Hope, Not a Burden
"Are you all right?"
To Yun Cheon's question, she gave no answer. Instead she shrank back, crouching low like a wounded beast cornered at the edge of a cliff.
"…I don't recall seeing you in the Inner Library before."
Her lips trembled, blue with cold, yet the wariness behind them was as sharp as hoarfrost.
"I am Yun Cheon, a warrior under Pavilion Lord Gal Mu-heun."
"…You needn't worry about me."
She looked precarious at a single glance. She had no control whatsoever over the yin energy swirling within her; with every breath, a white plume scattered from her lips like frost.
She's pushing herself far too hard.
Rather than answer, Yun Cheon fixed his gaze on the old scroll trembling in her hands.
"Cutoff Meridians Syndrome. And the yin has burrowed all the way into your marrow."
"…How could you possibly know that?"
Her voice was still thick with suspicion, but Yun Cheon replied flatly, driving home a single piercing line.
"That much, I can see at a glance. I suffer from congenital cutoff meridians myself."
Her glacier-blue eyes went wide.
"Th… that's impossible? With cutoff meridians, no one could stand there looking so healthy at your age…?"
In that instant, the strength drained from her hands, and the old scroll dropped to the floor with a soft thud.
Srrk.
The unrolled scroll was crowded with bizarre glyphs he had never seen in his life. Yun Cheon bent down slowly and picked it up.
…Script from the Western Regions? Or an ancient tongue?
It was a thicket of illegible characters that crawled like earthworms. But a note left in the margin caught his eye.
"Shatter the acupoints blocked by the clash of Extreme Yin and Extreme Yang… and from the ruins of destruction, a new path shall open… This is called the Two Extremes Merging Art."
Yun Cheon's brow furrowed. The annotation alone was enough to lay bare its monstrous principle.
This is madness. It isn't a treatment — it deserves to be called a demonic art outright.
It was the exact opposite of the Daoist way of harmony and natural order. To make a battlefield of a fragile body and set opposing energies colliding within it — this was not a notion of mending the body but of blasting it apart.
"Don't tell me you intend to master this?"
At his demand, she thrust her hand out desperately. "Give it back…!"
But Yun Cheon simply drew his hand back and shook his head.
"This is no cure. It's suicide. Striking acupoints sealed by Extreme Yin with Extreme Yang to force them open? Do you truly believe your body could endure that shock?"
"……!"
Her lips quivered. She knew. She knew full well this was a gamble staked on her life. But she had no choices left.
"It doesn't… matter. There's no other way now."
Her voice carried the chilling venom of one with nothing left to lose.
Like a wildcat, she flung herself at him to snatch the scroll back.
Crack—!
The wretched figure wasting away from her illness, ready to collapse at any moment, had vanished without a trace. Her movement closed the distance in a flash — eerily, impossibly fast.
Whiiiing—!
The moment she extended her arm, a savage cold wind howled through the shelves. The yin energy running rampant, beyond her control, sharpened into a blade at her fingertips and froze the very air.
Left alone, this is dangerous. The archive itself will take damage.
It was a chill that would necrotize flesh on contact, like being scorched by an open flame in reverse. But instead of dodging, Yun Cheon stepped one pace forward.
Tap.
His hand snapped out like frost and caught her wrist with perfect precision.
"……!"
Shock flooded her blue eyes. A cold that would freeze her to the bone on contact — and the man before her was absorbing it barehanded as if it were nothing.
"Let go! Unless you want to freeze solid and die with me!"
She screamed and poured out the yin energy she had been suppressing. White frost began crystallizing across the back of Yun Cheon's hand. A pain like tearing flesh climbed up his wrist, but his expression never wavered.
"I don't want to die. That's exactly why I struggle."
As he spoke, a foreign energy flowed through the captured wrist and into her body. It was not internal power stored in a dantian. It was vitality painstakingly teased out, thread by thread, through the Life-Prolonging Breathing Technique — the method Yun Cheon had devised himself to survive the cursed constitution of cutoff meridians.
True Origin True Qi.
That warm, weighty energy gently wrapped itself around her rampaging cold.
Sizzle.
Like a heated iron pressed into cold water, white steam rose where the two energies met. Any other collision of opposing qi would have sent them rebounding apart — yet like spring sunlight melting the frozen ground of deep winter, Yun Cheon's energy did not suppress the rampant cold. It simply opened a path for it to disperse naturally.
"Ah……"
A slender gasp escaped her lips. It felt as though the ice thorns constricting her heart were melting away. For the first time in her life, she was breathing without pain.
High above, in the darkness near the ceiling, an old man's eyes glinted with interest.
Hooh… well, look at that boy? An attack that even the Life and Death Venerable couldn't easily quell once it started — and he calms it just like that?
Even Cheon Gyeon, the overseer, could not carelessly intervene in her rampages. One wrong touch, and the suppressed yin could detonate and sever her heart meridian outright. Each time she spiraled, the best he could do was shield the books from the cold and summon the Venerable. And now a newcomer had stepped in and was stemming her rampage.
What is that technique…? I've never seen its like, even in the Inner Library. No wonder Gal Mu-heun grants him special treatment.
Yun Cheon's True Origin True Qi stroked her frigid, ailing qi, soothing it with deliberate care.
"…Wh… what is this?"
She stared blankly, her gaze moving between her wrist and Yun Cheon. Faintly, color was returning to her blue-frozen lips.
"That's not internal power…?"
The savage cold that had been swallowing her whole moments ago had been mastered by a boy she'd never seen before in her life — by a body afflicted with the very same cutoff meridians.
"Don't tell me… True Origin True Qi?"
Her eyes wavered. The primal life force one is born with.
And he wields it like that… how in the world…
Once her breathing had steadied, Yun Cheon slowly withdrew his hand.
"It was a stopgap, nothing more. I merely calmed you for a time. A true cure is…"
"I know that much."
She turned her head away and snapped the words out. But her fingertips, where the trembling had stopped, and the faint color returning to her pallid cheeks told the truth for her.
"…Don't get any ideas. I could have calmed myself even without your help."
It was pride. A fragile pride that felt as though it would shatter the instant she leaned on anyone.
Yun Cheon didn't know her name, but he was certain of who she was. A patient suffering grave cutoff meridians, drifting in and out of the Inner Library — forbidden ground of the Demonic Cult — as if it were her own home. If Gal Mu-heun and even Cheon Gyeon tacitly permitted her dangerous comings and goings, there could be only one answer.
…This woman is the Life and Death Venerable's granddaughter. To think I'd meet her before ever meeting the man himself.
Yun Cheon suppressed a smile and pointed out the facts, careful not to bruise her pride.
"No doubt. In about an hour's time, you'd have settled down on your own."
"……"
"Though in the meantime, your heart meridian would have frozen over and shaved years off your life — and the precious medical texts shelved here would have crumbled from frost damage, but of course."
A direct hit. She bit her lip. She could hardly be unaware of the damage her rampages brought.
After a long silence, she spoke in a voice that had shrunk to a crawl.
"…You're right."
She lifted her head. The wariness in her glacier-blue eyes had faded somewhat.
"Yun Cheon, was it? I'm Seol Yeong… Thank you. I didn't want to be a bother."
Yun Cheon picked up the old scroll at her feet as he spoke.
"That must be why you were so recklessly trying to master this deadly demonic art."
His gaze deepened. He handed the scroll back to her and added in a low voice:
"Because you couldn't bear to be a burden to anyone ever again."
"……!"
Seol Yeong's blue eyes shook violently. He had struck her most wounded place with perfect precision — the deepest, darkest corner of her heart that she had wanted no one to ever discover.
Even Grandfather couldn't cure my illness…
Her grandfather — the greatest physician of the Demonic Cult, the one they called the master of life and death itself, the Life and Death Venerable.
To watch him despair over her sickness, his healing arts laid useless at his feet — that was a punishment far crueler than dying of the disease itself.
"You have quite the talent for reading people's hearts. It's almost unsettling."
With a bitter smile, Seol Yeong accepted the scroll. But she no longer tried to hide it against her chest. Instead, she met Yun Cheon's eyes squarely.
"You're right. I don't want to be Grandfather's burden anymore. Even if mastering this demonic art drags me into qi derangement and kills me — that might be better."
In her eyes, Yun Cheon saw a desperate, ferocious resolve. A struggle that had accepted death — no, that welcomed it.
…So she reached for a forbidden art because she couldn't bear to watch her grandfather, a healer, despair over her.
His gaze settled on her trembling fingertips. This was not the madness of the Demonic Cult he so despised, but the desperate survival instinct of a human being standing at the cliff's edge.
"Shedding your burden through death is easy. Cowardly, even."
"What did you say?"
"You'd escape your burden by dying — but the one you leave behind would carry a heavier burden for the rest of their life: the weight of guilt."
Seol Yeong's eyes rippled violently. She knew full well the weight her grandfather would have to bear.
"Prove it while you live. Prove that you are not a burden — that you are hope."
It was also a vow Yun Cheon had been engraving into his own heart. The sworn brothers of Kunlun who had perished. Upon the survivor's shoulders rested both their deaths, and the hope of Kunlun's future.
"…Not a burden. Hope."
Seol Yeong turned his words over like an incantation. In her dying eyes, a spark of life flickered — faint, but unmistakable.
"I'll remember that."
Scroll gathered into her arms, Seol Yeong gave Yun Cheon a slight bow. It felt as though staying a moment longer would break her into tears.
She fled the shelves like a rabbit escaping a snare.
The Venerable's granddaughter, of all people…
With Seol Yeong gone, silence settled over the Inner Library once more. Yun Cheon stared for a moment at the place where she had vanished, then turned his steps back toward the medical texts.
He had spoken boldly in front of her, but inwardly, a sigh escaped him.
So even the Demonic Cult's foremost physician could find no answer to cutoff meridians.
The road to a cure looked remote indeed. But he was not without hope.
If I secure a private audience with the Life and Death Venerable later, having examined her condition today will become a decisive card to play.
From that day on, Yun Cheon became a ghost haunting the Inner Library. He sacrificed even his mealtimes, devouring every medical text the archive possessed, one after another.
Srrk.
With every page he turned, a chill clung to his fingertips — traces Seol Yeong had left behind. The dense notes crammed into every margin were evidence of just how ferociously she had clawed at life.
"When the yin energy surges back up the dantian, press the Yongcheon point to calm it… Failed."
"The principle of using poison to subdue poison… The risk is far too great."
Her handwriting shook, and some pages were stained with blotches — frost-bite, perhaps, or dried tears, impossible to tell which.
…She walked every one of these roads alone?
Yun Cheon clicked his tongue.
She researched this fiercely…
She was a fellow patient, fighting for survival against cutoff meridians just as he was.
Kindred suffering, drawing kindred hearts together.
If anything, she had endured the agony far longer than Yun Cheon, who had only known the torment of cutoff meridians for a year or so since his rebirth.
Then it happened. He was standing before an old tome written in thorny Western Region script, frowning over it, when—
Thud.
Someone dropped a thick stack of books carelessly onto his desk. It was Baekri Hyeon.
"What's this…?"
"…Books I've annotated. She learned the Western Region script from me too. Ask if there's anything you don't understand."
Arms crossed, Baekri Hyeon put on a deliberately put-upon expression. This was the same man who, under normal circumstances, would have picked a fight over a newcomer's insolence.
"Are you helping me?"
"…Don't flatter yourself. It's not because I like you."
Baekri Hyeon turned his head sharply and bit the words out.
"It's just… so even you have cutoff meridians. I'm helping in case it turns out to be the slightest use to her."
The words bristled with thorns, but the books he handed over were exactly the core material needed to unstick everything Yun Cheon had been hung up on.
"…My thanks."
Yun Cheon answered briefly and buried himself in the tomes. Baekri Hyeon quietly watched his back. His eyes held a tangle of feelings.
Talent, the Pavilion Lord's favor — even the very illness she suffers from…
Jealousy toward a boy who possessed everything he had ever wanted, or longed to touch. But a wish greater and more desperate than that jealousy was what drove him to help.
…Please. Find something. Anything — so long as she can… live.
Having watched Yun Cheon a moment longer, Baekri Hyeon slipped away silently into the shadows.
The smell of aged paper, and the dust of wisdom accumulated over thousands of years. Yun Cheon was deep in the Western Region medical texts Baekri Hyeon had given him when the stillness broke — hurried footsteps approaching.
"Yun Cheon, you have a visitor."
Baekri Hyeon stepped aside, and from behind him emerged a hulking figure Yun Cheon knew well — a man gasping for breath, sweat pouring off him as if from a downpour.
"…Instructor Ma Chung?"
Yun Cheon closed his book and rose. The drill instructor of the Hidden Demon Cave, coming all the way to the Inner Library himself, in broad daylight?
More than that, Ma Chung's face was not the face of a man who had come merely to check in.
"Damn it all — I had the Chief Instructor's emergency summons in hand and the gatekeepers still blocked my way. Wasted precious time."
The moment Baekri Hyeon cleared out, Ma Chung seized Yun Cheon's shoulder and dropped his voice low, urgency written across his features.
"There's no time. Listen carefully. It's bad news."
Ma Chung's expression had hardened into something dead serious.
"The Inspection Bureau is after you."
—
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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