The defeat of the three "Divine Generals" at the Three Gates sent a wave of icy terror through the Alliance headquarters in Wuhan. High Lord Jo Mu-Sang no longer paced; he sat in a silence so profound it felt like a physical weight. The "Reasonable Authority Figures" of the Great Families were beginning to look like frantic children.
"They did not just defeat our men," Mu-Sang whispered, his eyes fixed on a map of the Western territories. "They humiliated our laws. Gravity, illusion, the void... these are the domains of the Gods, not a minor clan from the mountains."
"Laws are merely equations, my Lord," a voice replied. It was cold, precise, and carried the sound of clicking abacus beads.
Jaegal Woon, the Grand Strategist and head of the Jaegal Family, stepped into the light. The Jaegal—often called the "Kennedys of the Murim"—were the masters of arrays, mechanical technology, and the hidden math of Ki. Woon held a fan made of black iron ribs, and his eyes, sharpened by decades of "Ethereal Enlightenment," saw the world not as flesh and blood, but as a grid of energy nodes.
"The Yun Clan utilizes a resonance with the atmospheric Ki," Woon continued, snapping his fan shut. "They bypass the Dantian by synchronization. It is clever, but it is still bound by the laws of the Central Plains. I have spent three days in the Great Library. I have found the anchor."
The Void-Anchor Array
The Alliance's counter-offensive did not involve a million men. It involved a single, massive construction at the mouth of the Heaven-Reach Valley.
Jaegal Woon had deployed three hundred "Engineers" from his family to construct the Heaven-Binding Soul-Draining Formation. It was an ancient array powered by high-grade Spirit Stones—rare crystals of condensed world energy that served as batteries for the most destructive Murim technologies.
As the sun reached its zenith, the array was activated. A hum began to vibrate through the earth, a sound like ten thousand bees trapped in a glass jar. A dome of shimmering, violet energy erupted, covering the valley in a "Ki-Vacuum." Inside this dome, the "Universal Origin Scripture" should have been useless. By anchoring the atmospheric Ki to the Spirit Stones, Jaegal Woon had effectively "locked" the air, making it impossible for anyone to draw energy from the environment.
"They are fish," Woon sneered, standing atop a command tower. "And I have just drained the pond."
The Unfathomable Path
Yun Baek-Ho appeared at the edge of the violet dome. He was alone. To the Alliance masters watching from the ridges, he looked small against the massive crystalline pillars of the array.
Inside the dome, Alliance warriors—men of the "Peak" and "1st Rate" realms—stood ready with cross-bows and heavy blades. They felt the array's power; their own Dantians felt sluggish, but the Yun boy should have been completely powerless, a commoner stripped of his supernatural resonance.
Baek-Ho stepped into the dome.
Jaegal Woon's eyes widened. According to his calculations, the moment Baek-Ho crossed the threshold, the atmospheric displacement should have crushed his lungs. Instead, the violet energy seemed to slide off his white linen robes like water off a swan's back.
"Impossible," Woon muttered, his fingers flying across the abacus at his belt. "The Ki-Vacuum is at 99% density. He has no internal storage... he should be dead!"
Baek-Ho didn't look up. He didn't even draw a breath. He began to move, and his movement was the Black Glacier Charge—a technique the Yun used to navigate the coldest, most stagnant reaches of the void.
He didn't run; he glided. Each step he took left a footprint of real, physical frost on the ground, despite the summer heat. The frost didn't just freeze the grass; it froze the violet energy of the array. Where Baek-Ho walked, the "math" of the formation began to fracture.
"My Ki does not originate from the atmosphere you have locked," Baek-Ho's voice echoed through the dome, cold and resonant. "And it does not originate from a Dantian you can seal. It originates from Non-Existence. Can you calculate the square root of nothing, Strategist?"
The Shattering of Logic
Baek-Ho reached the first Spirit Stone pillar. A "Peak" level protector of the Jaegal family lunged with a spear, but his movements were slowed by the very array meant to protect him.
Baek-Ho didn't strike the man. He struck the pillar with a Vibration-Shattering Palm.
The impact was not an explosion, but a sudden, absolute silence. The high-grade Spirit Stone—a gem that could power a city for a year—turned black. The "Heart-Chilling Frost" of the Black Glacier Charge surged into the stone's core, turning the condensed Ki into stagnant ice.
One by one, the pillars went dark. The hum of the bees became a scream of cracking glass.
Jaegal Woon fell to his knees on the command tower. His mind, built on the absolute certainty of logic and arrays, was being dismantled. He saw Baek-Ho standing in the center of the ruins, looking up at him with eyes that seemed to hold the cold light of a distant star.
"Your math is a cage for the earth," Baek-Ho said, his voice a whisper that felt like a blade against Woon's throat. "The Yun have already touched the Heavens."
The dome collapsed. The "Heaven-Binding" formation disintegrated into dust, and the Spirit Stones shattered into worthless pebbles. Jaegal Woon, the greatest mind of the Murim Alliance, was found an hour later staring at a blank scroll, his "Martial Spirit" shattered more thoroughly than his machines.
The Alliance had tried to use the past to chain the future. They had only succeeded in proving that their chains were made of glass.