The End of the Toryeong Juseo
Whoosh.
Yoo Eunhyeon heaved up the water bucket and dumped it straight onto the Toryeong Juseo that had poked its head outside.
The instant the water hit, the startled creature tried to dive back underground—but the soaked earth seized its movements for a precious moment, holding it in place.
Even so, they were still surrounded on all sides. This was no deep, lingering rain that had saturated the soil; only the surface had been wetted in a flash. In another breath the beast would punch through and vanish below.
“Yu-ryeon!”
Eunhyeon shouted. As if she had been waiting for nothing else, Ju Yu-ryeon burst from cover and drove a palm strike into the ground.
A faintly opaque white energy rolled out; Eunhyeon felt a sudden chill, and the force slammed into the earth.
Crack!
Yu-ryeon’s Ice Palm flash-froze the soil. She had never specialized in ice arts, so only the surface hardened—but that was more than enough. The already sodden ground locked solid, and the Toryeong Juseo found itself trapped, able neither to dig nor to flee.
“Krrrk…!”
Crunch!
In the next heartbeat the creature seemed to grasp its plight. It loosed a grotesque cry and drove its long, massive claws into the frozen crust. The ice-shattered earth split wide open. At this rate it would simply ignore the frost and burrow free.
Eunhyeon was not about to stand by and watch. Without a second’s hesitation he lunged and slammed into the beast.
“Kyaaak!”
Seized by the scruff, the Toryeong Juseo shrieked and reared its foreclaws. Moments earlier it had looked almost comical in flight; now, claws raised to strike, a savage aura rolled off it like a cold wind.
“So that’s how you want to play?”
But Eunhyeon had spent a lifetime among wild animals. A farmer’s fields had to be protected from every sort of hungry creature. He slammed the mole to the ground for good measure, then drew the weapon strapped across his back.
“Sorry, but I’ve got a bit of experience digging holes myself.”
What he pulled free was a sturdy iron shovel—not something he had brought for excavation, merely the tool his father Yoo Dong-gi had used during his stays here.
Eunhyeon raised the shovel high and brought it crashing down.
Clang!
Iron met claw. The ring of steel on steel split the air. Those claws truly were as hard as tempered metal.
The strength behind them, however, was another matter entirely.
“Kuuuk!?”
Whatever force traveled through Eunhyeon’s shovel far exceeded the creature’s expectations. With a warped screech the Toryeong Juseo tumbled three full rolls across the ground and sprawled flat. Eunhyeon, still full of fight, raised the shovel again and chopped downward. This time the beast judged flight wiser and rolled clear.
Eunhyeon planted one heavy strike into the earth, then simply chased after it. A few more shovelfuls later, a gaping pit had opened—proof that his boast about digging had been no empty words.
“I may not look like much, but this body’s been tempered by thousands of shovel strokes. Time to finish this, you bastard!”
He jammed the blade deep, then drove forward with the shovel still planted, using it like a plow. The Toryeong Juseo tried desperately to dive, but Eunhyeon was faster. With a powerful heave he scooped the creature skyward in a spray of dirt.
Inner energy flooded the shovel as he unleashed the Explosive Cross Form.
“Kyaaaak!”
The blade carved intersecting cross-paths through the air; caught at their center, the mole howled. Still reeling from the aerial impact, it never saw the next threat coming.
Su Hwa-seon, who had been waiting for precisely this opening, launched herself like a bolt of lightning. In her hand glittered a palm-sized short blade that flashed razor-bright under the high sun—yet the edge was not aimed at the Toryeong Juseo.
Ssst!
She rolled the little knife inward and drew it lightly across her own forearm. Blood welled and pattered down, but she treated the cut as the entire point and sheathed the blade again.
Before anyone could wonder, the blood streaming down her arm began to writhe as though it possessed a will of its own. Droplets that had been falling freely gathered into a single mass, then shot toward the creature like a living missile.
So that’s the technique I’ve only ever heard about…
Eunhyeon could not hide his astonishment. This was the first time he had ever witnessed Uiseon Suga’s hereditary martial art, Eoheolsangong, with his own eyes. He had expected something unusual, yet the sight still made him frown; it violated every ordinary principle of martial practice.
Eoheolsangong used the practitioner’s own blood, driven by inner energy, as a weapon. Mastery required more than mere study—it demanded the family’s secret internal method, Jipseolsimgong, which rapidly built internal power while thickening the blood itself. That same thickening, of course, was hard on the body, which was why practitioners had to take Yongseoldan regularly. The side effects were many… but the power more than compensated.
A stream of blood lanced forward and solidified into a thick, vicious staff bristling with murderous thorns.
“Blood Thread Staff!”
Su Hwa-seon was finishing the Toryeong Juseo, yes—but more than that, she was deliberately imprinting the texture of the family art onto her son’s eyes. That was why she shouted every technique name, making certain each form burned itself into Eunhyeon’s sight.
Whoosh!
She swept her arm. The thorny blood staff whipped through the air and smashed into the airborne mole.
“Kak!”
Already dazed from its bout with Eunhyeon, the creature curled into a ball on pure instinct. The force still hammered it into the dirt. It was not dead, but the impact left it thrashing as it uncoiled and raised its claws again—one last attempt to burrow free. Too late. The Blood Thread Staff dissolved into a cloud of floating crimson droplets.
The droplets became a storm of blood and poured down upon the creature like a killing rain.
“Chaotic Blood Rain!”
The mole, halfway into the earth, curled up once more. Attack after attack followed. Realizing that further flight would only leave it to wither and die, it abandoned the dig, half-rose, and bristled every hostile quill on its body.
“You damned mole. Today you die. I’ll roast the meat, fertilize the fields with the guts, and give the inner core to my son.”
“We ought to grind the whole thing up and drink it.”
Su Hwa-seon and Ju Yu-ryeon, who had been grinding their teeth over this pest for ages, stepped in. The end came swiftly. Both women poured out every scrap of their inner energy as though facing a blood feud, eyes blazing red. In moments the Toryeong Juseo was little more than a twitching lump of meat that barely held its shape.
Eunhyeon approached the two women, now gasping and spent.
“Is it dead?”
The question was purely formal. Anything that survived that would have to be called a divine beast rather than a spiritual creature.
“Dead. As if it could hang on after that.”
“Freedom…! Freedom at last!”
Su Hwa-seon nodded. Yu-ryeon flopped onto her back with a shout of pure release. While Yu-ryeon looked ready to collapse if she so much as twitched a finger, Su Hwa-seon still had strength enough to rise and walk over to the corpse.
“Wonder if there’s an inner core… There is!”
She rummaged through the body and drew out a round bead a little larger than a fingernail. Once the blood was wiped away it began to shed a strange, soft light.
“This should be worth a good ten years of internal energy. Here, son—you keep it.”
She tossed the core to Eunhyeon. He caught it, but his expression was doubtful.
“Isn’t this something precious? Is it really all right for me to just take it?”
“We never would have gotten it without you. Think of it as payment. Yu-ryeon—any objection?”
From where she lay half-dead on the ground, Yu-ryeon managed to stick a thumb straight up.
“It’s valuable enough, but not exactly some once-in-a-millennium treasure or fated opportunity. Keep it. Your foundational internal energy is still thin; this will help a great deal.”
“All right… I’ll take it for now. But Mother, what about that wound of yours?”
“It’s fine. You’ve seen me get hurt more than once or twice—why the fuss?”
“Because this is actually the first time I’ve seen it.”
Eunhyeon took her wrist and examined the cut. Already the injury had sealed under a scab of congealed blood.
“Eoheolsangong governs the blood with inner energy, so wounds close quickly.”
“You always did heal fast… I just never knew why.”
As a child he had simply assumed it was a blessed constitution. Now it was clear the art itself was responsible.
“Anyway, we all worked hard. I can finally breathe easy. You too, Yu-ryeon—one less weight on your shoulders, right?”
Su Hwa-seon turned. Yu-ryeon had recovered just enough strength to stagger upright. Exhausted as she looked, her face was the face of someone who had finally passed a decades-old blockage.
“One less weight? I feel like I’m going to go crazy. I’m only not running around screaming because my legs won’t hold me. Thank you both—especially you, Eunhyeon.”
Her eyes shone as she spoke. Eunhyeon looked away, awkward, yet Yu-ryeon remained buoyant, almost glowing.
“I only helped a little. And we’re not finished yet, are we? This mess still needs cleaning up.”
“Just knowing it won’t come back is already a miracle. Cleaning up is nothing. Let’s knock it out fast!”
Yu-ryeon thrust a hand skyward as though she could already see a bright future. Eunhyeon smiled at the sight.
And that was that. The operation to eradicate the Toryeong Juseo came to its end.