Chapter 303: Spirit Beasts and Humans (3) |
Episode 303. Spirit Beasts and Humans (3)
Demon Physician.
As one might guess from the epithet, he was anything but normal.
A former high-ranking expert of the Demonic Cult, he left after achieving his revenge and wandered as a physician.
However, having no fond memories of the Central Plains, he mostly roamed the outer regions of the martial world. His name was famous, but actually meeting him was rare.
Since losing his family in his youth, he suffered from bouts of madness to this day. Yet his medical skills were exceptional—enough to earn the moniker Demon Physician.
If properly fed and housed, he would treat patients without demanding payment…
…but only if the case was interesting to him.
If a patient failed to catch his interest, he wouldn’t lift a finger even for a thousand gold.
And he couldn’t be coerced—he possessed martial skill at the Sub-Perfection level, making him a troublesome madman to handle.
It was said his criteria for “interest” were only two things:
How urgent the case was, and how unusual the cause of the near-death state.
This was the information about him before the Demonic Cult’s invasion began.
All of it was false.
To begin with, the Demon Physician had never accomplished his revenge.
He was born into a physician family; his father had a decent reputation as a healer in the region.
That was likely why the Jinju Yeon Clan summoned him.
At the time, the Jinju Yeon Clan belonged to the Five Supreme Clans rather than being replaced by the Hebei Peng Clan. But as they gradually lost the techniques for undead-control—Zombie arts—their status began to decline.
This was because fewer and fewer people could properly use the sorcery, even though the clan possessed a large stock of crafted Zombie accumulated over generations.
With no one left who could control them, the clan found itself weakening until they stood at a crossroads:
Abandon the Zombie arts and pursue ordinary martial cultivation—or modify the arts to make them easier to use.
Today, the clan has taken the former path, and though they have stepped down from the Five Supreme Clans, they maintain dignity as a Prestigious Clan.
But this was not the choice they made at first.
Humans tend to become conservative when threatened. The Jinju Yeon Clan chose the latter path.
They would simplify the Zombie arts and streamline the creation process.
A reasonable choice on the surface, and indeed they achieved results…
…but time was too short.
They could not show outcomes before stepping down from the Five Supreme Clans, nor would future success allow them to reclaim their old position.
With fewer and fewer people capable of handling Zombie arts, the clan made a drastic decision:
They would gather those knowledgeable in human anatomy from outside the clan and conduct research together.
Although they risked exposing their inner secrets, the clan had no other option as they stood on the brink of collapse.
In exchange, those researchers would be bound by mental restrictions preventing them from revealing what they learned or using it themselves.
The clan offered extravagant payment—wealth, rare elixirs, or even their martial backing.
Any physician of talent received an invitation, and most accepted.
The Demon Physician’s father was among them.
But the Jinju Yeon Clan broke their promise.
After making some progress and breathing a little easier, they decided mental restrictions weren’t enough—and planned to eliminate every outside physician they’d summoned.
Not openly, of course. They killed them one by one, staging each death as an accident.
Who would suspect such vile acts from one of the Five Supreme Clans?
By using the knowledge accumulated from handling corpses and Zombie, they forged believable causes of death.
Most dismissed it as bad luck, curses from Zombie, or unfortunate coincidences.
No one imagined a slow and hidden massacre had taken place.
No one except one young man—the future Demon Physician.
Gifted as a physician, he sensed something wrong in the corpse of the father who returned home one day, cold and lifeless.
Realizing the Jinju Yeon Clan had killed him, he rushed to the magistrate…
…but by the time he broke free from an official who kept delaying and obstructing him, everyone else in his family was dead.
His elderly mother, who had waited endlessly for her husband.
His younger sibling.
His newly wedded wife.
And, whether as a warning or to erase all traces, the unborn child ripped from her swollen belly.
In just a few short hours, the Demon Physician lost everything.
It wasn’t hard to guess who was responsible, and it was clear he would be next.
So he fled without burying his family—fled as far as possible, to Xinjiang, and then beyond… to the Demonic Cult.
He excelled in martial arts as much as medicine, and rapidly grew stronger.
After twenty years of training, he reached Sub-Perfection.
Considering he began training late in life, and that most Demonic Cult martial arts were inferior, his growth was remarkable.
Once he felt he was strong enough, he left the Demonic Cult and returned to the Central Plains.
On his way to Hebei, he displayed his medical skills, earning fame step by step.
By the time he arrived, he had even earned the title Divine Physician.
Back then, he concealed not only his demonic energy but also his desire for revenge.
People simply saw a brilliant, benevolent healer who had suddenly appeared.
He entered the Jinju Yeon Clan naturally, carried by his reputation, and eventually discovered the name of the one who had ordered the massacre of the physicians.
But his actions stirred backlash within the clan.
Though they had strayed due to fear for their future, the Jinju Yeon Clan still clung to the orthodox way.
They concluded their obsession with Zombie and power was the root of their downfall.
So they decided to start over.
They released the bound Zombie from their sorcery and laid them to rest with proper rites.
They sealed their manuals deep within their vaults and created a new martial art using only fragments of the old sorcery.
Thus was born the Jinju Yeon Clan as it is known today.
They did not publicize their sins, so the Demon Physician’s enemy wasn’t punished—but he lost all his authority and languished in a small annex, simply waiting to die.
He was far more pitiful than the Demon Physician expected, but that was not enough to quench his revenge.
He snuck into the annex at night for a life-and-death duel—
And lost.
Despite his talent, his strange martial art based on medicine, and the demonic energy he had hidden… he couldn’t reach the man.
Naturally so.
Demonic Cult martial arts were vicious but crude. Their inner energy lacked purity, their heartscape tainted by madness.
Meanwhile, his enemy had grown up practicing orthodox martial arts, supported by excellent elixirs and decades of focused training—an elder of a prestigious clan.
It was the Heavenly Demon who was anomalous; most demonic practitioners could never surpass orthodox elites. Especially at higher realms.
After losing the duel, the Demon Physician barely escaped with his life, just as he had in his youth.
He stoked the flames of revenge and tried to grow stronger yet again.
But then came the twist.
The elderly elder of the Jinju Yeon Clan—though victorious in their duel—died soon afterward of natural causes.
The clan, realizing only then the depth of the Demon Physician’s hatred, sent a polite letter of apology.
His enemy had died peacefully, never suffering the fate he deserved.
And the clan, which he should have hated, lowered its head before he could accuse them.
His vengeance lost its mark.
He blamed himself for throwing away his last chance.
He regretted not dying in battle, or at least leaving a fatal wound that would ensure his enemy died by his hand.
All of it became the seed of deviation into madnessthat consumed the Demon Physician.
Though he could restrain his rampaging qi and blood through medical skill, he could not control the madness.
He began acting strangely.
When he was still the Divine Physician, he focused on saving lives.
But once consumed by madness, he focused on killing them first.
If a rare or dying patient came to him, he didn’t try to save them—instead, he conducted human experiments to satisfy his curiosity.
Clearly deranged behavior.
Thus, the Divine Physician became the Demon Physician.
Of course, none of this was widely known in the present time.
The Jinju Yeon Clan kept silent to hide their disgrace, and the Demon Physician was too lost in his failed revenge to explain himself.
Had he succeeded in avenging his family, as rumors claimed, things might have been better.
But he had not succeeded.
He was still aligned with the Demonic Cult, occasionally working for them.
And he still suffered from the delusion that he needed to personally kill his already-dead enemy.
The madness manifested in many ways, but the worst was this:
He believed he had to resurrect his dead enemy and kill him again.
To satisfy this impossible contradiction, he chose the very method his enemy had obsessed over: Zombie arts.
A deranged thought—that he could revive him as a Zombie and kill him afterward.
For him, this became an absolute imperative.
Using fragments of Zombie arts he had learned and counter-techniques he originally studied to defeat them, he attempted to create his own version of the art.
He failed, of course.
Even the Jinju Yeon Clan, who had developed the arts for ages, had abandoned them.
There was no way he could succeed alone.
Indeed, before my regression, he never accomplished anything close to it, and died at the hands of the Orthodox–Unorthodox Alliance.
But the attempts were the problem.
Some of the patients he treated went mad and rampaged during the war with the Demonic Cult.
Among them were important figures who had trusted him.
If the Beast Palace Lord had been treated by the Demon Physician before my regression, he too would’ve suffered complications.
The sudden alliance with the Demonic Cult.
The Beast Palace, which once rampaged wildly, settling for only Guizhou Province…
If I assumed the Demon Physician had been involved, everything about the Beast Palace Lord’s “compromise” felt different.
Perhaps…
The Beast Palace Lord before my regression had already lost his sanity.
As a Flowering Stage master, he held out longer than others—long enough to seize Guizhou.
But afterward, perhaps he too succumbed to madness like the Demon Physician’s other patients.
Perhaps that was why the Beast Palace expanded no further.
Perhaps they knelt because their palace lord was afflicted, and without him they couldn’t fight the Heavenly Demon.
With this, their strangely docile behavior after taking Guizhou made more sense.
To prevent the predetermined downfall of an ally—
To prevent further fractures within the alliance caused by outbreaks of madness—
The Demon Physician had to die here.
Even though I understood how excruciating it was to suffer unfulfilled, unreachable vengeance.
As with most demonic practitioners, he had tragic circumstances but had long crossed the line.
So, I withdrew the killing intent I had directed at Meng Gyeom and smiled faintly.
Whether the Demon Physician came as part of a Demonic Cult scheme, or whether Meng Gyeom brought him to strengthen his influence—
Either way, our paths would soon collide.
And when they did, only one of us could continue walking forward.
Having resolved myself, I sank my intent deep into my gut, hiding it completely, and spoke calmly:
“I understand. Meng Gyeom, your argument is reasonable.”
“Then…!”
“Yes. The Demon Physician and Tang Sowol. We’ll decide which one is the superior physician—with the sword.”
“...?”
Meng Gyeom stared at me as if looking at a madman.
And now that I looked around, everyone else wore similar expressions.
But why?
It felt like the most exemplary martial-artist answer possible.