SMASH—
The moment Geon Pyeong entered the room, he shattered everything that came to hand.
The paintings, the furniture, all the costly porcelain in the room, not one piece was left unbroken.
Even the men who served as Geon Pyeong's hands and feet were too afraid of him to open their mouths a crack.
They were simply waiting outside the door until his anger cooled.
“AAAAAH!!!”
Geon Pyeong, who had bellowed loud enough to lift the room away, only stopped moving after a long while.
In the ruined room, Geon Pyeong leaned back into the one chair that was still more or less whole.
“Bring wine!!!”
At Geon Pyeong's shout, a young maidservant came in trembling.
Geon Pyeong snatched the wine cup from the silver tray, drained it in one swallow and hurled the cup to the floor.
“Get out, before I kill you first, bitch.”
Only after the young maidservant had hurried away did Geon Pyeong look up at the ceiling and catch his breath.
He simply could not believe the way things were turning.
No, one thing was clear.
He had been had by the second son.
A foolish younger brother who had spent his whole life cowering and reading his face.
Blinded by lust, he frequented the pleasure houses more days than not, and his talent fell so far short of his ambition that every choice he made was a fool's choice.
The third son, called a genius, was one matter, but the second had always danced on his palm alone.
And yet he had made a losing trade with a bastard like that.
While taking Mother's rebuke on top of it.
“How do I grind that son of a bitch down?”
Letting it pass as it stood sat very badly with him.
***
“It would sit badly, sure enough. Yes, very badly indeed.”
I faced the glittering glow of eyes walking out of the darkness.
Damn it all, nothing goes through smoothly.
The spirit beast glaring fixedly at the Clear Blood Vine in my sack was, astonishingly, an Ice Abyss Lizard.
A rare spirit beast I had encountered once long ago while chasing down an old demon called the Dark Hollow Ice Demon.
Its bulk was just short of full growth.
How a creature said to live only in the abyss beneath a glacier came to exist in this place I had no idea, but one thing was clear.
This ice lizard, freezing everything solid with each breath, was peering at the ten roots of Thunder-Hidden Azure Dragon Herb along with the Clear Blood Vine.
Now I understand.
Why there had been ten stalks of Thunder-Hidden Azure Dragon Herb and not four.
By rights this creature should have become the owner of six stalks.
In other words.
“So you're after this too, is that it?”
I could feel my breath freezing by degrees as I murmured it low.
I tossed aside the wooden case holding the human-skin mask and moved one step forward.
The space here was already ruled by the Ice Abyss Lizard.
Four legs, each as thick as my torso.
A trunk that looked shaped from ice and gravel, and an icy wind that began to whirl each time it blew air from its nostrils.
The Ice Abyss Lizard, belly pressed to the floor without a twitch, let a thick, cool blue yin qi spill from the sharp ice crystals running from its head to its tail.
As time passed my whole body was freezing under the cold it exhaled.
If more time passed, my body would freeze solid and I would not even be able to plant my feet properly.
The Ice Abyss Lizard, by contrast, was waiting with room to spare.
It had its thick tail bolt upright, ready to swallow me down in a single motion.
The instant I moved, it would begin.
I could not overestimate my strength just yet.
But my knowledge and experience, piled up over long years.
A gall swollen good and thick I could trust.
GRIN—
I am the man of tenacity acknowledged even by the Heavenly Demon, who was called an absolute ruler.
TAP—
The instant I stepped into my footwork, the Ice Abyss Lizard crossed to right under my nose in a single leap.
The Ice Abyss Lizard's cold hung thick on every side, and its enormous mouth, split open above and below, loomed over my upper body.
There was no way to dodge.
“I had no thought of dodging either.”
SHRIIING—
The vine-shaped Clear Blood Vine stretched from my fingertips like a whip and coiled around every one of the ten roots of Thunder-Hidden Azure Dragon Herb gathered in one place.
At the same moment I kicked off the ground.
Not out of the Ice Abyss Lizard's mouth, but into it.
An instant from being sheared through, I was swallowed whole, torso and all, by the Ice Abyss Lizard.
CHOMP—
In that split second.
I wound the Clear Blood Vine around my whole body and stuffed every root of the Thunder-Hidden Azure Dragon Herb into my mouth.
A dizzying thunder qi came over me in an instant.
***
I had a dream.
A rather deep and long dream.
A pleasant memory spent together with my mother, and the day I learned to dive.
The water had been cold as ice then too.
But the hand that gripped my wrist and led me, my mother's hand, was warm and strong beyond measure.
-Breath isn't drawn through the mouth alone. Your breath exists everywhere the water touches. Don't be afraid, swim and feel it. Mother is right here.
I did not know it then.
That this was not simply something like a way of swimming through water, but a trace of the Cold Water Tribe left to my mother, its only inheritor.
SHHHHH—
The Cold Water Tribe's inherited art, rooted in water qi, allowed one to breathe through the whole body underwater.
And in my childhood.
From my mother's teaching I was already a being with it engraved into my whole body.
This is the strength that lets me endure even inside the belly of an Ice Abyss Lizard, filled with cold at its utmost extreme.
And added to this.
The essence of thunder qi I had swallowed, the Thunder-Hidden Azure Dragon Herb, and the Clear Blood Vine wound about my body collided with the cold as hot, fierce thunder qi.
The Ice Abyss Lizard's powerful cold was drawn into me, fused as one with the thunder qi, and set a spiritual qi churning that I had never dared imagine.
By rights, with my vessel, devouring even two roots would have been more than I could bear.
But now it was different.
The cold wrapped around my body cooled the thunder qi's fierce heat, and made more than that possible.
The pure thunder qi needed to complete the second grand art was not merely enough; it overflowed.
Now is the time.
This is the perfect opportunity to advance to the second stage of the Heavenly Brahma Molting Art.
***
CRASH!
I burst up through the thickly frozen floor of ice.
I had been carried all the way to a small pond connected to the cliff I had climbed down.
It seemed I had drifted here inside the Ice Abyss Lizard, where I had lain while completing the grand art.
HISSSS—
I stripped off the rag that had been my upper garment, threw it away and swept back my soaked hair.
The Ice Abyss Lizard's appearance had, in the end, worked as a miraculous encounter.
The effect was as though the Ice Abyss Lizard had conceived me.
Thanks to it I had used ten roots of Thunder-Hidden Azure Dragon Herb in the grand art and achieved more than the result I had wanted.
Under the blazing noon sun.
I had no idea how much time had passed, but the powerful energy writhing inside my body was clear enough.
“Reconstituted perfectly. The foundation is laid.”
Measured against my own case, the Heavenly Brahma Molting Art is completed across four stages, and these are called the Four Progressions.
The First Progression strips the potential bare. That potential transforms bone and flesh.
In the Second Progression, the qi center and blood vessels through which qi flows are reconstituted to match the awakened potential. For this, pure thunder qi is needed for the body's reconstitution.
Once the Second Progression brings essence, qi and body into balance.
From the Third and Fourth Progressions on, it is the domain of refinement.
Grinding and polishing, peeling away one husk at a time.
From that point, depending on what heavenly bone I had gained through the Heavenly Brahma Molting Art, I had to settle which martial art to learn and how to train.
After that, I had to meet the other conditions for the Third Progression.
Through the Heavenly Demon, Cheon Yu-wol, who had been my Liege, I had been able to examine the records concerning the Heavenly Brahma Molting Art, and to see every record of the various figures who had undergone this grand art.
Of them, the ones I had privately hoped for through the grand art were.
The Beyond-Heaven Demon God Body.
The Heavenly Spirit Immaculate Body.
The Northern Abyss Golden God Body.
These three bodies.
Even going by the records alone, these three cases are heavenly bones bestowed by the heavens.
Cheon Yu-wol's Beyond-Heaven Demon God Body alone showed as much.
The Beyond-Heaven Demon God Body was a body shaped for destruction at its utmost extreme.
True qi and a body built up in fine detail for the destructive force spun out by a single point of enhanced qi truly deserved the name Demon God.
I know it well, having watched from her side.
I grow curious. What about me—
If my potential is as outstanding as Cheon Yu-wol said when she claimed it would rival her own.
Then the heavenly bone I had reached would also be one of those bodies, or something close to them.
“She is not a person to misspeak.”
I sat on the ice and moved the inner arts gathered in my qi center.
I examined my whole body in fine detail.
How dense was the condensation of true qi.
Whether the sharp edge was strong or weak when qi was emitted.
How fast true qi accumulated in the qi center.
What interaction true qi and the body had with each other.
Whether the structure of my blood vessels was special.
The experience and knowledge piled up over long years shone.
And the conclusion I reached was.
“What on earth is this?”
Astonishingly, the heavenly bone newly shaped through my sleeping potential was one I had never seen before.
Ordinarily, special heavenly bones have special and powerful traits.
An outrageous speed of qi accumulation.
Or flesh dozens of times denser in grain, so that the body itself becomes strong armor.
Or destructive force beyond the ordinary, thanks to the cohesion of true qi.
I had such traits too.
Only, it was a special case I had never once seen in the records.
To put it in a word, a powerful lodestone qi flows everywhere my qi reaches.
What influence this will bring upon me I do not know myself, but one thing is clear.
The strength of this body, with my innate potential added as the Heavenly Demon had hoped, is this lodestone qi of unknown nature, and I suspect the water qi and thunder qi used in the grand art shaped my heavenly bone in some fashion.
So what remains now is what to choose as a method of refining this lodestone qi.
“There's nothing among the common martial arts.”
Right, finding a martial art suited to the peculiar heavenly bone called the Lodestone Body was a distant prospect.
Nothing came to mind even inside a head that had lived ninety years.
So I had to change my thinking.
Not to find a method of refinement suited to the Lodestone Body, but to consider cases in which the Lodestone Body makes up for a martial art's shortcomings.
Entering the road of refinement through mutual aid.
“Then it's an easy story.”
Arts that possess the supreme hegemonic way in destructive force.
But the worst of the forbidden arts, unstable in the handling of true qi, damaging even muscle and blood vessels, and through that exposing one far too easily to the danger of qi deviation and wrapping one in a berserk rage.
Of the ones that came to mind, I recalled the demonic art counted as the very worst of the worst.
“The Thunder God Annihilation Art.”
Even to a passing ear, it is a supreme art of overwhelming power.
And no wonder, since this demonic art's founder was a madman who contended with the first Heavenly Demon for the seat of Heavenly Demon.
He devoted his life solely to breaking the Heavenly Demon.
The trouble was that the annihilation in that art's name included both the opponent and oneself.
In the end he destroyed himself as well.
But as I am now, with a Lodestone Body, I might be able to turn this cursed demonic art into a divine one.
With my thoughts in order, it was time to recover the human-skin mask and head back.
***
If you have ever seen a drowned mouse, it was probably something like this.
With a mop of hair gone even wilder as the water dried, and returning half-naked besides, I was met by Seol Ha's twisted face.
“How did you know to come here?”
The place I was in now was a guest room provided by the pasture's manager, the Pasture Overseer.
“Young Master, what… is this state you are in? And through it all the human-skin mask is spotless. I still cannot get used to it, either.”
“There's a lot to talk about, but let's wash up first and talk again after. I asked the Pasture Overseer for clothes and bathwater. Let's meet as a new man.”
As I passed her, Seol Ha wrinkled the tip of her nose. Even Seol Ha, it seemed, could hardly forgive a stench this bad.
After scrubbing myself as hard as I could, I was fairly human again.
Once I had thrown on the coat the Pasture Overseer had found for me, I sat down across from Seol Ha again.
Of course, the carefully stored human-skin mask had long since been put properly back on.
It was still a shell I needed.
“The milk here is good. Have you tried it? Make sure you drink some before we leave. The yield is small but the quality is superb. If word got out, everyone would come looking for it.”
“…….”
I gave a small smile to Seol Ha, who was still watching me fixedly without a word.
“What is it you want to say?”
Seol Ha answered only after a long while.
“You never said you would vanish this suddenly.”
“Hurt feelings?”
“…….”
“Sorry. My heart was in a rush and I moved without telling you first.”
It was understandable.
Seven days and nights had passed, she said, since I parted from the eldest son, Geon Pyeong.
Seol Ha had endured and waited, and in the end, unable to hold back her worry, had come looking for me.
Before that, of course, she had received an order from the Grand Madam to follow me.
“Still, there were results. And you've come at just the right time.”
“What do you mean?”
At the question from Seol Ha, who had yet to shake off the hurt, I only grinned.
“Let's rest here a few more days before we go.”
There's something I need to do with you.