Pesu
Sounds of bustling activity rose from outside. He could feel people surrounding the clan head’s manor—the martial artists of the Dang Clan, no doubt.
This was a place that excelled at crafting mechanisms, so their emergency alert system seemed quite well-developed. Not even a quarter of a quarter-hour had passed, yet martial artists radiating a murderous aura already had the manor completely encircled.
“You really want to do this?”
Han Yuhyeon asked one last time. Dang Ga-hye would be hearing this voice as well. Instead of a reply, only irregular, trembling breaths spilled out.
The so-called Dang Clan Absolute Formation was clearly a last resort—an apparatus capable of collapsing the entire clan head’s manor. Even as clan head, making that kind of decision alone at her young age was no easy call.
“……Poison Soul Squad, subdue that ruffian! I will interrogate him myself—do not kill him!”
Dang Ga-hye’s voice rang through the entire manor, directed at the martial artists surrounding it.
In an instant, hidden weapons and projectiles poured in through every window of the manor, followed by a rolling wave of purple poison mist.
Naturally, Han Yuhyeon had never faced murim martial artists before. He only knew from the setting that they were no match for cultivators. So when the hidden weapons and poison mist came flying, he was startled for a moment—then quickly realized there was no need.
Instinct told him their weapons and mist would have not the slightest effect on him.
“What in the world…!”
Indeed, Han Yuhyeon currently had his Dragon-Scale Body permanently active. Their hidden weapons crumpled at the tips the moment they struck his skin and clattered uselessly to the floor, while the poison mist could not even approach his body.
To the martial artists, it must have looked like something out of a nightmare. Dang Ga-hye, watching from somewhere, let out a flustered cry.
“……Impossible. Indestructible Diamond Body?”
That was how absurd cultivators appeared to murim folk. Realizing this, Han Yuhyeon relaxed as well.
“You’ll pay for that attack.”
He stretched an open palm toward the windows. An immense suction force—something never seen in the murim—erupted from his hand. It wasn’t even a proper spell; just a basic technique anyone could use by circulating spiritual energy.
“Ugh, aaaargh!”
Two or three members of the Poison Soul Squad caught in the pull were dragged straight through the windows. Han Yuhyeon simply crushed the martial artists plastered against his palm. Using his Fire Spirit Root, he boiled their blood from the inside.
Before the corpses could even burst, every organ and bone had already melted, so only blood sprayed across the entire manor. Of course, not a single drop touched Han Yuhyeon.
“……Crazy.”
Dang Ga-hye muttered under her breath. In that single exchange, both the Poison Soul Squad and Dang Ga-hye herself seemed to have their wills completely broken. A monster beyond common sense, on an entirely different level—that was how Han Yuhyeon looked to them now.
“Stop this, stop! Ga-hye! What on earth are you doing!”
At that moment a man came crashing into the manor in a panicked scramble, making a tremendous racket. The man who entered looked to be past his forties.
Being from a prestigious clan, even past forty his face was glossy and well-kept; his hair was slicked back with what looked like pig oil, giving the overall impression of a man who paid careful attention to his appearance.
The middle-aged man took one look at Han Yuhyeon and immediately dropped into a full prostration.
“O Cultivator, please restrain your wrath. My niece is still young and cannot yet distinguish right from wrong.”
Surprisingly, the man knew of cultivators’ existence. Even if cultivators kept their distance from ordinary mortals, Han Yuhyeon had heard that certain high-ranking mortals maintained ties with them.
As an elder of the Sichuan Dang Clan—one of the greatest houses in the murim—it made sense that he might have connections to cultivators.
“Hmm.”
With the middle-aged man begging so desperately, Han Yuhyeon halted the flow of spiritual energy for now. The room was already a wreck—walls and floors torn apart—but the man looked utterly grateful just for the cessation.
“Thank you. Thank you, O Cultivator. Ga-hye! Come out this instant! What manner of rudeness is this!”
“……Haa.”
Still trembling, Dang Ga-hye let out a sigh from somewhere. After roughly half a quarter-hour, she returned to the ruined manor. Her face was pale, her pupils filled with fear.
“Hurry and apologize for your wrongdoing. Do you wish to sever the Dang Clan’s line right here?”
“Is this person one of the Three Emperors or Seven Sovereigns?”
Pressed by the middle-aged man, Dang Ga-hye asked hesitantly. The Three Emperors and Seven Sovereigns sounded like titles used in the murim.
Hearing her words, the middle-aged man’s face drained of color. He shot to his feet, seized the back of her head, and forced her to bow.
“I apologize. This child does not yet know of cultivators’ existence. Thus she dared to mistake you for a mere mortal. Please forgive her rudeness.”
“Cultivators?”
“There are things you do not know! Be silent!”
Dang Ga-hye truly seemed unaware of cultivators and tried to ask again, but the middle-aged man snapped at her and sealed her mouth.
Even if she was young, treating the clan head so roughly felt a bit much—but that was the Dang Clan’s internal affair, not something Han Yuhyeon needed to concern himself with. From the way the man called her “niece,” he was clearly a brother to Old Man Dang.
The middle-aged man prostrated himself alongside Dang Ga-hye and spoke in a terrified voice.
“O Cultivator, why have you visited the Dang Clan without prior notice?”
“How did you know I was a cultivator?”
“As far as I know, only cultivators can release such overwhelming natural spiritual energy.”
“Mm.”
The situation felt oddly amusing. Right now Han Yuhyeon was merely an inner disciple of the Baekun-pa in Yeongil-ju—an utterly insignificant existence by the standards of the cultivation world. Yet the moment he descended to the lower realm, he was being treated like a transcendent being. Refreshing.
“We’ll need to talk for a bit.”
“Yes. Then allow me to escort you to my residence. Ga-hye, you come as well. And apologize with your own mouth for your rudeness toward the cultivator.”
The middle-aged man’s voice was stern. Dang Ga-hye hesitated, yet in the end she bowed her head to Han Yuhyeon and spoke in a mosquito’s whisper.
“I apologize.”
“Yeah, whatever. I get it.”
She seemed to be laboring under some misunderstanding, and since she hadn’t even known cultivators existed, he saw no need to press the matter further.
“I am grateful for the cultivator’s magnanimity, vast as the sea. Please, follow me.”
As the middle-aged man left the clan head’s manor, he bellowed at the Poison Soul Squad martial artists still surrounding the place with murderous intent.
“All of you, return to your posts! How dare you bare blades and killing intent in front of whom? This person is my guest!”
Since the clan head was his niece, this middle-aged man clearly carried considerable weight in the Dang Clan. One roar, and the martial artists bowed their heads and melted away like an ebbing tide.
Even after entering his own residence, the middle-aged man roughly drove the servants. Whether for Han Yuhyeon’s benefit or not, at the very least the man seemed fully aware of cultivators’ danger and cruelty.
“It is the finest tea leaf the lower realm has to offer, though I do not know if it will suit the cultivator’s palate.”
When the tea arrived, the middle-aged man bowed his head once more. Dang Ga-hye looked as if she could not comprehend in the slightest why he was going this far.
It wasn’t as though Han Yuhyeon had been living on fine cuisine in the cultivation world either. He had mostly eaten fasting pills to save time for training.
So the tea the Dang Clan served tasted not merely good but downright luxurious to him.
“Mm, well. For the lower realm, it’s drinkable.”
Of course he couldn’t afford to look like a country bumpkin, so he put on a little air. Even at that unpleasant remark, the middle-aged man looked deeply honored.
“That it suits the cultivator’s taste is the greatest joy for this humble Dang.”
“What’s your name?”
“I am called Dang Ji-sang, O Cultivator.”
“What relation are you to Old Man Dang?”
“Old Man Dang… whom do you mean…?”
“This girl’s father.”
Han Yuhyeon indicated Dang Ga-hye with his chin. Only then did Dang Ji-sang let out a soft exclamation.
“I am his younger brother. He is my elder brother.”
“Ah. But the age gap seems pretty big?”
“There is about a five-year difference between us.”
“Five years?”
Though the memory was already hazy, Han Yuhyeon suddenly recalled Old Man Dang. By face value alone, the man had looked at least seventy.
“How old are you?”
“This year I turn forty-two.”
“Forty-two? Then that Old Man Dang is forty-seven?”
“That would be correct.”
Han Yuhyeon clicked his tongue. Forty-seven was an age when a man still had a fair amount of vitality, even if not in his prime. Right here, the younger brother five years his junior had a glossy, healthy face.
Yet Old Man Dang had looked like a flame on the verge of snuffing out—and he was only forty-seven? Whether he had suffered at the hands of cultivators or simply endured great hardship, there was no way to know.
“So that’s why the daughter is so young. I thought she was a child of his later years.”
“Ga-hye turned twenty this year.”
“I didn’t ask that?”
“Ah, my apologies.”
It had been a casual remark, yet Dang Ji-sang hurriedly tried to take the words back.
“Anyway, I find ‘Old Man Dang’ convenient, so I’ll keep calling him that. No objections?”
“How could there be, O Cultivator.”
As Dang Ji-sang bowed, Dang Ga-hye slowly raised a small hand. She looked exactly like a schoolchild about to ask a question of a fearsome village tutor.
Han Yuhyeon briefly explained the matter between Old Man Dang and himself. The content was simple enough that there was no need to drag it out—he had simply been asked to deliver a Longevity Lock, and he had promised to do so. That was the entire story.
“But then she suddenly started going on about kidnappers and whatnot, so I was a bit surprised.”
Han Yuhyeon shot Dang Ga-hye a look. She flinched and lowered her head.
“I-I apologize. After searching every possible avenue without finding a single trace of my father, suddenly seeing evidence of him… I simply lost sight of everything else. I offer my apologies once more.”
He wondered if she was only apologizing because the middle-aged man beside her was acting so subservient, but there was enough sincerity in her voice. At least she knew how to admit her own mistakes.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t even been particularly startled by his scale-covered face. She seemed like someone with a remarkably high level of awareness who did not discriminate based on appearance. Dang Ji-sang, of course, was simply too afraid of a cultivator to react. It definitely wasn’t that he was letting her off just because she was a beauty.
“Then… in any case, my father is still alive…”
Dang Ga-hye’s voice grew thick with tears. The cultivation world and the lower realm were nearly completely severed; no matter how hard she searched, she could never have found him.
Please do not worry. It has already been nearly fifteen years since I began guiding this formation.
Old Man Dang’s words suddenly came to mind. That meant he had been missing from the lower realm for at least fifteen years.
Dang Ga-hye was twenty, so she must have been torn from her father at the age of five at the latest.
“Well, yeah. He’s living well. Happily, even.”
Since accepting Old Man Dang’s request had been a kindness in the first place, he decided to extend that kindness a little further. How devastated would a daughter be if she learned that her father was now a blind man whose only job was guiding people through a storage warehouse?
“……That can’t be.”
“Hm?”
“That can’t be. Absolutely not.”
When Han Yuhyeon questioned her, Dang Ga-hye looked him straight in the eye and spoke clearly, word by word. At that challenging tone, Dang Ji-sang nearly had a heart attack.
“What rudeness is this before a cultivator!”
Dang Ji-sang’s face went pale, but Dang Ga-hye refused to lower her head and met Han Yuhyeon’s gaze.
“There is no way my father would abandon me and live happily alone. If that place is the paradise the cultivator speaks of, there is no way he would leave me here by myself like this.”
Dang Ga-hye bit her lip. Her voice was trembling. She was barely holding back tears.
If she could speak like that, their father-daughter relationship must have been quite good. But Han Yuhyeon had no idea how Old Man Dang had ended up in the Baekun-pa, so there was nothing more he could say.
“I’m just delivering a message.”
“Of course. Father would have said it that way. So I wouldn’t worry.”
“Yeah. Think whatever you want.”
Sympathy aside, Han Yuhyeon no longer wanted to get involved with these people. This place was So-ui-ju by the cultivation world’s regional divisions. A cultivator from Yeongil-ju meddling with a mortal of So-ui-ju already violated an unwritten rule of the cultivation world.
“Please, please tell me, Cultivator. Where is my father?”
Dang Ga-hye shot to her feet and clasped both of Han Yuhyeon’s hands in her own. Her large eyes were so full of moisture that the slightest touch looked ready to send tears cascading down like a waterfall.
“Stop this at once! That the cultivator is even sparing your life is already an immense mercy!”
Dang Ji-sang seized Dang Ga-hye’s shoulders and forcibly pulled her away. The soft sensation of her hands wrapping around his had felt rather nice. Having that contact with a beauty forcibly interrupted only irritated Han Yuhyeon further.
“Might I ask the cultivator a single question?”
“What?”
Still annoyed at being separated from Dang Ga-hye, Han Yuhyeon’s voice came out naturally surly.
But Dang Ji-sang seemed well accustomed to cultivators’ surly tones and showed no particular reaction.
“Does the cultivator have any connection to the cultivators residing in Seong-do?”
“Seong-do? You mean here?”
“Yes.”
It hadn’t directly affected the game, so he had forgotten, but Yeonhwa Seonrok had such a setting.
Losers who had given up on further cultivation and devoted their remaining lifespans to living large in the lower realm. In the cultivation world they were called by the derogatory term Pesu—discarded cultivators who had stopped cultivating.
“You seem to know a few of them?”
“Yes. By good fortune, I have formed ties with several of them.”
Dang Ji-sang answered. As expected of the uppermost elite among mortals. It was a bit strange that the actual clan head, Dang Ga-hye, didn’t know, but perhaps they simply hadn’t told her because she was young.
Then a thought pierced through Han Yuhyeon’s mind. Right now he was searching for Dragonian NPCs, yet he had no leads and no cultivators who might help—leaving him in a difficult spot.
“Could I meet them?”
If they were Pesu, they might at least provide some kind of lead.
Han Yuhyeon’s eyes lit up.