To the Gate
The banquet had begun.
A cultivator walking the Path of Sound—formally known as the Path of Rhythm and Pitch—had been invited to play. As the bow drew across the strings, a wondrous melody unfurled through the hall. Spirit Culinary Masters set freshly prepared dishes upon the banquet tables. Laughter from those who had raced here with a single shared purpose filled the venue to the brim.
A Foundation Establishment banquet existed for one reason alone: to feast and rejoice. And so the guests ate and drank their fill, raising their cups in praise of Eun Seolhwa, who had ascended to Foundation Establishment at last.
"Seolhwa, fellow Daoist—no, it's Senior Sister now! May your path of cultivation never falter!"
"Foundation Establishment at such a tender age… truly, a blessing upon all of humankind!"
Most of the cultivators packing the first floor stood at the mid-to-late Qi Refinement Stage. They had come simply to enjoy the celebration, and so they laughed and chattered without a care in the world.
The second floor, however, was another matter entirely. There, a host of Foundation Establishment cultivators and a scant handful of Peak Qi Refinement masters barely glanced at the food, offering only the occasional restrained chuckle. The atmosphere was thin ice underfoot.
And every bit of that tension traced back to a single man.
"Kuheok!"
A hundred-liter cask of liquor—worth several hundred thousand credits at the least—tipped end over end, and a cascading waterfall of amber liquid poured out. A vast mouth caught every last drop without spilling a single one. Thud. Another emptied cask rolled across the floor.
Seo Seongrak wiped his mouth and hoisted yet another brimming barrel.
"Keh. Not bad. Nain, what are you standing around for? Have a drink."
"Ah—haha."
Crrrk.
One hand held the cask; the other clamped down on Geumhae's slender shoulder like a tree branch. The rest of the siblings had already fled to a safe distance, watching as if it were a show. Only Decia still stood at Nain's side.
Nain was dying inside.
Why me? Why the hell is this lunatic of a grandfather even here?!
She wanted to scream. Inside, she had already howled hundreds of times over. The moment she tried to step away and make a break for it—
"Ah-ah. And just where do you think you're going?"
Crunch.
An invisible force crushed down on her shoulder. Her knees folded of their own accord, settling her demurely at Seo Seongrak's side. Her neck bowed with it, her entire body arranged into the posture of an attentive listener.
Bones compressed. Muscle fibers popped and snapped. It was a masterwork of spiritual force, precise and merciless. At least Geumhae's other senses—sight aside—weren't synced. Small mercies.
The old man had always been like this. Even when she was little, he had singled Nain out for endless torment.
She knew the reason, of course—he'd told her himself. Among all the siblings, she had the least talent, but her heart toward the cultivation path was the one he valued most. So he subjected her to training that bordered on torture. It never actually helped. It only hurt.
Pressure-adaptation drills—surviving bare-bodied in the vacuum of space. Sealed inside a steel drum and dropped ten thousand meters into the deep sea, forcing her body to regulate its own oxygen saturation while drowning in terror. Cast alive into a seething volcanic crater to endure the heat of magma.
Naturally, you died. Even a late-stage Qi Refinement cultivator couldn't survive those environments unprepared. And yet Seo Seongrak, with his overwhelming spiritual force, kept Nain alive every time—hovering right on the knife-edge between life and death.
Pain is the fundamental condition of true enlightenment. Did you make plenty of friends down below?
Nain ground her teeth in silence. Using spiritual force to torment the weak—how was that the mark of a noble Foundation Establishment cultivator?
An old-school body-worshipper. A mental-fortitude absolutist who believed that with a strong enough will, nothing was impossible. And an extreme masochist who enjoyed pain itself.
The worst!
Their natures were polar opposites down to the marrow. Once Nain had grown old enough to think for herself, she had done everything possible to avoid him. Years had passed without a single meeting.
And today, the natural disaster had finally caught up with her.
"Tsk, tsk. Sitting indoors fiddling with scraps of paper—that's why you've gone soft. Your spiritual energy is solid enough, but the body… now that's another story."
A divine sense as heavy and hard as diamond raked over her body from every angle. The sickening sensation made her want to shudder, but even that wasn't permitted. Nain cast a desperate look toward Decia, pleading for rescue.
Help me…!
Decia was standing right there—but she was occupied with social obligations of her own. As heir to the Geumdan Sect, networking was essential. She was busy making introductions with various Foundation Establishment cultivators through Eun Seolhwa as a bridge.
In the end, there was no one to save Nain. In a quiet, awkward corner of a lively banquet hall, she was stuck listening to the ramblings of an old man counting down the days until he died.
And yet… strangely, it wasn't entirely terrible.
Ssshh.
The invisible grip crushing her shoulder scattered like a lie. As her breathing returned, Geumhae's shoulders rose and fell in a small shudder.
"You've had unusual eyes since you were small. Haven't changed a bit, even after all this time."
His voice was oddly composed—not a trace of madness in it. The divine sense withdrew, and freedom returned to her body.
Pwah.
With her mouth free again, Nain stuck out her lower lip.
"…Are you going to drag me off and torture me again? I won't go quietly this time."
Boom!
A liquor cask easily weighing hundreds of kilos slammed into the floor. Had Geumhae been standing beneath it, she would have been flattened on the spot. Seo Seongrak threw back his head and laughed.
"Me? You? Hahaha! Forget it, forget it. Do that now and my daughter would beat me to death. You don't know, do you? Seolhwa nearly killed me once when she was little. The way that child turned so vicious and sharp just because I'd touched her kid… honestly…"
"…Mother, when she was little?"
Nain's interest pricked up at the mention of her mother.
Seo Seongrak snorted.
"She only mellowed out after she met you lot. As a kid she was pure porcupine. I never understood it, but…"
His thick finger pointed toward Nain's siblings, gathered among themselves and chatting, still struggling to adjust to the frozen atmosphere.
"Most of them are trash. Refuse not even worth challenging Foundation Establishment. Only you and Decia were different. The youngest had talent. You were extraordinary."
Nain sighed, stroking Pou on the soft sofa back in her real body. Thank heaven her true self was nowhere near this banquet hall.
"Me? More of that mental-strength nonsense? It never did anything. It just hurt like hell."
She had learned that the hard way, swimming through lava. Spiritual roots and constitution weren't the sum total of talent. The architecture of a mind that could adapt to extremes, the innate performance of the body—those, too, were unmistakably within talent's domain.
And in those respects, Nain had none. Dropped in lava, she was just someone dropped in lava. Cast into space, she was just a drifting cosmic orphan. No grand epiphany. Only miserable self-reproach.
"Keh. No effect, you say. You have no idea how an ordinary person reacts in those situations."
Seo Seongrak's eyes suddenly went black as the abyss of deep space. Nain's gaze was dragged in against her will. She swallowed hard at the sheer inhumanity of a Foundation Establishment cultivator.
"Truly dense. I don't even know how you managed to reach Qi Refinement. And yet for Foundation Establishment, you actually have a chance…"
His mouth curved into a grotesque crescent.
"Plenty of weaklings whose brains short out from a single bullet hole in the body. Stick their heads in boiling water and they scream—beg for mercy, say they're sorry, plead for it to stop."
Trash like that has no right to call themselves cultivators. Seo Seongrak tipped back more liquor and clicked his tongue. Nain tilted her head.
Huh. Was it really that bad?
…Is that supposed to be so hard?
It hurt, yes—horribly. But she had never felt her mind collapse the way he described. Surely anyone could endure that much?
If your heart toward the cultivation path was true, of course you could hold on.
"You thought any cultivator worth the name should be able to handle that much, didn't you? So then—am I frightening? Terrifying? Do I make you want to wet yourself just by looking at me?"
Before she knew it, Nain was fully absorbed in the conversation with her grandfather. The noise of the banquet hall receded, and only his figure—like a living mountain—filled her vision.
At his question, Nain fell silent, as if her mouth were full of honey. She looked honestly into herself.
Frightening? Of course he was frightening. Terrifying? The thought of being thrown into space or lava again made her skin crawl. Want to wet herself just looking at him?
…That part, not really.
On the plush sofa, Pou flipped belly-up with a contented purr under Nain's soft hand. The peaceful, cozy sensation of her real body layered strangely over Geumhae's field of view.
She spoke her honest impression.
"H-honestly, not that much. It's more like… I'm annoyed and I want to avoid whatever next insane, common-sense-defying thing you're going to put me through…"
"That, you idiot, is what extraordinary means."
Seo Seongrak flung the cask aside, stretched out his arm, and clenched his fist.
CRACK!
Hundreds of liquor barrels stacked in a careless mountain were yanked into a single point and crushed without mercy. Tap. Smaller and smaller, until a coin-sized scrap of wood settled onto the floor.
BOOM!
The weight of tens of tons compressed into that tiny fragment made the entire vast banquet hall shudder.
"They're here. Always so damn slow."
Tap, tap. Seo Seongrak dusted off his hands and looked up. Nain, still dazed by the overwhelming display, lifted her head with the same vacant expression.
Something enormous—too vast to take in at a glance—was drifting across the sky.
Wooooom…
Flutter—
The thing was the size of a warship, yet thin and smooth as paper, riding the night wind in natural undulations that belied its crushing mass. Blue-etched talisman script glowed across its surface like a galaxy strewn over the dark sky. A single, instinctive word flashed through Nain's mind.
"A… a talisman?"
"Good. At least you haven't walked the path for nothing. Well then—I'm off. The liquor was decent."
The last words weren't meant for Nain. Eun Seolhwa, surrounded by Decia and several other Foundation Establishment cultivators, looked their way and gave a slight nod. A faint curve touched her lips.
Whoosh!
"Wha—?!"
Seo Seongrak snatched Nain around the waist like a sack of grain and kicked off the floor.
KRAANG!
A single leap—nothing more—and the banquet hall's solid floor bore a crater as deep as a meteor strike, shards flying.
"Kyaaaaaah!"
Nain screamed. The raw wind and the sheer reality of it made her real body flinch on the sofa, even though she was nowhere near the scene. She thrashed inside Seo Seongrak's arm, thicker than rebar.
"Hm. Were you always this much of a little girl? Memory's fuzzy. Wonder why."
Using pure leg strength alone, Seo Seongrak rocketed hundreds of meters skyward and alighted lightly atop the colossal talisman gliding through the air. Nain sprawled across the rippling surface, gasping for breath.
"Hah… hah… hick."
"Slow as ever. I nearly died of boredom waiting."
Having dumped his granddaughter like luggage, Seo Seongrak crossed his arms and grumbled.
Ssshh.
A woman of calm bearing, her flowing hair loosely bound, turned slowly to look back at them.
Snap.
She unfurled a fan and half-hid the crescent of her smile.
"You don't suppose the fault might lie with the man who summons a busy person on a whim?"
"Hmph. We arranged this a month ago. Funny how you forget your own part in that."
"That much is my fault, I'll grant you… but really—you couldn't wait even that long?"
Twitch. Veins rose against Seo Seongrak's dark bronze skin. This woman truly had a gift for getting under people's skin.
Nain clutched her throbbing waist and staggered to her feet. Through Geumhae's synced vision, the view from this dizzying height spread out far below in perfect clarity.
"Where… is this?"
Moments ago she had been in the banquet hall. Warm air. The smell of fresh-cooked food. Now a high-altitude wind, cold enough to cut flesh, lashed her from head to toe.
"If you're up, get over here. The person who's going to be your master is right there."
Seo Seongrak jerked his chin toward the woman, his tone brusque. She snapped her fan shut with a sharp click and fired back.
"Who said anything about master? Nothing's been decided yet."
Pressing a hand to her spinning forehead, Nain made her way to Seo Seongrak's side. A complaint slipped out before she could stop it.
"Grandfather, what on earth were you thinking…? If you just came to celebrate, you could have sat quietly in the banquet hall drinking. Why snatch up someone who was minding their own business—"
She mumbled and pouted, still indignant over the inhuman abduction and the one-sided announcement. Memories of childhood rose unbidden.
"Ha. You think I came all this way just to mindlessly pour liquor down my throat? I move for a reason. And I had permission."
"A reason?"
"I've got a hundred years left to live, at most. No time to spare. I came because my daughter asked me to—again."
Could it be…
In Nain's mind, every exchange with her grandfather tonight and the conversation just now flashed past in sequence. Thinking it through on the comfortable sofa, her real body's head worked all the faster.
The sudden talk of her talent. The forced way he'd kept only her at his side while he drank. And above all—the colossal flying talisman and the prospective master standing before her eyes.
Don't tell me this was the plan from the start?
Nain's mouth fell open. While she stood there stunned, the two Foundation Establishment cultivators chatted between themselves as if she didn't exist.
"A request from my daughter, newly risen to Foundation Establishment. Hard to refuse."
"If even a sliver of potential shows itself… taking on one disciple wouldn't be so bad."
Seeing Nain's expression, Seo Seongrak burst into a hearty laugh.
"…So where exactly are we going right now?"
At her trembling question, he jerked his chin.
"Where do you think? The Gate, of course."
"Destination: the Sixty-Ninth Demon Realm, First Layer. The kind of place weaklings like you go. Never set foot in one, have you?"
Thwack. He clapped her hard on the back.
"This time, you're going to feel it in your bones—what kind of fight humanity is really fighting. Though, well, that's still a bit early for a mere Qi Refinement cultivator to hear."
The colossal talisman, already flying far beyond the speed of sound, streaked from the northern reaches of the Korean Peninsula toward its heart.