The distant roar of the crowd in the main courtyard was a dull, rhythmic thudding that vibrated through the stone foundations of the estate. Down in the fighting pit, Ma Hyeon and Ma Jin were locked in the center of the arena.
Through the narrow high window of the western wall, Yul watched the spectacle. His chest was tight, his breath shallow.
He had calculated that Hyeon would collapse from Jin’s Crimson-Gall poison by the tenth exchange. But he had severely underestimated the raw, desperate vitality of a Murim warrior. Hyeon wasn’t slowing down; he was pushing through the numbness by sheer force of will, his strikes growing wilder, heavier, and more lethal.
‘My calculation was off,’ Yul realized, a cold drop of sweat tracing down his temple. ‘A mortal's biological limits are not a clean mathematical equation. I lacked the data on Hyeon’s hidden meridian reserve.’
He couldn't afford to watch the end of the fight. He turned away from the window, his chest burning.
Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass. The Breath of the Frozen Void—the corrected stealth technique he had stolen from the Patriarch’s scripture—was supposed to be effortless. But Yul’s lungs were still those of a malnourished seven-year-old child. Keeping his body temperature down to match the freezing air was putting an immense, agonizing strain on his tiny, underdeveloped cardiovascular system. His heart fluttered erratically, protesting the forced slowdown.
He glided down the deserted western corridor, his boots dragging slightly.
"Where do you think you are going, Fifth Brother?"
Yul stopped.
From the shadow of a frozen pine tree near the western gate, Ma Min—the Fourth Brother—stepped into the pale moonlight. He wasn't at the fighting pit. In his hand, he held an unsheathed, slender sword.
"I thought it was strange," Min said, his voice a low, vicious purr. "Jin was so focused on poisoning Hyeon, and Hyeon was so focused on proving his strength, but I kept my eyes on you. You've been sneaking around, Yul. I smelled the coal soot on your collar weeks ago. Did you think you were the only one who knew how to watch a shadow?"
Min took a slow step forward, the tip of his blade tracing a shallow line in the snow.
"I don't know how you survived the Red-Thread Venom. But I know you're hiding something. Hand over whatever you took from the Patriarch's study, and I might let you die quickly."
Yul’s mind raced, searching his memories and analyzing his options. He possessed peerless instincts, a flawless grasp of structural weak points, and a mind that could calculate physical trajectories like a machine. But he was still a child. His physical muscle, stamina, and durability were painfully, strictly human. He could see the perfect angle to strike, but his small frame was a fragile, tiny cup trying to contain a raging storm.
"You should have stayed at the pit, Fourth Brother," Yul said, his voice small and steady.
Min’s face darkened. "Arrogant brat."
Min lunged. His blade cut through the air like a streak of white lightning. Yul’s extraordinary instincts calculated the trajectory instantly: The throat. He is aiming to kill.
Yul executed the Ghost-Step, attempting to slide to the left.
But his left leg—stiffened by the biting Shanxi cold and exhausted from carrying heavy water buckets all day—failed him. His calf muscle violently cramped.
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Instead of a flawless, ghostly evasion, Yul’s foot slipped on a patch of black ice. He threw his weight backward, but the sword still found its mark. The steel sliced deeply into his left shoulder, tearing through his wolf-fur coat and carving a bloody gash across his collarbone.
Yul hit the frozen ground hard, the breath knocked completely out of his small lungs. Blood, dark and hot, began to pool on the white snow.
"Ha!" Min laughed, stepping closer, his sword raised for a downward thrust. "A ghost? You're just a clumsy child who got lucky."
The pain in Yul's shoulder was blinding, but his calculating mind did not panic. He refused to let physical pain cloud his absolute focus.
As Min thrust his sword downward to impale him, Yul did not try to dodge.
He reached up with his right hand, his fingers curling into the claw-like shape of the Bone-Shattering Grip. He channeled every single drop of the black, freezing qi in his tiny dantian, forcing it through his narrow, unprepared meridians.
Clang!
Yul’s bare fingers clamped onto the flat of Min’s descending blade.
The dark, freezing energy violently surged from Yul’s hand into the steel. The metal instantly turned blue, then grey, then shattered into dozens of razor-sharp icy fragments under the immense pressure of the grip.
But there was a terrible price.
Crack. Crack.
Yul’s own fingers couldn't withstand the kinetic rebound of shattering the high-grade steel. The bones in his index and middle fingers fractured, the joints twisting at unnatural, agonizing angles. Blood burst from his fingernails, freezing instantly on his skin.
He didn't scream. He locked his jaw so hard his teeth cracked, forcing the agony down. He had the instincts of a master, but his hand was still painfully, vulnerably human.
Before Min could register the destruction of his weapon, Yul scrambled forward, using his good left hand to draw the rusted iron dagger from his waist. He drove the blade upward, aiming for Min's throat.
But Min was a trained martial artist, far faster than Yul’s battered body.
Min caught Yul’s wrist, his grip like an iron vise. "You little monster—!"
They rolled in the snow, a desperate, clumsy, and brutal struggle. Yul’s small frame was being crushed by Min’s superior weight and strength. His fractured hand screamed in agony as it dragged against the frozen ground.
‘My muscle mass is too low,’ Yul’s mind screamed, his vision blurring. ‘I cannot overpower him physically. I must... use the breath.’
With the last remaining pocket of air in his lungs, Yul activated the Ghost-Step's stealth mechanism at point-blank range.
Suddenly, his body heat dropped to absolute zero. The physical warmth of his hand in Min’s grip vanished. To Min’s sensory nerves, it felt as if he were suddenly holding a block of dry ice. The sudden, extreme thermal shock caused Min’s nervous system to glitch—his fingers involuntarily spasmed and released their grip.
In that split second of freedom, Yul swung the rusted dagger.
Slash.
The nicked, rusted edge didn't cut cleanly, but it tore through the soft flesh of Min’s throat. Blood, thick and hot, sprayed across Yul’s face.
Min stumbled backward, clutching his neck, his eyes wide with disbelief. He fell to his knees in the snow, his breath escaping his throat in a wet, choking gurgle, before toppling forward, face-first into the white drift.
Yul lay in the snow, his body shaking violently.
His left shoulder was deeply cut. His right hand was a ruined, bloody mess of fractured bones and torn skin. His chest heaved, his lungs burning as they tried to recover from the lack of oxygen.
He had won. But it wasn't a flawless victory. It was a desperate, ugly scramble for survival that had left him severely broken.
‘I am too weak,’ Yul thought, staring up at the dark, falling snow. ‘If I stay in this valley, I will die. Not by the hand of a master, but by the simple physical failure of this body.’
Using his broken right hand to prop himself up, he hissed through his teeth as the bones ground together. He forced himself to stand, clutching his bleeding shoulder. He dragged his feet toward the heavy wooden rear gates, his steps leaving a dark, irregular trail of crimson in the fresh snow.
He pushed the gate open with his shoulder, slipping out into the blinding, freezing fury of the Shanxi mountain pass.
The storm swallowed him, but this time, the cold was no longer his ally. It was a timer ticking down to his death.