🔊 TTS Settings
Chapter 05
“Father!”
Seeing the scene before him, Namgung Hyunwon—Sayeol’s father—staggered as he grabbed the hilt of his sword.
“Do not interfere!”
A mere sixteen-year-old girl was crossing blades with the head of the Namgung clan himself. Even if Hyunwon, who was a level below the clan head, stepped in, nothing would change. But before anything else—
Crack.
A deep fracture split across Patriarch Huicheon’s pride. A filthy bastard child his son brought from outside. If she hadn’t carried the blood of the now-vanished Ice Palace, he would never have accepted her.
Even though the Ice Palace was considered demonic, no warrior could ignore their martial arts. Strangely enough, their techniques could only be inherited by women.
The profound cold and yin energy cultivated through their arts—if the women of Namgung could wield it…
From the moment his son carried the infant Sayeol back home, Huicheon had thought exactly that. Especially because Sayeol was born with a deep yin constitution—her hair had been white since childhood.
‘If we join hands with the Zegals and unravel her, we may uncover the secrets of the Ice Palace.’
To him, she was never a person—merely a rat to be dissected someday. Yet that girl, who had never been taught a single martial art, was suddenly using techniques of the Ice Palace.
“Taking in that bloodline was the greatest mistake of my life!”
He swung his sword violently.
“I’ll end your worthless breath right here!”
Shatter—Crash!
Massive icicles shattered with a single sweep. Watching the scene, Hyunwon turned toward the outside and shouted:
“What are you all doing?!”
But despite Huicheon having issued orders earlier, no one appeared. The Namgung estate was vast, and the number of warriors guarding it was just as large. So why was there no sign of anyone?
Panicked, Hyunwon avoided the icicles and rushed out of the room.
“H-huh…!”
And then he saw it—a corridor drenched as if a giant serpent had slithered through soaked in blood. Around it lay the butchered remains of the warriors who had been standing guard.
“H-how… how could this…”
He muttered in a trembling voice. Even if Sayeol had secretly gained power, he himself had confirmed that only a few months ago she had been nothing more than a powerless girl.
‘Yet in just a few months she reached a level where she can silently kill trained warriors?’
It made no sense.
At that moment—like a slow, chilling breeze leaking from the torn paper door inside—the girl’s murmur flowed out once again.
“You refuse to answer, hm.”
For some reason, Hyunwon felt his heart plummet.
“Then you’re not needed.”
Crack!
In an instant, Hyunwon’s body was flung into the front courtyard. He barely stabilized himself midair before landing. Dumbfounded by the completely unexpected blow, he hastily looked back toward the clan head’s room.
“W-what… what is that…”
From within the room, a blinding white cold poured outward, and through it he saw a massive chunk of ice.
Hand trembling, Hyunwon drew his sword in denial.
Clang!
“This is the end…”
A girl with bright golden eyes stepped out.
“When did the Northern Sea Ice Palace disappear?”
Behind her, the figure of Namgung Huicheon—trapped and roaring in transparent ice—became visible. Hyunwon looked at the girl not as his daughter, but as a wicked demon.
The girl stared at Huicheon, frozen from head to toe. Then she reached out to the arm that protruded slightly from the ice and took hold of the Namgung clan’s most treasured sword, the Changung Sword.
In her small hand, it looked enormous. Yet with completely natural movements, she spun it once. Holding the blade in reverse, she brought the white tip to the ice—
Aiming precisely at Huicheon’s lower abdomen.
“I-it has already been a hundred years…!”
Hyunwon answered her question in a rush. Her arm, about to thrust, paused. Her gaze shifted to him.
“A hundred years, you say.”
“In… in a single night, the Ice Palace vanished. The reason was…”
“The Heavenly Demon.”
She whispered.
“So that was it.”
“H-how did you know…?!”
Hyunwon stammered. Only a select few knew the Ice Palace had been exterminated by the Heavenly Demon.
But there had been survivors—and one of them had been Sayeol’s mother.
If not for her mother’s words, even Namgung would never have known how the Ice Palace vanished overnight.
Despite her father’s shock, Sayeol replied calmly, then smiled faintly. Smiling was all she could do now.
She remembered her friend of ice—who had told her only to run, only to survive, to live foolishly with eyes and ears shut.
Seola, Seola… whether my waking in a body of Ice Palace blood was coincidence or fate, I do not know.
Crack—Crunch!
“No— don’t…!”
Namgung Huicheon—the sword he cherished—pierced through the ice and into his abdomen.
I will kill the one who destroyed you.
And I will add the price of your lives to my own debt.
Blue cold surged from Sayeol’s hand, slithering up the blade like a swift snake. The pale, merciless yin energy burrowed into the dantian of the grandfather who had drawn her blood.
A girl who once had no internal energy at all was forcibly injecting hers into the patriarch’s body. It was madness.
If she continued, she would suffer qi deviation and her dantian would shatter—she would never wield a sword again.
Gulp.
But Sayeol’s eyes locked onto him, glowing cold and blue. Hyunwon, trembling, could do nothing but stand there with his sword half-drawn. And while he stood frozen—
Crack—Pop!
Something burst.
There was no need to question what it was.
The ice melted, and the body of Namgung Huicheon—little more than a corpse—collapsed to the ground. In an impossibly short time, the heart of the Namgung clan had been overturned by that girl’s hands.
Hyunwon collapsed to his knees without realizing it.
“Y-you… who are you…”
His voice trembled like a quivering leaf.
“A ghost? A human? What in the world are you?!”
Sayeol’s smile stretched like a tearing wound as she answered:
“I am…”
Blue moonlight cast her face in a pale glow. Inside her torn smile, a pitch-black shadow pooled.
“…the ghost that Namgung summoned.”
That night, misfortune swept through Namgung. Patriarch Namgung Huicheon, who had taken a secret elixir and entered meditation, suffered qi deviation, slaughtered every guard, and even injured Jegal Hwangho—or so the fabricated story went.
Hyunwon, the new patriarch, was left with the problem of negotiating with the Jegal clan. After all, he had damaged the dantian of none other than their patriarch, Jegal Hwangho.
Though not as serious as Huicheon’s madness, damaging the dantian meant he might never use martial arts again.
The Jegal clan did have a young successor, but the Namgung clan’s wrongdoing was immense. Everyone pitied Hyunwon, who had to clean up the sins of the previous patriarch the moment he took his seat.
Hyunwon had personally handled the situation when Jegal Hwangho was stabbed by Sayeol’s hairpin, so none of that information had leaked to the outside.
‘Everyone who was present has been imprisoned.’
To fully bury Sayeol’s involvement, the right thing would probably be to kill them all.
Then—from behind a folding screen painted with a golden bird—came a chilling voice.
“Give them to me.”
“…What do you mean?”
“The ones whose lives you intend to take.”
At Sayeol’s voice, Hyunwon fell silent. The child—no, the thing—saw through everything inside him. Rather than impressed, he was terrified.
‘I am the ghost Namgung has summoned.’
That single line from the previous day would not leave his mind.
“What do you plan to use them for…?”
“As my hands and eyes.”
“What are you trying to make them do…?”
Before he could finish, her calm answer returned.
“To kill the Heavenly Demon.”
“…Surely you don’t mean—”
“He will return soon.”
“…!”
Hyunwon stiffened and pulled aside the folding screen.
Whoosh—
But in that brief instant, only a cold wind blew through. She was already gone.
Just like a ghost.
