi-gang’s vision flashed.
Back then.
That place was.
The distant past. The Yin-Zhou era.
It was Shang, where a brilliant civilization shone.
Yi-gang recognized it at once.
Because through the hole drilled into his brow, not only an illusion but even knowledge was transmitted.
In an instant, Yi-gang came to know many things.
How enormous the empire called Shang had been.
How brilliantly the civilization of that time had bloomed.
How great a ruler Gongsun Xuanyuan, who founded Shang, had been.
It was knowledge not even Yi-gang’s modern understanding contained, and knowledge even the great scholars of Ming didn’t know at all.
The hundred-year blank had erased most records. And instead, the fact that that ancient civilization far surpassed even Great Ming’s was hidden.
It was something people of this age couldn’t even imagine.
Yin Xu, the capital of Shang.
How could that city, which left not even a trace now, have been so splendid.
Beijing and the Forbidden City were not even worth comparing.
The people of this time were all tall, so the buildings were large to match.
It wasn’t merely that everything was bigger.
Pavilions of five stories or more were everywhere.
Buildings solidly stacked with stone. He couldn’t understand how even their traces had vanished.
Well-dressed people walked through perfectly maintained streets.
Sturdy roads laid with stone slabs led toward the center of Yin Xu.
There stood Shang’s imperial city.
The residence of the emperor who ruled the Central Plains.
The lords who submitted to Shang, more precisely, who submitted to the Yellow Emperor, had gathered there as well.
The people of Yin Xu all wore relaxed smiles, but they were different.
Especially the Yellow Emperor’s expression, holding the Xuanyuan Sword himself, was rigid.
Thanks to the knowledge injected into his mind, Yi-gang understood.
The Yellow Emperor, one of the Five Emperors within the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.
That in this age they judged him a god, a great god, but back then it had not been so.
The true heavenly gods of the Three Sovereigns’ rank, who created the world and humanity, were distinct from the Five Emperors.
From the start, bundling them together as “Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors” was almost nonsense.
The Five Emperors stood in the same rank as the heavenly gods of the Heavenly Realm.
The heavenly gods of the Heavenly Realm seemed immortal, but in truth they were not.
So long as they dwelled on the earth rather than the Heavenly Realm, unless they were gods like the Three Sovereigns, no being could avoid death.
That was the same for the Yellow Emperor and his vassals.
They had lived hundreds of years without aging, and even if they lived as long again, they would not age much.
But if a thousand years passed, and more than that, they would eventually decline and die.
The Yellow Emperor and the lords who had made a brilliant civilization bloom sought to overcome even human mortality.
Like their creator.
Like the Three Sovereigns.
They sought to gain Divinity and become true great gods.
But what had gone wrong?
That the god who created humans would come to the imperial city in person.
She came to punish sin.
She demanded the Yellow Emperor and the lords take their own lives, and commanded them to destroy Yin Xu and dismantle Shang.
All the lords knelt. Only the Yellow Emperor stood and looked at her.
“Lady Nüwa.”
The Yellow Emperor felt pain like his intestines were being torn apart.
That sorrow was contained in the expression with which he looked at Nüwa.
Nüwa wore plain clothing compared to the Yellow Emperor.
She wore clothes woven from natural materials, and with a blank face she looked at her creations.
“Take your own lives, and dismantle it.”
That was Nüwa’s command.
Yi-gang wondered what choice he would have made.
If Nüwa’s order had been to die alone, perhaps he would have.
But if it was to order everyone to die and dismantle the nation he had founded…
“How can you say such a thing?”
The Yellow Emperor made the same choice Yi-gang would have.
The Xuanyuan Sword cut off Nüwa’s head.
It was instantaneous.
In that moment, all the birds in Shang took flight at once.
Eagles and crows cried out like mad.
Blood sprayed from Nüwa’s severed neck.
The lords who had been kneeling rose all at once.
One lord standing in front hurriedly caught Nüwa’s falling head.
“A-aagh!”
Then that lord’s hair turned white, and his skin dried and shriveled.
Nüwa’s severed head spat out fury.
“So you commit sin at last.”
Bloody tears streamed from Nüwa’s eyes.
“You will vanish from this land. The sun will not rise, and bitter cold will come.”
Her curse was like thousands of crows wailing at once.
Even those mighty lords covered their ears and suffered.
“Go extinct! You are failures.”
“Shut her mouth!”
The Yellow Emperor screamed.
Then the strongest lords.
The Four Perils and Chiyou lunged at Nüwa’s head.
“Shennong and Taihao Fuxi will notice. Cover her eyes and shut her mouth!”
With silk woven with gold thread, they wound Nüwa’s living head round and round.
“Burn the body, and seal the head!”
One of the lords spewed flames from his mouth and burned Nüwa’s divine body.
“Summon all the lords! We need a countermeasure!”
God-slaying.
The crime of killing humanity’s creator happened that abruptly.
The Yellow Emperor and the lords sealed Nüwa’s head tightly and tried to conceal their act of murder.
But Nüwa’s curse was realized in the end.
Shang fell.
“When the darkness and bitter cold that seemed endless finally ended, the sun rose again.”
The Yellow Emperor recited in a desolate voice.
“The humans who once shone so brilliantly all died after that. You monkeys arose suddenly after that.”
“You speak, you make clothes and wear them, and you imitate humans. But that imitation ends now. You are worms that grew fat feeding on our corpses. And just as we did, you too will vanish from this world.”
Yi-gang’s lips moved.
The Yellow Emperor leaned in, listening to what Yi-gang was trying to say.
“…Failures.”
The Yellow Emperor’s face twisted violently.
He mercilessly slapped Yi-gang across the cheek.
A sound rang out like a face breaking.
Yi-gang’s head snapped aside.
The Yellow Emperor almost tightened the hand gripping Yi-gang’s throat, then held back.
A sound came from the Sealing Box.
The sound of the seal coming undone.
Absurdly easily, the Sealing Box’s lid opened.
Inside it was…
“Nüwa.”
A single severed head, dried so stiff it was hard to recognize the face.
It was probably Nüwa’s head.
“…At last, she is completely dead.”
What the Sealing Box contained was Nüwa’s severed head.
What was the Yellow Emperor going to do with that?
“Now the preparations are complete. You will live and watch until the very end. I will show you.”
The Yellow Emperor raised his hand.
As if about to snap his fingers, he said in a low voice.
“What you’ll see this time won’t be some illusion.”
Tak.
He snapped his fingers.
