Surviving as a Genius on Borrowed Time

Jeong Yeon-shin muttered under his breath as he watched the Seventh Apostle disappear into the distance. The echoes of her words still lingered in his ears.

She had called him Taesa again, that twisted endearment laced with obsession and sorrow.

"The karma of this cult is a blood debt," she had whispered. "And now, it's all mine. Because I am the cult leader."

Her voice had been oddly detached, carrying a sense of inevitable burden. Yet beneath that resignation, he could still feel the clinging possessiveness that made her so dangerous.

"I'm sorry for making you sad, my Taesa."

For a long moment, Jeong Yeon-shin remained frozen. The weight of her words pressed down on him, stirring emotions he thought he had long buried. A hollow emptiness clawed at him—something akin to the loneliness he felt whenever he recalled the Cheonggirin, Seonryong, or the Tang siblings.

There was no Ma Gwang-ik. No comrades from the Society of Sacred Swords.

He was alone.

"What are you thinking? You haven't made your move yet."@@novelbin@@

A small yet crystalline voice scattered his lingering thoughts.

Jeong Yeon-shin slowly lifted his gaze.

Even as he stood with the Divine Thunderblade gripped in his hand, filling his body with jin-gi, the presence before him felt impossibly distant—untouchable, no matter how quickly he might strike.

"Calculating my moves."

The petite figure of the Golden Dawn Sect’s Master tilted her head.

"Was that ever necessary for someone like you?"

"Before the unification of Jing-Qi-Shen, it always was. It used to give me headaches, like now."

"So you've mostly fought opponents above your level."

She nodded, as if it all made sense. There was no arrogance in her voice, only quiet understanding.

Behind them stretched the vast shadow of a mountain range, while ahead lay an empty village square, bathed in an eerie, suffocating stillness.

Jeong Yeon-shin gazed at the Greatest Martial Master of Sichuan in silence.

She was much shorter than him, but she did not seem small in the slightest. The sheer density of her presence made her loom larger than life.

There’s no opening.

He had fought the Tenfold Gate Lord, who had lost his cultivation at the hands of the Bloodflame Cult Leader. He had clashed with the Sunmaryeon Lord, whose martial techniques were inherently incompatible with his own.

But this was different.