The Secrets of the Old Estate
Now then, let's see how you make your move.
Having stepped out of Won'am Clinic, Namgung Yun took up a vantage point and kept close watch over the building.
I should be dead, yet I walked in completely hale and hearty, even claiming to have felt a surge of vitality—an effect that the Seven-Fold Trackless Poison could never produce.
None of this could possibly have factored into Seo Won-gil's calculations.
On top of that, I let slip that I'd caught wind of a lead regarding the serial child disappearances.
Rattled to such an extent, the physician would have no choice but to act.
Yun's prediction proved unerring. Before long, Seo Won-gil finally slipped out through the clinic doors.
Erasing his presence entirely, Yun began tailing the man. Seo Won-gil exited the city walls and marched onward without looking back.
That way is...
Directly ahead of the physician, Mount Cheonju cast its colossal shadow across the earth.
Yun glanced up at the sky. The sun lingered near the horizon, spilling a deep, bloody crimson over the heavens. Night would fall soon, and darkness always swallowed mountain trails far faster than the open plains. Venturing into Mount Cheonju at such an hour would strike anyone as glaringly suspicious.
After following him along the winding paths for some time, Yun watched Seo Won-gil come to a halt before an expansive manor.
This place...
Dusk had surrendered to twilight, leaving only the pale sliver of moonlight to distinguish shapes, but Yun easily took in the full layout of the estate by circulating his internal energy to his eyes. It was remarkably vast. Several detached houses surrounded the main compound, almost resembling a self-contained hamlet. Yet decades of neglect had left the structures weathered and desolate, with several pavilions reduced to heaps of rotting timber and crumbled masonry.
A dormant memory surfaced in Yun's mind.
The ancestral home of the Namgung Clan.
This was the very cradle where the Namgung Clan had first planted its roots. While the clan currently reigned from its stronghold at the foot of Mount Cheonju, their ancestors had originally nested deep within the mountain itself. Until a few decades ago, the clan had maintained the estate out of respect for their heritage, but it had since been utterly abandoned.
Cunning bastard.
Owing to the Namgung Clan's ruthless notoriety, commoners went out of their way to avoid anything associated with the family name, and this old estate was no exception. Yet the clan itself paid the place no heed whatsoever. A desolate sanctuary where no living soul dared tread—it made for a flawless hideout.
Creak!
The long-neglected gate swung inward with a harrowing shriek. Seo Won-gil slipped inside, and Yun followed in his wake like a silent specter.
Striding with purpose, Seo Won-gil made a beeline for the grandest pavilion in the compound, likely the former quarters of the clan patriarch. He squeezed through a door dangling askew on rusted hinges.
Skrrrk! Clack!
From within the darkened structure came the muffled grind of shifting machinery.
A hidden mechanism?
For the personal chambers of a great family's patriarch, the existence of one or two secret vaults was hardly a surprise. The sound had been so faint that Yun would never have caught it without straining his qi-enhanced hearing, and the noise itself was undoubtedly due to centuries of accumulated grime wearing on the gears. Another grinding vibration echoed, and Seo Won-gil's presence vanished completely from within the pavilion.
Yun advanced cautiously into the building.
Pale moonlight filtered through sashless frames. The interior was just as ruined as the outside promised. Decayed furniture stood entombed beneath blankets of thick dust, while mysterious dark stains told silent tales of elapsed decades. Cobwebs stretched across every corner, proclaiming that humans no longer held dominion here. Everything bore the unmistakable hallmarks of long abandonment.
Except for the floor.
A chaotic mess of overlapping footprints betrayed the recent passage of uninvited guests.
This way.
Tracking the origin of the mechanical sound, Yun arrived at what must have been the patriarch's master bedchamber, judging by the half-collapsed canopy bed in the center. The dust on the flagstones here was similarly trampled.
Trying to obscure his tracks in his own clumsy way.
He had noticed numerous footprints scattered throughout the corridors on his way in. Without bothering to check every room, Yun could guess that the entire estate had been deliberately disturbed like this. It was common knowledge that vagrants, beggars, and rogue thugs often squatted in derelict estates, and scattering tracks served as a crude disguise. While ordinary people feared this mountain, an investigator would assume reckless drifters had made camp here rather than suspect a deliberate secret entrance.
Yun scrutinized the chamber with a practiced eye, quickly spotting faint abrasions near the bedframe.
The trigger to the mechanism should be somewhere around here.
He was no novice when it came to hidden arrays and mechanical contraptions. During his past life's conquest of the Central Plains as the Heavenly Demon, he had encountered them until he was sick of them. The great sects had deployed every conceivable device under heaven to halt his march, whether designed for lethal ambushes or desperate subterfuge. Though he could not rival a master craftsman, uncovering a hidden switch was trivial once he knew a mechanism existed—especially in an abandoned room where even a light touch disturbed centuries of dust.
Found it.
One carved ornamental boss on the headboard possessed a suspiciously polished sheen. Yun pressed it firmly.
A dull rattle of counterweights resonated beneath the floor, and a section of flagstones beneath the bed slid back to expose a subterranean shaft. The opening gaped like the black maw of a predatory beast. Down there lay the answers he had spent days hunting for.
Yun lowered himself into the dark abyss.
The entrance led into a long, descending stone corridor.
As expected, an escape tunnel carved out for worst-case scenarios.
Those who lived by the blade in the martial world accumulated debts of blood and vengeance at every turn. Whether great or small, every sect harbored bitter enemies. When faced with natural rivals like the Unorthodox faction or the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, the inclusion of an escape route was standard practice.
I saw plenty of them back then.
During the Cult's invasion, countless Central Plains sects had spirited their families and young disciples away through subterranean corridors. But such cowardly precautions belonged solely to the fragile sects of the Central Plains. The Heavenly Demon Divine Cult possessed no such retreats. If the enemy ever managed to breach the sacred grounds of the Cult, it meant absolute defeat—and in such an hour, the only honorable course was to pay homage to the victor's strength, fight to the very last breath, and humbly fade into the pages of history.
Hypocritical righteous bastards, predictable as ever.
Flickering oil lamps hung at sparse intervals along the stone walls, casting long shadows that confirmed the passage was in active use. After walking a short distance, Yun slowed his pace.
A door.
It did not lead to the surface. It appeared the old patriarchs had carved out a private sanctuary alongside the escape route. Through the ajar iron-studded door, faint lamplight and an abrasive voice drifted out into the hallway.
"Let me out of here this instant!"
Hm?
The voice sounded strangely familiar—shrill, arrogant, and thoroughly deserving of a fist to the jaw.
"How dare you lock up a scion of the great Namgung Clan! Do you have any idea what kind of retribution awaits you?!"
Isn't that Namgung Geol?
The young hothead who had picked a fight with Yun only to be beaten to a pulp. Rumor had it the boy had thrown himself into frenzied cultivation ever since.
I thought he had at least an ounce of potential after that. What the hell is he doing down here?
"I said open this damn door right now!"
Noisy little brat.
The second occupant of the chamber evidently shared Yun's sentiment, as an irritated voice rasped in reply.
"You are an insufferably loud whelp."
Seo Won-gil.
"Young as you are, do you truly fail to comprehend your own predicament?"
"You're the one who doesn't understand! You've laid your filthy hands on the great Namgung Clan!"
He has plenty of venom, but his judgment is utterly infantile.
Geol had clearly been abducted, and his captor was fully aware of his lineage. How could hollow bluster possibly intimidate a kidnapper who knowingly targeted a Namgung scion? The boy was squandering his breath and stamina for nothing. While screaming like a madman could theoretically serve as a diversion, Yun knew Geol was nowhere near cunning enough to orchestrate such a ploy.
The clan was in an unusual uproar this morning. Did it happen because this idiot went missing?
Gliding silently to the threshold, Yun peered through the sliver between door and frame. His angle was restricted, preventing a full view of the chamber, but he could clearly observe Seo Won-gil and Namgung Geol. The boy was locked inside a newly erected iron cage bolted directly into the stone wall, while the physician stood outside the bars, glaring down at him. It appeared Seo Won-gil had installed the cage himself.
A secret chamber is one thing, but if the orthodox patriarchs had built a torture dungeon in their own house, I would have been thoroughly disgusted. Good to see it wasn't them.
Yet what truly caught Yun's eye was not the cage.
Coffins...
Arranged in neat rows across the center of the chamber were over a dozen plain wooden coffins. The sight alone was enough to send an icy chill crawling down the spine of even a hardened warrior. Worse still, they were distinctly smaller than adult size.
The missing children of the city immediately flashed through Yun's mind.
Am I too late? he clicked his tongue inwardly.
"I cannot fathom why you rage so," Seo Won-gil murmured, casually tapping the lid of a nearby coffin. "I am merely preparing to grant you what you came seeking."
Though Geol continued to yell, the bravado was merely a desperate shield against overwhelming terror. The moment his eyes followed Seo Won-gil's fingers to the wooden caskets, all color drained from his face.
"Wh-what nonsense are you spewing?"
"You stormed into my clinic demanding the secret behind how Namgung Yun gained his newfound might, and now you feign ignorance? It is far too late for that."
...What an absolute dumbass.
Yun could find no other words for it. The boy had apparently convinced himself that Seo Won-gil was some kind of hidden master or the source of a miraculous encounter that had elevated Yun's martial prowess.
Well, technically speaking, he isn't entirely wrong.
It was Seo Won-gil's botched batch of Seven-Fold Trackless Poison that had extinguished the original Namgung Yun's soul and awakened the Heavenly Demon within this flesh. Strictly speaking, the physician had been a miraculous encounter of sorts—just not the kind Geol was imagining.
"In any case, I must offer my gratitude for your idiocy," Seo Won-gil chuckled, his shoulders shaking with grotesque amusement. "Thanks to your impatience, I have secured a prime specimen from the Namgung bloodline. The subject I originally earmarked proved a failure, but to think fresh raw material would deliver itself right into my lap."
That 'failure' he's talking about must be me.
"And out of base greed to keep this miraculous encounter to yourself, you crept out in secret without breathing a word to your elders. Hehehe, you truly are a blessing. To think an utter fool like you is hailed as the future of the Namgung Clan. It makes their impending ruin all too easy to foresee."
Yun mentally parted ways with the physician on that point.
Future? What future? The clan is already rotten to the marrow right now.
"Now then, let us waste no more time," Seo Won-gil said, clapping his hands together. "Even if you slunk here in secret, I cannot evade the Namgung Clan's dogs forever if I linger in this mountain. I must relocate my workshop soon."
The physician raised a hand.
From the shadows beyond the door's blind spot, several silhouettes stepped forward.
What are those?
Yun had sensed them the moment he approached—an unnatural, suffocating chill that felt wholly discordant with living humans. Now that they entered the light, the wrongness became glaringly apparent.
Their faces were completely devoid of expression. No matter how callous or emotionless a human being might be, some faint flicker of life or intent invariably showed in their gaze. Even in his past life, when Yun had been raised as a living weapon within the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult and brainwashed until his emotions were nearly cauterized, he had never possessed eyes like that.
The figures stepping into the lamplight were different.
They look like walking corpses.
Yun could find no other description to fit what he was seeing.