I Definitely Saw You Die
The center of an abandoned city, saturated with bone-chilling, skin-crawling ghostly energy. Not even the usual weeds or moss dared show themselves.
Having ascended to the Nascent Soul stage, Han Yujin could now perceive the despair of this ruined world with far sharper clarity. He clicked his tongue inwardly without realizing it. No matter how many times he came here, the place never failed to impress him in the worst possible ways.
Jjik...!
“Cold? Already? You’re such a baby.”
He stroked Mu-yong, who had given a full-body shiver, then activated Monghwan Yusim to conceal his presence and soared upward using the Five Elements Heavenly Escape Art.
Rather than heading straight to his destination, he circled the nearby area in search of the ‘formal suit ghost.’ He wanted to confirm once more whether his hypothesis about his awakening ability had been correct.
A short while later.
Even after thoroughly searching with the Yin-Yang True Dragon Eye, he found no trace of the formal suit ghost. Han Yujin nodded to himself, as expected.
‘Beings that possess spiritual nature or consciousness aren’t duplicated. That much is certain.’
Ghosts were no exception. Since the formal suit ghost was now quietly sleeping inside the Ghost Soul Banner, it would never appear in this place again.
Having finished his verification, he calmed his mind and body through animal therapy with Mu-yong before heading toward Yeongwon High School.
It took less than a minute to arrive.
He landed at the main gate and examined the school building, which lay submerged in silence. Once again the sky was darkening rapidly, and with it came an intensifying, flesh-slicing cold that stirred a groundless sense of dread.
Nothing was visible, yet he could feel eyes watching him from every single window of the building.
“Let’s go.”
Jjik...!
Mu-yong shivered again inside his robe.
Without employing any special escape arts, he passed through the main gate, crossed the sports field on foot, and arrived at the building entrance. He slowly pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Creeeeak......
The rusted hinges let out a small but profoundly eerie groan.
The moment he entered, an unnatural silence and an even thicker chill enveloped him.
Dust blanketed the floor, paint peeled from the walls in patches, and a large full-length mirror—half shattered and abandoned—stood to one side. Below the mirror, the words “Yeongwon High School” were faintly visible in blurry, almost indecipherable traces.
Like most schools, the entrance hall was quite spacious. Seeing no need to search for another location, Han Yujin retrieved a wooden ritual table and various offerings from the Mountain Sea Pearl and began arranging them.
They were genuine items for ancestral rites, all acquired from the Zhou Kingdom. He knew they held little practical use, but he had brought them anyway, thinking that simply burning a single stick of incense would feel too half-hearted.
Once the offering table was fully prepared, he produced a stick of Qingling Anxi Incense—dark blue in color and about a palm’s length. He lit it with an ordinary flame, placed it in the censer at the center of the table, and sat down in a lotus position before it.
The fragrance of the Qingling Anxi Incense began to spread gently throughout the school building.
With it, the sinister, goosebump-inducing atmosphere seemed to soften slightly. The haunted-house feeling transformed into something closer to a well-maintained graveyard.
‘It’s more effective than I expected...?’
This was his first time using it personally, and he newly realized that the incense could stabilize the mind and even provide a faint boost to mental growth.
If he researched it further—adjusting ingredients or adding components—he would surely be able to amplify its mental effects even more.
As those thoughts crossed his mind, the sound of footsteps began on the floor above. Similar presences also emerged from beyond the corners of the corridors on both sides of the entrance.
They approached at irregular intervals, moving at an unnaturally slow pace for human beings. Mu-yong looked up at him from within his robe, but Han Yujin simply smiled faintly, undisturbed.
A moment later.
A female student rounded the corner of the staircase leading to the second floor. For an instant he wondered if it was Wonhee, but it was a different girl.
Her skin was deathly pale and she had a bob haircut. Her eyes were tightly shut, and at first glance she could almost pass for a living person. If not for the grotesque way both her feet were twisted backward—producing a sharp jijik sound with every step—she would have looked even more human.
Even so, the girl slowly descended the stairs, then stood blankly facing Han Yujin’s direction with her eyes still closed. By then the presences that had been approaching from the side corridors had also fallen silent.
The standoff did not last long.
Jii... jiiik...
Once again producing that strangely dragging noise, the female student began walking. She reached the seat directly across from Han Yujin, on the other side of the offering table, and sat down with surprising propriety.
An inescapable, bone-piercing cold radiated from her. It was not natural cold, but something far more terrifying—like it could seep into the body and freeze the marrow.
As the silence stretched on, only the blue smoke from the Qingling Anxi Incense rose quietly from the censer.
“Hello.”
In the end, displaying the tolerance of an elder, Han Yujin spoke first. He was rather curious how the other party would respond.
- Y...es... Hello...
- The incense... smells nice...
“I went through some trouble to obtain it. What do you think of the other offerings?”
The girl turned her head this way and that, eyes still closed, examining the ritual table.
- It’s... an offering table.
Her tone suggested she had only just noticed, yet she displayed neither interest nor surprise. As expected, an ordinary ritual offering seemed to have no positive effect on these beings.
- This incense... do you... have any more?
“I do.”
- ......Really?
In that instant, the female ghost opened her eyes.
The moment those two eyes—filled with nothing but pitch-black darkness—opened, every trace of anything resembling a human vanished. Simultaneously the cold intensified, now laced with the faint metallic scent of blood.
- If you have... more.
The ghost smiled.
Jjijijik...!
With a horrifying sound, the corners of her mouth stretched upward until they reached her ears. Since such a thing was physically impossible, her skin tore open and blood poured down in streams, creating a nightmarish sight.
- Give it all to me... right... now.
Suddenly Han Yujin glanced toward the corridor corners behind the female ghost.
From floor to ceiling, student ghosts had lined up in rows, each wearing the exact same expression as the girl before him as they stared.
- Then......
Dduddeuk...! Ppudeuk-!
The female ghost’s neck stretched out at an unnatural angle as she thrust her head forward, still wearing that torn smile. The skin of her neck ripped away in chunks, spraying blood everywhere. A nauseating metallic stench washed over him.
A significant amount of blood splattered across the carefully prepared offering table and the surrounding floor. Some droplets even reached distant walls and the ceiling.
It was a scene horrific enough to make an ordinary person faint on the spot.
I’ll kill you not by slowly tearing your flesh bit by bit, but by gently gouging out your eyes, ripping out your tongue, pulling your teeth, piercing your ears, and scrambling your brain.
After a brief silence, Han Yujin stroked the trembling Mu-yong to soothe her goosebumps and answered.
“That won’t do.”
- Why? Why won’t it? Why exactly?
The ghost immediately pressed him before he could even finish speaking. Her pitch-black eyes widened further, and bloody tears streamed down.
At the same time, the student ghosts poking their heads out from the corridor corners began to make sounds like pained panting.
In the empty school building, the overlapping gasps rose like the skittering of countless insects.
- Don’t like the way of dying? Would you prefer your flesh slowly torn off bit by bit? Or should I kill you another way? Slicing and scrambling, then slicing and scrambling again...
“The reason it won’t do,” he said, cutting off the ghost’s tirade, “is because I prepared all this for Wonhee.”
At that moment.
The elongated head of the female ghost student snapped backward violently.
As if the world itself had frozen, every sound—including the rising panting of the ghosts—cut off completely.
The quietly burning smoke of the Qingling Anxi Incense shook violently once despite the complete absence of wind.
The female ghost’s face had frozen in utter terror and shock. The other student ghosts peering from the corridor corners wore identical expressions.
Thud—
Immediately afterward, the sound of small footsteps came from directly behind Han Yujin.
It was as if the owner of those steps had been standing there the entire time, silently watching everything.
Swish...
Accompanied by the faint sound of clothing or hair dragging across the floor, a female student ghost in a school uniform brushed past Han Yujin’s side. The wave of cold that hit him was far stronger and more horrifying than anything he had felt before.
The female ghost fled the spot as if escaping, her limbs twisted grotesquely as she crawled away. Yet Han Yujin could not spare her a glance.
The ghost who now quietly took the opposite seat was, naturally, Wonhee.
Just like the first female ghost, her eyes were tightly closed, giving her a pale but almost living appearance.
Yet the moment one sensed her aura, it became impossible to see her as human.
It felt as though something that must never exist in this world was imitating a person. The sheer wrongness of it instinctively evoked fear and tension.
By then, strangely, all the blood that had been splattered everywhere by the previous ghost had completely vanished. The other student ghosts were gone as well.
Wonhee.
The entity he had encountered back when he was still in the Initiation Stage and not even a proper cultivator. The one who had appeared multiple times as the most terrifying hallucination while he prepared to advance to the Dharma Soul stage.
The being who still occupied a corner of his mind as the most vivid memory—horribly frightening, and for that very reason, the one he wanted to obtain more than anything else.
“Hello.”
With a heart that refused to stop trembling, he offered the greeting.
A dangerous instinct kept urging him to retreat and assume a combat stance. Yet Han Yujin revealed none of that outwardly.
“Do you like it? I went through considerable trouble to obtain it.”
He glanced at the Qingling Anxi Incense and asked gently, his demeanor exactly like the one he used with the young Lee Won-hee back on Earth.
For a brief moment, Han Yujin forgot the situation entirely and felt genuine joy.
“I have plenty more. And I prepared these as well.”
As he spoke, he placed upon the offering table the artifact meant to grant freedom and the Ghost Soul Banner he had refined using the Spirit Treasure Ghost Command Binding Art.
“This is...”
He was just about to explain the identity and purpose of the items when—
Wonhee opened her eyes and looked straight at him.
In that instant, every movement Han Yujin could make ceased completely.
He could not tear his gaze away from those two eyes—darker and more hollow than the abyss itself, utterly terrifying.
- You were definitely dead.
- I definitely saw it?