The Tiger-Ghosts of the Deep Mountain
Seong-jin held his breath as the figures appeared before him: a pair of siblings, looking utterly wretched and frail.
It was already disorienting enough to find humans instead of beasts, but the behavior of the children left Seong-jin even more bewildered.
Scritch, scratch!
The two children began to dig into the field with both hands, as if they had been transformed into moles.
Whether the intruder was human or beast, it was Seong-jin’s duty to protect the field. He stepped forward immediately to put a stop to them.
“What do you think you’re doing!”
As Seong-jin revealed himself and shouted, the children jumped in surprise and began to flee.
If he let them go now, they would surely return to ruin the field the moment his back was turned. Seong-jin hurriedly gave chase.
‘They’re fast?’
The children’s movements were so swift that Seong-jin’s frail body could barely keep up. They seemed intimately familiar with the terrain, sprinting through the mountain paths in the pitch black with an unnatural speed.
In contrast, Seong-jin, who rarely ventured beyond the paths he used to tend the fields, had to hack through the thick underbrush to follow them.
Seong-jin even employed his lightness techniques to pursue them, but the distance between them did not close.
“Huff, huff… this cursed, sickly body is useless even at a time like this.”
He had come to Mount Bongnae specifically to recuperate. Naturally, his body could not sustain such intense exertion for long.
Eventually, the gap widened, and Seong-jin collapsed, utterly exhausted.
When he finally caught his breath and looked around, all he saw was absolute, suffocating darkness. He had lived here for quite some time, but the unfamiliar surroundings suggested that he had lost his way.
“To think I’ve ended up deep in the mountains in the middle of the night without knowing the path… this is a disaster.”
Catching the Frost Tiger was the least of his worries; he was in a situation where his own life was at stake.
Seong-jin began to wander the mountain paths, searching for any sign of familiar terrain. Hours passed.
In the endless expanse of trees, the same scenery repeated itself, making it impossible to even track the passage of time.
‘Is it better to just camp out and wait for dawn rather than wasting my strength wandering aimlessly?’
Just as Seong-jin began to consider sleeping in the wild,
“Aaaah!”
“Please, help us!”
At the sound of the distant screams, Seong-jin, who had been about to settle into the branches to avoid the dew, sprang to his feet.
It was the children’s voices.
“Did the kids who were running from me get lost, too?”
By the time that thought crossed his mind, Seong-jin was already running. He leaped over ravines and sprinted up mountain passes, tracking the source of the sound.
There, he found the siblings, clamped firmly in the jaws of a tiger.
Raised on the spiritual energy of the sacred mountain, the tiger’s size was incomparable to anything in the mortal world. The glint of its eyes beneath the shade of the trees was a full head higher than Seong-jin’s own eye level.
If the eyes of a four-legged beast were at that height, one could only imagine the sheer scale of the body hidden in the darkness.
‘A spiritual beast—no, if something like that is preying on humans, it must be a monster.’
It was large enough to swallow a child in a single gulp. Seong-jin did not hesitate; he lunged at the tiger.
“A, a person…!”
As the older brother’s eyes widened upon seeing him, Seong-jin dove beneath the tiger’s legs and struck with a palm technique at the beast’s chest, right near its heart.
Thwack!
The sound of skin being struck echoed, but while he felt the impact, his power was lacking.
‘It’s because I couldn’t channel my internal energy.’
The Nine-Yin Severed Pulse. Seong-jin’s innate constitution meant his energy channels were blocked, dooming him to a short life. It was as if he had been born with an iron collar around his neck.
When he was young, the collar was larger than his neck, so it didn’t matter, but as he grew, the collar remained the same size, eventually choking the life out of him. Unlike a collar that could be cast off, the Nine-Yin Severed Pulse was a curse from heaven; there was no way for him to survive.
A life that was terminal from birth. If he practiced internal cultivation to store energy in his dantian, his lifespan would only shorten further. Thus, even though he was born into a martial family, he had only learned minor tricks for health and could not master a proper cultivation method.
Even here, he couldn't even sleep properly due to the cold wind, so there was no need to say more.
He was a man born with incredible talent, yet burdened with a body that could not store energy. Consequently, despite encountering all sorts of martial arts, he could never fully master them.
The true power of martial arts could only be unleashed when the form of the technique and the operation of internal energy were in perfect harmony. In truth, the Dragon-Subduing Palm and the Eight Drunken Immortals Steps he had learned were nothing more than half-finished techniques without the internal cultivation to back them up.
‘If I lack power…’
Then he would simply increase his speed.
And Seong-jin knew a heavenly footwork technique that even the greatest masters in the world could not hope to match.
“Shrinking the Earth (Chukji).”
One step.
Feeling as if the entire world were rushing toward him, Seong-jin thrust his palm forward.
A strike like a flash of lightning tore through the darkness. The Penetrating Palm, executed by perfectly consolidating every ounce of his strength, exploded without leaving a single sound of impact.
The aftermath of the palm, thrusting upward, turned the tiger’s brain into mush, and the remaining force was enough to slice through the leaves, letting sunlight pierce the shade.
The shade split along the trajectory of his palm, and sunlight began to pour in.
Sun-Illuminated Polarized Light (Iljo-pyeongwang).
The 19th technique, created for the first time by Lee Cheol-goi after reaching the realm of the immortals, was unveiled by Seong-jin’s hand.
As the tiger’s unfocused eyes grew dull and its limp jaw fell open, the siblings tumbled out from beneath it. Seong-jin caught them and spoke to the older brother.
“If you want to save your sister, take her and run in that direction without looking back.”
“Pardon?”
“It means it isn’t over yet. I’ll buy you time, so take her and run.”
Even as he spoke, Seong-jin did not take his eyes off the darkness where nothing could be seen.
“I don’t have the luxury of fighting while protecting you two, so hurry!”
The siblings looked panicked, but upon hearing the low, guttural growls echoing from the dark, they grasped the situation and began to run.
Left behind, Seong-jin stared at the glinting eyes that began to sparkle beneath the shade.
“I’ve never heard of tigers traveling in packs like this.”
The eyes that had filled the surroundings were clearly abnormal. How vast a territory would a tiger of that size need to hunt? But these creatures were not just overlapping territories; they were moving in a pack. It was certain they were no ordinary tigers.
‘It was good to compensate for my lack of power with speed, but even that won’t last if I have to face a multitude.’
In that case, there was only one method he could choose.
‘Use the opponent’s power to subdue them with the principle of overcoming the hard with the soft.’
It was his second practical exercise, following the Penetrating Palm that utilized the principles of internal energy manipulation. Seong-jin’s talent allowed him to understand all of this theoretically, but performing it in reality was an entirely different matter.
Theory was just theory. Martial arts were only meaningful if one could apply that study at any time, in any situation. Just as all academic study only shines when it is eventually used to enter government service and benefit the world, so too was the study of martial arts.
‘Can I do it?’
The answer was simple.
“I’ll just have to try. If I fail, the worst that can happen is death.”
Having sent the siblings away, Seong-jin took a bold step forward. For some reason, his body felt light. Despite the fatigue that should have been greater than before due to his intense movements, he felt as if power were surging within him.
“Come.”
At Seong-jin’s provocation, a tiger the size of a house leaped up and lunged at him. Seong-jin deployed a Capturing Hand, seizing its front paw and flipping it over his back. With just a slight application of force, the tiger’s landing point collapsed, and it rolled across the ground, crashing into its companions.
‘I see. So this is what martial arts is.’
Whether it was a technique for attack or defense, all martial arts were created on the premise that an opponent existed. Every martial art could only be completed when there was an opponent. The moment he realized that fact, Seong-jin felt that he had truly entered the path of the warrior. At the same time, he felt his own realm advance to the next stage.
Whoosh!
Seong-jin, who had accurately read the point of impact through the pain, reached out, and the tigers were sent flying with absurd ease. The teeth that had been trying to bite Seong-jin’s neck were suddenly biting a comrade’s leg, and the claws that had been trying to scratch his cheek were stabbing a comrade’s eyes.
By repeating this process over and over, Seong-jin was finally able to defeat the dozens of tigers and survive.
“Huff, huff… it’s a bit strange to say this after winning, but what on earth are these things…?”
What kind of tiger travels in packs of dozens? Seong-jin, having witnessed the monstrosity, felt his spirit wither at the bizarre sight. Although they were creatures he had defeated with his own hands, a sense of bewilderment surged up before the incomprehensible phenomenon. That feeling did not fade with time; it only grew larger.
‘Something is wrong.’
If he had simply been overwhelmed by the strange atmosphere, this feeling should have subsided. But Seong-jin’s senses were still crying out in anxiety and nervousness; he had to assume his intuition was warning him of danger.
Drip!
The shadows flowed down like ink. Beneath the branches, which were so thick that sunlight could not reach them, black shadows began to pool.
“What is this?”
The shadows soon flowed into the carcasses of the tigers that had been piled up, forming a bloody film, and soon, the dead tigers began to rise again.
“This is… sorcery?”
Just like the Taoist arts of the immortals, the sorcery used by demons was a power that twisted the natural order. Even a master of the Indestructible Body could be turned into a toad by sorcery and killed by a child’s stone. But what was happening before Seong-jin’s eyes looked far more dangerous than simple transformation magic.
—Grrr…!
A tiger with a broken neck stood up again, its head still lolling. Tigers with burst hearts, tigers with their eyeballs gouged out. With jaws torn off and necks twisted, they began to glint with light once more. No matter how skilled Seong-jin was, there was no way to kill what was already dead.
“No wonder there were so many of them. Were they like Jiangshi?”
There was no way tigers of that size could live sharing territory with each other. But if they were already dead, there would be no problem with such a number roaming about. If he kept fighting these Tiger-Ghosts that rose again even with broken necks, he would be the one to collapse from exhaustion first.
Seong-jin, who had been trying to flee, stopped when he discovered that the shadows that had flowed down had become a solid wall. He was trapped. And the moment Seong-jin realized that fact, the sound of ghosts wailing began to echo from the darkness.
* * *
Once upon a time, the siblings chased by a tiger ascended to the heavens to become the sun and the moon, and the mother who had been eaten by the tiger became a Chang-gwi (a ghost enslaved by a tiger), still wandering the nine heavens.
Even if one searched the entire world under heaven, there was no way to find the siblings who had ascended to the sky.
The Chang-gwi, searching for her children, indiscriminately attacked children of similar ages. The resentment of the woman who had lost her children had rotted away over a long period of time and been reborn as demonic energy. Now, only one evil spirit remained in the world.