Chapter 268: Forest of Sword Sacrifice (3)
Taebaek Mountain Range.
The mountain range that runs along the spine of the Korean Peninsula.
Among them, Taebaek Mountain, located in Gangwon-do, has long been revered as a sacred mountain by the Korean people.
At the same time, this mountain was the site of a long-ago gate explosion, where a ‘Drake’ took up residence.
Although a subspecies of the dragon race, Drakes are wingless monsters resembling dinosaurs. They possess immense strength, but their numbers are few, and as long as their territory isn’t invaded, they generally don’t descend from Taebaek Mountain.
And crucially, unlike the valuable Fire Dragon (Hwa-ryong) mentioned by Utopia on broadcasts, Drakes didn’t provide useful materials. As a result, hunting Drakes by scouring Taebaek Mountain was considered a losing proposition.
There was an unspoken agreement that provoking them was not worth the trouble, and so Taebaek Mountain was tacitly recognized as the Drakes' territory, leading to a decade of coexistence between humans and Drakes.
For the past ten years, human footsteps had all but disappeared from this region. Deep within the uninhabited mountain, a large traditional Korean house stood mysteriously.
Surrounded by clouds, the spacious training ground exuded a mystical atmosphere, reminiscent of a place where an immortal might reside.
On the wooden porch, a woman lay languidly on her side, propping her head on her hand with a bored expression.
The woman, lightly holding a smoking pipe in her mouth, appeared to be in her early thirties at most. She had a mole at the corner of her lips, and her hair was elegantly pinned up, giving her a seductive look.
There was a time when the world praised her name.