Chapter 1
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 1
Chapter Title: Prologue
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A vagabond, in the traditional sense, refers to a martial artist who wanders the jianghu without belonging to any sect or family.
There was once an era of romanticism where such wandering the jianghu was all the rage, but these days, just hopping onto job sites like Alba Extreme brings up hordes of vagabonds desperately shoving their resumes everywhere, begging to be hired.
It's an age overflowing with unemployed layabouts who graduate from some decent martial arts university, laze around at home, and when relatives ask what they've been up to during holidays, brush it off by saying they do "vagabond work."
If you want to proudly declare yourself a vagabond in front of others, you at least needed to be affiliated with a reputable vagabond guild.
In that sense, I could call myself a fairly upstanding vagabond. I'd taken on a few commissions subcontracted from the Murim Alliance through a guild that any martial artist would have heard of, and I'd completed them successfully.
I even had business cards. Though they were soaked in blood and not fit to hand out to anyone.
"John... you dead...?"
I asked the fellow vagabond sprawled beside me in a voice thick with blood.
No answer came.
John's blue eyes, clouded and dim, held no spark of life.
Suddenly, our conversation from that morning came back to me.
'Boss! You think there's really a Demonic Cult hideout at this place we're heading to today?'
'John, not you too? Where do you pick up this nonsense?'
'Haha! Come on, just tell me on the sly! If it's real Demonic Cult stuff... like a manual or an elixir, it'd be worth a fortune. Nah, no need to sell it! If I learned that peerless Demonic Cult technique that turned Bohemia Company’s sergeant into the Terror Demon Emperor, I could become the world's greatest vagabond...'
'Give it a rest. You think the Murim Alliance would let you live if you learned demonic arts? Forgot how the Lionheart Family got wiped out?'
'Ugh... yeah, you're right. Speaking of Lionheart, that Blood Lion Demon Queen bitch comes to mind, and my legs go weak just thinking about her.'
Not exactly a cheerful chat.
I muttered with a furrowed brow.
"Damn it."
That short curse was the entirety of my eulogy for my dead teammate.
I wasn't particularly sad. Vagabonds—no, martial artists—live closer to death than anyone. John must have known he could die at any moment.
Just that a veteran who'd survived Level 1 Martial Public Enemy subjugation requests was now lying cold as a corpse... that was a bit off from my expectations.
With trembling hands, I pulled a cigarette from my pocket and put it in my mouth.
No martial artist without internal energy to gather with their breath—essentially no better than a corpse—would be crazy enough to smoke like this. This was an emergency measure: century-old Hwasuo leaves rolled into cigarette form.
My body's a wreck, my mind foggy from internal energy depletion, but burning this should let me muster a bit of qi.
The moment I lit it with Samadhi True Fire, the genuine qi within the century-old Hwasuo leaves coursed through my lung meridians, spreading throughout my body.
And I was stunned. The cigarette butt dropped from my gaping mouth.
'What the hell? Why am I still alive?'
My injuries were severe. Fatal, really. I should have been dead already.
Even the vampire communists who regrow limbs like lizards would be shocked.
'Over half my Eight Extraordinary Meridians and Twelve Principal Meridians are wrecked, my dantian on the verge of rupture... no, already ruptured and leaking qi?'
These were just the internal injuries messing with qi circulation. The external wounds tied to my flesh were even worse.
A thought I'd overlooked even while staring at John's corpse flashed through my mind.
'I'm... gonna die here.'
Only then did regret flood in.
I shouldn't have taken this commission.
I'd been suspicious of the huge payout for just finding one item in some rundown alley hideout, but I never imagined actual Demonic Cult remnants lying in ambush.
I'd barely managed to take them all out, but the team was wiped, and I was next.
My judgment had led the entire team—including me—straight to hell.
Before I could dwell on the emotions of facing death, the drug's effects faded, and an irresistible drowsiness washed over me.
At that moment, a silhouette flickered in my blurring vision.
Even on the brink of death, a seasoned vagabond like me hadn't heard footsteps or any presence. Coincidentally, I knew one person who moved with such ghostly footwork.
"Son... Ha-rin...?"
She was my classmate from the Korean Martial Arts Genius Academy, same cohort, though it'd been over a decade since graduation.
We weren't close back in school. In fact, it had been years since I'd last seen her face.
Unlike me, raised in an orphanage and stuck in a gritty 3D job like vagabonding, she was the heir to Korea's top sect, the Wind Moon Sect. We lived in different worlds.
"Why... are you here...?"
Son Ha-rin didn't answer. Instead, she extended a pale hand and rummaged through the pocket of the corpse whose head I'd severed.
Her face was calm, as befitting a martial artist. Or rather, as befitting Son Ha-rin. I'd never seen her show a flicker of emotion.
She approached me and held out a jet-black bead, the size of a marble. It had been in the corpse's pocket moments ago.
I voiced the shock I felt.
"What... is this...?"
"Return Bead. A sacred treasure of the Demonic Cult."
Her tone was calm to the point of coldness, but I was genuinely surprised.
A sacred treasure. John's pipe dream of Demonic Cult manuals or elixirs wasn't entirely delusional after all.
But what was I supposed to do with it? Sell it on HAO Corporation's black market, and I could be filthy rich—but not like I could spend a dime before dying.
As if reading my unspoken question, Son Ha-rin answered smoothly.
"The Demonic Cult's doctrine is to defy heaven. Any guess what a sacred treasure tied to their history can do?"
Defy heaven. Rebel against the skies. Reject fate...
Coincidentally, I was dying from fatal wounds. No tales of it saving anyone that I'd heard, and even an archangel couldn't revive me now.
My fate was to die here and cool into a stiff corpse. If this beaded power embodied the core tenet of Demonic Cult faith...
Could it mean even I might escape a certain death?
"Depends on how you define life and death."
Son Ha-rin said slowly, shaking her head.
So, does that mean I'm alive, or dead?
It was frustrating, but I had no other choice.
I didn't want to die here. Even a straw's chance at hope was desperate for me now.
"Just... one question."
I asked without even wiping the blood trickling from my mouth.
"Why... give this to me...?"
"A deal."
A dry response came.
"Something I regret, but can't fix myself."
Ridiculous.
How could a mere vagabond like me fix something even Son Ha-rin—with her top-tier background in Korean murim and strength that graced Time magazine years ago—couldn't handle?
Even if my wounds miraculously healed, it would be impossible.
And impossible commissions aren't taken to begin with. Even in this state, some stubborn professional pride lingered, the vagabond's code popping into my head unbidden.
But Son Ha-rin had no intention of hearing my refusal.
She pried open my mouth, which no longer had the strength to speak, and shoved the black bead in. A baby's fist-sized orb down my throat naturally choked me, but I didn't even have the energy to cough.
"I saved you, so you... give me......"
That garbled request was the last moment I remembered of my previous life.