The Ruins
The Golden-Furred Nine-Tails, Tamamo-no-Mae.
The worst, most sinister shikigami in the Kurahashi family's possession.
And even this had not been its true manifestation.
Of its nine tails, only a single one had shown itself.
"Kurahashi! You have to sever the connection with the shikigami!"
The massive forepaw rose once more, slow and deliberate. Kim Ju-hyeok frantically pulled out a protective barrier and unfurled his spell — but if that paw came down on the group, a hastily thrown-up ward was never going to hold.
Except the Golden-Furred Nine-Tails wasn't aiming at them at all.
Those crimson eyes had been fixed on one place from the very beginning: the empty center of the clearing, where nothing existed — nothing, that is, except the fissure left behind by its first swipe of claws.
When the beast struck that spot again, something cracked, and a hidden space was revealed.
Chwejeojeok.
He had assumed the fissure was merely residue of the attack, but now the air itself began to split apart like shattering glass.
This is….
Dohyeon's eyes went wide.
It was hard to call this a Demonic Realm's space. Something far more artificial, far more intricate, lay within the torn opening — as if someone had splashed water over a painting still wet with ink.
Where the scenery of Cheongrim Valley had melted away, an enormous gate emerged. It was large enough to comfortably admit three people standing shoulder to shoulder.
Kim Ju-hyeok's eyes bulged.
Kyaooooo!
The moment it saw the gate, the Golden-Furred Nine-Tails grew even more frantic and hurled itself at it — but at the same instant, the sealing cord stretched taut around Shion's wrist snapped, and she collapsed to the ground.
With the spiritual energy flowing from its host suddenly cut off, the shikigami — which had been flinging itself madly at the gate — stopped moving entirely and began slowly sinking back into Shion's body. Only the single tail, the sole one of nine that had ever manifested, swayed toward the gate until the very last.
Kyaooo….
The moment the beast's form vanished completely, the oppressive weight that had crushed the forest lifted with it.
"Hahh…."
Seo Yu-ri exhaled the breath she'd been holding all at once. Her legs gave out beneath her, and she sat down right where she stood, clutching her chest.
Kim Ju-hyeok rushed over to Shion.
Why had the academy never expelled a student so deficient she couldn't even handle a shikigami? Because of the Kurahashi family — Japan's foremost onmyoji lineage. Even if she counted as a child they'd cast aside, no one dared touch her; instead they'd only piled on the pressure, waiting for her to walk out on her own.
But what if something happened to her here?
One thing was certain: Kim Ju-hyeok himself would never escape the blame.
"Kurahashi!"
He pressed his fingers to her neck. A pulse was there, but every sealing cord had ruptured, and dark crimson lines spider-webbed across her exposed skin.
"Did her twisted spirit channels go berserk? Damn it — if I knew anything about onmyojutsu I might be able to do something."
He drew a small bead from his coat, placed it on Shion's chest, and murmured something under his breath. A faint green light flowed along her body, split into several strands as it passed through her abdomen, and after circulating through her a few times, her complexion visibly improved.
"Whew. Doesn't look like she's about to die on the spot, at least."
Kim Ju-hyeok let out a short breath.
"I'll have to hand her over to Soeun Academy the moment we get back."
Even as he said it, he wasn't looking at Shion. His gaze had been locked past the space the Golden-Furred Nine-Tails had torn open the whole time.
A giant gate that had existed beyond Cheongrim Valley — and carved into its center, a fox with a brush clenched in its jaws, running across the clouds.
"The Cloud-Riding Brush Gate…."
Kim Ju-hyeok murmured as if under a spell.
"What's that?"
"Jeon Woo-chi."
This time it was Kwon Na-yeong who answered, in a low voice. Like Kim Ju-hyeok, she couldn't tear her eyes from the emblem on the gate.
That Jeon Woo-chi?
Jeon Woo-chi. For anyone in Korea's Taoist circles — no, for the vast majority of Koreans — it was a name no one could fail to know.
A rogue who appeared suddenly in the Joseon era, vowed to overturn a rotting Taoist establishment, defied the king, and fought the entire world of Taoist magic. Among common folk, she was celebrated as a folk hero who tormented corrupt officials.
But the official record told a different story: a traitorous criminal who insulted the throne, a Taoist who tried to shatter the order of the discipline itself. Multiple Taoist families had banded together to hunt her down, yet never found her true body, and after her defeat at Gangrim's hands she had vanished from the world.
Kim Ju-hyeok approached the gate slowly.
"If this is a place Jeon Woo-chi prepared…."
His voice was trembling.
However dangerous history had deemed her, no one in the centuries since had ever successfully reproduced her clone technique. Every one of her clones thought exactly like the original, and cast spells in multiple locations simultaneously.
On the day the government troops caught Jeon Woo-chi and took her head, an identical Jeon Woo-chi was emptying a magistrate's granary in a town miles away.
"Two sites confirmed so far as Jeon Woo-chi's dwellings."
Granted, they'd yielded plenty of spell artifacts and treasure — but not a single record or trace related to actual spells had been found at either. But if this place was a kind of ruins?
Unlike the great families, exceptional individual Taoists had traditionally taken on disciples directly — or built ruins of their own, so that a worthy heir could inherit their legacy. And if he inherited even a fragment of it…
He might gain power on par with a one-man family.
The unwritten rule of the Taoist world was that ruins belonged entirely to whoever claimed the inheritance. In other words, all he had to do was pass whatever trial waited here, and the years of grinding as an instructor's assistant — doing a senior researcher's work for him, never even getting his own name on a paper — would finally be over.
At the end of the day, power was everything in the Taoist world.
"I'm going in…."
The entranced voice spilled out of Kim Ju-hyeok's mouth.
"Instructor. You need to confirm Kurahashi's condition properly. And we have to report the ruins as well."
Kwon Na-yeong, having collected herself, spoke calmly — but Kim Ju-hyeok wasn't hearing a word of it.
"Shouldn't we verify it for certain before we head back and report? I'm only going in to take a quick look. Wait here or head back first, do whatever you like."
Kwon Na-yeong's brow furrowed.
"All the more reason we should call for support, wouldn't you say? If those are genuine ruins, we'd need at least a 5th-Rank Taoist."
"Haah… I said I'm only taking a look."
Without waiting for an answer, Kim Ju-hyeok walked up to the gate.
Clunk.
The moment he pushed it open with his hand, blinding white light burst from within and swallowed the five people standing before it.
A spatial transference spell?
It was nothing like passing through the entrance of a Demonic Realm. The structure dismantled all five bodies into units of spiritual energy, transported them to a fixed coordinate, and reassembled them.
Dohyeon's vision flooded with countless glowing spell-arrays streaming past.
Insane.
Did this Jeon Woo-chi person have an AI or something? One person wrote all of this? With the primitive mathematics of centuries past?
The instant Dohyeon, spellbound, began picking apart the structure of the spell, the force pulling his body vanished without warning.
Thud!
His back slammed into hard stone.
"Ngh…."
The backpack on his back had absorbed most of the impact, but it still hurt. He looked around — he appeared to have been separated from the others.
"Now what kind of event is this. I am going to make it out alive, right?"
The place where Dohyeon had landed was a small stone chamber enclosed on all four sides by black walls. A fist-sized spirit stone was set into the ceiling, and the faint light it emitted illuminated the room. There was no door.
As he drew close to the wall, faintly inscribed spell-arrays came into view. Half-hoping for something, he channeled a trickle of spiritual energy into one — and dozens of characters lit up and floated off the wall.
Wuum.
Eight on each of the four walls. Beneath each array, slender lines stretched toward the others, tangling in intricate webs.
"What is this, it looks like a spider web."
Small numbers were written along each of the connecting lines.
2, 3, 5.
The amount of spiritual energy consumed by passing through each point.
The moment Dohyeon touched the array that seemed to be the starting point, a sentence written in Hunminjeongeum floated up into the air.
"The energy you hold is fifty."
"Reach the endpoint. No path may be trodden twice."
"Huh? This is just a graph problem."
He'd solved this exact type of algorithm question back in undergrad. If someone tried to brute-force it point by point, even a 5th-Rank Taoist would burn through a fair amount of spiritual energy.
Of course, Dohyeon knew the formula, so deriving the shortest path took him no effort at all.
He pressed the arrays one by one in sequence, a blue light trailing after his hand. When the light touched the final point, more characters appeared in the air.
"Twenty seconds? Not bad."
Grroooomble.
The wall blocking the way ahead split open from side to side, revealing a pitch-black corridor.
With every step Dohyeon took, the spirit stones set into the walls lit up one after another.
Wuum.
"Am I allowed to take these? What are these even worth?"
Spirit stones that emitted light this pure — being used as mere lighting? Just how rich had Jeon Woo-chi been?
He pulled a collection pouch from his backpack and carefully mined his way along, until a round stone chamber appeared before him.
At its center sat a massive statue of a fox, brush clamped in its jaws. And before the fox statue—
"Sabu!"
A familiar voice. Seo Yu-ri was sitting beside Shion, who lay unconscious on the floor.
"Oh, you got out fast."
"Huueng, I seriously thought I was gonna die."
Holes burned through Seo Yu-ri's clothes in scattered patches.
"Every time I got one wrong, a fireball came flying at me."
"You solved it by calculating, didn't you?"
"I couldn't really tell, so I just pressed whichever ones felt right."
There had been thousands upon thousands of possible combinations — and she'd brute-forced her way through them on intuition?
Truly a disciple astonishing in every possible way.
"Ahem. You should put some clothes on first."
Dohyeon pulled spare clothes from his backpack and handed them over.
"Oh."
Only then did Seo Yu-ri remember what she was wearing. Scorched by fireball after fireball, her clothes were barely clinging to her body — less garments at this point than a few scraps that kept the most essential areas covered.
"Turn around for just a seeeec…."
Face flushing red, she scrambled into the clothes Dohyeon had handed her. He obligingly turned his back.
"Let me know when you're done."
"Almost done… ah, wait, hold on. Where is this sleeve even supposed to go?"
"You're asking me that?"
The rustle of fabric kept coming from behind him. Something about the sound made his ears prickle, so Dohyeon forced his mind elsewhere and studied the giant fox statue in the center of the chamber.
At its base were five lit spirit stones. Four of them glowed a pale blue — but one burned red.
Were they indicating Shion, unconscious, and the other four? A mechanism that changed color when someone lost consciousness or suffered some mishap, perhaps.
BOOOOOM!
"KAAAGH!"
From somewhere far off came a colossal crack of thunder — and a piercing scream with it. At the same moment, a high, light voice rang out through every corner of the ruins.
It was a playful tone — but the killing intent laced through it was anything but light.
BOOOOOM!
Thunder rolled through the stone chamber once more.
Crash.
Then, before the fox statue, one of the spirit stones glowing blue shattered into pieces.