Are You a Monster?
"What the hell is this now?"
The Celestial Time Boundary.
Not the Celestial Martial Body—a new special trait, added to the Yin-Yang Incarnation. Bihyung clicked the entry at once.
Classification: Yin-Yang Incarnation — Special Trait
The boundary that sets the time of heaven.
One look at that sorry excuse for a description and he clutched the back of his neck.
"Ah..."
"...Boss? Boss!"
The moment Dueogsi saw Bihyung's reaction, he knew something had gone wrong. He threw himself forward and caught the boy as he folded.
"Are you unharmed? What in the world happened..."
"...It's nothing."
No. It was, in fact, very much something.
I thought the Celestial Martial Body would slot into the Yin-Yang Incarnation as a special trait. So why is some completely different thing popping out and making a mess?
The Celestial Martial Body was tier-one performance for anyone who fought up close—a constitution tailored, almost obscenely, to a dokkaebi like Bihyung. Martial arts, melee strikes, all of it: damage amplified by 1.3 times. It even buffed the rate at which proficiency climbed. By any measure, it was a constitution he needed. So what, exactly, was the Celestial Time Boundary supposed to be?
First things first. Look at the dantian.
He turned his awareness inward at once, and the wrongness announced itself immediately.
...The membrane's gone.
The film that had formed across his dantian after he achieved the Yin-Yang Incarnation was simply no longer there. Something inside the dantian had changed as well.
Sky.
Where the sun had been, a blue heaven had been added. What was that supposed to mean?
The boundary that sets the time of heaven... boundary?
He fixed on that word. The sky changes little by little with time. Blue, then gradually red, and at the last, dark. How did people tell one stretch of it from the next? By the land's horizon, or the sea's. They watched the sun come up and the moon burn soft, and that was how a changing sky could be observed. But the dantian had neither sea-line nor land-line.
...Change the approach. Step out of a human point of view. The thing was named for heaven. Could it really be sorted by human standards? He didn't think so. Truth is, horizons don't exist at all. The earth is round.
Holding to that, he drove his consciousness down into the lower dantian, and the field he was looking at widened.
...The boundary between yokai power and dao power. All this time it only sat there, divided, and now that line is going faint.
What had been fading soon joined into one. Below lay a dark night; above, an unbroken sweep of clear blue.
...So?
That was as far as it went. Losing the wall between dao power and yokai power was a fine thing, but he couldn't see why it was worth an entire Great Reversion Pill. If he'd known it would turn out like this, he would have fed the thing to his club and dismantled it.
...No. Something's hidden in here.
What? He turned it over, and he agonized over it, and in the middle of that churn he remembered the notion of time that had drifted through his thoughts a moment ago.
In the real world, time passes and the sky changes on its own. The dantian doesn't work that way. It was stopped. Stagnant. The one who could move it was himself. The instant he understood that, he raised his yokai power.
Kugugugung—!
A violent tremor shoved up out of his abdomen. The yokai power flipped, and a black pond flooded the sky. Before he knew it, the landscape of the lower dantian had become a night heaven.
"...Boss?"
Dueogsi stared at him and could not hide his shock. His presence was already enormous, and now he seems like an entirely different being. The pressure around Bihyung had gone darker, and heavier. Bihyung felt it himself—the weight of his own presence thickening—because yin qi was racing through every acupoint, dyeing him black as the color of that night sky.
This is the night sky. He would take the look of the scene and call it midnight. Then what about noon, midnight's opposite?
To find out, he turned the time of the Celestial Time Boundary.
Click.
A sound like a clock winding rang inside the dantian. At the same moment the night sky sank, and the clear blue shot back up to take its place. And then something happened that even Bihyung had not expected.
"...Huh?"
"Boss?"
The yang qi spreading from his body was anything but ordinary—far more of it than the lower dantian had held, and moving with a rough, violent haste. It became a wave of qi and baked the air around him.
This... it's swallowing the traces the yin qi left behind as it passed. While midnight had been in effect, remnants of yin qi had settled in every acupoint of his body. Yang qi was chasing those remnants, nibbling them away bit by bit, and swelling in size and force as it did. Yang qi leaves remnants too. So in the end, it won't tip all the way to either side. Yin qi would gorge on yang qi just the same. That, he supposed, was the Celestial Time Boundary's true worth.
So he thought—right up until he caught the change showing in the dantian.
Huh?
The dantian began to squirm, shifting by small degrees, and at the end of that motion it started to peel away its own caul, the way a snake sheds its skin.
Not bone-forging... a shedding of the shell? But why was the dantian the one throwing a rebirth, and not even his body?
...Wait. The energy the dantian is holding... it's gotten purer.
Only by a hair. If he hadn't been concentrating, he might not have noticed it at all. Even so, the purity of the energy had plainly risen.
...Raising the purity of one's energy was something that only showed up in the mid-to-late game. And even then, it was the sort of thing you could barely attempt after offering up every resource you owned. The Celestial Time Boundary had simply done it, guaranteed. A first-use bonus?
Suspicious, he turned the Celestial Time Boundary's time again and brought the night sky back around to day.
And then—
...It worked.
It actually worked. This was no first-use bonus. Every time the Celestial Time Boundary's night and day crossed, his energy was being purified!
This... this isn't even in the same league as the Celestial Martial Body!
The Celestial Martial Body? A nobody. The best there had been, right up until the Celestial Time Boundary arrived. The amplification of my energy alone already catches its buff and then some. And on top of that, as an added function, the dantian itself grew pure.
Ah. The G.O.A.T. of all-purpose use. The. Great. Time. Boundary.
He was wearing a rapturous look, thoroughly pleased with the change in himself, when Mina came pounding in from far off—tat-tat-tat!
"Bihyung!"
There was something in her hand. Up close, he saw it was the same class of thing as his own: a spirit pill.
"Hm? That..."
He knew this one, too.
"That's the elixir that holds nothing but Water Qi, isn't it?"
"Yeah! The dokkaebi showed me the way!"
She pointed behind her, and the three dokkaebi who had escorted her ducked their heads with awkward grins.
"...You picked a pretty strong one."
That elixir was not something you picked up easily. Pretty sure they said you had to be around 4th Rank just to take a crack at it. And yet she'd walked back with it as if it were nothing. Had those dokkaebi been that strong after all?
No. Eodugi said they were a lower grade than he was. He wasn't looking down on Eodugi. That was simply the reality. Eodugi still couldn't fight a 4th Rank exorcist on his own. No—pit him against a 3rd Rank, a whole step below, and he'd still get erased in a blink.
Baffled, Bihyung looked from the dokkaebi to Dueogsi and back again, and Dueogsi puffed up, proud as anything, and praised his subordinates.
"Those ones have been clever with petty tricks since ancient times. This time as well, it seems they laid hands on the item by some method of skipping the qualification, or whatever it was called."
"...Then what about you?"
If a method like that existed, wouldn't it have been nice if he'd used it too? That was the meaning packed into the question, and Dueogsi answered it with absolute, unbothered pride.
"From of old, when the body is lacking, the head is the one that must suffer."
Bihyung decided he had heard enough. Dueogsi was more of a muscle-brain than he'd thought.
Their business in the treasury was finished. Mina had taken a spirit pill that could grow the water attribute; Bihyung had taken the Great Reversion Pill, already digested inside him.
"Everyone, into the shadow."
Eodugi, Mina, the three dokkaebi who had just joined them, and even Dueogsi—he tucked them all into the shadow, and then he was ready to leave the treasury. With that, a door appeared.
Clunk—!
A massive wooden bolt slid aside, and the great gate swung open on screaming, rusted hinges. Through the gap lay the grounds of the academy.
...They are dead serious about holding that restricted zone. Serious enough, apparently, to haul in "magic" of this caliber. Bihyung let out a dry laugh, stepped through the gate, and stood once more on academy land.
"Uuugh... All right. Shall we call it here for today?"
He made for a blind spot in the security system, drew Mina out of the shadow, and said goodbye. Back at the dorms, he didn't even pause to unpack. He went straight to the training ground and brought Dueogsi out.
"Is this the place where you reside, Boss?"
"Yeah. Nice, right?"
"The density of energy here is high."
Dueogsi gave a small, quiet marvel at how far human craft had come, then put distance between them and settled into a stance.
"Then, as we discussed, I shall begin the spar."
"Yeah. I'm counting on you."
"The purpose of this spar is for you to grow accustomed to the Void Phase, and to grow accustomed to the Five Great Yokai Arts you have learned."
"Add one more. Getting used to the Celestial Time Boundary from earlier."
And, while they were at it—
Whether I can bring that out through the Celestial Time Boundary, too.
Bihyung's eyes glittered. Dueogsi looked at him and gave a firm nod.
"...Understood."
Dueogsi took his stance slowly. The front foot planted straight toward Bihyung; the back leg opened, only slightly, along a diagonal. Tipped forward like that, he looked as if he might charge at any instant.
"Then, I begin."
With the words—
Thoom!
Something like a cannon going off. By the time Bihyung's mind caught up, his body was sailing through the air and slamming into the wall of the training ground.
"Ghk—!"
A speed he had no way to answer. A blow that outran recognition itself.
"Are you unharmed?"
Dueogsi asked it of his Boss, and Bihyung pushed himself up on shaking legs and put a smile at the corner of his mouth.
"Yeah. I'm fine. Keep going."
And then a blue ghost-fire began to frost both of his pupils.
"Understood."
Bang!
The cannon-roar of displaced air slammed in again, and Dueogsi's body vanished. Bihyung threw his focus into the Void Phase at once—the sense of it reaching outward, and the Roots laid over that sense.
...I see him.
He crossed both arms and guarded in the same instant, and his body still lifted clean off the floor and went tumbling.
A truly one-sided beating. A scene of merciless violence. And yet the two people in the middle of it did not see it that way.
He has watched my movement only a handful of times, and already he is adapting? Two attacks. That was all. And still the young Boss before his eyes had, somewhere along the way, begun to chase him. He was growing used to the sense of the Void Phase. If someone with talent like that grew further still? Then what Dueogsi had said before would prove no empty boast. Anticipating the future that was coming, he kicked off the floor again.
"I am coming!"
Thoom!
Inside the wind pressure bearing down on him, Bihyung watched Dueogsi with eyes sunk low and steady.
Today's Saturday. Midnight and noon kept trading places, and Bihyung's energy climbed higher with every pass. Regular classes start next Monday... I'll have this hammered into something usable by then. The story he himself had bent off its rails. He needed to be ready for it. And the anomaly Mina and I went to before. I have to be ready for whatever villain branched off from that place, too.
So.
"Let's push as hard as we can, Dueogsi."
"Yes!"
Kwaaang!
Dueogsi and Bihyung crashed together, and the training ground filled once more with thunder.
And so two days passed.
"Hwaaaahm..."
Shinhoo, the professor in charge of Class Gap, let out a long, dragging yawn as he wandered the hall. The weapon selection that had gone on and on was finally over. He had just been shaken out of a brief, honey-sweet nap and marched straight off to work, and the sheer injustice of his situation was enough to bring tears to his eyes.
Still. How far have those kids grown? Even so, his steps didn't look tired, and that was surely because of the students stamped into the back of his mind. Look away for a bit and they shoot up by the day.
An awl in a sack. No. Thinking back on that entrance speech, the boy didn't seem to have enough basic humanity to tuck himself into a pocket in the first place, so a crane among chickens suited him better.
Whistling as he pictured how far the student he'd marked might have come, Shinhoo opened the door to Class Gap.
"All right, you lot. Take your sea—"
And he saw it. Every one of them quiet as dead mice, mouths clamped shut, reading the mood of a single person. Shinhoo's own eyes were pulled to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
...Ha.
A dry laugh escaped him on its own. He couldn't hold it in, and he threw the words straight at Bihyung.