The Cultivation Sect and Ungyu Sect (1)
“Am I dreaming?”
Hyeongeuk muttered the words before he knew it, a breath of astonishment slipping from his lips.
The small sound scattered into the air and sank quietly between the waves.
The sea, which had been raging only moments ago, was calm now; the surf seemed to have stopped altogether, the current moving at a languid pace.
As though the world itself were holding its breath.
“Senior Brother. What do we do now?”
The moment the great tail that had supported them disappeared, one of his junior brothers swam over toward Hyeongeuk, who had fallen into the sea.
At that question, Hyeongeuk could not say a word.
He had never even imagined a scene like this himself.
I need time to think.
Of course, he had heard of beasts taking human form before.
Mostly, he had heard that spirit beasts kept by middle- and high-ranking cultivators could, after reaching a certain level, assume a human appearance.
But knowing something in theory and witnessing it with one’s own eyes were entirely different matters.
That thing was that monstrous shark?
Hyeongeuk stared toward the place where a crimson whirlpool had been raging only moments earlier.
From the center of that stillness, a woman was walking toward him.
He prayed this was a dream, but the tail draped behind her back proved that none of this was a nightmare.
“We can slip away if we get the chance.”
“But Senior Brother.”
“Why are you calling me again?”
“...She’s coming this way.”
When Hyeongeuk turned his head, the woman’s toes, stepping lightly on the water, pressed against the surface as if it were solid ground.
Silver hair glimmered in the light riding over the waves, and her tail flowed behind her in a subtle curve.
Even when she looked like a monster, she didn’t eat us. Maybe we can still work this out.
Instinctively, Hyeongeuk drew up his spiritual energy.
Though he had not yet learned any arts capable of dealing with a monster, he was still at the middle stage of the Refining Qi Realm.
If he fought only with the spiritual energy he had accumulated so far, he should at least be able to buy some time.
“Hm...”
But before long, Hyeongeuk’s spiritual energy scattered in an instant.
The woman stopped before him and tilted her head slightly.
Fascinated by her reflection in the water, she stared at her clear eyes for a long moment.
Then she clicked her tongue and made a sound.
“Comes... out. Words?”
Her clumsy voice, so unlike her appearance, struck Hyeongeuk’s ears with startling clarity.
What is she doing?
Hyeongeuk could neither relax nor respond.
He could not even bring himself to look directly at her.
After all, that monster of a shark had only just taken human form, and she was naked.
Unlike him, Baek Sang-ah seemed utterly unbothered. She touched her lips, marveling that words were coming out at all.
Her eyes, shining like pearls just drawn from the sea, held no trace of menace.
“It comes out. Words, comes out, right? Hehe.”
The woman cautiously opened her mouth again.
Each word seemed to be carefully tasted before being spoken, and though her voice was faint, the meaning rang with strange clarity.
Then Baek Sang-ah lifted her head and looked straight at Hyeongeuk.
“You.”
At that one word, Hyeongeuk’s shoulders jerked.
He tried his best to act as if he had heard nothing, but just as Baek Sang-ah drew nearer, a junior brother who had ducked beneath the water said,
“Senior Brother, I think she’s calling for you.”
“Shut... your mouth.”
Baek Sang-ah glanced down at the junior brother, whose head was just poking out above the surface, then turned her gaze back to Hyeongeuk.
There was still only harmless curiosity in her eyes.
Meanwhile, the moment she came close, Hyeongeuk lowered his head and looked only at his own reflection on the water.
He could not bring himself to look at her body.
And asking her to cover herself was impossible when he had no idea what kind of being she truly was.
“You said you wanted to live.”
“Pardon?”
Hyeongeuk answered in confusion, but the moment he thought over the meaning of her words, his expression slowly stiffened.
“You said, save me. To me. You.”
Baek Sang-ah moved her fingers slowly.
Her wet fingertips brushed her own lips, and her gaze pinned Hyeongeuk’s eyes dead on.
There was no more room to dodge the question.
“I-I did, Senior Sister.”
Hyeongeuk was so breathless he could barely speak, but he forced the words out anyway.
“Why?”
“Pardon?”
“Do you want to live? Why?”
Baek Sang-ah asked it back in the same tone.
“Isn’t it because no one wants to die?”
Hyeongeuk knew how cliché the words sounded.
Even as he said them, he felt how little meaning they held.
“That was true for me too. I wanted to live too.”
“Pardon?”
“Another reason. Don’t have one?”
Baek Sang-ah tilted her head a little.
Hyeongeuk could not for the life of him think of an answer.
He had no choice.
Nothing else came to mind.
Why did he want to live?
He had never once thought about the reason.
It was a question he had never heard, even after being born to a poor family and sold to Ungyu Sect because he possessed the talent known as the Water-Spirit Root, then becoming a cultivator there.
Why did he want to live?
Why did he cultivate?
Why was he pursuing the Dao?
The moment Hyeongeuk sank into thought, some principle he had never known... was about to rise within him.
“Kuhegh?”
“Why aren’t you answering? It’s frustrating.”
Just before he could realize anything, Baek Sang-ah, growing irritated, smashed him over the head with her tail.
He passed out on the spot.
……
……
……
As the unconscious Hyeongeuk’s body bobbed up to the surface, Baek Sang-ah looked down at her own body.
The sensation of arms and legs, after so long.
It was still awkward to have a tail, yet it felt even more familiar than her limbs.
But why did I turn human? I only wanted to be able to speak.
[It is because you have grasped the principle of humanity rather than that of beasts.]
The principle of humanity?
Baek Sang-ah frowned and thought about it, but nothing came to her.
Still, she did not ask Muyeonja any further. She was certain the explanation would go on too long.
Instead, Baek Sang-ah looked at the disciples who had ducked below the water.
“Did you guys want to live too?”
At her words, the cultivators hiding in the water all surfaced one after another.
The first to answer was the disciple who had kept interrupting Hyeongeuk.
“Of course we wanted to live!”
“Why?”
A silence fell among the cultivators.
No one dared answer carelessly. Once again, the same disciple who had spoken first opened his mouth.
“To be honest, we don’t know why either. Unlike Senior Sister, we’re only beginners who just stepped into the Refining Qi Realm, so our learning is shallow.”
“I see.”
Baek Sang-ah muttered softly, then stared at them in silence for a long while.
The people floating before her. Just as her curiosity toward them was starting to fade, the disciple spoke again.
“However! Our Ungyu Sect’s sect leader might know. He has cultivated far longer than us and is already at the middle stage of the Foundation Establishment Realm.”
“Ungyu Sect?”
“It’s the sect we belong to.”
“So it’s like one of those major sects.”
“Y-yes? Ah, probably so.”
At that moment, curiosity lit up in Baek Sang-ah’s eyes again, and the first disciple did not miss it.
He thought, Her head doesn’t seem to work as well as I expected, but if I flatter her carefully, maybe I can bring her to the sect leader. If that happens, the sect leader will surely reward me.
Whether or not he knew the disciple’s ambitions, Baek Sang-ah nodded as if she understood.
“Does that sect leader know? Why one wants to live?”
“I’m certain he does.”
At the same time, the first disciple swiftly stripped Hyeongeuk, who still hadn’t opened his eyes, down to his underclothes, leaving only his inner garments and trousers.
Then he held them out to Baek Sang-ah.
“Clothes. These are.”
“Yes, that’s right. They’re clothes.”
“You mean I should wear them?”
“W-well... if you need them, yes, wear them. If not, you can just throw them away.”
Baek Sang-ah took the inner garments and trousers and lifted them slightly with one hand.
The wet fabric sagged heavily, and droplets fell with a soft drip onto her toes.
“I’ll wear them.”
Baek Sang-ah took the clothes and studied them for a long moment.
The soaked cloth hung limp and clammy from her fingertips, and water dripped in little threads along the hems of the garments before falling onto her feet.
“Feels like I’m caught in a net.”
She slipped her unfamiliar hands into the inner robe.
Clothing, after so long without it, felt terribly awkward.
“A-arm. This side, right.”
She managed to force one arm through, but the shoulder of the robe immediately slid down and slipped along her waist.
Baek Sang-ah frowned and slapped the hem upward with her hand.
Needless to say, the inner robe and trousers did not fit her body at all.
Especially around the chest, where the fabric clung too tightly.
The wet cloth pressed against her skin, and every time she drew breath, it lifted with her and outlined her shape along her body.
“This doesn’t fit.”
Just as Baek Sang-ah was trying to put on the trousers, her tail refused to go through the legs of the pants and got stuck tight.
She tugged at the waistband and wriggled her tail again and again, but nothing worked. The tail was thicker than she’d expected.
After pondering for a moment, she finally bit down on the seat of the pants.
Crack.
Though she now wore a human form, her teeth were still sharp like a shark’s, and they tore through the cloth.
After she bit and bit and pulled with both hands, a rough circle of torn fabric appeared at the back, marked with the bite pattern of a shark’s teeth.
“As expected, Baek Sang-ah is the best at cultivation.”
The moment at last she got the pants on and her tail slid free comfortably, Baek Sang-ah thrust both arms into the air.
“Ahem.”
Then she swished her tail and turned one full circle atop the water.
The cultivators of Ungyu Sect stared at the sight, slack-jawed and speechless.
They wanted to say something, but could not bring themselves to do it.
“Did you all see that?”
Baek Sang-ah glanced around with a slight hunch of her shoulders and caught the eyes of the cultivators half-submerged in the water.
“N-no! I didn’t see anything at all!”
“Why didn’t you look?”
“I’m sorry, Senior Sister!”
At last, Baek Sang-ah raised a hand and pushed her wet hair back.
Human clothes were inconvenient, but since she had once lived as a human, she understood she was supposed to wear them.
So Baek Sang-ah decided to endure the inconvenience for the first time.
“You. Then do you remember now?”
“Pardon?”
“Why you wanted to live.”
“Ah... I still don’t know.”
At that answer, she closed her eyes for a moment in thought, then nodded.
“Then let’s go meet the sect leader. I’m curious.”
“I’ll guide you at once!”
The first disciple secretly rejoiced, already thinking of the credit he would claim for himself.
It did not take long to reach Ungyu Sect.
At most, it was only because this capital sect with a sect leader barely at the Foundation Establishment Realm had been pushed to the fringes after losing out in the struggle for power, leaving it in an out-of-the-way place.
Ungyu Sect was located on the outer shoreline near the sea.
As Baek Sang-ah crossed the water with the cultivators hanging from her tail, a row of miserable buildings came into view on the far side, barely worthy of being called a sect.
A few structures perched on earth-colored wooden pillars, the thresholds plainly split and weathered by the salty sea wind.
At a glance, the place looked shabby and poor.
Baek Sang-ah surveyed the buildings one by one and said,
“Is this right? A sect?”
She twitched her nose and looked at the old wooden pillars.
Her tail instinctively bristled at the strange, unfamiliar smell.
“Yes! This is our Ungyu Sect!”
“It’s shabby.”
“B-but the inside is decent enough to live in.”
Then the great gate of Ungyu Sect opened by itself. The creaking sound pushed by the wind almost sounded like a scream.
“What is all this racket? No, you little brats. Where on earth have you been wandering? I told you the outside is dangerous...”
From beyond the gate emerged an elderly man with a long white beard hanging down his chest.
He was the sect leader of Ungyu Sect, Elder Yun.
In any ordinary cultivation sect, the sect leader would never personally come out to greet guests, but Ungyu Sect was different.
Its disciples amounted to only two cultivators in the middle stage of Refining Qi Realm and six cultivators in the early stage.
In other words, aside from the one disciple who had been cultivating in the main hall, the seven cultivators now grabbed by Baek Sang-ah were all they had.
“You. Are you the sect leader?”
The instant Elder Yun, who had been about to rebuke his disciples gently, heard Baek Sang-ah’s voice, he closed his mouth.
A cultivator who spoke human language, possessing spiritual power so pure it was on an entirely different level from his own.
A beastkin with inhuman teeth and a shark’s tail.
What mattered here was that there were only two kinds of beings who possessed both human and beastly forms.
One was an ordinary beast that had been raised by a high-ranking cultivator and became a spirit beast.
The other was a monster that had survived for countless years, attained enlightenment, and transformed from beast into demon.
Moreover, the more closely one resembled a human, the higher their cultivation had to be.
At the very least, she must be above the Foundation Establishment Realm, perhaps already at the Golden Core Realm.
In any case, for someone like Elder Yun, who was only at the Foundation Establishment Realm himself, it meant she was an existence he could not handle.
Above all, if he looked at the uneasy faces of the disciples standing beside Baek Sang-ah, the situation was obvious as day.
Those fools had surely caused some disaster, and this woman had come to hold him accountable for it.
There was only one thing Elder Yun could do here.
“Oh dear, I’m terribly sorry for not recognizing you sooner, Senior Sister!”
Elder Yun hurriedly bent his knees and lowered his waist.
It was a gesture that cared nothing for dignity, meant only for survival.
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