Chapter 5
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Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 5
Chapter Title: Runaway Girl Yuyeon (2)
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The wild mountains were a symbol of terror.
Think of horror movies. Even if they weren't the main setting, wild mountains were a staple feature.
Especially those scenes where someone flees from something horrifying under the moonlight, gasping for breath—they absolutely had to be filmed in the wild mountains. That alone made the wild mountains a frightening environment.
But it was different for Yuyeon.
Horror movies were typically stories about ordinary folk, but Yuyeon—though she hadn't even taken her first step into Immortal Cultivation—felt no tension in the wild mountains at all, thanks to the pure yin essence she harbored and her Divine Sense. Instead, she hiked comfortably.
This was the first time Yuyeon had ever ventured beyond the capital.
She had originally planned short hikes into the back mountains to prepare for a potential runaway, but her Wet Nurse had absolutely refused to allow it.
To strangers, Yuyeon might seem like a mature, mysterious girl unlike other children, but in truth, she was weak to affection.
Her Wet Nurse always followed her every whim, so it was one of the rare times she had been scolded so sternly. Yuyeon had simply yielded.
As a result, Yuyeon didn't know the local geography well.
But that wasn't a problem.
In the end, in this world, if you just kept heading in one direction, you were bound to run into something. There was even a children's song about it.
'Forward~ forward~ forward— forward!'
All the children of the world end up meeting someone.
But Yuyeon's eyes were blind, even if her ears weren't deaf, and the eerie sounds unique to the wild mountains set her nerves on edge.
Buu-buu—
"Kiyaat!"
Yuyeon jumped in shock as that booming sound rippled through the entire forest like a wave.
The moment she realized she had flinched—even just a little—her face flushed red, and she felt her heart racing.
Yuyeon relied entirely on her Divine Sense for perception. She especially focused on hearing, picking up even the tiniest distant sounds and piecing them together to grasp situations beyond her Divine Sense's reach.
So when echoes rang out from all directions in the forest with slight delays, she momentarily mistook it for being surrounded.
Normally, she wouldn't have made such a mistake.
It absolutely, positively wasn't because the nighttime atmosphere had her pre-emptively spooked, making her more startled than usual.
Besides, even if she was blind—even if she was an eight-year-old girl—Yuyeon saw herself as a full-grown adult, a stout-hearted man of the world.
So she was far more embarrassed by the instinctively girlish squeak she had let out than by the misjudgment itself.
As the cool night air soothed her heated cheeks, Yuyeon belatedly realized it was the hoot of an owl.
She pretended to be irritated for no reason. It wasn't that she had been startled; she had simply mistaken it and tensed up.
Suppressing her embarrassment, she adjusted her Divine Sense.
She lowered the level of focus allocated to her hypersensitive hearing and redirected it elsewhere.
But that didn't fundamentally solve the issue. Hearing was her way of perceiving beyond the range of her Divine Sense.
People with eyes could see farther, even if their perception was less detailed and covered a narrower area.
In Xifeng County, sensing one zhang in every direction was plenty for getting around, but out here in the wild mountains, she needed more.
For the first time since her rebirth, Yuyeon felt a profound inconvenience from her lost vision. It even made her feel a bit weepy.
'But I absolutely can't turn back like this. If I've started something, I have to see it through.'
As her thoughts branched out and reached that conclusion, she forcibly rallied her spirits.
Then an idea flashed in Yuyeon's mind. This was a perfect chance to put into practice all the things she had only thought about but never actually done.
After all, there was no worry now about someone noticing her circulating qi.
To perceive even a little farther, she began operating her internal energy to alter the flow of her Concealing Form Formation in a way different from usual.
A good formation, once its flow was established, would operate on its own by drawing on the power flows from surrounding nature or objects, without needing further intervention from the installer. That was a key feature of formations.
That was why the old Daoist's Concealing Form Formation had remained undisturbed for five years until Yuyeon broke it.
Conversely, if one studied formations enough to add new anchors that could expand the flow, it was possible to deploy it slightly differently.
Yuyeon pushed the flow of her body-imbued Concealing Form Formation outward while adding new flows infused with her own energy, one by one.
It consumed mental energy to emit her internal power, but her previously contracted Divine Sense expanded to five zhang—the halfway point to its maximum range.
The world Yuyeon pictured in her mind via Divine Sense exploded outward in an instant.
But there was one problem she hadn't anticipated.
Accustomed to handling one zhang, suddenly taking in so much information at once made her feel her mental energy draining away in a flash.
It could be explained with simple logic: the volume of a five-zhang Divine Sense was 125 times that of a one-zhang sense.
Of course, the complexity it grasped went beyond mere calculation, making it even more taxing to maintain.
Yuyeon admired the old Daoist's foresight once more—he had reduced it to ten zhang initially.
Back then, she had just awakened her Divine Sense and couldn't fully utilize ten zhang anyway. And since it had only been for a short time, she hadn't felt the mental fatigue at all.
Moreover, now she was processing the information pouring in through her Divine Sense with one part of her mind while operating her internal energy to maintain the formation with another. Of course her mental energy was insufficient.
Yuyeon clutched her throbbing head as her mental energy depleted.
She hurriedly contracted the Concealing Form Formation again.
Finally, it spread across an ambiguous zone between her body and the outside, settling her Divine Sense's width at about two zhang.
'Two zhang should be about the same as the maximum visibility a healthy adult could manage in a moonlit forest at night.'
It was a level she could compromise on.
With that, Yuyeon focused on moving again.
Was it because she could use her internal energy without worry? She quickly crested one hill.
Though only eight years old, she knew how to wield internal energy, putting her at the level of a first-rate martial artist.
And with her vast reserves of yin energy, if converted to internal energy, it was enough to make even a peak expert's back explode on impact.
So crossing a mountain at night was no great burden for Yuyeon, and she had confidence from the start.
Why? Because her benchmark for martial artists was the Namgung Manor Lord. Even compared to him, she had more internal energy.
Wasn't that reason enough for confidence?
Plus, a child's body was lighter and more enduring than an adult's. With her internal energy, she was sure she could cover nearly a full day's distance overnight.
And so Yuyeon silently climbed the mountains through the night.
Walking was the most basic human movement.
That was why strolls were recommended when thoughts grew tangled or rest was needed—it cleared the mind.
But for Yuyeon, it backfired.
With her hearing dialed down, silently ascending the mountain let stray thoughts creep in one by one.
Earlier, when her mental energy had depleted in one go, there had been no room for such thoughts, so she hadn't noticed consciously until late.
The first thought that arose was simple.
'Ah, I want some tteokbokki.'
From her past life onward, Yuyeon had boasted that she was such a manly man among men that she wouldn't even touch tteokbokki.
But the truth was, in her past life, she simply grew sick of it.
She—no, he—had been the son of a snack shop before becoming Yuyeon.
That snack shop near a national prestigious university had been run by his family for generations since his grandmother's time, and it was his parents' pride.
His parents always told him:
"We served treats to those smart students and soaked up their good energy to have you, so make sure you grow up and get into a top university too."
Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or mere coincidence?
Did endlessly repeating something give it its own power?
The wish really did come true.
Just look at his innate temperament.
He was a reading fanatic bordering on addiction.
It was so extreme that even as a child, he read textbooks for fun—a total weirdo.
Born with keen wits, anything he read stuck in his head. He could retain what was useful and discard the rest.
That was what true insight really meant.
Simply having good memory or calculation skills were mere side effects of insight.
Insight, true to its name, was the ability closest to enlightenment itself.
Those with bright insight thought of the answer first, then attached reasons afterward.
Like human emotions.
Emotions precede reasons with results. In that sense, Yuyeon was profoundly emotional.
Anyway, Yuyeon ended up commuting to the university just ten minutes from home and was half-forced into helping at the snack shop every day after classes.
When he got hungry during work, he'd sneak a break for tteokbokki.
He'd help before classes, get hungry, and eat tteokbokki.
Lunch was tteokbokki with fried snacks; dinner was tteokbokki with sundae.
For the record, breakfast was kimbap with tteokbokki.
During elementary, middle, and high school, he mostly ate the leftover tteokbokki his parents packed for late nights, so it never got boring then.
But once he started helping and wolfing down tteokbokki for nearly every meal, how could it not get tiresome?
Yet after years without it, withdrawal symptoms hit late.
It was midnight snack time, too.
Yuyeon realized dawn had broken. The brightness within her Divine Sense range had increased.
At the same time, she became aware that she had been walking in a dazed, half-asleep state, lost in stray thoughts.
To shake off the sleep, she instinctively turned her head toward the dawn and opened her eyes.
She hoped the bright light might wake her up a bit.
This revealed her hazy, misty pupils.
But unlike the milky eyes of a typical blind person, though blurred, there was a distinct light within them.
Was it thanks to that?
Even her sightless eyes felt the sensation of dazzling light pouring in. Come to think of it, she had never once bothered to watch the morning sun like this.
'It's not because I lived lazily, right? Hmm, probably.'
Yuyeon gently closed her eyes again, savoring the feeling of embarking on a new life.
At least she had definitely parted ways with the life of a wealthy young lady who never rose at dawn.
After basking in the morning sunlight and taking a few more steps, Yuyeon adjusted her Concealing Form Formation again, explosively expanding her Divine Sense range in an instant.
'Looks like I need some sleep.'
In her current hazy state, she might trip over something.
So to find a place to sleep, she scanned the surroundings with her Divine Sense this time, heedless of the depletion.
Suddenly, an idea flashed, and she contracted the formation, adjusting her Divine Sense back to normal levels.
'It'll stick in my memory, so no need to keep it at maximum.'
As if confirming the thought was right.
Just like the afterimage left in the eyes after seeing bright light, the space she had grasped with her Divine Sense lingered in her mind as a blurry residual image.
It was pockmarked with holes like low resolution, but more than enough to map the surroundings.
Yuyeon's original goal had been to find a burrow dug by wild beasts or a natural cave under tree roots.
But lo and behold, at the edge of her Divine Sense, she detected an artificial building. By its shape, it seemed like an abandoned shrine.
Yuyeon decided to nap there during the day and set off again at night.
As she drew closer to the shrine, its form became clearer. It was definitely abandoned, but fortunately, the building itself wasn't too badly damaged.
Yet that very fact was even stranger.
Normally, such a shrine would have at least an incense burner. Whether enshrining Buddha, a mountain spirit, a local deity, or even an ancestral tablet from some family treated as a god, incense offerings were standard.
But the burner had been neglected for so long that its base had cracked, scattering the incense ash everywhere.
It looked like no offerings could even be made now if someone wanted to.
Decisively, the pedestal meant for the sacred object was completely empty.
In a world with Immortal Cultivators, Yuyeon didn't believe there were no ghosts.
On the contrary, it would be weirder if there weren't.
From what she had read, this world was insane—ghosts even cultivated via Ghost Dao techniques.
So a shrine like this wasn't just any shrine. The beings enshrined there were called divine beasts, a type of cultivator.
The "god" of a shrine had a physical form; it wasn't some imaginary, formless entity.
Thus, an abandoned shrine without its god was truly unsettling. Even by ordinary common sense.
Abandoned shrines were a familiar staple in novels.
They often popped up during rain, overnight mountain treks, or as shelters for runaways.
But even in those brief stays, the original Buddha statue, image, or sacred tablet should remain.
If the enshrined deity had been moved elsewhere, the shrine itself should have been dismantled.
If the overseeing family or village had fallen on hard times and abandoned it, the sacred objects should still be there.
No one would dare move them casually.
If it had been night, Yuyeon never would have stayed in such a creepy shrine, but for now, it was still a time when people were scarier than ghosts.
Her Divine Sense detected nothing, either.
Since she relied entirely on her senses for Divine Sense, she had no choice but to trust its results.
And Divine Sense was the perception of Immortal Cultivators, adept at detecting souls or energies, so it wasn't blind faith.
Crucially, sleeping elsewhere meant finding a burrow as she had pondered before.
Yuyeon hated burrows. Dirt in her hair was the least of it—they were damp and filthy.
So despite her reluctance, she decided to sleep in the shrine.
'No way a ghost would show up in broad daylight full of yang energy.'
She even thought something like that. Much like the yin energy within her—this world treated yang energy as a real thing.
Yuyeon suddenly missed those eras overflowing with yang energy.