Dividing the Soul, Twin Ultimates
Kugugugu―.
With every step the old man took out of the darkness, the air of the Inner Library grew heavier than lead.
The shelves trembled faintly, and years of settled dust bloomed upward into the empty air. It was an overwhelming wave of qi that dominated the very space itself—Cheon Gyeon, the Watcher of the Inner Library, and the formless tide surging from him crashed down over the two of them.
"Ugh…!"
Yayul Hui stumbled back without meaning to, a groan slipping past her lips. It felt as though some vast, invisible hand had seized her entire body, wringing the very air from her lungs.
I can't… retreat like this.
She bit her lip to anchor her mind, forced strength into her trembling legs, and dragged the energy of her dantian up against its will. Wuuung―. The hereditary inner art of the Wild Wind Yayul Family, Wild Wind Qi Art. A current like the wind itself coiled through her body and pried open her constricted breath.
A gale-like current spirals inward, forcing open the crushed breath and steadying the trembling frame.
At the sight, a flicker of intrigue crossed Cheon Gyeon's eyes.
"Hooh… I smell the wind. The Wild Wind Qi Art, is it?"
"H-how could you possibly—?"
An inner cultivation art worked upon the innermost recesses of the body. Discerning its origin at a glance from the outside was all but impossible—yet Cheon Gyeon was the mad old monster who had laid eyes on a thousand martial arts.
"Crude, but pure. A daughter of the Yayul clan."
He read the flow of Yayul Hui's inner energy as though sniffing at it.
My family…?
Her eyes went wide, but Cheon Gyeon only waved a hand as if the matter bored him.
"You pass. You have a day. Go in first—that one still has more to be tested."
The mountain-crushing pressure that had pinned Yayul Hui down receded like an ebbing tide. Only then did she drag in a rough breath and lift her head, her gaze turning to Yun Cheon standing beside her.
Will you… be all right?
Worry passed between them without a word. The pressure Cheon Gyeon directed at Yun Cheon had grown all the more relentless now that she had been released from it. Yet Yun Cheon's expression remained calm. He gave her a small nod.
Go on ahead.
A brief exchange of glances. Yayul Hui read the signal. The only thing she could do here was trust him and stay out of the way.
…Right. If it's Yun Cheon.
Without hesitation she turned and vanished into the darkness deep within the library.
"Utterly… unreadable."
Cheon Gyeon's eyes narrowed. Inner energy was flowing from Yun Cheon as well—a chill, pristine cold. But it was far too clear to be the ice arts of the Demonic Path, and its texture was unlike anything from the North Sea. Srrreuk. Cheon Gyeon advanced toward Yun Cheon step by measured step, his aura undiminished.
"Let's see what you can do. Just how many steps of my Thousand-Weight Stride can you endure?"
With every footfall, the crushing pressure doubles—and doubles again.
Kung. Each time the old man shifted his weight, the pressure bearing down on Yun Cheon swelled geometrically.
"One stride."
A crack sounded from Yun Cheon's knee joint. Still he stood.
"Two strides."
Kugugung. A hairline fracture split the hard black stone beneath Yun Cheon's feet. Cold sweat beaded his brow, but his gaze did not waver.
"Three strides."
Kwagagaga…! A violent force that seemed to warp the space itself—eightfold the pressure of the beginning.
Khh… monstrous inner energy. He's no mere watcher…!
Yun Cheon clenched his teeth, driving the Limitless Ice Heart Canon to its absolute limit to hold. Kiiiing… The bookshelves cried out first. Nearby racks groaned, and the volumes lodged within them shuddered. Push the pressure any higher, and the priceless texts of the Inner Library would be damaged. Precisely at that point, Cheon Gyeon halted and withdrew his aura.
"Hooh… inner energy of the first-rate order, and you endure three full strides of it."
He swept Yun Cheon with a strange look. It was clearly not a Demonic Cult art—yet neither could it be called an orthodox one, for the energy at its root was cold, yin-natured frost.
"Even I, Cheon Gyeon, who has known a thousand martial arts, cannot trace your inner art to its source."
There was none of the turbid, rampaging turbulence peculiar to demonic qi. Instead it was clear and profound, like the arts of the Dao. With eyes full of suspicion—and, in equal measure, a voracious curiosity—Cheon Gyeon spoke.
"…Answer my question."
The trial of strength had ended long ago. What began now was a trial of thought.
"What is the strong?"
Yun Cheon's eyes gleamed. The stock answers any Demonic Cult that worshipped power might offer flashed past his mind—one who tramples others to climb, one who survives to the very end, one who sets the world beneath his feet… But Yun Cheon shook his head and erased every one of those tired answers.
"The strong are those who possess a will that cannot be broken."
"…The strength of will, then. Fine. In that case—what is your Reverence for the Strong? Is it the weak as meat and the strong as feed?"
The doctrine at the very root of the Demonic Cult. Most equated it with raw predation: that the strong devouring the weak was simply the natural order. Yet the boy flatly denied it.
"Predation is merely the way of beasts."
Cheon Gyeon's brow twitched.
"…Then what? What is this Reverence for the Strong of yours?"
"True Reverence for the Strong is not a beast's struggle for survival, but a struggle of wills waged with one's life on the line. That is what I believe."
The boy's answer did not repudiate the Cult's doctrine—it elevated it a full step above.
A struggle of lives….
He had put this question to countless demon-kind over the years, and never once—not once—had he heard an answer like it.
"Your inner art carries no scent of the demonic. Neither does your answer."
Cheon Gyeon took a step closer, his eyes flaring as though to bore through to the bedrock of Yun Cheon's soul.
"Are you… a man of the demonic path?"
Yun Cheon chose his words with care. Was he a Daoist of Kunlun, or a warrior of the Demonic Cult? What should he call himself—one who had set foot upon the demonic road for the sake of vengeance?
"I am merely… one who could not master the fire in his own chest, and walked into the demonic on his own two feet."
Qi Deviation—the state of a martial artist driven mad in the course of his training. But Yun Cheon had redefined those four characters as his own destiny: one who carried the fire of vengeance and entered the demonic road.
"Qi deviation, is it…."
A grotesque twisting came over Cheon Gyeon's mouth. An answer of such depth could never have come from one born and raised within the Demonic Cult.
"Entering the path as a deviation from the demonic itself… yes… no one is born a man of the demonic."
A fool's question, answered wisely.
"Khekhekhek! A young one, and you give delightfully interesting answers! In you come, interesting fellow!"
Cheon Gyeon seemed to chew over Yun Cheon's reply, then abruptly burst out laughing.
"Go in. I grant you a day as well."
With the old man's sanction granted, Yun Cheon carefully stepped toward the depths of the library.
So that was what Gal Mu-heun was up to. I thought the man was simply meddling—and in the end, he's found me a genuine treasure.
By then Cheon Gyeon had already climbed back up to the great ceiling beams, a strange anticipation kindling in his eyes.
The air within was far colder and heavier than outside. The smell of aged paper and old ink, and the subtle auras clinging to the secret manuals, pricked at the tip of the nose.
So this is the place.
Yun Cheon's eyes moved restlessly. His heart wanted nothing more than to make straight for the Kunlun shelves, but mindful of Cheon Gyeon the watcher, he reined in his feet. Instead he turned with studied composure and began to survey the other racks.
This is….
It was a landscape nothing like what he had imagined. The shelves crammed with the secret manuals of the orthodox great sects were, in truth, one vast graveyard. Ranks of bookshelves stood at attention down an endless dark, guarding a weighty silence.
Like… walking into a field of tombs.
The name plaques of the great orthodox sects, lined up upon the shelves, were headstones in every sense—for each meant that the sect in question had been annihilated or plundered by the Demonic Cult. When Yun Cheon confirmed two particular names among them, his heart grew heavy.
Even Qingcheng and Emei….
From the considerable number of manuals laid out on display, it seemed both sects had failed to escape the calamity of extinction, just as Kunlun had.
Every one of them… sects that lay geographically close to Kunlun.
His chest ached at the sight. I despise the Martial Alliance—but to see the very root of it, Qingcheng and Emei, severed like this….
From the sects represented here alone, one could roughly gauge how far the Demonic Cult had pushed into the Central Plains. Its reach extends past Qinghai, where Kunlun stood… all the way into Sichuan…!
With his heart in knots, Yun Cheon left the Qingcheng and Emei shelves behind and moved on. And then—his eye caught it: in a corner of the library, two thin books lying abandoned, their covers torn clean in half. The ragged edges of the cuts were grotesque, as if some reader had shredded them in a fit of fury.
…What is this?
As if bewitched, Yun Cheon picked them up.
The passages made no sense at all. The longer he read, the more his head split with a grinding ache. Any ordinary warrior would have hurled the thing away as the scribblings of a madman lost to qi deviation. But Yun Cheon knew, with instinctive certainty, that buried within these maddening sentences hid the very answer he had been searching for.
He lifted the other half: Twin Ultimates.
Dividing Soul Twin Ultimates?
He spread the two volumes side by side, but still the text would not connect. So Yun Cheon closed his eyes and breathed deep.
You cannot simply read it.
Dividing Soul. To divide the soul—to split consciousness in two. Yun Cheon focused not on his eyes but on his awareness. His left brain dismantled the sentences of Dividing Soul with cold reason, while his right brain received the diagrams of Twin Ultimates through pure sensation. The feeling of cleaving his own skull down the middle.
Crack.
Consciousness splits down the middle—sight bifurcates into two worlds.
In the left world, a Daoist of Kunlun draws his sword. In the right, a warrior of the Demonic Cult brings his saber down.
Kwakwang―! Thunder cracked within his skull. The sentences of the two volumes tangled together in the void, interlocked like the pattern of the Taiji, and began to rearrange themselves into something entirely new.
[Within the Changes lies the Taiji; Yin and Yang are by nature one, and yet two.]
[If Nature herself follows such a principle, why should consciousness be exempt?]
…! Gooseflesh broke out across Yun Cheon's whole body. This was not the ravings of a lunatic. Orthodox and demonic. Yin and Yang. A method devised to wield the forces of mutual destruction simultaneously.
It resonates with the Two Extremes Merging Art.
Yun Cheon's eyes trembled violently. Cleaving the self in two—the sort of idea only a madman could conceive. Any ordinary warrior would have recoiled in horror, calling it a shortcut to qi deviation. But Yun Cheon knew a precedent: an art built upon precisely such a principle. The Wudang sect's Twin Principles Heart Art works thus, does it not? Then… it is not an impossible goal.
Was he not, after all, already carrying two utterly different energies—yin and yang—within a single body?
…I've found it. The final piece I needed.
Right there, Yun Cheon sank into the manuals. Whoever had left this strange book behind must have been a predecessor who had trained in both orthodox and demonic arts and wrestled desperately to keep from going mad.
His eyes read both volumes at once, and within his mind he split his selfhood again and again. His body began to move in answer. Yun Cheon's two hands swept in entirely different directions.
Divide the soul—and achieve the Twin Ultimates.
Wuuung―.
It's working….
Faint still, but the path was unmistakably visible. A constitution born with yin and yang energy knotted against each other—the Yin-Yang Great Spirit Blocked Meridians. But if one consciousness untangles the yin while the other untangles the yang—!
An intuition stirred: a new road might open. Yun Cheon stowed the two volumes into his breast and crossed his legs where he sat.
"Hooh…."
High above, atop the ceiling beams—Cheon Gyeon, hidden in the darkness, felt his eyes go round.
He… read that cursed thing?
Cheon Gyeon knew the history. Again and again, past book-ghosts had opened the volumes, lured by the promise of mastering two martial arts at once. And without fail, their two selves had collided until they vomited blood and went mad.
A true demonic art, that one… and yet….
That was why he had torn it in half and buried it in a corner, so that no one might read it lightly.
But that boy—not only has he not gone mad, his eyes have grown clearer.
Yun Cheon sat cross-legged, sunk deep into the state of no-self. Watching him, a grotesque smile curved Cheon Gyeon's mouth. The boy Gal Mu-heun had sent was a far more interesting specimen than he had expected.
"It has been a long time… since I last watched a soul learn the Dividing Soul Twin Ultimates…."
Having resolved to watch Yun Cheon to the end, Cheon Gyeon came down from the ceiling entirely and took up his post as guardian.
—
Return of the Cloud Dragon
Author | Chusang (Autumn Frost)
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