Who Do You Think You Are?
They arrived at the Alchemy Hall before long. It wasn't as large as he'd expected, but the exterior was quite lavish. Yi Yeok followed Jeong Tak inside.
The interior was a disaster. The center of the floor was scorched black as if something had exploded, with unidentifiable debris scattered everywhere. A thick, viscous liquid had splattered across the walls on all sides — even the ceiling.
The sect used spiritual herbs and spiritual flowers for refinement. These were materials that carried a certain amount of qi even without processing. Accidents like this happened when the refinement was botched, when the ingredients were added in the wrong order — sometimes for reasons no one could explain. In other words, the cauldron exploded.
Yi Yeok grasped the situation at once. Whether Jeong Tak had made a mistake or simply had terrible luck, his refinement had failed. And now, with the cleanup too much for him to handle on his own, he'd gone and dragged in a low-ranking disciple who looked easy to push around. For all Yi Yeok knew, the man intended to make him the scapegoat.
"What are you doing? Get cleaning."
Jeong Tak said.
"You should thank your lucky stars. How often does a greenhorn like you get the chance to even see the inside of the Alchemy Hall?"
"Just as you say, Senior Brother Jeong. I don't know how I could ever repay your kindness. Please continue to guide and instruct me in the days ahead."
Jeong Tak nodded with a satisfied look on his face.
"Good. You've got a decent character about you. Clean every corner until it sparkles. I won't forget the effort. Who knows? If you impress me enough, you might end up joining me as my direct subordinate."
He turned away.
"I have some business to attend to. I'll be back shortly, so it'd be best to have this finished by then."
It was clear he had no intention of lifting a finger himself. Yi Yeok moved like the wind, closing in behind Jeong Tak as the man stepped out of the hall.
Crack!
Yi Yeok struck the back of Jeong Tak's head and knocked him cold.
"Damn bastard. You should clean up your own messes."
Glancing around, he noticed a small room attached beside the refining chamber. It had a lock on it, but one flicker of the Heavenly Eye and it was cut away in an instant.
Stepping inside, Yi Yeok let out a low gasp of admiration.
It appeared to be a kind of storeroom. Shelves lined the walls on all sides, packed tight. Poria, poria cocos, kudzu root, gentian — and there, too, wild ginseng, gold coin grass, immortal crane grass, and more.
At a glance, they looked no different from the medicinal herbs of the mortal world. The only difference was how long each one had grown before being harvested. Every one of them had plainly passed the hundred-year mark, and some had been growing for over a thousand years.
Nearly all spiritual herbs and flowers grew more potent with age, and condensing them into pills made them stronger still. That was precisely why an ordinary person who came upon a spiritual pill through some stroke of heaven's fortune could never simply swallow it. Unless they divided it into dozens of pieces and consumed them over the course of months, their veins and blood would fail to withstand the power, and their entire body would burst apart and die.
Yi Yeok swept the herbs off the shelves and gathered them up. Collected in one place, they didn't amount to as much as his first impression had suggested — probably because Jeong Tak had only just attempted his refinement.
Still, this much alone meant he'd made off with a tidy haul. He was setting his disappointment aside and turning to leave when Yi Yeok stopped in his tracks and began combing through the room once more, thorough and deliberate.
A short while later, the corner of his mouth curling upward, he approached a shelf that looked no different from any other. When he slipped his hand beneath it, a section of the wall swung open to reveal a bronze door.
"An Eight Trigrams Lock."
Yi Yeok marveled. It was his first time seeing one in person.
An Eight Trigrams Lock could only be opened through its endlessly shifting permutations, which had to be aligned exactly. Anyone who tried to brute-force it without knowing the precise method could spend an entire lifetime and never crack it.
Of course, Yi Yeok had no intention of trying blindly. He steadied his breathing with a light exhale, circulated the Silver Soul White Wave technique, and studied the lock with piercing eyes.
Certainly enough, among the eight protruding faces of the octagonal lock, some portions showed more wear than the rest. He turned the worn parts carefully, listening intently. Gears were surely turning inside, but the thing was machined so finely that it made no more noise than a falling strand of hair. To Yi Yeok, even that was no obstacle.
Click.
With the sound of the lock releasing, the heavy bronze door swung open smoothly and without a whisper.
Yi Yeok stepped inside. The room was far narrower than the one outside — nothing but a single two-story shelf, about six paces deep.
But he wasn't disappointed. There was no chance in hell that a room guarded by a lock this elaborate would hold nothing but junk.
Yi Yeok drew out a small jade bottle, uncorked it, and promptly sealed it again. Just as he'd expected. Spiritual pills.
Most were middle-grade or low-grade, but no fewer than five bottles held high-grade spiritual pills, and one bottle contained three pills of the Emperor Blood Pill — a supreme-grade pill refined from the blood of spiritual beasts and spirit herbs, made specifically to temper and empower the Blood Spirit. A single one of these pills was worth more than the entire Alchemy Hall building.
Yi Yeok went back out, stripped the shirt off the still-unconscious Jeong Tak, and returned. Using it as a wrapping cloth, he gathered up every bottle of pills and every last herb.
"This is too easy."
Yi Yeok muttered as he left the Alchemy Hall.
"That's all a sect amounts to? There was never anything worth being nervous about."
Yi Yeok headed for Song Chui's quarters, which Jeong Tak had pointed out earlier. The sun soon set. No one noticed anything amiss at the Alchemy Hall, and Jeong Tak, it seemed, still hadn't come to from his blackout.
That's strange. Is there usually this little security around?
Yi Yeok tilted his head, then opened the door to Song Chui's quarters. It, too, was empty.
"Honestly. They leave their own headquarters hollow as a gourd and all go running off to where, exactly?"
Swinging his arms and legs in lazy, unhurried arcs, Yi Yeok wrecked the interior of Song Chui's quarters from top to bottom. He found a few expensive-looking ornaments and a bit of silver, but didn't bother taking any of it. Compared to what he'd gained today, it was pocket change.
Having yanked every garment out of the wardrobe and shredded them to ribbons, Yi Yeok discovered a desk with brush, ink, and paper. He soaked the brush thoroughly in ink and scrawled a single line of calligraphy across the wall in one fluid stroke.
'Never bother me again. — The Handsome Thief.'
"There. That should count as a warning."
Leaving Song Chui's quarters behind, Yi Yeok ran as though treading on the night wind itself. In the blink of an eye he was clear of the Yangcheon Sect. No one sensed so much as a trace of his presence the entire time.
At that moment, the Alchemy Hall was in chaos. Not only was the exploded cauldron left abandoned where it stood, but the storeroom — and even the sealed chamber behind the Eight Trigrams Lock — had been cleaned out to the last item.
Jeong Tak, robbed of even his clothes while he lay unconscious, knelt with his scrawny, bare torso exposed. Before him stood the elder in charge of managing the Alchemy Hall. His fury pierced the heavens.
"I could beat you to death and still not be satisfied... And you call that an excuse?"
Jeong Tak bowed his head as though he'd been wronged.
"I swear it on my life! Some unknown newcomer knocked me out, and when I came to, it was already..."
"How does a greenhorn disciple dare come and go from the Alchemy Hall! Must I tear your mouth open before you confess?"
Jeong Tak, startled out of his wits, abandoned the excuses that had been painting him into a corner — that is, excuses that had left out nearly everything — and told the truth.
"So. You caused the accident, then tried to push the cleanup onto someone else, and that's how this disaster came about?"
"It's not like that, Elder... I only meant to give the newcomer a chance..."
"Silence! Who do you think you are, handing out chances to anyone! Aren't you nothing but the lowest pup in this hall? And even that much, you couldn't have managed if your family hadn't donated that enormous sum, could you?"
The elder let out a bitter sigh.
"If most of the elders and disciples hadn't been called away on business outside, it would have been years before you were even allowed to touch a cauldron. And you threw away that golden opportunity with a blunder, then, trying to dodge responsibility, made an even bigger mess?"
"I'll... send word to my family... and see it all restored..."
"You've lost your mind. Do you have any idea what you've lost? Pull up your family's pillars by the roots and you still couldn't pay for it!"
Only then did Jeong Tak grasp that he'd been caught up in something far beyond salvaging, and his face drained white.
"This person you say dragged you into it — who was he? Not a newcomer at all, I'd wager. An outsider with no affiliation to this sect whatsoever."
"He introduced himself as Yi Chunbong..."
"You fool... You believe he gave his real name?"
The elder, realizing there was nothing more to be gotten out of Jeong Tak, turned away.
"Jeong Tak, you are expelled. From this moment, you are no longer a disciple of this sect. Gather your things and be gone. If I lay eyes on you again after this instant, you will not keep your life."
"But... Elder, if I'm cast out like this, what am I supposed to tell my parents? I spent nearly my family's entire fortune just to come here! And I still can't break through into the Celestial Realm of the Sky's Center on my own..."
"Would death on this spot suit you better?"
Jeong Tak clamped his mouth shut, terrified.
The elder walked out without sparing him another glance. Then he stilled himself for a moment and expanded his divine sense.
Before long, his eyes snapped open, and he fixed on a direction and began to run — straight along the very path Yi Yeok had vanished by.