Chapter 178
Baek Cheong had been staring blankly at the glyphs for a long while.
Only belatedly did she notice the gaze fixed on her.
At some point, Hyunheo Zhenren was facing this way.
His eyes were heavy with curiosity.
'Since when had he been watching?'
It seemed her blatant staring had been exposed.
Feeling awkward, she tried to quietly look away.
But she couldn't tear herself away.
The glyphs covering the zhenren's robe kept catching her eye.
The more closely she mulled them over, the more they differed from her first impression.
'But something about what's been inscribed seems odd...'
The glyphs packed across the robe were all uneven.
Some were so simple that she could recognize them at a glance.
But some took a long time of staring before she could barely make out their shapes.
Easy glyphs and difficult glyphs were mixed together without rhyme or reason.
There was no sense of context whatsoever in the arrangement.
'This was learned in the most slapdash way possible.'
There was no sign of any attempt to understand the grammar that makes glyphs interlock.
It looked like he had simply picked them up wherever he could and draped them over himself.
It was a skill gathered by guesswork, with no system at all.
And yet, it was clearly different from the formations used by ordinary formation masters.
The formation masters she had seen until now were all the same.
They did nothing more than memorize the formation diagrams passed down by their sect and copy them straight onto the formation array.
They never strayed even a little from the fixed framework.
But Hyunheo Zhenren seemed to have woven the glyphs into a formation with his own hands.
Even if it was only rough guesswork, it seemed capable of unleashing all sorts of simple formations depending on how it was used.
At the very least, he could be called a true formation master who forged formations on his own instead of relying on someone else's diagram.
As she kept looking, she felt strangely peculiar.
It was almost like facing a foreigner who had tattooed meaningless characters all over himself and called it style.
He had draped them across himself without knowing what they meant, simply because the glyphs looked impressive.
'So formations still work even like that, huh.'
Of course, Baek Cheong wasn't about to spare any thought for the zhenren's circumstances.
After all, her second older brother had already returned to the family after more than ten years.
She tore her eyes away from the glyphs and walked toward her second older brother.
Baek Sang was in the middle of catching up with their father and mother.
Since it was his first return in more than ten years, there were still many things they had yet to talk about.
At the approaching presence, Baek Sang quietly turned his head.
He soon recognized his youngest sibling and his eyes lit up with delight.
"Cheong-ah! You've gotten a lot bigger since I last saw you."
Baek Cheong flinched the instant she heard it.
It was right after Seo Jua had told her she hadn't grown.
Hearing him say she'd gotten bigger now felt like he was rubbing it in.
'Could even Second Brother be...?'
But if she thought about it carefully, there was no reason for that.
The last time Second Brother had seen her was back when she was tiny, ages ago.
At the time, she had only just been losing her baby fat.
'Well, compared to back then, I really have grown.'
Besides, Second Brother probably hadn't even heard much about the family.
He wasn't the sort of person who would harbor malice.
She quietly let her tension ease.
Unaware of her thoughts, Second Brother went on happily.
"I heard you'd advanced to Foundation Establishment, so I rushed back at once. I hurried so much I was afraid I'd be late for the celebration banquet."
That much sounded like something a kind older brother would say.
But then Second Brother suddenly composed his expression and carefully began.
"But, Cheong-ah."
"Yes, Brother."
"You'll be fourteen this year, won't you?"
Baek Sang looked genuinely worried.
"No matter how you look at it, wasn't it too rushed to raise your cultivation? I'm worried because your aptitude is mixed spirit roots."
He meant her Five Spirit Roots aptitude.
He really seemed worried that her foundation might be unstable.
The problem was that those words had been dropped right in the middle of the celebration banquet.
The fact that she had achieved Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment was already known to everyone present.
Just a moment ago, hadn't even the old patriarch of the Hosan Seo family praised it as innate talent?
Yet the very person who was supposed to be her own brother was worrying that she'd gone too far.
A silence, as if someone had suddenly splashed cold water over the crowd, fell over the hall.
Awkward coughs rose here and there.
Unable to bear it any longer, the third older brother quietly stepped in.
"Brother, Cheong didn't just reach Foundation Establishment."
"What do you mean?"
"She achieved Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment."
Baek Sang's face froze solid.
"H-Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment?"
"Yes. I was sure I wrote it clearly in the letter too."
Only then did Baek Sang scratch the back of his head with an "oh, right" expression.
Though embarrassed, he quickly brightened up again.
"I rushed over in such a hurry that I didn't even read the letter all the way through. Still, Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment... I'm proud of you."
Belated congratulations poured in one after another.
Baek Cheong stared blankly at her second older brother.
Only then did she finally get a clear picture of what kind of person Baek Sang was.
'Ah, pure evil.'
He had no malice at all.
He was simply the type who caused trouble just by breathing.
After all, before Baek Cheong had started standing out, the person known as the Yeonha Baek family's prodigy had been Baek Sang.
Gifted with extraordinary aptitude for formations, he had long been showered with the family's expectations.
With the family's full support, he'd grown up more pampered than a hothouse flower.
Having grown up knowing nothing of the world's hardships, his mind had to be a flower garden.
Trying to argue with someone like that would only hurt her own mouth.
Baek Cheong sighed inwardly and deliberately put on a generous expression.
"Formation work is such a finicky craft, after all. You were probably too busy delving into difficult techniques to keep up with outside news."
It was a way of shielding her second older brother, as if she understood everything.
But Baek Sang took the sugarcoated words completely at face value.
Instead, he brightened and nodded vigorously.
"That's right, you understand everything. If I'd known formations were this much of a people-killing craft, I would've become a talisman master instead."
Baek Cheong was left speechless.
Unluckily, right beside him stood her third older brother, who walked the path of talismans.
There was no bigger troublemaker than casually talking about someone else's craft as if it were easy.
'Look, he's at it again.'
But Baek Woo himself didn't even twitch, as if he were already used to it.
Like a liberated daoist, he merely gazed silently into the far distance.
It was clear he'd already been through this countless times and had long since gone numb to it.
"Now, now. There's no rush; we can catch up properly later."
Baek Mu-jin was the one who stepped in first.
He quickly cut in before his second son could make things worse.
Baek Mu-jin cleared his throat and hurriedly shifted the mood.
"We can't be doing this with honored guests waiting. Come now, let's all take our seats."
And just like that, Baek Cheong was swept into the very center of the banquet.
As the center of attention, she had to sit in the seat of honor and keep her expression and bearing in check.
The sting she had gotten from Seo Jua once and her second brother once still hadn't faded.
But the medicine that would soothe her sour mood was unexpectedly close at hand.
As the banquet grew lively, the guests each hurried to present precious gifts.
Every item that came in as a congratulatory gift was a rare treasure impossible to put a price on.
As she counted the gifts piling up one after another, the pain in her heart melted away like a lie.
'Right, this is what a celebration banquet is for.'
Only then did she feel it was worth sitting in the seat of honor, and her mood improved.
Even if she didn't have time to lurk on the forums.
***
The banquet went on for a full seven days and nights.
Including Pung Jin-hae, the inner sect elder of the Biun Sect, five Nascent Soul great cultivators graced the event.
The first great cultivators who appeared alone were enough to make jaws drop, but as the days went by, more and more heavyweights arrived.
Before long, it had surpassed even the celebration banquet held when Father broke through to Golden Core.
A banquet this grand just for a Foundation Establishment breakthrough left Baek Cheong dazed.
Still, the banquet ended in triumph without any major problems.
But the truly troublesome matter came after the banquet had broken up.
Even after it ended, the guests showed no sign of leaving.
People from the Hosan Seo family, Hyunheo Zhenren, and even the heads of other sects all seemed to have settled into the Yeonha Baek family as if they'd agreed beforehand.
Thanks to that, she couldn't even enjoy a single carefree forum session.
'No, if you're going to leave, then just leave already.'
She had been planning to hole up at home and enjoy plenty of forum lurking now that the banquet was finally over, but.
Before she knew it, a gathering for the younger generation had been organized and she was called out.
At that gathering, her second and third older brothers were there.
Seo Jua and the younger generation disciples of other factions were there too.
'Sigh, even a silver-spoon life is tiring.'
Baek Cheong swallowed a sigh inwardly and casually looked around.
Then she spotted a figure standing stiffly off to one side and blinked.
Among the fresh-faced junior disciples, Hyunheo Zhenren was standing there, plain as day.
'Why is Hyunheo Zhenren here...?'