Six Stars
The Overlord was a being who stood alone at the very summit, peerless. Which was why he had no faction. On the surface, at least.
No Transcendent, however reclusive, could truly exist without one. Even if he despised the idea, those who revered Transcendents would gather beneath his name of their own accord. And the Overlord had come to acknowledge their usefulness. He was a being who shattered everything by himself — but even he could not do everything. And so he kept followers behind the scenes.
His followers would never set foot in a place like this.
Most of them resided in the Boundary. They revered the Overlord's martial prowess to the point of stubbornness, believing it was there that he had forged his strength.
In that case...
If the faction behind the tip-off was one that only someone who knew the Overlord well would recognize, then the informant had to belong to a hidden power few in this world even knew existed. An ally. Monsters who had judged that a being like the Overlord could be bargained with. And the greatest of those allies was the Electronic Witch — the one they called the Unseen Eye, the witch who had abandoned her flesh-and-blood body to roam the sea of electrons.
Did she send him knowing I was Veritas? Come to think of it, the marker only she could read had been rather conspicuous. Though I never imagined she'd go so far as to play the Overlord card.
"Seducing my daughter?"
"Are you and Kim Ara seeing each other?"
"No, sir."
At Cheongyeon's question, I shook my head in denial.
"I see."
Violet eyes crackling with lightning studied me. Eyes capable of discerning truth from falsehood.
The Overlord must have realized I wasn't dating Kim Ara.
"Hmm... no, in this case it's rather the opposite, isn't it? Kim Ara is the one who..."
Cheongyeon said with a playful smile. The pressure that followed was crushing. Beside me, the Overlord glared at me like he wanted me dead.
"To me, Ara is—"
"Ara?"
The Overlord looked at me, head cocked at a crooked angle.
"...Kim Ara is my comrade."
"So my daughter isn't attractive, is that it?"
"That's not it. If anything, Ara is actually rather close to my type—"
"So you admit you seduced my daughter."
Killing intent seeped up from the Overlord's eyes.
Seriously, what do you want from me?
"Overlord, have you forgotten your manners as a guest?"
"What manners would those be?"
"Lee Seoha is my student."
"Well, I was only teasing, but don't press the boy too hard."
"..."
The Overlord looked between Seo Yebin and Cheongyeon.
"You two are taking that brat's side?"
"He's the most interesting student to come along in an age."
"He wields quite the peculiar power."
"You two are interested in him?"
The Overlord turned back to me. Violet eyes fixed on me, those strange lightning-laced pupils measuring me like a blade on a scale.
"..."
"Well? Can your senses read him?"
"Strange. Something is off. He is clearly right here."
Seo Yebin's brow twitched.
"Forgive me, but I would rather you not call him 'that brat.'"
"...?"
The Overlord gave her an odd look for a moment.
"Is that how it is...? Not that I'm one to talk, but mind your age. It's unseemly."
"That is truly rich, coming from the man who married a woman fifteen years his junior."
The Overlord and Seo Yebin locked horns.
"More importantly — you said you had something to discuss..."
"You've got steadier nerves than I gave you credit for. When those two go at it, even Transcendents of the highest order start trembling."
Cheongyeon let out a short laugh.
"Were you perhaps about to ask him to take you in as a disciple, like last time?"
"Well then. Would you join?"
"I already have a master, so I'm afraid that would be difficult."
"Hm. A master greater than myself, is it?"
Cheongyeon's expression turned subtle.
"I merely wished to study your power — for suitable compensation, of course. But more to the point, you two over there. How about calling off your little feud? The children will be arriving any minute now."
"...Ah, right."
Seo Yebin sighed. Behind us, a door creaked open. I turned to find a group of students gathered there.
"...Papa?"
Kim Ara said, her brow twitching. The Overlord flinched.
"That person is..."
"Now hold on just a moment. That man is Kim Ara's father?"
Everyone seemed to recognize the Overlord, judging by their stunned faces. It was only natural. A being like the Overlord could shift the world's balance of power on a whim — his was a face no aspiring hero could fail to know, for he was one of the handful of Transcendents in this world.
"Wait, Ara — you call your dad 'Papa'?"
"...Because Papa told me to call him that."
Kim Ara answered Kim Seohyun's question, her face flushing.
"So you're that one?"
The Overlord looked at Kim Seohyun.
"Not quite the physique that brat has, but a fine body all the same. You inherited the Thousand-Year Martial Vein in its entirety, I hear? And on top of that, you've mastered all sorts of scattered arts — magic, of all things."
"Oh, you mean Seoha? Well, it's true Seoha's body is astonishingly well made. A face like a god lovingly sculpted it, and a frame like someone who'd mastered the martial arts assembled it joint by joint."
Kim Seohyun said with a smile.
A textbook non-answer. They were talking entirely past each other. Kim Seohyun had no wish to discuss the Thousand-Year Martial Vein — or more precisely, because of a certain problem at its very root, this was not the place for it.
"Definitely a useful one. No wonder the Wizard of a Thousand treasures her so. She could go toe-to-toe with that bastard up in Heaven and hold her own."
"...Is he really that strong?"
The Overlord smirked at Kim Seohyun's question — perhaps because his own had gone unanswered. He studied him for a moment, then shifted his gaze to Kim Ara.
"So you finally awakened your blood as well."
"Seoha helped me."
Crack.
The ground beneath the Overlord's feet split half apart.
"Seoha. Is that brat Lee Seoha?"
"Seoha isn't a brat. Seoha is Seoha."
Kim Ara said flatly. I shot her a meaningful glance that said: please, give it a rest.
You two. Do not make eye contact in front of me.
The Overlord stared at me with eyes brimming with killing intent.
...I appeared to have grated on his mood even further.
"...Don't tell me you're dating now?"
The instant the words left his mouth, every gaze in the room stabbed toward us.
"No, nothing like that."
"That's right."
Erciel denied it, and Kim Seohyun chimed in beside her.
"I see."
At their answers, the Overlord nodded — apparently satisfied that what they said was the truth. Kim Ara quietly glared at him.
Evening.
I sat on the floor of the training grounds, meditating in silence. It was to temper the Black God Martial Art.
"When the sun sets, the moon rises; when the moon sets, the sun rises. All things flow along their natural course. Yet Defying Heaven overturns every law."
These were the verses of the Black God Martial Art. Heukcheon sat beside me, reciting them from memory, and I breathed in time with her voice.
"All are born blessed. Beneath heaven, I alone was born cursed. If that is heaven's will, then I defy its providence — I wish to Defy Heaven. And so, beneath the sky, I alone shall stand supreme."
My body came alive. Every muscle maximized its weave fiber by fiber, turning taut and springy. I took command of the movement of my blood and reinforced my organs.
"What is the martial way? In the end, it is the study of killing one's opponent so that one may live. End the enemy's life, and one need never bother with tedious things. That is why I studied the body and the eyes above all else."
At every joint, I wound Defying Heaven into coils, lending them elasticity. The power of Negation seeped into every corner of my body. The Black Core drank in the Defying Heaven energy coursing through me — then spat it back out through every inch. One full heavenly circuit. Each time Defying Heaven swept through my body, I grew a little stronger.
"My fate is not for heaven to decide. I decided it so. Therefore I shall shatter every shackle that oppresses me. Therefore I name this the Black God Martial Art."
Called a martial formula, it was nothing less than one being's vow — a diary, almost. I pushed Defying Heaven back into the Black Core. Like a machine, it memorized the movements I had just performed and set the energy circulating exactly as I had.
Training like this, I finally understood. The Heavenly Demon had been a genuine monster. How had anyone created something like this?
"Is it working?"
"Yeah. It's helping."
I answered Heukcheon and took stock of my body. It was running so smoothly you'd never guess I'd ever passed out mid-training.
I could probably lift five hundred kilos by now.
Absurd. Until recently, three hundred on the bench had been my limit — yet I could feel my body growing stronger by the day.
"What an outrageous martial art. I've never heard of one that wraps the body in law and forges it by commanding one's own energy."
A deep, weighty voice, tossed out as casually as a stone. The Overlord had appeared before me without my noticing.
"...You were watching?"
"I could hardly not. Your mana seemed to devour everything around it."
The Overlord regarded me for a moment.
"You. Any interest in becoming my disciple?"
It was a rather staggering offer.
Heaven.
The name referred to the land once hailed as God's own country. And when the world's Boundary collapsed and the dimensions fused, it was the place that reaped the greatest windfall of all — no doubt because the Pantheon of 100 Gods had descended upon it. Omnipotent beings, each wielding a different power, had manifested upon that land. A place where one hundred gods resided — hence it, too, came to be called Heaven.
Each wielded a different power, and the concept each embodied could well be considered omnipotent — so long as one stayed within its domain. A hundred such beings existed. It deserved the name.
"Hm."
And there, too, stood an academy — one where students studied divinity and awakened the sacred. The Divine Academy, the very symbol of Heaven.
A being was looking over a file.
"Six stars."
There was a boy known as their Great Adversary. A boy said to have studied magic under the Wizard of a Thousand, and to have inherited China's Thousand-Year Martial Vein — the first of the veins to collapse.
The stars inscribed on a file denoted danger and potential. And both their Great Adversary and they themselves had received five — and they were beings hailed as the most brilliant in the world.
Has there ever been a case like this?
The Emperor. Cheongyeon. The Overlord. The Wizard of a Thousand. Every one of them, as assessed by the Pantheon of 100 Gods, bore five stars. Which meant that even they had failed to truly see the boy this file described.
The being read on. And with every line, its eyes gleamed a little brighter.
• A boy enrolled at Korea Hero Academy.
• Identity: unknown. His past cannot be traced through any channel. (Even future sight fails.) A being as though dropped from the heavens.
• Wields a black power. It defies the world's providence and reason, yet it is not a power of the outer realms.
• Per the Heavenly God: it negates the powers of the outer realms all the more strongly. To append — the energy of Defying Heaven. Or, as some call it, mana of Negation.
• Growth rate: abnormally steep. No hero or Transcendent in history, it is said, can rival it. Rated six stars.
• Potential: unmeasurable.
• Barring death by misadventure, his eventual Transcendence is all but certain.
• Resolution of the Pantheon of 100 Gods: bring him to Heaven by any means necessary. Hostility toward him is forbidden, whatever the reason.
• Resolution of the administrative government: absolute recommendation. Hostility toward him is forbidden, whatever the reason. Should any party turn hostile toward Lee Seoha, that party is to be eliminated by any means necessary.
• A rumor persists that he is connected to Veritas — the turning point of alchemical scholarship.
"The exchange is in the second semester, if I recall."
The being rose from its seat. A being who surpassed even them — Great Adversary and all. Interest had been stirred.
It was the first time.
"This exchange might just come apart at the seams."
— such excitement, that is.
The being turned and shortly after left the room.