Vol. 1 Chapter 1.7

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After Hwangbo Jeong-gun left, the heavy thud of the door closing was followed by the gradual fading of his footsteps.

Still sitting on her bed, Yeon finally exhaled the breath she had been holding.

“Phew. Well at least that went smoothly.”

No matter how confidently she had spun that dramatic narrative, she had actually been sweating bullets on the inside. If Hwangbo Jeong-gun had loved his daughter just a fraction less, if he had interrogated her with cold logic she would have been in deep trouble.

Now that she was past the immediate crisis, Yeon sat quietly to sort out her thoughts.

Changing the original plot was going to be an uphill battle. Even if Peng Dong-hu had been thoroughly humiliated, the Hebei Peng Clan was still a towering juggernaut. But an even greater threat loomed somewhere in the shadows, the Cult of Baehwa is quietly amassing its strength.

In the novel, the Cult Leader was depicted as a monster, a villain so overwhelmingly powerful that no one could match him. Right now, practically no one in the Central Plains even knew he existed. But the day he decided to finally make his grand move, it would be game over for everyone. He wasn’t just strong, he was a meticulous planner who struck only after laying flawless groundwork.

The continent, coddled by decades of peace, would be utterly defenseless, trampled underfoot by him and his fanatical zealots.

The real problem? Yeon had no idea how the Cult Leader died or if he even died at all. She had dropped Martial Supreme: The Peak of Martial Arts long before reaching the ending.

Please don’t tell me it was a bad ending.

A wave of intense regret washed over her. If I knew I’d get thrown into this mess, I would’ve endured the boring parts and finished the damn book. A heavy sigh, entirely different from her previous one, escaped her lips.

If there was one silver lining, it was that time was still on her side. In a massive, long-running epic like Martial Supreme: The Peak of Martial Arts, the Cult Leader didn’t formally show his face until well past the midway point. Since Hwangbo Yeon’s awakening happened right at the beginning of the story, she had a decent head start.

Until then, she had to sabotage the Cult’s operations by any means necessary. Her immediate goal was to delay the Leader’s entry into the Central Plains for as long as possible. And after that…

Whatever. The actual protagonist of this novel can deal with it. That’s what he’s there for.

Brushing the existential dread aside, Yeon shook her head.

She had zero intention of carrying the weight of the entire martial world on her shoulders. Worrying about it wasn’t going to solve anything anyway. In the end, there was only one real answer she needed to get strong. Fast.

Yeon had never once considered herself weak, but her clash with Peng Dong-hu had been an eye-opener.

To put it bluntly, that bastard wasn’t a real martial artist. The only reason he got demolished was because he couldn’t use internal energy and completely dropped his guard.

But what if she went up against a genuine, seasoned master?

Wounded pride aside, she knew she would likely lose. As of right now, she knew next to nothing about actual conceptual martial arts. You can’t exactly dodge a flying energy blast with slick boxing footwork.

Things like Qi and internal energy were concepts she only understood abstractly through Hwangbo Yeon’s memories, she hadn’t experienced them firsthand. She needed to physically clash, train, and condition herself. Since she was stuck in the martial world, she had to play by the martial world’s rules.

The thought of entering another grueling training loop in a different universe made her a bit weary, but…

What can you do? It’s a universal law, if you’re ignorant, you get beaten to a pulp.

Yeon slid off the bed and crossed her legs, adopting a lotus position. It was time to attempt the most fundamental training method of this world cultivating her internal energy.

The signature martial art of the Hwangbo Clan was the Divine Art of the Heavenly King. Although the Hwangbo Clan had never quite managed to seize hegemony over the martial world, this specific divine technique was prestigious enough to command immense respect anywhere on the continent.

Closing her eyes, Yeon focused entirely on Hwangbo Yeon’s ingrained memories to circulate her Qi. The dormant energy pool resting within her dantian slowly began to stir, reacting directly to her mental command.

The moment it awakened, Yeon was stunned by the sheer volume of it. Thanks to her absurdly doting father, the original Hwangbo Yeon had been systematically fed every priceless spiritual elixir imaginable since childhood. Combined with the fact that she had practiced her forms more diligently than anyone else, this massive reservoir of raw energy was the natural result.

Before long, Yeon slipped into a terrifying state of focus. When it came to physical training, she had always been dead serious. Furthermore, the sheer, mystical sensation of manipulating internal energy was more than enough to ignite her modern curiosity.

“Phew…”

After completing several full meridian circulations, an indescribable wave of mental and physical clarity washed over her. The concentration of energy pooling within her dantian felt significantly denser. It was the literal, real-time sensation of becoming stronger by the second. The sheer immediacy of it left Yeon completely floored.

“This… this is actually possible?”

In the modern world, training was like blindly drawing an invisible growth graph. Even if you hammered out a hundred push-ups every single day, you never received a direct, tangible sensation that your power level had ticked upward.

You just had to push your body to the limit with weight training and intervals, blindly trusting the process until you suddenly realized you had evolved somewhere down the line.

But this? This is instant satisfaction. It’s practically a video game.

A dangerous glint flashed in Yeon’s eyes as she discovered this brave new world. The undeniable soul of a hardcore martial artist was roaring to life inside her.

From that moment on, Yeon immersed herself in her cultivation with terrifying momentum. She remained completely motionless, locked in a trance, until the bright morning sun streaming through the windows melted into a deep, violet twilight.