First Flight
Recruiting Seo Gayeon into the guild turned out to be a quick job. It helped enormously that my face was already fairly well known on Nutube.
The moment Seo Gayeon's younger siblings laid eyes on me, they were clamoring for my autograph and gushing that I was one of the most promising rising stars in Korea — and just like that, they gilded my reputation for me.
Frankly, I didn't much care what her parents thought.
Seo Gayeon was a grown adult; she didn't need her parents' permission. But she had a strongly dependent personality, which was exactly why I'd gone to the trouble of winning them over anyway.
Her parents watched footage of my exploits a few times, listened to their daughter's fervent pleading, took one look at the signing bonus, and after a brief deliberation gave their blessing.
"We've heard plenty about you. They say you've looked after our girl since the very start of the semester. So I found myself thinking — if it's you, Seoha, I can trust you with my daughter."
Something about it gave off the unmistakable vibe of a father sending his daughter off in marriage, but whatever.
Either way, Seo Gayeon was now in the guild.
"Hyung! Hyung! Could you sign this for me?"
An autograph, apparently — Seo Gayeon's younger sibling was asking me. I mulled it over for a moment, then signed the paper. Channeling the full power of the Midas touch as I wrote my name, even I had to admit the result was a masterpiece of penmanship.
"Whoa, thank you!"
With a bow so deep she could probably see her own navel, the kid went sprinting off somewhere.
Watching the child go, Heukcheon spoke up in a disgruntled tone. Yeongcheon nodded along in agreement.
-Well, I suppose it cannot be helped, I think. You have grown too strong too quickly, Seoha. And the Body of Defying Heaven has always possessed a constitution that defies easy comprehension.
-That much is true.
At those few words from Yeongcheon, the scowl on Heukcheon's face visibly thawed.
Once the talks with Seo Gayeon's parents were over — having even mooched dinner off them — I stepped outside.
"So when are you heading to China?"
"China?" Seo Gayeon echoed, blinking at Kim Ara's question.
"We decided to go to China."
"Oh, right — Ara's house is in China, wasn't it? Could I come too?"
I gave it some thought.
The Heavenly Demon had told me: Yeokcheon and Starlight were powers under the Creator's jurisdiction. No matter what you did, those powers could never attain divinity. And powers governed by a god tended, almost by nature, to be drawn to one another — the more of them gathered, the stronger the synergy they produced.
And if the one waiting for me is a being who wields Yeokcheon itself...
I had no idea how it would go. The dragon-shaped existence I'd encountered in America had been weak in raw power, but its rank itself was dangerous. Fortunately I'd been able to break its seal, so it hadn't been a problem — but that was luck as much as anything.
And if something strange happens over there...
I kept the worst-case scenario in mind. If I went to China, I could find the Heavenly Demon's legacy. The odds that the quest's difficulty would spike were high, though. Both Yeongcheon and Heukcheon had warned me: that thing was genuinely dangerous. Even before America, I'd had no intention of facing a being of the very top tier — and yet one had appeared as an enemy anyway.
There's no telling how this one will come at me. A being that wielded Dark Flame might have already devoured another Heavenly Demon's legacy to build its own rank. And that, specifically, would be a devastatingly lethal power for someone like me.
It was formed of Yeokcheon, wasn't it...
-That one is no ordinary being.
-A divine beast formed of Yeokcheon — Zhuque, of the same ilk as the dragon. The dragon lost its reason after so many long years of sealing, but... honestly, Zhuque may be a different case entirely. If she has recovered her strength, Seoha, you might well die at her hands.
That was what Heukcheon and Yeongcheon had told me. It was absurd, when you thought about it. I had to go to China to grow stronger, and in order to grow stronger, I had to be prepared to meet a top-tier existence head-on.
No — it was fine. Come to think of it, she had lessons that day anyway.
...Lessons?
"Yeah. Remember how Cheongyeon said he'd take me on as a student, back when I made that showing in America?"
-I wanted to go with you.
Her feeling drifted into my ear like a whisper on the wind. This was what made Starlight Mana so dangerous: her emotions reached me directly, with nothing filtering them out. I could hide my feelings from everyone else — but from her, never.
"Is that so? Well, that works out."
I couldn't quite bring myself to smile. If I had said yes, she would have turned Cheongyeon down on the spot and come with me instead. That was not something I could allow. Not yet.
Seo Gayeon's expression shifted — from faintly gloomy to bright and buoyant in an instant.
"Wait, you're not going with just Ara, are you?"
"...Why? You'll be going with Ara's uncle, won't you?"
Kim Hoseop, that was his name. He was based in China, but he was a hero of the very highest tier — famous even in this country.
"Right. Have a safe trip."
"I'll bring you back a souvenir."
"Mm."
The next morning, Hong Yuhwa came crashing through our front door.
"So. You started a guild, I hear."
"...The rumors have already spread that far?"
"Think about what you've been doing. You were already a talent under watch by the government and the Association, you're being personally managed by His Majesty the Emperor — and yesterday you took down that Ah-Ho, didn't you?"
"He let his guard down. Made it easy."
Granted, even without the carelessness I could have put him down — it just would have cost me considerably more power.
Then, without warning, a thought struck me. Why was this girl's intelligence always so fast?
"Seriously, isn't that way too quick? Are you stalking me?"
"Haah? What nonsense are you spouting! You think I have time to waste on you? I just— that is— you're my rival, so I merely... gathered a little information for intelligence purposes. That is all!"
Hong Yuhwa rattled it off in a flustered rush. Apparently she really had set her underlings to snooping on my movements.
"...So you really did stalk me."
"Anyway — leave a spot open in that guild."
"...Why?"
"Because obviously I'm the one who belongs in it. And the name is good, too. An Assembly of Stars? Honestly, who else but me?"
"Isn't your grandfather the Red Tower Lord?"
"He is. But Grandfather thinks it doesn't necessarily have to be me. Besides, I could hold my heir lessons there, couldn't I? And if I make something big of myself later — who knows? Maybe I'll do something for the place?"
And with that pronouncement, Hong Yuhwa ordered me to write her name down, then swept out the door.
So what she meant was: put my name in, and the Red Tower will throw something your way. That was the correct interpretation, right?
"...You barged in here at the crack of dawn just to say that?"
It was more than a little absurd.
-A bold woman, that one. But women of her stripe are always weakest at night. Master, allow me to impart a special lesson of my own——
"Not necessary."
Leaving Heukcheon and her nonsense behind, I set about making breakfast. Not that breakfast amounted to much — reheating yesterday's leftover braised aged kimchi in the microwave alongside a bowl of instant rice was about the extent of it.
After a quick meal, I got ready for China. And when I arrived at the warp gate—
"Hey."
The only person there to greet me was Kim Seohyun.
"Huh?"
China, together with Germany, was one of the nations that had suffered the most when the dimensions fused. It had gained an overwhelming new military force in the form of Murim — and, ironically enough, that very Murim made it the biggest target on the map for the demons and the Nazi Empire.
America was untouchable. Anyone who poked it would end up as a hornet's nest thanks to the Vaccine War. The otherworldly sorcery those enemies wielded clashed horribly with the divinity the Vaccine War possessed — they were already being pushed back at full strength, so there was simply no reason to provoke them.
Which meant that, from their perspective, China was the softest target on the board. And so the demons came to an agreement: China would become their stronghold.
Had China joined hands with Murim at that point, it could at least have preserved the skeleton of a nation. Instead, it refused — and went so far as to antagonize Murim outright.
And that was how China splintered into countless fractured states.
They styled themselves the So-and-So Republic, or the Such-and-Such State — but to the outside world, people simply called them China-1, China-2, and so on. That was China's current address. The country that had once been China was already divided into sixty nations.
Worse, all the myriad martial arts and sorceries that had existed within Murim were scattered to the four winds. Plenty of them were still buried somewhere in China, to be sure — but measured against Murim as a whole, what remained there amounted to less than half.
Kim Seohyun alone probably carries around eighty percent of it. Every martial art and every technique Murim had ever possessed was stored away inside her body. Who knew — maybe even a fragment of the Heukshinwu slept in there. Not that it mattered for me, with Heukcheon at my side.
Then again, this isn't exactly a bad thing.
"Ara had something urgent come up at home, so she rushed off by plane. I happened to be heading to China anyway, and — well, here we are, running into each other."
"...Sorry about that. You ended up arriving a day late because of me."
"No, I'm the one who said I wanted to come."
Kim Seohyun said it with a soft, faint smile.
"So — do you have a plan or anything?"
"Nothing yet. I'll probably just trail along after Seoha."
"Then I should stop by home first."
I looked out beyond the warp gate. If this were Korea — no, even America had more than ten warp gates going up in any given week — travel would have been effortless. But not here.
"A plane, then."
A private jet feels hopelessly antiquated. Well — nothing to be done about it.
Warp gates devoured staggering fortunes in maintenance costs, and the sixty fractured states of China simply could not afford them. So a plane it was — and chalked up as a new experience, it wasn't half bad.
Before long, the plane lifted off.
"This is my first time on a plane."
"Unless you live somewhere like China or Germany, that's probably true for anyone, isn't it?"
"Right? But don't planes get attacked by terrorist groups all the time?"
"You've been watching too many movies. Besides, this is Paewang's private plane..."
"Nobody move! One twitch and I shoot!"
The words were barely out of the man's mouth before heavily armed figures who looked for all the world like hunters came storming down the aisle.
It was certainly a new experience — if nothing else.