Pung Hyeon squeezed through the crack in the rock and pulled himself out of the cave.
The gap that the massive tiger had never managed to force its way through.
A scrawny boy's body passed through without much trouble.
After that, he spent three full days flat on his back.
Every joint in his body ached.
And whenever he closed his eyes, those amber irises rising out of the dark were still vivid behind his lids.
But on the morning of the third day, Pung Hyeon got up without a word and put away two full bowls of rice.
The stomach of someone who'd just cheated death was always honest about what it needed.
"Have you recovered?"
"……Thanks to you."
"Good. Then it's time for the final training."
Cheonbija pointed to one corner of the courtyard.
"Sparrows."
"……Sparrows?"
Pung Hyeon's expression went flat with disbelief.
Rabbits.
Deer.
A tiger.
After surviving all that hell, the last challenge was a handful of birds that fit in your palm.
"Can't I just reach out and grab one?"
"Try it."
"But if you hurt one, you don't eat."
Pung Hyeon snorted.
Then he walked toward the flock of sparrows pecking at grain in the courtyard and casually reached out a hand.
And immediately understood.
This was the cruelest gate of all.
Sparrows didn't stay on the ground.
The moment he reached for one, they lifted off without effort—
into the air,
up to the eaves,
to the tips of the branches—
and were gone.
Rabbits, deer, even the tiger—they had all fled along the ground in the end.
And so the Grass-Skimming Step, which pushed off the earth, had been able to reach them.
But in the sky where the sparrows escaped to, there was no blade of grass to step on, no rock to push off from.
Nothing at all.
"……There's no ground."
Pung Hyeon stared blankly up at the sky.
"How am I supposed to use the Grass-Skimming Step?"
"Who said there's nothing?"
Cheonbija fanned himself lazily in the shade of a tree.
"There's wind, isn't there."
Pung Hyeon didn't understand what that meant for a long time.
He leaped and lunged toward sparrows dozens of times, face-planting in the dirt.
He tumbled off the eaves and landed hard on his backside dozens more.
The sparrows chirped and circled above his head as if they were taunting him.
Like they were laughing: *Who do you think you are, you little ground-crawler.*
Then one day, Pung Hyeon fixed his eyes on a sparrow perched at the tip of a high branch and launched himself upward with everything he had.
As always, at the peak of his jump, his body seemed to hang for just a beat—
then began to fall.
In that one suspended instant, for the first time, Pung Hyeon felt it.
The grain of the air brushing past the soles of his feet.
A warm current rising upward.
A push of wind coming in from the side.
Invisible to the eye, but undeniably there—a flow with texture and direction.
On instinct, Pung Hyeon let his falling feet settle gently onto that invisible current.
The fall slowed.
By just one beat.
It wasn't solid like pushing off the ground.
But his feet had unmistakably found something to stand on.
From that single step, his body rose another hand's width, and his fingertips just barely grazed the feathers of the sparrow as it took flight.
"……That's it."
Pung Hyeon's eyes snapped wide open.
From that day on, he learned to read the wind.
Where the currents rose.
Where they sank.
Where they spiraled.
The invisible terrain of the air, which had meant nothing to him before, began to reveal itself to his eyes as a map of paths.
The feet that had once skimmed across blades of grass now stepped on currents of air, slowing his descent at will, shifting his direction mid-fall.
And at last, the day came.
Pung Hyeon landed softly on the highest branch of the old pine standing at the center of the courtyard.
A full person's weight had settled there, and yet not a single pine needle on that slender branch so much as trembled.
As if he weren't there at all.
The sparrow perched at the tip of the branch only realized someone had landed beside it a moment too late.
In the instant it startled and tried to take flight, Pung Hyeon's hand closed around it.
Gently.
Not a single feather bent.
Warm.
Light.
"……Got you."
Pung Hyeon looked quietly at the small life fluttering in his palm, then opened his hand wide and let it go into the sky.
The sparrow gave one short chirp and rose into the blue.
Below the tree, Cheonbija stopped fanning himself.
"The pine needles at the tip of the branch did not move."
The old man's voice, just for today, carried no trace of a joke.
"The boy who once skimmed across grass blades."
"Now walks on the wind."
"The Cheonroe Sect's Grass-Skimming Step."
"Has finally taken root in your body."
Pung Hyeon sat at the top of the pine and looked quietly down at the sea of clouds spread across Mount Tai below him.
The morning sun was rising over that endless ocean of white.
The landscape that had looked like nothing but hell when he was first dragged up this mountain—
today, strangely,
was beautiful.
"Master."
"Speak."
"Now that I've got this down…… I can pretty much run away from anything without dying, right?"
Cheonbija smiled.
"Is that so."
"You learned the Grass-Skimming Step and think it's all over?"
"……Isn't it?"
"You idiot. You've only mastered one footwork technique—skimming the grass. You've barely crossed the threshold of the Cheonroe Divine Steps. Above that, there's still—"
Cheonbija's eyes drifted for just a moment to the boy's feet—to the place where blue lightning had once flared on that night in the tiger's den, and had not shown itself since.
"A road ahead of you."
"That stretches further than you can see."
Pung Hyeon stuck out his lower lip.
*There's no end to it, is there.*
But whether Cheonbija knew what he was thinking or not, the old man snapped his fan shut and said something unexpected.
"Which is why. The time has come to leave this mountain."
Pung Hyeon's eyes went genuinely wide.
"……W-we're going down?"
"That's right. We're going down."
"For real? To the village at the bottom, where there's hot food and actual people?"
"Yes, you little brat. And isn't this old master a person too?"
Cheonbija grinned, showing his yellowed teeth.
But at the edge of that grin, something mischievous flickered.
"There is, however. One condition."
"……A condition?"
*Of course there is…*
"You must make it down Mount Tai on your own two feet without being caught by this old master. Only then will you have truly graduated."
Pung Hyeon didn't yet understand the weight of those words.
He was faster than a rabbit, tireless as a deer, able to read the killing intent of a tiger, and now capable of plucking a sparrow clean out of the air.
Surely he could shake off one scrawny old geezer.
And so Pung Hyeon thought nothing of it.
Not knowing that tomorrow would be the single most brutally unfair day of his entire life.