The woman slowly took a step toward Seonwoo Hyun.
In that instant, he flinched in alarm and hunched his shoulders with a fearful expression.
As if he had instinctively sensed that he was no match for her.
“Grrrrr.”
But that lasted only a moment.
Seonwoo Hyun shot a red glare at the woman and growled low.
Like a cornered rat biting a cat, Seonwoo Hyun, too, bared his madness at the woman.
“KRAAAAH!”
Unable to endure any longer the woman's energy pressing down on his whole body, Seonwoo Hyun kicked off the ground.
His hand, surging with red light, was ferocious enough to destroy anything.
But the woman easily dodged his hand merely by twisting her body slightly.
BOOM—!
The sound of shattering rock rang through the mountain again.
Turning quickly, Seonwoo Hyun reached for the woman once more.
His fingers, bent like hooks, were vicious, as if to seize her heart in a single grab.
But this time too, with only a slight movement of her body, Seonwoo Hyun's hand cut uselessly through empty air.
In that instant, the woman's expression creased.
‘What?’
The energy pouring out of Seonwoo Hyun was undoubtedly the energy of a fiend.
Yet within it, she sensed something inexplicably foreign.
‘This isn't just a fiend. Could this energy be…… human?!’
Before the woman had time to think further, Seonwoo Hyun's hand attacked her again.
At that moment, the woman's eyes flashed.
‘I'll have to put him to sleep first.’
The woman's hand struck down on the back of Seonwoo Hyun's neck at a speed invisible to the eye.
SWISH—!
BOOOOM—!
Spinning through the air before slamming into the ground, Seonwoo Hyun trembled in agony from the tremendous impact.
“Kh, khrrr…….”
At the same time, his eyes, in which only instinct had remained, gradually lost focus.
“…….”
The woman slowly approached Seonwoo Hyun, who lay sprawled with his eyes rolled back.
And as she examined him, her eyes flew wide as if in disbelief.
‘He's definitely a human child. So how did he give off cursed energy?’
The woman looked down at Seonwoo Hyun for a long while with a stiff face.
Then, as if she had made up her mind, she slowly bent down and placed her hand on his qi center.
‘Let's confirm it.’
In that instant, the woman closed her eyes, and her brow furrowed deeply.
The child was clearly human.
But as she examined the inside of his body, the woman was startled by an unbelievable phenomenon and bit down on her lip.
‘What? His qi center is shattered. Then how can such power be welling up from within it?’
The woman examined Seonwoo Hyun's body even more closely.
And then.
‘Beneath the shattered qi center… there's another qi center? And the power welling up inside it is.’
“Cursed energy……?”
In that instant, the woman's expression was overcome with confusion.
The child's qi center had undoubtedly been shattered. There was no room for doubt about that.
Yet from deep within the scattered energy, a new qi center had revealed itself.
That alone was inexplicable, but the power residing within it surprised her even more.
‘He carries cursed energy in his body… Could that qi center hold the power of a beast, like the inner core of a spirit beast?’
Just then, through her fingertips, she felt Seonwoo Hyun's qi center heave.
The cursed energy dwelling in the qi center was struggling to break out.
‘What on earth… This goes against the laws of the world. How can this be?’
Over the hundreds of years she had lived, she had occasionally seen humans who imitated the power of beasts.
But all of that was merely imitation; they themselves had never become beasts.
Yet the energy rampaging inside Seonwoo Hyun's body unmistakably belonged to beasts alone.
‘I've never seen or heard of such a case.’
Though she wore the form of a young woman, she was in truth a being that had lived for hundreds of years.
Naturally, the knowledge she had built up through all she had seen and heard over that time was beyond compare with any human's.
Even so, she had never once seen a human like Seonwoo Hyun.
A beast that endures a thousand years building up cultivation in order to commune with the heavens is called a spirit beast.
But some abandon their cultivation and fall into corruption, becoming fiends.
The energy these fiends give off is cursed energy.
To quench the endless thirst of their greed, fiends instinctively harm spirit beasts and absorb their spiritual energy.
Therefore, to spirit beasts, fiends were enemies that had to be vanquished at all costs.
Yet the energy of such a being was pouring out of Seonwoo Hyun, a human.
‘If that energy breaks through his qi center and rises to consume the child's body again, then…….’
At that moment, the cursed energy heaved violently once more.
But this time, too, it failed to rise above Seonwoo Hyun's qi center.
At the sight, the woman frowned deeply.
‘What should I do? Should I kill him now? But…….’
The woman had no choice but to agonize over it.
Fiends were undoubtedly evil beings that harmed the mountain, but Seonwoo Hyun was originally human.
Though she, too, wore human form, she was in truth the spirit beast that guarded Mount Tianzhu.
And spirit beasts could not kill humans.
If they killed a human, the spirit beast's spiritual energy would be defiled by the vengeful spirit of the dead.
And that, in turn, meant she herself would fall to become a fiend.
‘I can't kill him, but I can't leave him like this either… What should I do?’
The woman fell deep into thought as she looked at Seonwoo Hyun.
Whether the child would return to being human when he woke, or remain a fiend, even she could not know.
If, by some chance, he woke up completely dominated by the cursed energy?
Then he would no longer be human, so she could simply end his life without the slightest hesitation.
But in the opposite case, she could not take the child's life.
How much time had passed?
“Haah…….”
Having finally made her decision, the woman raised her head with a sigh.
She made a light gesture toward Seonwoo Hyun.
In that instant, his body was enveloped in a cluster of white light and slowly rose into the air.
‘For now, I'll take him with me and watch him. That's the best I can do right now.’
The woman turned and slowly climbed back up the path Seonwoo Hyun had come down.
And Seonwoo Hyun, floating in the air, slowly followed behind her.
A little while later.
The place the woman arrived at with Seonwoo Hyun was the top of Heaven's Barrier Cliff.
As she looked around once, the woman's brow furrowed delicately.
The smell of blood flowing from the torn, sprawled corpses of the assassins was extremely foul.
“……Filthy.”
Whirl.
When she lightly flicked her fingertips, an invisible wind suddenly rose.
It was an enormous wind, as if the mountain itself were exhaling.
The wind swept up the corpses in one go and fell whirling down into the gorge.
What the woman cleared away was not merely flesh and bone.
The scent of blood the assassins had left, their footprints, even the traces of the fight vanished in an instant.
Once Heaven's Barrier Cliff was clean, as if nothing had ever happened there, the woman's gaze turned back to Seonwoo Hyun.
He was still unconscious, but she could see energy like red threads seeping out of his body.
The woman frowned again.
But soon she shook her head and immediately threw herself down into the gorge.
She and Seonwoo Hyun fell endlessly down the thousand-fathom precipice, whose depth could not be fathomed.
The wind swirling at the bottom of the gorge was violent enough to devour the two of them.
But the woman, as if she had become a bird, entrusted her body to the wind with an utterly serene face.
How far had she descended like that?
Her eyes caught a thin light seeping through a crack in the rock face, and she began to glide toward it.
A small crevice that an ordinary person would hardly notice.
Through the narrow walls of the gorge, she and Seonwoo Hyun slipped inside.
What appeared once they entered was none other than a cave.
The cave was not damp and dark like other caves.
The interior was very clear and tidy, and a soft light flowed from everywhere.
The woman walked along the path as naturally as flowing water.
Seonwoo Hyun's body, following behind while floating in the air, did not sway either.
After she had walked a long while along the winding path, a spacious area finally appeared.
A secret space where luminous pearls glowing softly even in the darkness blended with the sound of clear water.
It was her dwelling, hidden in the deep gorge of Mount Tianzhu.
When the woman moved her hand gently, Seonwoo Hyun's floating body slowly descended onto a stone bed.
She laid Seonwoo Hyun out straight and gazed intently at his face.
In the unconscious Seonwoo Hyun's body, the cursed energy was still heaving to escape his qi center.
“…How can energy of a fundamentally different nature exist inside a human body?”
The woman's voice, low as a whisper, pierced the air of the cave.
She came up with countless hypotheses in her mind, but none of them produced a satisfying answer.
With no other choice, she resolved simply to wait until Seonwoo Hyun woke up.
‘If he's a fiend when he wakes, I'll just destroy him at once. So for now, let's watch.’
Sitting beside Seonwoo Hyun, the woman calmly listened to nothing but the sound of his breathing.
Just then, a thought different from all those before suddenly crossed her mind.
‘What would happen if he could control cursed energy while remaining human?’
But the woman soon shook her head.
‘What am I thinking… That's impossible.’
When a spirit beast is consumed by cursed energy, its physical abilities increase, but its mind no longer remains whole.
In fact, when she first saw the child, he had been unleashing cursed energy without any reason left in him.
‘Even if his mind comes back for a moment, he'll be devoured by the cursed energy before long. And then…….’
If the child turned into a fiend, she would end his life at once.
“…….”
The woman's gaze, fixed on Seonwoo Hyun, had sunk coldly before she knew it.
In the deep darkness of Mount Tianzhu.
One, a human, a young boy of the Namgung Clan.
And the other, in human form, a spirit beast of Mount Tianzhu whose age could not be guessed.
It was the moment two such different beings first faced each other.
***
Deep in the night.
It was an hour when everyone should have been asleep, but the lights in the Earth Martial Hall had still not gone out.
The instructors moved about busily preparing something, and the trainees paced around with anxious eyes.
Inside the Principal's office.
Namgung Woon, who had been gazing out the window with a stiff face, turned toward Namgung Ki as he hurried in.
“Has Seonwoo Hyun still not returned?”
“No, sir. There has been no word yet from the warriors guarding the main gate either.”
At Namgung Ki's answer, Namgung Woon's face grew even heavier.
“A child who said he was going to visit the graves has not returned by this hour… Something must have happened.”
He could wait no longer.
Namgung Woon sprang up from his seat and said:
“Have all the instructors gathered?”
“Yes, they are awaiting your orders.”
“Good. We set out for Mount Tianzhu right now.”
It was a short but resolute voice.
“Let us go.”
As Namgung Woon led the way out of the Principal's office, Namgung Ki hurriedly followed behind him.
Beneath the dark night sky.
Namgung Woon gazed at Mount Tianzhu in the distance with his mouth firmly shut.
‘Be safe, Hyun!’