It May Be Cast Aside, But It Can Never Be Stolen
Yi Pyeong and Seol Chong had gone. Yi Yeok had worn a mask of calm as he saw them off, but in truth his mind was a tangle of questions he had no way to resolve.
A sect I've never even heard of—and an immortal sect at that—summoned me by name?
It seemed too absurd to be anything but someone's idea of a joke.
He had tossed and turned all night before his eyes snapped open without warning. Something was rippling through the night sky. Not the wind—this was subtler, like the fabric of space itself trembling.
Yi Yeok rose in an instant and slipped out of his room. Ju Haek, sleeping in the next room, noticed nothing at all.
Tracing the strange sensation outward, he passed beyond the estate walls and out through the city gates.
A shadow flickered through the darkness ahead of him. There was something oddly familiar about it.
"Who is that?"
Yi Yeok unleashed the Hidden Soul Divine Spirit Knot and the Snowmist Traceless Art in tandem. He moved like the wind itself, so silently that even the night insects in the grass could not detect his passage.
On a small hill outside the city, two figures stood facing one another. One occupied the crest of the hill; the other stood a little below, on the slope.
"...Yi Pyeong?"
Yi Yeok's eyes narrowed. The figure below was none other than his own brother.
The other, however, was impossible to identify. She stood with the moonlight at her back, her face hidden in shadow. Yet even so, the beauty of her silhouette was unmistakable.
A long silk skirt rippled like waves about her, slit deep along one side to the thigh, revealing a leg white as polished jade. She was barefoot—and yet her feet did not touch the earth. She was floating.
The two were speaking of something. Yi Pyeong nodded again and again. Yi Yeok concealed himself in shadow and watched them intently, but even the Hidden Soul Divine Spirit Knot could not carry their words to his ears.
After a time, Yi Pyeong bowed at the waist in a deep salute and departed. The woman slowly turned around. In that instant, gooseflesh raced across Yi Yeok's entire body.
That woman...!
A face cold and beautiful. Her slender, arched brows were like clear ripples beneath an autumn sky. There was an otherworldly mystery about her, as though she had stepped in from somewhere beyond this world. She was so breathtakingly lovely that, woman though she was, even another woman could not have spared her a moment's jealousy.
Yi Yeok moved like a phantom. A cold light flashed in his right hand.
He unleashed a ferocious strike in the space of a heartbeat—something with the momentum of the Life-Severing Strike, an attack capable of cutting an opponent's throat in a single blow.
But the woman raised one hand and turned it aside with ease. It was as though an invisible shield wrapped around her.
Yi Yeok did not stop. At a speed no worldly powerhouse could hope to withstand, he whirled the Yaozhiyu in a storm of afterimages.
Yet the energy enveloping the woman without a single gap shed the Yaozhiyu helplessly, again and again. She showed no agitation whatsoever; she simply watched him with eyes as placid as a still lake.
"Hoo..."
Realizing his attacks were getting nowhere, Yi Yeok fell back and drew breath. The Yaozhiyu in his hand still gleamed with killing intent.
The woman regarded him quietly.
"You've grown."
Her voice was lovely, like pearls rolling across a jade dish.
"And yet you haven't aged a day."
She gave a faint smile.
"That's right. I suppose that's how it looks."
Yi Yeok dove in again at lightning speed.
Both his hands whirled like the wind, and the Yaozhiyu flashed like bolts of lightning.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Shrill notes rang out against the invisible shield that wrapped his opponent. And then, at last, a crack began to spider across one section of it.
Surprise flickered through the woman's eyes.
An ordinary mortal, shattering the Guardian Divine Shield. It was beyond belief.
She raised her hand. A terrifying energy spiraled outward, swallowing the surroundings whole—a force with the seeming power to split mountains and cleave the sea.
Yi Yeok did not meet it head-on. He slipped and squirmed like a loach, darting clear of every blow, and whenever that energy briefly ebbed, he hurled himself back in with a frenzy of attacks. The cracks in the shield spread wider and wider, until it looked as though a spiderweb had been stretched across the empty air.
He did not slow his assault. If anything, he only grew faster, until it seemed his two hands had vanished entirely from view. The speed was nothing short of astonishing.
The woman's eyes narrowed. The moment the Guardian Divine Shield shattered to pieces, a cold light swept past her throat.
The next instant, the woman, who had vanished like smoke, reappeared a dozen paces away—floating in empty air some twenty feet above the ground.
She looked down at Yi Yeok.
"Remarkable speed. Dozens of strikes in a single breath."
"Shall I go faster?"
She gave a light laugh.
"Could you?"
Yi Yeok shifted both feet in an eerie rhythm, like a shaman dancing across a ritual blade.
He shot upward at terrifying speed and rained down another flurry of blows on the floating woman. It was no mere bluff—the attacks truly were faster than before.
But the woman merely extended a hand, and still not one of his strikes came anywhere near her.
His feet touched earth again, and Yi Yeok steadied his ragged breathing.
She's strong. Truly strong.
He had never felt this kind of tension even facing powerhouses of the Transformed Blood Realm. But the woman before him was on an entirely different plane.
She still wore her easy smile as she spoke.
"Why do you bear me such hostility?"
"...What you took back then was my Hidden Blood, wasn't it?"
The woman's surprise showed again.
"You know of Hidden Blood? Even the elders of the immortal sects remain ignorant of it, most of them."
Her reaction confirmed it beyond all doubt. What had been stolen from him really had been the Hidden Blood.
"You cut my future off at the root."
"To most people, Hidden Blood means nothing at all. Even if you had kept it, you would have gone your whole life without ever once using it."
The woman said it with perfect composure. That shameless calm sent his fury surging all over again.
"To be sure, losing Hidden Blood means losing the possibility of ever reaching the very highest realm. But if you had lived an ordinary life, it would have done you no particular harm."
Damn you.
Yi Yeok barely swallowed the curse.
The woman went on, as though his trembling rage surprised her.
"In exchange for taking a useless Hidden Blood, I told your brother that you should be compensated. He offered to give up his claim as head of the family he was leaving behind. Have you not received the offer yet?"
"Who would want that? If that's the case, why didn't you take Yi Pyeong's Hidden Blood too? And why did you steal the Yi clan's family treasure? What's hidden inside it?"
"That is no business of yours. If you wish to go on living, you would do well to stop digging."
"Oh?"
Yi Yeok spoke with his usual barbed lilt.
"Then why don't you come down here and end my life yourself?"
The woman's manner was that of someone soothing a sulking child.
"I know you have reached the Blood Spirit Manifestation. But boy, the world is a very wide place. Do not waste your strength on empty defiance."
"That Hidden Blood is mine. I can throw it away with my own hands if I choose—but I will never, ever let anyone take it from me."
Yi Yeok's hands began to move, and before he knew it they had become thousands of afterimages.
Gritting his teeth, he launched himself upward. For the first time in his life, a killing intent shimmered around him—a resolve to kill this person before him, no matter what it took.
"Remember this well in your next life!"