Chapter 25
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 25
“I will visit you again.”
After bidding farewell to Mun Seong-hak, Lee Hyun stepped out of the Earthfire Cave. His six months of alchemy training had proven far more engaging than he had ever anticipated.
All that remained now was to acquire the pill recipe for the Barrier-Breaking Pill.
Five hundred merit points, is it…?
Lee Hyun pulled out his Retainer Token once more, turning it over in his hand.
His immediate path forward was set.
* * *
One year later.
Tunnel No. 1.
Lee Hyun had settled back into the steady rhythm of a Battlefield Retainer, quietly returning to Tunnel No. 1 whenever he took leave from the front.
As was his routine, he carefully inspected each of his spirit fields before finally harvesting a clutch of ripe Yin Water Lotus seedpods and several Rock Honey Peaches.
Crunch—
He bit into a plump Rock Honey Peach. A rush of crisp, invigorating sweetness flooded his mouth, washing straight down through his limbs.
“Mmm…”
Whenever he came across spirit insect eggs, stray larvae, or dead pests, he made a habit of tossing them into the stone breeding box he had carved out in the martial training ground, essentially treating it like a waste bin.
Today was no different. Having scooped up a handful of small spirit insects and unhatched eggs from spirit field No. 1-6, Lee Hyun walked over to the breeding box and pushed back the heavy stone lid.
Scrape—
“…Hm?”
His hand froze mid-motion.
Deep inside the box, something was staring back at him.
“What in the world are you lot?”
Lee Hyun formed a hand seal and cast the Glimmer Spell.
A fist-sized orb of soft luminescence manifested in the air, floating gently over the opening and bathing the dark interior in clear, steady light.
Huddled together on a flat shard of stone were five small, remarkably plump creatures. Short, stubby legs poked out from underneath round bodies, and pairs of translucent wings—comically small compared to their hefty frames—lay neatly folded against their backs.
Most striking of all was their fur. Thick, downy coats of alternating pale gold and pitch-black bands covered them from head to rear. On either side of their blunt, rounded heads sat two jet-black compound eyes, unusually large, glossy, and bright.
What are these… Bumblebees? Do bumblebees even exist in this world? Even if they did, there’s no way ordinary insects could survive down here…
They looked like bumblebees bred to be as round and spherical as physically possible.
With the lid now off, all five creatures propped their stubby front legs against the stone wall. Their antennae twitched and perked in perfect unison, looking for all the world like a nest of fledglings begging their mother for food.
A faint thread of spiritual qi unmistakably pulsed through their little frames. It was so subtle, however, that when he had casually swept the area with his Qi-Observation Technique from outside the box, the ambient spiritual energy of the surrounding earth and the dead pests had masked it completely.
Did I toss something like this in here before?
He racked his memory, but nothing came to mind.
Did an egg get swept in with the rest of the debris?
Curious, Lee Hyun dropped a dead spirit insect into the center of the box.
Thud.
In an instant, five pairs of antennae locked onto the carcass.
From the mouthparts of the nearest creature, a bead of clear fluid shot out with the force of a sling-stone.
Thwip!
The moment it struck the dead insect, the fluid snapped into tough, tensile threads.
Thwip! Thwip!
The remaining four chimed in without missing a beat. Within mere breaths, the dead insect was bound tightly in a web of translucent, sticky mucus. The fluffy creatures immediately scrambled over it, their miniature jaws working in a frenzy as they tore through its chitinous shell.
Crunch, crunch, munch.
“You eat other bugs?”
Come to think of it, nearly everything he had thrown into the box over the past year consisted of dead pests, stray larvae, and crushed eggs. That explained how they had survived in such a confined space—they had thrived by preying upon the scraps.
After a moment’s thought, Lee Hyun reached down and carefully pinched the smallest of the brood between two fingers. Startled, its tiny wings buzzed furiously, yet it made no move to bite him or spit its sticky thread. Instead, it paddled its short legs through the air before calmly crawling onto the back of his hand.
“Quite fearless, aren’t you?”
Looking at it up close, it was surprisingly endearing. Its round body caused its plump rear to wobble side to side with every step, and because its wings were vastly undersized, it could only hover a chi or two off his palm before gently drifting back down like a dandelion seed.
I have no idea what species of spirit insect this is. I’ll just call them Fluffy Bees for now. Still, do they only feed on other bugs, or do they eat spirit plants as well?
To test them, Lee Hyun carried the creature over to spirit field No. 1-7 and placed it gently onto a lower branch of a Rock Honey Peach tree. A rich, sweet fragrance drifted from the ripening fruits hanging nearby.
The Fluffy Bee’s antennae twitched.
Twitch.
Then it simply waddled past the fruit without a second glance.
Lee Hyun took out a small knife, sliced off a sliver of ripe peach, and laid the exposed, juicy flesh directly in front of it. The bee tapped the fruit once with its antennae, then turned clean around and ambled away.
It was the exact same story at the underground pool where the Yin Water Lotuses grew. Even when he split open a fresh seedpod and set a tender lotus seed right by its nose, the creature showed zero interest.
Yet as it waddled along the broad surface of a floating lotus leaf, its antennae suddenly snapped upright.
Thwip!
A thread of mucus shot straight toward the underside of an adjacent leaf. A grain-sized pest nestled in the shadows was instantly snared by the sticky fluid, and the Fluffy Bee hurried over, greedily devouring the intruder in seconds.
“Well now.”
Lee Hyun smiled faintly. Next, he made his way to spirit field No. 1-1.
The moment he unsealed the heavy stone door, a thick, medicinal reek rolled out, accompanied by an acrid cloud of toxic miasma. Faint purple dust drifted through the air—poisonous pollen shed by mature Bone-Corroding Flowers and Purple Poison Orchids.
Lee Hyun set the Fluffy Bee down on the loose soil just past the threshold.
Can you survive this kind of venom too?
The creature pulled its legs in slightly as a fine dusting of toxic pollen from a nearby Bone-Corroding Flower settled onto its golden coat.
Lee Hyun focused his gaze, examining its internal meridians with the Qi-Observation Technique.
Its aura hasn’t fluctuated at all.
Half an hour drifted by.
The little creature remained entirely unaffected. Looking almost nonchalant, it ambled deeper into the garden, strolling right beneath the long, drooping leaves of the Purple Poison Orchids and circling around the roots of the Yin Soul Grass. It even rolled around in the loose dirt near an Earth Vein Flower, yet not once did it nibble on a single leaf or stalk.
Could it really be…?
Crouching low, Lee Hyun silently trailed behind it.
Suddenly, the Fluffy Bee came to a halt. Both of its antennae angled sharply toward the soil beneath its feet.
Thwip!
A glob of mucus plunged straight into the loose dirt. With rapid, frantic sweeps of its stubby front legs, the bee excavated the earth.
Buried just beneath the surface was a small cluster of three translucent spirit insect eggs.
In the blink of an eye, one of the eggs vanished down its throat.
Lee Hyun’s eyes lit up with genuine delight.
This little fellow… Couldn’t I use them as natural guardians for the spirit fields?
Of course, drawing a definitive conclusion from a single afternoon’s observation was reckless. It was entirely possible the creature had spared the plants simply because it wasn’t starving, or perhaps its dietary preferences would shift drastically once it reached another stage of its lifecycle.
For the time being, Lee Hyun decided to leave just that single bee inside spirit field No. 1-5 to observe it long-term.
“Try living here for a while.”
The Fluffy Bee twitched its antennae, almost as if offering a casual salute.
Lee Hyun sealed the stone door shut.
* * *
Over the years that followed, Lee Hyun observed the creatures meticulously whenever he returned to Tunnel No. 1 on leave.
The results far surpassed his initial hopes. They exhibited an overwhelming, near-exclusive preference for living spirit insects and eggs; even when deliberately starved for days on end, they refused to take a single bite of the surrounding spirit flora. Furthermore, they went about their business inside the toxic miasmas of the Bone-Corroding Flowers and Purple Poison Orchids as though the lethal fumes were nothing more than a fresh spring breeze.
Another fascinating trait was how remarkably attached the Fluffy Bees grew to him over time.
Whenever he lifted the lid of the breeding box, they would scramble up to the rim even if he held no food in his hands. If he reached down, several would eagerly climb onto his fingers or burrow into the folds of his sleeves. Having tossed food into their enclosure for so long, they had clearly come to associate his unique scent and spiritual power with nourishment and safety.
Naturally, not every individual was born gentle. Every now and then, a newly hatched bee would snap aggressively at his finger or spit mucus in an attempt to escape into the tunnels.
Those, he culled without hesitation. He preserved only the calm, docile ones that hunted garden pests obediently.
As the years rolled on, an unexpected transformation took place. While their numbers naturally rose and fell through seasonal cycles, nearly all the newly hatched young grew noticeably more docile than the generation before them.
Whenever Lee Hyun reached out his hand, dozens of bees would clamber onto his skin entirely of their own accord.
Could it be because I’ve spent years selectively breeding only the compliant ones?
It reminded him of the silver fox domestication experiments he had read about in his past life. By consistently breeding only the individuals with the lowest aggression toward humans, a wild species had developed a profound, dog-like affinity for mankind within merely a handful of generations.
Without even intending to, he had achieved something remarkably similar with a subterranean spirit insect.
He still could not map out their precise reproductive cycle, biological lifespan, or developmental stages. His duties as a Battlefield Retainer kept him away from the tunnels for long stretches, and he possessed no formal foundational knowledge regarding spirit insect rearing to begin with.
Even so, one thing was beyond dispute: they were extraordinarily useful caretakers for his underground gardens.
Before long, Lee Hyun had introduced small colonies across all his plots, from spirit field No. 1-1 to No. 1-7. Where he had once spent painstaking hours inspecting every single leaf, root, and branch for parasitic blights, the bees now maintained the fields on their own. Harmful pests dwindled to near extinction.
Now, whenever he set foot inside a spirit field, several fuzzy furballs would come buzzing clumsily through the air, perching happily on his shoulders or nesting into his hair.
Plop.
A tiny, warm drop landed against his collar.
Lee Hyun’s brow twitched. “…Don’t shit on me.”
* * *
Traveling back and forth between the blood-soaked front lines and the quiet solitude of Tunnel No. 1, fifteen full years drifted by in his service as a Battlefield Retainer.
During that span, Lee Hyun visited not only Hoean Fort but dozens of fortified garrisons stretching across the southern border. True monsters of the Profound Realm like Jo Byeong-ak made their presence known on occasion, and border skirmishes between the Heavenly Yang Kingdom and the Untaek Kingdom flared, subsided, and erupted anew without end.
He ran down enemy scouts, clashed with infiltrating masters in midnight ambushes, reinforced defensive outposts on the brink of collapse, and crushed squads of elite martial artists targeting rear supply depots.
Yet once Lee Hyun realized that his martial prowess had grown somewhat absurd, he deliberately pulled his punches, ensuring he never drastically tilted the overarching scales of war between the two mortal nations. He was well aware that causing too massive an upheaval in a mortal conflict risked drawing the unwanted scrutiny of the Earth Kingdom’s cultivation sects.
Even with his measured restraint, the passing years saw his accumulated merit points steadily climb past six hundred. It was more than enough to claim the Barrier-Breaking Pill recipe he had set his sights on all those years ago, leaving over a hundred points to spare.
Merit points, however, were far from the only spoils he had gathered.
The sheer volume of martial arts manuals that had passed through his hands as he traversed the southern battlefields was beyond counting. There were secret scrolls stripped from the corpses of fallen warriors, hard-won family arts surrendered by captured experts bargaining desperately for their lives, and profound insights shared by grateful martial artists whose lives Lee Hyun had saved in the fray.
In the beginning, he had hungrily studied almost any manual that caught his interest. Yet as his combat experience deepened and his discernment sharpened, he naturally learned to separate the precious jade from the worthless stone. Nowadays, he wouldn’t spare a second glance for anything that fell short of a supreme art forged by a genuine Profound Realm master.
* * *
In a secluded mountain basin roughly a hundred li north of Hoean Fort lay a wide, long-abandoned stone clearing.
Thump!
The instant Lee Hyun’s right foot slammed against the hard-packed earth, his entire frame surged forward half a zhang like an arrow loosed from a bow.
Yet a second stride never came.
His lead toe scraped diagonally across the dirt, killing his massive forward momentum in an instant as if shattering the very laws of inertia. In the next breath, he slid a full chi to the left. He advanced half a step, dropped his center of gravity, snapped his waist, and darted diagonally back to the right.
Sharp, explosive maneuvers linked together in an unbroken, dizzying chain.
The distance crossed in any single motion was two zhang at most, with many spanning less than half a step. Yet within the brief span of a single breath, Lee Hyun’s physical position shifted more than half a dozen times, leaving blurred afterimages in his wake.
Square-Inch Step.
Of the countless footwork manuals Lee Hyun had collected over the years, this was the supreme art he judged utterly peerless for close-quarters mortal combat.
The creator of the Square-Inch Step was Yu Baek-cheon, a legendary Profound Realm martial artist who had carved out a terrifying reputation across the Heavenly Yang Kingdom sixty years ago. Having spent his youth spearheading naval invasions against the Untaek Kingdom, Yu Baek-cheon had fought for decades upon rocking ship decks and cramped gangways. As a result, he held utter contempt for traditional lightness arts that only showed their worth across vast, open plains.
The absolute core of the Square-Inch Step lay in explosive micro-acceleration, bone-snapping halts, minute directional shifts within a chi or two, seamless transitional angles, and an instantaneous ability to recover balance from broken postures.
Lee Hyun surged forward like a gale, and then—
Whoosh!
In the blink of an eye, he slid laterally, his torso snapping upright. Had an opponent stood before him with a blade raised, Lee Hyun would have effortlessly slipped past their strike while simultaneously driving himself deep inside their sword guard.
“Not bad at all.”
The Square-Inch Step suited Lee Hyun and his Primordial Unity Body down to the marrow.
Ordinary martial artists had to dredge internal energy from their dantian, guiding it through precise meridians down into their legs to fuel their steps. Lee Hyun, however, possessed Primordial Unity True Qi suffused through every fiber of his flesh, bone, and blood; he could manifest explosive power at any designated point on his body in an instant.
Furthermore, his baseline physical strength and skeletal density were leagues beyond anything a mortal martial artist could ever hope to fathom.
Though his conceptual philosophy regarding the Square-Inch Step had yet to reach the veteran heights of Yu Baek-cheon’s, his raw, overt execution of the technique had already far eclipsed that of its creator.
Swish—
Having swept across the clearing like a phantom, Lee Hyun came to an abrupt, silent halt.
Clang!
From the scabbard at his waist, he smoothly drew a plain iron sword—standard-issue military armament typically carried by Untaek Kingdom infantry.
Alongside the Square-Inch Step, the martial art Lee Hyun had poured the greatest effort into mastering was the Six Swords of the Single Ultimate.
This sword art, too, had been chosen after ruthlessly comparing the secret techniques of dozens of Profound Realm masters.
Its creator was Jin Baek-san, an elite Profound Realm swordsman renowned across the Heavenly Yang Kingdom three decades ago as the Iron Sword Old Man.
Unlike his peers, Jin Baek-san had never possessed particularly deep or boundless internal energy. Instead, he had dedicated his entire life to mastering a single martial doctrine: One Point Breaks the Surface—the absolute condensation of force, focusing an entire reserve of energy into a single, microscopic point to unleash devastating, armor-shattering lethality.
The ultimate fruition of that lifelong obsession was the Six Swords of the Single Ultimate. Battle records from his twilight years even claimed he had shattered the protective spiritual barrier of a late Qi Refining Stage cultivator with a single sword strike, inflicting near-fatal wounds upon the immortal.
“Hoo.”
Lee Hyun exhaled slowly. A cold, pale radiance began to ripple across the edge of the ordinary iron blade.
To an untrained eye, it looked nearly identical to the sword aura manifested by mortal martial arts masters, yet its fundamental essence was entirely distinct. What coated Lee Hyun’s blade was pure, refined spiritual power.
Drawing inspiration from countless sword manuals, Lee Hyun had succeeded in mimicking the principles of sword aura using pure spiritual power. For convenience, he simply referred to it as spiritual aura.
Channeling the core principles of the Six Swords of the Single Ultimate, he compressed that spiritual aura along the razor edge of the blade, condensing it down until the air around the steel began to hum with terrifying tension.
Flash!
The iron sword severed the empty air.
A beam of pale spiritual aura, no thicker than a man’s finger, erupted from the tip of the blade. It crossed the distance in a fraction of an instant, boring a clean, perfectly smooth puncture straight through the center of a solid cliff face more than ten zhang away. The tunnel plunged so deep into the rock that its far end was lost in pitch darkness.
“Hm.”
Lee Hyun lowered the blade, looking at the stone dust trickling from the puncture.
Martial arts truly suit me. Is it because of the Primordial Unity Body…? Having tempered every inch of my physical vessel, I’m essentially in the exact same position as a Body-Refining Cultivator.
A Body-Refining Cultivator was someone who fortified their physical form through grueling Body-Refining Arts. Such cultivators were inherently monstrous in close-quarters melee, naturally sharing vast common ground with mortal martial artists.
I’ll study the rest of the manuals slowly at my own pace.
The ultimate arts left behind by Profound Realm masters were undeniably vast; mastering all of them in a brief window of time was an impossible dream for any mortal. It was only because Lee Hyun, as a cultivator, possessed cognitive focus, memory retention, and physical recovery vastly superior to mortal men that he had managed to progress this far so quickly.
Lee Hyun turned, slowly casting his gaze across the sprawling mountains of the southern border.
He had extracted nearly everything he had come to find in the Untaek Kingdom. He had gained a solid foundation in alchemy, mastered a lethal array of martial arts, and tempered his instincts through countless real-life battles. He had also stockpiled more than enough merit points to claim the Barrier-Breaking Pill recipe he needed.
There was no longer any reason to linger.
“It’s time to move on.”