At Medicine King Mountain in Tongguan City, Shaanxi, lived the Murim’s highest-average-intelligence group. Unlike ordinary martial clans, the Zhuge Clan had relentlessly studied formations, tactics, and medicine, and proudly claimed a seat among the Five Great Clans. Their martial skill was only slightly above average, but in large-scale battles or shadow wars, everyone acknowledged the Zhuge Clan’s contributions and wanted them as allies.
Bound by blood, the Zhuge Clan shared an inescapable congenital frailty.
No amount of bone-washing elixirs, physically robust spouses, or decades of obsessive martial research could overwrite their fragile constitutions.
Occasionally, a physically healthy child was born into the clan, but they inevitably suffered from severe intellectual mediocrity—at least by the family’s astronomical standards.
Even if such children were considered prodigies in the outside world, they fundamentally failed to meet the Zhuge baseline.
Consequently, the Zhuge clan’s entire existence and ultimate pride rested upon their transcendent intellect—the sole weapon capable of overturning this strength-dominated world.
Wielding scholar’s folding fans or iron judge’s pens, the Zhuge scholars dispensed their wisdom with arrogant elegance.
They openly mocked the ‘meatheads’ who sweat over daily physical conditioning, and sneered at the unwashed masses who scrambled blindly at their mere predictions.
Arrogance was not merely a trait within the family; it was their culture.
Yet, one person found this prevailing cultural conceit utterly pathetic.
“Young Lady, I have brought what you requested,” a voice murmured through the door.
“Enter,” Zhuge Seol-rin replied, shifting her gaze from the tome resting on her window-side desk.
The door slid open to reveal a maid, her eyes dutifully lowered. She respectfully presented a small lacquered tray, approaching with quiet, hurried steps. Seol-rin picked up the pouch resting on the wood.
“Exactly twenty-three pieces?” she asked. “Were they exactly where they were supposed to be?”
“Yes, My Lady.”
“And you ensured no one touched them barehanded?”
“Yes. We took exceptional precautions, exactly as you commanded,” the maid assured her.
“Any reports of new plagues or suspicious deaths?”
“The situation remains identical to this morning’s report, My Lady.”
Exhaling a heavy sigh of relief, Zhuge Seol-rin offered a polite dismissal, sending the maid away.
Left alone, she returned to her desk and stared down at the silk pouch. Larger than two clenched fists, it rattled heavily at her touch.
“…”
After a long stretch of motionless silence, Seol-rin suddenly upended the pouch.
Its contents tumbled across her desk with a clear, melodic clatter.
Looking like jagged gravel roughly the size of two knuckles, the stones glowed with a pale, translucent blue, shimmering as if containing liquid water.
Upon seeing them, Seol-rin’s face twisted in profound disgust.
“Ha!” she scoffed, rolling her eyes in sheer disbelief.
The thoughts swirling in her mind suddenly erupted into a vitriolic tirade. This explosive paranoia was the precise reason the precious daughter of the Zhuge Clan had layered her private sanctum with absolute restriction arrays and heavily vetted her staff.
“He swore a horrific tragedy was imminent! Warned we’d bitterly regret ignoring it!” she shouted at the empty room. “I actually trusted his warning and procured the Purification Stones, only to discover it was a miserable bluff! Using the Moyong name to casually predict a catastrophe? Does that little young master possess not a shred of gravity or sincerity?!”
It was a thunderous roar, shockingly ferocious for a girl barely thirteen.
Had the offending ‘young master’ been present, he would have withered under her fury.
She looked entirely detached from the polite, soft-spoken aristocrat who had addressed her maid just moments prior.
But her temper made perfect sense; she was the daughter of Zhuge So-seo.
As the de facto powerholder whom the entire Zhuge Clan both feared and despised yet ultimately followed, So-seo had only one child.
Though a mild case of Severed Meridians permanently barred Seol-rin from learning martial arts, she compensated with an unparalleled, genius-level intellect that made her the clan’s greatest rising star.
She usually maintained a quiet demeanor, leaving people to wonder if she truly shared her tiger-like father’s blood, but her rare outbursts were violently disproportionate to her petite frame.
Now was one of those moments.
Seol-rin slammed her small, uncalloused hand against the desk. The impact sent several pristine Purification Stones scattering across the floor and onto her lap.
“What does that make me, watching all of Shaanxi for fifteen straight days based on his single warning?!” she raged. “The gold hemorrhaged, the manpower exhausted, the time utterly wasted! Does he think handing over a few rare artifacts gives him the right to toy with people?! Who does he think he is?!”
“You are venting your anger far more fiercely than I anticipated,” a voice suddenly echoed. “It serves no benefit to your frail constitution; calm yourself.”
“Who’s there?!”
Seol-rin whipped around, horrified to discover a stranger standing casually in the dead center of her immaculate room.
Operating on drilled precision, she instantly reached beneath her desk and triggered a hidden mechanism.
It was a failsafe engineered by Zhuge So-seo to protect his sickly child—a concealed weapon that launched a needle coated in a lethal, instantaneous poison.
Simultaneously, she snapped the neck off a porcelain fairy statue resting on a nearby cabinet, intending to trigger the room’s defensive arrays and alert the guards.
The poisoned needle flew true.
The porcelain shattered instantly.
Yet, the atmosphere remained utterly stagnant.
A wave of paralyzing confusion washed over Seol-rin, freezing her in place.
“W-What… what is this…”
“Forgive me for startling you,” the intruder said, his low, gentle voice entirely unsuited to the tense standoff. It washed over her like a cool autumn breeze, extinguishing her boiling fury and leaving behind the faint, soothing scent of aged herbal decoctions. “I harbor no intent to harm or abduct you. I merely carry a message.”
Her raging adrenaline finally subsiding, Seol-rin regained enough rationality to study her uninvited guest.
“…Who are you?” she asked.
“Someone who came to clear a misunderstanding,” he replied smoothly. “I assumed walking through the front gates would escalate matters unnecessarily and slipped in quietly. Had I known I would frighten you this badly, I would have simply penned a letter.”
The intruder wore un-dyed, un-embroidered cotton clothes and a bamboo hat veiled to the waist, completely obscuring his features. Standing just shy of six shaku, he exuded absolutely zero traces of external conditioning or internal qi in his danjeon, giving the perfect illusion of a mundane civilian.
…Impossible, Seol-rin deduced rapidly. Without martial arts, no one could blindly navigate the Zhuge Clan’s labyrinthine arrays and breach this sanctum undetected.
The man before her had to be either an unparalleled formation master or a transcendent martial god who had achieved the state of Returning to Simplicity.
Accepting her terrifying reality, Seol-rin released the empty hidden weapon and the broken porcelain neck.
She adjusted her posture, sitting with perfectly refined grace to face him.
Her only viable option was complete cooperation and information extraction.
Complicating matters further, the intruder projected absolutely zero hostility; instead, an undeniable aura of goodwill radiated from him, leaving her profoundly bewildered.
Following her lead, the intruder lowered himself to the floor. He knelt quietly about a jang and a half away in the center of the room, keeping his back perfectly straight.
As a heavy, evaluating silence stretched between them, Seol-rin meticulously weighed her opening words. Suddenly, the intruder raised one hand to chest level.
Seol-rin flinched, her shoulders jumping, but once again, nothing happened.
No, something had happened. Her eyes had simply been too slow to register it.
“You wielded a poison exceedingly difficult to procure, even from the Tang Clan,” the intruder noted softly. “It would be disastrous if it grazed you, so please, remain perfectly still.”
“T-Telekinesis…” she breathed.
The lethal brass needle, which she had assumed was lost in the shadows, was floating effortlessly through the air, returning directly to her. Knowing that a mere scratch meant certain death, and fully aware that this miraculous display required a monstrous reservoir of internal energy, Seol-rin’s jaw dropped.
She didn’t tremble, entirely because his command to ‘remain still’ lacked any venomous threat.
Coasting lazily through the air—slow enough for even a civilian to track—the poisoned needle slid perfectly back into the hidden mechanism she had just released.
Click.
At the soft sound of the needle locking into place, the intruder finally lowered his hand.
Seol-rin exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
She had no choice but to admit the absolute truth.
The man sitting before her was an unfathomable monster, far beyond her ability to measure.