The Golden Disc Appears
Only moments earlier, nothing had stood behind Yeop Pung but the crumbling wreckage of an old, dilapidated palace.
The instant he turned his head, a palace blazing with radiant gold unfurled before his eyes. The collapsed walls had vanished without a trace. Exquisitely carved pillars and beams, and magnificent halls painted with beautiful murals, stretched away in a grand and glittering procession.
There was not a soul in sight, yet a weight of dignity hung over the place so thick that any ordinary person would have known, at a glance, not to set foot here uninvited.
A vast and towering mountain loomed before the palace. Yeop Pung had to tip his head almost ninety degrees just to find the summit.
The sheer face rose easily a hundred meters, surging up in a great semicircle as if a colossal hand had cupped itself around the ground where he stood. Its smooth surface was packed tight with the same irregular holes he had seen before.
He looked around, and certainty settled in his bones. This was the very peak where he had been training only moments ago. That everything had changed could mean only one thing. He had truly returned to Nagun Peak — a hundred years in the past.
It took three long, deliberate breaths before he could even begin to steady himself.
Impossible. Time travel. This is actually happening to me.
He pulled himself together soon enough, and the memory of cultivating spirit herbs on the rear mountain in a previous jump came rushing back. A fierce, giddy joy seized him.
That's it. My life's about to take off.
Return to the past and rewrite the present. It was a power beyond anything he had ever dared to imagine.
The Spirit Origin Grass he had planted among the trees fifty years in the past had become, in the present, a third-grade spirit medicine — the Spirit Origin Fruit. So what if he planted ten of them? A hundred? Even the thought of it was staggering.
And growing spirit herbs is far too small-time.
He ought to be capable of something far greater than that.
Yeop Pung was no fool. The ability had simply arrived so suddenly that he had not yet worked out how to use a power that turned back time.
While he stood there, still half stunned, the moon climbed high into the sky. The moment its slanting light struck the massive mountain at a peculiar angle, something extraordinary began.
A whisper of radiance swept the cliff.
One after another, the irregular holes across the mountain's face caught the moonlight and began to shine. They glittered like stars, and together they looked like a river of light — a galaxy poured across stone. Tens of millions of points of brilliance gathered upon the cliff, weaving a mysterious Nine Heavens Star River Constellation across the mountain's surface.
It's beautiful.
Yeop Pung could scarcely believe that a sight like this had been hidden on Nagun Peak a century ago. It was as if the vast night sky itself had been lifted from the heavens and laid upon the earth.
Stranger still — the moment his gaze settled on that brilliant starlight, the Profound Qi in his body began to stir in a way he had never felt. Every acupoint seemed to resonate with the stars. A vast tide of heaven-and-earth profound qi came flooding toward him, pouring into his flesh.
The stars upon the cliff sang, and every acupoint in his body answered. Heaven-and-earth profound qi surged into him in a tide far beyond anything his ordinary cultivation had ever drawn.
This constellation isn't ordinary.
Yeop Pung was the kind of genius that appeared maybe once in a hundred years. He saw through the thing in a single glance. What hung before him was no mere pretty arrangement of lights. It was a formidable qi-guiding secret art.
Don't tell me… this is the reason for this jump?
The thought flashed through him as if someone, somewhere, were lending him a hand.
Had that someone seen his profound qi fall short of the next realm, and set him to growing spirit herbs? And this time, finding him without a proper art to cultivate, had they unrolled this mysterious constellation before his eyes?
Since when does the world hand out luck like this?
He knew he would not find the answer standing here. Purpose or no purpose, an enormous opportunity had been laid at his feet — and he was not fool enough to let it pass.
Memorize it. Now.
He fixed his whole mind on the giant diagram and began to burn it into his memory.
It was a deeply strange experience. With every fragment of the constellation he grasped, the acupoints in his body answered and stirred, as if the star-map and his flesh were bound by some hidden correspondence.
Watching closely, he caught it: the stars were flickering in a distinct, deliberate sequence.
That's it. This is an advanced qi-guiding art. The stars stand for the body's acupoints, and the order they flicker in is the order those acupoints should be opened. Train in that sequence, and I'll draw profound qi far more efficiently than before.
The more he understood, the more he trained, the sharper the changes in his body became. He had done nothing but a few simple movements while studying the diagram, and already a far greater volume of profound qi was flooding into him than his usual practice had ever managed.
If his old cultivation speed had been an ox-cart creaking down a dirt road, this was a thousand-li steed at full gallop. And this was only the beginning.
He threw himself into the work, reading the stars, moving with them, drinking them in. He did not know the art's name, but he felt it in his bones: on this jump, he had claimed another treasure of staggering worth.
He kept at it, racing to commit the constellation to memory as fast as he could. But the diagram sprawled across a cliff a hundred meters high. Even with Yeop Pung's gift and his memory, locking down a formation that vast and irregular — and the precise order in which it flickered — was no small task.
One day… was that why the voice gave me a full day?
Even with a day, I don't know if I can hold the whole thing. The mercy is that it works without perfect recall. I've barely memorized a tenth of it, and my training speed is already several times what it was. If I take in the rest, it'll be ten times faster at the very least.
There was no room left in him for any other thought. He poured everything he had into not letting the chance slip through his fingers.
And in the moment he failed to notice, a transparent barrier of profound qi flared to life at his back. Space rippled. Someone carrying a crushing weight of power stepped through.
What?
Yeop Pung jerked to his feet as if he had been burned.
What's going on? There's someone else here?
The thought corrected itself almost at once.
Of course there is.
Even the Cheonun Sect would never have left an art this profound lying around unguarded. He had simply been too busy falling through time to look properly at his surroundings.
That transparent barrier of profound qi said everything. This was a forbidden zone of the Cheonun Sect, a place no one was meant to approach. What he had just been doing was as good as asking to die.
"Wait, Senior! This is a misunderstanding!"
He waved both hands in frantic haste.
"I'm Yeop Pung, a third-generation disciple of the Cheonun Sect! We're on the same side!"
"A Cheonun Sect disciple?"
The man who had arrived in a surge of overbearing force faltered, thrown by the claim.
"Yes, that's right! Look, Senior — the robes I'm wearing are the inner-sect disciple uniform of the Cheonun Sect…"
"Hmph. Don't try to play clever with me. Lies, all of it! The Cheonun Sect has never had a disciple uniform that wretched-looking. Die!"
Damn it.
Yeop Pung cursed himself in silence. The disciple robes of a hundred years ago and the ones on his back were nothing alike. He had dug his own grave and climbed in.
The instant the last word left the guardian's mouth, the Cheonun Sect expert who watched the forbidden grounds struck.
A palm blast whose force seemed to blot out the sky became a colossal wave of profound qi, swallowing a hundred-meter radius in a single breath. There was nowhere to run.
The flow of that energy was as deep and violent as the sea itself. The man had long since stepped beyond the Profound Realm. He was a powerhouse of the Spirit Sea Realm. Before him, Yeop Pung had not even the strength to resist. The attack took him full on and swept him under.
It's over…
A terror that seemed to freeze him to the marrow locked every limb.
Was he going to die here — a cheap, pointless death, all because of time travel?
In that exact instant, a cold voice rang through his mind once more.
Life-threatening danger detected.
Terminating time travel ahead of schedule and returning to original timeline…
How did I end up with such a thoughtless brat…
In a flicker, Yeop Pung vanished from that place, slipping the killing stroke by a hair.
Joy and grief crashed through him at once. The joy was this: he could return to the present whenever he needed to. Every danger, in the end, was something he could walk away from. Time travel would never let him die.
The grief, however…
Who are you calling thoughtless?
You — hiding somewhere, watching me. Come out and say that to my face. Who the hell figures out every last rule on their first jump?
He seethed. And then the voice, as if it had reached into his skull and read the thought outright, added one cold, clipped word.
Weren't you the one who said you wouldn't answer if I made a nuisance of myself?
When Yeop Pung came back to the present, everything was exactly as he had left it.
He lifted his head and looked at the moon hanging in the sky. Time in the real world did not seem to have moved at all. In the span of a heartbeat he had gone a hundred years into the past, lived through that strange, glittering, nearly fatal night, and returned.
"So going back to the past doesn't touch the present at all?"
He knew nothing about his own ability. The voice hiding behind it had offered not a scrap of explanation. If he wanted the rules, he would have to find them, pick them apart, and put them together himself.
Why do I have this power? How does a jump even start? Is it always only a single day?
All of it was still a locked room. When he turned his attention inward to his dantian once more, something waited there — hazy, half-real and half-illusion. A disc of gold. The mysterious existence that had rewritten his fate had, at last, shown half its face.
"Hey."
Yeop Pung settled into a lotus seat and spoke toward the voice behind the Golden Disc.
"I know you're in there. Come out for a second. We need to talk."
"…"
"Don't be like that. You could at least tell me how to start the next jump."
"…"
"You little—!"
A sharp jolt ripped through his dantian. Golden lightning burst from the disc and tore through him.
Golden current erupted from the disc and slammed through his meridians, a wordless, crackling rebuke.
Damn it! It even shocked me. Unbelievable.