The Demonic Path (4)
Kwa-kwa-kwang!
A massive crater tore open across the plain where the moss had lain thick and undisturbed. Cheon Woo-jin's Black Lightning Annihilation Vista had erupted with such force that it reshaped the very terrain itself.
But Yu Gi-ryeong was still standing.
A blue protective barrier wreathed his entire body, shielding him from harm.
A defensive legal treasure!
Unlike Cheon Woo-jin's Silver Ridge River Guard, which served as a shield he had to actively wield, this was a legal treasure that intercepted attacks on its own. The moment it sensed the falling lightning, the barrier had deployed automatically.
Still, it hadn't come through unscathed.
"Kkeuk...!"
With a sound like shattering glass, the barrier broke apart. At the same instant, one of the bracelets on Yu Gi-ryeong's wrist exploded into fragments — the defensive treasure had failed to withstand the full force of the Black Lightning Annihilation Vista.
"You — how, with a mere Qi Condensation body...!"
Yu Gi-ryeong ground his teeth and glared at Cheon Woo-jin.
In that very moment, Cheon Woo-jin felt an ominous premonition and tore himself from his position. A split second later, a thunderous impact echoed from the spot where he had been standing.
Yu Gi-ryeong had launched an invisible attack — or so Cheon Woo-jin analyzed. It's not like the Instant Killing Heavenly Eye, something that strikes a target just by directing one's gaze at them.
As he widened the distance, Cheon Woo-jin stretched out strands of subtle spiritual energy like a spider's web. Only then could he grasp what kind of attack Yu Gi-ryeong was weaving.
Wind-attribute spellcraft... is he compressing air and firing it as transparent projectiles?
Wind-attribute spells most often carried a blue tint, since they drew upon the wood-adjacent qi of moving air. But wind and air, by their very nature, were colorless. Depending on how a cultivator manipulated their spiritual energy, an attack could be rendered utterly invisible.
Of course, to adepts of a certain caliber and above, such tricks were nothing more than sleight of hand. Cultivators still mired in the Qi Condensation stage, however, were easy prey for that deception.
Cheon Woo-jin himself had nearly fallen for it.
Expand your senses.
He spread his spiritual energy in every direction. Each individual strand of the web had to function like a sensory cell.
Not one thing can slip past me.
Swish.
He detected an attack threading its way through the lattice of the web — and knew at once that it was different from the one before. These were blades of wind. Dokgeomjong's Grand Elder had flung sword qi that gleamed blue, but these were colorless and transparent.
Worse, more than a dozen blades of varying sizes came mixed together in a single volley. An ordinary Qi Condensation cultivator would never have been able to respond. Even if they blocked a few, the small blades slipping in from the blind angles would have buried themselves in their flesh.
Even Cheon Woo-jin, relying on the Silver Ridge River Guard alone, could not have stopped them all. That technique formed only a hemispherical barrier — it could not intercept blades that curved around and struck from behind.
And so Cheon Woo-jin raised his spiritual energy to its limit. Within the spiritual domain of his Body of the Dark True Abyss, he forged a dozen black sword qi and scattered them in all directions.
The web spread across every direction traced the incoming trajectories of the wind blades. All he had to do was stuff his sword qi directly into their paths.
Papapat!
The invisible blades collided with the black sword qi and scattered into nothing. Yu Gi-ryeong's creations had been built to prize concealment above all else, which left them far from sturdy — fragile enough, as it turned out, for even Cheon Woo-jin's sword qi to shatter.
"...!"
Beyond the countless clashes, Cheon Woo-jin could see Yu Gi-ryeong's eyes flying wide open.
This was nothing like the Qi Condensation riffraff he had slaughtered like insects until now. The realization sharpened the tension in Yu Gi-ryeong's gaze.
"Are you truly at Qi Condensation?"
Yu Gi-ryeong demanded in a voice gone hard and brittle. "Don't tell me you've also hidden your realm behind the Mountain-Collapse Concealment Art, just like I have—"
Cheon Woo-jin did not answer. Instead of correcting the man's delusion, he forged sword qi without pause and hurled it at Yu Gi-ryeong in relentless waves.
"The Mountain-Collapse Concealment Art is a technique of the Demonic Path alone! Where in the world did you learn such a thing!"
Yu Gi-ryeong roared, unable to hide his bewilderment. "Are you from the Blood World Mara Sect, perhaps? A pawn dispatched by some rival faction scheming against Lord Jeok Ya-wol—"
A dry chuckle escaped Cheon Woo-jin's lips.
The man had reasoned fairly well at first, but the moment reality strayed beyond the borders of his common sense, he was leaping to one wrong conclusion after another. Cheon Woo-jin had no intention of setting him straight. He needed that head crammed full of faulty judgments. Only then would the man blunder again.
"Ugh...!"
Pat!
A black blade erupted from the ground beneath Yu Gi-ryeong's feet, hungry for his flesh. Cheon Woo-jin had kept the sword qi raining down to pin the man's attention to his front — then struck from a blind angle with the Black Shadow Technique.
But Foundation Establishment was Foundation Establishment, after all.
With a single flick of his hand, Yu Gi-ryeong raised a shield of wind and turned the ambush aside.
"Kkeuk...!"
At last, Yu Gi-ryeong fell back a step. Gathering his posture, perhaps — he spread a great shield of wind between both hands and lowered himself into a defensive stance.
Watching him, Cheon Woo-jin surged skyward.
He wove a formation from the spiritual energy within his body, coaxing the yang qi of the heavens and the yin qi of the earth into resonance — until lightning came falling down.
Black lightning darker than the darkened sky itself was born, devouring even the clouds as it plunged earthward.
Kwa-kwa-kwang!
The bolt struck true — directly above Yu Gi-ryeong's head. His defensive treasure had already been destroyed, so this time no barrier would deploy on its own.
But Yu Gi-ryeong was a Peak Foundation Establishment cultivator. He did not fall easily.
He layered the wind shields he had prepared in advance, one atop another, and caught the falling lightning above his head.
"Uuuuuk!"
Peo-peong!
Amid a deafening detonation, the black lightning scattered in every direction. The wind shields shattered completely, but Yu Gi-ryeong had succeeded in holding the Black Lightning Annihilation Vista at bay — defending himself by nothing more than his own strength, even with his defensive treasure already destroyed.
"You...!"
Yu Gi-ryeong bellowed. "You are not at Foundation Establishment! You've merely been borrowing power beyond your true realm through the might of your legal treasures!"
From Yu Gi-ryeong, truth arriving belatedly, burst a ferocious shockwave of killing intent. "But you've unleashed these attacks one after another in a Qi Condensation body — your spiritual energy must be spent by now...!"
Papapapat!
Countless blades materialized around Yu Gi-ryeong. No longer colorless and transparent — these were blades of blue wind, plainly visible to the naked eye.
Invisible attacks were useless against Cheon Woo-jin anyway. Against an opponent who was, as far as he could tell, a mere Qi Condensation cultivator running dry on spiritual energy, the best move was simply to overwhelm him with raw force.
"With what strength you have left, you can neither block nor evade this...!"
This blow would settle everything. Carrying that conviction, Yu Gi-ryeong mobilized every spirit meridian in his body, gathering himself to unleash his full power.
But there was something Yu Gi-ryeong did not know.
He did not know that Cheon Woo-jin, soaring high overhead, had drawn a single talisman from his storage pouch and was breathing spiritual energy into it.
It was no ordinary talisman. It was a subsidiary treasure in which Cheon Woo-jin had sealed the power of the legal treasure Scarlet Sea Incinerating Furnace — hoarded away for precisely this moment.
Unable to block or evade?
That applies to you, not me.
Cheon Wu-jin flung his hand down toward the ground with all his strength. The principle of Samadhi True Fire took form within his grip, and scarlet flame erupted outward as if to swallow the world whole.
"...!"
Below, Yu Gi-ryeong had already deployed his blades of wind on a grand scale — the killing edge of sharpened wind, condensed and compressed to its utmost. Had it been ordinary flame, the sheer force of that wind might well have scattered it into nothing.
But the old sayings held true.
True fire, meeting the wind, only blazes higher.
And the more fiercely one seeks to extinguish it, the more furiously it rages.
The Samadhi True Fire did not scatter in the wind — it devoured the wind whole and swelled even greater.
"Ah."
Yu Gi-ryeong, standing on the ground below, was swept under by the scarlet inferno.
Had he been wary of Cheon Woo-jin's attacks — had he spared even a thought for defense — he might have endured and somehow broken free. True, the power drawn from a subsidiary treasure inevitably fell short of the original legal treasure itself. Had he defended with the strength of a Peak Foundation Establishment cultivator while fleeing for his life, he could have saved his neck.
But Yu Gi-ryeong, in this very moment, had abandoned all thought of defense, pouring every ounce of his power into offense alone.
In such a state, one can neither block nor evade.
"Aaah."
From the very beginning, this had been the situation Cheon Woo-jin sought.
He had engineered the moment when Yu Gi-ryeong, certain of victory, would cast defense entirely aside. He had allowed the man to believe him a Qi Condensation cultivator precisely because he predicted that, as that delusion crumbled, his carelessness would only deepen.
The subsidiary treasure of the Scarlet Sea Incinerating Furnace was undoubtedly a devastating weapon — but a formidable cultivator at Peak Foundation Establishment stood a real chance of responding to it. At the very least, the instant Cheon Woo-jin drew out the talisman, a single slash at his wrist would have sealed the attack away entirely.
And so Cheon Woo-jin had led Yu Gi-ryeong's psyche along, step by careful step — all to construct a situation in which a Peak Foundation Establishment demonic cultivator could be driven, beyond any doubt, into death.
"Aaaaaah...!"
Yu Gi-ryeong's screams echoed through the scarlet flames. The fact that he endured instead of dying outright was testament to how high-ranking an adept he was.
But instant death would have been a mercy. As it was, he suffered the torment of being burned alive while still breathing.
"S-spare me—"
At the last, he sank to begging for his life — a groveling plea unbecoming of any demonic cultivator. Compared to how one of his own subordinates had detonated himself in a final, suicidal bid to take his enemy down with him, it was a truly pathetic sight.
But even that voice did not last to the end. The flames surged to their very peak, as if intent on burning even his screams away.
And when the raging fire of the Samadhi True Fire at last subsided,
no trace of Yu Gi-ryeong remained anywhere at all.
In a corner of the field, now nothing but ash, Cheon Woo-jin leaned against a nearby boulder and caught his breath.
Just as Yu Gi-ryeong had pointed out, he too had finally reached his limit. He fished out a pill for replenishing spiritual energy, chewed it down, and immediately began his energy circulation training.
In the game, swallowing a pill restored health or spiritual energy instantly — but that was nothing more than a permissible game mechanic. In reality, he had to melt the pill's energy into his body and circulate it through his meridians before it bore fruit.
So I've wiped out five demonic cultivators of the Mad World Yin Spirit Sect.
Even so, the war with the Mad World Yin Spirit Sect showed no sign of ending here. The sect was in the midst of pushing into Ghost Head City. Its detachment had been organized for the sole purpose of that expansion — losing a handful of underlings would never make it give up.
Worse, he had to account for the possibility that the Mad World Yin Spirit Sect would turn its attention toward him. If the sect's detachment and the Pae Dragon Society were annihilated in full while only the Four Yu Family Brothers and Cheon Woo-jin walked out alive... they couldn't help but find him suspicious. And Toyo Munju, who had joined the sect, had even witnessed Cheon Woo-jin entering the secret realm.
I'll need contingencies prepared in advance.
As he was organizing his thoughts while running his circulation, a shift stirred in the flow of spiritual energy around him.
He could feel something immensely powerful drawing near.
"..."
Cheon Woo-jin halted his training and turned his head.
Far in the distance, he saw a shape advancing over the hill toward him.
It was a colossal centipede.
Its body stretched dozens of jang in length, and its hundred-odd segmented plates were armored in an ominous, dark violet carapace. An enormous set of mandibles jutted from its head, and from the venomous forelegs branching out behind them, black poison dripped in slow, fat beads.
No doubt it had sensed the titanic clash between Cheon Woo-jin and Yu Gi-ryeong and stirred from its deep slumber — convinced that prey worthy of its maw had arrived.
A Core Formation demon insect.
The hidden boss of the Dark Mixed Secret Realm — a monster that no ordinary method could ever conquer — shook the very earth as it lunged at Cheon Woo-jin.