Cheon Dong-ha, who discovered the suspicious power in Gwangrim, immediately wrote a message to send to Joo Soo-hyuk.

Although the communication status was poor, he couldn’t send it right away, but he set the device to automatically send the message when the /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ communication resumed.

The message included the process, location, and reflections of how Cheon Dong-ha discovered the power.

In addition to the message, Cheon Dong-ha sent a picture of the sky.

‘I checked the cloud distribution with satellite photos right before climbing Hallasan. The sudden gathering of dark clouds is artificial.’

The weather changes every moment, and sometimes it changes so rapidly that it is difficult to predict with human science and technology, so it is possible that the clouds occurred naturally.

However, Cheon Dong-ha was concerned about the dark clouds that suddenly covered part of Hallasan, especially over the heads of the students of Eun Gwang High School.

There was also an observation result that the clouds gathered only around Eun Gwang-gu during the Christmas Eve incident, and those clouds were sprinkling bad snow.

Among the students, except for himself, Dong-ha Cheon asked Chae-ah Heo, who had the best eye for detail.

“Chae-ah, is that cloud the same one I saw on Christmas?”

“No. It feels similar, but it’s different. The one that snowed back then wasn’t a dark cloud.”

Dong-ha Cheon and Jun-yeol Yeom were absent, but among the third-year students who had climbed the mountain, there were quite a few who had seen the cloud at Eun-gwang High School.

All the students with the Insight skill agreed with Chae-ah Heo.

Dong-ha Cheon’s doubts deepened.

‘If something were to attack us, I thought it would be similar to what happened on Christmas Eve. What’s different? Is it a more powerful cloud? No, if it was, Chae-ah would have noticed.’

Dong-ha Cheon ended up not being able to solve the secret of the dark cloud.

That’s understandable, because the only people who could recognize the dark cloud were those who lived in the same era as Unsa among the powerful families.

Unsa resisted while burning in the furnace, so Poongbaek and Woosa could not use the powers he had at his disposal even if they had used their strength.

However, Unsa's heart was greatly broken by the Christmas Eve incident.

When Poongbaek and Woosa cooperated in killing young students and nobles in the new world and learned that his close friend Jeokho was among the dead nobles, Unsa, who had reached his limit, gave up everything.

The students barely overcame their grief and grew, but the power of the dark side had grown even more.

"Let's go down."

Cheon Dong-ha suggested going down.

The being presumed to have killed Seong Guk-eon might be on this mountain, so they couldn't continue hiking under the unidentified dark clouds.

The students who were planning to quickly climb the mountain and eat lunch complained.

"We came all this way and now we're going down? We have to eat!"

“But Choi Pyeon-deuk’s kid is going to be a hoot. The kids were provoking him a lot earlier.”

“That’s right. When they were falling behind, they said they would let them go and if they didn’t go all the way, they would go wild and say they wouldn’t let it go.”

“They made a fuss about including Hallasan trekking when they were planning their schedule. They actually ended up leaving.”

“Can’t we eat and talk when we’re hungry?”

I checked the faces of the teachers who were looking at me in a difficult way, leaving behind the grumbling of the students.

There were currently about 150 students in charge, but there were only two teachers.

Both of them were teachers who were in charge of the third-grade class, and although they didn’t have much talent or experience, they were people who were suffering under Choi Pyeon-deuk’s gang because they had a sense of duty toward their profession.

It was even more creepy to think that Choi Pyeon-deuk’s gang was not there at all in this strange situation.

On top of that, communication was cut off at the moment, so they couldn’t expect any outside help.

“Those teachers are obsessed with sending us up the mountain, but there’s not a single person here. We have to get down.”

At Cheon Dong-ha’s words, the students who were quick to notice them one by one distorted their faces with anger and shock.

Choi Pyeon-deuk’s gang wasn’t on campus even on Christmas.

Just like now.

“This mountain, we can just get down. Although Hallasan is high, it’s less steep than when Cheoniksan was destroyed.”

“When we get down, we’ll definitely find out what they’re up to and kill them. Is there anyone who wants to join the Choi Pyeon-deuk hunting party?”

“Me.”

“Me too!”

The students quickly came to their senses thanks to the fraud stemming from their anger.

Cheon Dong-ha and Kwak Kyung-gu immediately started preparing to get down.

There were no other ordinary tourists around.

When the Eun-gwang students set their trekking schedule, they worked with the Hallasan National Park office to set the entry time so that they would not overlap with other group tourists.

When players were doing outdoor activities in groups, it was polite to stagger the times so that the general public would not get involved in accidents.

Thanks to this, they were able to avoid situations such as getting tangled up with other tourists.

Still, they could not feel safe.

‘We are players and we cannot let our guard down just because we trekked on a gentle course.’

According to statistics released by the Jeju Fire and Safety Headquarters, more than 300 mountain accidents occurred on Hallasan every year.

Of these, mountain accidents due to loss accounted for the highest proportion at 48.5%, followed by slips and falls at 12.3%.

Even those who are used to hiking find it difficult to tell if they are going down or up when the fog thickens, but most of the students here were new to Mt. Halla and couldn’t use their devices at the moment.

It was when Cheon Dong-ha was arranging students with Insight skills into each group.

Kuung!

A strong force swept across the ground the students were walking on and dug into the center of Mt. Halla.

Students with good reflexes quickly lowered their bodies and wrapped their powers around themselves, while those who had more time grabbed other students who were frozen in surprise and bent down together.

Cheon Dong-ha stared at the ground with his powers closed and grasped the situation.

‘It’s power. Someone touched the vein!’

The moment he made that judgment, the sense of discomfort and ominousness he had felt before and after the school trip, and everything he had discovered during the hike flashed through Cheon Dong-ha’s mind.

Gwak Kyung-gu was disgusted by the heat rising from the ground throughout the trip.

Perhaps this was a fuse hidden under the unstable ground.

In addition to the strange behavior of Choi Pyeon-deuk and his gang, the strange supernatural powers discovered on Mt. Halla and the dark clouds, it seemed like the beginning of a huge conspiracy and incident.

Kukukukukuku!

A huge explosion occurred far away, enough to shake the ground and create cracks.

A volcanic cloud rose from the vent that could be seen even through the thick fog, signaling the explosion.

The huge force that had just struck the ground was the spark that ignited the fuse.

There had been a volcanic eruption on Mt. Halla before, but that was an explosion caused by lava coming into contact with cold water such as seawater and groundwater.

Furthermore, it wasn’t a violent explosion that could have caused such a huge volcanic cloud.

“Did the volcano erupt just now?”

“What passed through the ground before... Didn’t it explode just now because of the earth’s energy?”

Cheon Dong-ha had the same thought.

If something stimulated the earth’s energy and caused a volcanic eruption, the damage would be incomparable to the results of volcanic activity on Jeju Island so far.

In addition, the volcano’s veins continued to surge.

As if there were intermittent large and small earthquakes, some force continued to stimulate the volcano along the veins.

‘It won’t just end with the slow lava covering the ground of Jeju Island. Not only the volcanic gas, but also the volcanic bombs and volcanic ash will cover the houses!’

Cheon Dong-ha’s mind was moving in a complicated manner.

There are about 700,000 Jeju residents.

According to the tourist arrival status announced by the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province Tourism Association, the number of visitors per day is about 50,000.

In a situation where the device was down, it was impossible to know how many of them would be safe.

‘Even if all 150 students are on the rescue mission, it’s difficult. Even if we help evacuate more than a thousand people, we won’t be able to save even half of them.’

Cheon Dong-ha continued to calculate in his head.

Even after analyzing all the power available on Jeju Island, including the players deployed to the hotel and training center owned by TC, and the people in the Jeju Island branch of the Players Association, there was no answer.

In this situation, it was fortunate that no other world occurred, but the biggest problem was that the devices could not communicate, so even the few people could not communicate.

A group that was not prepared for this could easily collapse simply by cutting off communication.

During the First Christmas incident, Do Won-woo’s one-sided communication with the students by using the school broadcast was almost a miracle for a teenager.

“Dong-ha, it’s impossible for us to evacuate everyone right now.”

Yeom Jun-yeol, who had been resting his hands on the ground, said as he got up.

“I just convinced my older brother and sister in charge of security. It would be safer to eliminate the cause of the volcano.”

“Remove the cause of the volcano?”

“Yes, there is a fire energy flowing through the vein. I will use the red dragon to suppress this energy.”

Cheon Dong-ha felt uncomfortable while finding Yeom Jun-yeol’s words persuasive.

Although the Red Lion team members were weak to Yeom Jun-yeol, they rarely compromised on safety.

If Yeom Jun-yeol tried his best to persuade them, they would give in, but it didn’t seem like they would give in so quickly.

‘Did they quickly agree because it was an emergency? No, maybe they quickly agreed because they judged the odds of victory were high.’

Cheon Dong-ha’s judgment was reasonable, but there was a problem.

Cheon Dong-ha could not have imagined that the Dragon Palace had already fallen into the hands of the mastermind.

The Red Lion team members had a talisman that the shaman had given them in hopes of their safety.

It was true that the talisman contained the power of protection and actually functioned, but since its source was the power of the Imugi, the longer he carried it on his body, the more his thoughts became clouded.

The dragon tribe, including Yeom Jun-yeol, also had it, but they were safe thanks to the protection of the Dragon King.

However, the Red Lion team members did not have the blood of a dragon, so they could not fully receive the protection, and because of the legend of the dragon killing, the dragon tribe was not in charge of Yeom Jun-yeol's security today.

Kwarrrr!

At that moment, lightning struck from the dark clouds.

Cheon Dong-ha's face clouded over as the dark clouds spread out locally showed an ominous appearance.

It was raining.

So, it is impossible to calm the volcanic bombs that fly like bombs, nor can it cool the magma.

Instead, the volcanic ash is likely to harden with rain and collapse into a landslide, resulting in acid rain.

“Can you use your strength when it’s raining?”

“It’s okay. The energy of fire that disrupts the veins is felt far away from the dark clouds.”

Yeom Jun-yeol said, pointing in a direction where there were no dark clouds.

The place Yeom Jun-yeol pointed to was northwest of the peak of Hallasan, where there are ninety-nine valleys.

The person in charge of this place was student body president Kwak Kyung-gu, but he was in a state of deliberation because he was popular and honest but lacked flexibility.

Kwak Kyung-gu seemed to follow the opinions of Yeom Jun-yeol and Cheon Dong-ha, so the decision-making authority was now in Cheon Dong-ha’s hands.

“Okay. Instead, I’ll go with you. My eyes will be helpful.”

As a result, the students were largely divided into two groups.

Yeom Jun-yeol and Cheon Dong-ha trying to stop the volcanic eruption, and Kwak Kyung-gu helping the residents and tourists evacuate.

After descending, they quickly decided how to deploy the students who had gathered on Kwak Kyung-gu's side.

"Kyung-gu, please take care of the back. Nana Jun-yeol will be anxious if they act separately. Use Chae-ah's insight skill well and move carefully. I will also give you a list of people with useful skills, so think about the distribution of the special forces and change the responsibilities while moving forward."

"Be careful."

"You too."

Everyone followed Cheon Dong-ha and Kwak Kyung-gu's instructions, but there was one person who did not follow them.

It was Ma Jin-seung.

Ma Jin-seung took advantage of the confusion and followed Cheon Dong-ha and Yeom Jun-yeol.

Ma Jin-seung was nowhere to be seen in Cheon Dong-ha and Yeom Jun-yeol's eyes as they ran forward without looking back.