By Zephyria 
HF 53
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* * *
Ho-yeon stretched luxuriously and sat up on the bed with a dazed expression. Although the embers in the brazier had all gone out, leaving only ash, he felt no cold. Usually, he woke up with chills and started his day by drinking warm tea, but today, his hands and feet were warm. It felt as if he had just woken up from sleeping beside Cheon Mu-gyeong.
However, he was alone on the bed. He wondered if the man had visited during the night, but there were no traces of another person anywhere. It was just as Ho-yeon regained his senses and pushed himself off the bed.
With a soft thud, something fell, and his lower body felt suddenly empty.
‘Why is this…?’
He had tied the drawstring of his sleeping robes tightly before bed, but it seemed to have come undone somehow while he slept. Since he didn’t wear undergarments when sleeping, his bare skin was completely exposed.
“Your sleeping habits are serious.”
“Did you kick it off?”
“You’re lucky it was only that.”
Since it seemed to be due to sleeping habits he wasn’t aware of, there was no need to be puzzled. As Ho-yeon pulled up his robes, he tilted his head slightly. It was because the area felt strangely prickly the moment the fabric touched it.
When he reached down to grasp his member, the urethra stung as if it had been roughly rubbed against something. It wasn’t painful enough to be bothersome, so he assumed it was simply from rubbing against the robes during his sleep. Having never used his genitals for anything other than physiological functions, the skin was excessively delicate.
Opening the wooden door of the thatched cottage, Ho-yeon stepped outside and scooped water from a jar used for collecting rainwater to wash himself. Then, looking down from the peak, he noticed that unlike yesterday, there wasn’t a speck of mist, and the view was clear. Because of this, he could feel even more acutely that he was at a dizzying height.
Ho-yeon clenched his fist and raised his voice. He shouted, “Cheon Mu-gyeong!” but the only thing that returned was an echo. After finishing his meditative breathing in the empty dwelling and filling his stomach with fasting pills, he gradually began to organize his thoughts.
Even if he were lucky enough to be able to climb down this peak, from Cheon Mu-gyeong’s perspective, it would count as a second escape. To make matters worse, the man now knew he wasn’t the Palace Master’s child; he couldn’t even imagine what kind of retaliation he might inflict upon the Ice Palace.
If his words had taken root, there was a glimmer of hope that the man might simply threaten the Ice Palace or overlook it. After all, what Cheon Mu-gyeong needed was a being who could soothe his heat. However, the fact that he had shoved him here and hadn’t shown his face caused a significant amount of anxiety. He feared that the man might truly not appear until he had consumed all the fasting pills.
Ho-yeon shook his head slightly. That couldn’t be. He was suffering from a terrible blazing fire. Having found a way to soothe that pain through him, there was no way he would just leave him alone. Rather, it seemed more plausible that he had locked him in the sky prison to use him more conveniently.
Ho-yeon let a blue energy flicker on the edge of his hand, reconfirming that his dantian was safely open. Looking down the cliff, he gauged a way to leave the peak. Thanks to his open dantian, he was capable of making his body light, but attempting to descend using a lightfoot technique was impossible. This was because he had never learned the footwork and breathing required for such techniques.
The direct descendants of the Ice Palace practiced ice art before they could even walk, but as a collateral relative, Ho-yeon had been locked in the basement to become a human elixir by the time he should have been learning martial arts. Had it not been for the grace of the ice dragon, he would have been nothing more than an ordinary person even if he had survived.
The potential for internal energy implanted in his body was immense, but he had never properly learned martial arts, and he always suffered from pain when releasing internal power. Given his circumstances, he had nowhere to seek guidance, and thus Ho-yeon had never dared to cultivate his martial arts. But now, there was hope.
“The problem is that I don’t have a master,” Ho-yeon muttered to himself as he withdrew his internal power.
* * *
The dragon-phoenix bath, which he had once ignored, flickered before his eyes. Ho-yeon lay horizontally across the bed, his head hanging off the edge, doing nothing but breathing. Several days had already passed as the sun rose and set. Fearing that the cult leader might be visiting during the night, he had stayed awake all through the previous night. However, not a single hair of the man was seen until dawn.
That didn’t mean Ho-yeon’s spirit was broken. He was someone who had spent countless days alone. While the emotion of loneliness still existed, at least the opportunity for escape was far more visible than when he was in the basement of the eternal snow mountains.
Knowing that lounging around would do no good, Ho-yeon sprang up. He glared at the small jar filled with fasting pills as if they were his enemy, then immediately walked outside. Standing at the edge of the peak, Ho-yeon drew internal power from his lower dantian in one breath. He then lay flat on the ground and reached his hand out over the cliff.
As he concentrated his internal energy into his fingertips and struck the rock wall, a cold energy spread instantly, and the surface of the rock froze white. As he poured in more internal power, several palm-sized ice plates jutted out. Since all the moisture in the rock was drawn out and frozen, it created reasonably sturdy footholds.
He had tried various methods over several days, but this was the best. Ho-yeon named it the “ice ladder,” and today he intended to descend halfway down the peak. He believed his internal energy would be insufficient to reach the very bottom.
He pushed the potential dangers facing the Ice Palace due to his escape to the back of his mind for a moment. Even if he succeeded, he didn’t intend to flee immediately. For now, he simply wanted to establish a path.
Ho-yeon concentrated intensely, to the point of breaking into a cold sweat. To avoid looking at the dizzying depths, he focused only on the footholds he would step on. Along the way, he created ice handles to drop himself down and repeatedly used internal power at his toes to create new ice footholds. He reached a protruding rocky area halfway and stood there for a moment to catch his breath.
He thought he had descended quite a bit, but when he looked up, the top was still relatively close. At this rate, his internal energy might run dry before he even reached the middle.
To dispel his fear, Ho-yeon took a deep breath and looked down. He saw protruding rocky areas where he could rest, similar to where he was currently standing. Fortunately, he also spotted a tree jutting out at a height where he wouldn’t be seriously injured if he jumped. For a crookedly grown tree, it was as thick as Cheon Mu-gyeong’s torso.
Ho-yeon exhaled sharply and jumped straight toward the tree trunk. His hair surged upward, and frost scattered along with it. Fortunately, after landing on the tree trunk, Ho-yeon gasped for air and then burst into an involuntary laugh. If he practiced this a few more times, descending the peak wouldn’t be difficult.
Though he had never been properly taught, perhaps he had a great talent for martial arts.
“The Cult Leader showed outstanding talent in demonic arts from a young age and was called the reincarnation of the first heavenly demon.”
Those were the words Chief Han had told him back when Mu-gyeong still believed he was the young master of the demonic shadow martial house. Pride and awe had been etched in her eyes.
Since he was the child of the cult leader, he must have had an amazing master by his side. Ho-yeon belittled Cheon Mu-gyeong in his mind, then released internal power again to create a sturdy foothold. As he did, his skill improved, and he was able to descend the peak more easily than before. Just as he extended his foot toward a foothold, intending to go a bit further down before climbing back up—
With a crack, the foothold he thought he had frozen solidly shattered, and his body plummeted. Simultaneously, with a harsh sound of cutting through the wind, something sharp flew toward him. Immediately after, a massive thud echoed as the object embedded itself into the rock.
What had struck faster than Ho-yeon’s fall was a single sword. Ho-yeon desperately reached out and grabbed the hilt of the vibrating sword. His body, dangling from a single sword, swayed precariously. His heart pounded so wildly that he didn’t even know where the energy in his dantian was flowing.
Only then did Ho-yeon turn his head to see who had thrown the sword, but his vision suddenly went dark. A figure faster than the sword flashed past his eyes, and his body was snatched up. Ho-yeon snapped his head up.
He saw Cheon Mu-gyeong with red eyes, as if he had released his demonic energy. Despite the fierce wind, his hair only swayed calmly.
“First, l-let me explain.”
Since there was no expression on the man’s face, Ho-yeon spoke hurriedly. At the same time, Ho-yeon let go of the sword and gripped the man’s robes tightly with trembling hands. He felt that the man was safer than the sword. There were several low peaks around Mu-gyeong, but he had no idea where the man had come from.
“…As you can see, I can’t do things like lightfoot techniques. I couldn’t just die eating fasting pills, so I was trying to go hunting.”
Ho-yeon beat Mu-gyeong to the punch before he could say anything.
“This isn’t a place where people can live.”
However, for Mu-gyeong, those words were incomprehensible. That thatched cottage was the place where Mu-gyeong had resided for ten lives, starting from around the time his repeated lives had exceeded seventy. Even he did not know who had built the cottage that had originally been in that spot.
Therefore, it was a place that no one looked into and no one could find. Cheon Mu-gyeong had locked Ho-yeon in such a place. But he had not expected him to try and descend the peak in such a crude manner.
“If you had fainted, your head would have split open and you would have died.”
He didn’t seem to know that Ho-yeon’s dantian had opened without side effects. Ho-yeon decided it was better not to reveal the truth.
“I know it’s a crude method. But I… I hate fasting pills that much.”
As he forced out his excuse, Ho-yeon was momentarily bewildered to see that the man wasn’t holding onto the sword but was simply standing. Come to think of it, the place where Cheon Mu-gyeong stood was not a crevice in the cliff, but merely a protruding slab of rock. Moreover, it was a flimsy stone that could never have supported his weight. It was unbelievable that he had stepped onto it so lightly while holding him.
Even if the man had used internal power to make his body light, Ho-yeon had not. He had stopped the flow of his internal power due to shock and panic.
Ho-yeon consciously tried to operate his internal power again. Perhaps sensing his anxiety, the man fortunately reached out and gripped the hilt of the sword. But the relief was short-lived.
“What… what are you doing?”
The veins on the back of Mu-gyeong’s hand bulged further.
“Since you hate them, we should go down.”
In one motion, he ripped the sword out of the rock.
“Using an even cruder method.”
Crack. The flimsy rock supporting his feet also broke, and having lost his footing, their bodies began to fall. Unable to even scream, Ho-yeon froze like ice, his eyes and mouth wide open as he took the full force of the wind.
Mu-gyeong was facing the ground with his back to the fall, as if welcoming it. Ho-yeon, perched in Mu-gyeong’s arms, hugged him tightly. Thus, the two bodies were falling.
As Ho-yeon finally began to scream while plummeting down the dizzyingly high peak, the sound of laughter was heard. Cheon Mu-gyeong was laughing. Seeing Mu-gyeong laughing freely, revealing this side of himself, Ho-yeon looked at him with eyes of utter disbelief.
As Mu-gyeong’s fire energy mixed with the scattering frost, they fell toward the ground together like raindrops. Unlike Ho-yeon’s blue eyes, whose pupils had frozen in shock, the boredom had vanished from Mu-gyeong’s crimson light, which had once been filled only with indolence.