By Zephyria 
HF 76
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Even though he had held him close throughout the run, Ho-yeon was not just cold; he was like the ice walls of the North Sea.
That did not mean Mu-gyeong’s fire energy was appeased. Since not a single shred of internal energy or internal power could be felt from Ho-yeon’s body, he was no different from a mere piece of ice.
Cheon Mu-gyeong’s fire demon was not of a nature that could be stopped simply by coldness. If it had been that easily resolved, the demonic cult headquarters would have been moved to the North Sea long ago.
Since his fire energy was generated in the dantian, the energy capable of offsetting it also had to originate from the opponent’s dantian.
Cheon Mu-gyeong listened more obsessively to Ho-yeon’s heartbeats, which were gradually fading.
“So, I think it would be great if I just waste away for a while and then die. What do you think?”
“I don’t mean I’m actually going to die, I mean I’ll pretend to.”
Back when he didn’t know that Mu-gyeong was the Cult Leader, Wi Ho-yeon had boldly proposed a way to escape the demon sect. He must have meant for Mu-gyeong to cooperate in his act of pretending to be dead, but now, he was truly entering a state of suspended animation.
Cheon Mu-gyeong lifted his face from Ho-yeon’s chest and gazed blankly downward. The Ji-u umbrella he had cherished so much had vanished because the person meant to take care of it had lost consciousness, and only the dark gray light armor Ho-yeon wore remained, disheveled and messy.
With blades of prairie grass and dust entangled in his pure white hair, he looked like someone who had died not long ago. Suddenly, Cheon Mu-gyeong felt a dryness in his throat, as if he had swallowed the sands of a desert.
He gripped Ho-yeon’s wrist and lifted it. The arm followed, limp like a cloth doll.
It was different from when Ho-yeon had pretended to be asleep on purpose. Back then, he could feel a slight tremor and a heart beating rapidly with tension; now, he simply surrendered his body helplessly, without a hint of vigilance.
It was true that he had forcibly taken Ho-yeon’s internal power. However, he had not destroyed the lower dantian, the vessel that holds internal power. Even if the dantian became empty, internal power should have recovered, however minutely, over time.
Yet, Wi Ho-yeon’s lower dantian was currently a wasteland he had devastated, with nothing restored.
If the human body were expressed as a tree, the lower dantian would be the roots, the middle dantian the trunk and branches, and the upper dantian the flowers and fruit. What happens to a tree whose circulation stops from the roots? Eventually, it rots away.
If the lower dantian remained empty like this, Wi Ho-yeon would turn from a dying ember into irrecoverable ash.
Cheon Mu-gyeong lay on his side while embracing Ho-yeon with both arms. He rested Ho-yeon’s head, which had fallen toward the ground, on his forearm and cradled it with his hand.
Now that it had come to this, he briefly wondered if he should simply pierce through and devour all the dantians in the body with his hands, but he knew it was a futile effort. Since the yin energy Ho-yeon possessed could only be handled by Ho-yeon himself, absorbing it while it was in a sealed state would make it nothing more than an icy pebble.
But if he hadn’t been sealed, would he have let him live?
During his tedious life, Cheon Mu-gyeong had long since abandoned the habit of assuming “what if” scenarios. And yet, he continued to fabricate reasons not to kill Wi Ho-yeon.
At some point, he had stopped acting to save anyone. Even the members of the divine cult who followed him when he seized control of the Murim Alliance were no exception. Whether they were guardians or Do-gyeon, he never looked back to save anyone, regardless of who they were.
Because the moment he returned to being nineteen, everything returned to its place. Since death was not an end for him, everything was simply tedious.
At one time, he had hoped that if he could return to the past, he might reach the moment his mother was still alive, but by now, he couldn’t even properly remember her face.
In his first life after returning from the lava, he personally carried out the punishment of slicing the skin piece by piece from those who had poisoned his biological mother. There were times he ensured they didn’t die, making them writhe in agony for over three months, and in the next life, he cut off their limbs and hung them from the city walls. He wondered if it took about a day for Cheon Beom-yeong’s executed family to finally die.
He repeated the same acts several times in subsequent lives, but at some point, feelings like revenge ceased to matter. It must have been when his remaining human emotions began to run dry.
Cheon Mu-gyeong slowly shifted his gaze to Ho-yeon’s eyes, closed as if glued shut, his rounded nose from which not even a breath could be heard, and his lips, closed indifferently. The two dots that had moved attractively whenever he mumbled were now still and aligned.
“I’ve… accepted things much bigger than this.”
If that were the case, shouldn’t he be able to accept something like what he had done? He had merely extorted the internal power contained in the lower dantian.
Though he spoke sardonically, Cheon Mu-gyeong knew. If internal power were forcibly taken to the point of depleting the dantian, most people would end up as cripples.
Yet, despite knowing, Cheon Mu-gyeong had not hesitated in his actions. Just as he had opened the meridians of Ho-yeon’s middle dantian, he believed he could simply restore the flow of the lower dantian with his own true qi.
He condensed his true qi into a thread, thin but harder than steel. Then, in one breath, he pressed down hard on Ho-yeon’s lower dantian.
He sent the energy in one strand, then two, then dozens of strands, but the dantian, emptied of its internal power, had become an empty ice cave with its entrance tightly shut.
The act he had attempted several times against an unconscious Wi Ho-yeon was useless once again. The shock of trying to forcibly open the dantian should have been excruciatingly painful, yet there was no reaction.
Regardless of whether Wi Ho-yeon rejected it or not, he cast a thicker layer of demonic energy and poured it in forcibly. As the amount of true qi he poured in increased explosively, Cheon Mu-gyeong would suffer significant internal injuries if he failed.
The blood vessels in his arm swelled, bulging as if they would burst through the skin. Simultaneously with the attempt to forcibly open the dantian, Ho-yeon’s body in his arms convulsed violently once.
A vivid glint appeared in Mu-gyeong’s red eyes. He wondered if Ho-yeon was finally returning, but his true qi was repelled from the entrance of the dantian.
To be precise, Cheon Mu-gyeong was forced to retreat due to the stubborn rejection. If he ignored it and proceeded forcibly, Ho-yeon’s dantian would be completely shattered, leaving him a cripple.
The true qi that collided with Ho-yeon’s resistance surged backward through Cheon Mu-gyeong’s blood paths. The recoil from the clashing flow of qi twisted his internal organs.
Cheon Mu-gyeong hugged Ho-yeon’s body even more tightly and forced his qi and blood to circulate back to normal. In the process, he coughed up blood several times, but like Ho-yeon, he did not let out a single groan.
If he hadn’t been a being who had achieved transcending demonicity, he would have already fallen into qi deviation, and it would have been the perfect way for both of them to be found as corpses.
A small sound, a cough, escaped from Ho-yeon. Mu-gyeong quickly flipped Ho-yeon over and put his hand in his mouth. Dark red blood poured out of Ho-yeon’s mouth. It was a situation where Ho-yeon, having suffered internal injuries, could have died if his airway had been blocked by blood.
Despite being as naive and simple as his hair color, the inside of his body was dreadfully stubborn.
Damn it.
How long had it been since he had uttered such a raw curse? The vortex of emotion arising within him, feeling as if his intestines were twisting, was unfamiliar.
Even if a vast amount of yin energy lay dormant in Ho-yeon’s dantian, he felt an impulse to kill and destroy it. Since the act of striving to save something was a very foreign sensation to him, the instinct to simply eliminate it had surfaced.
Except for the repeating lives, the world had been beneath his feet. Aside from that one thing, he had never felt any sense of helplessness, but Wi Ho-yeon had presented him with another impossibility.
He roughly wiped the blood smeared around Ho-yeon’s mouth with his hand. No expression lingered on his face. Not a single trace of emotion surfaced, yet his red eyes seemed engulfed in an uncontrollable fire.
Slowly, Mu-gyeong’s hand moved to the nape of Ho-yeon’s neck. Though he hadn’t said it aloud during the journey to the ice palace, it must have been quite grueling, as the neck felt much thinner in his grip than before.
Should I just kill him now?
No, I cannot kill him.
Because Wi Ho-yeon was a variable that appeared once in a hundred lives?
There was no certainty that Ho-yeon would be in the same place when life repeated again.
But was that truly the only reason?
Mu-gyeong scoffed at his own question.
He was infinitely bored. Holding the unconscious Wi Ho-yeon in his arms, he realized he wanted to hear his voice. The reason he had tried to forcibly open the dantian to wake him was that those eyes, closed as if dead, had planted a seed of anxiety in him.
There was a time when he had run everywhere, seeking numerous demonic physicians to save his biological mother, who had been poisoned after drinking iron guanyin tea. Since everyone shook their heads, saying she could not be saved, his younger self had faced the mountain-like impossibility and helplessness for the first time.
The past, which had been so distant that he had forgotten it, surged back at this moment.
From the bottom of an abyss that had been so dried up that not even a scratch could form, emotions as cold and damp as Ho-yeon’s blood began to swell one by one.
Because Wi Ho-yeon’s heart was no longer beating.