No Take-Backs
The request ended up in their hands after Han Yuhyeon steamrolled the conversation and seized the floor. The village chief, visibly thrilled at the possibility of finally escaping years of terror from the Great Demonic Beast, even threw down a threat: if the cultivators unilaterally backed out of the request, he would report it straight to the Baekun-pa.
Even in the game of Yeonhwa Seonrok, missions came with time limits, and failing or missing the deadline carried penalties. Apparently that system had been realized in this exact form.
"Junior Brother, what the hell are you thinking?"
"Even so, with Senior Brothers present, making the call on your own like that seems a little out of line."
The Senior Brothers who had been completely shut out of the decision voiced their protest. To be precise, that was Hyeon Yong-gang and Jeong Cheon-o. Im Su-weol simply folded her arms and watched Han Yuhyeon with careful attention.
"Please trust me. I'll make sure you all look back on this later and think you were right to listen."
"Taking down the Gojo itself is no easy feat for people like us. If it's a Great Demonic Beast of Yeongil-ju, you'd need at least Qi Condensation Completion to even try hunting it. You know that as well as we do."
"We're not alone, are we? There are four of us."
"How many mid-stage Qi Condensation cultivators do you think someone at Completion can handle? That's a gap of at least five stars."
Han Yuhyeon knew perfectly well the mission was unreasonable. But it was not impossible. If the reward had been good enough, they would have taken it themselves—otherwise there was no reason to come all the way to Yeong-ha-san.
What actually bothered them was that Han Yuhyeon had rammed the decision through without any real persuasion, and that the reward was pathetic compared to the risk.
"I'll take a chance on Junior Brother. He doesn't seem like the kind of cultivator who acts without thinking."
Im Su-weol, who had been quietly observing, spoke up. She seemed to want to see Han Yuhyeon's confidence for herself. Even with her siding with him, Hyeon Yong-gang and Jeong Cheon-o remained firmly opposed.
"I'm still not convinced."
"Same here. Even with the artifacts we brought out from the archives for this report, there's no guaranteeing victory against a Great Demonic Beast."
The two were more stubborn than expected. Honestly, that was the normal reaction. No matter how unusual Han Yuhyeon's position in the sect had become, it still made no sense for the youngest member to accept a mission this unilaterally.
"Then at least tell us your reasoning. Convince us."
Hyeon Yong-gang said it. From his perspective, even asking that much was restraint.
But Han Yuhyeon still could not speak. There was a way to redirect the flow of the spiritual veins. The problem was that neither the method nor the information behind it was anything a Qi Condensation cultivator was supposed to know.
The moment other cultivators realized he possessed far more knowledge than his strength warranted, Han Yuhyeon would become a target for every cultivator in existence.
"Hmm. Is it grounds you can't share? Or grounds that don't exist?"
"I'd say grounds I can't share."
"So we're supposed to just trust Junior Brother and gamble?"
"It's a gamble I'm confident in. I'll say it again—you will not regret this."
Hyeon Yong-gang's frustration was understandable, but Han Yuhyeon was frustrated in his own right. He could not tell these people, but he was a veteran of this game—a walking wiki. He was practically offering to pick up spirit stones and shove them into their mouths, and they still doubted him this much.
"No. I'm the kind of man who only believes what he can see in front of him."
Hyeon Yong-gang answered firmly, then turned to Jeong Cheon-o.
"What about you, Junior Brother Jeong?"
"To be honest, I'm uneasy as well. I don't think we necessarily need to take this kind of risk."
"Then we're split two and two."
Jeong Cheon-o quietly drifted over to Hyeon Yong-gang's side. That guy—seriously. He had already failed to get a single scrap of the reward from the mutated demonic nest, and now he was kicking away another fortune that had rolled right up to his feet. There were people like that sometimes. People who personally kicked their own luck in the face.
"Junior Sister Im. Are you really going to take a gamble with no basis?"
"Who says there's no basis? He is the basis, as far as I'm concerned."
"Since when have you built up that much trust?"
"It's not trust in each other. It's trust in my own eye for people."
Im Su-weol had clearly decided to plant herself fully on Han Yuhyeon's side. If she had gone over to Hyeon Yong-gang as well, things would have gotten ugly—so he was more than a little grateful.
"Fine. Then let's do it this way."
Hyeon Yong-gang clapped his hands. At the clear, ringing sound, every gaze snapped toward him.
"Junior Brother Jeong and I will renounce our claim to the mine. In exchange, you two give us a hundred low-grade spirit stones each. Clean enough?"
"Senior Brother Hyeon. That's way too much, no matter how you look at it."
Im Su-weol's brows drew together. Even ordinary missions had a market rate.
That was exactly why the Yeong-ha-san mine request had gone unclaimed for so long. The reward simply did not match the going rate.
For mid-stage Qi Condensation cultivators to hunt a Great Demonic Beast safely, you normally needed six people. If you wanted to stretch the reward as thin as possible, you might go out with four, the way they had. The standard bounty for taking down a Great Demonic Beast was about a hundred low-grade spirit stones total—so with four people, each person could expect around twenty-five. And now Hyeon Yong-gang had casually named a figure four times that market rate: a hundred low-grade spirit stones apiece.
"What? I don't know what charm Junior Brother sees in that mine, but isn't it worth at least that much?"
Im Su-weol had no answer. She was only following Han Yuhyeon; she had no idea how much the mine was actually worth.
If she rejected the offer here, there would be no reason left to take the mission at all. If she accepted, they would be paying far above market price. A genuine bind.
Of course, that was only how Im Su-weol saw it. The moment Han Yuhyeon heard those words, he bit down hard on his lip—so hard he tasted the thick, metallic tang of blood. If he had not, the corners of his mouth would have split open.
"W-well. If that satisfies you, I suppose we have no choice."
Han Yuhyeon spoke while suppressing his voice as much as humanly possible. The generous helping of reluctance he layered into his tone was a free bonus.
"Junior Brother?"
"Huh. Is he serious?"
Im Su-weol and Hyeon Yong-gang, who had been glaring at each other, both turned to Han Yuhyeon at once. Im Su-weol looked like she could not comprehend why he would accept such an absurd deal. Hyeon Yong-gang looked like he had never expected him to take it.
But then a deep, unguarded smile—the very one Han Yuhyeon had been trying so hard to hide—spread across Hyeon Yong-gang's face.
"No take-backs, Junior Brother. I've been recording everything on a Recording Spirit Stone."
Hyeon Yong-gang clenched his fist and held up the ring on his finger for them to see. Han Yuhyeon had thought it was just an amber-set ring, but apparently a small Recording Spirit Stone was set inside. Im Su-weol looked thoroughly disgusted.
"Sneaky. How long have you even had that thing running?"
"You never know, right? From the start."
Hyeon Yong-gang shrugged. Strictly speaking the journey itself had not been part of the mission, so he had not needed to keep it on—but he had left it running for his own safety. Han Yuhyeon had no intention of calling that underhanded. That was just a cultivator being a cultivator.
"Anyway, what's written is written. Junior Sister Im already chose to throw in her lot with Junior Brother Han, so I'll take that as her agreement as well."
"Wait—"
Only then did Im Su-weol's face crumple, but Han Yuhyeon kept his expression under control as best he could. Originally the rights to the mine would have been split four ways. Now they only had to split half—which effectively doubled his share. There was no way he was not delighted.
"Then we're doing the mission together. A hundred low-grade spirit stones. Senior Brother Jeong agrees as well, I assume?"
Han Yuhyeon asked. Just in case Jeong Cheon-o later tried to claim he had never personally agreed. And sure enough, Jeong Cheon-o nodded at once.
"Right. Let's do it that way."
He kept enough dignity not to look openly pleased, but the corner of his mouth kept twitching. Even Jeong Cheon-o clearly thought a hundred low-grade spirit stones was a jackpot.
"Haa."
Im Su-weol sighed. Looked at that way, three people were happy and only one—Im Su-weol—was distressed. On utilitarian grounds alone, this was the correct outcome.
With every discussion settled, it was time to move. They set out at once toward the northwest, where the Gojo was said to dwell.
The Gojo they needed to drive out did not directly raid the village and slaughter civilians. Its mere presence, however, superheated the surrounding climate to an extreme degree. The heat reached nearly a hundred li in every direction, which for ordinary people meant it was simply impossible to live there.
Even the cultivators who had been fine at the Yeong-ha-san mine began to sweat as they drew closer to the northwest—despite actively circulating spiritual energy to ward off the heat. That sweat was proof the heat was anything but natural.
"It's too damn hot."
"The civilians must have had a rough time."
It was so oppressive that even Jeong Cheon-o managed to produce a line of concern for ordinary people. That was the kind of thing a cultivator only said when the heat had genuinely gotten to him.
"We're in the Gojo's territory."
Hyeon Yong-gang spoke as cracked, lifeless earth came into view, without a single blade of grass.
The Gojo, a creature that lived in water, had drained every last drop of moisture until the land itself had died. That was what a Great Demonic Beast was. The nests they carved out warped nature this directly.
Soon the inner disciples reached a region that radiated raw heat. In a ravine that had clearly been a winding valley stream not long ago, not a single drop of water flowed.
"There."
Hyeon Yong-gang said after scanning the surroundings. Upstream of the valley ravine. Looking up, they could feel an intense heat from far ahead, and something purple and circular shimmered faintly against the valley stone. It had nested at the valley's water source. A home for the Great Demonic Beast—and a place the inner disciples needed to clear.
The inner disciples stood before the entrance to the nest and took a deep breath. Hyeon Yong-gang and Jeong Cheon-o, who had never wanted to come in the first place, looked especially tense. But the matter of their separate compensation from Han Yuhyeon was already settled. No matter how many low-grade spirit stones a hundred might be, they still had to kill the Great Demonic Beast and survive to collect.
"I'm going in."
When the other inner disciples hesitated, Han Yuhyeon pushed forward first and entered the nest.
As he passed through the threshold, a searing pain spread across his skin as if it were cooking. If this was the level of pain and heat even while wrapping his body in spiritual energy, ordinary people would have been reduced to a handful of ash the moment they stepped inside.
The sensation of being sucked through ended, and he looked around. A barren wasteland with nothing in it. The ground was completely flat, cracked open as if struck by a great drought.
"Haa. Hot."
Jeong Cheon-o, the last to enter, spat out a complaint. Subjectively the temperature felt like at least seventy degrees Celsius—pure, dry heat without a trace of humidity.
From there they walked. They advanced carefully, braced for demonic beasts to appear at any moment—and yet, astonishingly, after several hours of pressing deeper into the nest, they had not seen a single demonic beast. Not even an ant.
"I've never experienced a nest like this."
Jeong Cheon-o wiped the sweat running down his forehead with his sleeve. Han Yuhyeon felt the strangeness too.
Then water droplets began to fall from the sky with soft taps. Just as they were wondering why it would rain inside a nest, a sound like a giant infant's wail rolled down from above.
"Waaaaah!"
Everyone looked up. A massive bird, its body easily three meters long, hung in the air. The droplets were falling from its thoroughly soaked feathers—it must have just come out of the water.
A horn jutted from its forehead, and its snout thrust forward long and thick, not like a bird's beak at all but like a crocodile's jaws. It looked closer to a pterosaur than a bird.
That was the Great Demonic Beast—the Gojo. It was so large that every beat of its wings hurled a choking blast of hot wind against the ground.
While everyone stared, stunned by its grotesque form, the Gojo opened its jaws wide.
A colossal fireball formed inside its mouth and launched at once.
"…Dodge!"
Im Su-weol shouted. They were already prepared to evade.
BOOM!
Where the fireball struck, flames roared up even though there was nothing left to burn. The crater gouged into the earth alone spoke to the sheer force. Taking that hit head-on would leave even a mid-stage Qi Condensation cultivator in pieces.
"Damn it, why is the Great Demonic Beast coming out first?!"
The inner disciples could not help but panic. Even a nest that housed a Great Demonic Beast was still fundamentally a nest. Trash mobs came out first; you cleared them, and only then did the boss—the Great Demonic Beast—appear. That was the usual pattern.
Han Yuhyeon sighed inwardly. Why were bad premonitions never wrong? The nest was not following the normal pattern—but whether his Luck had actually triggered was something he would have to wait and see. This game's filthy system never guaranteed that great risk meant great reward. The reverse was true, though—to get a great reward, great risk was mandatory—and that was what made it so infuriating.
KRA-KOOM!
Another fireball from the Gojo's mouth flipped the ground over and turned it into a wasteland.
"Shit, did you do something when we came in?"
"What could I possibly have done?!"
The attacks were so threatening that even Hyeon Yong-gang, who had maintained a shred of dignity until now, spat curses straight at Jeong Cheon-o. Jeong Cheon-o protested as if wronged.
Hyeon Yong-gang looked ready to keep yelling, but he could not. The Gojo was still hurling fireballs. Han Yuhyeon circulated spiritual energy through his body, ready to dodge as well.
"…?"
Something was off. He had been about to move—and then realized he did not need to.
More precisely, the Gojo overhead was attacking every inner disciple except Han Yuhyeon. The others were too busy scrambling for their lives to notice.
Come to think of it, even when the first fireball launched, Han Yuhyeon had been standing in a spot where he did not quite need to dodge.
"Aaaagh!"
For now, Han Yuhyeon screamed and kept up the pretense of dodging. If the other disciples realized the Gojo was deliberately not targeting him, he would have a hard time explaining.
So he even threw himself closer to the fireballs—only as close as he could still safely tank the blast, of course.
But the moment Han Yuhyeon charged toward a fireball, the Gojo lifted its head and started firing at a different disciple.
Until now it had been a suspicion. Now it was certain.
He could not understand why—but right now, that Gojo was actively avoiding shooting fire at Han Yuhyeon.