Chapter 101

Ah… what do I do with this?

On the very day Cheon-oh finally navigated his own turmoil to reach an answer, Cho Yoon slipped out of Estate of Deep Mists at the crack of dawn. Leaving his disciple behind under the guise of a morning stroll, he instead spent the early hours aggressively scouring the rugged expanse of the Point of No Return Mountain Range.

For two days following their return, Cho Yoon had lacked the luxury of a single spare thought, pouring every ounce of his focus into healing Cheon-oh’s horrific wounds. Thanks to the boy’s monstrous resilience, however, he had stepped out of the bath yesterday with a completely unblemished body. Cho Yoon had breathed a sigh of relief, expecting to finally enjoy a night free of worry.

Instead, he realized he would have preferred agonizing over his disciple’s physical state. Naturally, it wasn’t actually better for the boy to be injured, so neither situation was ideal, but the sheer mental toll remained the same. The moment his most pressing concern vanished, an avalanche of delayed problems he had pushed aside using Cheon-oh’s recovery as an excuse crushed down upon him all at once.

He had wrestled with these snowballing issues until his head pounded, eventually slipping into a fitful slumber, only to be subjected to a truly ghastly nightmare. It was the first dream he had experienced since arriving in this world, and it was a terror of the highest order.

The moment dawn broke, Cho Yoon penned a brief letter to ensure Cheon-oh wouldn’t panic and bolted from the estate. He needed to methodically dismantle the threats surrounding them just to find a shred of peace. He also hoped that walking aimlessly through the sprawling wilderness might wash away the lingering dread of his violent dream.

Cutting through the damp morning mist, his first destination was Mount Godo, where he verified that the buried Zhenniao poison was safely decomposing. Fortunately, while the peak felt slightly more oppressive than before, it showed no signs of collapsing, and the tainted groundwater had not bled into the Mangmang River.

He could have turned back to Estate of Deep Mists right then and spared himself further anxiety, but he simply couldn’t bring himself to bypass the Yeonpa River. As an anomaly who didn’t belong in this world and would eventually have to return to his own, Cho Yoon despised tangling himself in local affairs. Yet, so long as he wasn’t living completely alone, he couldn’t afford to turn a blind eye to potential threats. All he could do was pray he wouldn’t unearth any traces of intruders as he combed the mountain range.

That desperate hope brought him to the present moment. Cho Yoon stood frozen in the heart of Mount Wonik, a profound sense of defeat washing over him.

Tell me my eyes are playing tricks on me, he prayed silently. Please let me be wrong. But I know I’m not.

Clinging to a futile sliver of denial, he nudged a suspicious, protruding mound of earth with the toe of his shoe. The obviously artificial hillock collapsed instantly, mocking his weak hopes. Unlike the sun-baked surface, the exposed interior was thoroughly saturated. The faint, putrid stench that crawled into his nasal passages proved it was retaining far more than just moisture.

“Hah.”

A heavy sigh slipped past his lips as he scrubbed his face with dry hands.

His fingers eventually stilled over his mouth, his intensely displeased gaze locking onto the unearthed grave.

After glaring at the intruder’s handiwork in absolute stillness for a long moment, Cho Yoon expelled another breath, dropped to his knees, and shoved his bare hands directly into the muck.

There are far too many impurities for this to be pure blood, he deduced, rubbing the foul soil between his thumb and forefinger. It holds a trace of venom, but the acidity is overwhelming. Mount Godo might have withstood this, but Mount Wonik lacks the capacity to absorb something this potent. And it wasn’t just one or two people. At least five.

As the innate knowledge of the original ‘Cho Yoon’ supplied the gruesome answer, he released a soundless groan of despair. He genuinely resented this erudite body that robbed him of the bliss of ignorance.

Bone-Melting Powder.

They had used Bone-Melting Powder—the martial world’s signature method of destroying evidence, capable of dissolving a corpse without leaving a single bone fragment behind. The familiar venom mixed into the soil suggested some of them had succumbed to the Zhenniao poison. Furthermore, the meticulous cleanup proved there were survivors who had successfully escaped. He hadn’t spotted any other corpses on his way up the mountain, cementing the grim theory.

The implication was terrifyingly clear.

Someone had intentionally bypassed Cho Yoon—a Profound-level master—navigated a mountain range teeming with monsters and natural formations, and unleashed the Zhenniao to decimate the ecosystem and plunge Shaanxi Province into chaos.

His dismay swiftly curdled into a rare, palpable fury that fractured his usually stoic expression. Responding to his vivid emotion, the entire mountain shuddered violently, its leaves rustling without a breath of wind.

That was too close. One wrong step, and we would have lost everything. 

What if he hadn’t been there?

What if he had noticed the poisoned water too late, or Cheon-oh had encountered it first?

What if these culprits had ambushed Estate of Deep Mists while he was away?

It was pure, dumb luck that they had evaded such concentrated malice without a single casualty. His obsessive preparations to protect his disciples had merely served as a temporary shield.

That chilling realization summoned the nightmare he had desperately tried to outrun. He had assumed burying himself in work would erase the visions, but he was dead wrong.

In the dream, Cho Yoon stood engulfed in a dense fog that severed the Qinling Mountains from the Point of No Return Mountain Range. A half-empty medicine box weighed down his back, while a bamboo hat obscured half his vision.

Without a shred of hesitation, he waded into the impenetrable mist, his strides quickening until they bordered on frantic. His calloused heart couldn’t even label the emotion seizing his chest; he only knew he had an absolute, singular purpose.

I have to go. I have to see it with my own eyes.

His usual icy tranquility had long since shattered, the submerged fragments of his emotions churning violently beneath the surface. Had I really grown that attached? Had we really spent that much time together? The detached, contemplative reflection that had always salvaged him from life’s burdens proved entirely useless. The web of cause and effect was already woven too tightly for him to feign ignorance.

When the fog finally broke, the devastation defied comprehension.

The fiercely vibrant, verdant trees had withered into a sickly, desiccated brown, and the sky was entirely devoid of birds. Dead leaves crumbled to dust beneath his boots in a forest stripped of insect song. Venom still hung thick in the stagnant air. Cho Yoon hesitated, absorbing the mutated landscape, before surging forward. Only as the last flickers of hope died with every step did he realize what a foolishly optimistic fantasy he had clung to.

Eventually, a small homestead pierced the horizon. A low fence, a cramped yard, two modest rooms, and a thatched roof woven from dry grass. From the outside, it looked exactly the same.

He pushed through the flimsy gate.

“I’m back,” he announced, his voice shockingly composed.

Met with hollow silence, he lowered his medicine box and opened the doors one by one. His room was empty. So was the next. Since the boys knew the mountain’s dangers and would never wander off recklessly, only one place remained. The kitchen—where they kept the old water jar and their meager food.

It didn’t take long to witness the tragedy.

The doorway into the kitchen possessed a low threshold, rising only to the ankle. Draped limply over that wooden beam was a skeletal wrist. Cho Yoon immediately registered the unmistakable stench of two rotting corpses.

Was it the unavoidable stupidity of human nature to demand visual proof of an already undeniable truth, or was it the crushing weight of a hopelessly delayed guilty conscience?

Neither answer could change the outcome.

Cho Yoon’s elongated shadow stretched across the floor, blanketing the two bodies that had collapsed into a single, tangled heap. The hand reaching toward the door, desperately grasping for a salvation that never came, belonged to the older child. 

He always was a stubborn one.

The turbulent tempest of emotions he expected to feel flattened out with an almost embarrassing suddenness, leaving behind a profound emptiness. It wasn’t a peaceful settling; it was a total shipwreck of the soul, plunging so deep into the abyss that he was too exhausted to even register the loss.

Frozen in place, Cho Yoon stared down at the two boys, his quiet eyes slowly drifting away.

Beyond the walls, beyond the dead mountain, the river continued to flow.

Having jolted awake from such a visceral horror, Cho Yoon’s mood was predictably foul. 

Felt nothing, my ass. 

His dream-self might have frozen under the paralyzing shock of sudden tragedy, but the waking Cho Yoon, forced to obsessively chew over the implications, was practically vibrating with anxiety.

He had scoured the peaks to suppress that rising panic, to prove the nightmare was just a phantom of his mind—only to unearth concrete evidence of trespassing and biological terrorism. Worse, he couldn’t even begin to fathom how these intruders had slipped through the impenetrable defenses of the Point of No Return Mountain Range. The original Cho Yoon’s encyclopedic knowledge was always conveniently defective precisely when he needed it most.

Exhaling a weary breath, Cho Yoon finally pushed himself up from the dirt. He brushed the filthy soil from his hands and cast his gaze down the mountain, taking in the sweeping vista of the Yeonpa River and Mount Dumang.

He loathed admitting it, but the reality was undeniable.

He was not an omnipotent god capable of solving every crisis alone, and the Point of No Return Mountain Range were not an absolute sanctuary.

He could no longer be certain he possessed the strength to protect anyone.