His toes crossed the boundary marker.
One. Two. Three.
Pung Hyeon collapsed face-first into the dirt on the other side of the stone.
His lungs felt like they were about to burst.
His legs no longer felt like his own.
But he'd made it across.
He'd finally graduated from a life that felt like hell.
All those hellish days of training.
They were over at last.
"Ha… hah… I did it…
I actually… beat that old geezer…"
He lay there gasping into the dirt for a long moment, then a strange feeling crept over him and he turned his head.
Up on the ridge where the footsteps had gone silent.
His master, Cheonbija, was standing there.
He hadn't chased Pung Hyeon down.
He simply stood on the ridge, still and quiet, watching the back of his disciple descending the mountain.
And he was smiling.
Not the smug, knowing smirk he always wore.
This smile was distant in a way that was hard to explain—tinged with something lonely, yet unmistakably warm.
The moment Pung Hyeon saw it, a chill he couldn't name crawled up his spine.
*…Why didn't he catch me?*
Because Cheonbija had been right on his heels for almost the entire run.
Practically glued to his back.
Which meant he could have grabbed Pung Hyeon by the scruff of the neck at any point he chose.
So why.
Why, with only a few hundred steps left, had he pulled back those relentless footsteps?
*Was I actually faster than him at the end? Or…*
Or.
Had he been able to catch him all along—and simply let him go?
Maybe from start to finish, Pung Hyeon had never once been faster than his master.
Maybe his master had just chosen not to grab him, and instead quietly pushed his disciple down the mountain on purpose.
That question found no answer.
It lodged itself deep in Pung Hyeon's chest like a splinter.
When he looked back up the mountain again—
Cheonbija was already gone.
As if he'd never been there at all.
"…Master?"
No answer.
Instead.
Something rustled inside Pung Hyeon's robe.
A small bundle he had no memory of putting there.
Cheonbija must have slipped it in while Pung Hyeon was asleep.
*…What did he do now.*
He untied the bundle.
Inside were a few worn silver coins and a single faded sheet of paper.
As Pung Hyeon unfolded the paper, his expression slowly, steadily twisted into something deeply wrong.
It was a list.
Dozens of names and regions written in cramped, tiny characters.
And beside each one, a sum written in careful, deliberate strokes.
*Taiyuan, Guo Clan — three roots of spirit medicine.*
*Anhui, Namgung Family — one ancestral sword.*
*Sichuan, Tang Clan — one bundle of hidden weapon schematics…*
The list filled the entire front of the page and kept going on the back.
*What… is all this.*
Pung Hyeon swallowed hard.
And at the very bottom of the list, he found Cheonbija's crooked handwriting.
*Pung Hyeon. These are debts your master racked up during his time in the martial world.*
*I'm not asking you to pay them back.*
*But if any of these names ever come looking for you, run for your life.*
*That is the proud tradition of our Cheonroe Sect.*
*Stay alive.*
*If you get caught and killed, I'll have to go through the trouble of taking on another disciple…*
*I'm counting on you.*
Pung Hyeon's hands.
Started shaking.
Everything clicked into place.
That night he'd tapped the deer—
*"This master was once hunted to the brink of death as well."*
That strange, quiet voice.
Those eyes that sometimes drifted toward the mountains beyond, sinking into some faraway place.
All of it.
Every last bit of it had come from this single sheet of paper.
The old man had spent his years in the martial world stealing spirit medicines and ancestral swords and secret manuals, then dumped every last debt onto his disciple and gone into hiding at the top of a mountain to eat roasted sweet potatoes.
"You— you absolute OLD GEEZER!!!"
Pung Hyeon's anguished scream echoed across the foothills of Mount Tai.
Seven-plus years of hell, and his graduation gift was a list of creditors scattered across the martial world.
And not just any creditors—every single name on that list belonged to either a prestigious orthodox sect or a major unorthodox faction, the kind that made your knees go weak just hearing the name.
*The reason he taught me the Way of Running… was THIS? He wanted me to spend the rest of my life getting chased by these people?!*
But even that scream was quickly swallowed up by the hollow growling of his empty stomach.
Pung Hyeon slumped to the ground, drained.
No master.
No home.
No warm meal.
All he had in his hands were a few silver coins and a list of people he owed money to.
And.
The art of running away, drilled into every inch of his body over years of suffering.
He sat there for a long while.
Then, finally, he folded the list up and tucked it into his robe.
It didn't matter.
Feeling sorry for himself wouldn't fill his stomach, and no amount of resentment was going to make the old geezer take responsibility.
*…First things first.*
Pung Hyeon got to his feet and brushed himself off.
*First things first—I need to eat. Dying of hunger makes everything else pointless.*
And so.
At seventeen years old, Pung Hyeon stepped out into the martial world alone, carrying a few silver coins and a mountain of debt.
Not to fight.
Only to survive.
The story of the one fugitive whom the martial world would one day look up to as a legend of the Cheonroe Sect—
It began like this.
With a chaotic, stumbling search for a single bowl of warm rice.