The martial world was vast.
Pung Hyeon was broke.
Three days since he'd come down the mountain.
The few silver coins Cheonbija had stuffed into his pack had vanished without a trace on the very first night, at a roadside inn.
Seven-plus years of surviving on rabbit meat and kudzu root had left his stomach completely unequipped to handle actual human food. It had simply lost all self-control.
And so, on the fourth day, Pung Hyeon found himself penniless again, starving in the shade of a tree beside the main road.
That was when a snippet of conversation drifted out from a nearby inn and hooked itself into his perked-up ears.
"…The Guo family of Taiyuan, I'm telling you. Word is they've just stocked up on a whole haul of rare medicines. Thousand-year snow ginseng, he-shou-wu—the place is supposedly packed with treasures."
"The Guo family? They're the top orthodox house in Shanxi. Security's airtight. You'd be dreaming to think about stealing from them."
Rare medicines.
Treasures.
Pung Hyeon's eyes lit up—then narrowed at the name *Guo family of Taiyuan*.
His hand drifted into his robe and stopped on a single faded sheet of paper.
The debt list his master had dumped on him.
Right there at the top, written in neat, deliberate strokes:
*Guo Family of Taiyuan — three roots of rare medicine, owed.*
The corner of Pung Hyeon's mouth curled upward.
*So Master owes the Guo family three roots of rare medicine. That means if I take a few extra roots from their place, I'm just… settling the account in advance. That's not stealing. That's debt collection.*
Obviously, it was complete and utter nonsense.
But to a seventeen-year-old who hadn't eaten in three days, a halfway-decent excuse was more nourishing than a meal.
The question was how.
*Scale the wall? Iron spikes along the top, dozens of armed guards with torches. Trying to punch through the security of a top orthodox house head-on is… suicide.*
Pung Hyeon shook his head.
The one thing a person who's good at running away knows better than anyone else is this: you can't run from a path you never should've taken.
So there was only one answer.
Don't climb the wall. Walk in through the front door.
As luck would have it, the Guo family was hiring day laborers for the patriarch's upcoming seventieth birthday banquet.
Three days later, Pung Hyeon was one of them.
He hauled water.
Split firewood.
Swept courtyards.
These were the exact same chores he'd been doing on Mount Tai for seven years, so he could've done them blindfolded.
Pung Hyeon had one particular talent.
*Not being noticed.*
It was an unremarkable-sounding gift, but it was extraordinarily useful for blending into someone else's household.
Within a few days, he moved through the Guo estate as naturally as if he'd always been there.
And during that time, he quietly singled out one person to befriend.
Deokbae.
A warm, heavyset middle-aged servant who delivered food and medicinal tonics to the patriarch's quarters—and who loved eating more than anything else in the world.
Pung Hyeon figured out how to win him over in about two seconds.
Food.
Every time he went to the market, he'd swipe a little something to snack on and press it into Deokbae's hands. In the evenings, he'd pour the man a cup of wine and listen.
"You've got it good, Uncle Deokbae. Getting to go in and out of the patriarch's quarters like that."
"Good? It's just heavy lifting. You think hauling tonics down to that basement is easy?"
"Basement?"
"Shh. Just between us. There's a hidden room under the patriarch's bedchamber. That's probably where all those precious medicines and gold are kept. I only carry things as far as the door—only the patriarch's inner circle goes inside."
Pung Hyeon nodded along and refilled the cup.
And inside his head, he quietly mapped out a route.
The treasure wasn't in a storehouse.
It was in a hidden room beneath the patriarch's bedchamber.
Deokbae carried things as far as the door.
The only time anyone went inside was the day before the banquet, when tonics and ritual offerings were all brought down at once.
*…The day before the banquet.*
The one day when every pair of eyes in the estate would be scattered across a hundred preparations.
That was where the window was.
The night before the banquet.
Deokbae passed out drunk early.
More precisely—Pung Hyeon had said "Let me help you tonight, Uncle," and poured him twice his usual amount of wine, with something extra mixed in.
"Ahhh… Pung Hyeon, you're… such a good kid…"
Pung Hyeon laid the slurring Deokbae down, then slung the tonic crate the man had been carrying over his own shoulder.
Dressed as a servant delivering medicine, Pung Hyeon walked straight into the patriarch's quarters.
Nobody stopped him.
No sign of a wall being scaled.
No broken locks.
Not even a footprint out of place.
He hadn't *broken in*.
He'd walked in through the door.
Down the narrow staircase beneath the bedchamber, just as Deokbae had described, a heavy iron door appeared.
And in front of it stood a single armed guard with a spear.
"…Tonics? Set them down there and wait. Nobody goes inside."
The guard said it flatly.
But as Pung Hyeon set down the crate, the guard's face began to twist into a strange expression.
He'd clearly been holding something back for a while now.
"…Hey. You. Stand here and watch the door for a minute. I'll be right back. Don't touch anything!"
The guard clutched his stomach and waddled off into the darkness.
*…Nature calls?*
Pung Hyeon let out a disbelieving laugh.
The legendary Guo family. Their secret vault. And the guard protecting it had just abandoned his post because of a stomachache.
*Is this luck, or fate?*
And right then, something caught Pung Hyeon's eye.
Tucked into a small gap between the stones beneath the torch bracket beside the iron door—something small.
A worn, grimy key.
It was obviously a spare, hidden there by someone who wanted to cover themselves in case the real key ever got lost—their idea of keeping it "safe."
Pung Hyeon smirked.
*One person's anxiety is another person's windfall.*
Click.
The key slid perfectly into the lock.
Pung Hyeon pushed open the iron door and slipped inside.
And then the sight of the room knocked the breath right out of him.
Rare medicines nestled in jade cases.
Mountains of gold coins.
Treasures wrapped in silk.
Wealth he'd never laid eyes on in his entire life packed every corner of that small room.
"…Oh. How much is all this worth."
Pung Hyeon swallowed hard.
He'd only planned to take a few roots of medicine.
But once he started putting three roots of thousand-year snow ginseng into a cloth bundle, the he-shou-wu caught his eye. And once he started on the he-shou-wu, the pile of gold coins started beckoning.
Seven years of being dragged up a mountain and starved by his master—that resentment detonated quietly through his fingertips.
By the time he came back to himself, the bundle was already heavy and full.
*This should cover food for a good long while.*
He slung the fat bundle over his shoulder, closed the iron door, and locked it again.
The spare key went back exactly where he'd found it, tucked neatly into the gap between the stones.
*The guard won't notice anything's off for a while after he gets back.*
Sure enough, the guard still hadn't returned.
Pung Hyeon set the empty tonic crate tidily in front of the door and climbed back up the stairs.
Up to this point, everything had been perfect.
Up the narrow staircase, across the bedchamber, and out through the quarters' front door—then he'd slip away in the chaos of banquet preparations and walk right out of the Guo estate.
*Okay. Just get out the door and—*
The moment he stepped over the threshold.
"…Who goes there."
A low, cold voice seized him by the ankle.
Pung Hyeon slowly raised his head.
Standing in the doorway of the quarters, in a silk sleeping robe, was a white-haired old man staring directly at him.
The patriarch of the Guo family.
Guo Tianxiong.
Of all the timing—the man had come back to his quarters to turn in for the night, the evening before his own seventieth birthday banquet.
And Pung Hyeon had walked straight into him.
Guo Tianxiong's gaze moved slowly over the heavy bundle on Pung Hyeon's back, then over his unfamiliar face.
"…That face doesn't belong to any of the Guo family's workers. Who are you."
Guo Tianxiong's voice was low as a tiger's growl.
But the pressure packed into those few words crushed the air in the room flat.
Every hair on Pung Hyeon's spine stood on end.
The same instinct that had woken up in the tiger's den screamed at him.
*…This old man. He's the real thing. A genuine master.*
Before the thought even finished, Guo Tianxiong's hand sliced through the air.
WHOOSH—
Pung Hyeon folded his body on pure reflex.
A razor-sharp palm blast tore through the space where his neck had just been and blew the doorframe behind him to splinters.
"Thief! There's a thief in the Guo estate!"
In an instant, the entire compound erupted.
Pung Hyeon clutched the bundle tight and hurled himself through the shattered opening.
He ran for his life.
He crossed the courtyard with a rabbit's first burst, skimmed across the rooftops with a sparrow's light tread.
But the opponent was bad news.
The patriarch of a top orthodox house was the first genuine master Pung Hyeon had encountered since the old geezer on the mountain.
Palm blasts from Guo Tianxiong hammered in from behind in rapid succession, and an elder named Guo Tieshan joined the chase, raining hidden projectiles like a storm.
Pung Hyeon spun like a top to deflect the projectiles and cleared two walls—
But the gap wasn't widening.
If anything, it was shrinking.
Guo Tianxiong's lightness art was every bit as fast as Pung Hyeon's still-unrefined technique.
*No good… I'll get caught at this rate. And if I get caught… I'm dead.*
Clearing another wall, his legs buckled.
The legs that had just burned harder than they ever had against any tiger in seven years were starting to give out, screaming at him.
Behind him, Guo Tianxiong's reaching hand stretched toward the back of his neck.
In that split second, something flashed through Pung Hyeon's cornered mind.
Inside the bundle.
Thousand-year snow ginseng.
*…Forget it. It's this or death!*
Pung Hyeon reached into the bundle, grabbed a root poking out from the cloth, and shoved it into his mouth.
He chewed and swallowed.
RUMBLE—
A massive fireball detonated in his gut.
The enormous inner energy compressed inside the thousand-year snow ginseng came flooding into Pung Hyeon's energy center all at once, without warning.
For an ordinary person, that torrent would have twisted their meridians and killed them on the spot.
But Pung Hyeon's body moved on its own.
The breathing pattern he'd repeated thousands of times chasing deer.
The method that had fused breath and footwork into one.
Instead of trying to contain the rampaging inner energy in his energy center, it flowed outward—
Through the eight meridian channels.
Straight down to his legs.
To the tips of his feet.
Energy that would have exploded if held in became a current the moment it was released.
CRACKLE—
From the soles of his feet, the pale blue lightning that had vanished since the day of the tiger's den—
This time, not a faint ember.
A vivid bolt of lightning burst free.
BOOM.
Pung Hyeon's body simply disappeared.
Guo Tianxiong's hand, lunging for the back of his neck, closed around empty air.
Guo Tianxiong's eyes went wide enough to split.
The thief in front of him had become a streak of blue lightning and cleared the Guo estate's towering outer wall in a single bound.
"You—you! Who are you! What's your connection to that man from before? What sect are you from? Answer me!"
Guo Tianxiong's roar split the night sky.
From somewhere far away, within the fading blue afterimage, Pung Hyeon glanced back for just a moment.
His face was hidden in the dark anyway, so giving his name couldn't hurt.
Besides—thief or not, Pung Hyeon had at least a shred of conscience in him.
"Cheonroe Sect! I'm Pung Hyeon of the Cheonroe Sect!"
He left those words behind and threw himself into the night sky.
From the soles of his feet, a trail like scattered blue starlight stretched out behind him—
One long, fading streak.
He ran until he'd completely shaken off the Guo family's pursuit, then dropped onto a hillside somewhere and sat down hard, catching his breath.
He was soaked in sweat, but the heavy bundle was still in his hands.
And more importantly—he was alive.
The warm energy of the thousand-year snow ginseng still circled slowly through his gut.
His energy center felt a full measure heavier than before.
*…So that's what a rare medicine does. And this time, I actually rode that lightning properly.*
Pung Hyeon looked down at his own feet and smiled without meaning to.
But the smile didn't last long.
Something more urgent than the warmth in his stomach made itself known.
*Grumble—*
"…Man, I'm hungry."
That was what came out of the mouth that had just chewed and swallowed a thousand-year-old medicinal root.
Pung Hyeon hauled himself to his feet, the fat bundle of gold coins slung over his shoulder.
*First things first—get down there and eat some hot pork dumplings.*
He had no idea that the martial world would soon be in an uproar, insisting that "the legendary Cheonroe Sect had delivered divine punishment upon the Guo family."
The fugitive's first frost ended exactly like that—
With a crash and a stumble,
and thoughts of pork dumplings.