“A genius…!”
“Truly, the Seamless Heavenly Robe is in a league of her own.”
Those were the words Yeon Seo-rin had heard most often throughout her life. Yet, as Third Young Master Yeon Jeok-gwang gritted his teeth and unleashed a barrage of chillingly sharp sword-light, those accolades felt distant.
Seo-rin’s eyes, deep and still as a mountain lake, didn’t blink once as she tracked every lethal arc.
A variation of the Namgung Clan’s Emperor’s Sword Form. Like a master tea sommelier inhaling a delicate aroma, she dissected the nuances of Jeok-gwang’s martial arts layer by layer. Mixed with the fundamental principles of our Sword Clan’s secrets.
Clang!
Jeok-gwang’s first lightning-fast strike was deflected, only for a second, even faster blow to follow immediately. “Die!” he roared.
A lesser master would have suffered a fatal wound from such an onslaught, but Seo-rin had already read the rhythm. The Namgung Soaring Swallow Sword, reinforced by Sword Clan heritage.
Thwack!
With humiliating ease, the edge of Jeok-gwang’s blade was caught and pinned between Seo-rin’s knee and elbow.
“What the… fuck?!” Jeok-gwang stammered, his eyes bulging at the impossibility of stopping a live blade with bare limbs. “Goddammit!”
Black storm clouds began to roll from his wrists as crackling blue lightning arced in every direction. The Quanzhen Sect’s hidden heritage. Because the Quanzhen arts were a single-person succession shrouded in mystery, even Seo-rin didn’t know their exact patterns.
Instead of waiting for him to finish the technique, she lunged, driving a short, explosive punch into Jeok-gwang’s jaw, a move from the Sword Clan’s Martial Academy known as the Genesis of Inch Force.
Crack!
“Gah…!” Jeok-gwang stumbled back, spitting a spray of blood as the lightning at his wrists grew violent, churning like a tempest, and he manifested a Silk Reeling Force from his static position without any preparatory movement.
“Too slow, brat,” Seo-rin remarked, having already widened the distance to leave his redirected force with nowhere to go but empty air.
“DAAAAAAMMIT!”
***
—“How can she be that strong at her age? It makes no sense.”
—“I told you, that’s just the gap in talent.”
Those were the words Yeon Seo-rin loathed most.
Huff. Huff.
Morning, noon, evening, and night—for every hundred swings of her blade, she sought a hundred distinct realizations. She haunted the halls of the Martial Academy so frequently that the Director, a man once known as the Sword Sovereign, would sigh the moment he saw her face.
“Any new research papers on martial theory today?” she would ask.
“Do you think they grow on trees? They don’t come out every day!”
“Then the scholars here are getting lazy.”
She sparred with a new sect or a new technique every single day.
“Master, is there a new opponent yet?”
“I just brought you that expert from the Outer Lands a few days ago.”
“He relied on nothing but gimmicks and oddities. I need a real master.”
“…Fine. I’ll see what I can do.”
Her teacher, the Head of the Guard Pavilion, always struggled to find partners who could satisfy her, and once a target was found, Seo-rin wouldn’t sleep until she had absorbed every drop of their technical foundation.
Despite this obsession, the whispers never stopped.
“It’s only because she has a great father.”
“Must be nice to be the daughter of the Greatest Sword under the Heavens.”
Seo-rin never cared. Naturally straightforward, she didn’t linger on petty grudges and decided it was a better use of her time to read one more manual from the vast library her family’s wealth had amassed than to worry about such rumors.
“Fuck it all!”
Yeon Jeok-gwang slammed his hand, glowing with the critical mass of his Silk Reeling Force, directly into the ground.
Boom!
The solid bedrock of the cliff shattered, sending a jagged shockwave rippling through the earth. Seo-rin, who had been positioning herself for a follow-up, felt her footing shift violently—an impressive adaptation, a testament to Jeok-gwang’s raw, sensory brilliance.
“Finally…!”
Using the impact as a springboard, Jeok-gwang launched himself like a cannonball toward the unbalanced Seo-rin, his speed amplified by his surging internal energy to monstrous levels. Against anyone else, this erratic assault would have been fatal.
“GO TO HELL!”
In that desperate heartbeat, Seo-rin’s eyes narrowed, growing as deep and vast as the ocean. “Hup!” She kicked off a piece of flying debris in mid-air, successfully pivoting her momentum.
“I’ve got you!” Jeok-gwang snarled, having anticipated the move and held back his true top speed to lure her into a trap before accelerating again to close the gap in an instant.
Yet Seo-rin remained unfathomable. Her entire life—the study, the training, the endless sparring—coalesced into a single instinct as her body contorted in mid-air with jointless fluidity, her feet finding purchase on tiny pebbles and even her own other foot in an elegant, bizarre trajectory that mirrored the movements of ascetics from the distant lands of Indu.
“What…?!”
Seo-rin vanished from his line of sight, and unable to check his momentum, Jeok-gwang slammed head-first into a massive boulder.
Crack-boom!
“ARGH! MOTHER-FUCKER!”
Jeok-gwang shrieked as he scrambled out of the dust cloud, his hand clutching the back of his head where blood was beginning to flow. Seo-rin had delivered a short, concise slash to the base of his skull the moment she evaded him.
Too shallow. She clicked her tongue mentally. Had the strike landed properly, it would have ended the fight, but Jeok-gwang was a master who had “surpassed the wall” at sixteen—a genius among geniuses who was successfully acclimating to the Quanzhen heritage in real-time.
“Does the Quanzhen Sect teach its disciples to run around like wild buffalo?” she mocked.
“Shut up!”
Seo-rin offered a mocking smile, but inwardly, she was wary. He’s not an easy one.
***
“Did you hear? The Third Young Master surpassed the wall.”
“Amazing. At only sixteen?”
The news had spread like wildfire.
Rumors said the faction of the Third Young Master had intended to announce it at the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly, but the secret had leaked during the political infighting. Seo-rin hadn’t cared about the gossip; she had simply continued her daily swings, indifferent to who achieved what.
“Looks like the ‘Seamless Heavenly Robe’ has finally been caught up to.”
“There’s always a higher heaven, as they say.”
While the warriors of the Sword Clan admired her, those outside the martial circles often resented her success, and to them, the news of Jeok-gwang surpassing her at an earlier age was sweet nectar.
“The higher a bird flies, the harder it falls.”
Some called her a genius; others said she was purely a product of her lineage. Everyone acted as if the matter of who was superior had already been settled.
Am I a genius? She might have joked about it, but she knew the truth.
She knew a real genius.
Yeon So-hyeon.
He was the one who had possessed the ultimate state she craved from the very first moment he picked up a sword. Even now, the gap between them was widening, and she couldn’t even begin to guess what he saw or where he stood.
“YEON SEO-RIN! Stop scurrying away and face me properly!”
She would just do what she always did: strive and strive again.
Click.
Seo-rin sheathed her blade and dropped into a low stance.
“WAAAAAAAGH!”
Yeon Jeok-gwang closed the distance at a speed almost impossible to track with the naked eye. In that fraction of a second, Seo-rin gripped her hilt tighter.
Should I use the Flash Shadow Instant again?
No. Her preternatural senses rejected the idea. The Flash Shadow Instant was a supreme counter-technique created by her brother So-hyeon, a divine art in its own right, but even the greatest art had limits when faced with raw, escalating talent like Jeok-gwang’s—especially now that he was bolstered by the Quanzhen heritage.
If she hadn’t gained experience through her intermittent bouts with So-hyeon back at the estate, she wouldn’t have lasted this long.
I can’t give him any more time.
Jeok-gwang was becoming more proficient with the Quanzhen energy by the second.
Then… there’s only one move left.
***
“You’re saying you’ll handle Jeok-gwang yourself, Sister?”
“I am.”
Back on the cliff overlooking the battlefield, when she had first made the proposal, So-hyeon had surprisingly given a simple nod. “Very well. That seems appropriate.”
“You little brat…!” she had grumbled. “Aren’t you even a little worried about your big sister?”
If Jeok-gwang hadn’t received the Quanzhen heritage, she would have beaten him a hundred times out of a hundred. But with his current state, nothing was certain.
Yet So-hyeon had simply smiled. “You are more than capable, Sister.”
Yeon Seo-rin tightened her grip on the hilt as her brother’s voice echoed in her mind. “You are more than capable.”
Yes. I am.
“DIE, YOU BITCH!”
I can do this.
Flash!
“What…?!”
Mount Hua Sword Dragon Gam Woo-hyeon forgot what he was saying and snapped his head upward in a reflexive, primal reaction. “What… what just happened?!”
He stared at the sky, his words failing him. Across the twilight sky of the battlefield, a single, vivid line—a scar of pure sword-light—cleaved the clouds asunder.
Vroooooooom—
As Gam Woo-hyeon stood paralyzed, staring at the heavens, Grand Young Master So-hyeon’s voice drifted from behind him. “It’s Life-Severing.”
“L-Life-Severing?! You mean…?”
It was the signature technique of the Sword Clan’s Patriarch, the man who had once been the Greatest Sword under the Heavens.
“Are you saying the Seamless Heavenly Robe just executed Life-Severing?!”
“Indeed.” So-hyeon smiled, looking at the lingering trail in the sky as if it were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “I knew she could do it.”
A combination of heaven-sent talent and an unyielding will to endure infinite effort—to So-hyeon, there was no one more deserving of the title ‘Seamless Heavenly Robe.’
Yeon Seo-rin was, in every sense of the word, flawless.