349.
Orders came down immediately.
"Pull the advance scouts back."
"Withdraw the probing lines five li."
"No reckless advances."
The reconnaissance units that had pushed forward without hesitation only a day earlier bent back overnight.
When the advance stopped, the command staff began to fear an enemy they could not see.
The balance of the war shifted.
Zhu Yuanzhang examined the bodies one by one himself.
His face was rigid.
"Who… who did this?"
"Who could have done such a thing?"
A campaign martial officer bowed his head.
He was a military man from Shaanxi, famed for his skill—someone Zhu Yuanzhang had personally recruited.
Even among the martial world, he was considered first-rate.
"It was done by a single person, cut down in an instant.
There is no hesitation in the movement.
This is someone with a cultivated inner method."
Zhu Yuanzhang lowered his voice.
"…Not Zhang Shicheng. And not Han forces either."
He paused, then continued quietly.
"Then that man—was he from Goryeo?"
As the words fell, the commanders' expressions hardened at once.
All of them thought of the same person.
A Goryeo commander.
A martial man.
Someone who won battles in ways that could not be countered on the battlefield.
The very man who had cut down Zhu Yuanzhang's key generals.
Zhu Yuanzhang rose slowly.
"That master must be eliminated first.
He will decide the outcome of this war."
On the opposite bank of the river,
there was a quiet hand, and a quiet candle.
Park Seongjin sat before the flame.
There were parts of the day's fighting he could not recall clearly.
His body had moved first.
The blade had flowed with momentum.
Everything had been decided before thought could move.
He murmured softly.
"I didn't know I could go this far."
Yet inside him, there was calm.
A blade that moved like water.
Momentum that did not waver.
It was the day Song Isul's inner method first blossomed on the battlefield.
And from the moment it bloomed,
that flower began to change the enemy's tactics.
The boundary of the battlefield widened.
The next day, the entire eastern plain of Taiping became Park Seongjin's stage.
Rumors of the unidentified butcher from the night before shook Zhu Yuanzhang's camp.
As a result, the advance scouts spread out over a wider area.
Their reconnaissance net expanded.
But for Park Seongjin, it was the opposite.
The wider the net, the looser its knots.
A net cast too wide catches nothing at once.
The no-man's-land carved out by a single man blinded the enemy's eyes and ears.
That day, Park Seongjin did not mount a horse.
Using only lightness skill, he flowed through grass, ridges, and stone piles like water.
Where the wind flowed, he was there.
Where the wind stopped, he vanished.
Three scouts moved within a reed bed.
The instant a puff of dust rose beneath their feet, Park Seongjin was already behind them.
The blade was not seen.
With a sharp tak, all three dropped to their knees at once.
No one saw how they fell.
Only the stillness at the moment their breath was cut lingered in the wind.
Two more scouts hiding beneath a ridge barely sensed something wrong.
"Here—"
Before they could cry out, Park Seongjin's two fingers brushed shoulder and neck.
Thuk. Thuk.
They froze in place.
They could breathe.
Their eyes could move.
But they could not take a single step.
Park Seongjin spoke quietly.
"Move, and your blood will flow backward.
Stay still."
They could not move.
Goryeo soldiers arrived moments later and bound them for transport.
The interrogations that followed yielded intelligence on Zhu Yuanzhang's supply routes, formations, and night patrol paths.
Park Seongjin expanded the battlefield not with a killing blade,
but with a binding one.
A chill flowed across the plain.
Far away, the soil trembled faintly.
No one was visible.
Yet Park Seongjin thought to himself,
"…There."
He read an unseen intent.
It took shape like thin fog suspended in the air.
The breath of qi, invisible to others, was clear to him.
The flow of breath had changed.
The earth's energy had been cut, ever so slightly.
One of Zhu Yuanzhang's spies lay hidden beneath a large rock, bow drawn.
Park Seongjin reached him before the arrow could fly.
His hand flicked.
Not a blade.
The qi at his fingertips struck the edge of the rock.
A rebounding stone flew and hit the spy squarely on the forehead.
The man collapsed unconscious.
Park Seongjin rolled the phrase through his mind.
Motion within stillness; stillness containing motion.
On the battlefield, that realm unfolded not as technique,
but as tactics.
At dusk, Zhu Yuanzhang sent fifty advance troops.
This was no simple probe.
They were elites, tasked with hunting the unknown master.
The strongest men available.
As they entered the riverbank, the wind suddenly stopped.
Not a leaf stirred.
The unit commander felt it at once.
"…He's here."
But by then, Park Seongjin was already slipping among them.
He barely used his blade.
He pushed and pulled, tripped with his toes, broke balance with his shoulder.
He struck pressure points, dropping them without stopping their breath.
His aim was not to kill, but to immobilize.
What he did was less a fight than a seizure of momentum.
Elites fell without understanding why.
They did not even grasp the sensation of being defeated.
Only one feeling remained.
"We shouldn't have come here."
That night, an unprecedented order came from Zhu Yuanzhang's camp.
"Withdraw all advance scouts ten li."
"Cease all probing."
"No direct reconnaissance until countermeasures against the unidentified master are prepared."
It was an order to cut out the army's own eyes and ears.
As he issued it, Zhu Yuanzhang said in a low voice,
"…That man alone can hold back three thousand of ours."
The words sent a chill down the officers' spines.
At the same time, it meant that Park Seongjin's nameless deeds
had begun to change the course of the war.
That night, Park Seongjin remained calm.
Wiping a blade unstained by blood, he murmured softly,
"…This wasn't a fight.
I only followed the flowing path."
His eyes were still.
The breath of his inner method did not waver.
And beneath that stillness,
there was unmistakable fruition.
He had become a warrior of boundaries—
one who ruled the edges of the battlefield.
A silent headquarters.
A lamp that did not go out.
Ten, then twenty li withdrawn from the Taiping front,
Zhu Yuanzhang's main camp burned through the night.
Inside the command tent, generals and strategists were gathered,
their faces tight with strain.
Liu Bowen spoke first.
"Advance-scout losses to date: seventy-three.
Forty-eight recovered as bodies.
Twenty-five missing."