9. Jeon Woo-chi
There was no dodging it.
WHAM!
The massive forepaw slammed into Dohyeon's body full force.
The protective talismans he'd stuck to himself beforehand reacted, but they held for only an instant before the barrier tore apart, and Dohyeon went flying through the air. His body hurtled across the cavern and crashed into the stone wall.
"Gahk—!"
All the air left his lungs at once. Dohyeon sprawled on the floor, mouth opening wide as he tried to breathe, but all that escaped his throat was a short, broken wheeze.
His left arm wouldn't move.
The black spiritual energy that had followed the Mountain Lord's strike as a second blow was still burning into his side, searing him bit by bit. With a trembling hand, Dohyeon reached down and touched it. His palm came away soaked in red.
Blood.
It was a strangely numb, distant thought. Every time his heart beat, he could feel life draining out through his flank.
Maybe he had been treating this world like a kind of game all along. Spells, Taoists, all of it had felt so unreal, so detached from reality. He'd grown complacent, thinking that since he'd died once and come back, he'd survive dying again too.
But lying here bleeding out on the floor, he finally understood. There was no guarantee of a second resurrection anywhere. Not anywhere at all.
I'm scared.
In that moment, the world that had felt submerged underwater snapped into sharp, painful focus.
This is not a game.
Just because spells looked like code didn't mean this world was a program. And yet like an idiot, he'd assumed that throwing his strongest available attack at the problem would be enough to solve it. The result: the Mountain Lord still standing, and his own body wrecked.
The side effects of the five emergency potions he'd swallowed down were accelerating the breakdown of his body from the edges inward. His heart began racing on its own.
Thud.
Thud-thud.
Thud-thud-thud-thud.
It felt like molten metal was coursing through his veins. Every single bodily process became vividly, uncomfortably perceptible — a surreal sensation of being aware of his own machinery.
Face-to-face with death, his mind grew cold and clear — not fear, exactly, but a frozen stillness settling over his thoughts. The sounds that had filled the cavern began to recede. The Mountain Lord's roar, Seo Yu-ri's cries, even Kwon Na-yeong's ragged breathing — all of it faded, as though time itself had stopped.
All that remained in Dohyeon's vision was the spell.
Hundreds of thousands of tiny spell-gates flowing around the Mountain Lord's black body. An unthinkable formula that drew in the surrounding spiritual energy to sustain its own existence. Dohyeon read through the spell faster than he'd ever known his brain could work, filling in the unseen sections by inference from the parts he could observe.
Scanning, selection, conversion, distribution — and parallel processing.
The deeper he interpreted the structure and carved it into his mental image, the more his astonishment grew. It was an independent spiritual-energy intake mechanism, steadily pulling power from its surroundings to fuel itself. In other words — as long as the world's natural energy didn't run dry, it was practically a perpetual motion machine.
Which meant—
Doesn't that mean I don't need to have any energy of my own?
Dohyeon's own meager energy core was empty. Forcing out power with the potions had consumed nearly everything, down to the energy that kept his body running. But if he could make that spell his own—
Dohyeon began revising the formula engraved on the Mountain Lord inside his head. Tens of thousands of connection lines were erased and redrawn; hundreds of thousands of spell-gates rearranged themselves in an instant. His brain pushed past its limits — he could feel blood vessels bursting in his eyes and nose.
Hold on just a little longer, brain!
Energy backflow, collisions between spell-gates, meridians straining to hold — for every error that surfaced, a fix materialized simultaneously. Every possible structure unfolded in his mind, failed, and was rebuilt. And all the while, something long sealed shut inside him was creaking open in the face of death.
Oseong — the gift of enlightenment. The talent for grasping the principles of the world and rewriting them as one's own. Dohyeon had gone beyond merely understanding a spell someone else had made. He was rewriting the laws of the world in his own language.
It'll work.
Squeezing out the very last thread of his life force, Dohyeon cast his final spell.
1st-Tier Shaping Taoist Spell
⟨ Printing ⟩
Using his own blood as the medium, the formula etched itself across his entire body in fine print. The moment the spell completed, it flared crimson, drawing in the surrounding spiritual energy and sending it whirling violently through Dohyeon's meridians.
"Kkuuaaagh…!"
As the energy tore through his channels, it felt like his whole body was being ripped apart at the seams. Unlike the native structure making up the Mountain Lord's flesh, what was engraved on Dohyeon's body was nothing more than an imperfect imitation — barely functional, patched together to suit his current condition. Both the amount of energy it could absorb and the time his body could endure it were strictly limited.
But it's enough.
Even if casting this one spell killed him — he was going to die either way if he did nothing. With blood weeping from his eyes, Dohyeon began to engrave a single spell.
The most powerful spell he had ever seen in a forbidden book.
Natural energy poured into the formula on his body, circulated through his entire being, and was drawn into the spell. The endless cycle of fresh energy flooding in was agonizing beyond words — but at his current level, he had no capacity left to refine it.
A low growl rumbled through the cavern. The Mountain Lord turned its head and looked at Dohyeon. As if sensing what he was attempting, the spell-gates wrapping its body shuddered violently and blazed with light. Spiritual energy from the surroundings surged toward the beast, and it launched itself at Dohyeon at terrifying speed.
Too late.
Watching it charge, Dohyeon let out a weak, wheezing chuckle, then raised his blood-soaked right fist toward the Mountain Lord.
Dohyeon's middle finger rose slowly.
"Freeze."
In that instant, every sound in the cavern vanished.
The Mountain Lord's forepaw stopped — less than a handspan from Dohyeon's face.
Crack.
Frost spread across its black fur first, then over every floating spell-gate around it, coating them all in blinding white. As time passed, blue ice-blossoms bloomed atop the frost. And with each new blossom, the light in the spell-gates circling the Mountain Lord winked out, one after another.
When at last every gate had disappeared and the spell ceased to function, the Mountain Lord's form collapsed — and all that remained where it had stood was a mound of pristine white frost.
Seeing it, Dohyeon's arm finally gave out and dropped to the ground.
Ha. Judging by the state I'm in, I'm probably not going to survive this.
Looking around through eyes gone red with burst blood vessels, he saw Seo Yu-ri catching her breath again and again among the shredded remains of the protective talismans, and Kwon Na-yeong lying motionless — her consciousness knocked out when she'd slammed into a stone slab, most likely.
No one in any condition to help him.
He wanted to down a spirit-restoring pill from his backpack. He'd been given a second chance, and he didn't want to squander it by living carelessly and throwing it away like this. But no matter how hard he willed his body to move, not even a fingertip so much as twitched.
At last, with no strength left even to lift his eyelids, his eyes closed. The pain, and the flow of natural energy that had been shredding him from within, drifted further and further away.
This was a life he'd only just been given. He didn't want it to end like this, so hollow and empty.
I want to live.
It was the first thought that had ever surfaced so clearly in his mind.
Plink.
A single cold droplet of water fell onto Dohyeon's forehead.
Dohyeon opened his eyes. The pain that had consumed him moments ago was gone. His dead left arm was perfectly fine. When he sat up, gentle ripples spread outward from beneath him. There was no sky, no walls — only an endless, blinding white space, and a still, shallow sheet of water stretching to the horizon.
"Am I dead? Is this the afterlife?"
"Bit too empty for the afterlife, don't you think?"
"AAAGH!"
A strange voice came from directly behind him with no warning whatsoever, and Dohyeon shrieked as he spun around. Where nothing had stood moments before, a worn wooden platform now floated on the water's surface.
Reclining lazily across it was a woman in a carelessly draped blue Taoist robe, tilting back a bottle of liquor. Her long hair hung loose and untied, and a rich, mischievous smile curled at the corners of her mouth — the smile of someone who lived to tease people. Hanging from her collar was a jade tablet engraved with a fox running across the clouds.
"Don't tell me... Jeon Woo-chi?"
"'Don't tell me,' he says. Honestly, what a rude way to greet someone standing right in front of you."
Jeon Woo-chi set down her bottle with a small laugh and sat up on the platform.
"Wait — you were a woman?"
"Heh heh. There wasn't much a woman was allowed to do back in Joseon, you see."
She straightened her back and declared it with unmistakable pride.
"Fewer than five souls alive know my true form. Consider yourself honored."
"So... where exactly is this?"
"Your mental image."
Jeon Woo-chi pointed a finger down at the ground beneath his feet.
"To be precise, a fragment of the mental image I left behind has entered yours."
Dohyeon looked around again. Still nothing but endless white and the shallow, endless water.
"I see. But I was dying out there just now. Is this some kind of life-flashing-before-your-eyes situation?"
"Pfft. If I were just going to let you die that easily, why would I be sitting here chatting with you? I'll heal you myself, every last wound."
"Oh... thank you?"
"Is that gratitude real?"
Jeon Woo-chi shot him a pouty glare.
"Haha, I did just come back from the dead — hard for things to sink in."
"Well, whatever. You passed my trial, so I'll tell you the method that made me the greatest Taoist who ever lived."
Jeon Woo-chi spread her palm open. Above it, an enormous spell formula materialized, accompanied by a running commentary in glowing script.
"Judging by what you pulled off earlier, you'll pick it up in no time. Still, you ought to at least know where it came from, hmm?"
"Where it came from? Didn't you create it yourself?"
"Ahem. Well, there's nothing I couldn't make if I set my mind to it, but unfortunately, no — this one wasn't mine."
A spell that drew in the world's natural energy and allowed, in theory, unlimited casting. Someone had created something this monumental before her?
"This is Seonsul — the Art of the Immortals. It was devised long ago, before the Seal Wars, as a weapon for fighting the entities from beyond."
And yet Dohyeon had never once heard the term, never seen it in a single history book.
"This method looks far more powerful and efficient. So why did the Taoist world develop around accumulating one's own energy instead?"
"Hah. Plenty of reasons, but to put it simply — power. Political power."
"Power, you say?"
"Without Seonsul, no amount of raw talent could ever surpass the Taoists of the great noble houses. Think about it."
"Ah..."
Of course. The wealthier and better-resourced a family, the more spiritual energy it could stockpile across generations.
"So after the Great Seal Wars a thousand years ago, once the outer gods were sealed away, they declared Seonsul taboo. Burned every related text. Even built an institution to hunt down and kill anyone who practiced it. Excuses were never in short supply."
Jeon Woo-chi laughed, taking the bottle from her lips.
"But you know what's truly hilarious? They snuffed out humanity's greatest potential with their own hands — and now, after all these centuries, they're the ones trying to unseal the outer gods."
"Are the outer gods really that powerful?"
"I never laid eyes on one myself. But one thing's certain: I lost. Even against just that apostle."
Apostle? They said all traces of the outer gods had been erased during the sealing — yet the Magyeong rifts remained, and he'd wondered about that. Now an apostle was walking around in broad daylight.
For the first time, the ever-present playfulness drained completely from her eyes. And what surfaced in them was fear.
"The Netherworld. Those bastards are the ones you must truly fear."
"The Netherworld — you mean Hell?"
"Aye. And the weapons they wield are no spellcraft of this world."
Jeon Woo-chi slowly drew her hand down along her own arm. The limbs were clearly there — yet something about them felt achingly hollow.
"They use the spellcraft of the beyond. Not flesh — they tear your soul apart and swallow it whole."
In that moment, Jeon Woo-chi's arms and both her legs were simply erased from the air. Where her limbs had been there was no blood, no bone — only a jagged, torn void, rippling faintly.
"Once they take you like that, you can never recover. Not ever."
Jeon Woo-chi smiled bitterly.
"Never."