The Ice Within the Stacks
The spear of the sentry guarding the entrance of the Inner Library shot toward Yun Cheon's shoulder like a striking viper.
Shriek—!
This was no mere threat. It was a genuine killing technique, one that would punch clean through his shoulder if he failed to react properly.
Fast.
But Yun Cheon did not dodge. No — there was no need to.
Thud—!
A dull, heavy clang of metal rang through the corridor. Yun Cheon had simply raised his left arm and knocked the incoming spearhead aside.
"……?!"
The one struck with shock was the warrior who had attacked. He had hit a human arm, yet the rebound that rang up his grip felt like bringing a massive boulder crashing down, as though it might tear his hand clean off.
That… that arm, what in the—
His gaze settled on the black iron rings wound around inside Yun Cheon's sleeve — iron rings specially commissioned from the quartermaster, three times heavier than the standard issue. A crushing mass lurked there, enough to wrench the trajectory of a spear thrust clean off course.
"Is this all you have?"
With Yun Cheon's cold voice, his right hand moved this time. It brushed past his waist, and something flashed like a streak of lightning.
A flying dagger!
The warrior flinched and hastily retracted his spear shaft to block it — but Yun Cheon's movement defied expectation. Instead of throwing the blade, Yun Cheon unfolded the Shadowless Step, and his form burrowed in like a shadow, slipping into the warrior's very embrace.
"Ugh!"
The warrior recoiled in terror — but it was too late. The cold touch of metal was already resting against the Adam's apple of his throat.
"……!"
A flying dagger gifted by Ya Jin hovered in Yun Cheon's hand, leveled at the sentry's neck.
"Throwing it isn't the only way to use a dagger."
Reciting Ya Jin's teaching word for word, Yun Cheon's eyes were cold enough to cut the man down on the spot.
"Is my qualification proven with this? Or… must I show you more?"
The dagger in Yun Cheon's hand pressed coldly against the man's throat. Sweat trickled down beneath the warrior's mask.
The freakish strength that batted aside a spear with iron rings, the movement art that closed the distance in a heartbeat, and a killing intent without a trace of hesitation — this was not an opponent to be underestimated for his boyish looks.
"…It is… proven."
The warrior answered in a trembling voice and withdrew his spear, opening the way. The other sentry watching from the side swallowed dryly and hastily cranked the iron gate's mechanism.
Creeeeeak—.
The massive iron gate swung inward, and at last the heart of the Mad Path Pavilion revealed itself — the Inner Library.
Murmurs rose at his back.
"That guy… that movement just now, wasn't that the footwork of the Shadowless Killing Sect?"
"Those iron rings on his arms — no ordinary weight either. Young as he is, another monster has walked in…."
Their voices were awed, cowed by the overwhelming martial prowess Yun Cheon had displayed in an instant. They clicked their tongues as they watched his retreating figure vanish inside.
"Isn't he the youngest of all the late-entry candidates Instructor Gal Mu-heun has picked so far?"
"Every other Book Ghost was no ordinary sort either, but… somehow this one feels different."
Leaving their whispers behind, Yun Cheon stepped into the Inner Library.
"……."
The smell of aged paper and the heavy air of years-lain dust wrapped around him. Before his eyes, bookshelves stretching clear to the ceiling unfolded without end, forming a vast forest of knowledge. In scale, it was beyond any comparison with the basic martial library.
So this is everything the Demonic Path gathered from across the Central Plains….
The scale was overwhelming. Moreover, the cool temperature, the proper humidity, the perfect light-blocking — the preservation conditions were of the highest order.
Yun Cheon swept his gaze rapidly over the overall structure.
Not just martial manuals… formations, medicine, pharmacology, alchemy… books from all manner of fields are mixed in here.
There were even dossiers on the murim forces stationed in every region of the Central Plains.
Records not only on sects and noble clans, but on the imperial family and the military bureaus as well….
The breadth of material exceeded imagination. There were even tomes on the foreign murim beyond the frontier — the Western Regions, India, Persia.
…So they plundered more than just the Central Plains.
The Demonic Cult's headquarters sat between the Western Regions and the Central Plains. Because of that, a considerable share of the books here were not of Central Plains origin.
Perhaps, if it's medicine from outside the Central Plains…?
Setting aside his wonder, Yun Cheon headed straight for the section where the medical texts were gathered — the matter closest to his heart. In particular, old volumes dealing with the strange afflictions of qi, blood, and meridians caught his eye: Severed Meridian Syndrome, reversed blood flow, qi deviation from overreach, and the like.
Compendium of the Extraordinary Meridians, Art of Reversed Blood, Diagnosis of Demonic Meridians… The shelves were filled with rare medical texts whose very names he had never heard before.
He was just reaching out to take the Compendium of the Extraordinary Meridians —
Hwaeng—!
From an unseen blind angle, a heavy gust of wind came whistling at Yun Cheon's wrist. It was no mere check. It was a precise acupoint strike, aimed to stamp squarely on the pulse gate of his wrist.
Yun Cheon instinctively drew back his hand and retreated half a step. Where his fingers had been, a single judge's brush — shaped like a writing brush but forged from steel — stood embedded in the shelf.
"A newcomer, is it? No manners at all. Reaching for the books before anything else."
A man walked out from the shadows behind the shelves. Pale skin, irritable eyes. He plucked the judge's brush from the shelf and rolled it deftly between his fingers.
A weapon of the same kind as Pavilion Lord Gal Mu-heun's beloved brush….
That alone told Yun Cheon exactly whom this man admired.
"I manage the medical texts in this section. Don't touch them without leave."
"I entered with Pavilion Lord Gal Mu-heun's sanction. I hadn't realized I needed yours as well."
"Hmph. Every Book Ghost here was likewise chosen by the Pavilion Lord. But this place is still the Demonic Path — the law of Survival of the Fittest admits no exception."
The man smiled thinly and leveled the tip of his brush at Yun Cheon.
"The harm caused when an unqualified fool meddles with medical texts is not to be taken lightly. If you wish to handle the medical section, you must first earn the recognition of me, Baekri Hyeon."
The steel tip, honed to a point finer than a brush's nib, glinted coldly. This Inner Library, too, belonged to the Demonic Path. A place where, unless you proved your strength, even knowledge would be denied you.
"Well then — let's see what sort of newcomer the Pavilion Lord has sent this time."
Barely had the words left his mouth before Baekri Hyeon came charging in.
Martial arts wielded through a judge's brush. I couldn't gauge the full depth of Chief Instructor Gal Mu-heun's arts, but… I'm curious how far his kind extends.
Shriek!
Baekri Hyeon's brush darted in for the blood channel along Yun Cheon's arm — an exquisite acupoint method that only one who had fully mapped the body's blood vessels and qi meridians could perform. A martial art perfectly suited to subduing an opponent without spilling a drop of blood.
Tak!
But Yun Cheon, unfazed, caught it with the iron ring on his wrist.
"Oho. Young as you look, your fundamentals aren't bad… Every time you receive my brush, I'll teach you one of this place's rules."
As Yun Cheon turned aside a strike, Baekri Hyeon's eyes widened in surprise, and he spoke — as though the lesson itself were a reward.
"First, don't channel internal energy needlessly. It damages the books."
Baekri Hyeon's brush coiled in like a serpent, going for Yun Cheon's flank.
My body can't use internal energy anyway — that condition doesn't apply to me.
Even without internal force behind it, the point came in with enough keenness to carve into flesh. Yun Cheon stepped through the Limitless Step and evaded the brush's trajectory by the width of a single sheet of paper.
"Second, each library section has senior Book Ghosts assigned to it. Don't touch their books without their leave. It may look like chaos, but every shelf has its own order, kept in its own way."
A soundless exchange of blows wove through the narrow aisles between shelves. Each time Yun Cheon dodged or deflected the rapid-fire thrusts, Baekri Hyeon recited another rule of the Inner Library.
Baekri Hyeon, is it? Not bad. He knows how to use the space.
Baekri Hyeon seemed well accustomed to fighting within cramped stacks, and his command of the terrain was superb. He predicted where Yun Cheon would flee and jabbed his brush into that spot ahead of time — but Yun Cheon, borrowing the rotational force of his iron rings' weight, deflected each attack aside, all the while searching for an opening to counter.
"Third! When you question your seniors, show proper respect!"
Baekri Hyeon's eyes hardened, and his brush bored in for the Jianjing acupoint on Yun Cheon's shoulder. Dense shelves hemmed him in on both sides; the way behind was blocked. There was no room to evade.
If there's no space to dodge….
Instead of retreating, Yun Cheon crossed his ring-laden forearms and snatched the incoming brush head-on.
Tak—!
In the instant that steel met steel, the vibration transmitted through the judge's brush made Baekri Hyeon's eyes fly wide open.
"…You?"
The fine tremor at the tip of Baekri Hyeon's brush stopped dead. Rather than pressing the attack, he stepped back a single pace as though he had seen something uncanny — then, without lowering his guard, he looked Yun Cheon over from head to toe, still locked in the grapple.
"Your body's condition…?"
In that moment, the light in Baekri Hyeon's eyes changed — from the eyes of a man facing an enemy to the eyes of a physician facing a patient.
"From the look of you… your qi and blood are twisted all across your body. Don't tell me — Severed Meridian Syndrome? And… congenital, at that?"
Yun Cheon's brow twitched.
He read my constitution after only a few exchanges?
He had taken the man for nothing more than a territorial cur, but he was evidently a real master, fit to be entrusted with the medical section.
"So that's why you were nosing around the medical section? Looking for a way to survive?"
Yun Cheon, his guard still unbroken, gave only a slight nod.
"…And if I am?"
An intrigued smile crept across Baekri Hyeon's lips. His gaze picked Yun Cheon's body apart like a man studying a medical rarity of extraordinary value — not a mere intruder.
"What a coincidence. Another Severed Meridian patient entering the Inner Library…."
"Another Severed Meridian patient?"
At that very moment —
[How noisy.]
[Enough of your little test, Baekri Hyeon.]
From high in the ceiling, out of the pitch-black darkness, a crushing pressure came pouring down. A resonance as though the very air of the space were ringing. Eyes that flashed within the gloom swept across Yun Cheon.
Intuiting at once that this was no mere caretaker, Yun Cheon bowed his head.
[So you're the newcomer. Not bad. Turning aside Baekri Hyeon's brushwork without so much as creasing a book — Gal Mu-heun has made a bold exception, I see.]
In an instant, Baekri Hyeon shot back a look of disbelief.
"Elder Cheon Gyeon! An exception? Surely not…!"
[Yes. That boy has been granted unrestricted reading access to the Inner Library.]
"Unrestricted reading?! It took me more than half a year of grueling work just to earn charge of the medical section…!"
Baekri Hyeon's face flushed red and purple. It wasn't simple wounded pride. It was the shock and jealousy of learning that the Pavilion Lord — ever as impartial as the heavens — had shown favoritism toward a fresh arrival.
[Accept it, Baekri Hyeon. If it galls you, prove it with skill. What you look like right now is pitiful.]
"…Khh."
At Cheon Gyeon's rebuke, Baekri Hyeon bit his lip and lowered his head. If he drew the ire of Cheon Gyeon, the overseer of the Inner Library, even his qualification as a Book Ghost could be stripped away.
[Guide the newcomer yourself. Aren't you a man who walks the path of saving lives?]
"…Understood."
Forcibly swallowing his anger, Baekri Hyeon turned his head toward Yun Cheon. Even now, curiosity about Yun Cheon's condition still lingered in his eyes.
"Follow me. The medical section is this way."
Yun Cheon silently trailed after him. Baekri Hyeon walked ahead and tossed the words over his shoulder, curt and brusque.
"From here to that far end — that's the medical collection. No telling whether it holds a way to fix that broken body of yours."
"Much appreciated."
"Hmph. And one word of advice. If you dig through these shelves… you may come across her."
"Her?"
Baekri Hyeon's expression stiffened strangely — a tangle of fear, pity, and awe.
"And… steer well clear of her if you can. Wherever she is, even the bookshelves freeze over."
Baekri Hyeon paused, his voice dropping. What flickered across his eyes was pity.
"Above all… she may not have another winter left in her."
Leaving those cryptic words behind, Baekri Hyeon hurried away and vanished.
A week after Yun Cheon first set foot in the Inner Library.
Every single day, he felt the sticky weight of watching eyes upon his back. Between shelf and shelf, in every crevice where the darkness lay thick, glistening eyes lay hidden.
Book Ghosts, is it… Gal Mu-heun has gathered a fine collection of eccentrics here.
One of them hung upside-down from the ceiling like a bat as he read; another lay prone on the floor, endlessly muttering something under his breath. They found the newcomer interesting, but unlike Baekri Hyeon, none of them moved against him.
…Just as he said. Each Book Ghost has a section of their own.
Before long, Yun Cheon stopped bothering with them. Instead, he buried himself in the medical texts, reading them with single-minded devotion.
Then one day, he drew an old medical volume from a shelf.
Srururuk.
Yun Cheon's hand, mid page-turn, came to a halt.
…What is this?
The paper was crumpled and shriveled — not the mark of paper that had been soaked and dried. It was the ruin left when paper had frozen solid, then thawed. When he pressed a fingertip to it, a faint but unmistakable chill seemed to seep into his skin.
Someone was reading this until just a moment ago.
He examined the contents. It was a passage on the countermeasures to take when one fell into qi deviation from forcibly boring open the blood channels.
So this is the previous guest Baekri Hyeon spoke of.
Yun Cheon closed the book and gazed deep into the stacks. Ignoring the Inner Library's carefully regulated temperature, that one zone alone breathed the cold of midwinter.
The mere leakage of her qi is enough to turn the ground around her to frozen earth….
Then —
Tak. Tatatak…
The sound of teeth chattering. And a moan, strangled and suppressed.
"Uhhh… ugh…."
It might have been a beast enduring agony, or a soul shivering in the cold. Yun Cheon's eyes narrowed.
Something is at the very heart of that cold.
Jeobeok.
Yun Cheon followed the trail of frost with care. With every step, the biting cold lunged at him, worming into his collar.
At the farthest end of the shelves, where the darkness lay deepest, someone was propped precariously against the bookcase, one hand clutched to her chest, standing with obvious difficulty. With every breath she exhaled, a faint frost seemed to bloom in the air.
"Hheuk…!"
The faint moans grew clearer the closer he drew to the heart of the cold.
…This aura originates from a human being?
A savage, ferocious yin-cold energy — the kind that burrowed under the skin and seemed as though it would freeze the very blood within the veins. The figure was mummified head to toe in a thick woolen cloak and a face-veil. So severe was her sensitivity to cold that even bundled in layer upon layer of fur-lined clothing, she trembled violently.
Perhaps sensing a human presence, the figure slowly, painfully turned her head toward Yun Cheon. What revealed itself between the folds of the veil was not the coloring of the Central Plains.
Emerald eyes…?
Eyes like deep-blue glaciers set directly into their sockets. Even wavering with pain, that gaze alone lost none of its icy, mystical luster. Like an ice flower blooming alone upon the crown of a snow mountain.
"Who… might you be…?"
Her lips, blue to the very edges, framed the words as she fixed Yun Cheon with a gaze brimming with wariness.
…Yin-Severed Meridians. And in a state far graver than ordinary.
To live, she was waging an endless war against the cold that gnawed away at her own life.
Return of the Cloud Dragon
Author: Chu Sang (Autumn Frost)
Publisher: Samyang C&C Co., Ltd.
Managing Editor: Editorial Department
Published by: Samyang C&C Co., Ltd. — Dream Books
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