*"Run if you want to live."*
"Master. You're joking."
Pung Hyeon stared at the bamboo basket in front of him and asked in a trembling voice.
Inside the basket, dozens of wild rabbits were rolling their black eyes around, staring back at him with an expression that said *what's this idiot's problem.*
"Joking? Does this master look like someone who jokes?"
Cheonbija gave his tattered robe another extravagant flourish.
Seen in isolation—the hem snapping in the cold dawn wind—he looked every bit the immortal sage about to ascend to the heavens. The rabbit basket dangling from his hand demolished every last shred of that image.
"Listen well, Pung Hyeon."
"From this day forward, what you eat depends entirely on those two legs of yours. Catch those rabbits bare-handed—not a single hair out of place—and bring them back to me."
"……And if I catch them?"
"We roast them, obviously."
"And if I don't?"
Cheonbija smiled with boundless warmth.
"Then you starve."
*That old geezer actually went and did it.*
While Pung Hyeon was internally coughing up blood, Cheonbija hoisted the basket and upended it all at once onto the wide stone platform at the center of the cliff.
The captive rabbits reveled in their sudden freedom and shot off in every direction.
And not just any direction.
They bounded across the narrow rocky ridgeline—a thousand-foot drop yawning beneath their feet—as if it were flat ground, and vanished.
"Go catch them."
"If you haven't caught a single one before the morning sun clears that peak over there, there's no lunch and no dinner today."
With that, Cheonbija had already spread something out on a warm, sun-soaked boulder and stretched out on top of it.
He was peeling a steaming roasted sweet potato he'd produced from somewhere.
"……Where did that come from?"
"None of your business."
Pung Hyeon swallowed the saliva pooling in his mouth.
"Why are you still standing there?"
Pung Hyeon gritted his teeth and lunged at the nearest rabbit—a plump one that hadn't bothered to run far—
The result was catastrophic.
The instant the rabbit darted sideways right in front of his nose, Pung Hyeon's hands closed around empty air and his body slammed into the rock.
His knees scraped. His palms tore.
He scrambled up and gave chase, and the rabbit ducked into a crevice half a beat faster.
That maddening gap—always just barely out of reach—was enough to drive a person insane.
"Hey, you crazy little—stand still!"
He ran for a full hour.
Rabbits caught: zero.
He'd scraped and torn himself in more places than he could count.
What came out of Pung Hyeon's mouth was no longer human speech—just ragged, animal panting.
"Master……"
"This isn't something a person can catch……"
"Maybe the problem isn't the rabbits. Maybe you're just not a person."
Cheonbija finished the last bite of his sweet potato, dusted off his hands with a few crisp claps, and stood up.
Then he ambled over to Pung Hyeon's side and pointed lazily at a rabbit bounding around in the distance.
"Watch."
The next instant.
Pung Hyeon's eyes went wide.
The old man who had been standing right beside him folded away like a crease in the wind and was simply gone.
And then, on the rocky ridgeline a dozen paces away—
Cheonbija reappeared, as if he'd always been there, near the spot where the fleeing rabbit had just been.
The old man's toes were resting on a single blade of grass jutting precariously from the edge of the ridge.
And that slender blade of grass didn't tremble. Not even a little. As if no weight had touched it at all.
Cheonbija's hand dropped.
In it hung a plump wild rabbit, perfectly calm.
"……How."
"Did I not tell you? Inner energy is not about locking breath inside your energy center. It is about commanding the wind that flows through the eight meridian channels of the entire body."
Cheonbija tossed the rabbit into Pung Hyeon's arms and spoke.
No rambling nonsense. No theatrics. A genuinely serious voice, for once.
"Right now, you are running with your legs. That is why you will always be slower than a rabbit. The footwork of the Cheonroe Sect is not run with the legs. Let the inner energy pooled in your energy center flow down through your thighs, into your calves, into the soles of your feet. The moment that force gathers at your toes—"
The old man's eyes flashed.
"In that instant when your toes touch a blade of grass, your body's weight becomes lighter than a feather, and you must surge upward as if the earth itself is pushing you off. You do not push off the ground. You make the ground push you. This is the origin of our sect. The core footwork of the Cheonroe Divine Steps—the Grass-Skimming Step."
Pung Hyeon stared blankly down at his own feet.
He'd heard *run faster* his whole life. He had never once heard *make the ground push you.*
"……I have absolutely no idea what that means."
"Then starve until you do."
And Cheonbija was genuinely gone.
Nothing left behind but an empty sweet potato wrapper.
The sun climbed to the middle of the sky.
Pung Hyeon was still at zero.
He'd been running on an empty stomach for so long that his gut was rolling with thunder, his head was spinning, and his legs were shaking.
He had no will left to *try to run well.*
He just wanted to live.
He didn't want to starve to death.
He wanted one warm bowl of rice so badly it hurt.
And it was exactly that desperation that drove every nerve in his body down to the tips of his feet.
The moment every stray thought burned away in the single-minded need to survive—
Pung Hyeon forgot, for the first time, that he was supposed to *run with his legs.*
Instead, the old man's words came back to him.
The breath pooled in the energy center.
Pung Hyeon reached, groping, into the deep hollow beneath his empty stomach—and felt it. A faint, thin thread of warmth turning slowly there.
Something he would have let slip past him on any other day.
A warmth so faint he'd never even known it was there.
He drew that single thread slowly downward.
Through his thighs.
Past his calves.
Into the soles of his feet.
His feet tingled.
Right in front of him.
A plump rabbit hopped away again, taunting him.
Pung Hyeon stopped thinking.
He simply set his toes, gently, on a short blade of grass in front of him.
And in that instant.
His body vanished.
No—
More precisely, his weight vanished.
The two legs that had felt like lead became impossibly light, and the blade of grass under his toes didn't snap—it flicked him upward.
As if the earth had pressed its palm against the soles of his feet and shoved.
A dozen paces collapsed in a single step, smooth as sliding.
The tip of a grass blade.
The edge of a boulder.
A fistful of dirt.
Everywhere Pung Hyeon's toes landed, the ground threw him forward.
And then.
Something warm filled his hand.
Squirming.
Alive.
A rabbit. Not a single hair out of place.
"……I caught it?"
Pung Hyeon stared at his own hand.
He couldn't explain in his head what that one step had just been.
But every cell in his body, every patch of skin on the soles of his feet, remembered the sensation with perfect clarity.
*Don't push off the ground.*
*Make the ground push you.*
"I caught it……! I caught one! HAHAHA! Hey, you smug little rabbit! You're my lunch now!"
Standing on the rocky ridgeline, holding the rabbit above his head and laughing like a madman—
Cheonbija had returned without a sound and stood behind him, arms folded.
The corner of the old man's mouth had curled up, just barely, but Pung Hyeon didn't see it.
"So you caught one."
"Yes!"
"Master, just now, that—that Grass-Skimming Step—!"
"Yes, yes."
Cheonbija nodded with quiet satisfaction.
Then he reached into his robe and produced the basket that had been empty a moment ago.
It was full of rabbits again.
But these were nothing like the ones before—lean, long-legged wild mountain rabbits that looked like they'd been built for speed.
One of them shot out the moment it was free, ran straight up the sheer rock face of the cliff, and disappeared over the top.
"That—that's not a rabbit, that's some kind of mountain goat……"
"They are Mount Tai rabbits."
"Did you think catching one meant you'd earned lunch? Five is the minimum before you stop starving. Oh, and the one you just caught—that's this master's lunch. And this is your reward for catching one."
Cheonbija flicked a half-eaten piece of sweet potato at Pung Hyeon's feet and vanished like the wind.
Pung Hyeon waited until he was reasonably sure the master was far enough away, then let out what he'd been holding in.
"You old GEEZER!!!"
His scream rang through every valley on Mount Tai.
But a starving boy had no time to waste on protests.
The new Mount Tai rabbits were already shrinking to specks along the distant ridgeline.
For survival alone.
To not die of hunger.
Pung Hyeon gathered every nerve back down to the tips of his feet.
His feet tingled.
The warmth in his energy center flowed down through his legs.
And the boy's body—
became a gust of wind, and slipped away across the cliff's edge.