WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Dionysus
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◈ Cultivating Underground ◈
Chapter 89
──────
Yi Hyeon became a disciple of Lotus Court once again.
After the initiation ceremony, he knelt before Elder Wang Seo-rin’s residence.
“Greetings, Master.”
From inside, Wang Seo-rin spoke in a solemn voice.
“Come in.”
He opened the door and entered to find her sitting primly at a table.
She tried to keep a solemn expression for quite some time, but the corners of her mouth kept rising.
“Come closer.”
Before Yi Hyeon could reach her, she could no longer keep a straight face.
“Pfft!”
“...”
...
The years continued to pass.
Familiar peaks changed hands, and the names of old acquaintances entered the records in the Scripture Repository. To newly admitted disciples, Wang Seo-rin being an elder was simply a fact of life.
Then one day, Master Hyedam reached the end of a Golden Core cultivator’s lifespan and passed away in seated meditation.
He had never crossed the threshold into Nascent Soul, but the old monk’s face was peaceful.
On the day of the cremation ceremony, Yi Hyeon stood among the Lotus Court disciples as Wang Seo-rin’s direct disciple.
Master Hyedam had been a good person.
A few decades later, Elder Hye-gak followed him.
...
After nearly two hundred years under his new identity, Yi Hyeon left Jewel Light Temple once more.
Wang Seo-rin’s first direct disciple was said to have died after spending his remaining years elsewhere.
A few years later, she took in another Foundation Establishment cultivator, with a different face and name.
Her second direct disciple was also Yi Hyeon.
...
Time continued to pass.
Wang Seo-rin devoted herself to Golden Core cultivation, and Yi Hyeon did not neglect his own cultivation either.
However, he still needed more time to bring every part of his body to Great Perfection of Foundation Establishment. He did not intend to stop after forming a golden core in his lower dantian alone, so he could not rush.
Yi Hyeon helped Wang Seo-rin work toward Nascent Soul. Through the Two Heavens Society, he sold small quantities of the Tier 3 Bone-Rotting Flowers, Purple Poison Orchids, and Yin Soul Grass grown in his underground spirit fields. With those spirit stones, he bought alchemical pills for Golden Core cultivation.
He could not sell much. Releasing too many Tier 3 spirit herbs at once would draw attention, so he could only sell a few plants every several decades.
He also occasionally refined and sold Tier 2 Bone-Tempering Powder, Poison-Warding Pills, Spirit-Calming Pills, Origin-Opening Pills, Profound-Passage Pills, and other medicines.
Whenever Yi Hyeon brought her pills such as Tier 3 True Essence Pills without even discussing it with her first, Wang Seo-rin felt guilty.
“These are expensive.”
“They don’t cost much.”
* * *
Nearly five hundred years had passed since their wedding.
Wang Seo-rin reached Great Perfection of Golden Core.
But she had little time left to live.
A Golden Core cultivator’s lifespan had an end, and without reaching Nascent Soul, there was no escaping it.
She entered seclusion one last time.
...
Yi Hyeon waited outside her cultivation chamber.
He had waited like this long ago, when she formed her golden core. She had succeeded then.
Yi Hyeon thought of Senior Sister Jin So-yeong. She, too, had dual spiritual roots, and she had become a Nascent Soul cultivator.
‘Seo-rin can do it too.’
...
The restrictions on the chamber trembled on the seventy-first night.
Yi Hyeon immediately stood.
A powerful surge of energy swelled inside the chamber. Golden Core magical power gathered in one place, sending out fierce waves as though trying to break through something.
Shattering the Core to Form a Nascent Soul (碎丹成嬰)!
It was the process of breaking the golden core and nurturing a nascent soul within it.
For a long time, the waves grew stronger, weakened, then grew stronger again.
Then, all at once.
Snap.
The waves cut off.
A short while later, the restrictions were released from within.
Yi Hyeon opened the door and rushed inside.
Wang Seo-rin sat cross-legged.
Blood ran from the corner of her mouth. He could sense deep cracks in the golden core within her dantian.
She opened her eyes, looked at Yi Hyeon, and gave a weak smile.
“...It didn’t work.”
...
Wang Seo-rin had stopped herself midway through forming her nascent soul.
Had she pushed on, her golden core would have shattered on the spot. At the last moment, she withdrew her magical power and barely held the cracked core together.
The price was that her remaining lifespan had fallen to little more than a year.
“Don’t be too sad. It’s a path most cultivators are never allowed to walk in the first place.”
Wang Seo-rin spoke as Yi Hyeon carried her to her residence and examined the damage to her golden core.
“It wasn’t easy getting this far, either. I did my best... but it didn’t work this time.”
“Don’t talk. Save your strength.”
“What for? I only have a year anyway.”
She took his hand.
“I’ve had a truly happy life.”
...
Wang Seo-rin said she wanted to spend her final days in the Sanghwa Kingdom.
“Our children are there.”
Their children had left them long ago, but their bloodline continued through the generations.
At the news that a distant ancestor was returning, the royal family of the Sanghwa Kingdom once again opened every gate of the palace.
This time, many of those bowing before them bore the surname Yi, not just Wang.
They were the descendants of Yi Hwa, Yi Dan, and Yi Muk.
Wang Seo-rin greeted every one of them. She asked their names, asked which ancestor they descended from and how many generations removed they were, and studied their faces for a long time.
“This child looks like Dan.”
“This child has Hwa’s eyes.”
“Muk’s family... still has such loud voices.”
...
Wang Seo-rin visited the burial ground where their children lay.
It was well maintained.
The inscriptions on the gravestones had been carved anew several times, and collapsed stone walls had been repaired. The descendant responsible for the ancestral rites carefully explained what had been repaired and when.
Wang Seo-rin thanked them.
After sending everyone away, she remained alone with Yi Hyeon.
She ran her hand over their eldest child’s gravestone.
Then she went to their second child’s grave, and finally stood before their youngest’s.
“This would be a good place.”
Yi Hyeon looked at her.
Wang Seo-rin pointed to an empty spot on one side of the burial ground.
“I want to be with the children.”
“...”
...
As winter deepened, Wang Seo-rin spent more and more time in bed.
Her face was still young.
The looks preserved by the Youth-Preserving Pill did not change easily. Yet even a little movement left her breathless, and holding a brush for too long drained the strength from her wrist.
Yi Hyeon placed a small table beside her bed.
During her final months, she painted every day.
Her vow remained unbroken.
...
One morning.
Wang Seo-rin called Yi Hyeon closer.
“Hold my hand.”
He sat beside the bed.
Wang Seo-rin’s hand felt light in his.
After keeping her eyes closed for a long while, she spoke quietly.
“I had a good life, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
She smiled.
“I’m glad I asked you to marry me.”
Yi Hyeon could not speak.
Wang Seo-rin gave his hand a small tug.
“Our children were lovely too.”
“Yes.”
“And I loved living with you.”
Yi Hyeon lowered his head.
She touched his cheek.
“I still wish we could have a little more time together, though.”
He held her hand against his face.
Wang Seo-rin caught her breath before continuing.
“There’s nothing we can do now... about my failing to form a nascent soul. If that path were so easy, why would there be so many old Golden Core cultivators in the world?”
“Seo-rin.”
“Yes?”
Yi Hyeon did not know what to say.
He could not promise to find another pill or look for another way. He had already spent so long doing those things.
Wang Seo-rin watched him quietly.
“Don’t stay alone for too long just because I’m gone. Meet someone new.”
Yi Hyeon’s grip tightened.
“Read novels, get some sunshine. Laugh when something’s funny.”
Yi Hyeon did not answer.
She pointed toward the painting board and brushes beside her bed.
“You keep those.”
“They’re yours.”
“Exactly. They’re mine, so I’m giving them to you.”
Her voice grew softer.
“Try painting when you’re bored.”
“...”
She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again.
“You look so lovely when you smile.”
Yi Hyeon tried to lift the corners of his mouth.
He could not quite manage it.
Wang Seo-rin stroked his cheek once more.
“I love you.”
She slowly closed her eyes.
* * *
She was buried in the Sanghwa royal family’s ancestral burial ground, in the place she had chosen beside their children.
Yi Hyeon could not openly wail in grief.
Throughout the funeral, he remained quiet, acting as nothing more than Wang Seo-rin’s disciple. He received the descendants’ greetings, welcomed the mourners, and watched as earth covered her coffin.
Even after the funeral, he did not leave the Sanghwa Kingdom for some time.
He built a hut on a mountainside overlooking her grave and lived there.
By day, he sat endlessly beside her grave.
At night, he drank.
A cultivator’s body did not easily become drunk on mortal liquor. Yi Hyeon tried drinking while deliberately suppressing his spiritual power, but even then, he could barely feel its effects.
...
Spring came.
The person tending the burial ground pulled out the weeds.
In summer, there was heavy rain. Yi Hyeon widened the drainage channel behind the grave a little.
In autumn, fallen leaves piled up. He cleared them away by hand.
Then one day, Yi Hyeon left the hut without a word.
* * *
Underground Hideout No. 3.
Yi Hyeon lay on the floor of a stone chamber in one corner of the cavern.
And he did not get up.
He did not go to the spirit fields. He did not open any popular novels.
He simply lay curled on his side like a child in the womb, staring at the dark wall until he fell asleep.
When his thirst grew severe, he drank water. When the hunger became too much to bear, he swallowed a Fasting Pill. Often, he forgot even that.
The painting board and brushes she had left him remained in his storage pouch, but he could not bring himself to take them out.
...
One year passed.
The final spirit stone in Spirit Field No. 3-9’s Spirit-Gathering Formation lost its light. The formation stopped, but Yi Hyeon did not know.
Two years passed.
Squeak! Squeak-squeak!
Fuzzbees flew into the stone chamber.
These were not their usual cheerful cries, but sharp, urgent sounds. They circled above Yi Hyeon’s head, then bit his clothes and tugged.
Yi Hyeon waved a hand as though annoyed.
Squeak-squeak-squeak-squeak!
The Fuzzbees did not give up. It was not just one or two. Every Fuzzbee in the hideout gathered, squeaking noisily all over his body.
At last, Yi Hyeon sat up.
When he went out to the spirit fields, he found the water tank nearly dry. The water supply pipes were empty, and the soil in the fields had begun to crack. The leaves of some weaker spirit herbs were starting to wilt.
Yi Hyeon stared at the sight for a long time.
Then he raised his hand.
Patter-patter-patter...
Rain from the Spirit Rain Spell poured into the tank.
Until the tank filled, Yi Hyeon stood with his hand raised, thinking of nothing.
Even after it was full, the rain continued for a long while.
The overflowing water flowed on without mercy, and the drains worked without a care.
The Fuzzbees hovered around Yi Hyeon as though worried about him.
Yi Hyeon returned to the stone chamber and lay down again.
After that, he barely managed to get up whenever the Fuzzbees swarmed around him. Once he had filled the tank or cleared a blocked water pipe, he went straight back and lay down.
...
Twenty years passed.
Yi Hyeon’s body had wasted away.
The Primordial Unity Body still held plenty of spiritual power, but his flesh did not lie. Barely sustained by the occasional Fasting Pill, his body had grown thin enough for his bones to show.
One day, he picked a lotus seed from the pond.
He peeled it and put it in his mouth.
It had no taste.
The next day, he picked a Stone-Honey Peach. It still tasted of nothing.
The day after that, two lotus seeds.
Little by little, Yi Hyeon began to eat.
Then he went aboveground and gathered nuts and fruit in the mountains. The mountains changed color with the seasons. Yi Hyeon looked at them without interest.
Some of his strength returned, but his will did not.
...
Forty years passed.
One day, Yi Hyeon visited a mortal county town for the first time in ages and stopped in front of a bookshop.
Popular novels were piled up there.
Every title was unfamiliar. Tastes had changed over the past forty years.
Without thinking, Yi Hyeon picked up a book and paid for it. Back in the hideout, he opened it.
It took him a month to finish. In the past, he would have read that much in a single shichen.
After that, Yi Hyeon occasionally went to the county town to buy popular novels. Most were not very good. Once in a great while, he found a decent one.
...
Sixty years passed.
The book Yi Hyeon bought that day was titled 《The Teahouse Beneath the Thousand-Year Pine》.
Its cover showed an old pine tree and a small teahouse beneath it.
The main character was an old independent cultivator who had lost the Dao.
In his youth, he had been a genius who dreamed of reaching Nascent Soul. But a failed breakthrough had destroyed even the cultivation he had built up over the years. By the time he left the cultivation world and returned to mortal society, his whole family had already passed away.
He opened a teahouse beneath an ancient pine beside a mountain path.
All kinds of guests came to the teahouse.
A young sword cultivator on the way to a secret realm stopped for tea. The guest promised to visit on the way back, but never returned.
An elderly mortal searching for a daughter stopped by. A few years later, the mortal returned, holding the daughter’s hand.
A demonic cultivator on the run took shelter there. The owner served this guest tea too.
But fewer and fewer guests returned.
Yi Hyeon read the book slowly.
Each time a guest left, he closed the book and lay still for a long time before opening it again.
The last chapter of the final volume.
The teahouse owner had grown so old that death could come at any moment. There were no guests that day, either.
He washed the teacups, fetched water, and set it over the brazier.
While waiting for it to boil, he reflected.
He had thought he had spent his whole life waiting for those who had left.
The guests who never returned. The family who had gone ahead.
He had thought he was keeping the teahouse open for them.
But that was not true.
He had not only been waiting for those who would never come again.
He had also been boiling water for someone new who might arrive that day.
And he enjoyed the time he spent brewing and drinking tea with that water.
Bubble, bubble...
The old man added the tea leaves.
The book ended there.
Yi Hyeon lay with the open book resting on his chest.
...
Seventy years passed.
Yi Hyeon took the painting board and brushes out of his storage pouch.
Even after taking them out, he left them untouched for a month.
Then one day, he painted his first picture.
It was a Fuzzbee.
It was a mess. The wings were crooked, and the body looked more like a potato than a ball of fur. Had Wang Seo-rin seen it, she would have clutched her stomach with laughter.
Squeak?
The Fuzzbee that had served as his model looked at the picture and tilted its head.
“...Doesn’t it look like you?”
Squeak!
The Fuzzbee shot a piece of poop through the painting, punching a hole in it.
“You’re certainly honest.”
The next day, he painted a lotus seed. The day after that, a Stone-Honey Peach. Then one of Bonefuzz’s bones.
Every day, one thing he had never painted before.
At first, there was plenty to paint. Everything in the hideout was a new subject.
After about a month, he felt he had painted most of the things that were easy to spot and simple to draw. Yi Hyeon began searching every corner of the hideout. The grain of a rock wall, a drop of water clinging to the tank, a single hair shed by a Fuzzbee.
Then he opened the stone door to Spirit Field No. 3-9.
And stopped.
The Heaven-Origin Divine Tree stood there.
A sapling that had been less than two chi tall when he first planted it. A tree that had flourished during the centuries he lived with Wang Seo-rin, already tall enough to reach the cavern ceiling by the time she left.
That tree had stood alone for seventy years.
The Spirit-Gathering Formation had stopped long ago. While Yi Hyeon neglected it, the spiritual qi must have been nowhere near enough.
Yet the tree had not died.
Its leaves had thickened, and its branches spread sideways along the rock ceiling. Its roots had grown thick, gripping the soil of the spirit field firmly.
Slowly, ever so slowly, it was still growing.
Yi Hyeon stood before the tree for a long time.
Then he took spirit stones from his storage pouch and fitted them into the Spirit-Gathering Formation.
As the formation disk lit up again, the stalled flow of spiritual qi slowly resumed toward the tree.
That day, he painted the Heaven-Origin Divine Tree.
...
Eighty years passed.
Yi Hyeon visited one of the Two Heavens Society’s contact posts for the first time in many years.
The members at the post were shocked to see someone wearing the Badger mask. Some had thought Badger was dead.
“Society Leader, where have you been all this time...”
“Taking a little rest.”
...
Ninety years passed.
More than seven thousand sheets of paper had piled up beneath the painting board.
Painting one picture every day, just as she had, he came to realize something.
There were still so many things in the world he had never painted.
...
It was the hundredth year since Yi Hyeon had begun living like a broken man in his underground hideout.
That morning, he poured water into a pot and lit a fire.
Bubble, bubble...
Yi Hyeon crouched in front of the pot.
Even watching the bubbles rise had its own small pleasures.
Yi Hyeon took a handful of noodles from his storage pouch. He had bought them in the county town a couple of days earlier. They were ordinary wheat noodles from the mortal world.
He put the noodles into the boiling water.
...
There was nothing special about their flavor.
A little salt, a little spice, a few dried wild greens.
Even so, they tasted good.
That alone made it a fairly nice day.
After eating the noodles, he felt strangely full and sleepy, despite being a Foundation Establishment cultivator.
Yi Hyeon lay down on his left side.
And, like an ordinary mortal, he soon fell asleep.
...
He seemed to have had a warm dream of something he missed.
Perhaps someone had been laughing beside him.
Yi Hyeon opened his eyes.
He slowly rose and stretched.
Then he tried smiling.
Somehow, he could smile naturally again.
And so Yi Hyeon laid down his grief and found his strength again!
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