Snow Mountain (4)

The theory of the Five Elements holds the concept of mutual conquest.

It means that one of the five elements wields the power to suppress or obstruct another.

Water, for instance, exerts the force of water overcoming fire.

Pour water on a flame and it dies — easy enough to understand.

Then which element suppresses water in turn?

Earth.

Earth overcoming water — like a wall of packed earth damming a stream, earth is the force that obstructs water's flow.

That said, facing a water-attribute spell did not obligate one to answer only with earth-attribute magic.

A wooden palisade or a wall of steel could stem a flood just as well as a dyke of dirt.

In the invisible, essential dimension of spirit, however, the calculus changed.

To unravel the spiritual structure of the water spirit qi composing a water-attribute spell, earth spirit qi was the most devastating counter.

The same held true for the ice attribute, which likewise drew upon water spirit qi.

That was why I chose Yellow Lightning among the Five Lightning Arts.

Yellow Lightning.

One of the Five Lightning Arts — a lightning qi of the earth attribute, wielding earth spirit qi.

In the Five Elements, earth signifies the power of transformation.

Wood, fire, metal, and water correspond to spring, summer, autumn, and winter, but earth corresponds to the changing of the seasons that lies between them.

And so, within the Five Lightning Arts, Yellow Lightning was a lightning qi that shifted form at will.

It did not lance out in a straight line like Azure Lightning, nor spread in a fan like Crimson Lightning.

Yellow Lightning was the lightning that danced across a battlefield like a whip, carving unpredictable, ever-changing arcs through it.

And that transformation was entirely within Cheon Woo-jin's control.

I'm not going to smash the falling blades of ice with lightning.

Cheon Woo-jin looked up at the sky above him.

What he was watching, however, was not the torrential rain of ice blades.

He was watching the spiritual structure of Baek Sin-yeong's spell — the very mechanism conjuring that phenomenon.

The weak points in the spiritual structure... strike them all at once with Yellow Lightning.

KWA-REUREUNG!

Yellow lightning painted across the heavens.

The blades of ice shattered, transparent shards raining down — but that was hardly what mattered.

This Yellow Lightning had not been unleashed to break the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ice blades. Its true purpose was to hammer massive quantities of earth spirit qi into the weak points of the spiritual structure.

The earth spirit qi stored within the pearl of the Tamryeong Yeonhon Sword, now dancing as yellow lightning at Cheon Woo-jin's command, tore Baek Sin-yeong's spell apart from the inside out.

This, at last, was the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠refined technique known in the cultivation world as Counter-Cracking.

"...!"

PAA-AT!

Every blade of ice blanketing the sky shattered at once.

Stripped of their killing power, the fragments were swept up by the wind and became part of the blizzard that was simply the Snow Mountain Region's daily weather.

Only moments ago the sky had been packed with ice blades; now it had reverted to the region's ordinary scenery, as if nothing had happened.

Watching a grand spell he had unleashed with total confidence collapse entirely under the lightning of a mere Foundation Establishment cultivator, Baek Sin-yeong's eyes went wide.

"Wh-what did you just do?"

So stunned he forgot even to prepare his next spell, Baek Sin-yeong asked in a trembling voice.

"Is it the power of some dharma treasure? Did you Counter-Crack my spell with a treasure's power? How could a Foundation Establishment wretch like you even possess such a thing—"

By rights, dharma treasures required Core Formation or higher to wield.

Foundation Establishment cultivators could, at best, use dharma implements.

That was precisely why Baek Sin-yeong had fallen deeper into confusion.

"Something — something went wrong! This makes no sense!"

Baek Sin-yeong belatedly unfolded his next spell.

This time he shaped a colossal dragon of ice out of the sky.

A massive ice dragon with more than enough raw mass to crush Cheon Woo-jin dead beneath it.

Cheon Woo-jin stared at the ice dragon charging toward him.

Yellow Lightning still coiled in his grasp, sustained and ready.

By exploiting Yellow Lightning's pliable, ever-shifting nature, he had throttled its power and stretched its duration far beyond the norm.

Glaring at the enormous ice dragon bearing down on him, Cheon Woo-jin manipulated the Yellow Lightning once more.

The writhing whip of lightning lashed out and coiled around the ice dragon.

Its power was laughably insufficient to destroy the behemoth — but in an instant it bored into the spiritual structure's weak points and cracked the spell itself apart from within.

Pa-at...

The ice dragon collapsed entirely, scattering into a fine mist of crystalline dust.

Through that dissolving haze, Baek Sin-yeong saw Cheon Woo-jin standing there, utterly composed — and his eyes went wide.

"What — what in the world did you do...?"

Had Baek Sin-yeong been a more seasoned cultivator, he would have noticed that Cheon Woo-jin was attacking the weak points of his spiritual structure to Counter-Crack his spells.

He might even have reinforced those weak points on the spot and unfolded a spell Cheon Woo-jin could never hope to crack.

But Baek Sin-yeong could do none of that.

He was a cultivator who had stolen the spiritual power of his father and countless others through his Northern Darkness Divine Body and the Six Yang Six Snow Art, raising nothing but his raw realm in a fraction of the normal time.

He wielded tremendous power, yet possessed almost no real combat experience — and not once in his life had he ever fought a true life-or-death battle against someone capable of pushing him to the brink.

Though he had ascended rapidly by exploiting the Body of the Dark True Abyss, he was fundamentally, irreconcilably different from Cheon Woo-jin, who had crossed innumerable lines of death in the process and forged himself through relentless real combat.

"......"

The Yellow Lightning in Cheon Woo-jin's hand quietly faded away.

However much he had throttled its output, maintaining it any longer was beyond him.

He had burned the earth spirit qi stored in the Tamryeong Yeonhon Sword, and until it replenished itself, the technique was unusable.

But it didn't matter.

From here on, he intended to employ an entirely different refinement.

The second technique, following the Counter-Cracking that preyed upon structural weakness.

It was to study that structure and reproduce it — to imitate an opponent's spell, exactly as it was.

Replicating Seo Seol-ryeong's spells is impossible.

Cheon Woo-jin drew up his own water spirit qi.

More than that — through the Body of the Dark True Abyss, he pulled in the water spirit qi saturating the entire Snow Mountain Region to its limit.

But Baek Sin-yeong's spells... I can reproduce those.

Reproduction.

That was the second refinement Cheon Woo-jin had been drilling toward all this time.

Not merely understanding a spiritual structure and exploiting its flaws to break it — but rebuilding that structure in full, exactly as it had been.

With his discerning eye for spells growing by leaps and bounds, reproducing Baek Sin-yeong's magic was well within his reach.

Casting an ice-attribute spell takes more than water spirit qi.

Ice-attribute magic was, without question, a spell built on water spirit qi.

But watching Baek Sin-yeong's spellwork, Cheon Woo-jin had realized that water spirit qi alone was insufficient.

To make ice, moisture had to be gathered in one place and hardened — a two-stage process.

And the action of water spirit qi alone couldn't do it. In the Five Elements, water signifies the gathering of things in one place, like seeds — but the hardening was not the work of water. It was the operation of metal.

In the Five Elements, metal is the power of contraction and the power of harvest.

It is also the power that forges things hard as metal itself.

When ice-attribute spells shaped their solid ice, they were in fact drawing upon the principle of metal alongside water spirit qi.

Cheon Woo-jin, of course, was far from adept at handling the metal attribute.

But the pearl of the Tamryeong Yeonhon Sword held metal spirit qi as well.

He would use it — forcibly grafting the metal attribute onto his water spirit qi.

The white pearl embedded in the Tamryeong Yeonhon Sword lost its luster.

The white metal spirit qi stored within it had been liberated.

At once, the black water spirit qi Cheon Woo-jin had gathered began to bleed white.

So that's how it works.

The reason ice-attribute spells ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠glowed white — the color of metal — despite being founded on black water spirit qi.

Only now could he truly understand it.

And upon that realization, Cheon Woo-jin's first ice-attribute spell unfolded.

"H-how can you—!"

Baek Sin-yeong cried out in disbelief from midair.

"The same spell as mine—!"

Above Cheon Woo-jin's head, several hundred blades of ice now hung suspended.

There were differences in scale and in the fine details, but it was unmistakably a reproduction of Baek Sin-yeong's spell.

But this was not the end.

Within Cheon Woo-jin's spiritual domain, a sharp instinct surged into overdrive.

Merely imitating Baek Sin-yeong's spell was not enough — his instinct as a cultivator was demanding that he reach for a higher plane.

To something greater.

Come to think of it, Cheon Woo-jin had always pursued this.

When he had created Black Lightning Annihilation Vista in his battle against Jeok Ya-wol, it was because, while imitating the man's black flame, a superior form had occurred to him — and he had sublimated it into black sword qi.

Back then, he had followed that inspiration on pure instinct alone.

But now was different. He had to construct a polished, complete spell upon systematic understanding.

Spellwork like Baek Sin-yeong's — raw in power but riddled with structural holes — would be shattered in a single exchange by the transcendent beings he was bound to face in the future.

He needed a spell of such high dimensionality that, like the ones Seo Seol-ryeong created, its full scope could scarcely even be grasped.

Yes — like...

The spell Seo Seol-ryeong had used to cut Seolgeo-in down in a single stroke flashed through his mind.

Taking it as his guiding standard, he began to refine the spell within his spiritual domain.

He dismantled Baek Sin-yeong's spellwork in an instant and reconstituted it into something far more advanced.

It was a transcendent feat of technique that only Cheon Woo-jin — growing at such a breakneck pace — could have performed.

The hundreds of ice blades vanished.

In their place, a single white blade was born.

A blade so thin it could scarcely be seen by the naked eye.

Thin as a film of ice on water — and yet.

By the metal spirit qi of the Tamryeong Yeonhon Sword, the combined force of several hundred blades was converged and compressed into it, hard as a diamond edge.

The blade of thin ice crossed the sky.

Along its trajectory, the heavens filled with white in a single instant.

"Ah......"

By that white arc —

Baek Sin-yeong's upper body and lower body were severed.

To be precise, he was cut cleanly in two at the lower abdomen, where his dantian resided.

A blade too thin to properly see, unfolding at incomprehensible speed, had bisected Baek Sin-yeong in a single stroke.

"A—ah, ah......!"

Baek Sin-yeong's scream tore through the air.

It would have been one thing if his body had simply been cut — but the white arc had cleaved straight through to the Golden Core beyond his dantian.

"I must — I must become — a Nascent Soul—!"

The Palace Lord of the Ten Thousand Nights Ice Palace — a man who had formed his core too early and struck his wall too soon.

To break through that wall, he had tried to marry Seo Seol-ryeong; he had sought to claim the Ghost-Summoning Banner and borrow the power of the upper realms.

And now, facing death, not one of those ambitions had come to fruition.

No one mourned him.

Even the subordinates of the Ten Thousand Nights Ice Palace on the ground below felt nothing.

Perhaps because of the sheer cruelty ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠he had shown during his reign over the palace.

"Father......"

With those last words, Baek Sin-yeong plummeted toward the snow mountain.

He sank into the white snow, and even the place where he fell was swallowed without a trace.

"Hoo......"

Exhaling a plume of white breath, Cheon Woo-jin felt a profound sense of accomplishment wash over him.

He had surpassed the refinement of Counter-Cracking.

He had surpassed the refinement of Reproduction.

And now he had completed the refinement of Refinement itself — the improvement and elevation of another's spellwork.

All the relentless pursuit through one blood-soaked battle after another, ever since ascending to the 6th Layer, felt as though it had finally reached its terminus.

"Hm......?"

Suddenly, Cheon Woo-jin noticed steam rising from his own body.

He wondered if he had a fever from pushing himself too hard — but that wasn't it.

Perhaps from wielding so many spirit attributes beyond water in succession, the spirit meridians throughout his entire body had overheated and dilated.

Yet even as that heat subsided, the dilation of his spirit meridians did not revert.

And Cheon Woo-jin realized what that meant.

With meridians like these, I can operate every spirit attribute at once.

Ever since reaching the middle stage of Foundation Establishment at Mount Jagnyang, Cheon Woo-jin had been able to run water spirit qi and fire spirit qi simultaneously through his meridians.

But now the remaining elemental spirit qi could circulate alongside them as well.

It meant he could now freely command all Five Elements.

It meant that the vessel called Cheon Woo-jin had grown one stage greater.

With this, I'm... late-stage Foundation Establishment.

Core Formation had drawn one step closer.

Steeped in that certainty, Cheon Woo-jin took an elixir pill to recover his spent power and set his spirit qi cycling through the grand circulation.

It was then that a lament drifted down from the sky.

"My son... is that all you were capable of, dying like that?"

The spirit beast Baek Sin-yeong had ridden — a snow leopard with fur white as fresh snowfall — was keening in anguish amid the blizzard.