The Strongest of the Modern Age
I was strong.
There was no room to ask whether I liked it or not. I was simply strong — from the moment I first became aware, from the instant I understood that a human being named me existed in the world.
Some grow strong through effort. Some are born with talent. And very rarely, there are those who seem born for the sole purpose of being strong. I was a special case even among those. Not merely born to be strong — I was already complete the moment I drew breath.
The Gye Family. A house that commanded space itself. A renowned bloodline that for generations had passed down the art of drawing lines between worlds and bending the distances within those lines to its will.
They said a child born with the Boundary had appeared in that family for the first time in centuries.
That child was me.
I have no memory of ever meeting my father. My mother left when I was three, they told me.
More precisely: she bore me, took the money, and left. She had been a sorcerer of some renown herself, they said, and possessed a single, exceedingly rare technique — the kind that appears once in a generation, if that. She was paid handsomely for it.
The story went that she had cashed in on the value of producing one infant and walked out of the family without a backward glance.
I learned the real story much later. In this world, two people cannot exist who share the same ability. And so… she took her own life, they said. Well. The finer details were never entirely clear to me either.
When I heard it, I felt nothing in particular. No grief. No longing. She had been a stranger whose face I had never known.
Still, the thought would surface from time to time. Two people with the same ability cannot exist. Then I had been born to be alone from the very beginning, hadn't I?
When I turned three, the elders of the family gathered.
In a hall full of the era's finest sorcerers, they seated a child who had barely learned to speak in the center of the room and told him to work his art. At that age, they said, even drawing a single line of the Boundary was usually a struggle.
I folded an entire room in half.
The distance between wall and wall vanished, then stretched again. One of the adults reached out to rest a hand on my shoulder — and froze, watching the space between his palm and my shoulder skew so that the two never met.
No one looked simply happy. Their faces were a tangle of shock, rapture, and a thin thread of fear.
I understand it now. That day, the balance broke. The mere fact of my sitting there shifted the family's standing and rewrote the board of the sorcerous world. All I had been doing was sucking my thumb.
That was the first lesson. The world was a place whose shape changed the moment I reached out my hand.
"Young Master, you truly are a gift from heaven itself."
Around the age of eight, an old sorcerer who had come to teach me said that on the first day.
He was a Human-rank sorcerer — among the finest the family could boast. He spent a full hour explaining the principles of the Boundary. I watched once and reproduced them exactly. The realm he had spent a lifetime attaining, from a single demonstration.
The old sorcerer's face went white.
"Haha. You taught me well, sir."
I said it with a smile. So the old man wouldn't feel embarrassed. So the air between us wouldn't turn awkward.
That was manners.
From that day on, the old sorcerer never again tried to teach me. Instead he stood at my side, brush raised to take notes whenever I drew a Boundary — then stopped, and slowly lowered his hand. There had been nothing to write down.
A teacher with nothing left to teach is less a teacher than a spectator.
By the time I turned ten, no one remained in the family who could instruct me.
There were exchange gatherings.
Occasions where the children of the great houses assembled. The Gye Family of space, the Talisman Family of charms, the Divination Family of augury, and even the Eoryeong Family of shikigami. The pillars of the sorcerous world gathered in one place so their young heirs could put faces to names and form connections.
At those gatherings, I was always smiling.
"Young Master of the Gye Family — I hear you've completed another new technique?"
"It was nothing. I got lucky."
"Lucky? Too much modesty is just irritating!"
Someone laughed, bright and ringing. I laughed along.
I had a mask. Worn so long it fit my hand like a second skin. Appropriately humble, appropriately warm, carefully flawed in just the right places. With that mask on, everyone relaxed. Everyone liked me.
The performance was not difficult. I had been doing it since childhood. Accept adoration as it came. Catch a joke and toss it back. Laugh at the proper moment.
I was skilled at it. Skilled enough that it felt hollow.
"Young Master Hyeon."
A young lady of the Talisman Family approached. A year younger than me, daughter of a house famed for its charm arts. Cheeks flushed, she stood at my side fiddling with her sleeve.
"Um… the plum blossoms at our estate bloom next month. Would you… perhaps like to come see them?"
I had known for some time that she was fond of me. She was not the only one. Several daughters of the great houses felt the same. The Gye Family's strongest, the genius of centuries. An excellent match.
"Plum blossoms. That sounds lovely."
I answered with a smile.
"I'll be sure to come."
Her face lit up. Looking at that bright face, I somehow felt as though I were watching it through glass. As if I could reach out and touch it — and yet the moment I tried, the distance between us stretched without end.
By the time the plum blossoms bloomed, I had already forgotten the promise.
I grew up without ever learning how to take someone's hand.
It sounds strange, but it is true. Most people learn to hold hands by colliding with others, fighting, making up. I never had the chance. There was no one to collide with.
The space around me was always mine. When someone approached, the distance between us widened of its own accord before I could think. When a hand reached out, the gap skewed before contact could land.
Even if contact somehow managed to land.
Once, at an exchange gathering, a drunken heir swung a fist at me on a dare. I didn't even dodge. I simply stood there, and the space between his knuckles and my cheek twisted on its own.
His arm broke.
I hadn't done it. Whatever tried to touch me simply shattered on contact. Hold me too tightly and it broke. Grip too hard and it cracked. Everything near me was like that.
So I always held back. When I smiled. When I grew angry. When I worked my art.
I never once went all out. There was nowhere that required it.
The whole world felt as though it had been made of glass. Beautiful, yes — but untouchable. The moment you laid a hand on it, the cracks began.
Standing in the center of that glass world, I was always a little bored.
The year I turned twenty, the head of the Eoryeong Family came to find me.
A house that commanded shikigami — spirits broken and bound into service, a lineage utterly different from ours. Their elderly head, said to stand closest of anyone to Heaven-rank, came in person.
"Might I ask you for a bout?"
Plenty of people requested sparring matches. I always refused. There was no point. I was not idle enough to spend time on a fight whose outcome was already written.
But that day, for some reason, I said yes.
It must have been his eyes. Not the look of someone who worshipped me, nor the look of someone who feared me. Simply the look of a man who wanted to see the end.
The family head was strong.
Strong enough to draw cold sweat from every elder present. Each of the shikigami he commanded could overwhelm an Earth-rank sorcerer with ease, and they came at me from every direction at once.
I waved a hand once.
The shikigami rushed in from all sides. And the moment they touched me, they crumpled. The instant they brushed my Boundary, the space around them was crushed, folding them like sheets of paper. Without so much as twitching another finger, I watched it happen.
I yawned.
This again. Again, shattered without even getting to use their hands—
"…It seems I have no choice."
The family head recalled his shikigami. Then he drew a single worn talisman from his robes. His fingertips were trembling, as if he were afraid of what using it would mean.
"In all my life, I never thought the day would come when I would need this."
The talisman burned away.
And something descended.
The air changed.
No — not only the air. The world changed.
That shikigami was vast. Not merely in size; the being itself was of a different order. The family's secret treasure, sealed across generations. The strongest of shikigami, said to be beyond even a Heaven-rank sorcerer's reckless command.
The mere fact of its appearance made the sparring ground's barrier scream and split. The family elders went pale and stumbled back. Someone sank to the floor. Someone else fainted where they stood.
It looked at me.
And then it reached out a hand.
Contact would mean collapse. Everything that had ever touched me had been that way. As that hand brushed my Boundary, the space around it began to crumple from the edges inward.
Even so, it did not stop.
Crumpling as it came, the hand pressed on. Ignoring the destruction of its own body, it forced its way into my Boundary head-on — tearing, piercing, punching through.
Something touched my cheek.
It had been a very long time.
"……."
A thin line of blood ran down.
My blood. That lukewarm sensation of something that was not my own hand drawing it from me.
In that instant.
My heart beat once, hard.
Ah.
The corner of my mouth lifted before I could stop it.
What is this? What the hell. It didn't break? It brushed my Boundary, it touched my hand, and it still didn't shatter?
The blood did not cool. It boiled the other way. My fingertips tingled. A heat I had never once felt in my life surged up from beneath my sternum.
I laughed. A real laugh.
"…Aha."
So this was it.
This was what it meant to collide. This was the sensation of a hand making contact.
I reached toward that vast thing. For the first time, without holding back. For the first time, with everything I had.
Just a little more. Let me play a little longer. I want to feel this a little more—
A sound like bone grinding.
I closed my hand. In that instant, the space enclosing that strongest of shikigami crushed in all at once. The force that had always reduced everything else to ruin — this time I gave it whole, entire, complete.
That enormous being crumpled like a sheet of paper.
The secret treasure even Heaven-rank sorcerers dared not command freely shattered in the palm of my hand.
…Too fast.
This was what happened when I went all out. This was what happened when I did not hold back. Before I could even finish savoring that single boiling moment.
With my own hand.
I had crushed it.
The smile that had risen slowly fell away. The heat that had been boiling cooled again. What remained in my hand was only crumpled wreckage and that familiar emptiness.
Across from me, the family head staggered — the face of a man who had lost what he had spent a lifetime sealing and taming. And that day, the old head of the Eoryeong Family drew his last breath. He had burned through the remainder of his life to unleash the treasure.
Again.
Even the thing that had so rarely managed to boil, in the end, shattered like glass.
And not by anyone else's hand — by mine.
I stood in the center of the cooled sparring ground and looked down at the wreckage of the shattered shikigami. It had been brief. Truly brief. Contact. Collision. Heat.
And then it broke again. Because I could not control my own strength.
That was the coldest part. Colder than everyone being weak. The rare strong thing breaking in my hand. Showing me hope once, then snuffing it out myself.
"…Boring."
I muttered it under my breath.
A faint warmth still lingered at my fingertips. That only made it colder.
It was around then that I began digging through the old books.
Heian.
The golden age of sorcerers. An era of monsters, when curses flowed like rivers and mountains and shikigami outnumbered people. In the pages of those books, people like me were not rare. There were onmyōji who split the sky. Sorcerers who sealed entire mountains. Beings who, in human flesh, clashed with calamities that rivaled natural disasters.
Things that would not break even if I went all out.
If it had been that era.
If it had been an age crowded with opponents I did not need to restrain myself against, opponents I did not need to be careful with—
Would I not have been bored? Would I not have had to shatter what had finally boiled with my own hands?
…A pointless thought. No one chooses the age they are born into.
I had fallen into this tedious end-of-days. An age where even curses were anemic, and a sorcerer of Human-rank was the ceiling. The cold ash of a land where gods had once walked.
Even so, I could not let go of the longing. I kept turning through the old records.
Looking for anything a little stronger. Anything that, just a little, I would not have to break myself.
And then I met the Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons.
They said the seal had broken. A calamity the last onmyōji of Heian had ground their lives to powder to imprison — ten thousand ghosts fused into a single body. It had woken from a thousand years of sleep and crawled out to swallow the end-of-days whole.
The nation was on the verge of collapse. Every remaining sorcerer threw themselves against it and could not hold the line.
Of course not. It was a calamity of Heian. What could the sorcerers of a cold ash heap do against something born of the age of gods?
When I heard the news, I think I smiled for the first time.
Genuinely.
It was magnificent.
No other word comes to mind.
There was no end. Crush one and ten rose to take its place; grind those ten down and a hundred surged forward. Ten thousand ghosts. I carved space with my Boundary, pressed the gaps shut and crushed them, carved again, folded again.
I went all out.
For the first time since being born into that damned glass world. Without trembling for fear of breaking something, without pulling back for fear of shattering it — everything I had. To my heart's content.
Because the enemy did not break. Because no matter how much I poured out, there was no end. Because no matter how hard I pressed, it would not shatter.
For that stretch of time, I was not bored.
For the first time in my life.
Around the ten-thousandth, perhaps. Or one among them may have been a little stronger. My Boundary twisted for the first time. My sense of distance frayed. For a single instant, I lost the gap.
A ghost's claw tore across my chest.
Ah.
This, too, has been a long time coming.
As I fell, I looked at the sky.
The Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons still had no end. More remained than I had crushed, and that black procession still blotted out the heavens.
I had lost. In the end, I had not crushed them all.
And yet, strangely, I felt no resentment.
For the first time in my life I had gone all out. For the first time in my life I had not been alone. For the first time in my life I had lost — not by shattering something with my own hands, but before something that would not break no matter how far I went.
I, who had been born unbalancing the world. I, for whom everything shattered at the mere reach of a hand. For the first time, I went to my knees before something that would not break to the end.
Blood drained out of me. My vision darkened.
I was caught less by the feeling of defeat than by the rapture of it.
Ah. So this was it.
This was what it meant to truly meet something, someone, head-on.
I had so many regrets.
Far too many.
I did not want it to end like this. I wanted to fight once more. This time, I wanted to win. Where had I fallen short? How could I crush it all the way through, next time?
To meet, only at the moment of dying, something I did not have to break myself.
To meet, only once, at the very end of a life, an opponent I could go all out against.
It was too unfinished this way.
Not this tedious end-of-days.
But that age when curses flowed, when shikigami outnumbered people, when the world was full of things that would not break even when you reached for them.
If it had been that era.
In the consciousness that was sinking into black, I wished for it with everything I had.
One more time. Please. Just once more.
If a world like Heian exists.
There, I would…
"Waaah."
…What?
"Waaaaah."
That sound. Who's crying? So loud.
…No. Wait.
That's my voice.
When I came to myself, I was cradled in someone's arms.
I was small. Hands, feet, field of vision — all of it. Too small even to hold up my own head.
The ceiling was unfamiliar. Paper lanterns swayed among wooden latticework, and people in clothes of a style I had never seen looked down at me.
And more than anything, the air was dense.
Thick. So thick that simply drawing a breath pricked the throat — spiritual energy packed into every corner. A concentration that made the cold ash of the end-of-days look like nothing at all.
This was.
As if, something I had only ever read about in books—
Then I saw it.
The faint aura clinging to the person holding me. The currents of spiritual energy flowing between the ceiling lattice. The residual threads of Boundary turning through the lantern light.
The ridges and valleys of all that dense presence filling the room registered in my eyes, one by one, with perfect clarity.
……I can see it?
The eyes that measured Boundaries, read the gaps, peeled apart the seams of the world.
The eyes that had made me the strongest my whole life were still there, intact, in this newborn body.
The corner of my mouth lifted before I could stop it.
A grin.
The golden age of sorcerers I had thirsted after my whole life in the pages of books alone — where curses flowed like rivers, shikigami outnumbered people, and the world was full of things that would not break when you reached for them.
Right into the heart of that Heian.
The eyes of the modern world's strongest had fallen, exactly as they were.