The Scramble for Seizure (2)
Jongri Un could not hide his bewilderment.
Only moments ago, the cursed spirit his Ghost Soul Banner had produced had collapsed.
It had not been neutralized by a powerful counterattack, nor purified by some mysterious energy.
A blade of pitch-black dark shadow art had simply been driven into the cursed spirit like a knife.
As far as Jongri Un could tell, it was a trifling spiritual power, belonging at most to someone at the Foundation Establishment Realm.
And yet with only that, the cursed spirit had crumbled completely.
It made no sense whatsoever.
"This is—it's impossible……!"
Jongri Un screamed, his reason unraveling.
"My Ghost Soul Banner—the one I completed by offering my entire family as sacrifices……!"
The Ghost Soul Banner was a tool whose power grew in proportion to the depth of resentment held by the sacrificed souls.
That was why he had killed them all—his wife, his own children, every last member of his family.
He had believed that a Ghost Soul Banner forged from his own kin would grant him power beyond the limits of the Core Formation Realm.
"It was supposed to be a Ghost Soul Banner capable of unleashing power on the level of the Nascent Soul Realm……!"
And yet.
It had collapsed far, far too easily.
Against a man who seemingly possessed nothing more than the dark spirit energy of a mere Foundation Establishment cultivator.
"How—how did you break my spell……!"
Parhwae—breaking and dismantling.
It was commonly said that an attack had been parhwae'd when one met it head-on and neutralized it in return.
But strictly speaking, that was not true parhwae at all.
Parhwae, in its truest sense, meant completely destroying the opponent's spell and rendering it void—like this.
"How could a nobody like you destroy a cursed spirit on the level of the Nascent Soul Realm……!"
"It doesn't seem to have been Nascent Soul level, actually."
At that very moment, Cheon Woo-jin spoke in a cold, detached voice.
"There was certainly a powerful curse woven into it. But the spell's spiritual structure was simple, and riddled with vulnerabilities."
"What……!"
"It was precisely because it was such a spell that I was able to break it."
Jongri Un's confusion deepened.
It was true that the cursed spirit's spiritual structure had been simple. There had certainly been weak points.
But how could a mere Foundation Establishment cultivator have seen through them?
Unless the man was a genuine genius, it should have been impossible.
"If, for example."
At that moment, Cheon Woo-jin extended his hand forward as he spoke.
"The spell had been constructed like this, it would not have been broken."
"What……."
In the next instant, pitch-black mist billowed forth from Cheon Woo-jin's palm.
The mist spread in a heartbeat, filling the space around them.
"This is……!"
Jongri Un sucked in his breath.
The black haze spreading around them was unmistakably the energy of a curse.
More than that, it had been constructed on the very same principle as the cursed spirit Jongri Un had summoned with his Ghost Soul Banner mere moments before.
Naturally, as a curse art, its power fell far short of the cursed spirit produced by the Ghost Soul Banner.
Its killing force was practically nonexistent; even if Jongri Un had taken this curse head-on with his whole body, it would have amounted to no more than a fleeting spell of dizziness.
"Impossible……."
And yet Jongri Un could only stare in horror.
For all its insignificance, the spell's craftsmanship was overwhelmingly complete.
Though built upon the same principle as the cursed spirit from before, it had been given a convoluted structure designed to defy easy analysis.
Every point vulnerable to outside interference had been meticulously eliminated—so even a cultivator who fully understood the spell would struggle to break it.
Short of a Nascent Soul cultivator arriving and crushing it with pure brute spiritual force, dispelling this cursed mist would be impossible.
"And furthermore."
Cheon Woo-jin's composed voice reached the stunned Jongri Un.
"Like this, you can give it a far more practical form."
In that instant, the curse that had hung in the air like black mist abruptly vanished.
The fog that had spread across the whole area dissolved, and the view cleared.
What was he playing at?
Jongri Un was still blinking in incomprehension when something glinted within the long shadow stretched across the ground.
The blade leaps from the depths of darkness.
Shluck!
A blade erupting from the shadows impaled Jongri Un.
There was no pain—for it was not a technique that inflicted physical damage.
But the instant his body was pierced, a dreadful chill ran through him, as though he had been stung by a venomous needle.
The curse's energy had been injected directly into his body.
The moment that realization struck, Jongri Un was seized by violent vertigo.
"Ugh……!"
He could no longer wield his spiritual power properly.
A curse of this magnitude should have been trivially absorbable with his bare body—but having it driven through his skin and injected straight into his flesh was catastrophic.
It would have been better if he had actually been stabbed and left with a hole in his body.
Even a state of potent poison dissolving his internal organs would have been preferable to this.
Because a curse that attacked not the flesh but the soul itself had been pumped into him, Jongri Un was now reduced to a state where he could barely manage even the simplest spell.
"H-how can this……."
Unable to withstand the vertigo, Jongri Un collapsed to his knees where he stood.
"I-it's impossible. I, who reached the Late Core Formation Realm, suffering this humiliation at the hands of a whelp who looks barely past Foundation Establishment……"
"……"
Then Cheon Woo-jin extended his hand toward Jongri Un once more.
It was the posture of a man preparing to finish off a neutralized enemy.
"S-stop……!"
Jongri Un raised his voice in desperation.
"I—I have things to do! There are things I must do with the Ghost Command Summoning Banner……!"
"Things you must do."
Cheon Woo-jin asked in a frigid voice.
"And what would those be?"
"The Jongri Clan……"
The Jongri Clan.
As the name of the family he belonged to left his lips, Jongri Un spewed out the emotions that had festered within him for so long.
"Toppling the main house of the Jongri Clan—that is the purpose of my life……!"
Jongri Un had been a branch patriarch who owed fealty to the Jongri Clan's main house.
His duty had been to deliver up to the main family the resources and intelligence he gathered in the course of operating within Ghost Head City.
At some point, however, he had begun to dream of raising his banner against the main house and striking out on his own.
He had planned to monopolize every resource Ghost Head City yielded, and use that foundation to ascend to the Nascent Soul Realm.
But one day, a Nascent Soul elder of the main house had come for him.
The Jongri Clan, Weijin Country's greatest cultivating family, counted several Nascent Soul elders among its number—and the one who came was the elder in charge of inspection.
That elder had known of Jongri Un's treasonous ambitions and arrived to mete out punishment.
Someone in the branch family had exposed Jongri Un's schemes.
Jongri Un had been punished by that elder.
It was a torture that inflicted agony worse than death—a punishment that hollowed out his soul and made dying a mercy.
He had screamed again and again for them to simply kill him, but they had not obliged.
The elder had mocked him even as the torment deepened, and then departed Ghost Head City with a parting warning never to harbor such delusions again.
But it had the opposite effect.
Jongri Un came to harbor a seething grudge against the main house of the Jongri Clan.
He would not merely avenge himself on the elder who had tormented him—he would exact vengeance upon the entire Jongri Clan itself.
"I will erase the Jongri Clan from this world—utterly and completely! By my own hand……!"
Massacring his own family to forge the Ghost Soul Banner.
Stealing the Ghost Command Summoning Banner.
Every last bit of it had been in service of that one goal.
And yet Cheon Woo-jin's expression did not so much as flicker at Jongri Un's declaration.
"And here I wondered what grand ambition could have driven such madness…… So that was all it was."
"What……!"
"If your goal was revenge against the Jongri Clan, you could have joined one of the rival sects that opposed them and worked toward it there. Instead you insisted on taking vengeance with your own hands and went so far as to sacrifice your own family for this circus."
Cheon Woo-jin's voice was glacial.
"In the end, it was nothing more than an emotional outburst to vent your own resentment. Nearly four hundred years old, and still carrying an infantile personality."
"You son of a— Graaagh!"
Crack!
Cheon Woo-jin placed his hand on Jongri Un's shoulder and injected lightning energy into him.
Feeling his internal organs rupture and burst, Jongri Un shrieked.
His golden core had escaped damage, so he still drew breath—but in this state, even after the curse's influence wore off, he would be incapable of offering the slightest resistance.
"Ugh, ughhh……"
Cheon Woo-jin slipped his hand into the breast of the half-dead, crumpled Jongri Un.
He drew out the Storage Pouch and began rummaging through its contents.
Then he abruptly stopped and looked down at Jongri Un.
"I take it you assumed I was carrying the Ghost Command Summoning Banner myself……"
Watching Cheon Woo-jin fail to find what he sought, Jongri Un smirked.
"So you hid it somewhere else."
"That's right……"
A dharma treasure as potent as the Ghost Command Summoning Banner would radiate its presence constantly, even sealed inside a Storage Pouch.
However thoroughly it was sealed, its aura could never be perfectly concealed—which was why he had hidden it elsewhere to throw off any pursuit.
"The Ghost Command Summoning Banner is hidden in a place you people could never find. You will never lay hands on it, not in a thousand years……!"
Jongri Un squeezed out the last of his strength and moved his arm.
He thrust his hand into his lower abdomen and shattered his own golden core with his bare fingers.
It had come to this—he had no future left.
Then he would end his life here, so that no one—not a single soul—could ever claim the Ghost Command Summoning Banner.
With that thought, having destroyed his own core, Jongri Un was closing his eyes with an expression of grim satisfaction when—
"You entrusted it to Yoo Gwi-hun, didn't you."
Yoo Gwi-hun.
At that name, Jongri Un's eyes flew wide open.
"H-how do you know that name……"
"There's only one man who could hide a dharma treasure like the Ghost Command Summoning Banner perfectly. Yoo Gwi-hun."
Yoo Gwi-hun was a cultivator who had once operated in the upper layers of Ghost Head City, only to return to the 6th Layer after confronting the limits of his own abilities.
He ran several shops in the bustling commercial district—but beyond that trade, he also dealt in the safekeeping of precious items.
He possessed the Myriad Treasures Painting, a Storage-class dharma treasure acquired in Ghost Head City's upper layers, which allowed him to conceal any object with absolute perfection.
"Judging by that expression, my guess was right."
"Ah……"
Jongri Un was swallowed whole by a crushing sense of defeat.
He had lost to this man in every possible respect—not merely in spellcraft.
As he felt the body of his shattered core grow cold, Jongri Un trembled to the very end with humiliation.
As Cheon Woo-jin stood gazing down at Jongri Un's lifeless corpse, a voice came from behind him.
"It seems we need to head back to the surface."
It was Wi Ju-seon, who had been watching from the rear all this while.
She had initially moved to join the fight, but after seeing Cheon Woo-jin press Jongri Un into the dirt single-handedly, she had simply fallen back and observed.
"The Yin Scale Spirit Needle Sect lot have sent word to the Corpse Ghost Extreme Jade Gate to handle the surface. So we need only go straight up."
"Understood."
"And here I'm surprised you even knew about Yoo Gwi-hun. Did you hear that from Seo Seol-ryeong as well?"
Cheon Woo-jin gave no answer, ascending to the surface through the hole in the ceiling.
The surroundings were a commercial district where all manner of shops crowded together.
As it happened, they had emerged close to the very stores Yoo Gwi-hun managed.
Yoo Gwi-hun is a man who keeps his mouth shut. But once he learns Jongri Un is dead, he'll cooperate.
In Cheon Woo-jin's hand at this moment was a Soul-Extracting Talisman.
It was the talisman used to prove, beyond dispute, that a target had been properly killed in the course of fulfilling an assassination contract.
He had harvested a sliver of Jongri Un's divine soul after his death—so showing it to Yoo Gwi-hun would prove conclusively that Jongri Un was no more.
"Cheon Woo-jin!"
Just then, Wi Ju-seon's sharp voice cut through the air.
"Look over there!"
At her words, Cheon Woo-jin raised his head.
Above the rooftops of the towering, multi-storied buildings, a group clad in white robes was sprinting.
"The Myriad Night Ice Palace!"
One of the three great powers of the 6th Layer.
The Myriad Night Ice Palace of the snow-covered mountains was charging straight toward the quarter where Yoo Gwi-hun's shops stood.
"It seems they picked up the trail somewhere other than we did……"
"So it would appear."
They were a force that had dominated the 6th Layer for generations.
It was only natural that their intelligence-gathering ran ahead of everyone else's.
"It doesn't matter."
"It doesn't?"
"A collision was always going to be unavoidable anyway."
Even if Cheon Woo-jin had moved faster and secured the Ghost Command Summoning Banner first, the Myriad Night Ice Palace would have come for him afterward regardless.
The only difference was whether he fought them before securing the banner or after.
Repel all three great sects of the 6th Layer, and secure the Ghost Command Summoning Banner.
That was what Cheon Woo-jin had to do.
The body wrapped in thunder arcs skyward.
Cheon Woo-jin, his entire body sheathed in lightning energy, shot upward.
And he unfolded his spell art toward the Myriad Night Ice Palace cultivators bounding across the rooftops.
The black bolt falls from the heavens without mercy.
KRAKOOM!
A black bolt of lightning torn from the sky struck the Myriad Night Ice Palace cultivators dead center.
Caught in a sudden ambush, they were swept off the rooftops like autumn leaves in a gale.
But this had by no means subdued the entirety of the Myriad Night Ice Palace's forces.
There were still white-robed cultivators up ahead, moving at an even greater speed.
Everyone Cheon Woo-jin had just felled had been at the Foundation Establishment Realm—whereas the ones running point were all Core Formation cultivators.
I'll have to catch up.
Cheon Woo-jin pushed his speed even higher.
And then, beyond the Myriad Night Ice Palace cultivators, he caught sight of a woman's retreating figure—her eyes bound in cloth.