Chapter 386: Trapping the Dragon

The monster leaped into the air, but it seemed as though the catgirl existed in an entirely different world. Its attack passed straight through her phantom image, and its body crashed heavily onto the ground.

This time, the monster never managed to get back up.

"She" seemed to have anticipated this outcome long ago. Her expression did not change in the slightest as she lazily rose to her feet.

The monster let out a deafening roar that shook the hearts of anyone who heard it, yet it did not affect this space in the slightest. It struggled desperately across the surface of the lake like a headless fly, completely at a loss.

After watching for so long, Joo Joowon gradually began to understand what was happening.

This was a technique known as "Trapping the Dragon."

In the context of fortune and destiny, Trapping the Dragon referred to locking away a person's fortune and severing its connection with their main body, preventing that fortune from being used any longer.

However, fortune was like the air a person breathed every day or the heart that kept them alive.

Although people rarely paid deliberate attention to these things under normal circumstances, once something went wrong with them, the person involved would be dangerously close to death.

After all, a person's fortune fluctuated whenever they did anything, even something as simple as walking or drinking water.

Once their fortune was gone, the Fate closely connected to it would soon begin to encounter problems as well. A single disturbance could affect the entire system, causing one problem after another.

It was important to understand that for a Fate to exert its influence, it needed fortune to provide assistance and guide the development of events toward the path predetermined by "destiny."

Without the support of fortune, a Fate became like a clever housewife who had no rice to cook with. Yet even under such circumstances, the Fate would not stop following its own course. Instead, rather than drawing upon fortune as it had before, it would begin extracting something else to accomplish its purpose.

What it extracted was not magical power, life force, or anything of that sort. It was something much deeper, the connection established between a living being and their Fate Star.

Once this connection had been overdrawn to a certain extent, the bond between the Fate Star and the living being would be severed completely.

Without their Natal Fate, a person would become like duckweed floating without roots, an existence that the world itself could no longer tolerate.

It was easy to imagine how low a person's chances of survival would be if the entire world turned against them.

However, Trapping the Dragon also required considerable strength. After all, the world was fair and would not deliberately favor either side. If the world detected any underhanded manipulation while someone was performing this technique, the first person to suffer the consequences would instead be the one attempting to Trap the Dragon.

Moreover, under normal circumstances, Trapping the Dragon could only be accomplished successfully when the difference in cultivation between the two parties was nearly an entire major realm.

Clearly, the catgirl before him had not yet reached that level of strength. Therefore, if the monster managed to break free, the only one who would suffer in the end would be the catgirl.

This was a contest of fortune in which the winner took everything. When that happened, the world would turn against the catgirl instead.

However, when one lacked sufficient strength, knowing the consequences in one's heart did not change anything.

Yet the catgirl had chosen a different approach. Rather than locking away the fortune itself, "she" had mixed sand into it, disrupting the smooth flow of its circulation.

It was like a blocked pipe. When the Fate Star attempted to act, it could still sense the presence of fortune, but the connection would behave as though it had a faulty contact. The fortune might respond half a beat too late, and what eventually arrived might not even be the original fortune. Instead, it could be the "sand" that had been mixed into it.

In a certain sense, this could also be considered achieving the purpose of Trapping the Dragon, because it would cause a deviation in the course of destiny as well.

Fate was not unchanging. A Fate Star was merely equivalent to an anchor, symbolizing the fate a person was most likely to experience. Once fate deviated from its original course, everything would shift along with it, bringing about changes that no one could predict.

Under normal circumstances, such changes would only make things worse, never better.

A person's Fate Stars consisted of more than just the main star. There were also auxiliary stars, neighboring stars, and others. All of them reflected the person themselves and came together to form a 'Fate Palace.'

Therefore, every star was actually connected to a person to some extent.

When a person's fate was unstable, it became extremely easy for certain dangerous stars to take advantage of the situation and slip in.

The starry sky was an extremely dangerous place. Even the Astral Palace, which had always focused its attention on this field, still had only a very limited understanding of it.

No matter how high those Transcendents who followed the Path of Fate climbed in their cultivation, they would always maintain a sense of reverence toward the starry sky. A person's fate was both a restraint and a form of protection.

Therefore, whenever a person's fate changed, that protective barrier would also become ineffective. It was like having one's soul exposed in full view of the public. Whether someone turned it into a tool such as a soul lantern or sent it away for a proper spiritual passing depended entirely on luck.

But if even one's fortune could no longer be used, what else could one observe?

The monster before him had not yet reached the point of being a manifestation of fortune. It was merely a consciousness.